AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Jul 11, 2023 7:14 pm
Federica,
That's how it
appears from the normal Earthly perspective. Unlike physical traits that flow mostly through heredity forces from generation to generation, like hair color and such, cultural tradition flows through the life of ideas-ideals. So the individual souls who develop and participate in those traditions carry their fruits with them into the Cosmic spheres between incarnations and carry them forward into future epochs of history. Between
every incarnation, the human soul expands out into all the Cosmic intents, to the Zodiac and beyond. We are even now participating in structuring the new rhythms of Nature and the Cosmos that will manifest on the next planetary incarnation of Jupiter, for ex. So I don't think it makes any sense to create a separate analysis for intentional streams of "human" tradition, which were also
directly inspired by the higher beings when they were formed here on Earth (as Steiner documents in detail), from the intentional streams of Nature.
Ashvin,
I know that. It's even written in my post above, in different words. I don't argue at all for separating in principle the analysis of human traditions from the analysis of the ideals that inspire them. Surely it doesn’t make sense to artificially compartmentalize reality. Please don’t project on my current intentions some thinking mistakes I made in the past, don’t assume what is not written or suggested above. I am saying one simple thing. We have a language we use, which was formed within the earthly, human sphere, in full accordance with that sphere. There is a usefulness and an appropriateness in our language’s ability to single out limited dimensions, or portions, of any overarching rhythm or idea. That's what the word tradition does, for example. You can certainly decide to call the rising of the Sun a tradition, and as I said, in a sense I understand why, but you are risking serious misunderstanding when you decide to overstretch language in this way. Especially when there are other understandable ways to convey your thought in accordance to the logic of human language, namely by referring to Cosmic intent, or similar, for the rising Sun, and to tradition for the formula of a prayer, for instance, without implying any separate analysis of the two, and without disregarding the higher intents that manifest in both. It's hazardous to attempt an early deconstruction of human language beyond a certain extent.
Evidently, there is often sufficient reason to refer to only a limited aspect of a Cosmic intent, in this case, to a human tradition. The sufficient reason to intend tradition as human tradition apparent in this case is, to start with, because we trust and follow what Tomberg is saying in the quote, which is manifestly referred to the reality of tradition within the human sphere. He speaks of “not forgetting the past” and of “giving shape to the future”. He speaks of the life span of every tradition, he speaks of “the ability of the soul to bring the past alive in the present”, he brings devotional practices as an example, and so on. He is inviting us to focus attention on the human materialization of Cosmic intents in the form of traditions. So let’s follow this cue! This doesn’t mean that we lose sight of the larger wavelengths, through which we can encompass the reality of Cosmic intents across and beyond the boundaries of earthly life.
AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Jul 11, 2023 7:14 pm
Generally, outer forms of nature and culture decay and die on the physical plane - for ex. we know that many physical forms of animals have gone extinct, as well as primitive cultural forms of religions. The ones that survive across many epochs do so because they bring value to the overarching intents of spiritual evolution - they are continually given new life from the Spirit because they continue to be useful to fulfilling those purposes, just like we continue to create new sheaths that are useful for our localized purposes. The long-lasting traditions are those which were valuable and adaptive enough to be continually replenished from the spirit worlds through the forces of living souls, with feedback from the higher hierarchies.
Yes, but there is also a long-lasting tradition of Luciferic and Ahrimanic impulses coming to the physical Earth from across the boundary, at least as long-lasting as the institution of the Church, so I wouldn’t absolutize the time span of a tradition as a proof of its morality and goodness. It certainly means it’s given long life from across the spiritual world, but, as we know, there is more than only well-meaning impulses coming from across the boundary.
AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Jul 11, 2023 7:14 pm
These things get complex because there are many factors involved. It may seem like we learn the content of traditions only from our grandparents, parents, teachers, etc., but we need to also remember we
choose the family and locality we are born into before birth, based on our Karmic past. We develop particular affinities for certain regions, cultural values, and heredity streams that will help us fulfill our Karmic mission for that incarnation. Then we should also remember that living traditions are sort of like the air we breathe - they simply permeate our entire environment and we absorb them through a sort of cultural osmosis (or at least we used to until very recently). If we incarnate in the West, then we are breathing in the traditions of Christendom whenever we go to school and learn, study philosophy, art, and literature, exercise our civil/legal rights, and many other such things. We may not easily discern the connections between seemingly arcane practices of the early Church and the life of culture around us today, but they are present regardless.
Absolutely. We breathe in the traditional context we have chosen to be born into, which comprises both moral and amoral traditions. If we are born in the West, we breathe in the traditions of Christendom, as you say, just as well as we breathe in those springing from extreme materialism and possibly from extreme mysticism (more and more perceptibly) leading to dreams of transhumanism on one side, or to dreams instant self-deification on the other. I think we can say that these spiritual shortcuts have both become traditional in our present world. We can easily breathe them in without noticing.
AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Jul 11, 2023 7:14 pm
Let me first say, there are obviously corruptions that have entered into every institution of the last 2,000 years and no one is defending those. Every institution has its ascents and descents, its generative and degenerative phases, because they are entrusted to souls who go through these same psycho-spiritual oscillations, i.e. us. But we simply cannot let that sway our spiritual contemplation of what really resides beneath these institutions and their traditions. For ex. even the early Church fathers, such as Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Maximus, and others, recognized the hierarchy of the Church is a microcosmic model of the Divine hierarchy. We shouldn't confuse the corruption of souls who took part in that hierarchy for the reality of what that hierarchy symbolized and what it could ideally symbolize (or directly reflect) again.
I use the word 'dogma' because the creeds of the Church, for ex., are often referred to that way, but perhaps a better word could be chosen. Whatever the word is, I would look at a creed or teaching the same way I would look at a tree outside. If am trying to penetrate to the inner essence of the tree by gazing at its trunk, branches, leaves, etc. and making quantitative measurements, then I am making the tree phenomenon into a dogma in the negative sense.
Similarly, if I am trying to understand the essence of the Christ mystery and even attain 'salvation' by staring at and reciting the Apostle's Creed, only reaching its dim surface meaning (or, more often, projecting my personalized meaning into it), then it is dogma in the negative sense. But the creed itself, like the tree, embeds a whole array of archetypal ideal relations which point the way toward the immanent Divine essence in our stream of becoming. It can be like the balancing point for those relations that Cleric illustrated
here.
Cleric wrote:"When I concentrate on the [Apostle's creed] it is like I exist amidst a totality of complicated ideal relations. I cannot easily grasp this totality. It is living, it is dynamic. I have to consider simultaneously all the [higher hierarchies and the Godhead and their complicated relations with humanity] if I'm to grasp it. My mind would burst If I were to do that - I simply can't fit it all. Nevertheless I feel that there's certain lawful unity within the totality, something which captures a specific ideal current with it. In my mind I can find this specificity as a kind of point of balance. When my mind is focused in this point I feel as if I have found a peculiar point of stability within the totality - it is the point-experience that makes sense of the totality. The ideal totality is vastly larger than the soul life I experience at any instance, yet in my mind I can find a point which is stable and somehow remains at rest amidst the dynamics of the ideal. This ideal point in my mind I can call the concept. It is only a symbolic point of balance within my intellect which captures something essential of an ideal totality."
There is no point fighting against the dogma of the Apostle's Creed any more than there is to fight against the percept-concept of a tree in my yard, or any other concept I may use in my spiritual striving like 'evolution'. It only makes sense to fight against my own tendency to idolize the outer form of the dogma and thereby rest satisfied with it or become cynical about it.
(...)
So the dogma, in this context, is the end result of a whole stream of soul-spiritual development, just like the percepts-concepts we perceive around us. In the modern age, these have been encrusted and hardened to the extent that we fail to discern their inner currents anymore. So the first step is
always to develop our own inner capacity of living and ennobled thinking. Before that, there is little point approaching the traditions and dogmas of our heritage, since we can't but help attach ourselves to their outer forms or cynically cast them aside based on the appearance of those same outer forms. In that sense, it may be best to stick with the 'social safety net' basics of plain vanilla Protestantism and avoid too much exposure to the mysteries of tradition, dogma, rites, etc. Once we have deepened and matured our spiritual activity, though, we can revisit the latter to recover the essential soul-depths from which they arose. And by doing so we participate in shaping the spiritual pathways of future human and Earthly evolution.
Yes please, choose another name for the Apostle's Creed, because our human language has its logic and its functionality, with a certain openness to flexibility, however, words cannot be stretched out indefinitely. The fact that the Creeds or the Church are referred to with this same word blurs the question, not by coincidence, as it were. In order to convey the concrete import of the word dogma in common language (that we should use here) and all it signifies, in the context of the
institution-Church (not the Church of the Apostle's Creed) in terms of hierarchically imposing arbitrary constraints in an attempt to
overwrite reality, I would like to quote JVH in a passage about the evolving understanding of reincarnation within the
institution of the Roman Catholic Church:
von Halle wrote:This old understanding of ‘eternal life’ [the rhythm of reincarnations] … was maintained by the Christian Church for several centuries. Of course, the Church knew the secret principle of development of spiritually-knowledgeable souls, as initiated by Christ, and it knew about the new spiritual maturity that every person could develop. A fact which however was not compatible with the institutional claims to power of later ecclesiastical dignitaries, which is why it was unceremoniously removed from the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church by means of dogma.
J. von Halle. Reincarnation and Karma. Clairview Books, 2022, p. 29.
So, one greatly fitting example of dogma is the arbitrary decision by the RCC to
cancel consciousness of reincarnation in order to allow for
institutionalized (not isolated corrupted)
power structures (=Ahrimanic structures) to take over, and not
orders, if you see what I mean. Believe it or not, I have read the above for the first time today, after I wrote my post just above. Still, this summa is perfect to epitomize both points I have made:
- the meaning of dogma, and why it is not fine to normalize dogma, in the context of this forum. Again, our language is born and raised within the world of polarities, and cannot tolerate that words are extracted from their semantic milieu. It only can tolerate a fair level or artistic wise molding, so to say. By the way I notice the word dogma is not used either in the Apostle's Creed (naturally), or by Cleric. And when Tomberg uses it in the text you quoted, I notice he puts it multiple times within quotes, although he was writing in the 1950s, or 60s, and to the attention of a readership of Unkown Friends interested in esoteric matters.
- the real extent of the criticizable
structure and behavior of the
institution RCC - not of the spiritual community that practices the wise Christian traditions. So I am saying that the structure itself of RCC, which is a structure and not an order, is criticizable, not that merely isolated corrupted behaviors within it are.
I realize you have begun, as you shared in recent posts, a personal move towards the Church as institution. However, this cannot be a reason for me to add any vanilla flavor to the reality of such institution, agree to normalize the meaning of dogma, and let you state undisputed that there is of course room for constructive criticism of the institution-Church “
especially when the leaders of the Church fight against free thinking or attach its practices to entirely worldly concerns. That is even more so the case in Protestant circles.” You should dare to extend your “
especially” way beyond the boundaries of your current openness to constructive criticism. What you are doing with such statements is unfortunately the real sugarcoating of the reality of the Church-institution of these days.
As I said, with this criticism, I certainly don’t intend to negate the traditional value of the Church as spiritual community. On the contrary, I want to praise it. Similarly I want to praise the work of countless individuals who manage to think, feel and act in alignment with their high ideals, within the oppressive constraints of the institution. With all this saved, I am clearly saying that the institution-Church as a tentacular and stifling power
structure (not order) on Earth, is no less an expression of the Ahrimanic impulse than other growing power structures we can nowadays observe. Esoteric Christianity developed for a reason. The reason is that the hindrance to the evolution of consciousness acted by the institution-Church had to be overcome. And it doesn't seem self-evident to me, at all, that the reconciliation between inner and outer Christianity, between spiritual and institutional Christianity, is something we can seamlessly transition into, glossing over the dark impulses ingrained in its institutions (that only can be redeemed across appropriate time lengths) by virtue of the unifying power of overarching ideals, compressed under the sign of timeless living tradition.