Federica wrote: ↑Mon Aug 07, 2023 10:52 am
AshvinP wrote: ↑Mon Aug 07, 2023 12:34 am
Federica wrote: ↑Sun Aug 06, 2023 6:26 pm
Although my question was probably more similar to the question of Telos, not too focused on human destiny this time, your considerations are inspiring, I follow, Ashvin, thanks!
Federica, I'm curious as to how you understand the difference between those - Telos and human destiny? In my mind, they are quite the same, but perhaps I am missing an angle from which to view them as distinguishable.
I had In mind the lecture cycle "
The Spiritual Hierarchies". In those lectures, Steiner invites us to gaze at a time prior to the existence of our solar system, prior to the existence of our humanity:
Steiner wrote:Before a system of Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim can be evolved, it must have been a solar system at an earlier stage; which means, that when the Sun has got so far as to be reunited with its planets, it becomes itself a circle — a Zodiacal circle. That which we have come to know in the Zodiac, those great, sublime Beings, are the results that have come over to us from an earlier solar system. That which has formerly evolved within a solar system can now send down its influence out of universal space, and produce a new solar system, created out of itself. The Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones are for us the highest Hierarchy among divine Beings, because they have already passed through their solar system evolution and have risen to mighty cosmic deeds of sacrifice.
Hence it is that these Beings have come into the actual direct vicinity of the highest Godhead of which we can speak at all: the Trinity, the three-fold Divinity. Beyond the Seraphim we have to see that highest Divinity of which we find mention by almost all nations as the threefold Divinity — as Brahma, Shiva, Vishnu, as Father, Word, and Holy Ghost. From out [of] this highest Godhead, this most exalted Trinity, stream forth the plans for a new cosmic system. Glancing back at ancient Saturn we say to ourselves: before any of this ancient Saturn came into Being, the plan of it had grown within the divine threefold Unity. But the threefold Unity has need of Beings to execute its plan. These Beings must first prepare themselves for the task. The Beings who, are so to speak, nearest God Himself, who, as is beautifully expressed in Christian Western Esotericism, ‘bask in the light of God's countenance,’ are the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. These take up the plans of a new cosmic system streaming from the divine threefold Unity.
These thoughts bring us closer to the origin of Time, and the originally still perfection of the Trinity. So the question of the primal impulse towards differentiation and evolutionary cycles arises.
Ah ok, I see what you're saying.
Once we go back to the most primordial Origin of our solar system, things become quite paradoxical. It then makes little sense to speak of any telos in terms of temporal development because Time itself only came into being through the old Saturn stage. Prior to that stage, the beginning and the end of solar evolution as we know it was still
unified. It is as if a math problem arose simultaneously with the answer to that problem without any intervening stages of reasoning. The preparatory stages and the fulfillment of that preparation were all experienced as a unified Idea. We can say that something truly new arises through the convoluting/decohering process because the very process entails the engendering of unique perspectives within the Unity that involve and evolve through it, bringing new capacities to it (but which are, paradoxically, always existing). That is why we can also speak of the inner experience of higher development as a sort of rediscovery or remembrance of what we already knew and accomplished. Steiner also refers to this aspect at the beginning of those lectures on the spiritual hierarchies.
The knowledge and investigation which lead us into those regions has not, as you all know, come into existence only at our present time in evolution. There is what we may call a primeval world-wisdom; — all that man can fathom, all that he can know and realise, all that he has gained in ideas and conceptions, all that he has attained through clairvoyant imagination, inspiration, and intuition, — all has been lived before, and known before, by those Beings who are higher than he. He only follows so to say, in their track. To make use of a trivial example: the watchmaker has first the idea, then he makes the watch according to the idea. A watch is made after the maker's ideas which preceded the watch; afterwards everyone can study and observe for himself from what ideas the watch was made, he can follow up the thoughts of the watchmaker. At the present point of evolution it is indeed only this kind of connection that man can have with primeval world-wisdom and with the spiritual beings that stand above him. Spiritual beings had first those imaginations, inspirations, intuitions, those ideas and thoughts according to which the world, as we see it, was formed. Man finds these thoughts and ideas in the world again; when he rises to clairvoyant vision, he finds the imaginations, inspirations, and intuitions, by the help of which he can penetrate into the world of those spiritual beings. We can, therefore, say that before our world came into being there already existed the wisdom of which we are going to speak: it is the Plan of the World.
For all intents and purposes, to speak meaningfully about the telos, we have to tease apart the stages of this Plan of the World and discern what human evolution is bringing to the Cosmic hierarchies that otherwise would not exist without that evolution. We have spoken before about many of those qualities. For example, Cleric wrote the following recently,
Our Earthly existence becomes possible only because the Imaginative world becomes more and more frictious, more resisting to our spiritual activity. This forces us to 'micro-manage' our Imaginative stream of becoming. This is really the origin of the sensory world, which we'll hopefully address further on the other thread. This is also the basis for the experience of freedom because by understanding the dynamics of this decohered flow, we develop the degrees of freedom through which we do the micro-management. The goal of course is to spiritualize the decohered flow once again by developing the higher order spiritual activities within which the micro-flow would have to be musically embedded. Without this descend (involution) our existence would resemble an Imaginative safari, where we behold pictures that are harmoniously ordered and nothing will ever force us to experience the manifoldness of the world and its micro-management to such an extent.
Now one can ask: but what's the point of all this since after we evolve towards the more harmonic stages it will be all the same whether or not we have gone through the deep involution? But this is not so. The fact that today we're forced to micro-manage our existence makes us into a quite special kind of spiritual beings. Maybe we all know some of those people who seem to always try to get to the 'bottom of things'. For example, they are not satisfied to only know that they use a computer - they want to understand how it works. Or they are not content with the fact that they have a body - they want to know about its organs, how they work and so on. They don't want to do business just to get the profit - they want to understand how this business fits in the global economic flow. This is really the kind of being that our evolutionary scenario produces. Through the harsh experiences in the frictious sensory world, we're forced to get to the bottom of things. Initially we need this purely for survival but as we develop this turns out to make us into beings that have unprecedentedly deep and rich experience of reality. This is something that will make its way into the future man too. Even in the higher worlds we'll continue to have this manifold experience of reality. It is as if we're trained to seek the depth in everything, to get to the bottom of things.
In a sense, human destiny is to become the Divinities that are responsible for laying the Solar foundation of human destiny. But in that process, unique perspectives are engendered whose awakening will be the aim of 'new' Solar evolutions. Reality is structured as a palindrome in this way - it can be 'read' front to back or back to front, beginning to end or end to beginning, without losing its essential meaning. That is most sublimely illustrated for us through the image of the Christ events, which of course were prepared for from the beginning of Solar evolution and continue to unfold throughout the rest of that evolution. Christ is exactly the kind of being who wants to get to the bottom of things, figuratively in the sense that he incarnates the living Spirit into our capacity for intelligence, and literally in the sense that he renounced his Comsic existence and freely descended right into the depths of the Earth so that humanity could ascend in a sort of parallel development. In other words, Christ's descent
is one and the same as our ascent, as our descent will also be one and the same as ascents for new waves of beings.
In one of his karma lectures given in London, Steiner says that Christ, in his descent from the sun to the Earth, left his highest member-of-being, his spirit-man, behind on the sun, and his life-spirit in the surroundings of the Earth, and brought only his I with his spirit-self to the Earth. This departure of Christ from the sun is a process that is the polar opposite of the human being’s departure from the Earth at death. Christ died cosmically from the sun to the Earth. Just as the human being at death leaves his physical body behind on the Earth, so Christ left behind on the sun his higher member-of-being that corresponds to the physical body— spirit-man. The human being, soon after death, then gives up his etheric body to the cosmic ether; Christ gave up his corresponding higher member— his life-spirit— to the earthly ether in the surroundings of the Earth. And just as the human being finally enters the spiritual world, or Devachan, with his I and astral body, so Christ entered the earthly sphere with his I and transformed astral body, his spirit-self.
Kürten, Oskar. Mystery of the Christ (pp. 18-19). Temple Lodge Publishing. Kindle Edition.