On Symbolic Ordering, Theology, and Hierarchical Mystagogy

[Federica]

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:

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.

[AshvinP]

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:

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. 

[Federica]

Ashvin, thanks for elaborating. I found Steiner’s lecture quite difficult. It directly challenges the die-hard understanding that there’s the physical world, and separate 'behind it', there's the spiritual world. It’s difficult for me to realize how these 12 senses, that are perceptual, also send us smoothly across the threshold, in various ways, as explained. This, for instance, is hard to relate to, experientially:

Mediation through the sense of touch is still more inward, already quite separate from the objects, much more so than it is the case with the sense of smell. When you touch objects, you actually perceive only yourself. You touch an object and if it is hard it presses forcibly on you; if it is soft its pressure is only slight. You perceive nothing of the object, however; you sense only the effect upon yourself, the change in yourself. A hard object pushes your organs far back into you. You perceive this resistance as a change in your own organism when you perceive by means of the sense of touch.

I guess it helps to remember the following, from the same lecture:

You see, there are no atoms out there as materialists imagine. Out there is the world of imaginative, inspired and intuitive elements, and as this world affects us, the impressions of it arise in the outward sense perceptions.

Federica, the way I like to think about it is that the birth of higher meaning always requires a death of form. As we discussed before, when we permeate the objects of our sense perception with our concepts, the former become familiar and uninteresting, i.e. their perceptual structures involute as the conceptual meaning evolves out of them. That is how our normal I-activity mines meaning from the perceptual landscape. On the path of higher development, our superconscious I-activity does a similar thing, not only with outer sense impressions but with the sense organs themselves. Just as outer forms of sense perception must be sacrificed for conceptual meaning to be born and perceived, the outer forms of body-soul structures and even capacities must also be sacrificed for imaginative, inspired, and intuitive meaning to be born and perceived. 

Put another way, we are awakening to the higher currents of ideational activity that went into structuring those body-soul organs and capacities to begin with. The former is normally obscured by the functional utility of those organs and capacities, i.e. it had to die out within the latter for us to make use of it for the Earthly context. If we want to reawaken to the higher activity within the spiritual context, the inverse process needs to take place - we need to 'fall asleep' to its functioning within the Earthly context. 

I am reminded of an allegory Cleric once wrote to me. It is also somewhat difficult to approach with our normal ways of thinking, and I can't say I have a very clear inner understanding of these spiritual processes, but perhaps it will help kindle your intuition for them as it does mine. I think what he is speaking of below can be directly related to the spiritual nature of the touch-sense, i.e. the 'kinesthetic' intuition of the thinking-will force.

If the average person finds himself in a stage where the support of the senses and the imaginative substance is taken away, that would be deep sleep. But a mathematician who has developed such deep experience of mathematical thinking will find that he can be still conscious. He'll recognize his existence precisely in such inner transformation of the shape of our intuitive being. He doesn't imagine fingers to count but lives in the 'kinesthetic' intuition of his thinking-will.

This is not simply an analogy. Doing pure mathematical thinking without the support of reflection indeed already places us in a Devachanic state. The difference with true experience of the spiritual world lies in the following. In this state of pure thinking-will, we need something to anchor our self-consciousness. Without this, the state becomes dreamless sleep. The "I" can find that anchor in the experience of the shape of its thinking-will but in a sense it must will something stationary. Normally our body gives us plenty of anchor points for this but here we must provide that anchor point out of ourselves.

In a strange way we need to sacrifice something of ourselves. Allegorically speaking, we have to sacrifice a leg, scrape off the flesh and take the thighbone to use as a yardstick. Imagine this clearly. We're pure thinking-will within boundless thinking-space. Then we take the bone and begin moving as if with our elementary algebra. We place the bone before us and move to its other side. Then we place the bone in a new way and move again. This is exactly as construction problems in geometry (example), where we have to use only a compass and ruler to draw something with strict rules, where every transformation steps firmly on the previous elements. All these Imaginations need to be stripped of their substance and we should remain only with the experience of the thinking-will. The result is that through such thinking gestures we begin to traverse certain cognitive states. The mathematician could change his cognitive states among the invisible gestures for numbers, geometric forms and so on.

Now the critical thing is that we had to kill something in order to have this stable structure. In the same way we have to kill an animal to study its anatomy, then we can arrange the bones. We find these bones consistently every time we look at them. In the same way, by producing from ourselves something dead, we can arrange the most varied skeletons through which our cognitive activity can move. These skeletons have timeless character - as long as we use the same bones, the cognitive states that we can traverse are the same.

Thanks for the attempt, Ashvin. I follow your explanation, but no, I don't get Cleric's allegory. It's like trying to make a fire in the rain, the conditions are not favorable. Especially the part with the thigh bone, it seems imaginative to me, but the context is pure thinking-will stripped of imaginations.
If anything, it makes me think of Dennis Klocek. In Esoteric Physiology, he refers to the thigh bone as the origin of the new blood in our physical body, and recommends a meditation on the journey of the blood across the body, from there through arteries, veins, organs and capillaries and there are exercises in The seer's handbook, that involve rearranging bones from an animal skeleton.
The question of anchoring the I in boundless thinking space, once the physical body is not available as anchor has been addressed here by Cleric in maybe easier terms. The 12 senses may be seen as part of that lost anchor in the physical that has to be somehow recreated in the space of pure thinking, as it seems in the allegory. For now, I don't get any concrete sense of how it is done with an allegorical bone. I surely have much work left to do before I get there.

[Federica]

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. 

"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"


Yes, it does feel paradoxical, which gives the question its excruciating character I guess. I think of telos in terms of Divine intents first and foremost, rather than in terms of unfolding of time. A sort of spiritual equivalent to the philosophical-scientific question “Why is there something rather than nothing”. In other words, what is the meaning of the end of the unified state? Why does Unity need the unique new perspectives you speak of? For me this is the main question of telos, but I get that there’s no way to escape the paradox. I simply wonder if, somewhere ahead on the path, there is a clearer intuition of how Unity had to cease.

Now, I follow what you say about telos within a human scope, appreciate the great quote from Cleric and how you and Kürten relate it to Christ - these are fantastic intuitions! For a more down to earth (literally) descriptive account of the episodes of the life of Christ, is there a book or other read (other than the Bible) that you would recommend? To follow and visualize the events with the help of some text...

[AshvinP]

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. 

"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"


Yes, it does feel paradoxical, which gives the question its excruciating character I guess. I think of telos in terms of Divine intents first and foremost, rather than in terms of unfolding of time. A sort of spiritual equivalent to the philosophical-scientific question “Why is there something rather than nothing”. In other words, what is the meaning of the end of the unified state? Why does Unity need the unique new perspectives you speak of? For me this is the main question of telos, but I get that there’s no way to escape the paradox. I simply wonder if, somewhere ahead on the path, there is a clearer intuition of how Unity had to cease.

Federica,

I would say the intuition that becomes more clear is that Unity never did begin or cease, as we progressively awaken to how it is always present in our experience but eludes our conceptual grasp because the act of grasping is also the act of obscuring the experiential Unity. In other words, it becomes more clear that the question - like the 'why is there something rather than nothing' question - was only possible to ask within a tiny spectrum of the 4th convolution that we call the modern age, and then it is increasingly revealed as meaningless on either side of that spectrum. Ultimately, it is exactly as MS says - true meaning can only be experienced within the act of living thinking, an act that is continually dying in our dialectical questioning and answering. The meaning we think we possess is only the reflective corpse. It is sort of like a dreaming person asking about the meaning of waking reality when the only experiences that would allow a person to suspect that meaning are occluded from consciousness. We can intimate the dreaming nature of our questions about ultimate meaning by noticing how any conceivable answer to the question will invoke linear temporal concepts that are only characteristic of the 4th convolution. We can't positively think-speak of any 'intent', Divine or otherwise, without invoking the unfolding of time.

If I was forced to approximate a crude and simple answer, I would say the meaning of the unique perspectives is Love - they are not needed per se, but the Unity desires to share its Blessed existence with as many be-ings as possible.

It also reminds me of this Bergson quote that I have shared before, which is addressing more the 'something rather than nothing' question but could equally apply to all similar questions.

To the extent that we distend our will, tend to reabsorb our thought in it and get into greater sympathy with the effort which engenders things, these formidable problems recede, diminish, disappear. For we feel that a divinely creative will or thought is too full of itself, in the immensity of its reality, to have the slightest idea of a lack of order or lack of being. To imagine the possibility of absolute disorder, all the more the possibility of nothingness, would be for it to say to itself that it might have not existed at all, and that would be a weakness incompatible with its nature which is force. The more we turn toward this creative will, the more the doubts which trouble the sane and normal man seem to us abnormal and morbid.
...
Such is exactly the effect certain “great problems” produce in us when we set ourselves again in the direction of generating thought. They recede toward zero as fast as we approach this generating thought, as they fill only that space between it and us. Thus we discover the illusion of him who thinks he is doing more by raising these problems than by not raising them. One might just as well think that there is more in a half-consumed bottle than in a full one, because the latter contains only wine, while in the former there is wine and emptiness in addition.

Now, I follow what you say about telos within a human scope, appreciate the great quote from Cleric and how you and Kürten relate it to Christ - these are fantastic intuitions! For a more down to earth (literally) descriptive account of the episodes of the life of Christ, is there a book or other read (other than the Bible) that you would recommend? To follow and visualize the events with the help of some text...

Based on what I had read so far, I would probably recommend 'Christ and Sophia' (Tomberg) or 'Wilt Thou be Made Whole?' (Kuhlewinde), the latter being shorter and somewhat more basic, i.e. requires less spiritual scientific background. But if you are trying to avoid the esoteric angle and simply get a basic feel for the events first, I can't think of anything other than the Gospels. There is a great website with audio files for download that are narrated really well from the KJV - https://www.wordproject.org/bibles/audi ... w2_BlehWEs

[Federica]

Federica,

I would say the intuition that becomes more clear is that Unity never did begin or cease, as we progressively awaken to how it is always present in our experience but eludes our conceptual grasp because the act of grasping is also the act of obscuring the experiential Unity. In other words, it becomes more clear that the question - like the 'why is there something rather than nothing' question - was only possible to ask within a tiny spectrum of the 4th convolution that we call the modern age, and then it is increasingly revealed as meaningless on either side of that spectrum. Ultimately, it is exactly as MS says - true meaning can only be experienced within the act of living thinking, an act that is continually dying in our dialectical questioning and answering. The meaning we think we possess is only the reflective corpse. It is sort of like a dreaming person asking about the meaning of waking reality when the only experiences that would allow a person to suspect that meaning are occluded from consciousness. We can intimate the dreaming nature of our questions about ultimate meaning by noticing how any conceivable answer to the question will invoke linear temporal concepts that are only characteristic of the 4th convolution. We can't positively think-speak of any 'intent', Divine or otherwise, without invoking the unfolding of time.

If I was forced to approximate a crude and simple answer, I would say the meaning of the unique perspectives is Love - they are not needed per se, but the Unity desires to share its Blessed existence with as many be-ings as possible.

...


Based on what I had read so far, I would probably recommend 'Christ and Sophia' (Tomberg) or 'Wilt Thou be Made Whole?' (Kuhlewinde), the latter being shorter and somewhat more basic, i.e. requires less spiritual scientific background. But if you are trying to avoid the esoteric angle and simply get a basic feel for the events first, I can't think of anything other than the Gospels. There is a great website with audio files for download that are narrated really well from the KJV - https://www.wordproject.org/bibles/audi ... w2_BlehWEs

Thank you, Ashvin, these are appeasing thoughts and I feel it would be hardly possible to extricate the question more than you have already done! Thanks also for the references - yes, parallel to esoteric sources, I was searching for a support to vividly imagine the Christ events, as a basic step to improve my understanding of the Christ-being.

[AshvinP]

Federica,

I would say the intuition that becomes more clear is that Unity never did begin or cease, as we progressively awaken to how it is always present in our experience but eludes our conceptual grasp because the act of grasping is also the act of obscuring the experiential Unity. In other words, it becomes more clear that the question - like the 'why is there something rather than nothing' question - was only possible to ask within a tiny spectrum of the 4th convolution that we call the modern age, and then it is increasingly revealed as meaningless on either side of that spectrum. Ultimately, it is exactly as MS says - true meaning can only be experienced within the act of living thinking, an act that is continually dying in our dialectical questioning and answering. The meaning we think we possess is only the reflective corpse. It is sort of like a dreaming person asking about the meaning of waking reality when the only experiences that would allow a person to suspect that meaning are occluded from consciousness. We can intimate the dreaming nature of our questions about ultimate meaning by noticing how any conceivable answer to the question will invoke linear temporal concepts that are only characteristic of the 4th convolution. We can't positively think-speak of any 'intent', Divine or otherwise, without invoking the unfolding of time.

If I was forced to approximate a crude and simple answer, I would say the meaning of the unique perspectives is Love - they are not needed per se, but the Unity desires to share its Blessed existence with as many be-ings as possible.

...


Based on what I had read so far, I would probably recommend 'Christ and Sophia' (Tomberg) or 'Wilt Thou be Made Whole?' (Kuhlewinde), the latter being shorter and somewhat more basic, i.e. requires less spiritual scientific background. But if you are trying to avoid the esoteric angle and simply get a basic feel for the events first, I can't think of anything other than the Gospels. There is a great website with audio files for download that are narrated really well from the KJV - https://www.wordproject.org/bibles/audi ... w2_BlehWEs

Thank you, Ashvin, these are appeasing thoughts and I feel it would be hardly possible to extricate the question more than you have already done! Thanks also for the references - yes, parallel to esoteric sources, I was searching for a support to vividly imagine the Christ events, as a basic step to improve my understanding of the Christ-being.

As it so happens, Federica, I just came across a video that should be exactly what you were looking for, at least to begin with. It centers around the birth events celebrated at the Christmas festival and approaches from an artistic angle with some esoteric dimension as well. More broadly, I have been impressed with Andrew Linnell's videos and talks so far - he has an interesting website called MysTech (which seems to me an interesting play on both 'mistake' and 'mystic') that explores the mysteries of technology in the light of spiritual science. There is a lot of great insight into the transhumanism phenomena.

[Federica]

Federica,

I would say the intuition that becomes more clear is that Unity never did begin or cease, as we progressively awaken to how it is always present in our experience but eludes our conceptual grasp because the act of grasping is also the act of obscuring the experiential Unity. In other words, it becomes more clear that the question - like the 'why is there something rather than nothing' question - was only possible to ask within a tiny spectrum of the 4th convolution that we call the modern age, and then it is increasingly revealed as meaningless on either side of that spectrum. Ultimately, it is exactly as MS says - true meaning can only be experienced within the act of living thinking, an act that is continually dying in our dialectical questioning and answering. The meaning we think we possess is only the reflective corpse. It is sort of like a dreaming person asking about the meaning of waking reality when the only experiences that would allow a person to suspect that meaning are occluded from consciousness. We can intimate the dreaming nature of our questions about ultimate meaning by noticing how any conceivable answer to the question will invoke linear temporal concepts that are only characteristic of the 4th convolution. We can't positively think-speak of any 'intent', Divine or otherwise, without invoking the unfolding of time.

If I was forced to approximate a crude and simple answer, I would say the meaning of the unique perspectives is Love - they are not needed per se, but the Unity desires to share its Blessed existence with as many be-ings as possible.

...


Based on what I had read so far, I would probably recommend 'Christ and Sophia' (Tomberg) or 'Wilt Thou be Made Whole?' (Kuhlewinde), the latter being shorter and somewhat more basic, i.e. requires less spiritual scientific background. But if you are trying to avoid the esoteric angle and simply get a basic feel for the events first, I can't think of anything other than the Gospels. There is a great website with audio files for download that are narrated really well from the KJV - https://www.wordproject.org/bibles/audi ... w2_BlehWEs

Thank you, Ashvin, these are appeasing thoughts and I feel it would be hardly possible to extricate the question more than you have already done! Thanks also for the references - yes, parallel to esoteric sources, I was searching for a support to vividly imagine the Christ events, as a basic step to improve my understanding of the Christ-being.

As it so happens, Federica, I just came across a video that should be exactly what you were looking for, at least to begin with. It centers around the birth events celebrated at the Christmas festival and approaches from an artistic angle with some esoteric dimension as well. More broadly, I have been impressed with Andrew Linnell's videos and talks so far - he has an interesting website called MysTech (which seems to me an interesting play on both 'mistake' and 'mystic') that explores the mysteries of technology in the light of spiritual science. There is a lot of great insight into the transhumanism phenomena.

Wonderful! Thank you so much Watching this video could be the perfect last thing to do for me today.