On Symbolic Ordering, Theology, and Hierarchical Mystagogy

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

For my part, I don’t have any self-inflicted wounds related to religion, and I have no clear idea what the protestant-evangelical or evangelical faiths believe in. Sure I was born in a Catholic culture, however I didn't receive any explicitly religious education, and I have never been a member of any church, religious group or community. So in this sense, my consideration of the RCC is dispassionate.

Federica,

I will respond to your post/questions more in detail later. But the above really needs to confronted on an esoteric path of self-knowledge, first and foremost. What are you doing in your thinking when you declare, "I don’t have any self-inflicted wounds related to religion... So in this sense, my consideration of the RCC is dispassionate."? In a way, you are declaring that the current life of waking consciousness sufficiently informs you as to what actually lives in the deeper archetypal layers of mind and heart. Then that leads you to the unrepentant and definitive conclusion, "my consideration of the RCC is dispassionate". But we know that is not actually the case, and that our waking consciousness is the tiniest of apertures into what lives in our depths of soul. Perhaps I should have been more clear in my anecdote - the protestant evangelical phase is not the self-inflicted wound itself, but only a temporal manifestation of it in my given incarnation (along with many others). It is a symbol for that wound which we all sustained through the Luciferic Fall, and which is slowly but surely being healed through the redemption of Christ. The 'dogma' of repentance and confession should be seen as a symbolic portal towards self-knowledge of our soul-depths in which cynicism and resentment towards revealed Wisdom are most assuredly alive, regardless of our particular circumstances in this incarnation.

I do appreciate that, as usual, you are intelligently considering my posts and asking very pertinent questions in response, and I really want to address those questions soon. There are many portals of striving that can opened through such questions. The above is just something we always need to keep in mind, no matter what topic we are considering.

Ashvin,

Thanks, I look forward to reading your ideas on the question I asked, but wait a second here: you are overinterpreting:

What are you doing in your thinking when you declare, "I don’t have any self-inflicted wounds related to religion... So in this sense, my consideration of the RCC is dispassionate."? In a way, you are declaring that the current life of waking consciousness sufficiently informs you as to what actually lives in the deeper archetypal layers of mind and heart. Then that leads you to the unrepentant and definitive conclusion, "my consideration of the RCC is dispassionate".

I deny the bold. What I did is to mirror your statement in which you mentioned some past events of your present life. You said: "I went through a protestant evangelical phase where I literally equated the RCC with the Antichrist (and found very compelling discursive logical arguments for this position), and I don't think the cynical scars from that self-inflicted wound have entirely healed yet". I have simply reciprocated that, providing similar context referred to my present life. I have not declared anything more than that at all, I wanted to highlight the difference, because if you brought in that element from your present life, surely you thought it had a relevance in the discussion. Notice: I said "in this sense it is dispassionate", it is "a disapproval". I also said, in another sense it is still an opinion, it is still colored with the soul likes and preferences we often refer to. So, by all means, when you say "unrepentant and definitive conclusion" you are going overboard. I know that "our waking consciousness is the tiniest of apertures into what lives in our depths of soul" and I knew it as I was writing the above. Please revise your judgment in this case. Please realize that I promptly admitted that my position is an opinion, and in that clarification is encapsulated the awareness that you believe I have lost in unrepentant and definitive conclusions.

Alright, Federica, then I apologize for overinterpreting. It seems we both could have been more clear in our examples and phrasing. The self-awareness of our conceptual habits and what drives them, to be clear, is not something we gain or lose, but is something we are continually losing as long as the 'awareness' is only a matter of more concepts. Only the inner experience of the animating cognitive currents can provide the strength to retain the self-knowledge in a lasting way. Hopefully what follows also ties into this theme.

I don’t think that the path of living thinking should prompt us to become understanding of, and tolerant of, and happily embracing all kinds of cultural institutions, on grounds that they are there, and need to find a recognized place in the human cultural panorama as external symbols of a deep reality that reaches across the threshold. This is the risk I see in the symbolic approach you are communicating: to blur and balance out judgments to the point that we feel compelled to explain everything on Earth in the expanded terms of a divine reason and trajectory, that we should strive to apprehend no matter what. That certainly makes complete sense at the encompassing level of the highest intents and their telos, but is it an appropriate approach to every moment of our life on Earth? We are immersed in this finite world of contrasts, and I think we need to accept that this world calls for some ability to zoom in and out. In general, our human weakness is that we are all zoomed in at the level of sensory and soul fragmentation, but you seem to argue now that we need to zoom all out instead, and lock the objective in that mode indefinitely. I think we have to maintain some ability to also segment, consider things in isolation, and to discriminate, until we are here with a physical body, immersed in the sensory world. We need to remain flexible to zoom in, and out, and in again, when necessary. In other words we need to form flexible opinions. Not that we shouldn’t be open to move, and evolve, and expand orthogonally, of course. Not that we don’t need the ability to zoom out of the specific context, event, or angle, but we cannot either pretend that we should always be all-encompassing and all-seeing throughout, all-dispassionate and all-detached from the contextual, polar, one-sided content of everyday earthly life. Otherwise, isn't there the risk that this too can become a dogma? This focused aspiration that everything should always be loosely held, as loosely as one possibly can, maintained in perpetual balance on the mysterious apex of the cone of reality, and that nothing is bad, because when we say 'bad' we are first unduly isolating, and second projecting outside our inner evil, seems a way to stick to an extreme, paradoxically, by not willing to dwell in any extreme. Do you think we can traverse this world of form without holding any beliefs or opinions? In a permanent strive to maintain the zoom at maximum extension? Do you think that, while we pass through this Earthly life, we should always find a way to swallow and digest anything challenging that we find on our path, reedit it as lawful, or traditional, hence understanding and accepting any inner resistance we may encounter in this attempt as personal inadequacy?

I was already drafting another post on this topic into which I think my response to the above can be usefully integrated. I came across some relevant lectures from Steiner and feel it is only appropriate to share them in this context. As usual, Steiner proceeds to explore 'Roman Catholicism' in a very dispassionate and insightful way. 

What is it that is to bring about the decay of the old religions one and all? It is all that has arisen during the last three to four centuries as modern science, enlightened science — all that is taught as objective science in the educational institutions of civilized humanity. Bourgeois teaching and bourgeois methods of administration have been adopted by the proletariat. What the teachers of the universities and high schools right down to the elementary schools have put into the souls of men, comes out through Lenin and Trotsky. They bring out nothing but what is already taught in the institutions of civilized humanity.

My dear friends, today there exists an antithesis which one should contemplate without prejudice. It is this. What is to be done to prevent the influence of Lenin and Trotsky from spreading over the entire civilized world? The primary necessity is no longer to allow our children and our youth to be taught what has been taught right up to the Twentieth Century in our universities and in our secondary and elementary schools. To grasp this seeming contradiction demands courage, and because men do not want to have this courage, they go to sleep. That is why one has to say that whoever reads a declaration such as the one I have just quoted, even if it only appears in a few lines of an article, should feel as if stung by a viper; for it is as if the whole situation of present-day civilization were illumined by a flash of lightning.

Face to face with this situation, what would spiritual science with all its detailed concreteness have? What spiritual science would have, I would characterize somewhat as follows. The Roman Catholic Church, as a mighty corporation, represents the last withered remains of the civilization of the fourth post-Atlantean Epoch. It can be well authenticated in all detail that the Roman Catholic Church represents the last remnant of what was the right civilization for the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, what was justified right up to the middle of the Fifteenth Century, but what has now become a shadow. Of course products of a later evolution often herald their arrival in an earlier period, and its earlier products linger on into a later epoch; but in essentials the Roman Catholic Church represents what was justifiable for Europe and its colonies up to the middle of the Fifteenth Century.

Spiritual science, however, as we understand it, has to further the needs of the fifth post-Atlantean civilization. The Roman Catholic Church represents in a number of dogmas, as a self-contained structure which is dead, but which still exists as a corpse, something which hangs together inwardly through a well-constructed logic, a logic of reality. In this structure there is spirit, the spirit of a past epoch, but it is spirit. The way in which spirit is contained within it I have, I think, shown in the lectures I held here on St. Thomas Aquinas. There was spirit in these teachings, in these dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church, a spirit which had been perceived by those great ones whose last stragglers we find in Plotinus, and others, and with which St. Augustine had yet in an interesting way to wrestle.

Since the middle of the Fifteenth Century, what has appeared as philosophy, science, public opinion, world conception, apart from the Roman Catholic Church, is, for the most part, void of spirit. For the spirit of the fifth post-Atlantean age begins only to emerge with such principles as those of Lessing and Goethe. And it wants to enter into what the natural-scientific trend inaugurated by Copernicus, Galilee and Kepler was able to yield without spirit, and out of which Darwin, Huxley, and so on have blown the last remnant of Spirit. It wants to enter into that and fill it with Spirit. And spiritual science wishes to make manifest the Spirit which has to be the spirit of the fifth post-Atlantean age.

An institution permeated by a certain spirit as its own soul, if it is to maintain itself as an institution, can only fight for the past. To demand of the Catholic Church that it should fight for the future would be folly, for an institution which carried the spirit of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch cannot possibly carry that of the fifth. What the Catholic Church has become, what has spread over the civilized world as the configuration of the Catholic Church, and has its other aspect in Roman law and the abstractness of the whole Latin culture, all that belongs to the fourth cultural epoch. And the Catholic Church configuration has permeated the entire of civilization far more than men think. The monarchies, even if they were Protestant ones, were in their structure at bottom Latin Catholic institutions. For the fourth epoch it was necessary that men should be organized according to abstract principles, and that certain hierarchical ordinances should form the basis of organization. But what is to come as the spirit of the fifth post-Atlantean age, which we seek to cultivate through spiritual science, does not require such a firm structure, does not need a structure organized according to abstract principles, but requires such a relation of one human being to another as is characterized in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity as ethical individualism. What that book has to say on the subject of ethics stands in the same contrast to the social structure fostered by the Roman Catholic Church as in the last resort spiritual science stands to Roman Catholic theology.

Spiritual Science was verily never meant to appear in the role of belligerent; spiritual science was only meant to state what it saw to be the truth. Anyone who examines our activities here will have to admit that never, never have I taken an aggressive stance. Of course, one has had constantly to defend oneself against attacks which came from outside, and that is the essential thing. But it is simply a demand of the age that what spiritual science has to give should be stated quite concretely. One has to remember that modern civilization is asleep, and that Rome is awake. That Rome is awake is revealed by the mighty drama unrolled in the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception; in the publication of the Encyclical of 1864, with its Syllabus condemning eighty modern truths; in the declaration of the Infallibility of the Pope; in the naming of Thomas Aquinas as the official philosopher of the Catholic priesthood; and finally in the anti-Modernist Oath for the teaching clergy.

Now it is very tempting to read the above and latch onto some parts, formulating an equation which purports to capture Steiner's thinking and runs like, "RCC = good for continuity of Spirit during the 4th Atlantean Epoch, Spiritual Science = good for continuity during the 5th Post Atlantean epoch... Ipso facto, RCC is an outdated hierarchical institution that must fade away to favor individual esoteric striving". I know because I caught myself doing that exact thing while reading the lectures. I started wondering how I could discursively reconcile Steiner's position with another esoteric framework I have come to respect and admire, like Tomberg's. Then I asked myself, 'where did Steiner tell us he is giving us any such conceptual system to form definitive conclusions about the role of the RCC in his own time and the remainder of the 5th epoch?' That is not to be found in Steiner himself, but only in my own habitual systematic thinking. There is nothing that declares it impossible that the two streams can spiral together in some way during the 5th epoch and plenty elsewhere in his ideas that suggests that they can and should, even if the means by which that could happen was not clear to Steiner at the time. Personally, I think it makes little sense that these critical impulses of the 4th and 5th epochs would remain separate. Or that we would turn to the millions of Church faithful and say, "sorry your institution and its practices are all outdated, come join our esoteric community if you wish to evolve further". Instead it makes much more sense if we would say, "your spiritual institutions are established and critical for further human progress, if they are willing to also make room for the science of soul-spirit, which is in complete harmony with the Spirit of Church doctrine". It makes sense, above all, because it is true.

You (Federica) really captured the spirit of resisting the temptation of fragmenting and systematic thinking in this post. It would be interesting to hear how you feel what was written there compares to your last comment, where it was said, "I think we have to maintain some ability to also segment, consider things in isolation, and to discriminate..." In my view, the latter ability is only useful when a) it is used to spectrum analyze our environment as part of some specific applied purpose (which we must continue to do at our stage of evolution), or b) it is part of a more holistic endeavor to reunite what we have spectrum analyzed into a broader constellation of principled spiritual wisdom, and to rhythmically and repeatedly do that (or have that done by higher powers) without ever ceasing. That is how we spiral the pole of "everyday earthly life" into the pole of "all-encompassing and all-seeing" that we truly experience after death. Yes, that is indeed the path of modern initiation, which requires the sacrifice of personal beliefs and opinions. Because a mindset that clings to its desire for belief and opinion is capable of formulating a conceptual system of "zooming in and zooming out", but it practically prevents itself from living into the rhythmic practice of zooming in and zooming out. The system comes at the expense of the practice. If our ideal is to move freely across the threshold in waking consciousness, then we can't carry the systematic scaffolding with us. 

But what we naturally develop as a result of our sacrifice is infinitely more rewarding - it is the inner certainty of ideals, intents, and general curvatures of our destiny. The outer comfort and convenience we normally get from pinpointing beliefs, opinions, judgments, etc. about various philosophical-spiritual topics with conceptual proofs pales in comparison to the joy of inner certainty. We could say that it is a raising of the normal hysteresis to a higher level. Normally we observe the sensory spectrum and then step back to contemplate its meaning and derive our systems. But, at the higher level, our conceptual contemplation becomes more like our sensory perception, in so far as we probe the conceptual environment with our thought-feelers in a concrete way for holistic intuitions, and then the Y axis of the normal hysteresis becomes more like consciously returning the fruits of our probe to the Spirit so it can elaborate them into forces of feeling and will that help us steer towards our high ideals. Every series of concepts we approach becomes like a mini-journey into the rich mysteries of existence, which nevertheless remains lucid and well-defined. Of course, this isn't simply a switch we turn on and off - it is a path of persistence and practice that will surely encounter many bumps on the road. But the capacity to think symbolically through the World Content in a consistent way is something we surely underestimate. 

I mentioned previously the pilgrim who learned to pray without ceasing through interiorized heart prayer. These things are real and we can actually pray inwardly while we go about our daily tasks without the prayer interfering with those tasks. I am just using this as an example of what the human spirit is actually capable of on the path of higher development, not suggesting it is something everyone should try to do right away. It is the same thing Steiner speaks of here:

In the theosophical handbooks we meet with four attributes which must be developed by the student on what is called the probationary path, in order that he may attain the higher knowledge. The first is the faculty for discriminating between the eternal and the temporal, the true and the false, the truth and mere opinion. The second is a right estimate of the eternal and true as opposed to the perishable and illusory. The third faculty is that of practising the six qualities already mentioned in the foregoing chapters: thought-control, control of action, perseverance, tolerance, good faith, and equanimity. The fourth attribute necessary is the longing for freedom. A mere intellectual comprehension of what is included in these attributes is utterly worthless. They must become so incorporated into the soul that they endure as inner habits...  Now under the influence of these four spiritual habits the etheric body actually transforms itself... Enough has been said in the previous chapter of the six virtues of which the third attribute is composed. They are connected with the development of the twelve-petalled lotus in the region of the heart, and this, as already indicated, is associated with the life-current of the etheric body. The fourth attribute, which is the longing for freedom, serves to bring to fruition the etheric organ situated in the heart. If these attributes have become real spiritual habits, the individual frees himself from everything which only depends upon the capacities of his personal nature. He ceases to contemplate things from his own separate standpoint. The limits of his narrow self, which fetter him to this outlook, disappear. The secrets of the spiritual world reveal themselves to his inner self. This is liberation. For all fetters constrain the individual to regard things and beings as if they corresponded to his personal limitations. From this personal manner of regarding things the occult student must become independent and free.

Returning to the RC lectures quoted above, Steiner often emphasizes that he is not making hard and fast judgments, or taking the role of a 'belligerent', but simply relaying facts about the situation. That is, he is giving his listeners conceptual portals to enter into with their fluid, symbolic thinking so as to discern the overarching intentions that are at work to either keep modern civilization asleep to its spiritual heritage, i.e. through 'modernism', or reawaken it to that heritage. And I bet he would also say that those three lectures shouldn't be considered his "last word" on the topic - that it was never intended to be taken as a final word. There are generally two streams by which the awakening is being pursued - the exoteric Church and Christian esotericism, such as we find in Anthroposophy and other streams. We could call these streams of outer awakening and inner awakening, respectively. The latter should always take priority - the outer traditions/teachings won't find any useful place in our consciousness until the soil of the latter is sufficiently prepared to receive their inner wisdom. Eventually, though, the two grow closer and closer together, i.e. our inner thinking efforts are experienced to be more and more like an 'outer' stream of revealed Wisdom. And the outer traditions/teachings we approach are experienced to be more like the inner forum of ideas-ideals. The 'loose' holding of symbols is only a transitional (yet necessary) stage on the path. And it's not that everything becomes 'good' or nothing 'bad', but that our previous judgments of what is 'bad' start to lose their significance. Instead, we start to experience how our souls are interwoven with all other souls and what is bad becomes our failure, as a whole interconnected organism, to remain faithful to the path of redemption, which certainly encompasses particular acts of evil-doing.

We should strive to participate in the apprehension and redemption of the forms which precipitate from Divine intentions - which is all forms - no matter what. Again, that apprehension and redemption has already been accomplished. Both Steiner and Tomberg reveal to us how Lucifer has been redeemed through the Son's loving act (he has experienced an inner conversion), for ex., and how Ahriman will be likewise be redeemed by the loving power of the Father. These are exceedingly great mysteries, so they should feel unfamiliar and uncomfortable, perhaps making us even somewhat incredulous. How can we expect to have faith in such things when they seem so removed from our normal, everyday experience of the world? These are fine questions to ask and wrestle with. All I can say is that, in my experience, the esoteric path of intuitive thinking has been synonymous with increasing inner certainty about these broad curvatures of destiny. Not "certainty" in the form of beliefs or opinions, but in the same way that I have inner certainty every night that I will awaken the next day. Then the problems we deal with become of an entirely different nature - it is no longer a matter of finding conceptual proofs for this or that spiritual conclusion, but finding creative ways of how to participate in the completely certain waves of destiny that are unfolding. 

[AshvinP]

As always, concrete examples are what help us move from the domain of abstractions to the living substance of what is being referred to with all these words and labels. So can you provide a concrete example of the 'criticizable structure and behavior of the institution RCC', that is independent of 'corrupted behaviors within it' (such as for ex. the Crusades, the Inquisition, financial schemes, pedophilia and sex abuse scandals, etc.), that you refer to above? In other words, what is something baked into the very structure of the RCC, inherited from its understanding of scripture and ecclesiastical tradition, that makes into an equal parts moral and amoral institution, according to you?

Do you have a problem with the us/them, inside/outside, saved/unsaved, redeemed/damned dichotomies inherent in RCC teaching and dogma? You, me, Cleric, Federica, Steiner, and all others outside the Catholic Church, are hell-bound sinners according to RCC theology.

Anthony,

I'm sorry if it seems like I kind of blew by your question here, but the truth is, I don't really know how to respond to your questions anymore. I feel like much Cleric and I have written on the topic of the OT and NT, in response to your previous statements and questions, simply goes ignored. Or at least it is not responded to, and then you resurface later with another variation of the same point or question. For now I will just quote something from Tomberg, even though I am fairly certain you will find it as unsatisfying as you have all previous responses on this topic. I hope it manages to resonate more, though.

***

This subjective state of soul is neither long nor short—it is as intense as eternity is. Similarly, the blessedness that a saint experiences in the vision of God is as intense as eternity—although it could not so last, since someone present at the ecstasy of a saint would time it as a few minutes. The “region” of eternity is that of intensity, which surpasses the measures of quantity that we employ in time and space. “Eternity” is not a duration of infinite length; it is the “intensity of quality” which, if compared with time and thus translated into the language of quantity, is comparable with an infinite duration. Concerning this, Nicolas A. Berdyaev says:

In our life on earth it is given to us to experience torments that appear to us to go on for ever, that are not for a moment, for an hour or a day, but seem to last an infinity…Objectively this infinity may last a moment, an hour, or a day, but it receives the name of everlasting hell…When Origen said that Christ will remain on the cross so long as a single creature remains in hell, he expressed an eternal truth. (Nicolas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, London, 1937, p. 342 and p. 347)

What can one add to this, if not “amen”? Eternal hell is the state of a soul imprisoned within itself, where the soul has no hope of coming out. “Eternal” means to say “without hope”. All suicides committed through desperation bear witness to the reality of eternal hell as a state of soul. Before committing suicide, the person who commits it experiences a state of complete despair, i.e. eternal hell. This is why he prefers nothingness to the state of despair. Nothingness is therefore his last hope.

Eternal bliss—“heaven”—is, in contrast, the state of soul which is filled with boundless hope. This is not a blissfulness which lasts for an infinite number of years; it is the intensity of hope which gives the quality “eternal”. Similarly, it is the intensity of despair which imparts to the state of soul designated “hell” the quality “eternal”. The anguish of Gethsemane which gave rise to perspiration of blood was eternal. This night, the night of Gethsemane, was not measured in hours. It was—it is—immeasurable, therefore eternal. It is due to its eternity that he sweated blood, and not because of the temporary, and therefore passing, trial. He knew eternal hell through experience, and as he came out of it, we have the “good news” that not only death is vanquished by the Resurrection, but also that hell is—through Gethsemane.
...
This is why Origen himself knew with certain knowledge that there would be no “damned” at the end of the world and that the devil, also, would be saved. And whoever meditates on the sweat of blood in Gethsemane and on the words “It is I” (or “I am he”), announcing the eternal victory over eternal hell, also will know with certain knowledge that eternal hell exists as a reality, but that it will be empty at the end of time. The sweat of blood in Gethsemane is the source of “Origenism”; here is the source of its inspiration.

[Federica]

Ashvin,

Before considering your latest post, and maybe as a halfway step to it, I would like to comment on your previous point on hierarchical structures:

The issue regarding hierarchical structures is an important one, because I think it is very intuitive for modern people to be skeptical and cynical about such structures. And even on the esoteric path of intuitive thinking activity, we may start to feel that such structures inhibit our ability to freely commune with the Godhead without any, or only minimal, mediating individualities. Clearly that mood was at the very foundation of the Protestant reformation which sweeped Western Europe and its colonies. That was a clear move towards the forgetting of tradition and practices in which the living Spirit was embedded. I am not trying to identify Protestantism as some isolated mistake in cultural history, however, because that forgetfulness is also integral to our cultivation of thinking freedom, just like forgetting the reality of reincarnation was in the early Church. But we only fulfill the purpose of that forgetfulness if we use our thinking freedom to once again re-member and re-awaken the thread of tradition that was lost in the process. 

For my part, I actually never shared in the mood described in bold. That's not where my aversion to worldly hierarchical power structures comes from. On the contrary, I feel the spiritual hierarchies are fully justified and necessary, as they provide dimensions of understanding of both the complexity of reality, and its timeful unfolding. They literally give meaning to, or are the meaning of the timeful unfolding of complex reality. I am very grateful for the manifested existence of the heavenly hierarchies, and I never felt they inhibit anything, maybe also because “communing with the Godhead without mediation” is something I can hardly conceive, so I really don’t feel the hierarchies are in the way of anything. Now (and I know you will see this as a problem) I feel completely differently with regard to the worldly hierarchies. I see these predominantly as rigid structures that find more reason to be in the purpose of maintaining ill-intentioned, possibly abusing power relationships, rather than in ideal ordering.

I have the fresh memory of Steiner’s lecture series on the heavenly hierarchies to assist me here. Those hierarchies are expressing the principle of union, as I understand them. They are concentric, and time-based. They ensure meaning, continuity, eternity. They open, pave, and maintain a wise path for the lower levels (all levels, for that matter) to come closer to the core, the heart of all reality. On the contrary, cultural, worldly hierarchies are eccentric, and space-based. They primarily separate, rigidify, compartmentalize knowledge and participation, so that ill-intentioned power relationships serving all sorts of worldly desires can be enforced and maintained.

I realize, as I reflect on that, that one major theme of my life so far has been the rejection of worldly hierarchies. For example, that’s how I arrived in arguably the least hierarchical country in the world. And it’s been a progression, across the various geographical contexts in which I have lived, starting from the strongly hierarchical society in which I was born. And it’s not only a matter of geographical places. I recognize a similar movement in the evolution of my work life, and actually in all aspects of life, where I have fled hierarchical structures and mindset as well. Im this progression, I see Anthroposophy as the culmination of a moving away from hierarchy. I know this is disputable, but for me the immediate, direct access to a path of self knowledge, that anyone can initiate, out of bare freedom and intention, without intercessions, permissions, blessings or benevolent supervising of any kind, is the materialization on Earth of an advanced path to knowledge, decoupled from the heavy burden of worldly power structures and their written and unwritten pacts.

So in short, in the same way that a perceptual thought is dead and limiting, whilst thinking is an alive force, so worldly hierarchies are dead and limiting to me, whilst the heavenly hierarchies are an alive force. In this sense I am unsure to which extent this is the same thing as the forgetfulness you speak of. Now, I am able to suppose that, in the same way we can redeem and lovingly integrate our perceptual thoughts, it should also be possible to redeem our worldly hierarchies from within, coming to express that without as well. However, this seems to me at this current point, a much harder, far-away, and overwhelming task to incorporate in the sphere of material life. It’s almost as if, after the culmination of freedom I’ve had the chance to glimpse through Anthroposophy, now I am invited to renounce it, by making contact again with the limitations and flatness of space-bound, eccentric, separating, cultural hierarchy.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

Before considering your latest post, and maybe as a halfway step to it, I would like to comment on your previous point on hierarchical structures:

The issue regarding hierarchical structures is an important one, because I think it is very intuitive for modern people to be skeptical and cynical about such structures. And even on the esoteric path of intuitive thinking activity, we may start to feel that such structures inhibit our ability to freely commune with the Godhead without any, or only minimal, mediating individualities. Clearly that mood was at the very foundation of the Protestant reformation which sweeped Western Europe and its colonies. That was a clear move towards the forgetting of tradition and practices in which the living Spirit was embedded. I am not trying to identify Protestantism as some isolated mistake in cultural history, however, because that forgetfulness is also integral to our cultivation of thinking freedom, just like forgetting the reality of reincarnation was in the early Church. But we only fulfill the purpose of that forgetfulness if we use our thinking freedom to once again re-member and re-awaken the thread of tradition that was lost in the process. 

For my part, I actually never shared in the mood described in bold. That's not where my aversion to worldly hierarchical power structures comes from. On the contrary, I feel the spiritual hierarchies are fully justified and necessary, as they provide dimensions of understanding of both the complexity of reality, and its timeful unfolding. They literally give meaning to, or are the meaning of the timeful unfolding of complex reality. I am very grateful for the manifested existence of the heavenly hierarchies, and I never felt they inhibit anything, maybe also because “communing with the Godhead without mediation” is something I can hardly conceive, so I really don’t feel the hierarchies are in the way of anything. Now (and I know you will see this as a problem) I feel completely differently with regard to the worldly hierarchies. I see these predominantly as rigid structures that find more reason to be in the purpose of maintaining ill-intentioned, possibly abusing power relationships, rather than in ideal ordering.

I have the fresh memory of Steiner’s lecture series on the heavenly hierarchies to assist me here. Those hierarchies are expressing the principle of union, as I understand them. They are concentric, and time-based. They ensure meaning, continuity, eternity. They open, pave, and maintain a wise path for the lower levels (all levels, for that matter) to come closer to the core, the heart of all reality. On the contrary, cultural, worldly hierarchies are eccentric, and space-based. They primarily separate, rigidify, compartmentalize knowledge and participation, so that ill-intentioned power relationships serving all sorts of worldly desires can be enforced and maintained.

I realize, as I reflect on that, that one major theme of my life so far has been the rejection of worldly hierarchies. For example, that’s how I arrived in arguably the least hierarchical country in the world. And it’s been a progression, across the various geographical contexts in which I have lived, starting from the strongly hierarchical society in which I was born. And it’s not only a matter of geographical places. I recognize a similar movement in the evolution of my work life, and actually in all aspects of life, where I have fled hierarchical structures and mindset as well. Im this progression, I see Anthroposophy as the culmination of a moving away from hierarchy. I know this is disputable, but for me the immediate, direct access to a path of self knowledge, that anyone can initiate, out of bare freedom and intention, without intercessions, permissions, blessings or benevolent supervising of any kind, is the materialization on Earth of an advanced path to knowledge, decoupled from the heavy burden of worldly power structures and their written and unwritten pacts.

So in short, in the same way that a perceptual thought is dead and limiting, whilst thinking is an alive force, so worldly hierarchies are dead and limiting to me, whilst the heavenly hierarchies are an alive force. In this sense I am unsure to which extent this is the same thing as the forgetfulness you speak of. Now, I am able to suppose that, in the same way we can redeem and lovingly integrate our perceptual thoughts, it should also be possible to redeem our worldly hierarchies from within, coming to express that without as well. However, this seems to me at this current point, a much harder, far-away, and overwhelming task to incorporate in the sphere of material life. It’s almost as if, after the culmination of freedom I’ve had the chance to glimpse through Anthroposophy, now I am invited to renounce it, by making contact again with the limitations and flatness of space-bound, eccentric, separating, cultural hierarchy.

Federica,

Thanks for providing this additional feedback on your thinking. Perhaps this response can also supplement my previous post. It will appeal to higher esoteric experience-knowledge and I want to set that expectation from the outset. That is allowable and quite necessary when we want to explore the deeper significance of our esoteric striving.

On the path of modern initiation, we begin to inwardly realize how much of what we work out about our state of being in the form of concepts, even if they are rooted in spiritual science, when applied to us, are radically incomplete or sometimes even the opposite of what really lives in the depths of our thinking, feeling, and will. So when I point to a stream of development in the Western world, e.g. the Protestant reformation rooted in the consciousness soul, that has surely embedded itself in the soul-life of everyone currently living in the West at this point (and perhaps the whole world), and you tell me there is no inner subconscious aversion to hierarchical structures because you have studied the lectures on the heavenly hierarchies and find them compelling, I find that difficult to accept. I can say all the same things you did about the knowledge of higher hierarchies and my acceptance of that knowledge at the conceptual level, yet I also inwardly know that some unquantifiable degree of aversion/resentment against the Divine hierarchies, including higher human individualities who have progressed further in evolution and now work mostly 'from above', still lives in my heart. Cleric also discussed this topic in the context of the morphic spaces. 

This [Levin's approach] is not only a more roundabout way, full of traps and loopholes in which our thinking can become entangled, but is also a very tempting ground for our unconscious desires. As said before, as exciting as ML’s ideas are, they hold a great danger for humanity. In proper evolution we would start from the central thinking space and expand into the inner reality of lower and higher morphic spaces. This, as explained, leads to the attunement of our soul life which results in a deeper and balanced life of thinking, feeling and willing, centered not only around our individuality but concentric and harmonized with the higher order spaces. This in turn leads to attunement of life space and then the conditions for many of the most deadly diseases of our age are rendered nonexistent. Our spirit has the potential of becoming a formative and regenerative force for the bodily spaces. If such self-knowledge is denied to the soul, human passions continue to work from the subconscious regions of the psyche. Then the intellect extends its mechanical tentacles into other morphic spaces, trying to manipulate their curvature indirectly... Hopefully, these tendencies will be counterbalanced by enough souls who will recognize that true freedom and everything that humanity has cherished as the highest values of Truth, Love and Wisdom, is to be achieved not by following blind passions but by expanding consciousness into the nested morphic spaces, where we become fully conscious participants in the artful unfolding of the Cosmos.

You further go on to explain that you have in fact pursued a course of life that has 'so far been the rejection of worldly hierarchies', but in my view you incorrectly attribute that course entirely to the sphere of your intentional waking consciousness. Instead, I would say most of the reasons for that development until discovering Anthroposophy, and my own similar development, reside in the sphere of sleeping consciousness, i.e. the lower and higher morphic spaces. What you describe is, of course, the perfectly natural development for the modern consciousness soul that (subconsciously and supraconsciously) seeks evolution on a path increasingly free from worldly (and other-worldly) power structures. There is nothing wrong or unhealthy about that. But the discovery of the 'immediate, direct access to a path of self knowledge' is only the very beginning of modern initiation. We need to refrain from making conclusive judgments about our state of being - extending the mechanical tentacles - until we actually expand further into the nested morphic spaces in a healthy way. Eventually the question becomes, what is our overarching ideal aim in having this free and direct access to the path of self knowledge?

With every step deeper into the sphere of our own be-ing, into greater degrees of thinking-feeling-willing freedom, comes greater creative responsibility for how to use that freedom within the context of a whole living organism, and our decisions in this regard feedback into whether and how we will take even deeper steps. That is practically the Guardian at the threshold. It is how we choose to react to and employ the individual thinking freedom we have discovered within. That is also why it's so important to pursue a path of symbolic ordering of the World Content rather than systematizing - the former acts as means of purifying our selfish instincts with regards to the accumulation of spiritual knowledge. Again, these are instincts functioning well below the surface of our waking consciousness, and if we try to only assess them with the mechanical tentacles of that surface conceptual activity, we may easily convince ourselves they don't really exist or are nothing to be too concerned with. That is Maya.

As mentioned before, we cannot arbitrarily separate 'worldly hierarchies' that have evolved through cultural history from the Divine hierarchies themselves, who are responsible for that evolution, as you know also acknowledged above. There is a fine distinction between the sclerotized expression of hierarchical institutions in the modern age, and their ideal function as worldly reflections of the higher hierarchies. The last bold sentence you write is exactly correct, in a sense. You are invited on the path of modern initiation to renounce some of what you gained, by the grace of the Divine hierarchies, to freely serve them. The more we inwardly recognize that our entire life course was the result of that Grace, rather than our own waking consciousness, the more we are motivated to engage in that service. I hope it's clear that this path of 'renunciation' is not anything alien to Steiner and Anthroposophy. One could even say it is the very core of striving for higher modes of knowledge, as Steiner indicates in many different places. 

But as mentioned in the last post, we shouldn't feel that we are already familiar with how this path of sacrifice or renunciation will be experienced. We don't already suspect how the inflow of new spiritual life will realign our entire perspective on our 'individual freedom' and what it means within the overarching context of spiritual evolution. What we develop through the inner disposition of renunciation for service to the Cosmic whole is exactly as Steiner wrote:

If these attributes have become real spiritual habits, the individual frees himself from everything which only depends upon the capacities of his personal nature. He ceases to contemplate things from his own separate standpoint. The limits of his narrow self, which fetter him to this outlook, disappear. The secrets of the spiritual world reveal themselves to his inner self. This is liberation. For all fetters constrain the individual to regard things and beings as if they corresponded to his personal limitations. From this personal manner of regarding things the occult student must become independent and free.

To the extent that it is "making contact again with the limitations and flatness of space-bound, eccentric, separating, cultural hierarchy", it is making contact in a forgiving and redemptive way that is inwardly experienced as the most human thing we could possibly be doing with our lives. 

[Federica]

Federica,

Thanks for providing this additional feedback on your thinking. Perhaps this response can also supplement my previous post. It will appeal to higher esoteric experience-knowledge and I want to set that expectation from the outset. That is allowable and quite necessary when we want to explore the deeper significance of our esoteric striving.

On the path of modern initiation, we begin to inwardly realize how much of what we work out about our state of being in the form of concepts, even if they are rooted in spiritual science, when applied to us, are radically incomplete or sometimes even the opposite of what really lives in the depths of our thinking, feeling, and will. So when I point to a stream of development in the Western world, e.g. the Protestant reformation rooted in the consciousness soul, that has surely embedded itself in the soul-life of everyone currently living in the West at this point (and perhaps the whole world), and you tell me there is no inner subconscious aversion to hierarchical structures because you have studied the lectures on the heavenly hierarchies and find them compelling, I find that difficult to accept. I can say all the same things you did about the knowledge of higher hierarchies and my acceptance of that knowledge at the conceptual level, yet I also inwardly know that some unquantifiable degree of aversion/resentment against the Divine hierarchies, including higher human individualities who have progressed further in evolution and now work mostly 'from above', still lives in my heart. Cleric also discussed this topic in the context of the morphic spaces. 

This [Levin's approach] is not only a more roundabout way, full of traps and loopholes in which our thinking can become entangled, but is also a very tempting ground for our unconscious desires. As said before, as exciting as ML’s ideas are, they hold a great danger for humanity. In proper evolution we would start from the central thinking space and expand into the inner reality of lower and higher morphic spaces. This, as explained, leads to the attunement of our soul life which results in a deeper and balanced life of thinking, feeling and willing, centered not only around our individuality but concentric and harmonized with the higher order spaces. This in turn leads to attunement of life space and then the conditions for many of the most deadly diseases of our age are rendered nonexistent. Our spirit has the potential of becoming a formative and regenerative force for the bodily spaces. If such self-knowledge is denied to the soul, human passions continue to work from the subconscious regions of the psyche. Then the intellect extends its mechanical tentacles into other morphic spaces, trying to manipulate their curvature indirectly... Hopefully, these tendencies will be counterbalanced by enough souls who will recognize that true freedom and everything that humanity has cherished as the highest values of Truth, Love and Wisdom, is to be achieved not by following blind passions but by expanding consciousness into the nested morphic spaces, where we become fully conscious participants in the artful unfolding of the Cosmos.

You further go on to explain that you have in fact pursued a course of life that has 'so far been the rejection of worldly hierarchies', but in my view you incorrectly attribute that course entirely to the sphere of your intentional waking consciousness. Instead, I would say most of the reasons for that development until discovering Anthroposophy, and my own similar development, reside in the sphere of sleeping consciousness, i.e. the lower and higher morphic spaces. What you describe is, of course, the perfectly natural development for the modern consciousness soul that (subconsciously and supraconsciously) seeks evolution on a path increasingly free from worldly (and other-worldly) power structures. There is nothing wrong or unhealthy about that. But the discovery of the 'immediate, direct access to a path of self knowledge' is only the very beginning of modern initiation. We need to refrain from making conclusive judgments about our state of being - extending the mechanical tentacles - until we actually expand further into the nested morphic spaces in a healthy way. Eventually the question becomes, what is our overarching ideal aim in having this free and direct access to the path of self knowledge?

With every step deeper into the sphere of our own be-ing, into greater degrees of thinking-feeling-willing freedom, comes greater creative responsibility for how to use that freedom within the context of a whole living organism, and our decisions in this regard feedback into whether and how we will take even deeper steps. That is practically the Guardian at the threshold. It is how we choose to react to and employ the individual thinking freedom we have discovered within. That is also why it's so important to pursue a path of symbolic ordering of the World Content rather than systematizing - the former acts as means of purifying our selfish instincts with regards to the accumulation of spiritual knowledge. Again, these are instincts functioning well below the surface of our waking consciousness, and if we try to only assess them with the mechanical tentacles of that surface conceptual activity, we may easily convince ourselves they don't really exist or are nothing to be too concerned with. That is Maya.

As mentioned before, we cannot arbitrarily separate 'worldly hierarchies' that have evolved through cultural history from the Divine hierarchies themselves, who are responsible for that evolution, as you know also acknowledged above. There is a fine distinction between the sclerotized expression of hierarchical institutions in the modern age, and their ideal function as worldly reflections of the higher hierarchies. The last bold sentence you write is exactly correct, in a sense. You are invited on the path of modern initiation to renounce some of what you gained, by the grace of the Divine hierarchies, to freely serve them. The more we inwardly recognize that our entire life course was the result of that Grace, rather than our own waking consciousness, the more we are motivated to engage in that service. I hope it's clear that this path of 'renunciation' is not anything alien to Steiner and Anthroposophy. One could even say it is the very core of striving for higher modes of knowledge, as Steiner indicates in many different places. 

But as mentioned in the last post, we shouldn't feel that we are already familiar with how this path of sacrifice or renunciation will be experienced. We don't already suspect how the inflow of new spiritual life will realign our entire perspective on our 'individual freedom' and what it means within the overarching context of spiritual evolution. What we develop through the inner disposition of renunciation for service to the Cosmic whole is exactly as Steiner wrote:

If these attributes have become real spiritual habits, the individual frees himself from everything which only depends upon the capacities of his personal nature. He ceases to contemplate things from his own separate standpoint. The limits of his narrow self, which fetter him to this outlook, disappear. The secrets of the spiritual world reveal themselves to his inner self. This is liberation. For all fetters constrain the individual to regard things and beings as if they corresponded to his personal limitations. From this personal manner of regarding things the occult student must become independent and free.

To the extent that it is "making contact again with the limitations and flatness of space-bound, eccentric, separating, cultural hierarchy", it is making contact in a forgiving and redemptive way that is inwardly experienced as the most human thing we could possibly be doing with our lives. 

Ashvin,
Thank you, I appreciate your reply, and hopefully it will provide concrete means of progression to others as well. I have to clarify a few things though. You wrote: "you tell me there is no inner subconscious aversion to hierarchical structures because you have studied the lectures on the heavenly hierarchies and find them compelling, I find that difficult to accept."

That's not what I said. I said there is no conscious aversion to the heavenly hierarchies. I feel very positively about them, that's all I said. I would be foolish to make statements about the content of what I still haven't unveiled, i.e. what's unconscious. I am open to discovering that I have undetected resentment, for the reasons you explain. I know I have not even scratched the surface of my potential conscious development. That's why I also have to rectify the following:

"You further go on to explain that you have in fact pursued a course of life that has 'so far been the rejection of worldly hierarchies', but in my view you incorrectly attribute that course entirely to the sphere of your intentional waking consciousness."

No As I tried to say, this is something I have thought about for the first time today, through these reflections on the topic of hierarchical power. When I made those choices I was certainly not consciously thinking "ok this is a good move in order to reject hierarchies" It's only now that it dawns on me that there could be a consistent pattern. So it was certainly, as you say, marginally determined in its unfolding by my waking consciousness.

I'm not sure if I am particularly ambiguous in my writing or if you tend to overinterpret. If it's the former, sorry about that! The goal of my post was not to express any conclusive judgments. I do have a clear sense of how much remains obscure and unexplained, even only at the level of the immediately adjacent morphic spaces. My goal was to clarify how worldly and heavenly hierarchies stand almost opposite to each other in my perception, by their very different "geometry". I realize I mostly should be seeing a continuity, but that's just how I think about the two kinds of hierarchy right now - as opposite geometries, opposite expressions of complexity.

I understand the relevant question is "What is my ideal aim?" How can each of us, who has the opportunity to come to know this path, contribute in a unique way to further Love and Goodness. And I thoughtfully take your reminders on the risk of seeing oneself on top of a process, if not on top of 'things'. Finally, on renunciation, yes, I understand it's ingrained in every step of higher cognition, and I know I have been reluctant to accept even the tiniest portion of sacrifice, for example here.

[Federica]

As usual, Steiner proceeds to explore 'Roman Catholicism' in a very dispassionate and insightful way. 

What is it that is to bring about the decay of the old religions one and all? It is all that has arisen during the last three to four centuries as modern science, enlightened science — all that is taught as objective science in the educational institutions of civilized humanity. Bourgeois teaching and bourgeois methods of administration have been adopted by the proletariat. What the teachers of the universities and high schools right down to the elementary schools have put into the souls of men, comes out through Lenin and Trotsky. They bring out nothing but what is already taught in the institutions of civilized humanity.

My dear friends, today there exists an antithesis which one should contemplate without prejudice. It is this. What is to be done to prevent the influence of Lenin and Trotsky from spreading over the entire civilized world? The primary necessity is no longer to allow our children and our youth to be taught what has been taught right up to the Twentieth Century in our universities and in our secondary and elementary schools. To grasp this seeming contradiction demands courage, and because men do not want to have this courage, they go to sleep. That is why one has to say that whoever reads a declaration such as the one I have just quoted, even if it only appears in a few lines of an article, should feel as if stung by a viper; for it is as if the whole situation of present-day civilization were illumined by a flash of lightning.

Face to face with this situation, what would spiritual science with all its detailed concreteness have? What spiritual science would have, I would characterize somewhat as follows. The Roman Catholic Church, as a mighty corporation, represents the last withered remains of the civilization of the fourth post-Atlantean Epoch. It can be well authenticated in all detail that the Roman Catholic Church represents the last remnant of what was the right civilization for the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, what was justified right up to the middle of the Fifteenth Century, but what has now become a shadow. Of course products of a later evolution often herald their arrival in an earlier period, and its earlier products linger on into a later epoch; but in essentials the Roman Catholic Church represents what was justifiable for Europe and its colonies up to the middle of the Fifteenth Century.

Spiritual science, however, as we understand it, has to further the needs of the fifth post-Atlantean civilization. The Roman Catholic Church represents in a number of dogmas, as a self-contained structure which is dead, but which still exists as a corpse, something which hangs together inwardly through a well-constructed logic, a logic of reality. In this structure there is spirit, the spirit of a past epoch, but it is spirit. The way in which spirit is contained within it I have, I think, shown in the lectures I held here on St. Thomas Aquinas. There was spirit in these teachings, in these dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church, a spirit which had been perceived by those great ones whose last stragglers we find in Plotinus, and others, and with which St. Augustine had yet in an interesting way to wrestle.

Since the middle of the Fifteenth Century, what has appeared as philosophy, science, public opinion, world conception, apart from the Roman Catholic Church, is, for the most part, void of spirit. For the spirit of the fifth post-Atlantean age begins only to emerge with such principles as those of Lessing and Goethe. And it wants to enter into what the natural-scientific trend inaugurated by Copernicus, Galilee and Kepler was able to yield without spirit, and out of which Darwin, Huxley, and so on have blown the last remnant of Spirit. It wants to enter into that and fill it with Spirit. And spiritual science wishes to make manifest the Spirit which has to be the spirit of the fifth post-Atlantean age.

An institution permeated by a certain spirit as its own soul, if it is to maintain itself as an institution, can only fight for the past. To demand of the Catholic Church that it should fight for the future would be folly, for an institution which carried the spirit of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch cannot possibly carry that of the fifth. What the Catholic Church has become, what has spread over the civilized world as the configuration of the Catholic Church, and has its other aspect in Roman law and the abstractness of the whole Latin culture, all that belongs to the fourth cultural epoch. And the Catholic Church configuration has permeated the entire of civilization far more than men think. The monarchies, even if they were Protestant ones, were in their structure at bottom Latin Catholic institutions. For the fourth epoch it was necessary that men should be organized according to abstract principles, and that certain hierarchical ordinances should form the basis of organization. But what is to come as the spirit of the fifth post-Atlantean age, which we seek to cultivate through spiritual science, does not require such a firm structure, does not need a structure organized according to abstract principles, but requires such a relation of one human being to another as is characterized in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity as ethical individualism. What that book has to say on the subject of ethics stands in the same contrast to the social structure fostered by the Roman Catholic Church as in the last resort spiritual science stands to Roman Catholic theology.

Spiritual Science was verily never meant to appear in the role of belligerent; spiritual science was only meant to state what it saw to be the truth. Anyone who examines our activities here will have to admit that never, never have I taken an aggressive stance. Of course, one has had constantly to defend oneself against attacks which came from outside, and that is the essential thing. But it is simply a demand of the age that what spiritual science has to give should be stated quite concretely. One has to remember that modern civilization is asleep, and that Rome is awake. That Rome is awake is revealed by the mighty drama unrolled in the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception; in the publication of the Encyclical of 1864, with its Syllabus condemning eighty modern truths; in the declaration of the Infallibility of the Pope; in the naming of Thomas Aquinas as the official philosopher of the Catholic priesthood; and finally in the anti-Modernist Oath for the teaching clergy.

Now it is very tempting to read the above and latch onto some parts, formulating an equation which purports to capture Steiner's thinking and runs like, "RCC = good for continuity of Spirit during the 4th Atlantean Epoch, Spiritual Science = good for continuity during the 5th Post Atlantean epoch... Ipso facto, RCC is an outdated hierarchical institution that must fade away to favor individual esoteric striving". I know because I caught myself doing that exact thing while reading the lectures. I started wondering how I could discursively reconcile Steiner's position with another esoteric framework I have come to respect and admire, like Tomberg's. Then I asked myself, 'where did Steiner tell us he is giving us any such conceptual system to form definitive conclusions about the role of the RCC in his own time and the remainder of the 5th epoch?' That is not to be found in Steiner himself, but only in my own habitual systematic thinking. There is nothing that declares it impossible that the two streams can spiral together in some way during the 5th epoch and plenty elsewhere in his ideas that suggests that they can and should, even if the means by which that could happen was not clear to Steiner at the time. Personally, I think it makes little sense that these critical impulses of the 4th and 5th epochs would remain separate. Or that we would turn to the millions of Church faithful and say, "sorry your institution and its practices are all outdated, come join our esoteric community if you wish to evolve further". Instead it makes much more sense if we would say, "your spiritual institutions are established and critical for further human progress, if they are willing to also make room for the science of soul-spirit, which is in complete harmony with the Spirit of Church doctrine". It makes sense, above all, because it is true.

Ashvin, I am not going to hide what thoughts come to mind when I read the above.


- Yes, it is very tempting to read in Steiner’s message that the RCC is obsolete, for the good reason that it's unequivocally stated in the lecture!

- This looks exactly like the risk I was speaking of. The risk is to blur and balance out all evaluations, to the point that we feel compelled to grant everything on Earth immediate divine redemption, and we strive to apprehend reality through this lens no matter what. In this case you are saying: we are not allowed to consider anything obsolete. The RCC is established, it's been the cradle of wise traditions, it must remain no matter what, no matter its abstract structure and MO, no matter its corpse existence, etc.

- You can certainly think it makes little sense that these critical impulses of the 4th and 5th epochs would remain separate. But you cannot bend what Steiner says to make him agree with your thoughts!

- At this rate, one could wonder why Steiner spent his whole life writing numerous books and giving hundreds of lectures full of all sorts of evaluations and invitations to reasonable thinking. Instead he could have asked people to just sit down, do certain exercises and meditate, if any statement or judgment has to be pacified and neutralized in the seamless soup of perfect equanimity and constant, instant redemption of all creation.

- "Spiritual institution" is an oxymoron that attempts to make institutions what they are not, again, by veiling their worldly nature through instant redemption.

- You can think that the science of soul-spirit is in complete harmony with the Spirit of Church doctrine, but please recognize that Steiner says they are in contrast, not harmony! He uses this exact word! He says the RCC is dead, and still exists today as a corpse! He says that in the past, the rigid, abstract RCC structure was required, but now, direct relationships between individuals are required as illustrated in his ethical individualism in PoF. He couldn’t be more explicit in his evaluation of the RCC!

I have to admit, this concrete example of elaboration on the RCC based on the quoted lecture (that I have read in full) is uncomfortable. You don't want to accept the divergence, but insist there is "complete harmony" against all evidence... Would you have argued the above a month or two ago, before discovering Tomberg's work and life, and deciding to join the institution of the Church?

[AshvinP]

Ashvin, I am not going to hide what thoughts come to mind when I read the above.

I knew you wouldn't hide them and that they would look something like what you wrote below, Federica. What can I say, I like to challenge myself in redemptive thinking, since I could have much more easily used the Eastern Orthodox Church as the example of spiritual cult and hierarchy that everyone, Steiner and Tomberg alike, predict will be instrumental to our future progressive evolution as ethical individuals. Although I don't like to challenge myself as much as Tomberg, since I'm not gearing up to join the Catholic Church just yet

- Yes, it is very tempting to read in Steiner’s message that the RCC is obsolete, for the good reason that it's unequivocally stated in the lecture!

- This looks exactly like the risk I was speaking of. The risk is to blur and balance out all evaluations, to the point that we feel compelled to grant everything on Earth immediate divine redemption, and we strive to apprehend reality through this lens no matter what. In this case you are saying: we are not allowed to consider anything obsolete. The RCC is established, it's been the cradle of wise traditions, it must remain no matter what, no matter its abstract structure and MO, no matter its corpse existence, etc.

- You can certainly think it makes little sense that these critical impulses of the 4th and 5th epochs would remain separate. But you cannot bend what Steiner says to make him agree with your thoughts!

- At this rate, one could wonder why Steiner spent his whole life writing numerous books and giving hundreds of lectures full of all sorts of evaluations and invitations to reasonable thinking. Instead he could have asked people to just sit down, do certain exercises and meditate, if any statement or judgment has to be pacified and neutralized in the seamless soup of perfect equanimity and constant, instant redemption of all creation.

- "Spiritual institution" is an oxymoron that attempts to make institutions what they are not, again, by veiling their worldly nature through instant redemption.

- You can think that the science of soul-spirit is in complete harmony with the Spirit of Church doctrine, but please recognize that Steiner says they are in contrast, not harmony! He uses this exact word! He says the RCC is dead, and still exists today as a corpse! He says that in the past, the rigid, abstract RCC structure was required, but now, direct relationships between individuals are required as illustrated in his ethical individualism in PoF. He couldn’t be more explicit in his evaluation of the RCC!

I have to admit, this concrete example of elaboration on the RCC based on the quoted lecture (that I have read in full) is uncomfortable. You don't want to accept the divergence, but insist there is "complete harmony" against all evidence... Would you have argued the above a month or two ago, before discovering Tomberg's work and life, and deciding to join the institution of the Church?

Let me first briefly address your final paragraph/question. To be clear, I never said there was "complete harmony" between Steiner's view of the RCC and Tomberg's or my own. What I said was that there is complete harmony between science of soul-spirit and the Spirit of Church doctrine. The doctrine itself has condensed to a sclerotic expression in the last few centuries, as all other aspects of modern culture, but it previously lived in harmony with a deeper understanding of the soul-spirit. Steiner himself has elucidated this harmony in many places. In that lecture, he even wrote:

The way in which spirit is contained within it I have, I think, shown in the lectures I held here on St. Thomas Aquinas. There was spirit in these teachings, in these dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church, a spirit which had been perceived by those great ones whose last stragglers we find in Plotinus, and others, and with which St. Augustine had yet in an interesting way to wrestle.

Did Steiner lecture about St. Thomas Aquinas and his Catholic philosophy-theology as rigid and abstract? Not at all! In many ways, Aquinas was the quintessential example of living thinking and science of the soul-spirit, to the best of human capacity at that time. And you may know that Steiner identified Aquinas as his own previous incarnation. That may be instructive on how the two streams can spiral back together in the near future. Or in another lecture, we find the following about St. John of the Cross who was expressing the cult and hierarchy of the RCC in the 16th century (well into the beginning of the 5th PA epoch).

Another utterance of St. John of the Cross is: ”Priceless are the inner benefits imprinted by this silent vision into the soul when it is unconscious. In short they are nothing but the extraordinarily tender and most mysterious anointing by the Holy Ghost who, as he is God, acts as God.”

“The Holy Ghost acts as God immediately in the soul,” says St. John of the Cross (this was Catholic doctrine at the time of John of the Cross before the age of the consciousness soul) “And works upon, and inundates the soul in secret with such a measure of riches, gifts and graces that it is beyond description.”

And now I would ask you: what are we supposed to understand when one of those who write about heresy today says it is heretical to assert that God is identical with the human soul!"

At the time when St. John of the Cross wrote these things down, before the age of the consciousness soul, this was Catholic doctrine. What today holds sway as Catholicism where these things are concerned is only the shadow and no longer the light. It is really very beautiful how John of the Cross describes for that age the mystical path of Knowledge, the way into the supersensible. He says: “The narrow portal is the night of the senses. To pass through it, the soul has to get free from itself and cast its shell.” At that time these things were said not in the way that Rome speaks, but rather as Spiritual Science speaks. Spiritual Science is the real continuation of the noble strivings to enter the spiritual world as they appear in John of the Cross.

To answer your last question - I'm not sure. Certainly Tomberg's ideas and insights was the Platonic-Sophianic impetus that Providence arranged for me to even begin thinking along these lines. At this point, I have not 'decided to join the institution of the Church'. Perhaps you assumed that because I mentioned attending an Orthodox service the other day, but that was only because I was on vacation, visiting my parents in Florida where there is a really nice Orthodox Church. Back at home, I don't even attend Church on Sundays.

I wrote a lengthy reply to all the rest of your points above, but I feel it would be best to sideline for that now, because it would also be an indulgence of exactly what I keep saying we need to resist. The point of this discussion was never to launch into a conceptual dissection of Steiner's judgments on the RCC, but to make an exercise out of resisting that and practicing a symbolic ordering of the ideas surrounding this topic instead.  When I remarked that I like to 'challenge myself' above, that could also be seen as an instinct to cling to old argumentative habits that indulge the intellect. I am sure that tendency is still alive within me as well and in-forming the tip of my spiritual activity. The issue of symbolic ordering is revealing itself as the one of central importance in this entire discussion and practically many other spiritual scientific discussions we have had here. I think we should really start to cultivate the inner sense that there is a Light in our thinking that we can work with more indirectly, so to speak. We don't want to stare directly at this Light and try to analyze it (and/or sensuously indulge it) out of deferential love for its magnificence and a healthy fear of going [intellectually] blind. 

Or to use another simple metaphor. Let's say we are in a pool and aim to swim from one end to the other and back. At first, the idea-intent is entirely supra-sensory or unmanifest - it lives entirely in our consciousness and we can choose to either bring it to expression, or not. If we choose to do so, then the idea-ideal descends into our feeling and will and our arms extend, one after the other, rhythmically steering us towards our aim. Would it be reasonable to say our extended arms are constructing a system to grasp the water it meets as resistance? Of course not. The symbolic ordering technique is raising the instinctive practical wisdom that lives in our limbs into the lucid movement of our conceptual activity. Once we choose to engage our ideal, it channels that ideal into the conceptual apparatus through the portal of the symbolic appearance, which in turn animates the conceptual activity to steer through its environment of content, that it meets as resistance, to reach practical aims related to those completely certain ideals. Everything is imminently practical and can be tested in that way - if we can't discern ways in which our thinking is steering us towards the ideal of moving into the content so as to return back from it with its spiritual fruits for inner perfection, then we are descending down the gradient from dispassionate symbolic ordering much closer to indulgent systematizing. There should always be feedback from our thinking into how to understand our own spiritual activity and stream of becoming within the context of our ideals. 

With that said, I want to return to the core of our discussions lately. Like I mentioned above, I could switch from the RCC to the EOC as a concrete example to elucidate the underlying redemptive principles. But since I apparently also have a tendency of 'overinterpreting', it's probably best to first confirm whether I am understanding your points/concerns correctly. Does the following fairly summarize that position so far?

- Engaging with cultural (or "worldly") hierarchies feels like a regression to our past at the collective and individual scales, i.e. to a reliance on outer institutions and laws that purport to mediate the Spirit to us and for us, when in reality they often, if not always, heavily distort the communication. That reliance also weakens our free spiritual activity to be developed in the 5th PA epoch. Although it sounds nice and comforting in theory that we can use our free spiritual activity to redeem these hierarchies, that is practically outside the realm of possibilities for most institutions at this stage of decadence. At best, it is something we should only concern ourselves with doing way down the line, i.e. we can't have 'instant redemption', and the first priority is to get our own houses in order, i.e. to pursue the path of higher cognition and ethical individualism. 

[Federica]

You (Federica) really captured the spirit of resisting the temptation of fragmenting and systematic thinking in this post. It would be interesting to hear how you feel what was written there compares to your last comment, where it was said, "I think we have to maintain some ability to also segment, consider things in isolation, and to discriminate..." In my view, the latter ability is only useful when a) it is used to spectrum analyze our environment as part of some specific applied purpose (which we must continue to do at our stage of evolution), or b) it is part of a more holistic endeavor to reunite what we have spectrum analyzed into a broader constellation of principled spiritual wisdom, and to rhythmically and repeatedly do that (or have that done by higher powers) without ever ceasing. That is how we spiral the pole of "everyday earthly life" into the pole of "all-encompassing and all-seeing" that we truly experience after death. Yes, that is indeed the path of modern initiation, which requires the sacrifice of personal beliefs and opinions. Because a mindset that clings to its desire for belief and opinion is capable of formulating a conceptual system of "zooming in and zooming out", but it practically prevents itself from living into the rhythmic practice of zooming in and zooming out. The system comes at the expense of the practice. If our ideal is to move freely across the threshold in waking consciousness, then we can't carry the systematic scaffolding with us. 

Yeah, nice post I had forgotten about it. I often think and write more easily and maybe better when I think about others’ questions than my own. Anyhow, I don’t see opposition between the two posts I wrote here and here. That's how I feel about the two.

In the first one I said: "We come to accept that knowledge is an all-round expansion. Everything evolves around its center, including ourselves, as symbolized by the simple mandala Cleric shared". Another description of the same approach to knowledge is what I called zooming in and out from that center, in the second post. It’s not a linear expansion. We cannot instantly behold any points in the periphery of the cone, or mandala, just by switching in symbolic mode. That’s why it’s a path and not an instant enlightenment. Steiner spoke of the importance for the student to be exposed to illustrations of the higher worlds before being able to know them directly, through higher cognition. Such recommended approach is nothing else than exerting the ability to zoom in, and to remain flexible, ready to zoom out in living thinking, on the next wave of progression. In other words, it’s the same thing as forming reasoned and flexible opinions, subject to constant evolution, and supported by open-mindedness and feelings of reverence and gratitude. Maybe I could compare such a transitory opinion to something like a morphic space. It has to have form, before it can dissolve into symbolic nature. It's a step that we don't expect to stop on.

In the first post, I said that we need to “let go of our obsession with breaking down complex problems in simple steps, hoping to feel smart, resourceful, and in control”. In other words, we need to let go of the systematic approach. But this doesn’t mean that, when we do that, we have left all our context behind and we instantly flow into perfect instant redemption of all reality. We can’t look at a point in the far periphery of the mandala and make it known, redeemed and integrated by declaring it a symbol. Probably, in the centuries and millennia to come, the symbol of the RCC will shine as memory of a physical body of wise traditions, and will also exist as a living hierarchy of double-sided access points to stations of experience, and the two identities will be one thing. But here and now I for myself, who is writing at this end of the world, cannot jump straight in that reality or attract it to (my) center by grace of the pure light of Thinking. I only can walk steps, one step towards the threshold, and the next back on Regent Street, zooming out and then back in.

As I said in the post that you approved, we have to “meet our questions without intermediaries” - which could also be expressed: without the intercession of systematic hierarchies, right? - "knowing that the experience will not feel fully complete and mastered. And hopefully what happens next is that patience and open mindedness start to spring from that feeling (of reverence and gratitude), helping us accept that knowledge is brought within our reach only in slow waves of progression." Yes it's a path, as individuals and collectives, as you would say.

Now, I don’t forget that you and I are at different stages of development, so with these thoughts I am not trying to infer anything about your inner experiences, of course. But here you are accepting the constraints of human language, posting about the reasoned opinions Steiner suggests to the students’ consideration, as useful for their development on the path. Either we trust his methods and apply ourselves to grasp the evolutionary sense of the RCC as dead corpse in the 5th PA epoch, or we can see beyond that path of schooling, as you probably can. But putting in a post that there is nothing in that lecture that “declares it impossible that the two streams can spiral together in some way during the 5th epoch” and that “the means by which that could happen was not clear to Steiner at the time” is another thing, as I see it in this moment.

[Federica]

But what we naturally develop as a result of our sacrifice is infinitely more rewarding - it is the inner certainty of ideals, intents, and general curvatures of our destiny. The outer comfort and convenience we normally get from pinpointing beliefs, opinions, judgments, etc. about various philosophical-spiritual topics with conceptual proofs pales in comparison to the joy of inner certainty. We could say that it is a raising of the normal hysteresis to a higher level. Normally we observe the sensory spectrum and then step back to contemplate its meaning and derive our systems. But, at the higher level, our conceptual contemplation becomes more like our sensory perception, in so far as we probe the conceptual environment with our thought-feelers in a concrete way for holistic intuitions, and then the Y axis of the normal hysteresis becomes more like consciously returning the fruits of our probe to the Spirit so it can elaborate them into forces of feeling and will that help us steer towards our high ideals. Every series of concepts we approach becomes like a mini-journey into the rich mysteries of existence, which nevertheless remains lucid and well-defined. Of course, this isn't simply a switch we turn on and off - it is a path of persistence and practice that will surely encounter many bumps on the road. But the capacity to think symbolically through the World Content in a consistent way is something we surely underestimate. 

I mentioned previously the pilgrim who learned to pray without ceasing through interiorized heart prayer. These things are real and we can actually pray inwardly while we go about our daily tasks without the prayer interfering with those tasks. I am just using this as an example of what the human spirit is actually capable of on the path of higher development, not suggesting it is something everyone should try to do right away. It is the same thing Steiner speaks of here:

In the theosophical handbooks we meet with four attributes which must be developed by the student on what is called the probationary path, in order that he may attain the higher knowledge. The first is the faculty for discriminating between the eternal and the temporal, the true and the false, the truth and mere opinion. The second is a right estimate of the eternal and true as opposed to the perishable and illusory. The third faculty is that of practising the six qualities already mentioned in the foregoing chapters: thought-control, control of action, perseverance, tolerance, good faith, and equanimity. The fourth attribute necessary is the longing for freedom. A mere intellectual comprehension of what is included in these attributes is utterly worthless. They must become so incorporated into the soul that they endure as inner habits...  Now under the influence of these four spiritual habits the etheric body actually transforms itself... Enough has been said in the previous chapter of the six virtues of which the third attribute is composed. They are connected with the development of the twelve-petalled lotus in the region of the heart, and this, as already indicated, is associated with the life-current of the etheric body. The fourth attribute, which is the longing for freedom, serves to bring to fruition the etheric organ situated in the heart. If these attributes have become real spiritual habits, the individual frees himself from everything which only depends upon the capacities of his personal nature. He ceases to contemplate things from his own separate standpoint. The limits of his narrow self, which fetter him to this outlook, disappear. The secrets of the spiritual world reveal themselves to his inner self. This is liberation. For all fetters constrain the individual to regard things and beings as if they corresponded to his personal limitations. From this personal manner of regarding things the occult student must become independent and free.

I don't know of these lucid journeys in the mysteries of existence, or raised hysteresis. But it's so well conveyed, and it makes me think this is the death of philosophy. Scott will not like that, but philosophy might have died under the strokes inflicted to it by PoF, and all that has followed in philosophy outside the way opened with PoF, has become like the RCC as institutional container of the wise traditions of the past: a corpse. Maybe philosophy and Church will be born again as one, in the Sophia that Robert Powell speaks of, as a living unity of Thinking and Spirit on both sides of the threshold.

Returning to the RC lectures quoted above, Steiner often emphasizes that he is not making hard and fast judgments, or taking the role of a 'belligerent', but simply relaying facts about the situation. That is, he is giving his listeners conceptual portals to enter into with their fluid, symbolic thinking so as to discern the overarching intentions that are at work to either keep modern civilization asleep to its spiritual heritage, i.e. through 'modernism', or reawaken it to that heritage. And I bet he would also say that those three lectures shouldn't be considered his "last word" on the topic - that it was never intended to be taken as a final word. There are generally two streams by which the awakening is being pursued - the exoteric Church and Christian esotericism, such as we find in Anthroposophy and other streams. We could call these streams of outer awakening and inner awakening, respectively. The latter should always take priority - the outer traditions/teachings won't find any useful place in our consciousness until the soil of the latter is sufficiently prepared to receive their inner wisdom. Eventually, though, the two grow closer and closer together, i.e. our inner thinking efforts are experienced to be more and more like an 'outer' stream of revealed Wisdom. And the outer traditions/teachings we approach are experienced to be more like the inner forum of ideas-ideals. The 'loose' holding of symbols is only a transitional (yet necessary) stage on the path. And it's not that everything becomes 'good' or nothing 'bad', but that our previous judgments of what is 'bad' start to lose their significance. Instead, we start to experience how our souls are interwoven with all other souls and what is bad becomes our failure, as a whole interconnected organism, to remain faithful to the path of redemption, which certainly encompasses particular acts of evil-doing.

We should strive to participate in the apprehension and redemption of the forms which precipitate from Divine intentions - which is all forms - no matter what. Again, that apprehension and redemption has already been accomplished. Both Steiner and Tomberg reveal to us how Lucifer has been redeemed through the Son's loving act (he has experienced an inner conversion), for ex., and how Ahriman will be likewise be redeemed by the loving power of the Father. These are exceedingly great mysteries, so they should feel unfamiliar and uncomfortable, perhaps making us even somewhat incredulous. How can we expect to have faith in such things when they seem so removed from our normal, everyday experience of the world? These are fine questions to ask and wrestle with. All I can say is that, in my experience, the esoteric path of intuitive thinking has been synonymous with increasing inner certainty about these broad curvatures of destiny. Not "certainty" in the form of beliefs or opinions, but in the same way that I have inner certainty every night that I will awaken the next day. Then the problems we deal with become of an entirely different nature - it is no longer a matter of finding conceptual proofs for this or that spiritual conclusion, but finding creative ways of how to participate in the completely certain waves of destiny that are unfolding. 

In the context of this discussion, I think, when Steiner relays "facts about the situations", he is suggesting the student to use those "facts" as support to form temporary, provisional opinions about the worlds, lower and higher. There are no simple facts about situations. There can only be various pedagogical stimuli to present the student with, that act with different power in different ears, but have to be first contemplated as formative opinions by the student. I think Steiner is not really giving the student conceptual portals. Rather, he's giving the students the sense of the/their center, the means to redisover it. Then, it's entirely up to each of them how to think, feel, and act from that center, how to trace their path through "facts", portals, and all in between and beyond.

[Federica]

Ashvin, I am not going to hide what thoughts come to mind when I read the above.

I knew you wouldn't hide them and that they would look something like what you wrote below, Federica. What can I say, I like to challenge myself in redemptive thinking, since I could have much more easily used the Eastern Orthodox Church as the example of spiritual cult and hierarchy that everyone, Steiner and Tomberg alike, predict will be instrumental to our future progressive evolution as ethical individuals. Although I don't like to challenge myself as much as Tomberg, since I'm not gearing up to join the Catholic Church just yet

- Yes, it is very tempting to read in Steiner’s message that the RCC is obsolete, for the good reason that it's unequivocally stated in the lecture!

- This looks exactly like the risk I was speaking of. The risk is to blur and balance out all evaluations, to the point that we feel compelled to grant everything on Earth immediate divine redemption, and we strive to apprehend reality through this lens no matter what. In this case you are saying: we are not allowed to consider anything obsolete. The RCC is established, it's been the cradle of wise traditions, it must remain no matter what, no matter its abstract structure and MO, no matter its corpse existence, etc.

- You can certainly think it makes little sense that these critical impulses of the 4th and 5th epochs would remain separate. But you cannot bend what Steiner says to make him agree with your thoughts!

- At this rate, one could wonder why Steiner spent his whole life writing numerous books and giving hundreds of lectures full of all sorts of evaluations and invitations to reasonable thinking. Instead he could have asked people to just sit down, do certain exercises and meditate, if any statement or judgment has to be pacified and neutralized in the seamless soup of perfect equanimity and constant, instant redemption of all creation.

- "Spiritual institution" is an oxymoron that attempts to make institutions what they are not, again, by veiling their worldly nature through instant redemption.

- You can think that the science of soul-spirit is in complete harmony with the Spirit of Church doctrine, but please recognize that Steiner says they are in contrast, not harmony! He uses this exact word! He says the RCC is dead, and still exists today as a corpse! He says that in the past, the rigid, abstract RCC structure was required, but now, direct relationships between individuals are required as illustrated in his ethical individualism in PoF. He couldn’t be more explicit in his evaluation of the RCC!

I have to admit, this concrete example of elaboration on the RCC based on the quoted lecture (that I have read in full) is uncomfortable. You don't want to accept the divergence, but insist there is "complete harmony" against all evidence... Would you have argued the above a month or two ago, before discovering Tomberg's work and life, and deciding to join the institution of the Church?

Let me first briefly address your final paragraph/question. To be clear, I never said there was "complete harmony" between Steiner's view of the RCC and Tomberg's or my own. What I said was that there is complete harmony between science of soul-spirit and the Spirit of Church doctrine. The doctrine itself has condensed to a sclerotic expression in the last few centuries, as all other aspects of modern culture, but it previously lived in harmony with a deeper understanding of the soul-spirit. Steiner himself has elucidated this harmony in many places. In that lecture, he even wrote:

The way in which spirit is contained within it I have, I think, shown in the lectures I held here on St. Thomas Aquinas. There was spirit in these teachings, in these dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church, a spirit which had been perceived by those great ones whose last stragglers we find in Plotinus, and others, and with which St. Augustine had yet in an interesting way to wrestle.

Did Steiner lecture about St. Thomas Aquinas and his Catholic philosophy-theology as rigid and abstract? Not at all! In many ways, Aquinas was the quintessential example of living thinking and science of the soul-spirit, to the best of human capacity at that time. And you may know that Steiner identified Aquinas as his own previous incarnation. That may be instructive on how the two streams can spiral back together in the near future. Or in another lecture, we find the following about St. John of the Cross who was expressing the cult and hierarchy of the RCC in the 16th century (well into the beginning of the 5th PA epoch).

Another utterance of St. John of the Cross is: ”Priceless are the inner benefits imprinted by this silent vision into the soul when it is unconscious. In short they are nothing but the extraordinarily tender and most mysterious anointing by the Holy Ghost who, as he is God, acts as God.”

“The Holy Ghost acts as God immediately in the soul,” says St. John of the Cross (this was Catholic doctrine at the time of John of the Cross before the age of the consciousness soul) “And works upon, and inundates the soul in secret with such a measure of riches, gifts and graces that it is beyond description.”

And now I would ask you: what are we supposed to understand when one of those who write about heresy today says it is heretical to assert that God is identical with the human soul!"

At the time when St. John of the Cross wrote these things down, before the age of the consciousness soul, this was Catholic doctrine. What today holds sway as Catholicism where these things are concerned is only the shadow and no longer the light. It is really very beautiful how John of the Cross describes for that age the mystical path of Knowledge, the way into the supersensible. He says: “The narrow portal is the night of the senses. To pass through it, the soul has to get free from itself and cast its shell.” At that time these things were said not in the way that Rome speaks, but rather as Spiritual Science speaks. Spiritual Science is the real continuation of the noble strivings to enter the spiritual world as they appear in John of the Cross.

Yes, but we were discussing the institution, in its present worldly form, not the original spiritual stream. It's not difficult to picture that the stream of Esoteric Christianity as revealed by Steiner is in great harmony with the stream of the doctrine of the Church at its beginnings. They were almost indistinguishable then, I can imagine. But that was not the point. The point was their evolution into their present form.

To answer your last question - I'm not sure. Certainly Tomberg's ideas and insights was the Platonic-Sophianic impetus that Providence arranged for me to even begin thinking along these lines. At this point, I have not 'decided to join the institution of the Church'. Perhaps you assumed that because I mentioned attending an Orthodox service the other day, but that was only because I was on vacation, visiting my parents in Florida where there is a really nice Orthodox Church. Back at home, I don't even attend Church on Sundays.

Ashvin, could you please reformulate this part, I don't get it: "Certainly Tomberg's ideas and insights was the Platonic-Sophianic impetus that Providence arranged for me to even begin thinking along these lines."

Regarding joining the exoteric Church - Sure, I didn't know in which exact form you had come closer to it, whether more or less formally, more or less regularly. I don't even know how it works in case one wants to become a member. I certainly noticed your reference to attending a service, but what I meant by joining the Church was more in the general terms of coming closer to the institution as a result of the contemplation of the work and life of Valentin Tomberg.

I wrote a lengthy reply to all the rest of your points above, but I feel it would be best to sideline for that now, because it would also be an indulgence of exactly what I keep saying we need to resist. The point of this discussion was never to launch into a conceptual dissection of Steiner's judgments on the RCC, but to make an exercise out of resisting that and practicing a symbolic ordering of the ideas surrounding this topic instead.  When I remarked that I like to 'challenge myself' above, that could also be seen as an instinct to cling to old argumentative habits that indulge the intellect. I am sure that tendency is still alive within me as well and in-forming the tip of my spiritual activity. The issue of symbolic ordering is revealing itself as the one of central importance in this entire discussion and practically many other spiritual scientific discussions we have had here. I think we should really start to cultivate the inner sense that there is a Light in our thinking that we can work with more indirectly, so to speak. We don't want to stare directly at this Light and try to analyze it (and/or sensuously indulge it) out of deferential love for its magnificence and a healthy fear of going [intellectually] blind. 

Or to use another simple metaphor. Let's say we are in a pool and aim to swim from one end to the other and back. At first, the idea-intent is entirely supra-sensory or unmanifest - it lives entirely in our consciousness and we can choose to either bring it to expression, or not. If we choose to do so, then the idea-ideal descends into our feeling and will and our arms extend, one after the other, rhythmically steering us towards our aim. Would it be reasonable to say our extended arms are constructing a system to grasp the water it meets as resistance? Of course not. The symbolic ordering technique is raising the instinctive practical wisdom that lives in our limbs into the lucid movement of our conceptual activity. Once we choose to engage our ideal, it channels that ideal into the conceptual apparatus through the portal of the symbolic appearance, which in turn animates the conceptual activity to steer through its environment of content, that it meets as resistance, to reach practical aims related to those completely certain ideals. Everything is imminently practical and can be tested in that way - if we can't discern ways in which our thinking is steering us towards the ideal of moving into the content so as to return back from it with its spiritual fruits for inner perfection, then we are descending down the gradient from dispassionate symbolic ordering much closer to indulgent systematizing. There should always be feedback from our thinking into how to understand our own spiritual activity and stream of becoming within the context of our ideals. 

With that said, I want to return to the core of our discussions lately. Like I mentioned above, I could switch from the RCC to the EOC as a concrete example to elucidate the underlying redemptive principles. But since I apparently also have a tendency of 'overinterpreting', it's probably best to first confirm whether I am understanding your points/concerns correctly. Does the following fairly summarize that position so far?

- Engaging with cultural (or "worldly") hierarchies feels like a regression to our past at the collective and individual scales, i.e. to a reliance on outer institutions and laws that purport to mediate the Spirit to us and for us, when in reality they often, if not always, heavily distort the communication. That reliance also weakens our free spiritual activity to be developed in the 5th PA epoch. Although it sounds nice and comforting in theory that we can use our free spiritual activity to redeem these hierarchies, that is practically outside the realm of possibilities for most institutions at this stage of decadence. At best, it is something we should only concern ourselves with doing way down the line, i.e. we can't have 'instant redemption', and the first priority is to get our own houses in order, i.e. to pursue the path of higher cognition and ethical individualism. 

Here I don't understand well the metaphor of swimming, the "symbolic ordering technique" applied to it, as the explanation of the mystery of Will. To answer your last question: not exactly. I am not an anarchist. I think it's necessary and useful to engage with a number of cultural hierarchies, or human organizations. There is an objective aspect in any hierarchy, in the sense that worldly life without a certain level of representation and layered structure would be impossible, or highly unstable. But a hierarchy can also contain the seed of its moral degradation. Hierarchies that are created or taken over by personal or partisan interests are the ones that I have an antipathy for. As the Romans said: "Divide et Impera", divide and rule, is the abstract principle that allows - back then, and still today - to maintain arbitrary power by breaking the unity (unity of intent, of spirit, of information... however we want to put it) of the collective that the hierarchy is supposed to structure. That's why I spoke of hierarchies as separating, and that's also the essence of, for example, the RCC. So in general, I prefer cultural hierarchies that don't favor the application of the Roman principle of power by fragmentation.

Regarding spiritual development in particular, I think those hierarchies are particularly negative, at a time when the free human being is, and has to be, the direct initiator of a path of development that will reflect as ethical individualism in the Will, and in worldly life. In the case of the RCC, I think it's not only a matter of weakening our spiritual activity, but also that the power structure that has grown inside it could steer its members towards a seamless adherence to a materialistic mindset. I don't think it would feel "nice and comforting to redeem this hierarchy" in its institutionalized form, but only in the corresponding stream of wise traditions (as I suggested in the post just above this one). This being said, I think that communities today could be of great help in supporting spiritual development, hence to some extent, hierarchies - of the right type. I am unsure whether even the Anthroposophical Societies are the appropriate type of communities to foster human spiritual development, maybe they are, maybe not. But I suppose new communities based on the principle of union will arise in the near future, to frame and nurture the growing spiritual impulse of our times.