Federica wrote: ↑Thu Jul 13, 2023 7:13 pmAshvin,AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Jul 13, 2023 6:44 pmFederica wrote: ↑Thu Jul 13, 2023 5:58 pm 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.
Thanks, I look forward to reading your ideas on the question I asked, but wait a second here: you are overinterpreting:
Ashvin wrote: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.
Federica wrote: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.
Steiner wrote: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:
Steiner wrote: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.