We have often referred to Scaligero's ideas as complement to various discussions. In this thread, they can be collected as discussion starters, or as simple references. Here is a translation I’ve just jotted down of an article [1] written in 1980.
INITIATIC SYNTHESIS BASED ON SPIRITUAL SCIENCE
Habitual thinking is the passive instrument of the world of senses, emotions, desires and memories. By freeing thinking from this passivity, the force of thinking is realized in the head as part of the etheric organism.
For this purpose, thinking has to transform from the goal of the life of soul terminating in itself, into the instrument of the spirit, the carrier of the spirit. While, on the physical plane, man has to continually form opinions - by thinking about things, about events, about his human relationships - along the initiatic path man has to come to the realization of the uselessness and insignificance of all opinions, of all his thoughts, even the sharpest ones, and feel, by contrast, the pure value of the force of thinking.
It’s about liberating thinking from the distorting influence of the thoughts. “Eliminate the thoughts as dead ash”, says Chuang-Tze.
Then, it is realized that, as physical life is perceived with normal immediacy by the physical senses, so the force of thinking is perceived with even deeper immediacy - once it is liberated from the thoughts - by the individual I, by the being who is found at the center of all perceptions.
Then, I nearly have the experience of the spiritual who thinks in me.
Then, I experience thinking before the thoughts. It expresses itself in me as life of the thinking fabric of the universe, message of Michael, direction in me of the heavenly intelligence (the only force able to win over the current telluric intelligence and redeem the world).
As soon as the etheric brain is felt, the way to the etheric heart is opened (foundation for the announced possibility to encounter the etheric Christ) and the way to feel the thinking of the Macrocosm (Hierarchies) - that operates in us, sustaining all our organic life - is also opened. (Macrocosm = universal shakti; central etheric current = fire of kundalini. Hence, a possibility to understand the metaphysics of Tantra and Aurobindo).
Such organic life is continually disturbed and consumed by the narcissistic life of thoughts, sentiments and instincts, and above all by thought of Luciferic type (intellectualism, abstractism, rationalism). In essence, through the lower life of the ego, although we possess the precondition of I-consciousness, we obstruct the work of the spirit and the Hierarchies in us. This is why the East recommends the separation of Purusha from Prakrti.
Through mind silence, I establish calmness in the world of feelings and instincts also. Then, I-Purusha witness the establishment of metaphysical order in my individuality. This means that my astral, given back to its pure quietness of conscious silence, does not disturb the constructive work of the etheric, thus I can come to perceive the etheric, and through the etheric, the corresponding cosmos.
Thinking consumes cerebral energies that during sleep are given back through the work of the etheric (the Hierarchies, shakti, work in the etheric). The initiatic task is to disconnect thinking from the physical brain, hence to perceive it as disconnected from physical brain - in other words, to perceive the etheric - and let it operate. In essence, it is about letting the brain be in accord with the spiritual ordering that has originally built it.
By insisting in such exercise, at a certain point I realize myself as I. That is, I grasp the author of the activity, because my consciousness is no longer tied to the central nervous system, I self-perceive myself. The I, the Sat-Purusha, emerges. It is like a sun that blossoms in mental silence, a sun that illuminates the plant… Under different conditions, sleep would result. In essence, it is about bringing about those conditions in which the brain rests, like during sleep, while the I is nonetheless present to consciousness.
When the freed force of thinking begins to flow in me, the possibility is given to me to make it encounter the pure perceptions of the sensible world: then, its mystery is revealed.
The knowledge that guides towards the achievement of this clear consciousness and towards the liberation of the etheric from the physical is the knowledge of Michael. When this path is walked, the true magic-solar impulse of time is followed; therefore, one is in communion with Michael. This deeply engages one, it assigns an out-and-out mission in this time, among these people: a mission that results as revolutionary against all the old world that today, in disguise, wants to appear as new.
The plane of normal thought is the plane of the world of the senses (sphere of Ahriman), or of the abstract transcription of this world (sphere of Lucifer). The carrier of conscious thinking leads outside of the luciferic-ahrimanic domain, towards metaphysical freedom (path of Michael, towards the Christ).
In essence, in the experience of conscious thinking, the pure element of will begins to operate: a will exclusively willed by the pure I begins, which is therefore the expression of a world of freedom that is my freedom.
The path of Michael is then the path of pure will, which means conscious. It establishes the germ of action, the secret of action. It’s the beginning of the possibility to operate in the world of instincts and to solve them, up to sexuality. It’s the beginning of the possibility to operate with detachment in the external world, according to the mode of the Bhagavad-Gita.
The world of freedom and clear consciousness that I attain in this way is the realization of the Logos in me: Force, Wisdom and Love are its names on this plane (Sat-Cit-Ananda).
(The path of the seekers of power and the false absolute individuals is the path of the weak, who tries a fast track to become strong, or rather to appear strong. They do nothing else than develop a principle of conscious thought and cold detachment and - instead of accomplishing the process, by pursuing it through the elimination of the deepest demands of the ego - they submit the first obtained outcomes to it, feeding them back into the life of the ego. At best, they manage to appear in the world with traits of increased originality. Whoever conquers freedom to possess it, to identify with it, does not substantially possess it. He can only be free to the extent that he is free from it also, to the extent that he has overcome the condition of attachment to freedom as well. He possesses it because it enables him to make whatever he wants with it: he sacrifices it to the Big Game, for further conquests, for the liberation of other worlds.)
The absolute in freedom can only be an absolute grounding oneself in the spirit that one is, in one's profound essence: thus, at this point, it is natural and spontaneous to consciously and inexhaustibly irradiate what one is, that is, donation without passion, through the overflowing of serenity and strength that is Love. It is the solar nature. It is the way of Christ. Egoistically and egocentrically inhabiting a certain “freedom” is not Freedom; Thus, it is not the way of Christ.
For clear consciousness to be carried into the world of feeling, it is necessary to start by recognizing the unreality of any human tragedy, comedy or charade, freeing what happens around us from our personal feelings, making them flow in us, before us, until feeling presents itself as a new sphere of knowledge, as the carrier of a consciousness of a more subtle and admirable spiritual world.
Until I take malice, low passions and man's frantic attachment to lower Prakrti seriously; until I feel hurt by injustice and untruthfulness, I am in essence in the sphere of Maya, tricked by Maya. My solar task is to perceive the game of the forces behind the passions.
Realizing, with awe and indulgence, how people are immersed in the play of Maya; in conclusion loving them, because, by seeing beyond, I can find the Christ in them, even though by transcending them. By looking at things with different eyes, I sense the vacuity of uncontrolled feelings: every being is what he is, with his path and karma. By complying to the law that rules him, he continually unfolds the possibility of the situation in which he is immersed, according to a phenomenological objectivity not unlike the one of natural laws. His action can harm me or benefit me, but this is not the criterion by which I have to love him or hate him (nevertheless I don’t have to renounce to know what the power of love is, or the power of hatred).
“The wise man is good with the good ones, good with the evil ones”, says Lao-tze.
In this way, the world of feeling, continually distorted by our personal feelings, is freed from the paralyzing impulses of the ego. In this way, the urging forces of soul are not altered, but reawakened to their original state. When they are not relying on anything other than the translucid purity of a being enlightened in his I-consciousness, they will finally blossom in form of magic spontaneity, not as emotions, but as freed manifestations of heavenly hierarchies who operate in me, and know how they have to operate.
The attainment of such a state is naturally dependent on complete mastery of the world of thoughts. Then the experience of one’s thinking changes radically. One realizes that normal consciousness was not expressing objective thoughts, but was receiving and manifesting the rebounds of deeper energies flowing within the organic life. These energies are now perceived directly, from this side of the mediation of the physical brain.
One of the signs of the attainment of such a possibility is the coincidence of the “I am” with the essence of what I know and realize as true: the reason why a judgment is true consists of its arising by means of the objective quality of the Force of thinking - I recognize it as such. If I come to the point when the true essence of a thing arises in me as an idea, I have come to the place of the essential truth that I am. This truth does not require any explanations other than being itself, having grounding only in itself.
In this way, in my soul, the essence of the world identifies with the essence in me. To the extent that I realize that in myself, I establish in myself a world of freedom: the world of pure intuitions. I can free the sphere of my actions, if I can manifest in my will the same inner position that establishes itself in me when I have consciousness of the birth of these essential-solar intuitions.
Freedom in me can become creative will, by disenchanting the states of precipitation in which the powers of my physical life are convoluted.
In the atmic essence of each existence, the will presents itself as an idea to manifest, an idea about to become concrete, about to fully express its original being. But a lunar power enchants it in its tension towards form, and it paralyzes it, by materializing it in the darkness of existential necessity.
Inadequacy in the face of form sinks principle into manifestation, subject into object. In this way, the original essence is consumed in its manifestation and becomes unconscious movement, automatism, instinct, blind force that mechanically looks for itself in its objects. Such is the essence of nature. Nature is the degradation of the essence of existence, the precipitation of heavenly energies in the identification that leads them to mechanically iterate the act that made them blind in the first place. Thus, the supra-sensible world is enchanted and paralyzed in the physicality of creation.
This physicality is perceived by us as a “become”. We only see it in the last and inexplicable phase of its drama. For us it’s only exterior matter. The heroic task is to release it, to free it. This is dependent on the birth of freedom in me (because it releases conscious will).
By initiating liberation in me, by disentangling myself from the desire that has dominated my thinking-feeling-will so far, I disenchant the etheric in me, down to the depths of will. Then I reconnect with the etheric, and I perceive the world around me in living pictures, that resurrect from the grave of their physicality.
I can then glimpse at how desire arises in me. I realize my corporeal being as a fabric of desire. Going to the origin of this deep flowing of desires, I discover that, in its pure state, it is will. Will itself created the world. To the extent that now I am the one who wills the will, I can find my realization as I, conscious center of my being and my existence.
For this ascent, I do not have to oppose anything with my will. Rather, I have to recognize each of its contingent modifications (desires) in relation to objects. Then, only pure will is acting in me. Pure will is that from which the I is woven. Will with an object, with a content of desire, is ultimately attachment, dispersive fixation. Will without object is free from desire, it stands as self-will. It is initiated through thinking ascesis and feeling ascesis. It is deepened through this self-will, that radically solves every desire, and rediscovers them in their true essence, that is, pure will. From here, the overcoming of sexuality can also originate, as radical reabsorption of what sexuality is as a creative force. It is the desire that substantiates my being born as a physical creature.
Realizing the pure will, I am at the threshold of initiation.
I exist, not because I now want it, but because I wanted it in a state that transcends this one in which I exist. The true force of will, to which I can say I am a stranger, is that which asserts itself at the origin of my corporeal being, expressing itself through all the organic processes in which my consciousness is sleeping.
Ultimately, the task is to find again the origin of this will. Firstly through the search of the profound energies of thinking, and then by establishing oneself in the will, so as to extract it from the sphere of desire. In this way the origin of will can express its true nature, its divine nature, in me, revealing itself as the power of Logos in me. To this end, it is necessary that the normal ego is completely under control, if not yet resolved in me.
The process can be said to be complete when I can affirm: “Not me, but Christ in me!”
Now I will the will at its origin - the will that previously willed me, deviating in blind impulses and contradictions in every aspect of my physical being. In this way, the will becomes force of my self-perceiving and self-realizing as a spiritual being in a reality that is no longer only physical.
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[1] Thanks to Piero Cammerinesi for making the original document freely available to the public at Libero Pensare.
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Massimo Scaligero
Massimo Scaligero
In this epoch we have to be fighters for the spirit: man must realise what his powers can give way to, unless they are kept constantly under control for the conquest of the spiritual world. In this fifth epoch, man is entitled to his freedom to the highest degree! He has to go through that.
Re: Massimo Scaligero
Here I am recomposing a transcription-translation of Scaligero's last lecture [1], that I already posted in two parts in two separate posts, intertwined with parallel discussions. The audio recording of some of the lectures, including this one, is available here. The form of the lecture, as I understand it, is a blend of answering written questions submitted by the audience and following the thread inspired by some quotes of Rudolf Steiner. The thread of the lecture can be roughly highlighted as follows:
- The reappearance of the tuberculotic predisposition
- Thinking - the absolute a priori - in relation to feeling and the will
- Sophia and the redemption of feeling
- The Guardian of the Threshold, the collective Guardian, and Christ in the etheric
- The reunion of thinking and perception as revealed to us by Rudolf Steiner
- Spiritual Science, the gold of the Sun descended on Earth
Rome, January 23, 1980
What is the occult meaning of the massive reappearance of tuberculotic diseases, that had become almost a pale memory? We have touched sometimes on the occult meaning of that when we have discussed the asphyxia of feeling. In the beginning, it’s indeed during the Romantic period, with the last flashing of the sentient-affective soul, that tuberculosis was powerful. Afterwards, a time came of greater rigor of consciousness and thought, and the forces of the I have appeared. That period lasted a few decades, and at the same time some rather effective remedies were found. But deseases do not disappear because remedies are found. Rather, diseases have to disappear, and then the remedies start to work. Now, why is tuberculosis back? It’s back because there is no life in the median seat, there is no life in the seat of rhythm, and the forces of the heart are missing.
For example, we have previously recalled certain verses of the poem Dei Sepolcri, by Foscolo, in which there is the most solid lyric power, a Greek lyric power. There is also emotion, there is some romanticism, but it’s a firm, solid romanticism. There is rhythm, there is music. The poets of today make fun of this music. But they make fun of it at their own expense, at their own disadvantage, because they are no longer able to feel that music. That’s why they make fun of it. It’s not that we should have stopped at the music of Sepolcri, or the music of Carducci’s Barbarian Odes. No, we should have moved forward. Indeed, some have attempted the way of poetry, for example Onofri, but how many have understood him, or helped him? The truth is that young people are deprived of the forces of feeling, because everything that is proposed to them is a mockery of feeling, a mockery of all that is beautiful, poetic, esthetic, gentle. The impression is given that strength means absence of feelings, that it means to be brutal. And this makes these poor kids unhappy people, neuropaths.
At its beginning, this neuropathy takes various forms. Cancer, for example, is the last instance of this neuropathy, because cancer, as our Doctor says, is a nervous process taken to its extreme [sound glitch] a lateral development of a certain organ, a kind of sense organ, as it were. This happens in a strong being, while those who don’t possess that same level strength have to necessarily become tuberculotic, because the instinctive impulses that should be catched and harmonized within the median seat, to be then controlled and dominated - or even transformed in esthetic activities - reach directly into the head and paralyze the center of breathing. This matches a hysteric state. The principle of tuberculosis is a state of hysteria taken very far. In certain cases, the illness does not manifest, but it is there nonetheless. The tuberculotic type is the one who is always about to catch a cold, or a flu, feeling unwell at the least breeze. It means, the predisposition is there. Why?
Now, it’s not that I’m trying to give a lecture in medicine, still it’s a question that I can address, based on observations that I have been making for years. I have realized that there is a weakness of feeling that, in some, transforms into cynicism or hardness, similar to what we see in movies: there’s the brutal cowboy, everyone becomes tough, they don’t greet each other, because greeting with kindness is a weakness, and everything is rough, everything is forceful. There lies a great weakness underneath all that. And there is also the fear of appearing sentimental. Now, feeling can be said to be the most powerful strength possessed by man, as of today. And the belief that feeling should be overcome through cold detachment or roughness is the same thing as castration. It’s like chastity obtained by eviration. It’s the same thing. It is a really serious form of absence of feeling. The misunderstanding is to believe that fullness of feeling means to be weak. Feeling really is the strength of the strong ones, because it’s in feeling that eveything low - all that gathers the most telluric impulses in man - is balanced out, through the gathering of very different ideal impulses. Therefore, a balanced and strong being has to have a very harmonious life of feeling. A strong being also has to be able to continually intervene and facilitate all the work of thinking, because, in essence, the work of thinking leads us to a broader inner life, not through an intensified rationalism - rationalism is a sign of weakness, it’s a limit - but by enriching thinking with the immediate force from which it arises. The immediate spiritual impulse inside thinking is feeling.
Naturally, this has a correlate below, when man believes he thinks, but really is dominated by sentiment. Here we are in a lower domain. For this reason, in the classification of the various soul domains, a rational and affective soul is reported, not a purely rational soul. Because it has no content. Pure rationalism is simply a logical net, with no real existence. It always has feeling, immediately underneath its surface. It has no own strength. Therefore, certain mental, ideological positions are the result of feeling - a rather equivocal, low feeling. Indeed we have shown how there are mental positions, dialectical positions, that are not grounded in true thinking, but in the presence of a certain feeling energy of one’s race, family, constitution, and temperament. Such feeling is very close to animality, very egoistic, and it immediately finds its way to thinking.
On the contrary, true feeling is feeling that appears when thinking develops in intensity until it releases itself from the physical, until it finds itself as a movement originating from itself, without needing the cerebral organ for movement. And when thinking finds this intensity within itself, it immediately joins the highest feeling impulse, the immaculate but powerful force of feeling. This is the true force of man. Whatever activity man executes, with intents of perpetuity, with higher intents, he needs this force of feeling. Tuberculosis is back, and it will be a good lesson. It already is a good lesson, as it seems like it's on the rise - an unexpected rise. Thus, medicine will have to provide for that. Above all, spiritual medicine, because neuropathies, mental illnesses will increase, and tuberculotic diseases also will increase - not necessarily tuberculosis, but tuberculotic predisposition. Those who bear the predisposition, who are continually unwell, will maybe not get tuberculosis, however they will have to get treatment of the kind that is considered effective for tuberculosis.
Naturally, we could add that what really can help a young person who has a predisposition for tuberculosis are the exercise of concentration, and the exercise of the will, because these two exercises are the ones that grant feeling the possibility to finally express itself according to true soul balance, without dreadfully oscillating between attraction and repulsion. Thus the sick person really needs an edifying life of feeling. This is obtained through the energetic exercising of thinking, and the energetic exercising of the will. At this point we can ask the question [reading] “What is the goal of the exercise of concentration? What is necessary to do when the force of concentration gets lost in idle dream images?” Yes, this really is a current problem. Why is it so?
Because - for the same reason that tuberculosis is on the rise, for the same reason that cancer is soaring - the work of concentration is difficult, because the atmosphere is weighed down, filled with beings who hamper the activity of concentration. Thus, if previously a certain amount of strength was necessary, today a double amount is required. But there is no other remedy. And we shouldn't think that we have become weaker. Rather, we should notice that all around there are entities that obstruct this activity, and have acquired a remarkable might. Here, when it says “the force of concentration gets lost in idle dream images” we see those beings coming forth, as if they were saying “Don’t do it, distract yourself”. We can see these beings. And here the art is to realize that the spiritual world requires more strength from us. There is no other response. We have this strength, because we have a thinking that has a source that we can call inexhaustible, unlimited, in which the Logos flows. There’s everything there. Thus we can really ask thinking for this powerful gift. So it’s a matter of more rigor, more determination, and more “grit” - for those of you who are not from Rome, this word means more tenacity. We need some more tenacity. Naturally, this is until thinking becomes free. Afterwards, tenacity needs to be suspended to set the spiritual world free.
Let’s see… [reading] “The ascesis of the mystics, grounded in feeling, is not of our times anymore. The ascesis of spiritual science is grounded in thinking. It can be presupposed a future direct ascesis of the will, once the consciousness soul will be a realized reality.” Absolutely. Simply, we have to notice that the way of spiritual science calls forth all three forces. It starts from thinking, because thinking is the first conscious activity. The immediacy of consciousness appears in thinking. It’s inevitable that one moves from thinking. Thinking is the absolute a priori, because it’s the only activity that immediately connects us to the spiritual world, directly. It’s the lowest activity of consciousness and at the same time it’s the freest activity, the most retraceable, from Maya in which it manifests, back to its essence. We can let it appear as it does, with Maya. When we have the strength to make it appear, we find its essence.
However, when we do this work, its appearance escapes us, which is why we need to do the exercise of concentration. Actually when we do the thinking exercises, we essentially set the will in motion. This links back to what we have said a short while ago, that we appeal to thinking and to will, with the exercises of spiritual science. And we have also mentioned, speaking of tuberculosis, that thinking and will give us real strength of feeling, because feeling is the depth relationship between the will and thinking. Therefore, we need to practice in continuous harmony between thinking and will, so that feeling - the secret feeling, the most hidden feeling - can reawaken. Because in feeling lives Lucifer, and Lucifer comes from the side of the spirit, while Ahriman comes from the side of terrestriality, of corporeality. Thus we have a more direct grasp towards the sphere of Ahriman, through the senses, the bodily sensation, etcetera, while feeling is fluid, elusive, subtle. It dominates thinking, and thinking doesn’t realize it. In order to get a handle on feeling we should not head in the direction of feeling, but we should operate through the accord between thinking and will. Then, feeling feels the joy of its rhythmic function, because it’s feeling that harmonizes, feeling is the one that is called to accord the two forces. Feeling is the bearer of the music of the universe. It’s feeling that feels the Logos.
Feeling’s only task is to feel the divine. But it doesn’t feel it. It’s forced to not feel it, although its function is to feel the divine. And the fact that this function is taken away from it impoverishes feeling, and makes man little, and petty. It makes him petty in his feelings that become trivial, equivocal, transient, and subjective expressions. This is the unhappiness of feeling, and the reason why we start from thinking, not from feeling. Technically, it would be wrong to start from feeling. Technically, we would never reach the inner life of the soul, if we didn’t start from thinking, that is, from that within which the I really has a hold on our consciousness. But we have to harmonize thinking and will. Every exercise of concentration is an exercise of will. And when we say that Michael is the prince of cosmic intelligence, the regulator of thinking, we have to say: he is the regulator of the will. He acts within the will, in the will that thinks. For Michael, there exists no will without thinking, as much as there is no thinking without will. Thinking without will is dialectical thinking, it’s ideology, at the service of the enemy of the spirit. This is the tragic situation of thinking in our times, that it's truly devoid of the current of will. Therefore, the will through which it operates is not the will of man. It’s the will of the opposer of man. This is why all ideologies are anti-human. They really impede the evolution of man.
All occultisms, all their variations that are becoming plethora nowadays, bring those brilliant methods of yoga, etcetera, but none of them is aware of this tragic behind the scenes of the human condition. Hence they work against man’s liberation, against the possibility for man to clearly see what is happening. It is of paramount importance that feeling… When we say that feeling has to be redeemed, we refer to the Virgin-Sophia, to Isis-Sophia, of which our Doctor [Steiner] says that without her we cannot find Christ. It says [reading]: "We have the I. The I is already there. What we don’t have, what we have lost, is Isis-Sophia." This is when our feeling is imprisoned, compressed. It’s that feeling which makes us sick with tuberculosis. It’s feeling asphyxiated, feeling that young people would like to feel, but they don’t feel it anymore. There are some young people who brighten up when they are told something that kindles their feeling. So we see how brigandish is the activity of the schools, that leads them to abstract ideologies, to everything that is truly against that which illuminates history and nature, as power of inner life that only feeling can grasp. This is the responsibility that we have for those who approach us, for the young people. This is the most important responsibility, because young people are in search of that, but then they end up in some kind of maharishi... mahesvaari.. or brakmachari… [dark humour] etcetera, and they waste their time.
[Seemingly browsing some written pages] We can say that we are following the thread…..
We can say that, by not experiencing living thinking, man cuts himself off from a relationship with the Logos, and for this reason he has to die. This death is a true one, because there are beings who don’t die any longer. It seems like they do, but they do not die, because they are alive in the immediacy of life. There are beings who, through death, reawaken to a new force. But when they have not found the connection with Logos they have to die. They have to go through the experience of death, and that experience educates them, because it’s a somber event, a moment when man knows the power of the abyss, that can be known through living thinking only during life on Earth, so that he can win over death while still alive. There is this saying of the Rosicrucians: “Who does not collapse before dying, will know the fall down after death” It goes more or less so, true? It means that, if one has not faced death before death, one will have to face it afterwards, and really feel the tragic moment of death. If you now read again the book “Initiation” by our Doctor, you will see, it’s entirely a track following which one can overcome death during life.
Then we can move up to more demanding questions. One is about the Guardian of the threshold. We can say that the Guardian of the threshold is a being who appears to us as a symbol of what we have left to overcome. But why does this happen? Because we deserve to know it. There are beings who would be terrified to see what they are. They delude themselves that they are good, helpful, generous, altruistic, fraternalistic, radical, etcetera, but they aren’t. The Guardian of the threshold is the moment on the spiritual path when man finally deserves to know what he has left to transform, to overcome. Naturally, this requires much courage of vision. This courage gives form to forces that, facing the vision of the Guardian, become positive forces. But relapses can happen, a fall back into the old nature can happen, in which case the Guardian becomes a very unpleasant being. It’s terrible, because he’s constantly there, admonishing us: “You have fallen back. That which you had expelled is reawakening in you”. This is a fight of crucial importance, where man prepares for initiation, prepares for a birth in accord with the spirit. It’s a level at which one is ready to encounter Christ.
I believe it is appropriate to add the following. It is expected in our present times an experience of the Guardian of the threshold for the whole of humanity. Not in a specific, precise sense, as described in “Occult Science”, but as an experience that brings every being on the brink of desperation, due to the fact that man has omitted to complete a task. This operation has to happen now, it should have already happened. That is, the transition from a rational-affective soul, to the consciousness soul. By various signs, it’s apparent that it hasn’t happened. It’s not happening. Therefore it’s inevitable that every being has a tragic experience, an experience in which it’s felt that there are no more human strengths coming to help. In this way, through pain, through darkness, there could be a blossoming of the forces that the spiritual world needs in order to help humanity. The spiritual world helps man, but it needs man to be free. It needs man to offer a sacrifice through an inner free act.
This unconscious experience of the Guardian, lived through by the whole of humanity transforms into something that operates on the path of freedom, by the activity of those who are aware of the behind the scenes we have discussed. In this way, the free activity of the real experimenters of the spirit allows the spiritual beings to take hold of this human spiritual gist and transform it in power of destiny, in order to prevent man from falling, from collapsing, in order to save our civilization, so that it can move forward without destructions and cataclysms. You can see how the course of history presents us with a panorama where there’s no respite. And the situation is becoming penned, encircled from all directions. And so where are the redeeming forces coming from, if not from a condition of inner tension through which man is led to intuit an inner activity that he owes the spiritual world? This is already visible in certain figures.
Now let's conclude with this thought, that I have saved for last. This could be the true comment on our discussion. It could help us understand the mistake in which we have sunk. [Reading] “We can call reality only that aspect of the world content, obtained through knowledge, in which are reunited two apparently separated elements, thinking and perception.” I have kept this question for last, because it’s a help. Presently, through the incontrovertible scientific thought, we only live in the world of perception. Thinking is excluded. You may say, how is it excluded? We have thought, we have the philosophy of science, we have epistemology…” Yes, but all this is at the service of the percept. The counterpart in terms of thinking is lacking, from all progress of physics, for instance. It’s a terrifying misunderstanding, by which we are not getting out of the OT, of the old moralism. We are unaware of the new forces of the consciousness soul.
As we have often discussed, the conquest of the incontrovertible truth of physics - which is true! - where the concept coincides with the object, really is the element that pleases everyone. However, it’s overlooked that this is simply the first moment of cognition. We have learned how there is a first moment in cognition, conditioned by the sensory world. This first moment of cognition is true. Inquired by idealists, it's considered a content of our consciousness, thus all subjective; inquired by materialists it’s considered a reflection of the external world, where thinking is nothing other than a sort of photograph of what happens, so we are done, reality is what it is, and we copy it, interpret it, and apply it - it's frightening!
But that is only the first moment of cognition, that idealism has shown to depend on subjective means of knowledge, to be integrated from the side of sense-free thinking. Because it’s thinking that has given us mathematical intuitions! What happens when this understanding is absent? It happens that we are stuck in a dualistic condition, in which the truth of science becomes dogmatic, omnipotent, dominant. We are all puppets, at the mercy of it, from technology, to income declaration. It’s a potent mechanism from which we can’t extract ourselves. True, there is a political mechanism of opposition, that you know very well. Those who are in power know very well how to go beyond the bankrupt economy.
But if Athens cries, Sparta doesn’t laugh. Everyone, in a way or another, suffers from the same sinking into the rational soul. We know that the rational soul is the expression of Ahriman, while the affective soul is the expression of Lucifer. So the rational-affective soul expresses itself in this science. When our Doctor tackles this question, he doesn’t argue that it’s a mistake. Rather, we need to discover up to which point it’s true, and where we have stopped. Because there is an initial moment of cognition, reached by science, that represents the relationship of thinking with the object. But nothing is known with regards to thinking. Nothing is known of the forces that really give origin to the contents of science. Science without thinking intuition would be nothing. Still, science denies it. If we look at technology and science, we can see that it’s all science of percept. The other part, the inner part, that has provided all the content - that is, thinking - is absolutely not there.
We can say that this is the consequence of the powerlessness of philosophy. Philosophy in the West has reached its culmination through idealism. In Germany, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel. But also here, through Vico, Gioberti, Spaventa, Rosmini, down to Croce and Gentile. But none of these philosophers has intuited the force of knowledge. None of these has received the idea that the forces of knowledge that allow science to exist are experimentable. This powerlessness of philosophy has permitted what in “Truth and science” is called the advent of anti-philosophy. Philosophy has lacked the courage to recognize this trajectory. But when the forces of knowledge have not been cultivated, such courage is impossible. And we are paying the price of this situation. Because it’s this collapse of philosophy, the collapse of the minimally positive element brought by idealism, that has opened the way for the ideologies of matter to take over humanity. Because everyone believes in this ideology. It’s at this level that we are stuck. If we can’t find the level of sense-free thinking, we will not have a true economy. We will not have true psychology. We will not have true science.
Thus, the Guardian of the threshold is knocking at the door. What’s been evoked by our friend Leopoldo by saying “Then it’s death before death” is important. We are dead already, because we know nothing of what is happening, any longer. We don’t know the behind the scenes, although we have the fortune to have at our disposal all that is needed. You see - you are told this by someone who knows all the currents, someone who knows them in depth. There isn’t a current that I have not experimented with. I know them all, with all their deceits and pitfalls. I can tell you that the spiritual science of our Doctor is the gold of the Sun descended on the Earth. It’s the big venture of man, the path of liberation of man, because in it there is everything. And we have to be worthy of the realization of this impulse. It is a duty to others, a duty to our neighbors. Enlivened by love for our neighbor, we realize this life only if we are able to bring this principle in us, as instruments - though not worthy instruments - of the Logos.
***
[1] Thanks to Piero Cammerinesi for making this recording freely available to the public at Libero Pensare.
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- The reappearance of the tuberculotic predisposition
- Thinking - the absolute a priori - in relation to feeling and the will
- Sophia and the redemption of feeling
- The Guardian of the Threshold, the collective Guardian, and Christ in the etheric
- The reunion of thinking and perception as revealed to us by Rudolf Steiner
- Spiritual Science, the gold of the Sun descended on Earth
Rome, January 23, 1980
What is the occult meaning of the massive reappearance of tuberculotic diseases, that had become almost a pale memory? We have touched sometimes on the occult meaning of that when we have discussed the asphyxia of feeling. In the beginning, it’s indeed during the Romantic period, with the last flashing of the sentient-affective soul, that tuberculosis was powerful. Afterwards, a time came of greater rigor of consciousness and thought, and the forces of the I have appeared. That period lasted a few decades, and at the same time some rather effective remedies were found. But deseases do not disappear because remedies are found. Rather, diseases have to disappear, and then the remedies start to work. Now, why is tuberculosis back? It’s back because there is no life in the median seat, there is no life in the seat of rhythm, and the forces of the heart are missing.
For example, we have previously recalled certain verses of the poem Dei Sepolcri, by Foscolo, in which there is the most solid lyric power, a Greek lyric power. There is also emotion, there is some romanticism, but it’s a firm, solid romanticism. There is rhythm, there is music. The poets of today make fun of this music. But they make fun of it at their own expense, at their own disadvantage, because they are no longer able to feel that music. That’s why they make fun of it. It’s not that we should have stopped at the music of Sepolcri, or the music of Carducci’s Barbarian Odes. No, we should have moved forward. Indeed, some have attempted the way of poetry, for example Onofri, but how many have understood him, or helped him? The truth is that young people are deprived of the forces of feeling, because everything that is proposed to them is a mockery of feeling, a mockery of all that is beautiful, poetic, esthetic, gentle. The impression is given that strength means absence of feelings, that it means to be brutal. And this makes these poor kids unhappy people, neuropaths.
At its beginning, this neuropathy takes various forms. Cancer, for example, is the last instance of this neuropathy, because cancer, as our Doctor says, is a nervous process taken to its extreme [sound glitch] a lateral development of a certain organ, a kind of sense organ, as it were. This happens in a strong being, while those who don’t possess that same level strength have to necessarily become tuberculotic, because the instinctive impulses that should be catched and harmonized within the median seat, to be then controlled and dominated - or even transformed in esthetic activities - reach directly into the head and paralyze the center of breathing. This matches a hysteric state. The principle of tuberculosis is a state of hysteria taken very far. In certain cases, the illness does not manifest, but it is there nonetheless. The tuberculotic type is the one who is always about to catch a cold, or a flu, feeling unwell at the least breeze. It means, the predisposition is there. Why?
Now, it’s not that I’m trying to give a lecture in medicine, still it’s a question that I can address, based on observations that I have been making for years. I have realized that there is a weakness of feeling that, in some, transforms into cynicism or hardness, similar to what we see in movies: there’s the brutal cowboy, everyone becomes tough, they don’t greet each other, because greeting with kindness is a weakness, and everything is rough, everything is forceful. There lies a great weakness underneath all that. And there is also the fear of appearing sentimental. Now, feeling can be said to be the most powerful strength possessed by man, as of today. And the belief that feeling should be overcome through cold detachment or roughness is the same thing as castration. It’s like chastity obtained by eviration. It’s the same thing. It is a really serious form of absence of feeling. The misunderstanding is to believe that fullness of feeling means to be weak. Feeling really is the strength of the strong ones, because it’s in feeling that eveything low - all that gathers the most telluric impulses in man - is balanced out, through the gathering of very different ideal impulses. Therefore, a balanced and strong being has to have a very harmonious life of feeling. A strong being also has to be able to continually intervene and facilitate all the work of thinking, because, in essence, the work of thinking leads us to a broader inner life, not through an intensified rationalism - rationalism is a sign of weakness, it’s a limit - but by enriching thinking with the immediate force from which it arises. The immediate spiritual impulse inside thinking is feeling.
Naturally, this has a correlate below, when man believes he thinks, but really is dominated by sentiment. Here we are in a lower domain. For this reason, in the classification of the various soul domains, a rational and affective soul is reported, not a purely rational soul. Because it has no content. Pure rationalism is simply a logical net, with no real existence. It always has feeling, immediately underneath its surface. It has no own strength. Therefore, certain mental, ideological positions are the result of feeling - a rather equivocal, low feeling. Indeed we have shown how there are mental positions, dialectical positions, that are not grounded in true thinking, but in the presence of a certain feeling energy of one’s race, family, constitution, and temperament. Such feeling is very close to animality, very egoistic, and it immediately finds its way to thinking.
On the contrary, true feeling is feeling that appears when thinking develops in intensity until it releases itself from the physical, until it finds itself as a movement originating from itself, without needing the cerebral organ for movement. And when thinking finds this intensity within itself, it immediately joins the highest feeling impulse, the immaculate but powerful force of feeling. This is the true force of man. Whatever activity man executes, with intents of perpetuity, with higher intents, he needs this force of feeling. Tuberculosis is back, and it will be a good lesson. It already is a good lesson, as it seems like it's on the rise - an unexpected rise. Thus, medicine will have to provide for that. Above all, spiritual medicine, because neuropathies, mental illnesses will increase, and tuberculotic diseases also will increase - not necessarily tuberculosis, but tuberculotic predisposition. Those who bear the predisposition, who are continually unwell, will maybe not get tuberculosis, however they will have to get treatment of the kind that is considered effective for tuberculosis.
Naturally, we could add that what really can help a young person who has a predisposition for tuberculosis are the exercise of concentration, and the exercise of the will, because these two exercises are the ones that grant feeling the possibility to finally express itself according to true soul balance, without dreadfully oscillating between attraction and repulsion. Thus the sick person really needs an edifying life of feeling. This is obtained through the energetic exercising of thinking, and the energetic exercising of the will. At this point we can ask the question [reading] “What is the goal of the exercise of concentration? What is necessary to do when the force of concentration gets lost in idle dream images?” Yes, this really is a current problem. Why is it so?
Because - for the same reason that tuberculosis is on the rise, for the same reason that cancer is soaring - the work of concentration is difficult, because the atmosphere is weighed down, filled with beings who hamper the activity of concentration. Thus, if previously a certain amount of strength was necessary, today a double amount is required. But there is no other remedy. And we shouldn't think that we have become weaker. Rather, we should notice that all around there are entities that obstruct this activity, and have acquired a remarkable might. Here, when it says “the force of concentration gets lost in idle dream images” we see those beings coming forth, as if they were saying “Don’t do it, distract yourself”. We can see these beings. And here the art is to realize that the spiritual world requires more strength from us. There is no other response. We have this strength, because we have a thinking that has a source that we can call inexhaustible, unlimited, in which the Logos flows. There’s everything there. Thus we can really ask thinking for this powerful gift. So it’s a matter of more rigor, more determination, and more “grit” - for those of you who are not from Rome, this word means more tenacity. We need some more tenacity. Naturally, this is until thinking becomes free. Afterwards, tenacity needs to be suspended to set the spiritual world free.
Let’s see… [reading] “The ascesis of the mystics, grounded in feeling, is not of our times anymore. The ascesis of spiritual science is grounded in thinking. It can be presupposed a future direct ascesis of the will, once the consciousness soul will be a realized reality.” Absolutely. Simply, we have to notice that the way of spiritual science calls forth all three forces. It starts from thinking, because thinking is the first conscious activity. The immediacy of consciousness appears in thinking. It’s inevitable that one moves from thinking. Thinking is the absolute a priori, because it’s the only activity that immediately connects us to the spiritual world, directly. It’s the lowest activity of consciousness and at the same time it’s the freest activity, the most retraceable, from Maya in which it manifests, back to its essence. We can let it appear as it does, with Maya. When we have the strength to make it appear, we find its essence.
However, when we do this work, its appearance escapes us, which is why we need to do the exercise of concentration. Actually when we do the thinking exercises, we essentially set the will in motion. This links back to what we have said a short while ago, that we appeal to thinking and to will, with the exercises of spiritual science. And we have also mentioned, speaking of tuberculosis, that thinking and will give us real strength of feeling, because feeling is the depth relationship between the will and thinking. Therefore, we need to practice in continuous harmony between thinking and will, so that feeling - the secret feeling, the most hidden feeling - can reawaken. Because in feeling lives Lucifer, and Lucifer comes from the side of the spirit, while Ahriman comes from the side of terrestriality, of corporeality. Thus we have a more direct grasp towards the sphere of Ahriman, through the senses, the bodily sensation, etcetera, while feeling is fluid, elusive, subtle. It dominates thinking, and thinking doesn’t realize it. In order to get a handle on feeling we should not head in the direction of feeling, but we should operate through the accord between thinking and will. Then, feeling feels the joy of its rhythmic function, because it’s feeling that harmonizes, feeling is the one that is called to accord the two forces. Feeling is the bearer of the music of the universe. It’s feeling that feels the Logos.
Feeling’s only task is to feel the divine. But it doesn’t feel it. It’s forced to not feel it, although its function is to feel the divine. And the fact that this function is taken away from it impoverishes feeling, and makes man little, and petty. It makes him petty in his feelings that become trivial, equivocal, transient, and subjective expressions. This is the unhappiness of feeling, and the reason why we start from thinking, not from feeling. Technically, it would be wrong to start from feeling. Technically, we would never reach the inner life of the soul, if we didn’t start from thinking, that is, from that within which the I really has a hold on our consciousness. But we have to harmonize thinking and will. Every exercise of concentration is an exercise of will. And when we say that Michael is the prince of cosmic intelligence, the regulator of thinking, we have to say: he is the regulator of the will. He acts within the will, in the will that thinks. For Michael, there exists no will without thinking, as much as there is no thinking without will. Thinking without will is dialectical thinking, it’s ideology, at the service of the enemy of the spirit. This is the tragic situation of thinking in our times, that it's truly devoid of the current of will. Therefore, the will through which it operates is not the will of man. It’s the will of the opposer of man. This is why all ideologies are anti-human. They really impede the evolution of man.
All occultisms, all their variations that are becoming plethora nowadays, bring those brilliant methods of yoga, etcetera, but none of them is aware of this tragic behind the scenes of the human condition. Hence they work against man’s liberation, against the possibility for man to clearly see what is happening. It is of paramount importance that feeling… When we say that feeling has to be redeemed, we refer to the Virgin-Sophia, to Isis-Sophia, of which our Doctor [Steiner] says that without her we cannot find Christ. It says [reading]: "We have the I. The I is already there. What we don’t have, what we have lost, is Isis-Sophia." This is when our feeling is imprisoned, compressed. It’s that feeling which makes us sick with tuberculosis. It’s feeling asphyxiated, feeling that young people would like to feel, but they don’t feel it anymore. There are some young people who brighten up when they are told something that kindles their feeling. So we see how brigandish is the activity of the schools, that leads them to abstract ideologies, to everything that is truly against that which illuminates history and nature, as power of inner life that only feeling can grasp. This is the responsibility that we have for those who approach us, for the young people. This is the most important responsibility, because young people are in search of that, but then they end up in some kind of maharishi... mahesvaari.. or brakmachari… [dark humour] etcetera, and they waste their time.
[Seemingly browsing some written pages] We can say that we are following the thread…..
We can say that, by not experiencing living thinking, man cuts himself off from a relationship with the Logos, and for this reason he has to die. This death is a true one, because there are beings who don’t die any longer. It seems like they do, but they do not die, because they are alive in the immediacy of life. There are beings who, through death, reawaken to a new force. But when they have not found the connection with Logos they have to die. They have to go through the experience of death, and that experience educates them, because it’s a somber event, a moment when man knows the power of the abyss, that can be known through living thinking only during life on Earth, so that he can win over death while still alive. There is this saying of the Rosicrucians: “Who does not collapse before dying, will know the fall down after death” It goes more or less so, true? It means that, if one has not faced death before death, one will have to face it afterwards, and really feel the tragic moment of death. If you now read again the book “Initiation” by our Doctor, you will see, it’s entirely a track following which one can overcome death during life.
Then we can move up to more demanding questions. One is about the Guardian of the threshold. We can say that the Guardian of the threshold is a being who appears to us as a symbol of what we have left to overcome. But why does this happen? Because we deserve to know it. There are beings who would be terrified to see what they are. They delude themselves that they are good, helpful, generous, altruistic, fraternalistic, radical, etcetera, but they aren’t. The Guardian of the threshold is the moment on the spiritual path when man finally deserves to know what he has left to transform, to overcome. Naturally, this requires much courage of vision. This courage gives form to forces that, facing the vision of the Guardian, become positive forces. But relapses can happen, a fall back into the old nature can happen, in which case the Guardian becomes a very unpleasant being. It’s terrible, because he’s constantly there, admonishing us: “You have fallen back. That which you had expelled is reawakening in you”. This is a fight of crucial importance, where man prepares for initiation, prepares for a birth in accord with the spirit. It’s a level at which one is ready to encounter Christ.
I believe it is appropriate to add the following. It is expected in our present times an experience of the Guardian of the threshold for the whole of humanity. Not in a specific, precise sense, as described in “Occult Science”, but as an experience that brings every being on the brink of desperation, due to the fact that man has omitted to complete a task. This operation has to happen now, it should have already happened. That is, the transition from a rational-affective soul, to the consciousness soul. By various signs, it’s apparent that it hasn’t happened. It’s not happening. Therefore it’s inevitable that every being has a tragic experience, an experience in which it’s felt that there are no more human strengths coming to help. In this way, through pain, through darkness, there could be a blossoming of the forces that the spiritual world needs in order to help humanity. The spiritual world helps man, but it needs man to be free. It needs man to offer a sacrifice through an inner free act.
This unconscious experience of the Guardian, lived through by the whole of humanity transforms into something that operates on the path of freedom, by the activity of those who are aware of the behind the scenes we have discussed. In this way, the free activity of the real experimenters of the spirit allows the spiritual beings to take hold of this human spiritual gist and transform it in power of destiny, in order to prevent man from falling, from collapsing, in order to save our civilization, so that it can move forward without destructions and cataclysms. You can see how the course of history presents us with a panorama where there’s no respite. And the situation is becoming penned, encircled from all directions. And so where are the redeeming forces coming from, if not from a condition of inner tension through which man is led to intuit an inner activity that he owes the spiritual world? This is already visible in certain figures.
Now let's conclude with this thought, that I have saved for last. This could be the true comment on our discussion. It could help us understand the mistake in which we have sunk. [Reading] “We can call reality only that aspect of the world content, obtained through knowledge, in which are reunited two apparently separated elements, thinking and perception.” I have kept this question for last, because it’s a help. Presently, through the incontrovertible scientific thought, we only live in the world of perception. Thinking is excluded. You may say, how is it excluded? We have thought, we have the philosophy of science, we have epistemology…” Yes, but all this is at the service of the percept. The counterpart in terms of thinking is lacking, from all progress of physics, for instance. It’s a terrifying misunderstanding, by which we are not getting out of the OT, of the old moralism. We are unaware of the new forces of the consciousness soul.
As we have often discussed, the conquest of the incontrovertible truth of physics - which is true! - where the concept coincides with the object, really is the element that pleases everyone. However, it’s overlooked that this is simply the first moment of cognition. We have learned how there is a first moment in cognition, conditioned by the sensory world. This first moment of cognition is true. Inquired by idealists, it's considered a content of our consciousness, thus all subjective; inquired by materialists it’s considered a reflection of the external world, where thinking is nothing other than a sort of photograph of what happens, so we are done, reality is what it is, and we copy it, interpret it, and apply it - it's frightening!
But that is only the first moment of cognition, that idealism has shown to depend on subjective means of knowledge, to be integrated from the side of sense-free thinking. Because it’s thinking that has given us mathematical intuitions! What happens when this understanding is absent? It happens that we are stuck in a dualistic condition, in which the truth of science becomes dogmatic, omnipotent, dominant. We are all puppets, at the mercy of it, from technology, to income declaration. It’s a potent mechanism from which we can’t extract ourselves. True, there is a political mechanism of opposition, that you know very well. Those who are in power know very well how to go beyond the bankrupt economy.
But if Athens cries, Sparta doesn’t laugh. Everyone, in a way or another, suffers from the same sinking into the rational soul. We know that the rational soul is the expression of Ahriman, while the affective soul is the expression of Lucifer. So the rational-affective soul expresses itself in this science. When our Doctor tackles this question, he doesn’t argue that it’s a mistake. Rather, we need to discover up to which point it’s true, and where we have stopped. Because there is an initial moment of cognition, reached by science, that represents the relationship of thinking with the object. But nothing is known with regards to thinking. Nothing is known of the forces that really give origin to the contents of science. Science without thinking intuition would be nothing. Still, science denies it. If we look at technology and science, we can see that it’s all science of percept. The other part, the inner part, that has provided all the content - that is, thinking - is absolutely not there.
We can say that this is the consequence of the powerlessness of philosophy. Philosophy in the West has reached its culmination through idealism. In Germany, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel. But also here, through Vico, Gioberti, Spaventa, Rosmini, down to Croce and Gentile. But none of these philosophers has intuited the force of knowledge. None of these has received the idea that the forces of knowledge that allow science to exist are experimentable. This powerlessness of philosophy has permitted what in “Truth and science” is called the advent of anti-philosophy. Philosophy has lacked the courage to recognize this trajectory. But when the forces of knowledge have not been cultivated, such courage is impossible. And we are paying the price of this situation. Because it’s this collapse of philosophy, the collapse of the minimally positive element brought by idealism, that has opened the way for the ideologies of matter to take over humanity. Because everyone believes in this ideology. It’s at this level that we are stuck. If we can’t find the level of sense-free thinking, we will not have a true economy. We will not have true psychology. We will not have true science.
Thus, the Guardian of the threshold is knocking at the door. What’s been evoked by our friend Leopoldo by saying “Then it’s death before death” is important. We are dead already, because we know nothing of what is happening, any longer. We don’t know the behind the scenes, although we have the fortune to have at our disposal all that is needed. You see - you are told this by someone who knows all the currents, someone who knows them in depth. There isn’t a current that I have not experimented with. I know them all, with all their deceits and pitfalls. I can tell you that the spiritual science of our Doctor is the gold of the Sun descended on the Earth. It’s the big venture of man, the path of liberation of man, because in it there is everything. And we have to be worthy of the realization of this impulse. It is a duty to others, a duty to our neighbors. Enlivened by love for our neighbor, we realize this life only if we are able to bring this principle in us, as instruments - though not worthy instruments - of the Logos.
***
[1] Thanks to Piero Cammerinesi for making this recording freely available to the public at Libero Pensare.
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In this epoch we have to be fighters for the spirit: man must realise what his powers can give way to, unless they are kept constantly under control for the conquest of the spiritual world. In this fifth epoch, man is entitled to his freedom to the highest degree! He has to go through that.
Re: Massimo Scaligero
Thank you for starting this thread and posting these inspiring lectures from MS, Federica!
This is also a question that I've been thinking about a lot lately in connection with my own path.
What I find to be a great way to orient my spiritual path is by comparing it to that of humanity as a whole in our current time. We have a much easier time viewing with relative objectivity the developments happening across humanity and the World as a whole than those happening within our own soul life, since we are in such proximity to the latter, so we can use the former to leverage a sense of dispassion and objectivity with the latter. It is most important for us to get a hold of a sense of the Good that comes out of all the trials and tribulations we endure on the path. Or even more importantly, for the Good that is revealed by the very fact that we are enduring trials and tribulations in a more and more conscious way.
The details of all these things are not really important right now but only the general principle that it reveals. Even secular science speaks of the layers of the Earth becoming more and more ancient i.e. representing past stages of development, the further we go towards the core. Within the Earth are all the stages that we had to pass through in order to reach the stage of human I-consciousness that we currently possess. In order to progress even further, we need to become conscious of and work through those past stages that now serve as resistance to our spiritual activity, i.e. for the perfection of our inner capacities. Humanity is gradually encountering the Earth's subconscious as it irrupts into the sphere of its waking ego-consciousness through the sacrificial descent of Christ. How that encounter will manifest on the physical plane depends on whether we cling to old materialistic habits of thinking, which cannot help but understand such irruptions as external oppressive forces, or whether we penetrate them with spiritual wisdom and realize the opportunities of Love and Grace that they represent. The former attitude gives us an excuse to become less mobile in our thinking, less grateful in our feeling, and less energetic in our willing. The latter attitude presents endless opportunities for creatively strengthening and perfecting our inner soul forces.
On the esoteric path of intuitive thinking, there will be a period of time, perhaps several, when we seem to be plagued by increasing maladies of the spirit, soul, and body. We will feel harassed by a guilty conscience with respect to many of our daily activities we previously engaged in without second thought, or by various psychological and physiological sensitivities to our spiritual activity, perhaps in the realm of diet and sleep. We'll wonder if we are doing it all wrong or whether we should just quit and go back to our safe and secure previous existence. Temptations towards abandoning the cumbersome, exhausting intellect and living in our pleasurable animal nature will seem all the more potent and intense (yet never anything we cannot endure), because now are not completely merged with the intellect anymore and therefore know how feeble it is. We should realize that these developments are nothing other than a refined sensitivity that is developing in our intuitive consciousness, which also reveals to us, experientially, that consciousness is at the root of all psychological, biological, and physical structures and activity. It means we are going through the exact same path, in advance and consciously, of what humanity is and will continue to go through mostly unconsciously. We are voluntarily meeting the personal Guardian like most of humanity is involuntarily meeting the collective Guardian that MS speaks about.
In the new Mission Impossible movie, there is an artificial intelligence that is capable of predicting human behavior many moves in advance. Everything that the protagonists plan to do, everywhere that they and up, was already predicted and even arranged by this autonomous AI. That is an image of Ahrimanic intelligence, of course. What that intelligence cannot account for, however, are true acts of goodness and virtue, i.e. acts of humility, tolerance, grace, love, and forgiveness. Those cannot be calculated through any mathematical algorithm. They cannot be predicted from past behavior because they flow into our consciousness from the future, i.e. they are genuine creations ex nihilo (out of nothing) from moral imagination, inspiration, and intuiton. Humanity was redeemed through its violence towards Christ Jesus who is in the Father, by a sort of inner judo where the enemy's own forces are used against it. Those forces are redirected by doing what is least expected, i.e. what is least conditioned by mere Earthly purposes of accumulating wealth, status, reputation, defending one's egoic attachments to race, nation, family, etc.
"And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid not to take thy coat also."
So too Ahriman will be redeemed through his mechanized violence towards humanity who is in Christ Jesus, if we are able to redirect his forces towards the Good through our unconditioned and unexpected acts of endurance and forgiveness. Lucifer united himself with human soul nature through the first Fall and was redeemed through the central sacrifice of Christ. Now Ahriman is uniting himself with the human physical nature through the 2nd fall, i.e. transhumanism and its various offshoots. It is because of this union that Ahriman will be redeemed as humanity works to redeem physical nature, out of a profound sense of sacrificial love in the imitation of Christ. We must become willing to let the demons in, to invite them into our homes with open arms and open hearts, and treat them in the way they least expect us to, to show them by example that even what they do by their instinctual and destructive nature can be, must be, and will be in service of the Good.
MS wrote: Then we can move up to more demanding questions. One is about the Guardian of the threshold. We can say that the Guardian of the threshold is a being who appears to us as a symbol of what we have left to overcome. But why does this happen? Because we deserve to know it. There are beings who would be terrified to see what they are. They delude themselves that they are good, helpful, generous, altruistic, fraternalistic, radical, etcetera, but they aren’t. The Guardian of the threshold is the moment on the spiritual path when man finally deserves to know what he has left to transform, to overcome. Naturally, this requires much courage of vision. This courage gives form to forces that, facing the vision of the Guardian, become positive forces. But relapses can happen, a fall back into the old nature can happen, in which case the Guardian becomes a very unpleasant being. It’s terrible, because he’s constantly there, admonishing us: “You have fallen back. That which you had expelled is reawakening in you”. This is a fight of crucial importance, where man prepares for initiation, prepares for a birth in accord with the spirit. It’s a level at which one is ready to encounter Christ.
I believe it is appropriate to add the following. It is expected in our present times an experience of the Guardian of the threshold for the whole of humanity. Not in a specific, precise sense, as described in “Occult Science”, but as an experience that brings every being on the brink of desperation, due to the fact that man has omitted to complete a task. This operation has to happen now, it should have already happened. That is, the transition from a rational-affective soul, to the consciousness soul. By various signs, it’s apparent that it hasn’t happened. It’s not happening. Therefore it’s inevitable that every being has a tragic experience, an experience in which it’s felt that there are no more human strengths coming to help. In this way, through pain, through darkness, there could be a blossoming of the forces that the spiritual world needs in order to help humanity. The spiritual world helps man, but it needs man to be free. It needs man to offer a sacrifice through an inner free act.
This unconscious experience of the Guardian, lived through by the whole of humanity transforms into something that operates on the path of freedom, by the activity of those who are aware of the behind the scenes we have discussed. In this way, the free activity of the real experimenters of the spirit allows the spiritual beings to take hold of this human spiritual gist and transform it in power of destiny, in order to prevent man from falling, from collapsing, in order to save our civilization, so that it can move forward without destructions and cataclysms. You can see how the course of history presents us with a panorama where there’s no respite. And the situation is becoming penned, encircled from all directions. And so where are the redeeming forces coming from, if not from a condition of inner tension through which man is led to intuit an inner activity that he owes the spiritual world? This is already visible in certain figures.
This is also a question that I've been thinking about a lot lately in connection with my own path.
What I find to be a great way to orient my spiritual path is by comparing it to that of humanity as a whole in our current time. We have a much easier time viewing with relative objectivity the developments happening across humanity and the World as a whole than those happening within our own soul life, since we are in such proximity to the latter, so we can use the former to leverage a sense of dispassion and objectivity with the latter. It is most important for us to get a hold of a sense of the Good that comes out of all the trials and tribulations we endure on the path. Or even more importantly, for the Good that is revealed by the very fact that we are enduring trials and tribulations in a more and more conscious way.
Robert Powell wrote:Here, therefore, we see that, owing to the nine spheres of evil inserted between humanity and the realm of the Mother, the path to the Mother is beset with difficulty; however, this path is possible with Christ. Indeed, Steiner emphasized that opening the way to Shambhala is the central meaning of Christ’s Second Coming. As mentioned earlier, this path has opened up to humanity at large since 1945. Previously, it was accessible only to the highest initiates. At the same time, with the opening of the gates of Hell, humanity is increasingly exposed to the demonic influences of subearthly spheres.
The details of all these things are not really important right now but only the general principle that it reveals. Even secular science speaks of the layers of the Earth becoming more and more ancient i.e. representing past stages of development, the further we go towards the core. Within the Earth are all the stages that we had to pass through in order to reach the stage of human I-consciousness that we currently possess. In order to progress even further, we need to become conscious of and work through those past stages that now serve as resistance to our spiritual activity, i.e. for the perfection of our inner capacities. Humanity is gradually encountering the Earth's subconscious as it irrupts into the sphere of its waking ego-consciousness through the sacrificial descent of Christ. How that encounter will manifest on the physical plane depends on whether we cling to old materialistic habits of thinking, which cannot help but understand such irruptions as external oppressive forces, or whether we penetrate them with spiritual wisdom and realize the opportunities of Love and Grace that they represent. The former attitude gives us an excuse to become less mobile in our thinking, less grateful in our feeling, and less energetic in our willing. The latter attitude presents endless opportunities for creatively strengthening and perfecting our inner soul forces.
On the esoteric path of intuitive thinking, there will be a period of time, perhaps several, when we seem to be plagued by increasing maladies of the spirit, soul, and body. We will feel harassed by a guilty conscience with respect to many of our daily activities we previously engaged in without second thought, or by various psychological and physiological sensitivities to our spiritual activity, perhaps in the realm of diet and sleep. We'll wonder if we are doing it all wrong or whether we should just quit and go back to our safe and secure previous existence. Temptations towards abandoning the cumbersome, exhausting intellect and living in our pleasurable animal nature will seem all the more potent and intense (yet never anything we cannot endure), because now are not completely merged with the intellect anymore and therefore know how feeble it is. We should realize that these developments are nothing other than a refined sensitivity that is developing in our intuitive consciousness, which also reveals to us, experientially, that consciousness is at the root of all psychological, biological, and physical structures and activity. It means we are going through the exact same path, in advance and consciously, of what humanity is and will continue to go through mostly unconsciously. We are voluntarily meeting the personal Guardian like most of humanity is involuntarily meeting the collective Guardian that MS speaks about.
In the new Mission Impossible movie, there is an artificial intelligence that is capable of predicting human behavior many moves in advance. Everything that the protagonists plan to do, everywhere that they and up, was already predicted and even arranged by this autonomous AI. That is an image of Ahrimanic intelligence, of course. What that intelligence cannot account for, however, are true acts of goodness and virtue, i.e. acts of humility, tolerance, grace, love, and forgiveness. Those cannot be calculated through any mathematical algorithm. They cannot be predicted from past behavior because they flow into our consciousness from the future, i.e. they are genuine creations ex nihilo (out of nothing) from moral imagination, inspiration, and intuiton. Humanity was redeemed through its violence towards Christ Jesus who is in the Father, by a sort of inner judo where the enemy's own forces are used against it. Those forces are redirected by doing what is least expected, i.e. what is least conditioned by mere Earthly purposes of accumulating wealth, status, reputation, defending one's egoic attachments to race, nation, family, etc.
"And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid not to take thy coat also."
So too Ahriman will be redeemed through his mechanized violence towards humanity who is in Christ Jesus, if we are able to redirect his forces towards the Good through our unconditioned and unexpected acts of endurance and forgiveness. Lucifer united himself with human soul nature through the first Fall and was redeemed through the central sacrifice of Christ. Now Ahriman is uniting himself with the human physical nature through the 2nd fall, i.e. transhumanism and its various offshoots. It is because of this union that Ahriman will be redeemed as humanity works to redeem physical nature, out of a profound sense of sacrificial love in the imitation of Christ. We must become willing to let the demons in, to invite them into our homes with open arms and open hearts, and treat them in the way they least expect us to, to show them by example that even what they do by their instinctual and destructive nature can be, must be, and will be in service of the Good.
"Most people would sooner regard themselves as a piece of lava in the moon than as an 'I'"
Re: Massimo Scaligero
This is an article by MS, published in the journal «Vie della Tradizione» N. 19, 1975, that I've translated from this digital transcription. This is not the easiest text, and I am not a translator. To me it makes sense, but please excuse any obscurity or typo.
CONCENTRATION AND LIBERATION
Concentration of thinking practiced by the ascetic of our time, encloses the possibility to liberate the soul from its physio-psychic nature. No asceticism of the past could know this possibility, for the very reason that thinking has never bound itself to man’s lower nature like it does in these times. In fact, the exclusively physical enquiry of reality is carried out at the expense of a thinking activity that enters the sensory world on the condition that it ignores its own autonomous movement. Thinking does not recognize its own spiritual intuition of physical-mathematical truths, that it therefore identifies as coming from outside - from phenomena and from calculus. The inner element of thinking is continuously unrecognized, thus annihilated.
Whenever this thinking - through right and energetic concentration - realizes its own autonomous movement, it conquers itself in a depth of senses at the level of which this depth - like in a state of cataleptic sleep - represents for thinking the most profound degradation. It’s not quantitative Science that is degradation, but thinking that bounds itself to it. Materialism really is such a degradation. Therefore, the ekâgrata of the ascetic in these times, cannot be but daring and courageous. There is no other way to crush Materialism. Materialism is not conquered through spiritualistic or dialectic persuasions, but through rigorous inner action, as precise as a mathematical operation. But one has to know this type of action. It’s necessary to know what the canon of right concentration really is today.
It is a liberation of thinking from its most subtle constraint, the less conscious one, which is not solved by being a disciple of the traditionally intended idea, but exclusively through the realization of the independence of the thinking principle from any conditions, including the one of tradition. The true precondition is being absolutely free from any dogmas, any myths, any principles, except the absolute a priori of consciousness. Whatever noble name any other precondition might take, it’s a deceit.
The most degraded thinking of today is the same thinking that - through profound concentration - can become the most powerful one, synthesis of the forces of soul, exactly because it’s the most coincident with the darkness of matter. The possibility of samadhi, of “penetrating vision” today, of supra-sensory activity is contained in the typical rational thinking turned to the sensory world.
The sensory-rational experience is the initial level - the lowest - of a conscious experience of the Supra-sensory. Dream state and deep sleep state of thinking that immerses itself in the sensory world is responsive to the higher grades of consciousness that ancient ascetics reached by evading the sensory world. Conscious thinking contains in itself these grades of consciousness, corresponding with the states of dream and deep sleep at the sensory level, and can only experience them by penetrating into itself. In Self-consciousness, it holds the beginning of this possibility. It’s the realization of an independent consciousness of self, that thinking prepares as the ultimate sense of its movement. It is the absolute and impersonal identity with a content that is valid not in itself, but as the sign of an in-depth activity: the new path of the soul, consciously turned to the rediscovery of the Logos.
The unconscious movement of thought that loses itself in a sensible object is in itself the force to overcome subjectivity and psyche. The modern disciple has the possibility to realize this force in awareness. His task is to objectively experience the same thinking through which he experiences the sensory world, so as to really enter a higher secret about himself and the world.
It seems as if reflected thought is reflected because it adheres to the sensory world, but in reality thinking reflects the sensory world thanks to the in-depth coincidence of its unconscious part with the sensory spectrum. Nonetheless, thinking is one. Reflected thought is only the appearance of thinking. From this appearance, it would be necessary not to draw culture, but to raise the real thinking.
Whenever the deep power of identity in thinking is neither realized by a minimum number of conscious inquirers, nor lived in itself as the real meaning of the sensory experience, this power gets lost for the human community. It sinks into corporeality. It becomes instinctive life, of a kind that further degrades man.
The experimenter operates in such a way that the non-corporeality of the reflection becomes the carrier of the non-corporeality of the power of depth of thinking. Non-corporeality that dominates corporeality is original in thinking, as power of identity. The experimenter has nothing to do that is not already accomplished in the immediate movement of thinking turned to the sensory object: he has to willfully realize that power of identity. He has to realize that same exact immediate movement with regard to reflected thought, as soon as he is able to objectively hold it before himself. Contemplated in such a way - with the same determination elicited by the sensory object, thanks to its easier orientation to it - thinking, as non sensory content, appeals to the immediate Life of Light.
Such immediacy - as power of original thinking - now seizes the non sensory object. Lacking the counterpart of a sensory object, it does not need to generate any reflection. Instead, it independently extracts its force regardless of the reflected form. In the power of its Light, it resolves the reflected form.
In reflected thought, the I is present, but unknown. If the reflection is penetrated, the I is found. In the same way in which one intently looks at a sensory object, it is necessary to come to intently look at thinking. It is a more radical operation than the simple objectivizing of thinking in concentration, because its ultimate sense is the penetration of the mystery of the mineral world. Earthly minerality conceals the secret of the original Saturn-structure and Sun-structure of the Earth. To the extent that thinking realizes a deeper and deeper penetration of terrestriality, contemplation ascends to purer and purer essences of liberation, in terms of metaphysics of the “solar” Earth.
In every form of being, the radical current of thinking is alive and operates the synthesis relative to the particular determination through which thinking distinguishes every object from the other ones. The particularity belongs to perception, and its overcoming belongs to thinking. Being arises from this synthesis, and it’s the disciple’s task to possess it, as he progressively gets to know his own knowing. This synthesis - whenever he realizes it in himself according to solar ascesis - allows him to encounter the essence of thinking, by assuming thinking as object, as essence of objectivity.
Thinking, by diving in its own noetic moment, operates in itself the synthesis with itself, but in reality, it unites the two currents of being: the inner one (metaphysical) and the outer one (cosmic) coming from perception liberated from the side of the sensory world.
Man lives in ideas, but he ignores that. He moves forward with the power of idea, continually extinguishing in it the factuality of the sensory world, but he ignores that. For man, the last instance of the sensory experience is to grasp the will through which he moves within the idea, at the point where the relevance of physical matter starts to be exhausted; at the point where being rises up as thinking, as initial synthesis that requires to be known in order to be pursued. Discipline has to allow him to seize the will that is present in thinking, though unconscious. It’s identical to the will that radically encounters minerality, through perception. The art is the entelecheia of this will of his, that is one with thinking, a will that allows him to be the experimenter of being as thinking, that is, the experimenter of the initial reality of the world, of which he is the creator, not because he thinks, but because he realizes the power of being in thinking. It is beneficial to notice that the experience of such original state of being of inner soul and of the world corresponds to a superior state of annihilation of dialectical thinking. The true Magic is that thinking realizes itself as being, so that being as otherness disappears. Thinking - although only for instants - is back to being the primordial firebolt traversing minerality.
The being of the world arising as thinking - in its reality of thinking arising as being - is not the being of idealism, but the being of solar thinking, that is the synthesis of the original current of thinking in human consciousness with the thinking force of the Cosmos. That which appears as the being of the world is not otherness - external object knowable by thinking - that thinking finds before itself as an opposite, but original synthesis of thinking that penetrates in it, by its first movement. Such a synthesis is not conscious to the reflected thought. The mechanism of reflected thought needs the otherness of the world, in order to feel grounded in concreteness.
True concreteness is the absolute grounding that thinking recovers in itself in concentration. Then, it is not thinking anymore, but an original magical will. This magical will is found again in the secret Operatio Solis [solar act] of thinking. Here happens the essential connection with that which was lost. Here, Tradition is resumed as willed depth-activity, independent from mediations of any type - cultural, philological, ritual, etcetera - that are maya. This is the end of the misunderstanding of subjectively accepted Tradition, without consciousness of the noetic limitation of subjectivity, when it’s not an integration, but a further form of interruption. To the present day, with regards to the metaphysically assumption of the I, the so-called “organism” given as the mediator of Tradition has inevitably ended up complying with pragmatic conditions and modes that, in fact, contradict the metaphysical character of Tradition, that is, its possibility to have value independent of the ritual or ceremonial course.
Traditional knowledge - when effectively repurposed in critical “modern” form - can be a useful object of meditation and a stimulus for the memory. However, accepting it as a metaphysical direction should not keep one from knowing what one really wants from it. One should not ignore the I from which one moves to research, and that initially, if one pays attention, the I has to do with such research in the same way as it has to do with any other research. Indeed, the relationship with the research is bound to the astral, rather than to the not-yet-realized I, because the I, in order to realize itself, tends to be present to such a relationship like to any other process of cognition. With regards to any other cognitive process, the metaphysical intent of the I is to be the experimenter of the forces of the astral body, operative as the relationship of the latter with the world. In seeing, in listening, in thinking, in imagining, it’s in fact the I who experiments. The relationship has to move from the astral plane to the I. The task of the I is to only perceive - through the soul, at the sensory level - contents that the I already possesses at its own supra-sensory level. Without the presence of the I, perceiving, thinking, knowing would remain at the state of somnambulic relationship of the soul to the world. In conscious thinking, the I has that initial pure encounter with the astral, with the soul, and the inner order is reestablished, although for a short moment.
The Divine referred to in the domains of Tradition is living in the normal conscious activities. Indeed, man is the “temple of the Divine”, but he cannot discover the higher forces that operate within the processes of perception and cognition, as long as he is immersed in these processes, no matter if they are of physical or metaphysical nature, and as long as he seeks those higher forces outside of himself - in the signs of the past, in exhausted soul impulses - through these processes. The first act of resurrection of the I is realized in thinking, whenever it makes itself free from submission to the astral body and expresses the autonomy of its supra-rational principle.
True Tradition is unforeseeable transmission, inception that is not imposed to the Spirit, not by any rule, formulation, rite or belonging to any particular traditional organization. Today, the Spirit can realize itself within the conscious soul as that which does not need any support of other entities, in order to be active at the center of the human element, because it contains the absolute foundation in itself. It is important to discover how the obstacles to Spirit depend on the fact that pure autonomy is not mined from it, that pure autonomy which is already experimentable, although at its lowest level, the level of conscious thought. The identity with the perennial element rediscovered in Tradition begins whenever it is no longer necessary to think in order to know, because thinking becomes pure will of the I, owner of that which it previously had to know. This identity with the perennial element found again in Tradition is effected even when the name of Tradition has never been known. The nominalism of such name can become the biggest impediment, despite the massive philological-historical structure - in fact, through it.
CONCENTRATION AND LIBERATION
Concentration of thinking practiced by the ascetic of our time, encloses the possibility to liberate the soul from its physio-psychic nature. No asceticism of the past could know this possibility, for the very reason that thinking has never bound itself to man’s lower nature like it does in these times. In fact, the exclusively physical enquiry of reality is carried out at the expense of a thinking activity that enters the sensory world on the condition that it ignores its own autonomous movement. Thinking does not recognize its own spiritual intuition of physical-mathematical truths, that it therefore identifies as coming from outside - from phenomena and from calculus. The inner element of thinking is continuously unrecognized, thus annihilated.
Whenever this thinking - through right and energetic concentration - realizes its own autonomous movement, it conquers itself in a depth of senses at the level of which this depth - like in a state of cataleptic sleep - represents for thinking the most profound degradation. It’s not quantitative Science that is degradation, but thinking that bounds itself to it. Materialism really is such a degradation. Therefore, the ekâgrata of the ascetic in these times, cannot be but daring and courageous. There is no other way to crush Materialism. Materialism is not conquered through spiritualistic or dialectic persuasions, but through rigorous inner action, as precise as a mathematical operation. But one has to know this type of action. It’s necessary to know what the canon of right concentration really is today.
It is a liberation of thinking from its most subtle constraint, the less conscious one, which is not solved by being a disciple of the traditionally intended idea, but exclusively through the realization of the independence of the thinking principle from any conditions, including the one of tradition. The true precondition is being absolutely free from any dogmas, any myths, any principles, except the absolute a priori of consciousness. Whatever noble name any other precondition might take, it’s a deceit.
The most degraded thinking of today is the same thinking that - through profound concentration - can become the most powerful one, synthesis of the forces of soul, exactly because it’s the most coincident with the darkness of matter. The possibility of samadhi, of “penetrating vision” today, of supra-sensory activity is contained in the typical rational thinking turned to the sensory world.
The sensory-rational experience is the initial level - the lowest - of a conscious experience of the Supra-sensory. Dream state and deep sleep state of thinking that immerses itself in the sensory world is responsive to the higher grades of consciousness that ancient ascetics reached by evading the sensory world. Conscious thinking contains in itself these grades of consciousness, corresponding with the states of dream and deep sleep at the sensory level, and can only experience them by penetrating into itself. In Self-consciousness, it holds the beginning of this possibility. It’s the realization of an independent consciousness of self, that thinking prepares as the ultimate sense of its movement. It is the absolute and impersonal identity with a content that is valid not in itself, but as the sign of an in-depth activity: the new path of the soul, consciously turned to the rediscovery of the Logos.
The unconscious movement of thought that loses itself in a sensible object is in itself the force to overcome subjectivity and psyche. The modern disciple has the possibility to realize this force in awareness. His task is to objectively experience the same thinking through which he experiences the sensory world, so as to really enter a higher secret about himself and the world.
It seems as if reflected thought is reflected because it adheres to the sensory world, but in reality thinking reflects the sensory world thanks to the in-depth coincidence of its unconscious part with the sensory spectrum. Nonetheless, thinking is one. Reflected thought is only the appearance of thinking. From this appearance, it would be necessary not to draw culture, but to raise the real thinking.
Whenever the deep power of identity in thinking is neither realized by a minimum number of conscious inquirers, nor lived in itself as the real meaning of the sensory experience, this power gets lost for the human community. It sinks into corporeality. It becomes instinctive life, of a kind that further degrades man.
The experimenter operates in such a way that the non-corporeality of the reflection becomes the carrier of the non-corporeality of the power of depth of thinking. Non-corporeality that dominates corporeality is original in thinking, as power of identity. The experimenter has nothing to do that is not already accomplished in the immediate movement of thinking turned to the sensory object: he has to willfully realize that power of identity. He has to realize that same exact immediate movement with regard to reflected thought, as soon as he is able to objectively hold it before himself. Contemplated in such a way - with the same determination elicited by the sensory object, thanks to its easier orientation to it - thinking, as non sensory content, appeals to the immediate Life of Light.
Such immediacy - as power of original thinking - now seizes the non sensory object. Lacking the counterpart of a sensory object, it does not need to generate any reflection. Instead, it independently extracts its force regardless of the reflected form. In the power of its Light, it resolves the reflected form.
In reflected thought, the I is present, but unknown. If the reflection is penetrated, the I is found. In the same way in which one intently looks at a sensory object, it is necessary to come to intently look at thinking. It is a more radical operation than the simple objectivizing of thinking in concentration, because its ultimate sense is the penetration of the mystery of the mineral world. Earthly minerality conceals the secret of the original Saturn-structure and Sun-structure of the Earth. To the extent that thinking realizes a deeper and deeper penetration of terrestriality, contemplation ascends to purer and purer essences of liberation, in terms of metaphysics of the “solar” Earth.
In every form of being, the radical current of thinking is alive and operates the synthesis relative to the particular determination through which thinking distinguishes every object from the other ones. The particularity belongs to perception, and its overcoming belongs to thinking. Being arises from this synthesis, and it’s the disciple’s task to possess it, as he progressively gets to know his own knowing. This synthesis - whenever he realizes it in himself according to solar ascesis - allows him to encounter the essence of thinking, by assuming thinking as object, as essence of objectivity.
Thinking, by diving in its own noetic moment, operates in itself the synthesis with itself, but in reality, it unites the two currents of being: the inner one (metaphysical) and the outer one (cosmic) coming from perception liberated from the side of the sensory world.
Man lives in ideas, but he ignores that. He moves forward with the power of idea, continually extinguishing in it the factuality of the sensory world, but he ignores that. For man, the last instance of the sensory experience is to grasp the will through which he moves within the idea, at the point where the relevance of physical matter starts to be exhausted; at the point where being rises up as thinking, as initial synthesis that requires to be known in order to be pursued. Discipline has to allow him to seize the will that is present in thinking, though unconscious. It’s identical to the will that radically encounters minerality, through perception. The art is the entelecheia of this will of his, that is one with thinking, a will that allows him to be the experimenter of being as thinking, that is, the experimenter of the initial reality of the world, of which he is the creator, not because he thinks, but because he realizes the power of being in thinking. It is beneficial to notice that the experience of such original state of being of inner soul and of the world corresponds to a superior state of annihilation of dialectical thinking. The true Magic is that thinking realizes itself as being, so that being as otherness disappears. Thinking - although only for instants - is back to being the primordial firebolt traversing minerality.
The being of the world arising as thinking - in its reality of thinking arising as being - is not the being of idealism, but the being of solar thinking, that is the synthesis of the original current of thinking in human consciousness with the thinking force of the Cosmos. That which appears as the being of the world is not otherness - external object knowable by thinking - that thinking finds before itself as an opposite, but original synthesis of thinking that penetrates in it, by its first movement. Such a synthesis is not conscious to the reflected thought. The mechanism of reflected thought needs the otherness of the world, in order to feel grounded in concreteness.
True concreteness is the absolute grounding that thinking recovers in itself in concentration. Then, it is not thinking anymore, but an original magical will. This magical will is found again in the secret Operatio Solis [solar act] of thinking. Here happens the essential connection with that which was lost. Here, Tradition is resumed as willed depth-activity, independent from mediations of any type - cultural, philological, ritual, etcetera - that are maya. This is the end of the misunderstanding of subjectively accepted Tradition, without consciousness of the noetic limitation of subjectivity, when it’s not an integration, but a further form of interruption. To the present day, with regards to the metaphysically assumption of the I, the so-called “organism” given as the mediator of Tradition has inevitably ended up complying with pragmatic conditions and modes that, in fact, contradict the metaphysical character of Tradition, that is, its possibility to have value independent of the ritual or ceremonial course.
Traditional knowledge - when effectively repurposed in critical “modern” form - can be a useful object of meditation and a stimulus for the memory. However, accepting it as a metaphysical direction should not keep one from knowing what one really wants from it. One should not ignore the I from which one moves to research, and that initially, if one pays attention, the I has to do with such research in the same way as it has to do with any other research. Indeed, the relationship with the research is bound to the astral, rather than to the not-yet-realized I, because the I, in order to realize itself, tends to be present to such a relationship like to any other process of cognition. With regards to any other cognitive process, the metaphysical intent of the I is to be the experimenter of the forces of the astral body, operative as the relationship of the latter with the world. In seeing, in listening, in thinking, in imagining, it’s in fact the I who experiments. The relationship has to move from the astral plane to the I. The task of the I is to only perceive - through the soul, at the sensory level - contents that the I already possesses at its own supra-sensory level. Without the presence of the I, perceiving, thinking, knowing would remain at the state of somnambulic relationship of the soul to the world. In conscious thinking, the I has that initial pure encounter with the astral, with the soul, and the inner order is reestablished, although for a short moment.
The Divine referred to in the domains of Tradition is living in the normal conscious activities. Indeed, man is the “temple of the Divine”, but he cannot discover the higher forces that operate within the processes of perception and cognition, as long as he is immersed in these processes, no matter if they are of physical or metaphysical nature, and as long as he seeks those higher forces outside of himself - in the signs of the past, in exhausted soul impulses - through these processes. The first act of resurrection of the I is realized in thinking, whenever it makes itself free from submission to the astral body and expresses the autonomy of its supra-rational principle.
True Tradition is unforeseeable transmission, inception that is not imposed to the Spirit, not by any rule, formulation, rite or belonging to any particular traditional organization. Today, the Spirit can realize itself within the conscious soul as that which does not need any support of other entities, in order to be active at the center of the human element, because it contains the absolute foundation in itself. It is important to discover how the obstacles to Spirit depend on the fact that pure autonomy is not mined from it, that pure autonomy which is already experimentable, although at its lowest level, the level of conscious thought. The identity with the perennial element rediscovered in Tradition begins whenever it is no longer necessary to think in order to know, because thinking becomes pure will of the I, owner of that which it previously had to know. This identity with the perennial element found again in Tradition is effected even when the name of Tradition has never been known. The nominalism of such name can become the biggest impediment, despite the massive philological-historical structure - in fact, through it.
In this epoch we have to be fighters for the spirit: man must realise what his powers can give way to, unless they are kept constantly under control for the conquest of the spiritual world. In this fifth epoch, man is entitled to his freedom to the highest degree! He has to go through that.
Re: Massimo Scaligero
AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Aug 08, 2023 12:06 am Humanity was redeemed through its violence towards Christ Jesus who is in the Father, by a sort of inner judo where the enemy's own forces are used against it. Those forces are redirected by doing what is least expected, i.e. what is least conditioned by mere Earthly purposes of accumulating wealth, status, reputation, defending one's egoic attachments to race, nation, family, etc.
I just remembered where I first encountered this inner judo technique which was, fittingly enough, in MS' Practical Manual for Meditation. It is also a great way to understand the Passion of the Christ, at least from one spiritual angle. Through the unconditioned sacrificial deeds, Christ restored the potential for humanity to redirect its automatic impulses tied to the sensory spectrum into voluntary and creative will forces that give birth to higher ideation that is capable of seeking and fulfilling Divine Ideals, and we can now realize that potential by freely and faithfully following in his footsteps.
***
Let us again recall the concept of inner judo. It has nothing to do with an instrumental image but, rather, with a precise technique, which appeals to forces that are present today in the astral body's relation to the “I,” and which, therefore, has nothing in common with judo in the strict sense of the word. Any form of agitation, in essence, is but the illegitimate prevailing of astral impulses over the “I.” If they did not control the “I,” these impulses would manifest as its forces.
What we conveniently call inner judo is a technique foreseen by the ancient solar spiritual practice, in that it is a discipline that restores the original movement of the astral, which utilizes the forces of alteration within the alteration itself. This technique consists in abandoning oneself even more profoundly to agitation, beyond what is its hold upon the soul, until being able to add a volitive force to the impulsive current.
We must not forget that, within the soul, will and impulsivity are the same force under a different rule. The initial movement is to escape capture, namely, to surrender beyond the very limit of alienated calm; it is to insert ourselves here, or to insert the imaginative-volitive current already trained by means of exercises, so as to descend into the profound zone within us, where the original forge of forces exists... To abandon ourselves, to yield subtly, to free ourselves and simultaneously operate as we would in judo, is, from an occult point of view, to operate with the permanent forces of the Buddha, which today cosmically enliven, within human depths, the capacity of freedom from the sensory realm within sensory experience.
...
The limit of alienated calm can be reached by means of the most profound forces of the “I,” evoked by the state of necessity, that is, by agitation. Usually, they work toward the unconscious restabilization of calm at the expense of the etheric-physical organism. Such calm is fictitious, because it does not spring from the “I”-being's willful action within the astral, but from an insufficiency of the “I” with respect to such action. Therefore, it confirms that dependence of the astral on the lower nature, which will reproduce the agitation.
The inner judo manages to free the “I”-being's most radical forces by means of a sinking that is willed in the alienated calm, which is to say, by means of the very forces of agitation that automatically involve the “I.” We must possess this automatism. It is the transference of function from instinctiveness to imaginative will, possible as a judo-like yielding. It corresponds to the attitude, “God's Will be done,” technically brought to its last resort.
Usually, this attitude is a passivity of inertia. We must take it further, from the essence, all the way to the power of inert passivity. To lead this passivity beyond itself is to descend into the depths, until reaching the entire root of the being that organically rules physical corporeality. It is a fundamental presence of the “I,” from one of its more elevated attained heights.
True calm is reached, when it becomes the soul's golden zone. There, we can retreat, as if it were a magical landscape, in order to become independent of conditions when these become overwhelming—like actors that leave the scene where they are reciting a difficult role with which they identify and discover themselves, realizing the functional unreality of the world that they have just left, that is, an unreality whose human measure consists of pain and death. Of these, living calm truly realizes the metaphysical content—profound peace.
Scaligero, Massimo. A Practical Manual of Meditation . Lindisfarne. Kindle Edition.
"Most people would sooner regard themselves as a piece of lava in the moon than as an 'I'"
Re: Massimo Scaligero
AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Aug 08, 2023 12:06 am Thank you for starting this thread and posting these inspiring lectures from MS, Federica!
MS wrote: Then we can move up to more demanding questions. One is about the Guardian of the threshold. We can say that the Guardian of the threshold is a being who appears to us as a symbol of what we have left to overcome. But why does this happen? Because we deserve to know it. There are beings who would be terrified to see what they are. They delude themselves that they are good, helpful, generous, altruistic, fraternalistic, radical, etcetera, but they aren’t. The Guardian of the threshold is the moment on the spiritual path when man finally deserves to know what he has left to transform, to overcome. Naturally, this requires much courage of vision. This courage gives form to forces that, facing the vision of the Guardian, become positive forces. But relapses can happen, a fall back into the old nature can happen, in which case the Guardian becomes a very unpleasant being. It’s terrible, because he’s constantly there, admonishing us: “You have fallen back. That which you had expelled is reawakening in you”. This is a fight of crucial importance, where man prepares for initiation, prepares for a birth in accord with the spirit. It’s a level at which one is ready to encounter Christ.
I believe it is appropriate to add the following. It is expected in our present times an experience of the Guardian of the threshold for the whole of humanity. Not in a specific, precise sense, as described in “Occult Science”, but as an experience that brings every being on the brink of desperation, due to the fact that man has omitted to complete a task. This operation has to happen now, it should have already happened. That is, the transition from a rational-affective soul, to the consciousness soul. By various signs, it’s apparent that it hasn’t happened. It’s not happening. Therefore it’s inevitable that every being has a tragic experience, an experience in which it’s felt that there are no more human strengths coming to help. In this way, through pain, through darkness, there could be a blossoming of the forces that the spiritual world needs in order to help humanity. The spiritual world helps man, but it needs man to be free. It needs man to offer a sacrifice through an inner free act.
This unconscious experience of the Guardian, lived through by the whole of humanity transforms into something that operates on the path of freedom, by the activity of those who are aware of the behind the scenes we have discussed. In this way, the free activity of the real experimenters of the spirit allows the spiritual beings to take hold of this human spiritual gist and transform it in power of destiny, in order to prevent man from falling, from collapsing, in order to save our civilization, so that it can move forward without destructions and cataclysms. You can see how the course of history presents us with a panorama where there’s no respite. And the situation is becoming penned, encircled from all directions. And so where are the redeeming forces coming from, if not from a condition of inner tension through which man is led to intuit an inner activity that he owes the spiritual world? This is already visible in certain figures.
This is also a question that I've been thinking about a lot lately in connection with my own path.
What I find to be a great way to orient my spiritual path is by comparing it to that of humanity as a whole in our current time. We have a much easier time viewing with relative objectivity the developments happening across humanity and the World as a whole than those happening within our own soul life, since we are in such proximity to the latter, so we can use the former to leverage a sense of dispassion and objectivity with the latter. It is most important for us to get a hold of a sense of the Good that comes out of all the trials and tribulations we endure on the path. Or even more importantly, for the Good that is revealed by the very fact that we are enduring trials and tribulations in a more and more conscious way.
Robert Powell wrote:Here, therefore, we see that, owing to the nine spheres of evil inserted between humanity and the realm of the Mother, the path to the Mother is beset with difficulty; however, this path is possible with Christ. Indeed, Steiner emphasized that opening the way to Shambhala is the central meaning of Christ’s Second Coming. As mentioned earlier, this path has opened up to humanity at large since 1945. Previously, it was accessible only to the highest initiates. At the same time, with the opening of the gates of Hell, humanity is increasingly exposed to the demonic influences of subearthly spheres.
The details of all these things are not really important right now but only the general principle that it reveals. Even secular science speaks of the layers of the Earth becoming more and more ancient i.e. representing past stages of development, the further we go towards the core. Within the Earth are all the stages that we had to pass through in order to reach the stage of human I-consciousness that we currently possess. In order to progress even further, we need to become conscious of and work through those past stages that now serve as resistance to our spiritual activity, i.e. for the perfection of our inner capacities. Humanity is gradually encountering the Earth's subconscious as it irrupts into the sphere of its waking ego-consciousness through the sacrificial descent of Christ. How that encounter will manifest on the physical plane depends on whether we cling to old materialistic habits of thinking, which cannot help but understand such irruptions as external oppressive forces, or whether we penetrate them with spiritual wisdom and realize the opportunities of Love and Grace that they represent. The former attitude gives us an excuse to become less mobile in our thinking, less grateful in our feeling, and less energetic in our willing. The latter attitude presents endless opportunities for creatively strengthening and perfecting our inner soul forces.
On the esoteric path of intuitive thinking, there will be a period of time, perhaps several, when we seem to be plagued by increasing maladies of the spirit, soul, and body. We will feel harassed by a guilty conscience with respect to many of our daily activities we previously engaged in without second thought, or by various psychological and physiological sensitivities to our spiritual activity, perhaps in the realm of diet and sleep. We'll wonder if we are doing it all wrong or whether we should just quit and go back to our safe and secure previous existence. Temptations towards abandoning the cumbersome, exhausting intellect and living in our pleasurable animal nature will seem all the more potent and intense (yet never anything we cannot endure), because now are not completely merged with the intellect anymore and therefore know how feeble it is. We should realize that these developments are nothing other than a refined sensitivity that is developing in our intuitive consciousness, which also reveals to us, experientially, that consciousness is at the root of all psychological, biological, and physical structures and activity. It means we are going through the exact same path, in advance and consciously, of what humanity is and will continue to go through mostly unconsciously. We are voluntarily meeting the personal Guardian like most of humanity is involuntarily meeting the collective Guardian that MS speaks about.
In the new Mission Impossible movie, there is an artificial intelligence that is capable of predicting human behavior many moves in advance. Everything that the protagonists plan to do, everywhere that they and up, was already predicted and even arranged by this autonomous AI. That is an image of Ahrimanic intelligence, of course. What that intelligence cannot account for, however, are true acts of goodness and virtue, i.e. acts of humility, tolerance, grace, love, and forgiveness. Those cannot be calculated through any mathematical algorithm. They cannot be predicted from past behavior because they flow into our consciousness from the future, i.e. they are genuine creations ex nihilo (out of nothing) from moral imagination, inspiration, and intuiton. Humanity was redeemed through its violence towards Christ Jesus who is in the Father, by a sort of inner judo where the enemy's own forces are used against it. Those forces are redirected by doing what is least expected, i.e. what is least conditioned by mere Earthly purposes of accumulating wealth, status, reputation, defending one's egoic attachments to race, nation, family, etc.
"And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid not to take thy coat also."
So too Ahriman will be redeemed through his mechanized violence towards humanity who is in Christ Jesus, if we are able to redirect his forces towards the Good through our unconditioned and unexpected acts of endurance and forgiveness. Lucifer united himself with human soul nature through the first Fall and was redeemed through the central sacrifice of Christ. Now Ahriman is uniting himself with the human physical nature through the 2nd fall, i.e. transhumanism and its various offshoots. It is because of this union that Ahriman will be redeemed as humanity works to redeem physical nature, out of a profound sense of sacrificial love in the imitation of Christ. We must become willing to let the demons in, to invite them into our homes with open arms and open hearts, and treat them in the way they least expect us to, to show them by example that even what they do by their instinctual and destructive nature can be, must be, and will be in service of the Good.
This post was really heartening and inspiring, Ashvin. Thanks for putting these thoughts in writing so clearly. Indeed, the Good that comes from more awareness of tribulations is certainly there, but often elusive to the worn out consciousness, that is quick to forget, and quick to get distracted, which is why reminders such as this one are so beneficial.
The passage from Robert Powell and especially your elaboration are very interesting. I was also reading some of Powell’s articles this week. I'm somewhat familiar with the path through the resisting layers of the Earth, as in von Halle’s book on Christ's descent to the core of the Earth for our sake. Your reading is current and alive. It readlily depicts the situation we are traversing right now, inwardly and outwardly. Evidently, we have reached a moment in time when we’re receiving/generating clearer and clearer outer reminders that we are in this together with the Earth-being, and our tribulations are reciprocal. Maybe it could be said that The Earth’s subconscious is the same as our human collective subconscious, and the Guardian waits for us, both individually and collectively, to become worthy of the encounters, somewhere within those rarefied layers. Maybe we could say that the Earth is for us at the point of balance between below and above, where our microcosmic organization becomes ready to encounter the spiritual macrocosm in soul form. Our Earth is like a layered mirror that both captures-inters and liberates-reveals the personal-to-collective spectrum of human soul qualities. Now that we glance towards adulthood, as a hierarchy of beings, it makes sense that the ways to the spiritual have broadened, and so has our exposure to the risk of downfall. I really appreciate how you point to the Good that can emerge from the Earth tribulations too, if we only create and maintain consciousness of the shared destiny they express, and opportunities for redemption.
As you say, soon enough, the path becomes fraught with difficulties, and I can relate to every single word you have written about that. I really feel the challenge of maintaining as much thinking mobility as one can provide. It’s too easy to default to a mode of dull resistance, where not only gratitude, but also joyful positivity towards the opportunities enclosed in the tribulations, are forgotten. Here I begin to understand the importance of the basic exercise number of positivity, of which you have given a great example with this post!
In this epoch we have to be fighters for the spirit: man must realise what his powers can give way to, unless they are kept constantly under control for the conquest of the spiritual world. In this fifth epoch, man is entitled to his freedom to the highest degree! He has to go through that.
Re: Massimo Scaligero
Do you have a sense at all that Powell is a nutter? For me, the words that he utters sound like they come from an AI engine trained from Deepak Chopra's collection of works.AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Aug 08, 2023 12:06 am ...
Robert Powell wrote:Here, therefore, we see that, owing to the nine spheres of evil inserted between humanity and the realm of the Mother, the path to the Mother is beset with difficulty; however, this path is possible with Christ. Indeed, Steiner emphasized that opening the way to Shambhala is the central meaning of Christ’s Second Coming. As mentioned earlier, this path has opened up to humanity at large since 1945. Previously, it was accessible only to the highest initiates. At the same time, with the opening of the gates of Hell, humanity is increasingly exposed to the demonic influences of subearthly spheres.
I know Steiner recommends one keep an open mind to new ideas but surely there must be some limit to garbage we expose ourselves to.
Re: Massimo Scaligero
Anthony66 wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 5:42 amDo you have a sense at all that Powell is a nutter? For me, the words that he utters sound like they come from an AI engine trained from Deepak Chopra's collection of works.AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Aug 08, 2023 12:06 am ...
Robert Powell wrote:Here, therefore, we see that, owing to the nine spheres of evil inserted between humanity and the realm of the Mother, the path to the Mother is beset with difficulty; however, this path is possible with Christ. Indeed, Steiner emphasized that opening the way to Shambhala is the central meaning of Christ’s Second Coming. As mentioned earlier, this path has opened up to humanity at large since 1945. Previously, it was accessible only to the highest initiates. At the same time, with the opening of the gates of Hell, humanity is increasingly exposed to the demonic influences of subearthly spheres.
I know Steiner recommends one keep an open mind to new ideas but surely there must be some limit to garbage we expose ourselves to.
Anthony,
I'm not sure if your "nutter" judgment is based on that snippet I quoted, or you have read Powell more extensively and formed it. Can you clarify that? The quote wasn't really the point of the post, but I suppose you are more interested right now in voicing the judgment about the quote than the post itself. In either case, I don't share your sense at all, otherwise I would not have quoted it.
"Most people would sooner regard themselves as a piece of lava in the moon than as an 'I'"
Re: Massimo Scaligero
The quote is nutty in itself but I have listened to Powell with all his Covid conspiracy theories which we know are utterly out to lunch.AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 12:28 pmAnthony66 wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 5:42 amDo you have a sense at all that Powell is a nutter? For me, the words that he utters sound like they come from an AI engine trained from Deepak Chopra's collection of works.
I know Steiner recommends one keep an open mind to new ideas but surely there must be some limit to garbage we expose ourselves to.
Anthony,
I'm not sure if your "nutter" judgment is based on that snippet I quoted, or you have read Powell more extensively and formed it. Can you clarify that? The quote wasn't really the point of the post, but I suppose you are more interested right now in voicing the judgment about the quote than the post itself. In either case, I don't share your sense at all, otherwise I would not have quoted it.
Steiner's PoF framework is rock solid. His broader esoteric musings take some time to get your head around but for the most part appear to be on the mark. But then there are the likes of Powell who depart from the secure waters and lead one right over the edge.
Re: Massimo Scaligero
The quote is nutty in itself but I have listened to Powell with all his Covid conspiracy theories which we know are utterly out to lunch.Anthony66 wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 1:20 pmAshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 12:28 pmAnthony66 wrote: ↑Thu Aug 10, 2023 5:42 am
Do you have a sense at all that Powell is a nutter? For me, the words that he utters sound like they come from an AI engine trained from Deepak Chopra's collection of works.
I know Steiner recommends one keep an open mind to new ideas but surely there must be some limit to garbage we expose ourselves to.
Anthony,
I'm not sure if your "nutter" judgment is based on that snippet I quoted, or you have read Powell more extensively and formed it. Can you clarify that? The quote wasn't really the point of the post, but I suppose you are more interested right now in voicing the judgment about the quote than the post itself. In either case, I don't share your sense at all, otherwise I would not have quoted it.
Steiner's PoF framework is rock solid. His broader esoteric musings take some time to get your head around but for the most part appear to be on the mark. But then there are the likes of Powell who depart from the secure waters and lead one right over the edge. One must not disengage the BS detector in all of this.