Reincarnation and Analytic Idealism

[LukeJTM]

This is a YouTube channel I came across recently. I think it is a good example of content that helps inspire active thinking: https://www.youtube.com/@Formscapes/videos

Yes, btw, I have been participating on this discord server a bit recently. I had mentioned Steiner to the founder a while back and now he is very much enthralled by Anthroposophical thought. The problem is, as usual, things are taken too intellectually and abstractly. People are trying to synthesize an all-encompassing TOE and that can lead in very unhealthy directions, mainly towards psychological instability. So I try to bring it back to the phenomenology of spiritual activity and spiritual exercises as much as possible. But that really requires lengthy posts and great attention span by the readers (and a willingness to try seemingly mundane and trivial thinking-will exercises), which is unfortunately lacking on discord forums. The very structure of the latter is geared towards incentivizing people to quickly snipe back and forth with brief comments about known topics, rather than patiently think through unfamiliar lines of reasoning. Anyway, you still may be interested in checking it out.

https://discord.com/channels/1117553909 ... 8235909121

Thanks I'll have a look. I did join that server the other day actually, but I haven't used it or interacted on it yet.

[LukeJTM]

As far as movies, I hadn't thought about that. To be honest I don't watch much in terms of movies these days because there is a lot of poor quality movies being released these days unfortunately. But not always. For example, I thought Oppenheimer was very good when I saw it at the cinema. The story, music, acting, lighting, costume, script, was all very impressive. I did some research and found out they didn't use much CGI, which was surprising.
I think it is potentially a decent thinkig exercise to research the behind scenes of a movie because you can consider it if you re-watch the film, and then you have a new insight into the movie, or into human thought (which made the movie possible). I remember a while ago you shared an exercise like this from Rudolf Steiner, he mentioned something along the lines of people watching silent films and their etheric eyes look like goggles when they are watching it, so it is potentially useful to think actively about the film such as how they used a camera angle to convey a mood, or something like that. Is that right?

I found the quote now. Here is what he said:

A particularly powerful means of driving people towards materialism is something that has hardly been viewed from this angle at all: the cinematograph. For what one perceives in films is not reality as it is actually seen. Only an age that has so little idea of reality as ours, which worships reality as an idol in the materialistic sense, could believe that the cinematograph represents reality. A different age would consider whether people walk along the street as they do in films, whether—if one were to ask oneself what one has seen—the images that one sees really correspond to reality. Ask yourselves very honestly: is what you have seen on the street closer to a picture painted by an artist, which does not move, or to the ghastly flickering images of the cinematograph? If you are really honest, you will say to yourself: what the painter portrays in a state of rest has a much stronger resemblance to what you yourself see on the street. So when people are sitting in the cinema, what they see there comes to reside within them not through their ordinary faculties of perception but at a deeper material level than is normal for the process of perception. A person becomes etherically goggle-eyed. His eyes begin to look like those of a seal, only much bigger, when he watches lots of films. I mean etherically bigger.


This has an effect not only on what lives in his conscious mind but it has a materializing influence on his subconsciousness. Do not interpret this as a denunciation of the cinematograph. I should like to make it quite clear that it is perfectly natural that there should be cinematographs; and the art of cinematography or film-making will be developed to an ever-increasing degree. This will be the road leading to materialism. But a counterbalance needs to be sought. This can happen only if the addiction for the kind of reality that is being developed through films is connected with something else. Just as with this addiction there develops a tendency to descend below perception by way of the senses, so must there develop an ascent above sensory perception, that is, into spiritual reality. Then it will do no harm to go to the cinema, and one can see such images as often as one wishes. But if no counterbalance is created, people will be led through such things to relate to the Earth not in the way that is necessary but to become more and more closely related to it to the point where they are completely cut off from the spiritual world.

Steiner, Rudolf. Building Stones for an Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha (The Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner) (p. 95).

[AshvinP]

As far as movies, I hadn't thought about that. To be honest I don't watch much in terms of movies these days because there is a lot of poor quality movies being released these days unfortunately. But not always. For example, I thought Oppenheimer was very good when I saw it at the cinema. The story, music, acting, lighting, costume, script, was all very impressive. I did some research and found out they didn't use much CGI, which was surprising.
I think it is potentially a decent thinkig exercise to research the behind scenes of a movie because you can consider it if you re-watch the film, and then you have a new insight into the movie, or into human thought (which made the movie possible). I remember a while ago you shared an exercise like this from Rudolf Steiner, he mentioned something along the lines of people watching silent films and their etheric eyes look like goggles when they are watching it, so it is potentially useful to think actively about the film such as how they used a camera angle to convey a mood, or something like that. Is that right?

I found the quote now. Here is what he said:

A particularly powerful means of driving people towards materialism is something that has hardly been viewed from this angle at all: the cinematograph. For what one perceives in films is not reality as it is actually seen. Only an age that has so little idea of reality as ours, which worships reality as an idol in the materialistic sense, could believe that the cinematograph represents reality. A different age would consider whether people walk along the street as they do in films, whether—if one were to ask oneself what one has seen—the images that one sees really correspond to reality. Ask yourselves very honestly: is what you have seen on the street closer to a picture painted by an artist, which does not move, or to the ghastly flickering images of the cinematograph? If you are really honest, you will say to yourself: what the painter portrays in a state of rest has a much stronger resemblance to what you yourself see on the street. So when people are sitting in the cinema, what they see there comes to reside within them not through their ordinary faculties of perception but at a deeper material level than is normal for the process of perception. A person becomes etherically goggle-eyed. His eyes begin to look like those of a seal, only much bigger, when he watches lots of films. I mean etherically bigger.


This has an effect not only on what lives in his conscious mind but it has a materializing influence on his subconsciousness. Do not interpret this as a denunciation of the cinematograph. I should like to make it quite clear that it is perfectly natural that there should be cinematographs; and the art of cinematography or film-making will be developed to an ever-increasing degree. This will be the road leading to materialism. But a counterbalance needs to be sought. This can happen only if the addiction for the kind of reality that is being developed through films is connected with something else. Just as with this addiction there develops a tendency to descend below perception by way of the senses, so must there develop an ascent above sensory perception, that is, into spiritual reality. Then it will do no harm to go to the cinema, and one can see such images as often as one wishes. But if no counterbalance is created, people will be led through such things to relate to the Earth not in the way that is necessary but to become more and more closely related to it to the point where they are completely cut off from the spiritual world.

Steiner, Rudolf. Building Stones for an Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha (The Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner) (p. 95).

Yes, that's a great point and is applicable to practically all worldly phenomena that is becoming increasingly abstract from living experience i.e. subsensible. Movies, VR, computer games, TV shows, commercials, social media, sports, etc. All of it is structured so that we get a very skewed perception of reality IF we meet it with only our normal intuition conditioned by fragmented sensory perception and concepts, and the habit of naive realism. If we are able to counterbalance them with supersensible thinking that has liberated itself to some extent from that conditioning, on the other hand, then we can do exactly as you say. We can start to peek behind the curtains and discern the ways in which our experience is 'staged' according to certain deeper desires and motives, like that of entertaining an audience, appealing to base pleasures, and driving ticket sales, or in much rarer cases, to really capture archetypal moral themes of the human situation.

I would say we want to develop the skill of intuiting these things without relying on specific behind-the-scenes research and so forth, i.e. relying on other people telling us what they supposedly intended. The intentions will be made manifest in the way the narrative landscape is presented to us. As you said, we can try to work out how a certain mood was presented to us through specific camera angles, soundtracks, dialogue, and so forth. And that's a principle we can bring to real-life or dream experiences as well. If we start to notice certain patterns in the way the symbolic events of our dream life are presented, for ex., then we can try to discern the underlying moods, habits, inclinations, etc. that they point to. 

Everything should become more temporally extended in our evaluation. We can't really look at an isolated rock, tree, animal, or human and discern the overarching themes at work in their 'presentation' to us. But if we look at the seasonal rhythms of nature, for ex., we can discern the overarching themes of chaos and order, flexibility and stability, decay and rejuvenation, death and resurrection, etc.  Or if we look at our interactions with a particular individual over time, we may discern themes of bitterness, resentment, enmity, etc. that point us toward certain compensatory thoughts, feelings, and actions. The wise guidance of the Cosmos is always presenting the World to us in certain configurations, from certain angles, in certain modes of experience, for reasons related to our inner perfection as creative and moral agents. 

I am not sure if you have a chance to look at Cleric's aliasing metaphor. This is one of the most helpful metaphors to get a broad sense of how our physical sensory-intellectual experience is 'staged' through the higher layers of our ideational being. That in no way overrides our free will, because we ourselves are participating in the staging through our deeper willing, feeling, and thinking activity. We are helping to arrange the sets, the lighting, the props, the characters we dialogue with along the story arc, etc. Several movies explicitly refer to this dynamic like The Truman Show, the Matrix, and such. Although many of them one-sidedly portray it as mostly sinister forces arranging the production, but the reality is that it's a confluence of progressive forces of remembering, awakening, and resurrecting, meeting the resistance of forces of forgetfulness, sleepiness, and death. We are always caught between these forces and, in our creative/moral thinking, we strive to make our waking experience more resistant to the lower forces and transparent to the progressive forces.  

[LukeJTM]

Thanks, Ashvin.

I will have a look at Cleric's metaphor when I get the chance!