Symbolic thinking, Anthroposophy and Transhumanism

[Federica]

Before I hit the button to post, I can try to become self-aware of what is happening and, in that process, redirect the very same soul forces that went into forming the judgments in an orthogonal direction toward the ideal of inner perfection. That is essentially what the Christ impulse is all about. Perhaps I go through the post and start rephrasing everything as more of a question instead of a definitive conclusion. (...) And if we simply can't think of any questions or ways to summarize what we are reading and thinking through, then we can pause our initial judgments, like we are taking a deep breath to inhale them back in and holding that breath, and say "I will let these marinate within my soul for a few more hours or perhaps a full day, and pray or meditate on it, and then return to it later with fresh eyes, mind, and heart."

Ashvin, I do that very often, and I definitely did that with the posts about Linnell. You have definitely not seen them in the original form in which they firstly appeared on the page

[Federica]

Misled (by Ahriman) - because the essence of a transhumanist is, as you brilliantly said, to corporealize, or naturalize, soul and spirit. Evidently, this activity, which is literal mortification of spiritual activity, has zero to share with all that Steiner is. As Steiner said: “We can only advance the cause of progress in the epoch of the Consciousness Soul, when men recognize the validity of spiritual realities. Therefore everything depends upon this one aim: the search, the quest for truth.” Everything depends on one aim: development of higher cognition.

I wanted to briefly comment on this point as well.

What exactly does it mean to develop higher cognition? It means a lot of things, and a central meaning is that we progressively de-identify our essential being from our corporeal nature. Many of us can say right now, "my essential soul-spirit is invisible and eternal and passes through many incarnations in which it adopts different bodies as instruments of its purposes", but that conceptual assertion is not the same as the de-identification. Practically speaking, we still experience ourselves as identified with our bodily and lower soul nature. Every period of sleep, however, our higher organism detaches from that bodily and lower soul nature, and the path of intuitive thinking gives us the opportunity to remain conscious during this separation.

If we were to truly acquire that differentiated experience of our essential being on a consistent basis, the risks of merging our bodily nature with machine technology (more than we already have) would not be nearly as great as they would be otherwise. Do you see why? Another way to describe the 'corporealization of the soul-spirit' is to say it is remaining unconscious to the essential difference between the two natures, the lower and the higher. That is what we are seeking to overcome on the path of higher cognition. Then our corporeal nature can more perfectly serve its intended purpose as an instrument of our higher organism, and one of those intended purposes could be to continue acting on the physical plane for redemptive aims through integration with future technology (not only physical but also etheric). Our higher spiritual organism, however, remains completely de-identified with the lower instrument due to our development of higher cognition.

My aversion to Linnell’s idea that “Our society will steer the destiny of humanity through technology” and that we will “upload our consciousness to the etheric cloud realm and control our physical body from there“ is not based on fear that it would be detrimental because our physical body would face great risks and suffer, hence we would suffer, by way of full identification with our physical body. Rather, the reason is that this prefiguration of activities initiated in the physical sphere is presented as the lever, the portal, the means by which spiritualization of consciousness and evolution towards the next epoch will happen. Or at least that’s how I understand the idea.

[AshvinP]

Misled (by Ahriman) - because the essence of a transhumanist is, as you brilliantly said, to corporealize, or naturalize, soul and spirit. Evidently, this activity, which is literal mortification of spiritual activity, has zero to share with all that Steiner is. As Steiner said: “We can only advance the cause of progress in the epoch of the Consciousness Soul, when men recognize the validity of spiritual realities. Therefore everything depends upon this one aim: the search, the quest for truth.” Everything depends on one aim: development of higher cognition.

I wanted to briefly comment on this point as well.

What exactly does it mean to develop higher cognition? It means a lot of things, and a central meaning is that we progressively de-identify our essential being from our corporeal nature. Many of us can say right now, "my essential soul-spirit is invisible and eternal and passes through many incarnations in which it adopts different bodies as instruments of its purposes", but that conceptual assertion is not the same as the de-identification. Practically speaking, we still experience ourselves as identified with our bodily and lower soul nature. Every period of sleep, however, our higher organism detaches from that bodily and lower soul nature, and the path of intuitive thinking gives us the opportunity to remain conscious during this separation.

If we were to truly acquire that differentiated experience of our essential being on a consistent basis, the risks of merging our bodily nature with machine technology (more than we already have) would not be nearly as great as they would be otherwise. Do you see why? Another way to describe the 'corporealization of the soul-spirit' is to say it is remaining unconscious to the essential difference between the two natures, the lower and the higher. That is what we are seeking to overcome on the path of higher cognition. Then our corporeal nature can more perfectly serve its intended purpose as an instrument of our higher organism, and one of those intended purposes could be to continue acting on the physical plane for redemptive aims through integration with future technology (not only physical but also etheric). Our higher spiritual organism, however, remains completely de-identified with the lower instrument due to our development of higher cognition.

My aversion to Linnell’s idea that “Our society will steer the destiny of humanity through technology” and that we will “upload our consciousness to the etheric cloud realm and control our physical body from there“ is not based on fear that it would be detrimental because our physical body would face great risks and suffer, hence we would suffer, by way of full identification with our physical body. Rather, the reason is that this prefiguration of activities initiated in the physical sphere is presented as the lever, the portal, the means by which spiritualization of consciousness and evolution towards the next epoch will happen. Or at least that’s how I understand the idea.

Alright, then I'm interested in hearing how exactly you are differentiating "activities initiated in the physical sphere" from the evolution of consciousness and progression of human history. Our activity of meditation, for ex., is something initiated in the physical sphere, right? Same thing with Anthroposophy and spiritual science in general. So I am unclear what exactly you mean by that.

[Federica]

I wanted to briefly comment on this point as well.

What exactly does it mean to develop higher cognition? It means a lot of things, and a central meaning is that we progressively de-identify our essential being from our corporeal nature. Many of us can say right now, "my essential soul-spirit is invisible and eternal and passes through many incarnations in which it adopts different bodies as instruments of its purposes", but that conceptual assertion is not the same as the de-identification. Practically speaking, we still experience ourselves as identified with our bodily and lower soul nature. Every period of sleep, however, our higher organism detaches from that bodily and lower soul nature, and the path of intuitive thinking gives us the opportunity to remain conscious during this separation.

If we were to truly acquire that differentiated experience of our essential being on a consistent basis, the risks of merging our bodily nature with machine technology (more than we already have) would not be nearly as great as they would be otherwise. Do you see why? Another way to describe the 'corporealization of the soul-spirit' is to say it is remaining unconscious to the essential difference between the two natures, the lower and the higher. That is what we are seeking to overcome on the path of higher cognition. Then our corporeal nature can more perfectly serve its intended purpose as an instrument of our higher organism, and one of those intended purposes could be to continue acting on the physical plane for redemptive aims through integration with future technology (not only physical but also etheric). Our higher spiritual organism, however, remains completely de-identified with the lower instrument due to our development of higher cognition.

My aversion to Linnell’s idea that “Our society will steer the destiny of humanity through technology” and that we will “upload our consciousness to the etheric cloud realm and control our physical body from there“ is not based on fear that it would be detrimental because our physical body would face great risks and suffer, hence we would suffer, by way of full identification with our physical body. Rather, the reason is that this prefiguration of activities initiated in the physical sphere is presented as the lever, the portal, the means by which spiritualization of consciousness and evolution towards the next epoch will happen. Or at least that’s how I understand the idea.

Alright, then I'm interested in hearing how exactly you are differentiating "activities initiated in the physical sphere" from the evolution of consciousness and progression of human history. Our activity of meditation, for ex., is something initiated in the physical sphere, right? Same thing with Anthroposophy and spiritual science in general. So I am unclear what exactly you mean by that.

Maybe if I put it in a comparison I will make myself clearer.

In the same way in which we don't spiritualize our consciousness by means of eating ice cream, as much as we do by exercising our thinking activity (and even less so if eating ice cream distracts us from thinking exercises), similarly we wouldn't spiritualize our consciousness by manipulating the ordering of the mineral elements in our physical body as much as we would by developing higher cognition (and even less so if the interests in genetic manipulation, robotics and VR distracts us from the task of developing higher cognition, through the illusion that it's meaningful enough as a spiritual seeker's life task).

PS. I wouldn't say that meditation is initiated in the physical sphere. It should be clear how I mean that, given the comparison above. Meditation starts in the moment I activate the thinking-will.

[AshvinP]

My aversion to Linnell’s idea that “Our society will steer the destiny of humanity through technology” and that we will “upload our consciousness to the etheric cloud realm and control our physical body from there“ is not based on fear that it would be detrimental because our physical body would face great risks and suffer, hence we would suffer, by way of full identification with our physical body. Rather, the reason is that this prefiguration of activities initiated in the physical sphere is presented as the lever, the portal, the means by which spiritualization of consciousness and evolution towards the next epoch will happen. Or at least that’s how I understand the idea.

Alright, then I'm interested in hearing how exactly you are differentiating "activities initiated in the physical sphere" from the evolution of consciousness and progression of human history. Our activity of meditation, for ex., is something initiated in the physical sphere, right? Same thing with Anthroposophy and spiritual science in general. So I am unclear what exactly you mean by that.

Maybe if I put it in a comparison I will make myself clearer.

In the same way in which we don't spiritualize our consciousness by means of eating ice cream, as much as we do by exercising our thinking activity (and even less so if eating ice cream distracts us from thinking exercises), similarly we wouldn't spiritualize our consciousness by manipulating the ordering of the mineral elements in our physical body as much as we would by developing higher cognition (and even less so if the interests in genetic manipulation, robotics and VR distracts us from the task of developing higher cognition, through the illusion that it's meaningful enough as a spiritual seeker's life task).

PS. I wouldn't say that meditation is initiated in the physical sphere. It should be clear how I mean that, given the comparison above. Meditation starts in the moment I activate the thinking-will.

In that case, I think it's clear that the polar dynamics of spiritual activity are being taken too abstractly. When we consider an illustration or metaphor that speaks of the overlapping and mutually influencing aspects of all of the planes of existence, such as Cleric's CEO metaphor in the morphic spaces essay, we find this easy to agree with as accurately reflecting the structure of our existence. But when we go to apply this structure concretely to events on the physical plane, we start to feel like those events really have little to do with developing higher consciousness. I am using "we" here because this is a most common issue for people on a spiritual path, especially at the initial stages. We start to discern the logic of the higher principles at work but we don't know how to relate this to the concrete course of our lives and the life of humanity.

Our intentional thinking activity is not exercised in a vacuum but in the context of the manifest planes of existence. That is the purpose of these manifest planes to begin with, i.e. to provide the support by which our activity can be exercised and become conscious of itself at ever-higher stages. If we take the example of eating food, we have to understand food as something concretely spiritual i.e. something which has definite influences on the course of our spiritual activity. It is hardly imagined right now how creatively responsible human beings can become in terms of nutrition and diet to purify and enhance their spiritual activity because we simply aren't conscious of the manifold spiritual relations embedded in the kingdoms around us - Cosmic and Earthly relations - from which we draw our food.

An interesting angle to consider this fact is by contemplating how the results of our own spiritual activity - our thoughts and ideas - are food for higher beings. That isn't simply a nice metaphor, but speaks to be essential spiritual relations of beings within the hierarchical 'food chain'. Our thoughts and ideas in relation to the physical plane provide feedback to higher beings by which they can more effectively work their influences in structuring the Earthly context. When we form ideas about the higher planes as well on the esoteric path, we are providing even better quality feedback to higher beings. That is similar to what the mineral, plant, and animal elements provide for our spiritual activity, except we are mostly unconscious, at our normal stage, of the feedback provided to our organism. The spiritual world doesn't only enter our organism through sense-perception, but also food consumption.

People thought and felt quite differently five thousand years ago than they did three thousand years ago and from the way they do today. And it is the spirits of the age or, according to spiritual science, the spirits of personality who change. These spirits of personality are going through their evolution in the super-sensible world just as the human race is going through its evolution in the sense world. But all that the human race develops of a super-sensible nature is food and drink for these spirits of personality, and they benefit from it. If there were an age in which men were to spend their lives without developing any treasures of thought, without pleasure or displeasure, nor any feeling for duty beyond the limits of karma — in such an age the spirits of personality would have no nourishment and they would become emaciated. Such is our connection with the beings who are invisibly interwoven with our life.

So we shouldn't feel like higher consciousness is something we develop only in our thinking-will, as we experience it in our head space, and the manifest elements of existence are mostly decoration. Everything that is manifest around us on the physical plane has a definite role to play in our spiritual evolution and should stand before us like a mysterious puzzle piece that needs to find its proper place in the course of our creative activity. These manifest elements are really the outermost expression of complicated spiritual relations of the higher hierarchies and their activity that flows through our spirit into the World. Or in other words, we are always interacting with spiritual beings and our "I"-consciousness represents this to itself as various perceptual elements. Things become concrete when we start to experience how even the act of eating ice cream has a definite influence on spiritual evolution. Unlike the naive or educated materialist, however, we don't leave our own thinking agency out of the equation and assume there is some completely independent influence emanating from the material substance, i.e. an influence unrelated to our own intentions.

You will have gathered from the last lecture that under the influence of Esotericism, or the serious study of Theosophy, the physical body of man becomes more alive, in a certain way, more filled with movement inwardly; and it may on that account become more uncomfortable. It is more felt than in the external, exoteric, so-called normal life of man. We shall have to speak later of the difference between vegetable and animal food in connection with the other sheaths; but in the construction and organisation of the physical body, the difference between vegetable and animal food is greater to an amazing degree. Emphasis must always be laid upon the fact that it cannot be our mission to make propaganda for any particular system of diet, but only to state what is right and true on this subject; and as the soul develops, the matters now under consideration become matters of personal experience. Above all, it becomes a matter of experience that when meat is eaten our physical body has more to bear, more to drag about, as it were, than when we eat vegetable food.
...
It is interesting to compare three kinds of food with respect to their cosmic significance. These are: milk and all connected with it; the plant world and all connected with that, and the foods prepared from it; and animal food. We may learn to compare milk, plants and animals as nourishment when, through theosophical or esoteric development, we become more sensitive to the effects of these foods; and it will then also be easier for us to observe the verification obtainable from a rational observation of the outer world.

[Federica]

In the same way in which we don't spiritualize our consciousness by means of eating ice cream, as much as we do by exercising our thinking activity (and even less so if eating ice cream distracts us from thinking exercises)...

In that case, I think it's clear that the polar dynamics of spiritual activity are being taken too abstractly. When we consider an illustration or metaphor that speaks of the overlapping and mutually influencing aspects of all of the planes of existence, such as Cleric's CEO metaphor in the morphic spaces essay, we find this easy to agree with as accurately reflecting the structure of our existence. But when we go to apply this structure concretely to events on the physical plane, we start to feel like those events really have little to do with developing higher consciousness. I am using "we" here because this is a most common issue for people on a spiritual path, especially at the initial stages. We start to discern the logic of the higher principles at work but we don't know how to relate this to the concrete course of our lives and the life of humanity.

Not to say that I am completely at ease with the bold. However, if I have used the violet (as opposed to "we don't spiritualize it at all") it was precisely to signal that I was not forgetting the CEO.

[Federica]

In the same way in which we don't spiritualize our consciousness by means of eating ice cream, as much as we do by exercising our thinking activity (and even less so if eating ice cream distracts us from thinking exercises)...

In that case, I think it's clear that the polar dynamics of spiritual activity are being taken too abstractly. When we consider an illustration or metaphor that speaks of the overlapping and mutually influencing aspects of all of the planes of existence, such as Cleric's CEO metaphor in the morphic spaces essay, we find this easy to agree with as accurately reflecting the structure of our existence. But when we go to apply this structure concretely to events on the physical plane, we start to feel like those events really have little to do with developing higher consciousness. I am using "we" here because this is a most common issue for people on a spiritual path, especially at the initial stages. We start to discern the logic of the higher principles at work but we don't know how to relate this to the concrete course of our lives and the life of humanity.

Not to say that I am completely at ease with the bold. However, if I have used the violet (as opposed to "we don't spiritualize it at all") it was precisely to signal that I was not forgetting the CEO.

we have to understand food as something concretely spiritual i.e. something which has definite influences on the course of our spiritual activity

I can tell you with certain confidence that I am experientially very aware of that, which I am reminded of at every meal, everytime I meet my family, every time I do my groceries, and at some other times as well.

[AshvinP]

In the same way in which we don't spiritualize our consciousness by means of eating ice cream, as much as we do by exercising our thinking activity (and even less so if eating ice cream distracts us from thinking exercises)...

In that case, I think it's clear that the polar dynamics of spiritual activity are being taken too abstractly. When we consider an illustration or metaphor that speaks of the overlapping and mutually influencing aspects of all of the planes of existence, such as Cleric's CEO metaphor in the morphic spaces essay, we find this easy to agree with as accurately reflecting the structure of our existence. But when we go to apply this structure concretely to events on the physical plane, we start to feel like those events really have little to do with developing higher consciousness. I am using "we" here because this is a most common issue for people on a spiritual path, especially at the initial stages. We start to discern the logic of the higher principles at work but we don't know how to relate this to the concrete course of our lives and the life of humanity.

Not to say that I am completely at ease with the bold. However, if I have used the violet (as opposed to "we don't spiritualize it at all") it was precisely to signal that I was not forgetting the CEO.

Alright, Federica, you haven't forgotten anything. So do you now have a concrete sense of why what we choose to do in "ordering of the mineral elements in our physical body" is not something separate from "developing higher cognition"? In other words, we can't isolate these things as snapshots of existence and say, event X on the physical plane gives me 10% evolution of consciousness while event Y in my thinking-will gives me 90%. They are continual streams of rhythmic feedback across the time-scales of existence that go into our spiritual evolution and can't be understood apart from one another. That might be even more clear if we consider it in terms of acts of love, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and so forth on the physical plane. That is ultimately what we are speaking of in the context of working through technology or any other forms with our self-aware spiritual activity. The highest strata of cognition will only be developed through such sacrificial acts towards our fellow beings accomplished on the physical plane.

[Federica]

In that case, I think it's clear that the polar dynamics of spiritual activity are being taken too abstractly. When we consider an illustration or metaphor that speaks of the overlapping and mutually influencing aspects of all of the planes of existence, such as Cleric's CEO metaphor in the morphic spaces essay, we find this easy to agree with as accurately reflecting the structure of our existence. But when we go to apply this structure concretely to events on the physical plane, we start to feel like those events really have little to do with developing higher consciousness. I am using "we" here because this is a most common issue for people on a spiritual path, especially at the initial stages. We start to discern the logic of the higher principles at work but we don't know how to relate this to the concrete course of our lives and the life of humanity.

Not to say that I am completely at ease with the bold. However, if I have used the violet (as opposed to "we don't spiritualize it at all") it was precisely to signal that I was not forgetting the CEO.

Alright, Federica, you haven't forgotten anything. So do you now have a concrete sense of why what we choose to do in "ordering of the mineral elements in our physical body" is not something separate from "developing higher cognition"? In other words, we can't isolate these things as snapshots of existence and say, event X on the physical plane gives me 10% evolution of consciousness while event Y in my thinking-will gives me 90%. They are continual streams of rhythmic feedback across the time-scales of existence that go into our spiritual evolution and can't be understood apart from one another. That might be even more clear if we consider it in terms of acts of love, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and so forth on the physical plane. That is ultimately what we are speaking of in the context of working through technology or any other forms with our self-aware spiritual activity. The highest strata of cognition will only be developed through such sacrificial acts towards our fellow beings accomplished on the physical plane.

No, as you said, this is still too abstract in me (although I don't think it in terms of 90%-10%). If you hadn't provided the answer here, I would have answered by recalling the "differentiation of experience of our essential being on a consistent basis" as in your earlier post today. Clearly I am missing something essential, because I keep receiving an impression of arbitratiness in what you say across posts (sometimes it's "necessary differentiation" in understanding, sometimes "it can't be understood apart form one another")

[AshvinP]

Not to say that I am completely at ease with the bold. However, if I have used the violet (as opposed to "we don't spiritualize it at all") it was precisely to signal that I was not forgetting the CEO.

Alright, Federica, you haven't forgotten anything. So do you now have a concrete sense of why what we choose to do in "ordering of the mineral elements in our physical body" is not something separate from "developing higher cognition"? In other words, we can't isolate these things as snapshots of existence and say, event X on the physical plane gives me 10% evolution of consciousness while event Y in my thinking-will gives me 90%. They are continual streams of rhythmic feedback across the time-scales of existence that go into our spiritual evolution and can't be understood apart from one another. That might be even more clear if we consider it in terms of acts of love, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and so forth on the physical plane. That is ultimately what we are speaking of in the context of working through technology or any other forms with our self-aware spiritual activity. The highest strata of cognition will only be developed through such sacrificial acts towards our fellow beings accomplished on the physical plane.

No, as you said, this is still too abstract in me (although I don't think it in terms of 90%-10%). If you hadn't provided the answer here, I would have answered by recalling the "differentiation of experience of our essential being on a consistent basis" as in your earlier post today. Clearly I am missing something essential, because I keep receiving an impression of arbitratiness in what you say across posts (sometimes it's "necessary differentiation" in understanding, sometimes "it can't be understood apart form one another")

Our normal experience is that of all the planes/spaces merged together. In a sense, everything is given to us on a platter as "reality" and "inner life" and we don't need to do much in terms of spiritual development to live. Our thinking-feeling-willing is all mashed together as an indistinct blob of inwardness. As we know, that is quickly changing and now natural development can only take us so far before we are thrown back upon ourselves and need to start creatively managing the streams of thinking, feeling, and willing separately with the aim of harmonizing them. We then begin to differentiate the various layers/spaces of our soul and body life. Only when this differentiation occurs can we start to become conscious of the spiritual influences that are always working into us from the manifest and unmanifest Worlds. Before we are like fish in the water, and once we lift our heads above the water, first for a few minutes and then in longer durations with more intensity of experience, we actually become conscious of what the water is (the lower planes) and how it relates to our essential being.

The basic principle is that spiritual evolution is a stream of development of past (actualized) spiritual activity that is embedded in the manifest World meeting future (still potential) spiritual activity which flows in from the unmanifest World through our thinking-will. What is manifest and what remains potential will depend on what stage of evolution we are at and there are many stages of evolution overlapping in our present time, even within humanity, but now we can speak in a very general sense of average people like you and myself. Let's take meditation as an example of how we are working to spiritualize our consciousness. We can't isolate any particular frame of our activity and say that is responsible for spiritual evolution. Our meditation is only possible because we have a physical body, a physical landscape of physical elements, and cultural institutions that provide us with wealth, health, and safety. All those elements provide the basis for the brain and intellect/imagination that is capable of cultivating certain soul qualities/capacities that allow for spiritual striving, learning about meditation, and then willing certain exercises. And after we have exercised our thinking-will during meditation, we must plunge back into the physical spectrum with our spiritual activity to elaborate the inner forces that were seeded. Scaligero speaks about that in his book on meditation.

After the meditation, the suprasensory force that is evoked tends to become life. Yet, in order to incarnate, it needs the operator's ordinary state of wakefulness, that is, the state of positive unconsciousness proper to the ordinary activity of the soul-physical organism. It demands that we forget the completed operation and immerse ourselves into everyday life with dedication. In the spontaneity of action, the evoked forces are led to flow to the extent that they go unseen. To see them or notice them is their paralysis. This positive forgetting, nonetheless, does not mean that we must forget the responsibility regarding ordinary life that we derive from meditation. Just as the cosmic forces that restore our etheric-physical vitality can operate thanks to sleep, so, too, do the forces evoked in concentration and in meditation need that positive state of sleep of the soul-physical organism, which is its normal spontaneity during the waking life.

Scaligero, Massimo. A Practical Manual of Meditation . Lindisfarne. Kindle Edition. 

We could also look at what we are doing now to evolve our consciousness. We are steering our spiritual activity through our technological extensions i.e. the phone or computer. I think it is safe to say that few of us would be on this path of higher development if we did not have consistent access to the spiritual wisdom of others, past and present, through this technology that essentially extends our cognitive-perceptual capacity on the physical plane and to some extent in the higher worlds insofar as we access ideas from individualities who are no longer on the physical plane. We need to get in the habit of keeping all these different aspects of our evolution in mind when contemplating the individual and collective screams of becoming. Eventually, we will no longer only be meditating in our rooms for 30 min. or an hour before we go back to work or some other routine activity on the physical plane. As Cleric once mentioned before, it would be a great accomplishment if many people got to the stage where their entire night became a meditation in communion with the higher worlds, and then during the day, they returned to work on the major domains of cultural life that need to be harmonized with the higher intents experienced. Actually, I will quote his post here, since it is so topical to what we are discussing.

This is the process of redemption. Science with all its abstractness will have to be redeemed, spiritualized. We have a long road ahead before the dreamscape begins to become imaginatively pliable. For quite more time we'll still have to work with our hands and walk with our feet. If everything goes well, human life on Earth will transform such that the night and day cycle will be much more integrated.

Our night time should become something like a night-long meditation where we consciously expand in the higher order spaces and work creatively together with departed souls and higher beings. Everything we learn from the sensory spectrum will have to be worked upon in the higher spaces. This is similar to the way how social and political ideas are worked upon and they then steer the will in the perceptual spectrum, except that in that case we're using completely intellectual ideas, while in future we'll be consciously working on the curvatures of the higher order spaces. This will be true artistic engineering of our spacetime flow.

The daytime will be the more 'manual' aspect of life, where the elemental worlds will have to attuned to the higher flow. Needless to say, there will still be animals and human beings at all stages of development, so there'll be a lot of educational work to be done with the beings whose consciousness flows within the more elemental, fragmentary streams.

With all this in mind, everything that we have as our modern civilization should stand before us as a riddle - how will all this be transformed? It is clear that humanity can't change overnight. We can't say "All this modern technology is Ahrimanic so we have to get rid of it in order for the world to become spiritual." But if we're to do such a thing it is not at all clear how the redemption of the sensory spectrum can be achieved. If we swiftly destroy the Internet, transportation, technology and live in small communities with local ashrams where people meditate all day, sing and pray, the Earth will transform into something like a temporary restrictive space (even if very peaceful and pleasant) that one has to endure until death. Needless to say, this can't happen because even if some part of the population would accept such a path, there will always be those who still live in the ambitious mindset of dominating the Earthly realm.

We shouldn't imagine that what lies ahead of us will be easy. Personally, I have no idea how these transformations will be possible. It's so easy to be overwhelmed by pessimism when we see how hopeless everything looks. But the fact that through the cognitive tools developed by spiritual science and even those who instinctively make their way (like Levin), we also begin to see new possibilities. In any case, our present job is to develop the spiritual soul. More and more of our perceptual world has to be grasped from the proper spiritual perspective. We need to learn to read the world with our spiritual eyes. For this reason, we have to be able to find the place of every Earthly phenomenon within the spectrum of reality. We need to understand how the phenomena work, what ideas are invested in them, what desires and so on. This is the raw material that we will work with. Higher spiritual ideas will have to meet this raw material and give it more musical forms. If we seek the spiritual by turning our sight away from the raw material, by saying that there's nothing to learn there, we enter spiritual vacuum. The spiritual has to flow into the raw material and make it pliable and docile.