Symbolic thinking, Anthroposophy and Transhumanism

[AshvinP]

Not to mention that this "distraction" is a valuable spirtiual exercise in itself, if one is open to that.

That much we can agree on, IF we use it as an opportunity to reorient towards the important questions. Whether Linnell is consciously or unconsciously serving material transhumanist agendas is simply not of any primary importance. So are you willing to engage with any of the Steiner quotes presented and share your understanding of what they mean, so we may perhaps gain insights into the course of spiritual evolution and our own tasks as spiritual seekers?

[AshvinP]

Anything is redeemable, if you only decide. This makes you ontologically always right, and this is your new philosophy, as it were. Sure you can try to “prescribe” reality, just by thinking it your way.

To the above, I must point out the redemptive potential of any-thing is not a 'philosophy', it is an inner certainty, and in many ways THE inner certainty, in which all spiritual evolution and human destiny is rooted.

In this way we come ever closer to a truth which should be engraved in the human soul as a lofty moral maxim: When you see something evil in the world, do not say, Here is evil — that is, imperfection; ask, rather, How can I attain to the enlightenment which will show me that on a higher plane this evil is transformed into good by the wisdom of the cosmos? How can I learn to tell myself: Here you see naught but imperfection because you are as yet unable to grasp the perfection of this imperfect thing?

Whenever man sees evil he should look into his own soul and ask himself, Why am I not yet able to recognize the good in this evil that confronts me?

[Federica]

Not to mention that this "distraction" is a valuable spirtiual exercise in itself, if one is open to that.

That much we can agree on, IF we use it as an opportunity to reorient towards the important questions. Whether Linnell is consciously or unconsciously serving material transhumanist agendas is simply not of any primary importance. So are you willing to engage with any of the Steiner quotes presented and share your understanding of what they mean, so we may perhaps gain insights into the course of spiritual evolution and our own tasks as spiritual seekers?

Ashvin,

I already clearly said that I wish to explore the referenced quotes from Steiner, did you miss that? I am already drafting my thoughts about some of them. But there is some preliminary work to be done first. Please consider the following.

An important clarification is pending. It’s the difference that you make between redeemable and redeemed. If something is redeemable, there are clear actions to take, thinking-will and acting-will, certainly both. These actions imply and require resistance. If something is redeemed, one can leave behind the memory of any past evil and be grateful that redemption has been understood by all, and that it has happened. Because we are evolving in Maya, this distinction has not spiraled together yet. One can and should press and push towards spiraling, but one has to also be aware of, be listening to, and responsive to the feedback that unfolds in earthly time. There is a difference between wishing and pushing something towards “redeemed”, and the reality of achieved redemption. Now, you have acquired this tendency to arbitrarily discriminate - as if you were alone in the whole Cosmos, as if reality only depended on your thinking - what is redeemable and requires resistance, from what is already redeemed, in which latter case you would pass off any dissonance as irrelevant detail, as if you could one-sidedly, instantly, and magically redeem things just by one-sidedly thinking them redeemed.

I find this pretentious and, most importantly, dissonant. When I say dissonant, I mean something very precise. That is, firstly it puts you in shrill contradiction within the space of your own overall expressions and propositions, as for example recorded in this forum. Secondly, it creates new dissonance where there was none, as for example recorded in this thread. In short, it pumps wide-range arbitrariness, both horizontally and vertically, into the fabric of events, so that definition is lost, meaning is blurred, and an environment is created where you can state almost anything and its contrary, and make yourself the meekest, simply by being the most inflexible, or vice versa.

Rolling in this way, one can get away with things as absurd as, on one side, praising and complimenting a public figure who advocates transhumanism at the expenses of living thinking (under Anthroposophical emblem!), and “moral technology”, while utterly incapable, when asked, to attach any meaning whatsoever to those words, and, on the other side, at the same time, prefiguring “great tragedy” for me, because I dare to criticize that figure, while also constantly distorting my words, and making unwarranted inferences on my inner motives.

I am not fine with these methods. Please try to make these things straight, and also explain how you reconcile the many contradictions you face when you bring your inner certainty of the redemptive potential of any-thing into action in such an arbitrary way. For example, when you have incited forum members to actively work at developing living thinking, on penalty of “free fall” and similar, while now, speaking of a public figure active under Anthroposophical emblem, you estimate that "it’s not everybody’s karma to develop living thinking", and the responsible thing to do is not to develop it. Another example: one day you heavily criticize Neuralink and its transhumanist project, calling it the opposite to “the Ideal of faithful striving through spiritual activity, a striving to spiritualize (or moralize) the soul and body, rather than to corporealize (or naturalize) the soul and spirit”. And the next day, you praise a lecturer (whom you even insist to call an Anthroposophist) who advocates for AI to be welcomed as the enabler of human evolution, while calling Steiner a proto-transhumanist.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

I am very grateful to you for the further explanation of the facts, I read what you wrote several times to understand what you mean.

Basically, the esoteric writings are a map of the time-consciousness spectrum.
They are symbolic and are intended to point us to the constitution that makes us who we are. In this sense, it is also problematic to theorize these teachings, since they actually want to draw our attention to realities within us.

I also watched the video you linked, but to be honest I was tired and it was late at night. He took myths and applied them to humans (our inner lives) and interpreted them.
It reminded me a bit of Jung's way of interpreting the archetypes and myths.


,,Our thinking investigation can actually come to resemble the Cosmic and Earthly involution and evolution in that sense, since the latter is of course teased apart into many aeons, ages, epochs, and so forth. That is the only way inner perfection can arise as a result"

How can our thinking become similar to this process?
It is quite difficult to experience this process on an experiential level through ordinary thinking.
How does it all look in your practice, how do you acquire these intuitions of things that make up your constitution and can therefore be extremely subtle?

,,A text is not meant to be read intuitively, necessarily. Rather, we strive to become more conscious of how the text condenses from intuition into mental pictures, verbal concepts, and outer perceptions so that intuition can fulfill another function, namely that of lucid, precise, and communicable understanding which further clarifies, expands, and strengthens the intuition. It is a process of inner perfection. We should really try to sense how we are always engaged in this rhythmic process while reading through the text. Then we are able to increasingly maintain that intuition of the perfecting process in the background as we also understand the content of what was written."


Yes, but intuition is strengthened in the one who has articulated things.
I don't understand how this is supposed to strengthen my intuition.
I have to get one first.
I have not experienced that I can strengthen my intuition when I study esoteric scriptures.
On the contrary, most of the time confusion arises.


,,Our metamorphosing states of being in the car from point A to point B will be constrained even more tightly by what we call the 'laws of nature' such as the force of gravity, but these are not at all transparent to our intuitive understanding, i.e. we can hardly resonate with the underlying activity. That is why we conceive of them as abstract and mechanical forces rather than the intentional ideational activity of concrete beings."

That would have to be the same reason why so many esotericists imagine a world full of angels in another dimension. They cannot find this "world" in themselves.
(Probably there is a reason that we got angels in pictures of winged beings, probably because that is how they represent themselves in imagination?)
Here again the question arises, how should we perceive the intentionality of nature and the environment by reading Steiner's writings, for example?

Guney,

What you say about the TC spectrum is right, and the best way I have found to approach an intuitive understanding of our experience with normal cognition is to keep the TC spectrum in mind. We can ask questions like, "what beliefs, personal soul qualities and dispositions, personal circumstances, national and cultural circumstances, and human qualities, led me to this activity I am now engaged in?" The only way to cultivate these things with our normal activity is to practice and practice more. Again, there is only so much that can be done with the normal intellect, and eventually, we need prayer, concentration, and meditation to attain greater scope and depth of consciousness within the TC spectrum. The latter is a very mysterious process by which higher beings give us the forces we need to fulfill our evolutionary tasks. The basic principle is to become more conscious of how we are thinking about thinking activity itself. All of the 'durations' of the TC spectrum are structured through intentional thinking activity, which is a mixture of our own activity and that of higher beings.

For example, if we are reading through a lecture on the higher hierarchies, the concepts and ideas we are using to understand their functions in our evolution were woven together by the activity of the same higher hierarchies we are thinking about. That provides a great opportunity for our intentional activity to harmonize with the intentional activity of higher beings. The latter is nothing other than the means by which we think (and feel, perceive, and act). We may be studying how the Spirits of Form sacrificed their substance to give man his Ego-"I" during the Earth's evolution, and that Ego-"I" is exactly what allows us to think through the World Content and penetrate to the existence of the Spirits of Form (the name of the hierarchy doesn't really matter, but only the fact that there must be some spiritual beings who fulfill that function in the course of our spiritual evolution). In that sense, it becomes like a closed circuit. What we are doing in our thinking and what we are thinking about becomes more experientially united when we are able to hold such realities in our consciousness. 





What we experience outwardly is depicted on the right, i.e. a 'lightbulb' in our mind turns on and we feel to have greater insight into whatever we are exploring. What is happening inwardly is depicted on the left, i.e. our thoughts are entering into the living flow of thinking activity to some extent and thereby completing the circuit, which is to say, collapsing the gap between the activity itself and the final result of that activity (concepts-perceptions). The esoteric path is about more consciously pursuing the experience of the inner happening. This isn't done by simply repeating the fact to ourselves with our inner voice but by really trying to intuitively sense the depth through which our conceptual thinking is born. Although there is still a significant gap because our concepts always keep us at a distance from the inner reality, this sort of thinking investigation of thinking with supersensible concepts is invaluable for providing more leeway into which the Spirit can incarnate during our more focused exercises like concentration and meditation. When we only are thinking in sense-perceptible concepts, it is like everything is packed too tightly together and too rigidly for the living Spirit to find any room for its incarnation. Our thinking consciousness is then like a block of solid ice. The aim is to make it more like water, gas, and warmth, where there are empty spaces that higher spiritual activity can incarnate into and plant seeds of intuitive understanding. 





This is always happening when we think through something and attain insights, but it is obscured by our conceptual life. Mostly our insights are seeded during sleep when that conceptual life is extinguished, but we mistakenly feel that they are attained during the day at the time of our conceptual thinking. To be clear, the conceptual and perceptual activity is necessary to rekindle the spiritual experiences we had during sleep and that is what we call insight. Without that activity, we would never become self-conscious that we are beings capable of insight into the Cosmic secrets. On the esoteric path, we aim to expand what normally is only experienced during sleep into our waking consciousness as well.

Here is another technique that we can use. I'm not sure if you play a musical instrument but we can use that as an example. Let's say we sit down to play a song on the piano and we have the overall intuition of how the song should sound. Then we start playing the first measures, i.e. the intuition condenses through our soul life into our arms and hands and the latter press against certain piano keys to bring the intuition into concrete expression on the perceptual plane. When we observe that expression, however, we sense that something is off, for ex. we are rushing the tempo. That perception gives us feedback to adjust our I-activity so that we can more perfectly bring the intuition to expression in the next iteration. 

We can apply this same understanding to any number of activities, for example when we are writing something down or if we are walking down the street from point A to point B or practically anything else we engage in consciously. When reading through a text, we can also understand our conceptual activity as engaging a similar dynamic - instead of our intuitive activity meeting the resistance of the piano keys, it meets the resistance of our concepts tied to the words on the page. When we are aware of this fundamental dynamic and practice keeping it in mind, we are already strengthening our capacity for intuitive thinking even if it is not noticeable to begin with (and it won't be, just like we may notice health improvements from changing our diet only after some weeks or months). We are already in the process of loosening our concepts so that our intuitive activity meets less immediate resistance in our conceptual life when steering through the words on the page, thereby penetrating to deeper meaning and getting better quality feedback for how to steer further in the next iterations. It is a good sign when we sense that our thinking activity is almost becoming more like an organ of touch like our fingers or toes.

Now, whether or not this image is well-founded from a natural scientific point of view is not important here, for it can still be used by way of comparison. It is as if one of the lower forms of life had not yet developed the sense of touch but experienced only inwardly, experienced itself inwardly in constant stirrings of movement, in this way experiencing the borders of the physical world, the surfaces of single objects. A being that has not yet developed the sense of touch and experiences only the surfaces of sense-perceptible objects remains entirely shut within itself, unable as yet to feel, to touch, what is there outside it by way of sense impressions.

In the same way, a person struggling with knowledge feels himself purely soul-spiritually (we should not think here of anything material) when he comes to the kind of place I have just described. In the case of our rudimentary animal, the organism breaks through to the outer, sense-perceptible world by its impact with it, differentiating itself through the sense of touch, by which surfaces are touched and knowledge gained as to their roughness or smoothness, their warmth or cold. In the same way, when what has lived only inwardly opens itself to what is outside, the possibility is acquired to break through, as it were, just at the places we have described and to acquire a spiritual sense of touch. Only when a person has wrestled perhaps for years at these boundaries of cognition, struggling to break through into the spiritual world, can he first acquire real spiritual organs. I am speaking only in an elementary way of how this sense of touch is developed. To use these terms in a more definite way, however, we can say that by ever greater application of inner work, working away from being enclosed within oneself, spiritual eyes, spiritual ears develop. To many people today it still seems absurd to say that at first the soul is just as undifferentiated an organ as the organism of a lower animal, forming its senses out of its own substance and out of this substance developing soul concepts, spiritual organs differentiated as to their soul qualities, which then bring an individual face to face with the spiritual world.

Returning to the piano-playing example, we can use these simple first-person intuitions of the rhythmic process as anchor points for our understanding of spiritual evolution because that is, in fact, how the entire World Content is structured and evolves through the layers of the TC spectrum. If we designate our piano playing activity or similar activity with a small circle at the top of a cone, the activity which structures our home life, our work life, our social life, the life of our community and nation, the life of our epoch in human history, the life of humanity as a whole across all epochs, are like concentric circles which lay at the foundation and structure the tip of the cone, which is the tip of our spiritual activity i.e. our stream of becoming. In everything we think, perceive, and do, this entire structure is present as an embedded reality. 





The goal is to bring this structure embedded in every act, perception, and thought into greater experiential awareness. This is already done for us in an unconscious way. Every night our being expands out into the widths of the Cosmos to absorb these archetypal impulses from higher beings in whom we are nested and then contracts back into the sensory spectrum during the day to experience them from another perspective, which is a perspective that is necessary for our inner perfection. But in that process, we normally lose experience of the tip's foundation, which are the deeper layers of our own organism, and experience ourselves as only the tip, with the rest as the 'outer world' of physical events and destiny. The goal is to consciously expand the tip of our waking consciousness back into the deeper layers, which is also the means by which we gradually take over responsibility from the higher beings for our inner perfection, i.e. we grow into spiritual freedom.

Just thinking through the TC structure in a somewhat symbolic and imaginative way, always connected to our first-person experience, is deepening and strengthening our intuition for it and putting us on path towards being more consciously active in the daily process. We will find many esoteric scientific concepts and paradigms can be made sense of in the light of that intuition. But there are no quick hacks to make it stick with us, only disciplined practice and humble commitment to and faith in the Spirit who is inspiring us all along the way, giving us the courage we need to persist. We will experience setbacks, obstacles, and what appear as "failures" throughout the path forward, but these can be understood as hindrances that are instrumental in perfecting our inner forces. Most of all, we can have reasoned faith that the path was already tread by He who made the path to begin with, and we only need to trace his footsteps with our own activity. 

"For it became him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings.

For both he that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all of one: for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren," (Hebrews 2)

,,The first thing is always to begin differentiating the layers of our consciousness that are normally merged together. We don't need to worry about imaginatively or intuitively grasping a text or any particular outer perception like a tree, but rather seek to experientially awaken more and more to how our experience of the world's content is always intertwined with our variable modes of consciousness. In these differentiated modes of consciousness reside the intentional structuring of the Cosmos, of Nature, of Culture, and of our individual spirit-soul-body structure."

Can you explain here in more detail? This passage seems inaccessible to me, but important.


,,So we should pay more attention to the nuances of consciousness throughout the day, and there are many opportunities to do so."

Do you have an example to illustrate?

There are many examples here. When you are sitting in front of a computer screen, you can try to notice how your thinking activity is flowing in comparison to when you look away and outside a window at the natural world. Or as Steiner mentioned, we can notice how our activity is structured when we are thinking about something by ourselves in comparison to when we are in a group setting, or in a situation that is informal compared to one that requires formal tact, like a school or work setting. We can also compare our activity at different times of day, between day and night, between the seasons of the year, and so forth. The key is that we need to practice paying attention to these differentiations on a consistent basis. our intuitive organism is highly flexible and adaptive, always mimicking the environment it comes into contact with, but again this is smeared out by our flattened conceptual activity. We only become more sensitive to the differentiations in our intuitive organism when we have exposed it to many different situations in a very intentional way, like we can become more sensitive to temperature differences if we expose ourselves to a wide spectrum of warmth and coldness. The highest sensitivity to these differentiations will come through a consistent diet of meditative practice since that is the most unlike our normal conceptual activity.

I wanted to share another quote from MS.

,,Considering that there is no man-made object that does not have thinking as its origin,
the disciple cultivates the idea that, in the sphere of earthly appearance, continually the
invisible becomes visible .
This idea is the principle of surpassing appearances Any object whatsoever made by man harks back to a moment in which it did
not exist, but was only though: this thinking was then translated into the concrete and
sensory.

The invisible has become visible.
There is no human production, nor creation that does not hark back to a time of
inexistence, that is to its original void in which its idea can be found anew. No one, looking
at a car or a building, thinks they made themselves. But is has happened that some primitive
people, in their first contact with objects or gadgets from the machine civilization, believed
that those items were marvelous products of nature: but not as if those objects were made on
their own, but as if they belonged to the creative process of the Universe.
Anyone who looking at a compass, could think it had made itself, would be taken as mentally inadequate.
Nevertheless the naive realist, notwithstanding logical analysis, today behaves no differently
with regard to created nature: no better than the primitive faced with the unknown world of
machines.

If there is no man-made object that des not hark back to a conscious thinking able to
conceive of it and to realize it, and for this reason one can argue that the invisible becomes visible: that which has not been produced by mankind and which nevertheless expresses a
creative power, harks back to a thinking that mankind is unable to think, at least at the
present time. The ascent of thinking hath precisely the task of awakening in the soul the
capacity for such thinking."

Great quote, thanks for sharing!

[AshvinP]

Not to mention that this "distraction" is a valuable spirtiual exercise in itself, if one is open to that.

That much we can agree on, IF we use it as an opportunity to reorient towards the important questions. Whether Linnell is consciously or unconsciously serving material transhumanist agendas is simply not of any primary importance. So are you willing to engage with any of the Steiner quotes presented and share your understanding of what they mean, so we may perhaps gain insights into the course of spiritual evolution and our own tasks as spiritual seekers?

Ashvin,

I already clearly said that I wish to explore the referenced quotes from Steiner, did you miss that? I am already drafting my thoughts about some of them. But there is some preliminary work to be done first. Please consider the following.

An important clarification is pending. It’s the difference that you make between redeemable and redeemed. If something is redeemable, there are clear actions to take, thinking-will and acting-will, certainly both. These actions imply and require resistance. If something is redeemed, one can leave behind the memory of any past evil and be grateful that redemption has been understood by all, and that it has happened. Because we are evolving in Maya, this distinction has not spiraled together yet. One can and should press and push towards spiraling, but one has to also be aware of, be listening to, and responsive to the feedback that unfolds in earthly time. There is a difference between wishing and pushing something towards “redeemed”, and the reality of achieved redemption. Now, you have acquired this tendency to arbitrarily discriminate - as if you were alone in the whole Cosmos, as if reality only depended on your thinking - what is redeemable and requires resistance, from what is already redeemed, in which latter case you would pass off any dissonance as irrelevant detail, as if you could one-sidedly, instantly, and magically redeem things just by one-sidedly thinking them redeemed.

I find this pretentious and, most importantly, dissonant. When I say dissonant, I mean something very precise. That is, firstly it puts you in shrill contradiction within the space of your own overall expressions and propositions, as for example recorded in this forum. Secondly, it creates new dissonance where there was none, as for example recorded in this thread. In short, it pumps wide-range arbitrariness, both horizontally and vertically, into the fabric of events, so that definition is lost, meaning is blurred, and an environment is created where you can state almost anything and its contrary, and make yourself the meekest, simply by being the most inflexible, or vice versa.

Rolling in this way, one can get away with things as absurd as, on one side, praising and complimenting a public figure who advocates transhumanism at the expenses of living thinking (under Anthroposophical emblem!), and “moral technology”, while utterly incapable, when asked, to attach any meaning whatsoever to those words, and, on the other side, at the same time, prefiguring “great tragedy” for me, because I dare to criticize that figure, while also constantly distorting my words, and making unwarranted inferences on my inner motives.

I am not fine with these methods. Please try to make these things straight, and also explain how you reconcile the many contradictions you face when you bring your inner certainty of the redemptive potential of any-thing into action in such an arbitrary way. For example, when you have incited forum members to actively work at developing living thinking, on penalty of “free fall” and similar, while now, speaking of a public figure active under Anthroposophical emblem, you estimate that "it’s not everybody’s karma to develop living thinking", and the responsible thing to do is not to develop it. Another example: one day you heavily criticize Neuralink and its transhumanist project, calling it the opposite to “the Ideal of faithful striving through spiritual activity, a striving to spiritualize (or moralize) the soul and body, rather than to corporealize (or naturalize) the soul and spirit”. And the next day, you praise a lecturer (whom you even insist to call an Anthroposophist) who advocates for AI to be welcomed as the enabler of human evolution, while calling Steiner a proto-transhumanist.

Federica,

Given your above-expressed feelings and concerns, I feel like a more in-depth treatment by me is necessary here, instead of brushing it off like I mostly did in previous posts. I apologize for that. I completely agree with the redeemable and redeemed distinction which needs to be spiraled together in our consciousness. As you know, the redemption of humanity and human creations has already been accomplished through the sacrificial activity of Christ. The remarkable thing is that this redemption has been accomplished, not only in the broad arc of Earth and human evolution but across all the nested scales of our existence as well. We can speak of a redemptive accomplishment in every epoch of human existence, in every century, in every year, and in every thinking-perception duration of our lives. The task is to bring these accomplishments into greater and greater experiential awareness, starting from where we are, thereby making them more and more transparent on the perceptual plane. 

It is exactly that reality which makes me confident that people like Linnell have valuable insights to offer even if we don't agree with everything about their vision for the future. As we have discussed before in many different contexts, such as VR, what makes the difference is always the sort of spiritual activity that is approaching, developing, and utilizing the new forms of technology. Obviously the sort of spiritual activity in Neuralink is completely devoid of any self-consciousness of what it is doing or any moral orientation. Spiritual seekers can sit by and let secular culture do those things without our participation, or even a consciously anti-spiritual culture, which will surely happen and is already happening, or they can try to dispassionately understand the development and participate in steering it towards the redemptive purposes for the benefit of all. We need to become very concrete about these redemptive purposes and their potential manifestations if they are not to remain floating abstract principles.

I have already said that each post-Atlantean epoch has a special task, and I have described the task for mankind in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch as that of coming to terms with evil as an impulse in world-evolution. We have spoken of what this means from various points of view. The indispensable need is that the forces which manifest as evil when they appear in the wrong place shall be overcome by human endeavour during this epoch, so that men can begin to make out of these forces something favourable for the whole future of cosmic evolution. Hence the task of this fifth post-Atlantean epoch is quite specially arduous, and many temptations lie ahead. And as the powers of evil make their appearance in gradual stages, men are naturally much more inclined to give way to them in all realms instead of battling to place what appears as evil in the service of the rightful course of world-development. This, nevertheless, is what has to come about — up to a certain point evil must be turned to good ends.

All this, of course, gives no occasion for lamentation but for a strengthening of human energy and aspiration towards the spiritual. For if men achieve what can be achieved in this epoch by taking hold of the forces of evil and turning them to good ends, then they will at the same time achieve something tremendous: this fifth post-Atlantean epoch will gain for human evolution grander conceptions than those of any other post-Atlantean epoch, or indeed of any previous epoch. For example, the Christ appeared and passed through the Mystery of Golgotha during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, but only in our fifth epoch will it be possible for human reason to encompass the meaning of this event. In the fourth epoch men could comprehend that in the Christ Impulse they had something which would carry their souls beyond death: this was made sufficiently clear through Pauline Christianity. The fifth epoch will bring an even more important development: men will come to recognise the Christ as their helper in the task of transforming the forces of evil into good. But connected with this characteristic of the fifth epoch is a fact we must inscribe daily in our souls and never forget, although we are readily inclined to forget it. In this epoch we have to be fighters for the spirit: we must realise that our forces grow slack unless they are kept constantly in training for the conquest of the spiritual world. In this fifth epoch man is in the highest degree dependent upon his freedom, and he has to experience it to the full. And the idea of human freedom should be the criterion of whatever he encounters in this epoch. For if human energies were to grow slack, everything might turn to evil. 

It may surprise you to hear, and I am even hesitant to mention it here, but will risk it anyway in the spirit of Steiner's quote above, that I expect previous forms of technology that arrived in horrible manifestations will be redeemed by spiritual seekers through the Christ impulse. For example a technology like 'eugenics'. In the future, this technology will not be limited to a purely physical understanding of manipulating genes and so forth, but will also take into account the full spectrum of soul-spiritual influences that go into the process of new incarnations. That will allow humans on the physical plane to more precisely and effectively plan for incarnating souls in a way that furthers our collective evolution. Steiner speaks about how in ancient epochs birth was always planned for propitious times determined by the configurations of the stellar sphere. Now, through spiritual scientific developments like Powell's hermetic astrology, that ancient wisdom can be recovered and taken more consciously in hand. Can we see a similar thing happening with respect to computer and robotic and VR technology? I once again hesitate to post what is below, but I hope it is understood with the dispassion and objectivity that is necessary to confront such realities.

Every knowing member of these secret circles is aware that, solely by means of certain capacities that are still latent but evolving in man, and with the help of the law of harmonious oscillations, machines and mechanical constructions and other things can be set in motion. A small indication is to be found in what I connected with the person of Strader in my Mystery Dramas.

These things are at present in process of development. They are guarded as secrets within those secret circles in the field of material occultism. Motors can be set in motion, into activity, by an insignificant human influence through a knowledge of the corresponding curve of oscillation. By means of this principle it will be possible to substitute merely mechanical forces for human forces in many things...

It is known that there are two other capacities that will likewise develop. One, which I shall venture to call the eugenic capacity, will evolve primarily among people of the East, of Russia and the Asiatic hinterland... By the eugenic capacity I mean the removal of the reproduction of human beings from the sphere of mere arbitrary impulse and accident. Among the peoples of the East there will gradually develop a brilliantly clear knowledge as to how the laws of population, the laws of peopling the earth, must run parallel with certain cosmic phenomena. From this information they will know that, if conception is brought about in accord with certain constellations of the stars, opportunities will thus be given for souls that are either good or evil in their natures to obtain access for earthly incarnation...

I must speak to you also regarding a third capacity, which is latent today but which will evolve. This is what I venture to call the hygienic occult capacity. Now we have all three: the materialistic occult capacity, the eugenic occult capacity, and the hygienic occult capacity. This hygienic occult capacity is well on its way and will not be long, relatively speaking, in arriving. This capacity will come to maturity simply through the insight that human life, in its course from birth to death, progresses in a manner identical with the process of an illness. Processes of illnesses are, in other words, only special and radical transmutations of the quite ordinary, normal life process taking its course between birth and death, except that we bear within ourselves not only the forces that create illness but also those that heal. These healing forces, as every occultist knows, are precisely the same as those that are applied when a person acquires occult capacities, in which case these forces are transmuted into the forces of knowledge. The healing power innate in the human organism, when transmuted into knowledge, gives occult forms of knowledge. 

...Hygienic occultism will develop primarily in the Central countries, and eugenic occultism in the Eastern lands. It will be necessary, however, for intercommunication to exist between people. This is something that must be taken up into the impelling forces of the social order of the future. It makes it imperative for people to see that they will be able to live in future throughout the world only as total human beings... Mutual confidence among men in a profound inner sense is what must come about. This is manifest through their remarkable future evolution... This is something that must be inscribed deeply upon our souls, that we arrive at a point here where guilt or innocence or similar concepts lose their significance, where the fact to bear in mind is that we must take these things in with the utmost earnestness, in the profoundest sense of the word, for the reason that these things embody a knowledge that alone is capable of passing over into the guidance of humanity in the future.

That last part is perhaps the most important - "Mutual confidence among men in a profound inner sense is what must come about... guilt or innocence or similar concepts lose their significance". Exploring this domain requires the utmost dispassion. I feel that you started this whole discussion on Linnell with an unwarranted presumption. That is, the presumption that I had not worked through many of Linnell's videos already (including all the ones referenced on this thread), noticed all the concerning objections you are raising (so I perfectly understand why they are concerning, especially the way he speaks about it), thought through them in the light of my own intuitive experience and knowledge of spiritual science, and decided there is no fundamental incompatibility with the path of intuitive thinking, and moreover found that my intuitive understanding was illuminated by working through the content. I don't bring this up, however, because I would either like you to work through them in the same way or to at least work your way to a realization that your initial judgments are based on many presumptions and should be put on pause until you can work further through the content, let it sit patiently in your consciousness, view the issues from more angles, consult more writings by Steiner, etc. 

That is what you have the most difficult time doing right now, as evidenced on several other threads, and I can offer no apologies for trying to point that out to you. What I can apologize for is the way I tried to point that out to you, which was probably much less than ideal. But the underlying issue remains the same and I suspect it will continue to recur unless it is confronted. It is mostly an expression of intellectual pride and that is something we all have to deal with on the esoteric path, because we are constantly at risk of inflating that pride as we gain new insights and become more familiar with esoteric realities. We feel like it is suddenly easy to know who is on 'our side' and who is working against living thinking. Developing higher cognition does not necessarily make it go away. It is not even a risk so much as a certainty, but we can do our best to remind ourselves of this Luciferic tendency that we lean into on the path of higher thinking and stay on top of it through the power of the humble, faithful, trusting, forgiving, and redemptive Christ impulse. 

[Federica]

Ashvin,

I want to eventually answer all parts of your last post above, but all at once would make for too long a reply. I will start with the following:

It may surprise you to hear, and I am even hesitant to mention it here, but will risk it anyway in the spirit of Steiner's quote above, that I expect previous forms of technology that arrived in horrible manifestations will be redeemed by spiritual seekers through the Christ impulse. For example a technology like 'eugenics'. In the future, this technology will not be limited to a purely physical understanding of manipulating genes and so forth, but will also take into account the full spectrum of soul-spiritual influences that go into the process of new incarnations. That will allow humans on the physical plane to more precisely and effectively plan for incarnating souls in a way that furthers our collective evolution. Steiner speaks about how in ancient epochs birth was always planned for propitious times determined by the configurations of the stellar sphere. Now, through spiritual scientific developments like Powell's hermetic astrology, that ancient wisdom can be recovered and taken more consciously in hand. Can we see a similar thing happening with respect to computer and robotic and VR technology?

I have now reviewed a few Steiner lectures. By the way, I read them from the bottom up - in reverse - and I find this a useful way to get a more objective grasp of what the intention was, the moment the ideas were expressed. My opinion is this:

I do understand that technologies, and manifestations in general, will be redeemed through the Christ impulse.
But I don’t see how this is the same thing as, for example, the idea that humans on the physical plane will more precisely and effectively plan for incarnating souls. I don't see the redeeming activity being performed through actions on the physical plane, as if it was a lever.

The great task is always Spiritual Science, which is the task of evolution itself, as Steiner puts it. That’s where energies have to be concentrated. The task is never to engage with this or that manifestation on the physical plane, instead of standing by and looking. I don't think the relevant choice we have is between “letting transhumanists do evil with their tech, or, since they are here, choosing to engage in those technologies to make them moral” as you have argued. The choice is always to either understand the spiritual plane and develop living thinking, or not to develop it. That is the primary choice. It’s the choice that Tomberg inspired you to express as follows - I will quote you again: “One cannot help but set that ideal [Neuralink’s] in contrast to the Ideal revealed in scripture.That is the Ideal of faithful striving through spiritual activity so we are graced with the power to have our sins blotted out, i.e. to karmically compensate for our past deeds that have crippled our psycho-physical organization. It is a striving to spiritualize (or moralize) the soul and body, rather than to corporealize (or naturalize) the soul and spirit“.

The physical plane is and will continue to be a reflection of how we were/are/will be able to understand spiritual reality. So the idea that we should now make a big difference on the physical plane, taking the bull by the horns, so to say, and transhumanize ourselves on that plane in order to redeem humanity, is a diversion, as I see it. It amounts to a glorification of the physical plane, as if it was the alpha and omega of all-thing. It’s never been, and it’s even less going to become the crucial element now, when we are reascending the evolutionary curve and spiritualizing our being. You said:

Yes, I saw that [that Linnell calls Steiner a proto-transhumanist] and I think it would be an interesting and challenging question to contemplate carefully, without passion or prejudice either way. I think the term "proto-transhumanist" is already too charged and is probably unhelpful. It seems to me the overall issue is, since the merging of man and machine is practically a given at this point - and we are already merged with our machines to a significant extent even if they are technically separated in our consciousness from our bodies by abstract space - how can this inevitable development be used in a fundamentally moral way to further human and Earth evolution?

I think the question of “using an inevitable development” is not given. The development is surely inevitable. However:

1) Telling people that we should put efforts into engaging with these developments is going to divert them from thinking development. It happens at the expense of living thinking. As you would say, it would relieve people from the creative responsibility of energetically developing living thinking. Which is why I find all this material pushed out by Linnell damaging, and ahrimanic: it diverts people from developing thinking, It tells people: “Consider AI as a valid portal to help save humanity from evil, and transition to Jupiter. It is a very meaningful life task you can feel satisfied with.”

2) Even if spiritual seekers were able to both develop higher cognition and engage with AI at the same time, the proposition is misleading, because thinking is where humanity is lacking, not technology. Thinking is and will be the one lever. “Our society will steer the destiny of humanity through technology” - as Linnell likes to put it - is to me an abstract proposition. Nothing can be steered through technology, as if it was a lever. For the same reason I agree that it’s not worth it, and also misled, to actively oppose AI. What should be actively opposed is the forgetfulness of spiritual reality, and the forgetfulness of the Christ events. All sorts of forgetfulness are the real enemy of the Consciousness-soul.


In this perspective, I strongly disagree that “Steiner proto-transhimanist” is an interesting and challenging question. It is instead, in my opinion, a disrespectful and misled question.

Disrespectful - because, when one says that Steiner was proto-whatever, it’s implied that he was “proto”, meaning someone who, without being fully aware of it, was kind of presaging something, kind of unconsciously laying down the initial premises of something. Now, I can hardly think of an adjective that would be less appropriate that this one to describe Steiner, who could not have been proto-anything, as aware as he is of the true-scale trajectory of evolutionary - hence historical - becoming.

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.


To be honest, when I hear you say this idea “since AI it’s here, let’s engage with it and try to make it moral” I get an impression similar to the one you get when you hear people engaging so much in “identity politics now - racial this, gender that, matriarchy/patriarchy this, cultural appropriation that”, if you can understand what I'm trying to convey. Along the same lines, I disagree with that:

Not everybody has it in their Karma to evolve higher cognition and become initiates … In fact, if Linnell is experientially unfamiliar with higher cognition, it is exactly the responsible thing for him to focus his efforts on the broader conceptual outlines of spiritual evolution.

I think that the path of initiation - now, and even more so going forward - has little to share with what the word 'initiation' still evokes. It’s not anymore that secret, high-sounding, pioneering life endeavor, pursued by some elected few. It is more and more like a necessary task for anyone who is able to touch the realization of its importance. It’s like paying taxes. Maybe in the present day it is still a sort of special tax, but everyone who has the minimum level of drive and acumen to get their head out of the predominant materialistic current, should both pay that tax, and pay it forward, for both individual and collective benefit. And I think that the representatives of Anthroposophy do have a particular responsibility in that. They should pay that tax themselves, and they should guide their audience in that direction, as well. I'm not saying this in order to continue the particular debate on Linnell. I am saying it because I would like to see whether you maintain that the "exactly responsible" thing to do for people unfamiliar with higher cognition is to focus on the broader conceptual outlines. I think this is a crucial point. I was very surprised to read that thought. If you maintain it, one could then notice that focusing on the broader outlines could be an easy excuse to precisely get rid of our creative responsibility as free beings, as you often notice. This sends us back to the arbitrariness in your methods that I referred to in my last post (and I still miss an understandable answer on that point).


To come back to your initial proposition about eugenics, I don’t have at all the clairvoyance to see how the process of incarnation will evolve in the future. However, even without that, I don’t think that it makes sense to envision that robotics and VR, in combination with gene manipulation, can become the means for humanity to optimize incarnation from an astral and etheric perspective. Maybe it will happen, that those technologies will evolve much further at the same time as some humans will be able to become more conscious of the incarnation process. You try to bring forth your argument using the bridge of hermetic astrology as an example, but, as I see it, there is a link that is inevitably severed if we now attempt to consider AI and gene manipulation in a similar way. That is, those technologies operate and die on the physical plane. The physical plane cannot become a cause, an instrument of spiritualization . It can only become an object of spiritualization. These are very different things. I don't think there is a way to make technology moral. That’s an oxymoron. Death cannot be made moral, it can only be made conscious. It only can be experienced, passed through in awareness. What is moralized then, is not the object-technology. Only our consciousness-soul can be made moral. Physical objects are physical objects. Their destiny is to decay in their physicality, just as they have already decayed in their essence, as soon as we fully realize that. We don’t bring them 'with us' by moralizing them, we don’t coopt them by transforming them, we don't have to turn isolated physical objects inside out. Rather, we leave them behind, as we freely moralize our soul.

This is also the confusion that I think I see in Linnell’s message. He outlines the great trajectory of human evolution in fitting anthroposophical fashion, only to conclude with the abstract jump that we should then enter the portal of AI, and 'therein' redeem the world. But then in concrete, not abstract, terms, nothing is said about this supposed morality of AI, it all remains at the level of empty words. And I understand why. It's because morality is the fabric of the Spirit and it's an abstract idea to try to weave some AI thread inside it.

I may have some more detailed comments of Steiner passages, but in another post.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

I want to eventually answer all parts of your last post above, but all at once would make for too long a reply. I will start with the following:

It may surprise you to hear, and I am even hesitant to mention it here, but will risk it anyway in the spirit of Steiner's quote above, that I expect previous forms of technology that arrived in horrible manifestations will be redeemed by spiritual seekers through the Christ impulse. For example a technology like 'eugenics'. In the future, this technology will not be limited to a purely physical understanding of manipulating genes and so forth, but will also take into account the full spectrum of soul-spiritual influences that go into the process of new incarnations. That will allow humans on the physical plane to more precisely and effectively plan for incarnating souls in a way that furthers our collective evolution. Steiner speaks about how in ancient epochs birth was always planned for propitious times determined by the configurations of the stellar sphere. Now, through spiritual scientific developments like Powell's hermetic astrology, that ancient wisdom can be recovered and taken more consciously in hand. Can we see a similar thing happening with respect to computer and robotic and VR technology?

I have now reviewed a few Steiner lectures. By the way, I read them from the bottom up - in reverse - and I find this a useful way to get a more objective grasp of what the intention was, the moment the ideas were expressed. My opinion is this:
...
I may have some more detailed comments of Steiner passages, but in another post.

Federica,

I hope you forgive me for not responding point by point, but I think most of the core themes of your post will be addressed in what follows. I will also go back and review the post later to see if anything was missed.

I think it would be good to interact more directly with the quotes because right now my sense is that your current thinking through these issues is too abstract. That's why I brought up the Steiner lectures and the specific quotes, so I still look forward to your responses on those or any other parts of the lectures. We can refer to the need to develop living thinking, which we all agree needs to be developed by anyone communicating esoteric realities (and 'living thinking' is not the same as higher cognition proper, hence the need for separate posts about it like this one comparing it to 'symbolic ordering'), but we also need to engage in living thinking ourselves when pursuing these inquiries. It all comes back to the question of how seriously we take the idea that spiritual activity is at the foundation of all existence - all manifest structures of the soul and body, at all scales of Earthly existence from the individual to the natural kingdoms and humanity as a whole, are weaved through human spiritual activity. To a certain extent, how seriously we can take that idea will be determined by how much we have entered into the intuitive flow of our own thinking through our spiritual exercises. 

Until then, however, we can at least admit that it's not wise to form judgments about the future course of spiritual evolution or to definitively judge other peoples' ideas about that course without a concrete sense of what evolving higher cognition looks like in practical reality. The Steiner lectures I referenced give many concrete examples of how this will manifest in the domain of human institutions and technology. If some of these examples sound like we will evolve 'superpowers' with respect to our technology, then we are thinking in the right direction (although we obviously shouldn't caricature such things in terms of how we perceive human activity right now). No one is saying that the form of technology and spiritual activity will remain exactly the same as it is now when these developments unfold (it surely won't), so we shouldn't use our current flattened images of such things as a basis for our judgments about future potential developments. Current exoteric visions of transhumanism are not even a possibility, because they assume a static form of technology that is only influenced by physical laws and there is no scenario in which that remains the case. 

Steiner's research clearly reveals that spiritual etheric forces, governed by higher etheric 'laws', will be consciously utilized to construct, power, and control machines, so the question is what will this actually look like? We already use such forces in the creation of technology but, with our current stage of physical consciousness, our use of them is indirectly mediated through our intellectual thinking in relation to the mineral element i.e. we must micromanage the partial transitions needed to fulfill the intuited, inspired, and imagined intent of new technological development. As human consciousness grows into a more direct resonance with the etheric Cosmic influences, there will be much fewer partial transitions to be managed between the intent and the concrete manifestation, which may begin as hybrid forms that are part mechanical and part living. Steiner is really very clear about it in those lectures.

Whether to conquer the cosmic for mankind in a wrong, twofold way, or rightly in a one-fold way — that is the question facing mankind. From this will come a true renewal of astrology, which in its old form is atavistic and cannot survive. The wise Beings of the cosmos will enter into the struggle; one side will use the morning and evening processes in the way I have indicated; the West will prefer the midday processes, shutting out the morning and evening ones; and the East will prefer the midnight ones. Men will no longer manufacture substances on the basis merely of chemical attraction and repulsion; they will know that different substances arise according to whether they are made with morning and evening processes, or with midday and midnight ones. It will be known that such substances act in a quite different way on the triad, God, virtue and immortality — gold, health and prolongation of life. When the forces of Pisces and Virgo act in co-operation, nothing wrongful can be brought into being. Men will achieve something through which the mechanism of life will be detached, in a certain sense, from man himself, but will not give any one group power and rulership over another. The cosmic forces drawn from this direction will create remarkable machines, but only those that will relieve man of work, because they will carry a certain power of intelligence within themselves. And a Spiritual Science which itself reaches out towards the cosmic will have to see to it that all the great temptations which come from these machine-animals, created by man himself, are not allowed to exercise any harmful influence upon him.

But that is all abstract jargon until our living thinking can also connect it with our own intuitive experience of the etheric forces that stream in from the Cosmos and also the concrete streams of collective development and events on the physical plane. That is no easy feat and that's why I mention the need for intellectual humility in this domain. Our normal habits of thinking will run into all sorts of obstacles here that make premature judgments unwise. And if we are speaking about the dangers humanity faces from those forces that seek to forestall its spiritual maturation, that's exactly what they aim to engender - rushed intellectual conclusions about the nature and course of future evolution that promote tribes and factions within both exoteric and esoteric communities. That doesn't mean we need to automatically agree with everyone else's vision, but we simply need to refrain from making conclusive judgments until we can explore from many angles and meditate on the results. These seemingly trivial exercises, if they are frustrated by more intellectual and worldly forms of judgment, end up being the biggest threat to the spiritual maturation that is necessary. 

(I highly recommend reading this entire lecture)

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA145/En ... 24p02.html

Therefore, even if it should seem more natural to describe the ordinary life in words belonging to the higher life, let us translate them into the language most fitted for the physical plane. It must be emphasised again and again that these things are not without consequence, but are full of significance and possess active power. This being admitted, we may also speak without prejudice of the fact that, as regards the life in the higher worlds, the ordinary power of judgment ceases to be of use, and we learn to feel, to a certain extent, that the sort of cleverness we had before is now at an end. And here again the student notices — this is an experience which grows more and more frequent — he notices his dependence upon the etheric life of the world, that is, upon time. How often do we find in our particular age that people, even quite young people, approach everything in the world upon which judgment can be passed, and think that when they have acquired a certain power of judgment they can pronounce opinion about everything in existence, and speculate on everything possible. In esoteric development the belief that one can speculate on all things is torn out of the soul by the roots; for we then notice that our opinions are capable of growth and, above all, that they need to mature.

The student learns to recognise that if he wishes to arrive at an opinion with which he is himself able to agree, he must live for some while with certain ideas which he has acquired, so that his own etheric body can come to an understanding with them. He learns that he must wait before he can arrive at a certain opinion. Only then does he realise the great significance of the words: ‘Let what is in the soul mature.’ He really becomes more and more modest. But this ‘becoming modest’ is a very special matter, because it is not always possible to hold the balance between being obliged to form an opinion and being able to wait for maturity to have an opinion upon a subject, though delusion about these things is possible to a high degree, and because there is really nothing but life itself which can explain these things. A philosopher may dispute with a person who has reached a certain degree of esoteric development concerning some cosmic mystery, or cosmic law; if the philosopher can only form philosophic opinion he will believe himself necessarily in the right concerning the matter, and we can understand that he must have this belief; but the other person will know quite well that the question cannot be decided by the capacity for judgment possessed by the philosopher. For he knows that in former times he also used the conceptions upon which the philosopher bases his opinion, but allowed them to mature within him, which process made it possible for him to have an opinion on the subject; he knows that he has lived with it, thereby making himself ripe enough to form the opinion which he now pronounces at a higher stage of maturity. But an understanding between these two persons is really out of the question, and in many cases cannot be brought about directly; it can only come to pass when in the philosopher there arises a feeling of the necessity of allowing certain things to mature in his soul before he permits himself to give an opinion about them. Opinions, views must be battled for, must be won by effort — this the student recognises more and more. He acquires a profound, intense feeling of this, because he gains the inner feeling of time which is essentially connected with the development of the etheric body. Indeed, he gradually notices a certain opposition arise in his soul between the way he formerly judged and the way he now judges after having attained a certain maturity in this particular matter; and he notices that the opinion he formed in the past and the opinion he now holds confront each other like two powers, and he then notices in himself a certain inner mobility of the temporal within him; he notices that the earlier must be overcome by the later. This is the dawn in the consciousness of a certain feeling for time, which arises from the presence of inner conflicts, coming into existence through a certain opposition between the later and the earlier. It is absolutely necessary to acquire this inner feeling, this inner perception of time, for we must remember that we can only learn to experience the etheric when we acquire an inner idea of time. This develops into our always having the feeling that the earlier originates in ourselves, in our judgment, in our knowledge; but that the later flows into us, as it were, streams towards us, is vouchsafed to us. More and more clearly comes the feeling of what was described in the last lecture, viz., that the cleverness which springs from oneself must be separated from the wisdom which is acquired by surrender to the stream flowing towards one from the future. 

We also need to remember the fundamental principles of spiritual evolution. No plane of existence can be reduced to any other as we know from Cleric's essay on the morphic spaces. The physical plane is a real plane of conscious existence and most certainly can become the cause of spiritualizing processes insofar as it rhythmically feeds what is experienced there back into the higher planes of consciousness. We also need to make these principles as concrete as possible when thinking through events on the physical plane. Keeping the illustrations and metaphors in mind as much as possible throughout the day is very helpful.

In the configuration space of the CEO, reality looks like traversing a space of high level goals. These are the elements of reality at that level – merging of companies, new branches, new product lines and so on. This is the landscape through which the CEO’s geodesic streams. It’s a level where the details of the mid and low level management are abstracted. This doesn’t mean that this level is an absolute master control over the lower. If the CEO sets unrealistic goals, the lower level will face certain impossibilities and will respectively bend his own morphic space where his geodesic will deviate from the intended goal.

At the same time, the CEO’s space itself is being bent by higher order spaces. For example, national and global economics, politics, legislation. The CEO’s space is influenced by both the lower and higher, and at the same time he works upon the lower (by issuing orders) or even the higher (for example by lobbying).

That is always happening and we can't make sense of spiritual evolution without accounting for that mutually influencing aspect between the planes (or spaces) of existence. Spiritual activity at the collective level cannot become conscious of itself at ever-higher stages without the resistance of the physical, etheric, and astral planes, just as we as individual egos cannot become more conscious of ourselves without the resistance of our lower soul and body members. So these formative instruments of spiritual activity are essential to the path of evolving Self-consciousness. We are generally reintegrating all the worlds, planes, planets, kingdoms, forms, etc. that we cast out in order to reach our current stage of creative consciousness, and our cultural institutions and technology are the most recent of such forms. It is easy to see our machine technology is a spatially separated extension of our own cognitive-perceptual capacities. It also must be reintegrated. It's not about the individual physical objects, but the stream of development as a whole (that is what I refer to as 'cultural institution'). Again, if this concept of "reintegration" is not to remain abstract, we need to steer our thinking through the concrete ways in which it could potentially manifest, not to form definitive conclusions one way or the other and feel self-satisfied about them, but to strengthen our intuitive orientation within the overall individual-collective stream of becoming, to inwardly perfect ourselves.

Of course, none of this means we need to join Linell's organization and devote all our time to responsibly merging man with machine at the expense of all else. That is only one, albeit very important, piece of the collective puzzle going forward. Before we work on anything, we need to work on our own spiritual maturation and discernment through patient study, prayer, soul-purifying work, and meditative exercises. There are also the spheres of eugenic and hygienic occultism that Steiner mentioned and which many other spiritual scientists are currently working on. Tomberg also mentions these streams in Christ and Sophia. There are people working on childrens' education, agriculture, beekeeping, aesthetics, economics, and many other sub-domains of these streams (Linnell's YT channel has talks from some such people). Everyone in these domains will need to begin to work more and more like a symphonic orchestra conducted by the higher worlds.

The three realms of occultism are distinct in regard to their missions and their methods. The task of mechanical occultism is to regulate the outer forces of nature in a way that corresponds to the true destiny of humankind. Hygienic occultism does the same with respect to the forces of the human organism. Eugenic occultism, however, has the mission of establishing a correct relationship between spiritual forces and humankind—that is, it must regulate human karma by means of birth and death. Mechanical occultism, therefore, is related more to the forces outside humanity, the forces that work in nature. Hygienic occultism is concerned especially with humankind. And the special theme of eugenic occultism is the human relationship to the tasks set by the superhuman spiritual world—in other words, one’s destiny. It must be understood that the three realms of occultism are always represented by living personalities, each being the leader of an appointed realm. These (the highest authorities of human spiritual science) work, for the most part, silently for the health and welfare of humanity. The characters Benedictus, Theodosius, and Romanus in Rudolf Steiner’s mystery plays are portrayed as the three most advanced initiates. They are supposed to represent the three realms of occultism. It is easy, too, to perceive how each of the three realms of occultism corresponds to each character; as one watches the mystery dramas, it is easy to quickly solve this matter unequivocally.

Tomberg, Valentin; Bruce, R.H.. Christ and Sophia: Anthroposophic Meditations on the Old Testament, New Testament, and Apocalypse (p. 3). steinerbooks. Kindle Edition. 

[Federica]

Federica,

I hope you forgive me for not responding point by point, but I think most of the core themes of your post will be addressed in what follows. I will also go back and review the post later to see if anything was missed.

I think it would be good to interact more directly with the quotes because right now my sense is that your current thinking through these issues is too abstract. That's why I brought up the Steiner lectures and the specific quotes, so I still look forward to your responses on those or any other parts of the lectures. We can refer to the need to develop living thinking, which we all agree needs to be developed by anyone communicating esoteric realities (and 'living thinking' is not the same as higher cognition proper, hence the need for separate posts about it like this one comparing it to 'symbolic ordering'), but we also need to engage in living thinking ourselves when pursuing these inquiries. It all comes back to the question of how seriously we take the idea that spiritual activity is at the foundation of all existence - all manifest structures of the soul and body, at all scales of Earthly existence from the individual to the natural kingdoms and humanity as a whole, are weaved through human spiritual activity. To a certain extent, how seriously we can take that idea will be determined by how much we have entered into the intuitive flow of our own thinking through our spiritual exercises. 

Until then, however, we can at least admit that it's not wise to form judgments about the future course of spiritual evolution or to definitively judge other peoples' ideas about that course without a concrete sense of what evolving higher cognition looks like in practical reality. The Steiner lectures I referenced give many concrete examples of how this will manifest in the domain of human institutions and technology. If some of these examples sound like we will evolve 'superpowers' with respect to our technology, then we are thinking in the right direction (although we obviously shouldn't caricature such things in terms of how we perceive human activity right now). No one is saying that the form of technology and spiritual activity will remain exactly the same as it is now when these developments unfold (it surely won't), so we shouldn't use our current flattened images of such things as a basis for our judgments about future potential developments. Current exoteric visions of transhumanism are not even a possibility, because they assume a static form of technology that is only influenced by physical laws and there is no scenario in which that remains the case. 

Steiner's research clearly reveals that spiritual etheric forces, governed by higher etheric 'laws', will be consciously utilized to construct, power, and control machines, so the question is what will this actually look like? We already use such forces in the creation of technology but, with our current stage of physical consciousness, our use of them is indirectly mediated through our intellectual thinking in relation to the mineral element i.e. we must micromanage the partial transitions needed to fulfill the intuited, inspired, and imagined intent of new technological development. As human consciousness grows into a more direct resonance with the etheric Cosmic influences, there will be much fewer partial transitions to be managed between the intent and the concrete manifestation, which may begin as hybrid forms that are part mechanical and part living. Steiner is really very clear about it in those lectures.

Whether to conquer the cosmic for mankind in a wrong, twofold way, or rightly in a one-fold way — that is the question facing mankind. From this will come a true renewal of astrology, which in its old form is atavistic and cannot survive. The wise Beings of the cosmos will enter into the struggle; one side will use the morning and evening processes in the way I have indicated; the West will prefer the midday processes, shutting out the morning and evening ones; and the East will prefer the midnight ones. Men will no longer manufacture substances on the basis merely of chemical attraction and repulsion; they will know that different substances arise according to whether they are made with morning and evening processes, or with midday and midnight ones. It will be known that such substances act in a quite different way on the triad, God, virtue and immortality — gold, health and prolongation of life. When the forces of Pisces and Virgo act in co-operation, nothing wrongful can be brought into being. Men will achieve something through which the mechanism of life will be detached, in a certain sense, from man himself, but will not give any one group power and rulership over another. The cosmic forces drawn from this direction will create remarkable machines, but only those that will relieve man of work, because they will carry a certain power of intelligence within themselves. And a Spiritual Science which itself reaches out towards the cosmic will have to see to it that all the great temptations which come from these machine-animals, created by man himself, are not allowed to exercise any harmful influence upon him.

But that is all abstract jargon until our living thinking can also connect it with our own intuitive experience of the etheric forces that stream in from the Cosmos and also the concrete streams of collective development and events on the physical plane. That is no easy feat and that's why I mention the need for intellectual humility in this domain. Our normal habits of thinking will run into all sorts of obstacles here that make premature judgments unwise. And if we are speaking about the dangers humanity faces from those forces that seek to forestall its spiritual maturation, that's exactly what they aim to engender - rushed intellectual conclusions about the nature and course of future evolution that promote tribes and factions within both exoteric and esoteric communities. That doesn't mean we need to automatically agree with everyone else's vision, but we simply need to refrain from making conclusive judgments until we can explore from many angles and meditate on the results. These seemingly trivial exercises, if they are frustrated by more intellectual and worldly forms of judgment, end up being the biggest threat to the spiritual maturation that is necessary. 

(I highly recommend reading this entire lecture)

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA145/En ... 24p02.html

Therefore, even if it should seem more natural to describe the ordinary life in words belonging to the higher life, let us translate them into the language most fitted for the physical plane. It must be emphasised again and again that these things are not without consequence, but are full of significance and possess active power. This being admitted, we may also speak without prejudice of the fact that, as regards the life in the higher worlds, the ordinary power of judgment ceases to be of use, and we learn to feel, to a certain extent, that the sort of cleverness we had before is now at an end. And here again the student notices — this is an experience which grows more and more frequent — he notices his dependence upon the etheric life of the world, that is, upon time. How often do we find in our particular age that people, even quite young people, approach everything in the world upon which judgment can be passed, and think that when they have acquired a certain power of judgment they can pronounce opinion about everything in existence, and speculate on everything possible. In esoteric development the belief that one can speculate on all things is torn out of the soul by the roots; for we then notice that our opinions are capable of growth and, above all, that they need to mature.

The student learns to recognise that if he wishes to arrive at an opinion with which he is himself able to agree, he must live for some while with certain ideas which he has acquired, so that his own etheric body can come to an understanding with them. He learns that he must wait before he can arrive at a certain opinion. Only then does he realise the great significance of the words: ‘Let what is in the soul mature.’ He really becomes more and more modest. But this ‘becoming modest’ is a very special matter, because it is not always possible to hold the balance between being obliged to form an opinion and being able to wait for maturity to have an opinion upon a subject, though delusion about these things is possible to a high degree, and because there is really nothing but life itself which can explain these things. A philosopher may dispute with a person who has reached a certain degree of esoteric development concerning some cosmic mystery, or cosmic law; if the philosopher can only form philosophic opinion he will believe himself necessarily in the right concerning the matter, and we can understand that he must have this belief; but the other person will know quite well that the question cannot be decided by the capacity for judgment possessed by the philosopher. For he knows that in former times he also used the conceptions upon which the philosopher bases his opinion, but allowed them to mature within him, which process made it possible for him to have an opinion on the subject; he knows that he has lived with it, thereby making himself ripe enough to form the opinion which he now pronounces at a higher stage of maturity. But an understanding between these two persons is really out of the question, and in many cases cannot be brought about directly; it can only come to pass when in the philosopher there arises a feeling of the necessity of allowing certain things to mature in his soul before he permits himself to give an opinion about them. Opinions, views must be battled for, must be won by effort — this the student recognises more and more. He acquires a profound, intense feeling of this, because he gains the inner feeling of time which is essentially connected with the development of the etheric body. Indeed, he gradually notices a certain opposition arise in his soul between the way he formerly judged and the way he now judges after having attained a certain maturity in this particular matter; and he notices that the opinion he formed in the past and the opinion he now holds confront each other like two powers, and he then notices in himself a certain inner mobility of the temporal within him; he notices that the earlier must be overcome by the later. This is the dawn in the consciousness of a certain feeling for time, which arises from the presence of inner conflicts, coming into existence through a certain opposition between the later and the earlier. It is absolutely necessary to acquire this inner feeling, this inner perception of time, for we must remember that we can only learn to experience the etheric when we acquire an inner idea of time. This develops into our always having the feeling that the earlier originates in ourselves, in our judgment, in our knowledge; but that the later flows into us, as it were, streams towards us, is vouchsafed to us. More and more clearly comes the feeling of what was described in the last lecture, viz., that the cleverness which springs from oneself must be separated from the wisdom which is acquired by surrender to the stream flowing towards one from the future. 

We also need to remember the fundamental principles of spiritual evolution. No plane of existence can be reduced to any other as we know from Cleric's essay on the morphic spaces. The physical plane is a real plane of conscious existence and most certainly can become the cause of spiritualizing processes insofar as it rhythmically feeds what is experienced there back into the higher planes of consciousness. We also need to make these principles as concrete as possible when thinking through events on the physical plane. Keeping the illustrations and metaphors in mind as much as possible throughout the day is very helpful.

In the configuration space of the CEO, reality looks like traversing a space of high level goals. These are the elements of reality at that level – merging of companies, new branches, new product lines and so on. This is the landscape through which the CEO’s geodesic streams. It’s a level where the details of the mid and low level management are abstracted. This doesn’t mean that this level is an absolute master control over the lower. If the CEO sets unrealistic goals, the lower level will face certain impossibilities and will respectively bend his own morphic space where his geodesic will deviate from the intended goal.

At the same time, the CEO’s space itself is being bent by higher order spaces. For example, national and global economics, politics, legislation. The CEO’s space is influenced by both the lower and higher, and at the same time he works upon the lower (by issuing orders) or even the higher (for example by lobbying).

That is always happening and we can't make sense of spiritual evolution without accounting for that mutually influencing aspect between the planes (or spaces) of existence. Spiritual activity at the collective level cannot become conscious of itself at ever-higher stages without the resistance of the physical, etheric, and astral planes, just as we as individual egos cannot become more conscious of ourselves without the resistance of our lower soul and body members. So these formative instruments of spiritual activity are essential to the path of evolving Self-consciousness. We are generally reintegrating all the worlds, planes, planets, kingdoms, forms, etc. that we cast out in order to reach our current stage of creative consciousness, and our cultural institutions and technology are the most recent of such forms. It is easy to see our machine technology is a spatially separated extension of our own cognitive-perceptual capacities. It also must be reintegrated. It's not about the individual physical objects, but the stream of development as a whole (that is what I refer to as 'cultural institution'). Again, if this concept of "reintegration" is not to remain abstract, we need to steer our thinking through the concrete ways in which it could potentially manifest, not to form definitive conclusions one way or the other and feel self-satisfied about them, but to strengthen our intuitive orientation within the overall individual-collective stream of becoming, to inwardly perfect ourselves.

Of course, none of this means we need to join Linell's organization and devote all our time to responsibly merging man with machine at the expense of all else. That is only one, albeit very important, piece of the collective puzzle going forward. Before we work on anything, we need to work on our own spiritual maturation and discernment through patient study, prayer, soul-purifying work, and meditative exercises. There are also the spheres of eugenic and hygienic occultism that Steiner mentioned and which many other spiritual scientists are currently working on. Tomberg also mentions these streams in Christ and Sophia. There are people working on childrens' education, agriculture, beekeeping, aesthetics, economics, and many other sub-domains of these streams (Linnell's YT channel has talks from some such people). Everyone in these domains will need to begin to work more and more like a symphonic orchestra conducted by the higher worlds.

The three realms of occultism are distinct in regard to their missions and their methods. The task of mechanical occultism is to regulate the outer forces of nature in a way that corresponds to the true destiny of humankind. Hygienic occultism does the same with respect to the forces of the human organism. Eugenic occultism, however, has the mission of establishing a correct relationship between spiritual forces and humankind—that is, it must regulate human karma by means of birth and death. Mechanical occultism, therefore, is related more to the forces outside humanity, the forces that work in nature. Hygienic occultism is concerned especially with humankind. And the special theme of eugenic occultism is the human relationship to the tasks set by the superhuman spiritual world—in other words, one’s destiny. It must be understood that the three realms of occultism are always represented by living personalities, each being the leader of an appointed realm. These (the highest authorities of human spiritual science) work, for the most part, silently for the health and welfare of humanity. The characters Benedictus, Theodosius, and Romanus in Rudolf Steiner’s mystery plays are portrayed as the three most advanced initiates. They are supposed to represent the three realms of occultism. It is easy, too, to perceive how each of the three realms of occultism corresponds to each character; as one watches the mystery dramas, it is easy to quickly solve this matter unequivocally.

Tomberg, Valentin; Bruce, R.H.. Christ and Sophia: Anthroposophic Meditations on the Old Testament, New Testament, and Apocalypse (p. 3). steinerbooks. Kindle Edition. 

Ashvin,

Thank you for bookmarking and commenting on all the above passages.
I understand that it might be necessary to leave questions aside and say something like "when and if you are spiritually grown up you will understand". Then I also don't see any point in getting specific about the lectures and discussing how I might understand them. Your reply to those thoughts is already contained above, as I am obviously not spiritually grown up and that will not change by the return post so to say. So I guess this puts an end to this whole discussion. Thanks for the lectures, I will definitely read them.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

Thank you for bookmarking and commenting on all the above passages.
I understand that it might be necessary to leave questions aside and say something like "when and if you are spiritually grown up you will understand". Then I also don't see any point in getting specific about the lectures and discussing how I might understand them. Your reply to those thoughts is already contained above, as I am obviously not spiritually grown up and that will not change by the return post so to say. So I guess this puts an end to this whole discussion. Thanks for the lectures, I will definitely read them.

Federica,

Sometimes we can make progress in this domain by putting things to the side and ignoring them. On the other hand, if we have already encountered them and are thinking about them, we can make it into an exercise as you suggested before. Notice this latter approach is the redemptive one, i.e. we are confronting conceptual forms that we have cast out into the world and seeking to spiritualize them so they grow as new inner forces for our development and that of humanity as a whole. I don't want to give the impression that I never form definitive judgments about other people's ideas, because I do, but there is also a significant difference between holding those judgments in our consciousness and letting them descend into our feeling and will and manifest on the perceptual plane as speech or writing. On the other hand, my will impulses with respect to things like an unhealthy diet often do manifest on the perceptual plane, and perhaps you are more skilled at taming such impulses. We discussed how the deeds so manifested become a stronger attractive force, exerting a greater pull on our consciousness going forward and therefore a greater redemptive effort to compensate/reintegrate. We may notice this pull becomes greatly exaggerated in our meditative exercises, distracting our focused attention. We can understand a lot of seemingly complex spiritual science by keeping these simple principles in mind and applying them concretely to what we are doing with our spiritual activity on a daily basis, such as commenting on this forum.

It is helpful to understand our thought-deeds in a similar way as how we understand our physical deeds. We all intuitively know there is a big difference between thinking about tripping someone or punching someone and actually doing it. And there is also a big difference between walking half the distance with the intention of punching someone and then stopping to renounce that intention, compared to fulfilling that intention. Let's say I write a post filled with many of my judgments on another person's esoteric ideas and vision. The more confident we are in those initial judgments and the more we feel a certain antipathy for the other ideas, the more useful it will be to practice these exercises. 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. Of course, this should be something we are doing freely out of a true longing, when we we are genuinely interested in asking questions and receiving answers, because maybe our initial judgments, however unlikely, are off the mark. In that sense, our conceptual activity can become less analytical/judgmental and more contemplative and meditative.

I have also seen posts where you simply summarize in your own words what was argued, claimed, presented, etc. by others. It is somewhat easy to do that when we have a general affinity for what we are summarizing, but how much more could we strengthen our inner forces by doing that with something we feel a general antipathy for? 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." Often we will find new inspirational forces have worked on our judgments in the meantime and softened them in some ways. With all that said, I am still interested in hearing your thoughts, questions, concerns, etc. about the relevant Steiner quotes. It is certainly no problem to work through them in that open-ended way and try to get a better intuitive orientation to their practical meaning and significance, as long we don't approach with a mindset that it must not be speaking of something because we already ruled that out via our judgments. Then we will only see the meaning in the text that we can still resonate with, which we have arbitrarily limited.

[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.