Federica wrote: ↑Sat Aug 19, 2023 2:03 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Sat Aug 19, 2023 12:53 pm
Federica,
What you write about cultural institutions, in the post where you are telling me that you understand the principles and they are nothing new, once again makes me feel like the principles aren't understood in a concrete way. I must have a really difficult time comprehending the meaning of your posts, sort of like Cleric on the thread about spiritual freedom where you were adamant that our ideas could not be reconciled with PoF and Max's essays, because I don't see only slightly different angles on the core principles of physical-cultural-spiritual interplay being expressed, but in some cases diametrically opposed viewpoints. Maybe it's the
way you express them, i.e. you are continually overstating and overemphasizing certain perspectives, but I am not sure because the issue keeps coming up across threads. It's as if you are ignoring thousands of years of cultural evolution and how it brought most of us from a state of tribal violence that we hardly imagine now to the relative stability we enjoy every day. These are concrete images of the Spirit at work in Earthly evolution preparing for the development of higher cognition in our own time. I see this as being very much related to your previous adamant critique of Scaligero when he was making the distinction of using man-made objects in concentration (I'm curious, do you still feel he was 'altering Steiner's guidelines'?). That is definitely a question of having a principled understanding of our evolving spiritual structure.
You wrote that meditation is possible
despite our body, as if in meditation we are escaping from the body and it no longer serves a critical purpose for higher cognition. We need to remember that every world-outlook that spiritual science critiques is critiqued because it becomes too one-sided, i.e. it deviated from the core principle of spiritual evolution which unfolds through a continual balancing of poles at various scales. And as Steiner often mentions, the Luciferic one-sidedness is especially prevalent on the esoteric path, especially in the initial stages where everything physical and traditional is experienced as a sort of 'reproach' for us. In this respect, I feel that you are projecting human development far out into the future, as you accused me of doing with the redemption of cultural institutions, and using that projection as the basis for various conclusions about what it means to develop higher knowledge. But clearly, our cultural institutions will be redeemed (spiritualized) much sooner than the physical plane and physical body. The former is exactly what Steiner was working on and made concrete progress on, although it could have been even more expansive if nations had adopted the threefolding social order, for example. But if you feel that I am just repeating things to you that you already know and are expressing slightly differently in your own terms and my 'rebuking' is inflexible, I'm not going to bother arguing that point. I'll just wait until the next time this same issue crops up
Ashvin,
I don’t deny that I have made mistakes (as previously recognized) and also that I am usually quick at forming opinions, while it would be wiser, as you said, to ponder longer and wait until more experience is gained. But this cannot be the primary way to address every new point I make…
Maybe I shall do like Eugene once did, burn out the future-attractive karma of my current alias, and log back in with a brand new one, for a fresh start!
Because digital technology today allows for this level of spiritualized human interconnection, why not leverage it to the benefit of a kind of self-driven digital rebirth?
I see this as being very much related to your previous adamant critique of Scaligero when he was making the distinction of using man-made objects in concentration (I'm curious, do you still feel he was 'altering Steiner's guidelines'?)
Yes, I still feel that Scaligero calls concentration what Steiner calls concentration, and not what Steiner calls Basic Exercise 1, as per my
last post on the topic, which you said contained some good points, but all in all, not good enough. However, I am doing what you suggested, I have put the question on hold, waiting until I have better holistic understanding and practice of concentration before returning to it. And I have tried in the meantime to compensate for my certainly overemphasized expressions by paying closer attention to his work.
Fair enough, Federica! In that case, I think the issues will certainly resolve themselves over time and it is probably unwise and a bit prideful for me to think I can 'force it' along. You are right that we're all on an individual path as well as a collective one and our karmic destiny, shaped by the higher self, wisely puts certain obstacles in our way to work out that may be different in their manifestations, intensity, and so forth from those of other people, even if the archetypal structure of walking the temptational and tribulational path of Christ is the same.
By the way, I came across an interesting snippet from Steiner that clairvoyantly locates this distinction between natural and man-made in the spiritual worlds as well:
Steiner wrote:An object in the physical world is found in Devachan as a vacuum corresponding to the space occupied by the object in the physical world, and a void, a nothing in the physical world is found in Devachan as something resplendent, radiant and resounding. We may compare this with the photographic negative. The physical object would exactly fit into the vacuum. It is however strange that this only applies to objects of Nature, whereas artificial forms made by man appear in Devachan as a positive.
Federica wrote:You wrote that meditation is possible despite our body, as if in meditation we are escaping from the body and it no longer serves a critical purpose for higher cognition.
There is no need to speculate the ‘as-ifs’, since I provided the words for what I meant with that: “My sense is that meditation is possible despite our body, since it is
a striving towards dying before death, and after physical death it’s a continual meditation state, as I understand it.”
This is what I meant with “despite our body”. Do you have anything to object to those words? If you do, please tell me what. That would be more helpful to me, rather than speculating on what I may have signified with "despite".
I felt that I addressed this somewhat with the post from Cleric and the paragraph on how we remain conscious between death and rebirth. The question is, what is the 'continual meditation state' across the threshold? Clearly, that question gets into the complexities of spiritual science, although our core principles can give us a solid intuitive orientation to those complexities and what they signify. One such principle is that there is always something serving the
function that our physical body does for our I-consciousness on the physical plane. And we have to remember that all the lower bodily members of our being are
reflections of the higher spiritual members of our being. In a sense, the physical body and the physical plane as a whole is what our highest spiritual member i.e. Spirit-Man or Atma, looks like to our decohered cognition. That is the true nature of our "I", which is reflected to us through the physical plane when we first awaken to our essential being. All our other members, all the other spiritual forces, are embedded within this physical body-plane (and that's why we can differentiate between the physical forms of minerals, plants, animals, and humans). That's why Steiner often speaks of the physical body as the most perfect member of our organization.
The wording of your post is not the issue, but I bring these things up because you were using that as a response to my original point:
Our meditation is only possible because we have a physical body, a physical landscape of physical elements, and cultural institutions that provide us with wealth, health, and safety. All those elements provide the basis for the brain and intellect/imagination that is capable of cultivating certain soul qualities/capacities that allow for spiritual striving, learning about meditation, and then willing certain exercises. And after we have exercised our thinking-will during meditation, we must plunge back into the physical spectrum with our spiritual activity to elaborate the inner forces that were seeded. Scaligero speaks about that in his book on meditation.
Would our meditation be possible without the physical body or, even in future stages of evolution, something serving the function of that body? Quite simply, no. We are
always going to be halfway between the manifest/known and the unmanifest/unknown, and our spiritual evolution comes through our activity streaming in from the latter and meeting the former to work through it and recover its inner essence. That is what we must do at the individual and collective scales. I came across the following passage from Steiner recently.
Steiner wrote:There was a moment in evolution when what we today call magnetic and electric forces established themselves within the human being. For magnetic and electric forces live in us in a mysterious manner. Before this time, human beings lived on earth without the magnetic and electric forces that have developed ever since on a spiritual level between the workings of the nerves and the blood. They were incorporated into the human being at that time. The forces of magnetism we will leave out of consideration, also some forms of the forces of electricity. But the forces which I will distinguish as the electric forces in galvanism, voltaism, etc., forces that have taken deep hold in the culture and civilization of our time, these forces entered the human organism in that far-off time and combined with human life; and this very fact made it possible for them to remain for a long time unknown to human consciousness...
After humankind had passed the moment in the Lemurian age when it had implanted into it the forces that pass through the wire today as electricity and work in an invisible manner in the human being himself, after this time had passed, electricity existed inside the human being. Evolution never proceeds in the simple straightforward way in which people are inclined to picture it. They imagine that time goes ever forward on and on to infinity. That is an altogether abstract conception. The truth is that time moves and turns in such a way that evolution is constantly reversed and runs back on itself. It is not only in space that we find movements in curves, such as in lemniscates, but also in time.
During the Lemurian epoch human beings were at the crossing point of the lemniscate and that was the time when they implanted into themselves the principle of electrical force. They traversed the return path in the Atlantean period and, in respect of certain forces, in the post-Atlantean period, and at about the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century arrived exactly at the point in the evolution of the cosmos at which they were in the old Lemurian age when they implanted into themselves from the cosmos the principle of electricity. There you have the explanation of how it came about that Galvani discovered electricity at that particular time. Human beings always go back again in later times to what they experienced at an earlier stage. Life takes its course in cycles, in rhythms. In the middle of the materialistic age which had been developing since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, humankind was standing at that point in the cosmos through which it had passed long ago in the Lemurian epoch. And humankind as a whole at that point remembered the entry of electricity into the human being and as a result of this memory endowed the whole of civilization with electricity. The soul and spirit in the human being rediscovered what it had once experienced long ago. Truths like this must be clearly seen again, for it is only with truths like this that we shall escape decadence in the future.
Steiner, Rudolf. A Road to Sacred Creation: Rudolf Steiner's Perspectives on Technology (pp. 73-74). SteinerBooks. Kindle Edition.
So as we ascend into our supernature i.e. the light-filled etheric world of moral impulses, we are
simultaneously descending into our subnature (layers of being woven in past ages) which consists in decaying light i.e. electricity which bears immoral impulses (as is pretty obvious when we consider how our electronic devices can now distract immensely from the task of inner perfection of soul forces, IF we remain experientially unconscious of their spiritual influences). Our spiritual future is made possible by reencountering past 'self-similar' stages of soul experience which were instrumental to our development in prior epochs of existence, but now need to be infused with the higher Light of spiritual consciousness. That is
why we discovered electricity at the time we did. We should understand that one process is always accompanied by the other and only both together can be understood as "spiritual evolution". The risk is not in the fact that subnatural processes are being revealed, because that
must happen for spiritual evolution to unfold, but that we remain unconscious of why it is occurring and therefore cannot find creative pathways of redeeming that subnature, i.e. redirecting its forces towards spiritual ideals. It is the exact same process that happens in our individual striving as well, as we work through the lower soul and bodily nature to ascend into higher spheres of moral imagination, inspiration, and intuition.
Now electrical energy is of such a nature that as a general rule, human beings cannot experience it internally; it remains something external. The nineteenth century achieved a certain greatness, which became even greater than is generally believed, through the rise of electricity. It would be easy to show how infinitely much our present civilization owes to electric power, and how much more it will depend on it in the future, when electric power will be used as it is today without being experienced inwardly. Even more! But it is precisely the power of electricity that has replaced the old, familiar power in the cultural development of humanity, and it is the one through which human beings are intended to mature to a higher level with respect to their moral development. No one using electricity today thinks of it as having any connection with morality. But there is wisdom in the ongoing historical evolution of humanity. People will mature by virtue of the fact that for a time they will be able to bring about even greater harm in the bearer of their lower “I”—their depraved, dissolute egoism—than is already present there in sufficient quantity, as every day now shows us. . . . Electric power, as a cultural force in modern civilization, is the very power that makes this possible.
Steiner, Rudolf. A Road to Sacred Creation: Rudolf Steiner's Perspectives on Technology (pp. 77-78). SteinerBooks. Kindle Edition.