Federica wrote: ↑Fri Oct 06, 2023 1:46 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Oct 04, 2023 2:05 pm
Returning to the light-ether, perhaps the following excerpt is instructive:
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA165/En ... 02p01.html
Remembrance is this: the perception from the outer ether of inner etheric movements; the perception from the outer light-ether of movements in the inner light-body: that is, to remember.
Suppose, for example, that you see two men meet each other. Perhaps the one merely sees the face of the other, but because of this certain movements arise in his etheric body. Then he goes his way. The etheric body retains the tendency to repeat these movements if stirred to do so. Five days later these two men meet again. They perceive each other, the one whose light-body is stirred to make the same movements which it made when he saw the other's face before. This is expressed in his consciousness when he says: I have seen this face before. That is: consciousness perceives the inner movements of the light-ether from the light-ether. This is remembrance purely as an act of perception. We can say: in the external light one perceives the movements taking place in the inner light-body. But we do not see them as light movements. Why do we not see them thus in ordinary life? We do not see them as light movements, because this light-ether body is seated within the physical body, and therefore the movements of the light-ether impinge everywhere on the physical body. Through these impacts, the light movements of the etheric body are transformed into memory pictures. These light movements are not perceptible, it is only through what the memory presents to us through contact with the physical body that we are aware of them.
It seems to me that the faculty of
memory directly corresponds to the quality of previous states of being consciously superimposed on our current state of being. From a strictly phenomenological perspective, that is basically how we experience memories (...)
Thanks for adding a reference to my questions on the nature of spiritual light, Ashvin.
I feel I'm somewhat behind on life ether, I haven't read the relevant lectures and I only have in mind Cleric's posts, so I'm not yet able to connect those dots, but I have a note on the nature of memory as you have described it.
I can't see how the underlined statement connects with the preceding quote, as well as with the way memory has been often characterized here, that is as the only constraint to the flow of becoming, that can only be experienced as coherent flow when the first-person perspective understands every time-frame as self-similarly linked to the previously experienced ones, that are embedded, or nested, in the subsequent ones as memory. How do you go from vertically nested succession of events to horizontal alternative storylines in the characterization of memory? It seems to me that memory is the opposite of superposition of states of being. And Steiner's quote speaks of the event of
remembrance, not of the faculty of memory. He speaks of how an event triggers a specific remembrance of a past event. Aren't these two different things? (Despite that in English memory means both the faculty and the specific thought image occasionally recalled).
Superposition has to be horizontal, right? And when we recall a past event, and bring it all the way to the now, from the past, I wouldn't say the current event and the past one are superimposed, since they are not alternative storylines. They are both realized parts of our becoming, they have both collapsed in our karma, and are vertically related. Alternative superimposed storylines stand with each other, or interfere, in a quite different way: they express potential, as it seems to me. Could you say more about why you see memory as superimposed states?
Federica,
I am not sure why you are characterizing the 'alternative storylines' or 'superposition' as "horizontal" in this context. In my view, these storylines are our dim way of thinking about the superimposed, vertically nested potential in which our states of being unfold. In response to Cleric's previous post, for ex., I had mentioned how we often evaluate the
value of decisions we are making, whether utility value or moral value (which can overlap), by comparing them to alternate branching structures of our stream that will unfold (for decisions not yet made) or would have unfolded (for decisions completed). So, in that sense, the alternative storylines act as background meaningful context in our stream of becoming, which is just as
practically significant for how our stream will unfold as the frames of our stream which are experienced as actualized. Our normal memory stream that is tied to intellectual consciousness only resonates with the 'actualized' frames, but as our thinking consciousness expands outwards via higher development we can begin to also intuitively resonate with what we normally experience as 'what could have happened'. In other words, we could experience 'what could have happened' as intimate and integral to our stream as we normally experience 'what did happen'. That doesn't mean we suddenly start fantasizing that we ate caviar for breakfast and went skydiving when we actually ate cereal and went to work, but only that we have a keener sense of how the possibilities that didn't actualize 'interfered' to result in that which moved our will in a certain direction towards what actualized.
Now, for me, this is just speculation about the higher essence of our memory faculty based on conceptual reasoning through what I have encountered in esoteric science, including Cleric's posts on this forum. I don't have any intimate experience with this vertically expanded memory. But if we just look at our phenomenal experience of normal memory, the latter is also experienced as 'past' states of being superimposed on our present state of being. Like you said, the stream of memory is experienced as being
embedded in our current state. In contrast, an animal can hardly experience any past states superimosed on its present state. We can also think about how much we
miss in our previous actualized states experienced as memory - if we could revisit those states with the same intensity as if they are presently happening, how much more insight could we extract from them once our intuitive consciousness deepens? Theoretically there is no upper limit to that possibility. We can imagine that, in every 'next state' we transition to, we actually transition to
all possible states, but only those that resonate with a certain constellation of self-similar states are actually experienced as 'next'. Through higher development, this constellation expands because we become intimately related to more states of being, i.e. our interest expands to encompass the first-person soul-life of more beings.
We could imagine that the
whole potential of humanity has manifested itself in the differentiated streams of becoming for individual humans across the globe (or in disincarnate states), with various perspectives-experiences based on soul factors, life factors, and physical factors evenly distributed. The path of spiritual evolution will lead our individual stream to integrate with all others and eventually experience those 'other streams' as our own, including what they went through
before we integrated with them. Or, put another way, the "before" and "after" integration will lose its meaning for our stream. That has already happened to some limited extent over the last 2,500 years or so and accounts for modern cultural evolution, in which broader swaths of individuals are able to thoughtfully communicate and work towards shared ideals with each other independently of gender, tribe, race, nationality, etc. Cleric touched on the much more expanded extent of this development in the context of the Jupiter evolution:
Cleric wrote:Man in the next aeon will be a new being. As the Jupiter stage is re-created from the spiritual potential it is like the evolutionary journey is recapitulated. An interesting example of such recapitulation can be observed in the way the human embryo quickly passes through its evolutionary stages. In the early stages it is difficult to distinguish human embryo from fish embryo, then from amphibian, from mammalian (remember that we have a tail that is then reabsorbed). But while other animal forms stop at a certain stage, the human being continues to its human form.
On Jupiter man evolves once again to his fully conscious state but in a different environment. There is no rigid mineral world, reality is of Imaginative nature. But this new man is now at a different ‘scale’ so to speak. It is similar to what the Angelic beings are today.
Now the critical point, however, is that when we reach self-consciousness again at that stage, we’ll be able to remember the Earthly aeon but there’s something very peculiar. That new man won’t be able to say for example “In the Earthly aeon I went through this and this incarnation. In one particular incarnation I was called Eugene.” This is very significant. There’s no one-to-one ‘mapping’ between the future man in the next aeon and our present man-unit. Instead, the future man feels himself as if he was already present in the Earthly aeon but was not fully conscious. But the interesting thing is that that man lived in whole groups of human beings, very roughly analogously to the way our “I” lives in the group of cells of our body.
...
It is necessary that we conceive of this higher man, as something that exists even at this moment in its germinal beginnings. But more importantly, we have to conceive of that being as something independent from our human-scale sense of self. It penetrates our being, we share one essence, it secretly attracts our becoming, yet there’s no strict one-to-one correspondence between our sense of “I”-unit and that of the higher man. The reason is that this being lives in other souls too. We can’t simply say “I’m that higher being” because what about the other souls? If everyone claims that they are the higher being, a fight will ensue. For this reason, the proper attitude is to have clear consciousness that that being lives in its germinal beginnings and acts as attractor of our evolutionary worldline and at the same time we’re collectively responsible for that being because after Pralaya it will evolve out of the karma that we have collectively weaved.
Another abstract way to characterize the above is to say, on Jupiter the new man will have consciously mastered the etheric movements that weave his memory experience into connection with many other humans, which is already the case but mostly obscured from our intellectual consciousness and its limited capacity for resonance (which is rooted in a lack of genuine interest, reverence, and love for our fellow beings). The fact that this higher 'man'
already exists and is attracting our stream of becoming is quite important to recognize for our discussion here. In the context of QM science-philosophy we often speak of these things as metaphors, analogies, and so forth for higher realities, and that is generally the proper way to proceed, but they are not
merely metaphors in the ordinary sense. They are also literally true, in so far as they point to concrete ideational perspectives that encompass broader spheres of potential states than our own current perspective. These are the more universal perspectives we experience every sleep and after death, where our "I" participates in intentionally weaving the curvatures of morphic spaces through which our relatively fragmented Earthly states of being have unfolded and will continue to unfold.