Re: Esoteric knowledge for skeptics
Posted: Tue Nov 14, 2023 9:51 am
Guney, maybe you can step back for a moment and take a more general view of the matter. As a whole, we all experience the movie of life. While the movie is running, everyone has some idea about its nature. In general, this idea has the form of scientific understanding or some religious myth of how reality came to be and where it is going.Güney27 wrote: ↑Mon Nov 13, 2023 8:35 pm Ashvin,
I have to disagree with that.
So you're saying that just studying occult science changes thinking (consciousness).
In most cases of people who call themselves anthroposophists I have not observed this.
Furthermore, it is of considerable difficulty to understand what you say in the last post.
Furthermore, your post does not explain how one can check whether esoteric statements, such as that before Earth there was another planetary state in which we breathed fire, are true. This must be believed in confidence until one has acquired the ability to see spiritual events.
I myself am fascinated by Steiner's work, but there is a separation between the phenomenology of thinking, which we can all understand when we observe our thinking, as Cleric shows in his essays, and the claim that we can know that esoteric statements are true without having the ability to see clairvoyantly.
In addition to that we can acknowledge the relatively new impulse to delaminate the movie and understand that our human consciousness spans the full depth of reality and as such we’re not separate but can intimately know the spiritual deeds of the Intelligences who support the envelope of the movie, who work out its rhythmic acts and so on. This is new because in the evolution of humanity so far, we have been like babies in the cradle of the Cosmos. Only now we are barely approaching the level of maturity of being able to consciously partake in the creative process that supports the dreamscape and its metamorphoses.
On these grounds, we should really see where we stand. Do we belong to the epoch where we’re fully satisfied with watching the movie pass by while holding some myth in our heart about the greater plot? Or we feel that we’re not yet fully human unless we begin to understand how our own conscious experience is embedded within the spiritual life of the Cosmos?
Today we need to have at least some position on that question. If we fall into the first category, then anything that can be said about reality will seem like a myth. Then we’ll look at Steiner’s cosmology and ask “How can I verify this? Why not believe in the myths of the Greeks or Hindus, or Christians, etc.?”
But if we consider ourselves belonging to the second category, then we really have to struggle with these questions. We can forget about Steiner and spiritual science for a while and start on our own. We can reflect and meditate, thinking from the most varied directions. Basically, all our questions would revolve around something like: “If the movie of life is only a flattened conscious experience, how can delaminate it? How can the knowing essence of my being extend into its depth. In what form can I expect the realities of this depth? What would be the laws of reality in that perspective?” and so on.
In other words, if we feel ourselves in the second category, or at least leaning towards it, such questions should arise in our soul. Then when we encounter the World, the things that hint something about the answers to these questions will stand out.
This can be considered a starting point. If we’re simply looking for the most plausible creation myth, then spiritual science will be perceived on equal footing with any other myth – ancient or modern. But things become different when we realize that spiritual science today doesn’t simply aim to provide another myth but give hints at the answers of these pressing questions. And I say ‘hints’ because the answers really come from our own experience. The hints can only help us assume the proper posture such that we can perceive the facts. And further, when I say ‘spiritual science’, I mean it in a much wider sense. It’s not simply a body of work by Steiner. Just as ‘history’ is not some trademarked endeavor of the human spirit, but it is a very specific experience of knowledge that connects the sensory facts of experience, so spiritual science is the endeavor of the human spirit to enter and intimately know the depth of the movie.
All this comes to say, that we have the proper stance in our age not when we feel that someone tries to advertise a modern creation myth (for which we can always ask “how do I know if it is true”) but when we already feel some pressing questions in our soul. The reason spiritual science (again in the wider sense) is ignored, hated, ridiculed and so on, is simply because most souls do not yet feel the gravity of such questions. Spiritual science gives them answers to questions that they do not ask and may not even realize that such questions can exist, let alone that they may have some relevance to the future of humanity. If we happen to be pressed by such questions, then we’ll very soon see that the vast majority of the so called spirituality of today simply reiterates ancients and modern myths in varying packages. If we seek answers to these questions, then it won’t take long before we begin to recognize the as of yet few places where such things are considered. Then we do not simply ask if the resulting creation myth is the true one but whether our intuitive orientation within the movie improves in face of the communicated facts.
We can ask "but how do I know if there's such thing as soul body, life body, etc.?" Again - this is something that must already be pressing in our consciousness. Think about it: if there are no such depth strata of being, then in what way do we expect this depth to manifest? You see, if we really yearn to be conscious of the movie depth, at some level we should already anticipate something like these strata of manifestation. If we have no such anticipation, then we're really not looking for deeper reality but only more floating stickers on top of the flattened movie.
So, if we are really interested in understanding how our consciousness is embedded within the Cosmic movie context, and how this can give us unsuspected direction in life, together with the strength and sacred joy of following it, then it will very soon be possible to see at a glance what the different philosophies offer in that respect.