Güney27 wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 1:05 am
Ashvin,
It's always the last part which I can't understand ( :
Can you explain it for dummies?
What makes us free individuals is when we rise above these templated experiences in our sense-free ideas and ideals, which are truly the first-person perspectives of archetypal beings, and thereby participate in creatively and morally shaping the streamlines of destiny.
Guney,
It's true, that last part was commented especially in a very broad and abstract way. Let's try to flesh it out some more.
Remember, all the concepts-ideas presented in these posts are symbolic points of balance that should direct our attention right back at the intuitive thinking activity that is perceiving and contemplating the words. In other words, everything should relate back to the living flow of experience that transforms our current state of being toward more integrated, holistic states that we are aiming for. Think of it like you are in a sailboat on the ocean heading toward some important ports in the distance, amidst surging storm waves of Spiritual Activity that structure the whole of perceptual experience (inner and outer). If you simply flow directly along with the Spirit (wind), the boat runs the risk of getting overwhelmed and flipping over. The conceptual points of balance are like little coves into which our activity can flow, where we can rest our thoughts for a bit and gather our bearings, rig the sails back up, before heading back out to navigate the choppy waters. All of our posts here are not to explain or model the ideal waters, i.e. provide a conceptual model that explains "participating in creatively and morally shaping the streamlines of destiny", but simply gain a more advantageous orientation toward how that idea will be explained from
out of ourselves when we return to sea and experience ourselves engaged in the creative shaping process itself.
To extend this sailboat metaphor further, our local spiritual activity is like when we adjust the sail to
resist the Wind (higher order Spirit that has precipitated into thought, soul, and sensory forms) so it effectively propels us toward our ideal aims. This is especially the case in the state of concentration, where our spiritual activity becomes very firmly planted and also receptive to the surrounding influences that impress their activity, beginning with local soul influences, so we gain flashes of intuition as to how the latter are
always steering our spiritual activity in certain directions. Because it is firmly planet, the activity isn't simply carried away by those influences like a leaf on a stream, like it normally is during sensory life, but can remain firm and gather imaginative impressions of the forces that structure its flow. But this is also the case outside of the concentrated state, when we use our phenomenological thinking activity to probe supersensible realities, or when we resist certain soul inclinations that would otherwise compel our activity during the normal course of the day. For ex., Steiner speaks of how we can practice resisting the speaking forth of habitual thoughts, inwardly or outwardly, that pop into our consciousness. All of these things help us gain intuition about the forces that structure our usual flow of thinking experience and more effectively navigate the ideal waters with our thinking sailboat.
(my cat actually gives me many opportunities to practice this resistance - whenever she does something cute, funny, silly, etc., which is often, and I feel the urge to make some comment on it, I try to remain present and quiet that urge. It's almost as if we are taking the outward flow of speech and redirecting it back inward so its energy can be repurposed for developing inner soul faculties)
What are the ports we are heading to, in a practical sense? These are the sense-free ideals that structure our individual and collective destiny. They precipitate into our Earthly existence as definite ages of Time and quite concrete tasks for each age that should be fulfilled if Earthly humanity is to continue harmonizing its rhythms with those of the Cosmos. For ex., there was a time when ancient cultures organized the reproductive process with alignments of the planets and stars because they knew, at a deeply experiential level, that these indicated that certain souls needed bodies to carry their important work on Earth, whatever that happened to be. As we know, because this flowed through the life of instincts and feeling, rather than lucid thinking, it was practically forced adherence to the Cosmic rhythms. Humanity was weaned off of that forced adherence through the evolution of lucid thinking consciousness. But now we can use that lucid consciousness to trace the karmic interconnections that would allow us to once again provide a favorable environment for incarnating souls. Otherwise, the current stream of humanity risks extinction. This is just one example - practically every sphere of cultural life - politics, economics, science, technology, religion, art, etc. - needs to be reimagined to resonate harmoniously with the higher-order intents.
Before we do that, however, each individual has the task to purify, enliven, and strengthen the soul forces that would allow us to trace those supersensible karmic threads. That task, as with all other tasks, always begins in our thinking. In our thinking, we are still in a dialogue with the higher worlds, which we experience as intuitions, inspirations, imaginations, and concepts (these are all merged together in concepts for the normal consciousness), although it is becoming increasingly tenuous these days. Our feeling and willing activities are structured by the higher worlds, but we have practically no participation in these domains - it is a one-way dialogue. I have noticed on the spiritual path there is always the temptation to try and 'bypass' this concrete overlap in our thinking. Many other approaches promise more quick, intense, revolutionary, etc. experiences of spiritual reality, but for reasons discussed many times before, such as Cleric's last post, all of those are empty promises. We never make it past the soul world with such approaches, which appears as a psychic jungle with no overarching rhyme or reason. So we need to remain trusting and faithful to our lucid spiritual activity, through which we will gradually work our way into the deeper layers of feeling and willing as well.
By working our thinking through these metaphorical ideas about supersensible realities, we are
already re-enlivening our thinking and making our way to a near port in the choppy seas. As long we don't confuse the metaphors for some metaphysical theory about the 'nature of reality' that we can passively absorb, but instead use them as symbols that point back at the ongoing flow of our inner experience, i.e. phenomenology, we are moving our thinking in ways that were simply unsuspected before, attaining new degrees of freedom for our spiritual activity. Right now, as you contemplate the meaning of the words above, you are probing the depths and dynamics of your own thinking. We should fluidly and continually move our intuitive activity through the ideas, read and reread as necessary, and cycle through the same lectures or posts a few times. This will be invaluable for when we engage in deeper concentration exercises through which our spiritual activity can retrace its flow into the deeper layers and find what is presented metaphorically as a completely inner reality. Then we will feel like, 'ok so
this is the inner soul geometry that I had been probing in my thinking with all those posts.'
What is the most crucial part of humanities development in our time.
To get more control over the inner life?
To become more controlling about our lower nature?
Or maybe to understand thinking more deeply?
So I hope it's clear, these three are all the same. By understanding our thinking flow more deeply, and by retracing that flow into the deeper 'wavefunctions' from which our normal sequential thoughts collapse, we also gain consciousness and control over the lower nature and the inner life. Our thinking states are always riding on the waves of these deeper currents and we can only make sense of those states by knowing the currents, which, at the same time, is gaining more creative control over how we shape and harmonize the currents. I will refer here to very
helpful metaphors from Cleric, which was also mentioned to Federica recently.
)
