A Disconnect

[Anthony66]

One thing that has been animating me of late is what I perceive as a disconnect between various elements of esoteric/SS spiritual practice. On one hand we have the classical spiritual practices of prayer, devotion, ethical/moral development and the reading of spiritual texts. But then when we turn to meditation, it has the character of learning to speed read or leaning a memory system. For example concentrating on a mental image such as a dot or the vowels exercise seem so...unspiritual. These latter practices seem in tension with the norms of saints throughout the ages, e.g. Meister Eckhart, where we have Bhaktic posturing and trying to be empty within to allow the mystery of God become real. And this means letting go of the contents of consciousness.

An answer I would give to myself is that these concentration exercises are preliminaries and will lead one to imaginative cognition. But to go beyond that, Steiner advises one to use this strengthened thinking to drive the images out of consciousness and so yield an empty mind. So while not appearing terribly spiritual, these early exercises develop a necessary toolkit for later use.

I'm aware that some of this may reignite the Eugene/Cleric/Ashvin battles of old

[Cleric K]

One thing that has been animating me of late is what I perceive as a disconnect between various elements of esoteric/SS spiritual practice. On one hand we have the classical spiritual practices of prayer, devotion, ethical/moral development and the reading of spiritual texts. But then when we turn to meditation, it has the character of learning to speed read or leaning a memory system. For example concentrating on a mental image such as a dot or the vowels exercise seem so...unspiritual. These latter practices seem in tension with the norms of saints throughout the ages, e.g. Meister Eckhart, where we have Bhaktic posturing and trying to be empty within to allow the mystery of God become real. And this means letting go of the contents of consciousness.

An answer I would give to myself is that these concentration exercises are preliminaries and will lead one to imaginative cognition. But to go beyond that, Steiner advises one to use this strengthened thinking to drive the images out of consciousness and so yield an empty mind. So while not appearing terribly spiritual, these early exercises develop a necessary toolkit for later use.

I'm aware that some of this may reignite the Eugene/Cleric/Ashvin battles of old

Anthony, if I understand rightly, you see the disconnect between the technical (unspiritual) concentration and the consequent emptying of consciousness from contents. Thus the natural question is: "How do I know if I've had enough playing around with dots and vowels and it is time to start emptying the mind, such that the truly spiritual can fill me in?" We have spoken about this many times and tried to explain that they are not in contradiction. Let's try once more.

First, we have to understand that our thinking process is the most spiritually real thing we know. I'm not speaking about the semi-automatic words that we hear all the time but the energetic spiritual activity through which we recognize our existence. Everything else which we consider supremely spiritual - God, Angels, the mystical states of the masters - all of this, at least initially, exists for us only as mental pictures. We may have incredibly powerful religious feelings pulsating as an aura clothing these mental images but if we are perfectly honest, we'll have concede that whatever these mental images represent, is far less spiritually real than the living thinking process which brings them forth. Just ask yourself: what is more real - the Angel, which I don't even know how to conceive, or my thinking process through which I'm conscious of my spiritual existence? I'm getting banal here but: what's more alive - the tree or the apple that has fallen off the tree?

This is the first step. Unless we're struck by the lightning of insight and realize that our thinking process is the most spiritual part of our human experience, we'll keep looking for the spiritual only as some vague expectation, as something that we hope one day will peek behind the curtains of phantasmagoria. Yes, our thinking process seems absolutely insignificant on the face of the limitless Cosmos but at the same time it is the only instance of the Divine Process that we experience.

The second thing depends on our understanding of the first. If we simply empty the mind in the obvious sense, we'll remain in the world of powerful religious feelings. We'll find God but as a feeling. When our thinking comes back to its senses, we say "I felt God in everything." Yes, we felt the Divine but our "I" still remains on the other side of God.

All this happens because we don't appreciate the small. We jump straight for the grand, the 'spiritual', but that is really only a mental picture loaded with powerful expectations. We don't need to go far to see that Wisdom has spoken:

The Kingdom of Heaven is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field; which indeed is smaller than all seeds but when it is grown, it is greater than the herbs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in its branches.

If we don't recognize the Spirit in its smallest manifestation, we simply can't find it anywhere else. We prefer the idols which are great, shiny, 'spiritual', yet their supposed reality always remains on the other side of our thinking mustard seed.

That's why we keep stressing that our meditation is not simply a technical act. There's something sacred concealed in the process that pops out thought after thought, which can be known not by simply clearing our mind and expecting to perceive or feel it, but when we're willing to admit that there might by something far more powerful pulsing behind the facade of our earthly "I". This something can manifest a tiny spark of its infinity only if we surrender our dreamy self and are willing to allow a little bit of a far wiser and loving being to awaken from within our perspective - that is, to see ourselves through the consciousness of this being. A being from whose perspective our Earthly self is what the glove is for the hand.

When we concentrate, we're not idolizing our thought images, believing that it is a necessary boredom that we have to endure before we can see God. This would indeed be highly unspiritual. No, the concentration is needed in order to shed the crude clothes of thinking and come to know the living Spirit that animates the thoughts. When this concentration goes further and further, the clothes naturally fade away - this is the driving away of images. However, there's great difference whether we put out the soul imagery and remain in an empty container filled with religious feelings or we put out the imagery as an act of undressing the Spirit. Then we also reach the state of Cosmic infinitude, yet we now come to know that in this tiny thought process, the Divine Spirit has been concealed. This is the mighty tree that can grow from the mustard seed in the course of evolution.

I hope it is clear how great the difference is between the kind of humility that worships the spiritual and even empties its mind in order to feel its insignificance in the bosom of God, and the kind of humility that acknowledges that we need to sacrifice our Earthly persona for the truly spiritual to awaken within our perspective, and to live in the stream of Divine Thoughts.

Are those two situations understood? Is it clear that the second goes further and knows God not only as a mighty feeling, but from within the creative process of His Spirit. Could there by anything more spiritual than living as one with the creative process of the Spirit?

[Güney27]

One thing that has been animating me of late is what I perceive as a disconnect between various elements of esoteric/SS spiritual practice. On one hand we have the classical spiritual practices of prayer, devotion, ethical/moral development and the reading of spiritual texts. But then when we turn to meditation, it has the character of learning to speed read or leaning a memory system. For example concentrating on a mental image such as a dot or the vowels exercise seem so...unspiritual. These latter practices seem in tension with the norms of saints throughout the ages, e.g. Meister Eckhart, where we have Bhaktic posturing and trying to be empty within to allow the mystery of God become real. And this means letting go of the contents of consciousness.

An answer I would give to myself is that these concentration exercises are preliminaries and will lead one to imaginative cognition. But to go beyond that, Steiner advises one to use this strengthened thinking to drive the images out of consciousness and so yield an empty mind. So while not appearing terribly spiritual, these early exercises develop a necessary toolkit for later use.

I'm aware that some of this may reignite the Eugene/Cleric/Ashvin battles of old

Hi Anthony,
I can very well understand that you find these exercises unspiritual. One want to do exercises in which one see colored fractals in the soul space, coupled with an adventurous feeling. You often hear something like this from reports from people who consume psychoactive substances.


However, I would say that we should not look for spiritual satisfaction in exotic fantasies,
but in our experience.
Think of Cleric's last essay, if we try to live through and search for what has been written in our inner experience, we come to the fact that we permanently live in a consciousness that gives us orientation.

We live in an intuitive consciousness when we have perceptions.
This awareness explains our perception. We live in the meaning, the meaning.
We can focus on these through our thinking and thus freeze them.
Once we understand this, we become aware that in our everyday experience we constantly have an invisible and spiritual layer that makes our experience in the world possible.

So we are already active in our thinking, in a spiritual way.

The exact reason for the difference of the exercises (Clerics and Steiners concentration and eastern/mystical methods of emptying)
I can not tell you.
I think others will be able to explain the difference.

[AshvinP]

One thing that has been animating me of late is what I perceive as a disconnect between various elements of esoteric/SS spiritual practice. On one hand we have the classical spiritual practices of prayer, devotion, ethical/moral development and the reading of spiritual texts. But then when we turn to meditation, it has the character of learning to speed read or leaning a memory system. For example concentrating on a mental image such as a dot or the vowels exercise seem so...unspiritual. These latter practices seem in tension with the norms of saints throughout the ages, e.g. Meister Eckhart, where we have Bhaktic posturing and trying to be empty within to allow the mystery of God become real. And this means letting go of the contents of consciousness.

An answer I would give to myself is that these concentration exercises are preliminaries and will lead one to imaginative cognition. But to go beyond that, Steiner advises one to use this strengthened thinking to drive the images out of consciousness and so yield an empty mind. So while not appearing terribly spiritual, these early exercises develop a necessary toolkit for later use.

I'm aware that some of this may reignite the Eugene/Cleric/Ashvin battles of old

Anthony,

From a more conceptual angle of what Cleric and Guney already mentioned, we could consider the nature of evolutionary progression in general. We need to decouple the idea of evolution from our phantom intuition that it takes millions of years for anything of significance to change. That is simply an extrapolation of mineral laws into the domains of life, soul, and spirit, which as we have seen before, cannot even help us gain insight into how a living cell functions and evolves, let alone human spiritual activity. That decoupling can be supported by focusing on the metamorphoses of human culture over a few thousand years or even a few hundred years. Already in PoF, we come across the following:

Evolution is understood to mean the real development of the later out of the earlier in accordance with natural law. In the organic world, evolution is understood to mean that the later (more perfect) organic forms are real descendants of the earlier (imperfect) forms, and have developed from them in accordance with natural laws. The adherents of the theory of organic evolution ought really to picture to themselves that there was once a time on our earth when a being could have followed with his own eyes the gradual development of reptiles out of proto-amniotes, had he been able to be there at the time as an observer, endowed with a sufficiently long span of life. Similarly, evolutionists ought to picture to themselves that a being could have watched the development of the solar system out of the Kant-Laplace primordial nebula, had he been able to remain in a suitable spot out in the cosmic world ether during that infinitely long time. That with such mental pictures, the nature of both the proto-amniotes and the Kant-Laplace cosmic nebula would have to be thought of differently from the way the materialist thinkers do, is here irrelevant. But no evolutionist should ever dream of maintaining that he could get the concept of the reptile, with all its characteristics, out of his concept of the proto-amniotic animal, if he had never seen a reptile. Just as little would it be possible to derive the solar system from the concept of the Kant-Laplace nebula, if this concept of a primordial nebula is thought of as being directly determined only by the percept of the primordial nebula. In other words, if the evolutionist is to think consistently, he is bound to maintain that later phases of evolution do actually result from earlier ones, and that once we have been given the concept of the imperfect and that of the perfect, we can see the connection; but on no account should he agree that the concept attained from the earlier is, in itself, sufficient for evolving the later out of it.
...
But can we not then make the old a measure for the new? Is not every man compelled to measure the products of his moral imagination by the standard of traditional moral doctrines? For something that should reveal itself as morally productive, this would be just as absurd as to want to measure a new form in nature by an old one and say that, because reptiles do not conform to the proto-amniotes, they are an unjustifiable (pathological) form.

Our time is marked by people of widely varying religious, philosophical, scientific, political, economic, etc. outlooks all finding common ground in the desire to rest their current thoughts, feelings, and actions on the ideas and traditions of the past, as if the course of future evolution will miraculously be revealed through a linear extrapolation of those past forms. Think about this in the context of modern science - at every paradigmatic revolution in scientific understanding, the old scientists said the new pioneers were being 'unscientific' because they fell into the trap described above. They couldn't imagine that their current scientific concepts at the time were only the dream images of more encompassing paradigms of scientific thinking that were unfolding. It is the same reason the modern spiritualists call the new paradigm of spiritual seeking 'unspiritual' because they have deviated from the mystics and saints of old. As always, an understanding of the new paradigm can illuminate and elucidate the old, but not the other way around.

As Cleric pointed out, reality has evolved so that we are now free at the tip of our thinking - that is where we truly participate in the Divine Life. This is not our normal thinking conditioned to sensory impressions and lower soul impulses, which obviously dictate how our thinking should proceed. We have very few degrees of freedom when thinking is led around by personal desires, feelings, and sensory impressions. Yet in our sense-free imaginative thinking, such as we pursue in concentration, finally, the appearance meets the 'thing-in-itself' - the causative Idea finds its own reflection. There is no need to ask why the thought-image appears or its meaning because the answer is embedded in the experience of our own willed activity - the thought-image is immediately elucidated at an intuitive level by our own activity.

This thought-concentration is only the seed point from which we can grow into the higher cognitive realms in freedom. In a sense, we can expand the freedom of our thinking "I" into these deeper archetypal layers of feeling and willing from which the manifest World is structured. These are the layers that the mystics and saints were given access to through Divine Grace, but notice how that still leaves them unfree in a certain way. They are still interacting with the Spirit of their own being as if with something external (not in every case, but as a general rule). We can go through the same experiences but remain fully present during the whole process through the link of our thinking "I" kernel, thereby gaining concrete insight into how we are already participating in planning and administering the future course of evolution.

The most important thing to notice is that this gives every seeking individual a way to simultaneously spiritualize the World as they spiritual their own soul-structure. It is time for humanity to transition from being only consumers of spiritual wisdom to also becoming co-creative producers with the Spirit. We are actually awakening to how the World has always evolved through those spirits who could experience the archetypal Ideas of the Divine Life in adavnce of their manifestafion. These experiences were then condensed into images and concepts which informed every advance in human culture. Only by more and more individuals experiencing such a participatory awakening can the redemptive Earthly mission be fulfilled.

"Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now."

[Anthony66]

One thing that has been animating me of late is what I perceive as a disconnect between various elements of esoteric/SS spiritual practice. On one hand we have the classical spiritual practices of prayer, devotion, ethical/moral development and the reading of spiritual texts. But then when we turn to meditation, it has the character of learning to speed read or leaning a memory system. For example concentrating on a mental image such as a dot or the vowels exercise seem so...unspiritual. These latter practices seem in tension with the norms of saints throughout the ages, e.g. Meister Eckhart, where we have Bhaktic posturing and trying to be empty within to allow the mystery of God become real. And this means letting go of the contents of consciousness.

An answer I would give to myself is that these concentration exercises are preliminaries and will lead one to imaginative cognition. But to go beyond that, Steiner advises one to use this strengthened thinking to drive the images out of consciousness and so yield an empty mind. So while not appearing terribly spiritual, these early exercises develop a necessary toolkit for later use.

I'm aware that some of this may reignite the Eugene/Cleric/Ashvin battles of old

Anthony, if I understand rightly, you see the disconnect between the technical (unspiritual) concentration and the consequent emptying of consciousness from contents. Thus the natural question is: "How do I know if I've had enough playing around with dots and vowels and it is time to start emptying the mind, such that the truly spiritual can fill me in?" We have spoken about this many times and tried to explain that they are not in contradiction. Let's try once more.

First, we have to understand that our thinking process is the most spiritually real thing we know. I'm not speaking about the semi-automatic words that we hear all the time but the energetic spiritual activity through which we recognize our existence. Everything else which we consider supremely spiritual - God, Angels, the mystical states of the masters - all of this, at least initially, exists for us only as mental pictures. We may have incredibly powerful religious feelings pulsating as an aura clothing these mental images but if we are perfectly honest, we'll have concede that whatever these mental images represent, is far less spiritually real than the living thinking process which brings them forth. Just ask yourself: what is more real - the Angel, which I don't even know how to conceive, or my thinking process through which I'm conscious of my spiritual existence? I'm getting banal here but: what's more alive - the tree or the apple that has fallen off the tree?

This is the first step. Unless we're struck by the lightning of insight and realize that our thinking process is the most spiritual part of our human experience, we'll keep looking for the spiritual only as some vague expectation, as something that we hope one day will peek behind the curtains of phantasmagoria. Yes, our thinking process seems absolutely insignificant on the face of the limitless Cosmos but at the same time it is the only instance of the Divine Process that we experience.

The second thing depends on our understanding of the first. If we simply empty the mind in the obvious sense, we'll remain in the world of powerful religious feelings. We'll find God but as a feeling. When our thinking comes back to its senses, we say "I felt God in everything." Yes, we felt the Divine but our "I" still remains on the other side of God.

All this happens because we don't appreciate the small. We jump straight for the grand, the 'spiritual', but that is really only a mental picture loaded with powerful expectations. We don't need to go far to see that Wisdom has spoken:

The Kingdom of Heaven is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field; which indeed is smaller than all seeds but when it is grown, it is greater than the herbs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in its branches.

If we don't recognize the Spirit in its smallest manifestation, we simply can't find it anywhere else. We prefer the idols which are great, shiny, 'spiritual', yet their supposed reality always remains on the other side of our thinking mustard seed.

That's why we keep stressing that our meditation is not simply a technical act. There's something sacred concealed in the process that pops out thought after thought, which can be known not by simply clearing our mind and expecting to perceive or feel it, but when we're willing to admit that there might by something far more powerful pulsing behind the facade of our earthly "I". This something can manifest a tiny spark of its infinity only if we surrender our dreamy self and are willing to allow a little bit of a far wiser and loving being to awaken from within our perspective - that is, to see ourselves through the consciousness of this being. A being from whose perspective our Earthly self is what the glove is for the hand.

When we concentrate, we're not idolizing our thought images, believing that it is a necessary boredom that we have to endure before we can see God. This would indeed be highly unspiritual. No, the concentration is needed in order to shed the crude clothes of thinking and come to know the living Spirit that animates the thoughts. When this concentration goes further and further, the clothes naturally fade away - this is the driving away of images. However, there's great difference whether we put out the soul imagery and remain in an empty container filled with religious feelings or we put out the imagery as an act of undressing the Spirit. Then we also reach the state of Cosmic infinitude, yet we now come to know that in this tiny thought process, the Divine Spirit has been concealed. This is the mighty tree that can grow from the mustard seed in the course of evolution.

I hope it is clear how great the difference is between the kind of humility that worships the spiritual and even empties its mind in order to feel its insignificance in the bosom of God, and the kind of humility that acknowledges that we need to sacrifice our Earthly persona for the truly spiritual to awaken within our perspective, and to live in the stream of Divine Thoughts.

Are those two situations understood? Is it clear that the second goes further and knows God not only as a mighty feeling, but from within the creative process of His Spirit. Could there by anything more spiritual than living as one with the creative process of the Spirit?

Cleric,

I've read your response here a number of times in the days since you posted it and it is finally started to resonate.

Much of what you write is irrefutable. But the connection between spiritual activity and thinking would be challenged by the average theist who would want to maintain a separation between the activity of higher realms and our activity. The transcendent God of classical theism maintains a fundamental creator/creation separation. But yes, all of this is metaphysical speculation and inference.

I still have an inclination in me that finds it preferable to direct one's eyes heavenward rather than on dots and vowels, albeit understanding why one is better placed to grow one's perspective from small to big and greater levels of encompassing thinking. Whether that translates to focusing on the inner stillness or the shiny spiritual godlike images, it seems more aligned with spiritual tradition of which I've had a lifetime of.

[Cleric K]

Cleric,

I've read your response here a number of times in the days since you posted it and it is finally started to resonate.

Much of what you write is irrefutable. But the connection between spiritual activity and thinking would be challenged by the average theist who would want to maintain a separation between the activity of higher realms and our activity. The transcendent God of classical theism maintains a fundamental creator/creation separation. But yes, all of this is metaphysical speculation and inference.

I still have an inclination in me that finds it preferable to direct one's eyes heavenward rather than on dots and vowels, albeit understanding why one is better placed to grow one's perspective from small to big and greater levels of encompassing thinking. Whether that translates to focusing on the inner stillness or the shiny spiritual godlike images, it seems more aligned with spiritual tradition of which I've had a lifetime of.

I see. Well, it really boils down to self-determination. You've had a lifetime of tradition, yet you are still looking for something. The question is whether you are seeking the bridge between the creator/creation separation or you simply seek some thoughts and feelings that can make your life in the creation pole more fulfilling?

I think the idea that God maintains this fundamental separation has no real ground, even in the scriptures:

21 That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.
22 And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one:
23 I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.

In fact, the whole Christ event can be understood as the act through which God initiates the bridging of the chasm between the World (perceptions) and His Spirit. Comprehending the Christ mystery is ultimately about overcoming death while still in the body. This is not about some theoretical comprehension but actual transformation of our whole mode of being. We are moved from the position of an onlooker/commenter on creation (a position which is necessarily brought to an end at the moment of death) to the very center of Cosmic unfolding, which is the same both within and outside the web of sensory entanglement. The new testament can only be fulfilled through our I's perspective. Two thousand years ago people could behold the Christ in a body as onlookers and comment on the events to this day, but now He can only be known in Spirit and Truth.

So it is really a question of where do we place ourselves in this Cosmic drama. Could it be that the separation doctrine is used as some kind of buffer, which gives us the piece of mind that we can mind our own Earthly business, while God takes care of his Divine work? And if we feel that to become human in the full sense we need to find our spiritual being as embedded within the Divine Being, then how do we initiate this process?

[Anthony66]

One thing that has been animating me of late is what I perceive as a disconnect between various elements of esoteric/SS spiritual practice. On one hand we have the classical spiritual practices of prayer, devotion, ethical/moral development and the reading of spiritual texts. But then when we turn to meditation, it has the character of learning to speed read or leaning a memory system. For example concentrating on a mental image such as a dot or the vowels exercise seem so...unspiritual. These latter practices seem in tension with the norms of saints throughout the ages, e.g. Meister Eckhart, where we have Bhaktic posturing and trying to be empty within to allow the mystery of God become real. And this means letting go of the contents of consciousness.

An answer I would give to myself is that these concentration exercises are preliminaries and will lead one to imaginative cognition. But to go beyond that, Steiner advises one to use this strengthened thinking to drive the images out of consciousness and so yield an empty mind. So while not appearing terribly spiritual, these early exercises develop a necessary toolkit for later use.

I'm aware that some of this may reignite the Eugene/Cleric/Ashvin battles of old

Anthony,

From a more conceptual angle of what Cleric and Guney already mentioned, we could consider the nature of evolutionary progression in general. We need to decouple the idea of evolution from our phantom intuition that it takes millions of years for anything of significance to change. That is simply an extrapolation of mineral laws into the domains of life, soul, and spirit, which as we have seen before, cannot even help us gain insight into how a living cell functions and evolves, let alone human spiritual activity. That decoupling can be supported by focusing on the metamorphoses of human culture over a few thousand years or even a few hundred years. Already in PoF, we come across the following:

Evolution is understood to mean the real development of the later out of the earlier in accordance with natural law. In the organic world, evolution is understood to mean that the later (more perfect) organic forms are real descendants of the earlier (imperfect) forms, and have developed from them in accordance with natural laws. The adherents of the theory of organic evolution ought really to picture to themselves that there was once a time on our earth when a being could have followed with his own eyes the gradual development of reptiles out of proto-amniotes, had he been able to be there at the time as an observer, endowed with a sufficiently long span of life. Similarly, evolutionists ought to picture to themselves that a being could have watched the development of the solar system out of the Kant-Laplace primordial nebula, had he been able to remain in a suitable spot out in the cosmic world ether during that infinitely long time. That with such mental pictures, the nature of both the proto-amniotes and the Kant-Laplace cosmic nebula would have to be thought of differently from the way the materialist thinkers do, is here irrelevant. But no evolutionist should ever dream of maintaining that he could get the concept of the reptile, with all its characteristics, out of his concept of the proto-amniotic animal, if he had never seen a reptile. Just as little would it be possible to derive the solar system from the concept of the Kant-Laplace nebula, if this concept of a primordial nebula is thought of as being directly determined only by the percept of the primordial nebula. In other words, if the evolutionist is to think consistently, he is bound to maintain that later phases of evolution do actually result from earlier ones, and that once we have been given the concept of the imperfect and that of the perfect, we can see the connection; but on no account should he agree that the concept attained from the earlier is, in itself, sufficient for evolving the later out of it.
...
But can we not then make the old a measure for the new? Is not every man compelled to measure the products of his moral imagination by the standard of traditional moral doctrines? For something that should reveal itself as morally productive, this would be just as absurd as to want to measure a new form in nature by an old one and say that, because reptiles do not conform to the proto-amniotes, they are an unjustifiable (pathological) form.

Our time is marked by people of widely varying religious, philosophical, scientific, political, economic, etc. outlooks all finding common ground in the desire to rest their current thoughts, feelings, and actions on the ideas and traditions of the past, as if the course of future evolution will miraculously be revealed through a linear extrapolation of those past forms. Think about this in the context of modern science - at every paradigmatic revolution in scientific understanding, the old scientists said the new pioneers were being 'unscientific' because they fell into the trap described above. They couldn't imagine that their current scientific concepts at the time were only the dream images of more encompassing paradigms of scientific thinking that were unfolding. It is the same reason the modern spiritualists call the new paradigm of spiritual seeking 'unspiritual' because they have deviated from the mystics and saints of old. As always, an understanding of the new paradigm can illuminate and elucidate the old, but not the other way around.

As Cleric pointed out, reality has evolved so that we are now free at the tip of our thinking - that is where we truly participate in the Divine Life. This is not our normal thinking conditioned to sensory impressions and lower soul impulses, which obviously dictate how our thinking should proceed. We have very few degrees of freedom when thinking is led around by personal desires, feelings, and sensory impressions. Yet in our sense-free imaginative thinking, such as we pursue in concentration, finally, the appearance meets the 'thing-in-itself' - the causative Idea finds its own reflection. There is no need to ask why the thought-image appears or its meaning because the answer is embedded in the experience of our own willed activity - the thought-image is immediately elucidated at an intuitive level by our own activity.

This thought-concentration is only the seed point from which we can grow into the higher cognitive realms in freedom. In a sense, we can expand the freedom of our thinking "I" into these deeper archetypal layers of feeling and willing from which the manifest World is structured. These are the layers that the mystics and saints were given access to through Divine Grace, but notice how that still leaves them unfree in a certain way. They are still interacting with the Spirit of their own being as if with something external (not in every case, but as a general rule). We can go through the same experiences but remain fully present during the whole process through the link of our thinking "I" kernel, thereby gaining concrete insight into how we are already participating in planning and administering the future course of evolution.

The most important thing to notice is that this gives every seeking individual a way to simultaneously spiritualize the World as they spiritual their own soul-structure. It is time for humanity to transition from being only consumers of spiritual wisdom to also becoming co-creative producers with the Spirit. We are actually awakening to how the World has always evolved through those spirits who could experience the archetypal Ideas of the Divine Life in adavnce of their manifestafion. These experiences were then condensed into images and concepts which informed every advance in human culture. Only by more and more individuals experiencing such a participatory awakening can the redemptive Earthly mission be fulfilled.

"Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now."

Ashvin,

You highlight the importance of growing outward/upward from the seed point but I'm not really seeing how you are addressing my question of the disconnect. I think this was in part some of Eugene's issue, the novelty of the SS approach in contrast to the spiritual traditions. I can take on board the evolution of the human being in general but I'm still struggling to parse exactly what is said here. I will continue re-reading.

[AshvinP]

One thing that has been animating me of late is what I perceive as a disconnect between various elements of esoteric/SS spiritual practice. On one hand we have the classical spiritual practices of prayer, devotion, ethical/moral development and the reading of spiritual texts. But then when we turn to meditation, it has the character of learning to speed read or leaning a memory system. For example concentrating on a mental image such as a dot or the vowels exercise seem so...unspiritual. These latter practices seem in tension with the norms of saints throughout the ages, e.g. Meister Eckhart, where we have Bhaktic posturing and trying to be empty within to allow the mystery of God become real. And this means letting go of the contents of consciousness.

An answer I would give to myself is that these concentration exercises are preliminaries and will lead one to imaginative cognition. But to go beyond that, Steiner advises one to use this strengthened thinking to drive the images out of consciousness and so yield an empty mind. So while not appearing terribly spiritual, these early exercises develop a necessary toolkit for later use.

I'm aware that some of this may reignite the Eugene/Cleric/Ashvin battles of old

Anthony,

From a more conceptual angle of what Cleric and Guney already mentioned, we could consider the nature of evolutionary progression in general. We need to decouple the idea of evolution from our phantom intuition that it takes millions of years for anything of significance to change. That is simply an extrapolation of mineral laws into the domains of life, soul, and spirit, which as we have seen before, cannot even help us gain insight into how a living cell functions and evolves, let alone human spiritual activity. That decoupling can be supported by focusing on the metamorphoses of human culture over a few thousand years or even a few hundred years. Already in PoF, we come across the following:

Evolution is understood to mean the real development of the later out of the earlier in accordance with natural law. In the organic world, evolution is understood to mean that the later (more perfect) organic forms are real descendants of the earlier (imperfect) forms, and have developed from them in accordance with natural laws. The adherents of the theory of organic evolution ought really to picture to themselves that there was once a time on our earth when a being could have followed with his own eyes the gradual development of reptiles out of proto-amniotes, had he been able to be there at the time as an observer, endowed with a sufficiently long span of life. Similarly, evolutionists ought to picture to themselves that a being could have watched the development of the solar system out of the Kant-Laplace primordial nebula, had he been able to remain in a suitable spot out in the cosmic world ether during that infinitely long time. That with such mental pictures, the nature of both the proto-amniotes and the Kant-Laplace cosmic nebula would have to be thought of differently from the way the materialist thinkers do, is here irrelevant. But no evolutionist should ever dream of maintaining that he could get the concept of the reptile, with all its characteristics, out of his concept of the proto-amniotic animal, if he had never seen a reptile. Just as little would it be possible to derive the solar system from the concept of the Kant-Laplace nebula, if this concept of a primordial nebula is thought of as being directly determined only by the percept of the primordial nebula. In other words, if the evolutionist is to think consistently, he is bound to maintain that later phases of evolution do actually result from earlier ones, and that once we have been given the concept of the imperfect and that of the perfect, we can see the connection; but on no account should he agree that the concept attained from the earlier is, in itself, sufficient for evolving the later out of it.
...
But can we not then make the old a measure for the new? Is not every man compelled to measure the products of his moral imagination by the standard of traditional moral doctrines? For something that should reveal itself as morally productive, this would be just as absurd as to want to measure a new form in nature by an old one and say that, because reptiles do not conform to the proto-amniotes, they are an unjustifiable (pathological) form.

Our time is marked by people of widely varying religious, philosophical, scientific, political, economic, etc. outlooks all finding common ground in the desire to rest their current thoughts, feelings, and actions on the ideas and traditions of the past, as if the course of future evolution will miraculously be revealed through a linear extrapolation of those past forms. Think about this in the context of modern science - at every paradigmatic revolution in scientific understanding, the old scientists said the new pioneers were being 'unscientific' because they fell into the trap described above. They couldn't imagine that their current scientific concepts at the time were only the dream images of more encompassing paradigms of scientific thinking that were unfolding. It is the same reason the modern spiritualists call the new paradigm of spiritual seeking 'unspiritual' because they have deviated from the mystics and saints of old. As always, an understanding of the new paradigm can illuminate and elucidate the old, but not the other way around.

As Cleric pointed out, reality has evolved so that we are now free at the tip of our thinking - that is where we truly participate in the Divine Life. This is not our normal thinking conditioned to sensory impressions and lower soul impulses, which obviously dictate how our thinking should proceed. We have very few degrees of freedom when thinking is led around by personal desires, feelings, and sensory impressions. Yet in our sense-free imaginative thinking, such as we pursue in concentration, finally, the appearance meets the 'thing-in-itself' - the causative Idea finds its own reflection. There is no need to ask why the thought-image appears or its meaning because the answer is embedded in the experience of our own willed activity - the thought-image is immediately elucidated at an intuitive level by our own activity.

This thought-concentration is only the seed point from which we can grow into the higher cognitive realms in freedom. In a sense, we can expand the freedom of our thinking "I" into these deeper archetypal layers of feeling and willing from which the manifest World is structured. These are the layers that the mystics and saints were given access to through Divine Grace, but notice how that still leaves them unfree in a certain way. They are still interacting with the Spirit of their own being as if with something external (not in every case, but as a general rule). We can go through the same experiences but remain fully present during the whole process through the link of our thinking "I" kernel, thereby gaining concrete insight into how we are already participating in planning and administering the future course of evolution.

The most important thing to notice is that this gives every seeking individual a way to simultaneously spiritualize the World as they spiritual their own soul-structure. It is time for humanity to transition from being only consumers of spiritual wisdom to also becoming co-creative producers with the Spirit. We are actually awakening to how the World has always evolved through those spirits who could experience the archetypal Ideas of the Divine Life in adavnce of their manifestafion. These experiences were then condensed into images and concepts which informed every advance in human culture. Only by more and more individuals experiencing such a participatory awakening can the redemptive Earthly mission be fulfilled.

"Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now."

Ashvin,

You highlight the importance of growing outward/upward from the seed point but I'm not really seeing how you are addressing my question of the disconnect. I think this was in part some of Eugene's issue, the novelty of the SS approach in contrast to the spiritual traditions. I can take on board the evolution of the human being in general but I'm still struggling to parse exactly what is said here. I will continue re-reading.

Anthony,

It was simply a broad conceptual look at how we came to the point where the Spirit can only be found in its 'smallest' manifestation, i.e. at the tip of our thinking, the 'dots and vowels' that become the objects of our concentration. I didn't really go into any details of this evolution but was only pointing to the fact that it has taken place and how, throughout all of modern history, the old vanguard has resisted recognition of this fact of evolution at every step. That is why people so often have 'issues' with the novelty of modern initiation through the portal of thinking, just as the Newtonian had 'issues' with the new thinkers who embraced the 'strange' yet undeniable dynamics of spacetime suggested by GR and QM.

So we should really try to sense the evolution of consciousness in a concrete way - this is not the evolution of ideas, but the evolution of the very intuitive activity through which we form ideas and perceive the World. By perceiving this overarching context, we also understand how every outlook served an adaptive purpose and fit into the broader stream of humanity's intelligent guidance back to the spiritual. Now we have arrived at the point where the most adaptive approach is to inwardly examine the means by which we adapt - intuitive activity.

Another way to consider it - the spiritual traditions were all aimed at cultivating moral virtues, correct? Regardless of how they got there, that is what the saints and mystics of old all had in common. It is in this way that the earthly personality becomes more and more self-similar to the Divine beings who manifest the meaningful contexts of nature and culture, through intuitive activity that is concentric with our own, and therefore experience something of the higher consciousness within their perspective. The problem is that, in the modern age, we developed a major split in our be-ing between the domains of objective knowledge and moral virtues. We can think about one thing via philosophy, religion, or science and act in complete opposition to that content of our thinking.

That is the case with all modern intellectual thinkers, materialist or idealist, secular or religious. The materialist, if he was true to the content of his thinking, would immediately give up trying to understand reality, because the means by which he does that is only the result of mindless chemical reactions. And the same thing applies for the analytic idealist or mystic who denies that thinking representations are symbols for something deeper in reality that can be known. This should stop all further thought-out discussion of reality if taken seriously. Fortunately for humanity, the deeper layers of our be-ing, our higher intuitive self, is not bound by the contents of our current philosophical, religious, and scientific thinking. It continues to think through reality even when the contents of that thinking suggest we should stop all thinking.

Modern initiation is a concrete way to bridge the contents of our thinking with what we are always presupposing and doing with our thinking - to bridge the objective knowledge of modern thinking man with the moral virtues of the saints and mystics. That is what we have always been discussing - how to spiral the two poles together without forsaking either one. It is when the source of our moral intuitions - intuitive thinking - also becomes the object of our knowledge. And we also shouldn't forget that cultivating the virtues is still essential for that bridge. That is why so much emphasis is placed on the six 'basic' exercises, for ex. (1) control of thought, (2) control of will, (3) equanimity, (4) positive attitude, (5) open-mindedness, (6) rhythmic alternation through the previous ones. If we leap straight for the big and shiny spiritual experiences, we completely miss these 'basic' exercises that will propel us through the pinhole of thinking concentration.

[Stranger]

One thing that has been animating me of late is what I perceive as a disconnect between various elements of esoteric/SS spiritual practice. On one hand we have the classical spiritual practices of prayer, devotion, ethical/moral development and the reading of spiritual texts. But then when we turn to meditation, it has the character of learning to speed read or leaning a memory system. For example concentrating on a mental image such as a dot or the vowels exercise seem so...unspiritual. These latter practices seem in tension with the norms of saints throughout the ages, e.g. Meister Eckhart, where we have Bhaktic posturing and trying to be empty within to allow the mystery of God become real. And this means letting go of the contents of consciousness.

An answer I would give to myself is that these concentration exercises are preliminaries and will lead one to imaginative cognition. But to go beyond that, Steiner advises one to use this strengthened thinking to drive the images out of consciousness and so yield an empty mind. So while not appearing terribly spiritual, these early exercises develop a necessary toolkit for later use.

I'm aware that some of this may reignite the Eugene/Cleric/Ashvin battles of old

I agree, Anthony, and in a more general sense I find Steiner's approach too reductionist: anthroposophy overemphasizes Thinking and neglects the infinite richness of consciousness that has so many other facets beyond Thinking (even including higher cognition levels of imaginative, intuitive and inspirational thinking), and even beyond feeling and willing, and these neglected facets, IMO, have no less importance than thinking with all of its ideational content. As a result, Anthroposophy converged into Platonic kind of idealism where all richness of the reality of Consciousness is reduced to ideas only (Reality=Idea). Nobody denies the place and importance of Thinking and its content (ideas, meanings), but reducing all the richness of reality to only Thinking and the Idea is a gross reductionism.

[lorenzop]

Also, Steiner entices his followers with the promise of acquiring shiny subtle objects he labels as 'spiritual', but are simply finer levels of relative existence - if these objects exist at all.