AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Dec 08, 2023 5:32 pm
lorenzop wrote: ↑Fri Dec 08, 2023 4:07 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Dec 08, 2023 1:17 pm
I don't see any 'list of right actions' above. My question was simple - are you redefining 'spiritual' to
exclude the Buddhist eightfold path? What is an example of spirituality that still had its edge, according to you?
Depends on the context - for civilians on the street - I would refer to Christianity\Buddhism\etc. as spiritual practices even with their faults.
In this forum I reserve spirituality to refer to 'recognizing one's true nature'.
Christianity\Buddhism\etc. have lost their way and as a substitute largely offer right behavior, giving back, justice, compassion, etc. There is nothing wrong with this - it's not anybody's fault - this is the best most pastors\rabbis\priests can offer.
Anthroposophy suggests the self can be 'fixed', just get your thinking\feeling right and you can extend the self into a World Content of Eternal Ideas . . . you'll even be able to report on all your past and future deaths. It's better than biological immortality.
I agree, the core of all ancient spiritual practices has been 'recognizing one's true nature'. And many of those practices have fallen into decadence more recently. In a certain sense, they came to rely on the
outermost expression of the original practices, which stemmed from genuine insight into the interweaving threads of spiritual activity and forms. The ideas of charity, justice, compassion, etc. used to be based on genuine insight into how our inner activity relates to the inner activity of many other beings and how our corresponding deeds feedback into the quality of those inner streams of experience. All of this was known in an instinctive or dreamy way, the same way we intuitively know that we exist, that we have certain memories that constellate our stream of experience, and that we have a certain orientation to the places, things, and beings around us. We don't need to know all those things in clear-cut concepts for them to be integrated into the way we experience and interact with the World.
Modern initiation, which includes but is not limited to Anthroposophy, is simply about recovering that original wisdom, the original genuine insight into one's true nature, in full lucidity. It is about bringing that intuitive insight of our stream of experience into clearer focus. All of this begins at the place where that stream of experience is
already in clear focus - our rhythm of sensing and thinking. It is from here that we can radiate out into the deeper layers of feeling and willed activity that inform all genuine spirituality and their corresponding practices.
For ex. imagine you are stopped at a stop sign and need to turn left. For that, you need to cross two lanes of traffic going from your left to right and merge into another lane of traffic going from right to left. What do you do? First, you visually sense the oncoming cars in either direction, looking left and right. These visual sensations stimulate your thinking to expand into a broader intuitive context of principles that help you
anticipate the future. In this case, you expand into the intuition of how distance and speed relate to the time it takes for moving objects to reach certain locations, both the other vehicles and your own. The whole time you are also rhythmically moving back to the sensations and allowing those to feed back into your expansive intuitive context that anctipates the future. All of this rhythmic activity takes place very quickly and smoothly without you needing to explore it in clear-cut concepts. Even without such concepts, we can know it is
actually happening and we can later use our concepts to make this experience clearer to ourselves like we are doing now.
If we're not willing to concretely experience what we are
already doing with our inner activity at all times, then there is no chance of attaining a genuine spirituality that recovers the original wisdom, i..e that goes beyond the outermost expressions of dogmas and moral precepts and penetrates the inner reasons for why those expressions came into being and how they help us attune to our true inner nature. As we can see, there is nothing at all shiny or secretive about this process, unless we call our current experience of reality and how we engage with it, such as when we need to turn left at a stop sign, 'shiny and secretive'. It is not a matter of debate, either. We cannot deny this rhythmic experience of reality any more than we can deny the rhythms of day and night, waking and sleeping. That following the threads of our living experience happens to lead into the profound reservoirs of ancient wisdom is not surprising either. The only question is whether we have any interest in delving deeper into that living experience or we would rather remain speculating and philosophizing about 'spirituality' from a safe distance.