I notice that when I think about how my thinking is structured by deeper layers, it becomes incomprehensible to me how my physical nature (physical body) comes into being, since, like thought, it also reaches a crystallized level.AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Jan 25, 2024 8:59 pmGüney27 wrote: ↑Wed Jan 24, 2024 12:57 am Ps: steiner himself really describes the occult realities, in a way that we understand them as sensory and space like phenomena.
How can he don't know that people will get it wrong?
For example:
Or"This is clear to straightforward observation as an inner experience, but for the Initiate the astral body can become an outer reality. The Initiate sees this third member of man as an egg-shaped cloud which not only surrounds the body, but permeates it. If we “suggest away” the physical body and also the etheric body, what we shall see will be a delicate cloud of light, inwardly full of movement. Within this cloud or aura the Initiate sees every desire, every impulse, as colour and form in the astral body. For example, he sees intense passion flashing like rays of lightning out of the astral body.
In animals the basic colour of the astral body varies with the species: a lion's astral body has a different basic colour from that of a lamb. Even in human beings the colour is not always the same, and if you train yourself to be sensitive to delicate nuances, you will be able to recognise a man's temperament and general disposition by his aura. Nervous people have a dappled aura; the spots are not static but keep on lighting up and fading away. This is always so, and is why the aura cannot be painted."
If I didn't came across this forum, I would understand this in a total different way.Anyone who wants to know the nature of the etheric body by direct vision must be able to maintain his ordinary consciousness intact and “suggest away” the physical body by the strength of his own will. The gap left will, however, not be empty; he will see before him the etheric body glowing with a reddish-blue light like a phantom, but with radiance a little darker than young peach blossom. We never see an etheric body if we “suggest away” a crystal; but in the case of a plant or animal we do, for it is the etheric body that is responsible for nutrition, growth and reproduction.
Guney, these are interesting questions you pose. I will just comment on this one for now, with a quote I recently came across:
Steiner wrote:In the purely spiritual state, we do not experience a physical and etheric human organism as belonging to us as we do when we are sleeping. We experience these organisms in a totally different way. We experience their foundations in cosmic worlds. We experience how these organisms evolve out of the spiritual cosmos. We behold a spiritual cosmos. This spiritual cosmos is the spiritual part of the germ of the physical earthly organism with which we will be united in future. When we speak of a germ in this context we are describing something that is the opposite of what we call a germ in the physical sense. Usually, when we speak of “germ” in this connection, we mean the minute physical beginning of a growing, expanding organism or structure. But the spiritual organism, made up of powers or forces, which one sees in one's pre-earthly spiritual existence in connection with one's essence, is huge and continually contracts, as it were, until finally it grows together with the physical germ. We use the terms huge and minute in this context, but we must always bear in mind that the events in the spiritual world are spiritual. Space in the physical sense does not exist there. The terms are therefore used only as images for something spiritual, entirely non-spatial, and purely qualitative.
We will find many similar comments throughout the lectures, but given the sheer volume of material, it will seem like they are few and far between. This just means that it is up to us to make the effort to remember the proper relation here - spiritual relations are non-spatial, purely ideal/qualitative, yet these relations clearly can be condensed into sense-like, spatial phenomena. Consider how we can take temporal events of our lives and condense them into a photobook of images, side by side in space. Or imagine how you could take purely inner states of emotions, desires, and ideas and record them in a journal over the course of time. Then you have access to these temporally extended inner states in space. It is a similar principle at work with the quotes you shared above.
Imagine if Steiner put this bolded caveat into every other paragraph of a lecture he was giving - then people would complain the lectures take forever to get through and are too repetitive! Furthermore, a major part of our spiritual development comes from working through the resistance of ingrained spatial thinking habits so we develop much stronger inner forces. Remember, this is the whole telos of spiritual evolution - that beings gradually perfect their inner forces, take up their productive roles in Cosmic evolution, and provide the ideal support for new waves of beings to awaken and develop. It is because these concepts can so easily be taken in the wrong way that they can also become so inwardly productive when we orient toward them properly.
I would also remind of this post - viewtopic.php?p=22825#p22825. Did it make sense for you at the time?
I think unconsciously in a dualistic way because I experience a difference between the inner world and the outer sensory world.
But I can't explain it exactly.
And I still have the tendency to understand this currents abstract, like something we see before or minds eye.
I didn't manage do get rid of it yet.