Anthroposophy for Dummies

[AshvinP]

I am also curious, though, if you could elaborate on why you feel this discontinuity. For instance, you seem to grasp quite well the phenomenological method of Cleric's GL essays, feeling that they helpfully orient your imagination toward supersensible realities, and are enthusiastic to continue that exploration. Yet when a very similar method is applied to elucidating the nature of 'elemental beings', you feel it has become too abstract and impersonal, and presumably not too helpful for understanding such beings. Do you have any thoughts on why that may be, where the difference may reside?

Hi Ashvin and Cleric
Yes, that's right. I suspect the discontinuity arises mainly because I haven't yet been able to establish the right relation with the descriptions you both have provided, or with the numerous descriptions from other practitioners who can "directly" encounter such elemental beings on an intuitive level. In particular, I'm also aware that Bardon offers a path of training to become an adept here, which is something different from being an initiate or a clairvoyant (Steiner describes the distinction between the three very well), so perhaps that’s part of the reason as well.

Maybe it's also a matter of time, and it simply takes time. It's probably because I haven't delved deeply enough into the material yet. I’ve also been thinking about starting over from scratch. Somehow, I don't seem to be making much progress in general recently.

That makes sense. It's difficult when our attention is drawn in many different directions, with our worldly studies, work, other personal situations, the ideas of various philosophers and esotericists, and so on. For me, in meditation, it is quite helpful to close my eyes and simply attempt to feel these attractors of my present state more closely, pushing and pulling it from the 'periphery'. In other words, we don't need to immediately concentrate on an image and hope to make some clearly detectable progress, but can just take a few seconds to 'recalibrate' our perspective on the experiential flow. Literally only a few seconds of that recalibration will offset much of the discalibration that generally takes place throughout the day, as our imagination is dragged from one elemental moment to the next, seeking to satisfy one myopic attractor or another. We should feel how we are continually a part of this 'tug-of-war' on our existential state, and a key part of the inner work is simply maintaining our ground with brief exercises here and there.

It also helps me to reflect on striking inner experiences from meditative practice and their significance (even from months or years ago), perhaps by contemplating how my present state would be quite different without them. This shouldn't be done during meditation, where we need to strive to kindle new experiences rather than rest our inner activity on memories of old ones, but it can become a useful strategy whenever we are thinking about these things intellectually, and we are having a hard time appreciating their importance and why they matter in the bigger picture. In other words, we can learn to not only wait for our perspective to change through exercises, but to actively contemplate the fact that it is changing in some intuitively felt ways.

For instance, you have mentioned your breakthrough experiences with the stretching exercises, even if they were fleeting (as is usually the case). You can try to feel how such experiences have slightly expanded your imaginative palette, the inner 'buttons' you can press when interfacing with reality. We should try to feel how the palette of our potential state transitions has slightly morphed in the wake of these experiences, allowing us to probe otherwise unsuspected 'dimensions' of our human existence. Now we can think, feel, and will in slightly different ways than ordinary life, education, and so on conditioned us to. This helps to cultivate some interest and enthusiasm for exploring the phenomenological foundations further, which, when considered only abstractly, can seem quite trivial and boring compared to the magical operations and so forth described by adepts. In the end, everything we contemplate in this respect should be related back to our concrete flow of experience. Then the nature of the deeper esoteric descriptions will naturally fall into place without too much intellectual effort, i.e., attempts to forcibly harmonize the facts and cram them into an encompassing and coherent tableau.

Time is indeed also a critical factor. The more we develop a sensitivity to the value of the phenomenological path, the more at peace we feel with Time and its rotations. Then, when something confusing presents itself, we don't feel rushed to cram it into our previous intellectual understanding, but can trust that it will find its proper place in our intuitive context as we patiently explore the inner constraints and allow our soul rotations to play out. Certain esoteric concepts will then naturally remind us of characteristic inner experiences that help us relate to them in an organic, open-ended way.

[AshvinP]

...

This helps to cultivate some interest and enthusiasm for exploring the phenomenological foundations further, which, when considered only abstractly, can seem quite trivial and boring compared to the magical operations and so forth described by adepts. In the end, everything we contemplate in this respect should be related back to our concrete flow of experience. Then the nature of the deeper esoteric descriptions will naturally fall into place without too much intellectual effort, i.e., attempts to forcibly harmonize the facts and cram them into an encompassing and coherent tableau.

Kaje,

I'd like to highlight another way we can reinforce our phenomenological explorations. As Cleric mentioned before, the modern intellect has developed to the point that many of its conceptual explorations can become almost literal expressions of higher-order dynamics when viewed from a healthy intuitive perspective (in contrast to the Hermetic age, where there was still a lot of indirectness between mental images and their points of convergence). That is true not only for those who consciously try to present those dynamics, but also for many thinkers who are simply trying to understand the flow in a more experiential, intuitive way. We have pointed attention to Levin and Hoffman before (I am currently working on an essay that will try to leverage the latter's Trace Model to elucidate the spiritual scientific method and some of its insights).

Even more directly expressed, in my view, are some of JP's lectures. I believe he is currently ill, but as he recovers, his organization has been sharing some lectures from his academic courses. The following lecture deals with Mircea Eliade and his work on initiatory practices. JP generally does a great job relating everything discussed to concrete aspects of experience. For me, it is very helpful to listen to such lectures while driving, walking, and so on. They don't demand as much close attention as Steiner's lectures - you could get distracted and tune out for a few seconds or even minutes, yet still have a good sense of the inner dynamics being explored. Because of that, it is sometimes easier to cultivate interest and motivation in this direction, since we often lack motivation when we feel something may be too difficult to deal with and we're not sure whether we will understand it properly or what we will gain from it.

I think you will see how closely many of the concepts discussed point toward similar inner dynamics that we explore here through spiritual phenomenology. This can be a fruitful way to anchor and refine our orientation to those dynamics. For those lacking any previous encounter with spiritual phenomenology, it can all remain quite abstract, or at least limited to narrow intuitions about the flow of ordinary Earthly life. Yet if we have any intimate familiarity with the axis of higher cognition and the evolutionary process, then the concepts explored feel even more helpful and profound. For example, there is a brief discussion of 'sacred time' and how it contrasts with our familiar linear experience of marching frames. Such a discussion can anchor our independent exploration of what it means for our daily states to be embedded in the overlapping rotations of persistent tendencies.