Anthroposophy as Fascio

[Federica]

I may also disagree with many scientists or philosophers, but that does not mean I deny the validity of science or philosophy as a method of acquiring knowledge. This is the difference between the scientific and sectarian approaches. In the scientific and philosophical approach people admit that they can be wrong, they take their views hypothetically, and many of them indeed were wrong with their theories or philosophies, including the most leading scientists or philosophers. In the sectarian approach it is unthinkable, they consider their views to be always true and any other views not aligned with them always by default wrong, especially when related to the founders of their sects. If Steiner would really be a scientist, he would present his teachings as assumptive, as all good scientists and philosophers do, but instead, he and his followers accepted them as the truth in its final form with no possibility of being wrong. And as I said, in the spiritual realm it is especially important to be skeptical and exercise spiritual discernment because it is very easy to become deceived by imposter discarnate beings. I do not claim that Steiner got his esoteric knowledge from the dualistic hierarchies, but I'm just pointing to the possibility of it being quite real, for a simple reason that I don't see even a glimpse into Oneness in his teachings (in the way it was pointed to by Christ or in the Eastern nondual traditions), but instead, a very assertive denial of it: " It is precisely of this oneness-striving that one must be cured if one wishes to stand correctly in the spiritual world."

Everyone besides you, Eugene, must have noticed how this piece that you have written is once again stuffed with contradictions:


- You say that good scientists and philosophers take their views "hypothetically”, still you do not take your views hypothetically at all, suffice to notice how you use Oneness as the absolute of absolutes, by means of which you decree either the seriousness or the sectarianism of any other views. For some strange reason, you are - in your own vision of taking own views hypothetically - the only one benefitting from a special exemption. An exemption that entitles you to not take your views hypothetically, as it appears.


- You claim that you grasp the meaning and the limitations of intellectual, abstract modeling, compared to first-person, experiential, living understanding. To be on the safe side when stating or implying such claims, you have even adopted the habit of replicating Cleric’s wording of this idea. Still, you keep on falling in the trap of confusing the methodologies set by the philosophy of science for science - and more and more adopted by philosophy at large as well - for the knowledge one can start growing into when aspiring to discover the truth of reality, when engaging the path of REAL first person understanding, when the experience of understanding is brought within, enlivened from within, rather than looked at, examined from a distance, as an external phenomenon.


Sadly, you still don’t get the difference between the established good practices for approximating - or mimicking through models - the DYNAMICS OF THE SCREEN OF PERCEPTIONS, I.E. THE VEIL, (for ex. falsifiability principle) and the practices and methods of Spiritual Science, that allow us to deploy our higher sense organs, to gradually FIND (find! not create, or replicate!) a path to the Truth of universal reality BEYOND THE PERCEPTUAL VEIL.
Inevitably, when one mixes up the levels of the two quests/inquiries - the one beneath the veil, with the one across the veil, then it’s easy to believe that one can grasp the higher level from the perspective, and with the methods, of the lower. That’s how you end up extending the methods of secular science, where any claims for truth could be called “sectarian”, to Spiritual Science. Basically you do that because you don’t know any other methods. So you make do with what you have - materialistic methodology - not realizing that, in so doing, you exclude for yourself the possibility to FIND a path to Truth. Parallel to that, you still utter an aspiration to truth, but lacking any methods, other than the materialistic, to inflow such wording with meaning, you are faced with the impossibility of moving beyond abstract words, and with the plague of permanent self-contradiction.


What’s going on is this. Instead of finding the elevated path on the RIDGE of the polar balance between the extremes of idealized sense-free oneness (mysticism) and idealized sense-dense multiplicity (materialism) you are torn apart, half of you smashed onto the vertical axis of Oneness, where the depth of multiplicity is endlessly molded into trivial duality, and the other half of you left agonizing against the opposite flat wall of materialism-compliant methodology, where multiplicity is deified and iconized, i.e. endlessly replicated with models, that obviously have to admit they can be wrong, just so the theorizing process itself can be idealized, and kept going.


Manifestly, when you spend all your vital energy keeping such extreme split open, smashing your self-function onto both reductionist asymptotes at the same time, the vertical and the horizontal, the mystical and the materialistic, then the unified middle ground, the synthesis, the central ridge, the high path, spiraling the extreme opposites into unity, remains invisible. Inevitably, any help to DISCERN (not create, as one would create a theory!) the high path on the ridge of true knowledge, on the way to inner discovery of Truth, and any encouragement to start walking the path, will be judged through the lens of materialistic inquiry, and called “sectarian”.


Again, when one self-limits oneself to the methods applicable in the sense-bound lands of “good science and good philosophy” - where activity is focused on producing the ultimate reading grid for perception of sense phenomena (mainstream science) and perception of thought phenomena (mainstream philosophy) - of course coherent practice has to incorporate “the possibility of being wrong”, the possibility that the next best model could approximate the flow of perception more fittingly. No reasonable theorist would claim that their grid is the ultimate and only one, that they behold the truth of phenomena.
Your mistake is to naively extend such contextual methods to the pursuit (not the creation! as one would create a model!) of Truth beyond the screen of perceptions. Your particular position (compared to Lou’s, Mike’s, and others’) where you attempt to adhere to BOTH opposite asymptotes of materialistic methods and mystic affirmations, is probably the hardest, most contradictory, and impossible to maintain. It forces you to what I would call a superstitious view. One can sense the essence of this superstitious approach when you speak of the deceiving dual hierarchies and luciferic beings, for example. One can feel the fear. Superstition is always associated with fear. Unfortunately your understanding of the Christ events, your understanding of Oneness, is not liberating you from fear. This is because it is abstract, affirmed understanding, it’s conjured up. If you were to really gradually grow into understanding, you would gradually dissolve all fear and need to superstitiously throw up demiurgic theories.




PS. Let’s incidentally remember that we still have no explanation of:

1. what the affirmed “Divine hierarchies” are in your vision, and how they square with the statement that our connection to Source is direct.
2. a hierarchy that’s not “nested whatsoever” but “commonly rooted” (Lou’s tip). How does it work? What is its raison d’être?

Lou, Mike, Lorenzo, anyone else - maybe you want to try and come to help?

[Anthony66]

Ashvin, I know, you were offering yet another concrete and well substantiated illustration to help. My point is that, at this stage, it's very likely to be useless. Let's even say, I am convinced it's useless, and maybe even counterproductive. You and Cleric have been offering countless posts, pages and pages and pages of insightful illustrations. Every post is like a pristine lake, in which reflection the intellectual arrangements jubilate and take delight in admiring themselves, without ever dipping not even the little finger, let alone letting the substance of the waters purify and inflow understanding.
I am still happy and thankful for all your attempts, insofar as they are precious for us who are interested in improving our understanding, but as far as Eugene's position goes, they defeat the purpose of helping him make any progress. As you recently noticed, he has not changed one iota in his beliefs since last year. So, unfortunately, people are not "interested in now understanding what it means more precisely, even if they didn't earlier or contradicted themselves". The pattern of these exchanges has now continued for long, and it is repeating itself ad nauseam. Enough is enough. Evidently, it's not possible to build anything at all, before the old constructions are dismantled. So the only way is to bring to the surface and under the spotlight, the continuously overlooked contradictions. It has to be made incontrovertible how one is crushed by his own abstract concepts, as soon as they are made the foundation of beliefs of choice that remain in the blind spot, taken for higher revelations. Dismantling is gross and not fun, still it is necessary groundwork. I can do it, it's unskilled work, that doesn't require much competence or expertise.

This counsel seems to assume that convincing another is achieved through "countless posts, pages and pages and pages of insightful illustrations". But in matters of which are discussed here, a new perspective can shine forth from a single phrase. I know that is true of myself - often a few words from a many thousand word post can have the greatest weight. And insights don't happen linearly or formulaically. I know of people who have been exposed to the Christian message for decades and then one day the lights came on and it finally makes sense to them.

Indeed, we disagree here, Anthony. It seems evident to me that the development of a truthful understanding of reality takes time, effort, work, and is therefore necessarily progressive. For this reason, pages and pages of posts are indeed helpful - for those who are interested in acting towards such a progression. Believing that one can always have a revelation, or Eureka moment, and suddenly understand everything in a blink of an eye is, to me, an unreasonable, passive, dreamy perspective, that discounts the importance of continued, intentional effort. This does not mean that the progression is linear, or formulaic. I certainly don't exclude that miracles can happen, and that people can discover in themselves a faithful feeling from one moment to the next. Would such sudden feelings grant solid understanding of reality? I don't think so. The path of living thinking is not the same as the feeling of having opened oneself to religious faith, as revelation. As Cleric and Ashvin often say, for present-day humanity the path of knowledge has to take the way of willed cognitive intent. We have not gone (and still going) through centuries of materialistic development of the rational individuated mind - with the correlated levels of suffering and destruction - just for nothing. Oftentimes it's helpful to try to not overlook the big picture of human trajectory, keeping things in perspective, rather than dreaming about the bliss of faith descending on us as grace and out of nowhere, which has for corollary that we can always remain hopeful that it can happen, even without purposefully imparting much direction to our activity. As Klocek pointed out in The Seer Handbook, the childhood of humanity is behind us. Now we need to take initiative and responsibility. We cannot count on divine grace mysteriously descending on us and magically transforming our feeling and thinking.

And remember that there are the onlookers like me who have benefited greatly from these interactions. I haven't posted much lately due to the business of work but also because Eugene has done such a great job in stimulating the various responses and illustrations from you guys.

Maybe my language was bad or unclear? I not only remember that there are onlookers, but I explicitly said that, in the post that you have quoted: "I am still happy and thankful for all your attempts, insofar as they are precious for us who are interested in improving our understanding".

I'd also add that I don't think "side SS" has really displayed an understanding of non-dual experience. There have been the many illustrations of the Oneness/Manyness spectrum, but I've never got the sense that the seismic shift in perspective described by those who have a non-dual awakening is appreciated and explained.

Well, this is disappointing to read, Anthony. Bluntly said, non-dual awakening is a soul experience, or perspective, or condition. Its phenomenology has been appreciated and explained at incredible levels of length, and depth, by Cleric and Ashvin throughout these conversations. If you have never gotten the sense of either these explanations, or the mind-boggling levels of pretentiousness and self-contradiction expressed in Eugene's discourse, and your overall selective impression is that of "a great job", well maybe you should pause and reassess, what is the nature of that interest that you have been expressing in the path of living thinking? What are your true inner drivers? Because that interest seems quite incompatible with the sentiment and stance you seem to come from in this post.

My push back was directed advocating giving up on someone because they have not to this point adopted your way of thinking despite the many, many pages of dialog. As I've said a number of times, SS is difficult and someone unlikely to grasp things in any a progressive manner like learning the rules of a particular game of cards. Rather there are more likely to be a series of "aha" moments that may happen over months or years. And I'm not talking about miracles or revelations or suggesting some will "understand everything in a blink of an eye". Patience is my plea.

And I don't appreciate suggestions that my inner motivations are somehow defective. Perhaps the pause and reassessment needs to center on this:

Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.’ I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.

Cleric and Ashvin have indeed offered an abundance of illuminating posts on so many aspects of spiritual matters for which I'm enormously grateful. But it is my judgment that there have been a number of occasions when the non-dual position has not been steel-manned or that misconceptions were demonstrated. And so much of the argumentation has had the form of non-dual says X, but forget X, and see how much better Y is according to SS (and Y is wonderful but we still desire to better understand X in light of Y).

[AshvinP]

Cleric and Ashvin have indeed offered an abundance of illuminating posts on so many aspects of spiritual matters for which I'm enormously grateful. But it is my judgment that there have been a number of occasions when the non-dual position has not been steel-manned or that misconceptions were demonstrated. And so much of the argumentation has had the form of non-dual says X, but forget X, and see how much better Y is according to SS (and Y is wonderful but we still desire to better understand X in light of Y).

Anthony,

It would help if you could point to something concrete here so we can further explore the topic. Obviously from the perspective of Federica and myself, Cleric has provided endless illustrations of exactly what you ask for above - the steel-manned non-dual position and the careful first-person reasoning through why the position is flawed in its claims of 'pure Oneness'. For ex. the TCOCT essays. There was no "forget X" argument there, in fact we got detailed info about why X arises in the first place. The same could be said of many other posts. You are probably just as familiar with them as we are, so we need you to point to something specific. What exactly is being misconceived about the non-dual position?

I think I already addressed the 'perspective shift' argument, which from Eugene's own admission, doesn't lead to any deeper understanding into how activity in the soul-spirit worlds influence the precise unfolding of events on the physical plane and vice versa. Again, is that a shift in perspective or simply an enlargement of one's personal happiness and satisfaction? From the spiritual scientific perspective, the latter cannot at all be equated with the former and, moreover, will only last on this side of the threshold.

[Anthony66]

I'd also add that I don't think "side SS" has really displayed an understanding of non-dual experience. There have been the many illustrations of the Oneness/Manyness spectrum, but I've never got the sense that the seismic shift in perspective described by those who have a non-dual awakening is appreciated and explained.

Anthony,

I think part of the issue here is that the seismic shift in perspective through the higher cognitive path is also vastly under-appreciated. Perhaps it is conceived like reaching up towards Oneness but bouncing back into all sorts of differentiated structures on the way there. But as Cleric has mentioned and illustrated many times, the 'non-dual awakening' is the very beginning of the higher cognitive path. Imagine you step outside and see the flowers, the trees, the birds, the air irradiated by light, the clouds, the sky, the Sun, and you immediately have a concrete sense of how a symphony of elemental and archetypal spiritual activity has temporally woven this unique holistic perspective through the evolving life of your body, soul and spirit. It is like the 'Eureka' moments we normally have when contemplating something except a few orders of magnitude more powerful, experienced and understood from the inside-out. We have a living, textured sense of where it all came from, where it is heading, why, and what our concrete role is in fulfilling the interweaving intents. I myself am relying on such a crude description from lack of experience and lack of capacity to translate the little experience I have into 'intellectual grunts' on the keyboard, but the overall point is that these are completely unimagined and unsuspected experiences from the intellectual perspective.

I think Cleric has given us very concrete reasoning in the TCT essays and elsewhere why the intellectual cognitive perspective is maintained on the path of 'nondual awakening' which does not understand its concentrated thought-life as the tip of a temporally extended cascade of inner desires, preferences, interests, character, temperament, familial and cultural context, gender context, etc. It simply views examining and working to trace those influences as beneath its purview, an unnecessary frolic in the 'dual world'. And we already know what sort of work needs to be done due to our familiarity with life and learning new skills - we need to study hard with impeccable dispassionate reasoning, to be persistent, patient, dedicated, to remain wondrous, open and, yes, even deferential to the wisdom of those who have already learned the skills. There is perhaps nothing more resisted by the modern mystics than that last one - just look at the title of this thread. These things go without saying if we are trying to learn how to fly a rocket into space, but are viewed as tyrannical if we are trying to learn to responsibly steer our thinking activity through the inner worlds which are the true Cosmic worlds.

Without that work, the genuine spirit worlds simply don't open to us - we can't unveil the living tones and speech of differentiated beings within what we experience to be the 'infinite space of awareness'. So where exactly is the seismic shift in perspective if the living and evolving processes of the Earth and Cosmos in which we are embedded are not further elucidated? Does this shift in perspective feedback into and inform the art of healing, the pursuit of science, the teaching of children, or anything similar? All these take on new artistic depths of practical meaning through higher cognitive research in ways we normally can't fathom. So I think the question is, what does it actually mean to 'shift in perspective'? If it simply means we experience new and profound personal feelings of peace, connectedness, compassion, etc., then yes sure many paths will lead us there. But if it means we begin to understand the destinies of individuals, nations, cultures, and kingdoms, and how to optimally steer our own spiritual stream of becoming within those contexts with ever-greater freedom, then we need to enliven, ennoble, and expand our cognition.

Your response here is illustrative of much of the issue I see at play here in terms of moving the conversation forward. Rather than steel-manning or demonstrating a familiarity with non-dual experience, the virtues of SS path are focused on. My critique here is not demean SS, rather to try to draw out that which I think has not been fully addressed. I'm at a disadvantage here because of my lack of non-dual or SS experiential knowledge. But I'm familiar enough with the non-dual literature and accounts to recognize the writing of someone who has attained to a non-dual state. A fundamental shift in identity, self-validation, transcendence, ineffability, bliss (ananda), are some of the marks. Do you know any of this?

I appeal for a greater focus on the connection between the non-dual state and the imaginative/inspirative/intuitive states rather than a tit-for-tat that has characterized a lot of the discussion lately. I know Cleric has entered this territory from time to time.

[AshvinP]

I'd also add that I don't think "side SS" has really displayed an understanding of non-dual experience. There have been the many illustrations of the Oneness/Manyness spectrum, but I've never got the sense that the seismic shift in perspective described by those who have a non-dual awakening is appreciated and explained.

Anthony,

I think part of the issue here is that the seismic shift in perspective through the higher cognitive path is also vastly under-appreciated. Perhaps it is conceived like reaching up towards Oneness but bouncing back into all sorts of differentiated structures on the way there. But as Cleric has mentioned and illustrated many times, the 'non-dual awakening' is the very beginning of the higher cognitive path. Imagine you step outside and see the flowers, the trees, the birds, the air irradiated by light, the clouds, the sky, the Sun, and you immediately have a concrete sense of how a symphony of elemental and archetypal spiritual activity has temporally woven this unique holistic perspective through the evolving life of your body, soul and spirit. It is like the 'Eureka' moments we normally have when contemplating something except a few orders of magnitude more powerful, experienced and understood from the inside-out. We have a living, textured sense of where it all came from, where it is heading, why, and what our concrete role is in fulfilling the interweaving intents. I myself am relying on such a crude description from lack of experience and lack of capacity to translate the little experience I have into 'intellectual grunts' on the keyboard, but the overall point is that these are completely unimagined and unsuspected experiences from the intellectual perspective.

I think Cleric has given us very concrete reasoning in the TCT essays and elsewhere why the intellectual cognitive perspective is maintained on the path of 'nondual awakening' which does not understand its concentrated thought-life as the tip of a temporally extended cascade of inner desires, preferences, interests, character, temperament, familial and cultural context, gender context, etc. It simply views examining and working to trace those influences as beneath its purview, an unnecessary frolic in the 'dual world'. And we already know what sort of work needs to be done due to our familiarity with life and learning new skills - we need to study hard with impeccable dispassionate reasoning, to be persistent, patient, dedicated, to remain wondrous, open and, yes, even deferential to the wisdom of those who have already learned the skills. There is perhaps nothing more resisted by the modern mystics than that last one - just look at the title of this thread. These things go without saying if we are trying to learn how to fly a rocket into space, but are viewed as tyrannical if we are trying to learn to responsibly steer our thinking activity through the inner worlds which are the true Cosmic worlds.

Without that work, the genuine spirit worlds simply don't open to us - we can't unveil the living tones and speech of differentiated beings within what we experience to be the 'infinite space of awareness'. So where exactly is the seismic shift in perspective if the living and evolving processes of the Earth and Cosmos in which we are embedded are not further elucidated? Does this shift in perspective feedback into and inform the art of healing, the pursuit of science, the teaching of children, or anything similar? All these take on new artistic depths of practical meaning through higher cognitive research in ways we normally can't fathom. So I think the question is, what does it actually mean to 'shift in perspective'? If it simply means we experience new and profound personal feelings of peace, connectedness, compassion, etc., then yes sure many paths will lead us there. But if it means we begin to understand the destinies of individuals, nations, cultures, and kingdoms, and how to optimally steer our own spiritual stream of becoming within those contexts with ever-greater freedom, then we need to enliven, ennoble, and expand our cognition.

Your response here is illustrative of much of the issue I see at play here in terms of moving the conversation forward. Rather than steel-manning or demonstrating a familiarity with non-dual experience, the virtues of SS path are focused on. My critique here is not demean SS, rather to try to draw out that which I think has not been fully addressed. I'm at a disadvantage here because of my lack of non-dual or SS experiential knowledge. But I'm familiar enough with the non-dual literature and accounts to recognize the writing of someone who has attained to a non-dual state. A fundamental shift in identity, self-validation, transcendence, ineffability, bliss (ananda), are some of the marks. Do you know any of this?

I appeal for a greater focus on the connection between the non-dual state and the imaginative/inspirative/intuitive states rather than a tit-for-tat that has characterized a lot of the discussion lately. I know Cleric has entered this territory from time to time.

The best way for me to address your appeal is to simply point to Cleric's posts already illustrating that connection, or to wait for him to provide yet another illustration, as he is always more than willing to do.

In the meantime, I will address this question in bold. A lot of implicit things are wrapped up in there.

1) If you lack non-dual or SS experiential knowledge, then what exactly do all those terms mean to you? How do you know whether you are imagining them to be something completely different than what is actually experienced in the non-dual state?

2) Why is it important to experience 'transcendence, ineffability, bliss' for our spiritual growth which progressively integrates us with humanity as a whole? If we only have one single incarnation before we return to a spiritual soup, then we can reasonably say those things are critical to experience while on Earth, but if our individuated lawful becoming continues after death and we work consciously in concert with the hierarchies to advance our evolution and that of the Earthly kingdoms as a whole, and our self-consciousness is rooted in what purely personal enrichments we were willing to sacrifice during our incarnation, then those experiences could be positively counterproductive to spiritual evolution.

3) How do these experiences feedback into and inform the World and its evolution?

As said often before, the nondual state - which was realized many thousands of years ago - must be experienced on the path to higher cognition - which was made possible only in the last 150 years. But for the latter to actually unfold, the former must be sacrificed after it has been attained. These are not parallel paths of approaching to the higher worlds - modern initiation is an evolutionary metamorphosis of the nondual state which adapts to our modern body-soul-spirit constitution, where the "I" is fully awake within the intellectual thinking force. We need to get a concrete sense of the depth we are speaking of here. If we only speak of these things in horizontal abstractions, it will never dawn on us why the higher cognitive path understands and embeds the nondual state, advancing beyond it.

For ex., with respect to #3, the nondual practitioner might say that the experiences give us a sense of love, compassion, etc. for our fellow humans because we know that we are all One. Therefore we are more willing to donate our money to charities, spend some time in a soup kitchen, help an old lady across the street. I am really not trying to demean such outward gestures - they are indeed important. But once we cognitively enter the inner depth of the outer world and our soul-life, the degrees of freedom through which our spiritual activity can positively (or negatively) contribute to the World Process expand greatly. For ex. consider the following:

Let us take a particular case: the Mongolian onslaughts of the Middle Ages, when the Mongols came into conflict with the Europeans, spreading among them fear and alarm. Such fear and such alarm are then present in the peoples in question. When one looks at these attacking hordes, of which the Mongolians are the last, placing oneself in the mood of all these mediaeval peoples, one sees how the desperation of the last branches of the Fourth Root-Race and the fear and alarm engendered in the Europeans created spiritual forms. If such an onslaught were to be met with courage and love, then the putrefying substance would be dissolved. But fear, hate and alarm conserve such decaying forms and these provide a source of nourishment for beings such as bacilli. Later they incarnate in those material forms suitable for such an incarnation. Thus the decaying substances embedded themselves in the fear and alarm of the European peoples as seeds of decay. These are minute living beings. In this way arose the mediaeval disease, leprosy. It arose out of the decaying substance of the declining Mongolian peoples.

What then is the origin of those disturbers of human physical nature? They come from earlier spiritual causes, from sinfulness. This is Karma as it manifests in national communities. From this you can estimate how the moral life of a nation conditions the external life of the future. It lies in the power of a nation to care for its physical future through a corresponding moral life in the present.

If we never enter into these details and confirm their validity through higher cognitive practice, then we simply have no idea what sorts of astral forms we are always creating through our spiritual activity. Every thought, feeling, desire, and deed produces such forms and, when this process remains entirely subconscious, we naturally produce all sorts of contradictory and disharmonious forms. At the level of communities and nations, that lack of self-awareness of the depths at which our spiritual activity functions can lead to disastrous consequences, as the astral forms later condense into physical incarnations. Of course a certain amount of higher cognitive development is necessary before we are even able to discern the logical coherence of what is written above - generally it will be written off as fantastical nonsense when we remain with the horizontal intellect unaware of the depths. Most nondual practitioners will write these things off or ignore them precisely for that reason. I am not mentioning this to tout the virtues of SS, but to point to why the higher cognitive path is venturing into the depths of the soul-spirit worlds while nondual practice, as penetrating as it was thousands of years ago, now only remains swimming near the surface. The ignorance of the depths leads to inner dispositions and modes of be-ing which are counterproductive to the spiritual aims which modern man needs to fulfill for his continued evolution and that of the Earth as a whole living organism, whose members need to function in more and more harmonious rhythms.

[Federica]

My push back was directed advocating giving up on someone because they have not to this point adopted your way of thinking despite the many, many pages of dialog. As I've said a number of times, SS is difficult and someone unlikely to grasp things in any a progressive manner like learning the rules of a particular game of cards. Rather there are more likely to be a series of "aha" moments that may happen over months or years. And I'm not talking about miracles or revelations or suggesting some will "understand everything in a blink of an eye". Patience is my plea.

And I don't appreciate suggestions that my inner motivations are somehow defective. Perhaps the pause and reassessment needs to center on this:

Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.’ I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.

Cleric and Ashvin have indeed offered an abundance of illuminating posts on so many aspects of spiritual matters for which I'm enormously grateful. But it is my judgment that there have been a number of occasions when the non-dual position has not been steel-manned or that misconceptions were demonstrated. And so much of the argumentation has had the form of non-dual says X, but forget X, and see how much better Y is according to SS (and Y is wonderful but we still desire to better understand X in light of Y).

Anthony, please tell me how one should interpret a statement like this:

My push back was directed advocating giving up on someone because they have not to this point adopted your way of thinking despite the many, many pages of dialog.

To me, it is more evident than evident who has one-sidedly been repeating things like:
- I am giving up on you
- I will stop replying to you
- I will leave the forum any moment
- You are a liar, you are arrogant, sectarian, …

There are numerous quotes that could be reported on the above. Conversely, I don’t remember Ashvin or Cleric ever giving up on anyone, calling people names, or threatening to do this or that. Do you? Or do you mean that I did that? Not even one question or post has been left pending from their side, or addressed rudely. So I have difficulties getting how you are receiving such impressions. Who is advocating giving up on anyone? It’s as if we were reading two different forums. Of course, I agree that understanding SS cannot be likened to learning a game of card. It's a path that extends not only across years, but most likely across multiple life cycles, and there is certainly no expectation that one would progress at a fast pace. I think this is clearly reflected in how tirelessly the topics have been addressed by Cleric and Ashvin, again and again, from many different angles, every time with unchanged availability and patience.

And I don't appreciate suggestions that my inner motivations are somehow defective. Perhaps the pause and reassessment needs to center on this:

Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Doesn’t he leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.’ I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.

Cleric and Ashvin have indeed offered an abundance of illuminating posts on so many aspects of spiritual matters for which I'm enormously grateful. But it is my judgment that there have been a number of occasions when the non-dual position has not been steel-manned or that misconceptions were demonstrated.

I can imagine that you don’t appreciate suggestions to reassess your inner motivations. I haven’t said, though, that they are "somehow defective". I wouldn’t take the risk of qualifying your motivation from my standpoint. I would let you make your own judgments. Please read carefully what I wrote. I said that an interest in the path of living thinking seems to me incompatible with the way you have expressed your complaints about how nondual awakening is being addressed by “side SS”. What I mean is, speaking of nondual awakening as you do - with its many accounts, its seismic shift, ist unjust treatment on the forum - to me is incompatible with an understanding of WFT as approached on the path of living thinking. That's why I suggested that you reassess that interest (again, I didn't speculate what the result of the assessment would be).

Because, as I see it, when the hysteresis process of thinking is understood, the nature of the experience commonly called 'nondual awakening' should come into focus as pertaining to the sphere of the astral (soul) body, and not as something to be put on the same level of, or that can be opposed to, the experience of growing in living thinking. If you remember the Fourier transform analogy for thinking, non-dual awakening can be seen as an experience made possible by there being an awareness of the effect of the last rotating segment only, on the specific shape traced by it. Expanding self-awareness (in detailed ways that require deep dive into manyness/ multiplicity) would allow to elevate one’s self function to the point where one can walk the higher path - the ridge I am speaking of in my previous post - consciously encompassing the experience of 'nondual awakening' as nothing else than the polarized act of asymptotically leaning towards one edge of the plane, or the polarized act of ignoring the compound effect of all the rotating segments but the last one, in determining the shape of the final manifestation of thought.

So, as I understand it, what you ask - to give more attention, recognition, and appreciation to the experience of nondual awakening - would require to deep dive into someone’s personal soul tendencies and karmic forces that specifically influence one’s individual trajectory, and how they shape that individual’s thinking patterns and preferences in a way that keeps them one-sidely bound to one of the polarities of thinking - the vertical axis of Oneness - in a soul-driven attempt to step out of thoughts/multiplicity/separate self.

[Lou Gold]

No, we are all on the same page, we just approach it with different formulations and perspectives. The path of Oneness is very inclusive and allowing many variations with rich diversity. Mike is following Rupert Spira approach which is a modern version of classical Advaita with some blend of Sufism, he is IMO one of the best modern teachers of nonduality (I learnt a lot from him), even though his teachings are incomplete in some ways. Lorenzo is on the more traditional Hindu Karma/Bhakti/Jnana yoga path and I'm in full alignment with it too. Lou is on the indigenous path of connectedness with the Cosmic Spirit and the Divine Feminine Creative Principle, and sees the Cosmos as Divine Integrated Diversity and Great Mysteriousness (which is his way of expressing the ineffability of the Divine). From one perspective it is "mycelium-like network of being" and from another perspective, it is evolution of individuated souls through incarnations (which we can also call "ascension"), I don't see any contradiction here. It is all essentially the same diversity of paths of evolution in harmony with the Oneness of the ineffable Divine Spirit unfolding and evolving as the Cosmos in all its diversity and network, but never separate from the Oneness of the Spirit in its essence.

I agree. I don't have the skills of deep philosophical discourse that would allow argumentation. For this skill set, I am grateful for paragraphs like this one from Eugene. Intuitively and experientially, I feel deep resonance with these words but not as a laudatory for the personal insight of Eugene. My praise goes to the perennial philosophies of the Ancient ones who delivered the Revelations. My purpose in stating this is to express my gratitude and to offer my testimony. I believe the word "fundamental" means "pertaining to a foundation" or to something that can "be built upon." I've heard philosophers speak of "the fundament ground of being." I've never heard anyone use the phrase "fundamental peak." The legend says that when the original Buddha attained full realization, he placed his hand downward and said, "Let the earth be my witness." As in the story of the sower and the seed, the Parable needs Good Soil in order to sprout, blossom and grow. The process is thus an interdependent co-arising. The lessons offered by Master Teachers are known as Great Stories because these stories open the portals of possibility, offer practical practices and offer meaning and purpose to the struggle to attain their Promise. We all have our stories. May we find alignment with the great ones. May each attain the firmness of faith in their chosen story. May we all perform well. May each be nurtured by the Sovereign Mother of all that is born and dies. May we all be made worthy of the Promise of Christ.

[Cleric]

Part of the reason this opposition between spiritual science and nonduality persists, is that on the surface it seems that nonduality communicates these deep, mysterious and heartfelt realities of existence while SS is lost in lifeless metaphysics in the intellect. When the former are shared in poetic language, when we hear about bliss, immensity, boundlessness, unconditional love, these things are still somewhat relatable to our ordinary human life, except that we try to conceive of higher, more ‘seismic’ forms. On the other hand, words like bodies, soul organs, planetary spheres and so on, not only sound too technical and lifeless but we don't even know how to connect them with anything from our living experience.

Alas, this way of judging things can be very misleading. If we follow its threads we’ll conclude that those who return from a mystical experience with a thousand-yard gaze, as if shell-shocked, should pass for the most enlightened of all. Then naively reasoning people would say “Look at him, he must have witnessed the most astounding mysteries of the Cosmos. He’s stupefied! He has lost all his vocabulary! On the other hand, those who speak in concepts about spiritual reality seem like they live in their dry intellect only. If they knew something of true reality they would have been at least somewhat stupefied, they would have lost at least part of their vocabulary.”

These are the absurd conclusions that we’re led to if we start with superficial criteria. In that view, the person who has taken thousand doses of LSD* and then goes insane for the rest of his life, and only fit for the Bedlam, would pass for the most enlightened of all! People would look and say “He must have seen God Himself, his humanness is completely gone, he's on another level now.”

* This is not hard to achieve since LSD is so incredibly potent, even 20 μg can produce effects. Furthermore it passes through the skin so if we get in contact with a larger quantity of laboratory grade liquid LSD we can easily receive a thousandfold dose.

To understand why Initiatic science today has to speak as it does, we have to first understand the nature of what it tries to communicate. Through our materialistic habits we have become comfortable to count only on our bodily senses. The domain of the spiritual is accepted to be either a pure fantasy (according to materialism) or an orthogonal reality demarcated by the gate of death.

If we encompass in our sight the religious life of today we’ll easily see that it is all based on some belief in an afterlife and some basic guidelines on how to live our life as a preparation for the beyond.

The reason why people are so fond today of saying that there are many paths that lead to the same place is that even without knowing it, this ‘place’ is really the gate of death. Call it God, call it consciousness, call it nirvana – from the perspective of our intellectual soul these are all images of something we know approaches us with every passing day. Everything else may be an illusion but this mystery of death is most real. Everything else we may dismiss as doubtful but we know that we’ll know death from our own experience. So when people try to superficially smear out all differences between religions, they practically say: we’re all gonna die and something’s going to happen – that much we agree on.

For most people this mystery of death is deeply covered by the layers of modern secular life and its infinite distractions, and of course sealed by fear.

This is really a self-test to see if we have any interest in the science of Initiation. If all that interests us is to enhance our Earthly life and embellish our vision of whatever expects us across the threshold, then naturally nothing of which spiritual science speaks will interest us. We have to note how easy things are with Lorenzo – he’s straightforward about it and simply states that all that stuff about the beyond is pure nonsense. He has chosen to meditate at the threshold and not care about what happens when the time for crossing comes. With this all conversations end and no extra energy is wasted by either side.

Things are different with Eugene since his scientific scrutiny doesn’t allow him to simply say “I don’t care about this”. He wants to feel justified in his position and thus has to point out how the path of Initiation is delusionary because in his view it is impossible to cross the threshold while still on Earth and be able to communicate something coherent from beyond. Not because of personal deficiencies but simply because the cognitive plane of Earthly man is completely orthogonal to that of nondual cognition beyond death. Then all attacks take the form of pointing out that whatever is said about, for example, our existence between death and new birth, can be nothing more than arbitrary metaphysical speculation.

We can approach Initiatic science only if (among other things) we’re willing to seek living intuition about our state after death. How is this possible? It should be obvious for those who already have some sense of nonduality/monism. Our death-state is already present, it is overlapping, so to speak, with our bodily state. All mystical traditions know that we approach the death-state by quieting down that which is characteristic to the bodily state – sense perceptions and intellectual thoughts. However we’ll be mistaken if we imagine that what’s left is only the empty container of pure consciousness. Instead, we should imagine that our waking conscious life obscures the deeper life of soul and spirit. For this reason, meditation as evolved in the modern age, not only empties the container but allows higher existence from beyond the threshold to shine in the space thus obliterated.

Volumes can be written on these topics, the point was only that the death-state is not something that we can only fantasize about but we should try to find something of it as it is obscured in our present state. For this reason, when we read something like what was quoted from Steiner, we shouldn’t conceive a model of the Cosmos, like a doll house and fantasize soul-figures moving across floors. Everything communicated from higher states of consciousness can only be understood if we align our first-person perspective with it. In many cases it's not even the specific communicated facts that are most important but our attempt to discover from what state of existence could such facts be known. In other words, to understand anything about the period between death and rebirth it’s useless to imagine things from the side but instead we have to imagine that we are dead and in all earnestness try to gradually develop our intuition about the state we exist in. We have to wrestle with the fact that we don’t have sense organs, that we don’t have the scratchpad of the brain which supports our intellectual thoughts and so on.

This in itself is already a problem for many. Even the mere idea to imagine that we are already dead could be disturbing. Then people think about these things from a distance, as a Barbie house full of doll-souls and wonder why it all seems like pure fantasy. Because it really is!

So behind the seemingly dry words with which Initiatic science speaks of the most profound mysteries, are hidden points of support that allow us to find intuitive orientation within the death-state that is overlapping with our waking. We don’t have to boast about seismic states, we don’t have to demonstrate a thousand-yard gaze in order to convince someone that we’re dealing with the real stuff. All these things tingle only the most superficial sentimentality. Initiatic science doesn’t need to bribe people in such a way because as it often happens in life, they’ll simply take the bribe and do nothing else. As said, it’s a great danger to evaluate spiritual teachings by comparing which of them gives the strongest high. That’s why today we speak calmly and factually about the nature of existence outside the bodily spectrum. Those who enter into these descriptions with all seriousness will encounter feelings springing from unsuspected depths and of great magnitude. These can of course be spoken of but in no way they should be used as an inducement. If we try to entice a person by promising them powerful and seismic experiences, it is guaranteed that we’ll only stimulate the basest and most egoistic layers of their soul.

Let’s keep these things in mind. Initiatic science is difficult and dry only until we break our habit to consider everything as a metaphysical puzzle in the mind that has to be arranged. The moment we realize that every word speaks of first person experiences that are part of each one of us but are not yet equally unveiled, everything begins to make much more sense in a completely unsuspected ways.

[Federica]

the death-state that is overlapping with our waking

On the other thread, I gave a concrete example found in Steiner of just that.

[Lou Gold]

Part of the reason this opposition between spiritual science and nonduality persists, is that on the surface it seems that nonduality communicates these deep, mysterious and heartfelt realities of existence while SS is lost in lifeless metaphysics in the intellect. When the former are shared in poetic language, when we hear about bliss, immensity, boundlessness, unconditional love, these things are still somewhat relatable to our ordinary human life, except that we try to conceive of higher, more ‘seismic’ forms. On the other hand, words like bodies, soul organs, planetary spheres and so on, not only sound too technical and lifeless but we don't even know how to connect them with anything from our living experience.

Alas, this way of judging things can be very misleading. If we follow its threads we’ll conclude that those who return from a mystical experience with a thousand-yard gaze, as if shell-shocked, should pass for the most enlightened of all. Then naively reasoning people would say “Look at him, he must have witnessed the most astounding mysteries of the Cosmos. He’s stupefied! He has lost all his vocabulary! On the other hand, those who speak in concepts about spiritual reality seem like they live in their dry intellect only. If they knew something of true reality they would have been at least somewhat stupefied, they would have lost at least part of their vocabulary.”

These are the absurd conclusions that we’re led to if we start with superficial criteria. In that view, the person who has taken thousand doses of LSD* and then goes insane for the rest of his life, and only fit for the Bedlam, would pass for the most enlightened of all! People would look and say “He must have seen God Himself, his humanness is completely gone, he's on another level now.”

* This is not hard to achieve since LSD is so incredibly potent, even 20 μg can produce effects. Furthermore it passes through the skin so if we get in contact with a larger quantity of laboratory grade liquid LSD we can easily receive a thousandfold dose.

To understand why Initiatic science today has to speak as it does, we have to first understand the nature of what it tries to communicate. Through our materialistic habits we have become comfortable to count only on our bodily senses. The domain of the spiritual is accepted to be either a pure fantasy (according to materialism) or an orthogonal reality demarcated by the gate of death.

If we encompass in our sight the religious life of today we’ll easily see that it is all based on some belief in an afterlife and some basic guidelines on how to live our life as a preparation for the beyond.

The reason why people are so fond today of saying that there are many paths that lead to the same place is that even without knowing it, this ‘place’ is really the gate of death. Call it God, call it consciousness, call it nirvana – from the perspective of our intellectual soul these are all images of something we know approaches us with every passing day. Everything else may be an illusion but this mystery of death is most real. Everything else we may dismiss as doubtful but we know that we’ll know death from our own experience. So when people try to superficially smear out all differences between religions, they practically say: we’re all gonna die and something’s going to happen – that much we agree on.

For most people this mystery of death is deeply covered by the layers of modern secular life and its infinite distractions, and of course sealed by fear.

This is really a self-test to see if we have any interest in the science of Initiation. If all that interests us is to enhance our Earthly life and embellish our vision of whatever expects us across the threshold, then naturally nothing of which spiritual science speaks will interest us. We have to note how easy things are with Lorenzo – he’s straightforward about it and simply states that all that stuff about the beyond is pure nonsense. He has chosen to meditate at the threshold and not care about what happens when the time for crossing comes. With this all conversations end and no extra energy is wasted by either side.

Things are different with Eugene since his scientific scrutiny doesn’t allow him to simply say “I don’t care about this”. He wants to feel justified in his position and thus has to point out how the path of Initiation is delusionary because in his view it is impossible to cross the threshold while still on Earth and be able to communicate something coherent from beyond. Not because of personal deficiencies but simply because the cognitive plane of Earthly man is completely orthogonal to that of nondual cognition beyond death. Then all attacks take the form of pointing out that whatever is said about, for example, our existence between death and new birth, can be nothing more than arbitrary metaphysical speculation.

We can approach Initiatic science only if (among other things) we’re willing to seek living intuition about our state after death. How is this possible? It should be obvious for those who already have some sense of nonduality/monism. Our death-state is already present, it is overlapping, so to speak, with our bodily state. All mystical traditions know that we approach the death-state by quieting down that which is characteristic to the bodily state – sense perceptions and intellectual thoughts. However we’ll be mistaken if we imagine that what’s left is only the empty container of pure consciousness. Instead, we should imagine that our waking conscious life obscures the deeper life of soul and spirit. For this reason, meditation as evolved in the modern age, not only empties the container but allows higher existence from beyond the threshold to shine in the space thus obliterated.

Volumes can be written on these topics, the point was only that the death-state is not something that we can only fantasize about but we should try to find something of it as it is obscured in our present state. For this reason, when we read something like what was quoted from Steiner, we shouldn’t conceive a model of the Cosmos, like a doll house and fantasize soul-figures moving across floors. Everything communicated from higher states of consciousness can only be understood if we align our first-person perspective with it. In many cases it's not even the specific communicated facts that are most important but our attempt to discover from what state of existence could such facts be known. In other words, to understand anything about the period between death and rebirth it’s useless to imagine things from the side but instead we have to imagine that we are dead and in all earnestness try to gradually develop our intuition about the state we exist in. We have to wrestle with the fact that we don’t have sense organs, that we don’t have the scratchpad of the brain which supports our intellectual thoughts and so on.

This in itself is already a problem for many. Even the mere idea to imagine that we are already dead could be disturbing. Then people think about these things from a distance, as a Barbie house full of doll-souls and wonder why it all seems like pure fantasy. Because it really is!

So behind the seemingly dry words with which Initiatic science speaks of the most profound mysteries, are hidden points of support that allow us to find intuitive orientation within the death-state that is overlapping with our waking. We don’t have to boast about seismic states, we don’t have to demonstrate a thousand-yard gaze in order to convince someone that we’re dealing with the real stuff. All these things tingle only the most superficial sentimentality. Initiatic science doesn’t need to bribe people in such a way because as it often happens in life, they’ll simply take the bribe and do nothing else. As said, it’s a great danger to evaluate spiritual teachings by comparing which of them gives the strongest high. That’s why today we speak calmly and factually about the nature of existence outside the bodily spectrum. Those who enter into these descriptions with all seriousness will encounter feelings springing from unsuspected depths and of great magnitude. These can of course be spoken of but in no way they should be used as an inducement. If we try to entice a person by promising them powerful and seismic experiences, it is guaranteed that we’ll only stimulate the basest and most egoistic layers of their soul.

Let’s keep these things in mind. Initiatic science is difficult and dry only until we break our habit to consider everything as a metaphysical puzzle in the mind that has to be arranged. The moment we realize that every word speaks of first person experiences that are part of each one of us but are not yet equally unveiled, everything begins to make much more sense in a completely unsuspected ways.

Cleric,

Having not read Steiner or done any of his suggested practices, I offer no pro-or-con about SS. I do not practice Initiative Science. I have practiced Initiations in the form of environmental direct action, of Lakota SunDance, then in a combination of 25 years with Santo Daime ceremonies and nowadays living my medically imminent dying with as much active awareness as I can muster. I am here as a storyteller to testify that loving acceptance is a true liberator and that I and many others do not fit your straw-manned LSD analogy offered in the lead section of the above post. The asserted likeness does not fit me or many ranging in diversity across high-performing professionals and quite ordinary folks, some of whom are religious or not, some who drink an entheogen and some who do not. I do not seek to resolve the Great Mysteriousness; I seek to not get in the way of It changing me in ways I can but barely imagine. I do not proselytize for my path; I respect the diversity of people, ways and means. May all beings be well.