Are you moving away from God or toward God?

[Stranger]

Then if we go even further than the national spirits, we can experience the common element in all human beings. This leads us too to a perspective of the World flow that is a coherent be-ing. And this is the be-ing know as the Christ. The intuitive curvatures that he modulates over the total World flow are that of the inner life of the Divine Man, bending the flow at Solar scales. It is fairly easy to see in this way, why the impulse that the Christ brought to humanity is that of Love. Only through it we can have the strength to find our superimposed flow with all of humanity.

Thank you, Cleric, very insightful as usual. I'm still wondering where the Free Will of individual beings fits into this picture. By stating that the individual experiences of beings is just a basis decomposition of the World Flow, aren't we denying the Free Will of the individual beings and basically smuggling the materialistic view of superdeterminism (Sam Harris, Sabine et al) into the World of Spirit?

[Güney27]

Ashvin,

Isn’t it interesting that Steiner never gave exercises for astral projection, while other masters gave these exercises in our current time.
For example daskalos often mentioned astral projection and Samael aun weor too(a gnostic initiate who was aware of Steiner).

...


They say that one can a lot of wisdom and guidance from higher beings trough this way.
Of course one can be blinded and there are dangers to it.
But the content of the visions one see are there anyway in waking life.
Maybe many people will think that they leave earth and enter a “world behind the veil”, instead of becoming conscious of a deeper current of their own spiritual constitution, but that is the fault of their world conception.

Most people that are having these experiences, interpret them in a wrong way, because they didn’t work in their own world conception.


Did you ever come across Samael aun weor?
If you don’t then you would find a lot of similarities to steiner and a lot of interesting writings from him.

Very well said, Guney! You have characterized the situation well. This is also the core point of my response concerning the breathing exercise. It all depends on our intuitive orientation to the contextual gradient in which our lives flow, whether that is sensory life or deeper movements of inner life (and of course, sensory experience and its lawfulness is also "inner"). The more we are inwardly attuned to the contextual modulation of intuitive movements, the more we can permeate psychic and bodily processes with lucid knowledge. 

Then we are not so much at risk of conceiving astral projection as a journey to a separate realm with entirely separate laws, with new exotic beings and processes, etc. Then the new perceptual content can artistically speak to us of the higher karmic lawfulness in which our movements are embedded, the streamlines of destiny that shape the individual-collective tasks ahead of us. What was once a great danger is redeemed as new degrees of freedom to expand and refine our intuitive orientation. A great sign of that orientation is when we already feel that the higher lawfulness is present in our daily flow of experience - as you say, the content of the visions is always there anyway - structuring how we perceive, understand, and interact with the flow of perceptual content. We can become more sensitive to how our opinions, beliefs, desires, preferences, etc. modulate the way we direct our attention to perceptual content, what ideas catch our attention, the way we feel about those ideas, the way we interact with others through speech and gestures, etc. When we add all those modulations up, so to speak, we realize just how instinctively involved we are in shaping the perceptual flow of experience and how more potentially active we could be at a fully conscious level, steering toward higher ideals (within the constraints of more archetypal modulations, of course).

At the same time, we shouldn't underestimate the lure of these astral projection techniques. Merely having a decent phenomenological orientation is necessary but not sufficient, because we don't have a good measure of exactly what powerful forces are working in our soul life and will come to heightened expression when we approach the soul spectrum more directly. To use a cliche example, a person can be quite familiar with their alcohol addiction, to have a very good conceptualization of the dangers of excessive alcoholic consumption (which may be a relatively small amount on a spiritual path), but once they have the first drink or even the first sip, it's off to the races. The altered soul state induced by the alcohol establishes the conditions for further temptations to bypass the normally vigilant and resistant "I" more easily, and this spirals in a negative feedback loop. 

In a similar sense, if we haven't already strengthened our realtime thinking skills through repeated practice and by living into the virtues, then we will be much more susceptible to temptation within astral dreams. We may not realize how strong the externalizing habit of cognition still has a grip on us. Steiner mentions something similar with higher cognition and reincarnation - many people who start to gain insights in this domain don't realize how strong the temptation is to draw premature conclusions about who they were in a past life, which are usually conclusions that conveniently make them feel more elevated, profound, important, virtuous, etc. A similar thing can happen in the imaginal space where we are interacting with our personal soul landscape but we are not aware of how desperately we want to believe we are dialoguing with higher spiritual beings. We can become excessively comfortable with the exotic degrees of freedom these astral dreams afford us, perhaps even a seemingly high level of spiritual insight, and lose incentive for further inner development.

I have heard of Aun Weor but have not looked into his teachings in any depth. What are your impressions of his writings so far? I will take a look at the video, thanks. 

Ashvin,

He really goes deep into certain topics like the importance of occult sexual education (sexual magic).
He says that he is the incarnation (if I understand correctly) of an archangel (Samael).

He tries to bring unity to all religions and traditions and shows the similarities and points that they come all from the same direction so to say.


One good thing I noticed is that he couples the theoretical aspect with the practical elements for life of occult knowledge.


Another thing which he postulate is that he had the mission to reveal more occult knowledge for humanity in general, which was still hidden in the time of Steiner.

Overall I find him very clear and intelligible.
A lot of anthroposophical minded people are very close minded in relation to other spiritual masters, they see Steiner as the only source for genuine spiritual knowledge, but that seems to me like an idolization of the persona of RS.
It would be better to harmonize different cultures and traditions, to see how this knowledge manifests at different locations and time epochs.
At least this is my current opinion, of course I could be wrong.

I would recommend you to look up into his work.

[Stranger]

A lot of anthroposophical minded people are very close minded in relation to other spiritual masters, they see Steiner as the only source for genuine spiritual knowledge, but that seems to me like an idolization of the persona of RS.
It would be better to harmonize different cultures and traditions, to see how this knowledge manifests at different locations and time epochs.
At least this is my current opinion, of course I could be wrong.

I agree and have a similar approach, and for me it is not only about studying the views of these traditions, but actually practicing them and using them to guide and shape a living inner spiritual experience.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

He really goes deep into certain topics like the importance of occult sexual education (sexual magic).
He says that he is the incarnation (if I understand correctly) of an archangel (Samael).

He tries to bring unity to all religions and traditions and shows the similarities and points that they come all from the same direction so to say.


One good thing I noticed is that he couples the theoretical aspect with the practical elements for life of occult knowledge.


Another thing which he postulate is that he had the mission to reveal more occult knowledge for humanity in general, which was still hidden in the time of Steiner.

Overall I find him very clear and intelligible.
A lot of anthroposophical minded people are very close minded in relation to other spiritual masters, they see Steiner as the only source for genuine spiritual knowledge, but that seems to me like an idolization of the persona of RS.
It would be better to harmonize different cultures and traditions, to see how this knowledge manifests at different locations and time epochs.
At least this is my current opinion, of course I could be wrong.

I would recommend you to look up into his work.

Thanks, Guney. I think we should always remain as discerning as possible. It is true that we can become too closed-minded and instinctively reject other traditions or spiritual paths because they present things in a different language and concepts than we are familiar with. I see this happening in Anthroposophy as well. But, as always, we should be careful of polarizing to the other extreme where we simply flow along with teachings because, at the content level, they seem to speak of things that are highly spiritual and even align with what we have learned so far, or because they give us convenient spiritual 'binoculars' by which to peer into deeper strata of the intuitive World flow.

This is deeply related to Cleric's last post as well. In fact, we can take the post as an example. Do we think this sort of artistic phenomenological illustration can be born out of any spiritual path? Clearly not - it requires a certain level of disciplined cognitive development that is enthusiastically interested in exploring the most detailed aspects of our moment-to-moment flow of experience, from the personal scale all the way to the collective human scale and beyond. That is also what we get from Steiner's copious lecture cycles on the spiritual hierarchies, the mission of the folk souls, the stages of evolution, the impulses of the cultural epochs, the spiritual aspects of agriculture and medicine, etc. These are not simply informational details about "the nature of spiritual reality", but they are artistic expressions of intuitive modulations that, if effortfully participate with their gestures in good faith, are deeply transformative in our soul-life.

As Cleric says, it's not so much about reaching the "right/correct" concepts but continually outgrowing fully finished pathways of experience that our intuitive steering is normally merged with - to begin with, opinions, habits, inclinations, preferences, etc. - and steering within higher-order curvatures. We are already doing that to some extent when imaginatively working through Cleric's last post, for ex. We can then experience our spiritual activity realizing this prophecy from Isaiah in real-time:

I will bring the blind by a way they did not know;

I will lead them in paths they have not known.

I will make darkness light before them,

And crooked places straight.

We tend to approach a spiritual corpus of work like Steiner's with our default mental habits, trying to understand everything as informational content like when someone is communicating dates, times, places, etc. to us in normal life. It is experienced as a highly theoretical and academic discussion. We feel like Steiner keeps talking and talking and talking about the detailed "nature of spiritual reality", "how beings created the world", etc. It is exactly the sort of discursive intellectual process that most people criticize these days, but which they engage in when approaching Steiner's work, projecting it onto the content of that work, and then concluding he is engaged in the same process. It is like climbing on the branch of a tree, sawing off the branch we are sitting on, and then blaming the tree for not supporting our weight. This is something we will all do by default, simply by being born and raised in modern civilization. The way we redeem this habitual tendency is to become more sensitive to the inner movements we make when engaging with the text - we stop focusing so much on the content for its own sake but understand it as a symbolic tool for heightening sensitivity to archetypal movements that we are always participating in.

It is indeed problematic to use more and more concepts to metaphysically describe some 'spiritual reality' that is felt external to our inner activity, interacting with the Earthly spectrum through 'psychic photons'. Instead, when we use concepts like 'saturn, sun, moon, earth' or 'physical, etheric, astral, ego', 'intuition, inspiration, imagination, intellect', etc., we can use them as symbolic pointers to the intuition that our present state of being (including sensations, thoughts, emotions, impulses, intents, etc.) is contextualized by various mysterious inner constraints that lead us to direct our attention in certain ways and to certain ideas, to think in some ways and not others, to entertain some ideas and not others, to feel a certain way about the ideas we entertain, to act a certain way on those ideas, etc. This can also apply to higher-order movements as Cleric discussed, i.e. how 'folk' express archetypal intuitions through specific cultural practices, how nations rise and fall, how humanity integrated new impulses from epoch to epoch, etc. So the concepts are simply artistic symbols for something that we can explore entirely inwardly, by becoming more intuitively sensitive to the constraints on and possibilities for inner activity to explore various superimposed archetypal, mental, emotional, and sensory states of being. The concepts can be used to flesh out, orient, and refine our ever-expanding intuition of the experiential flow.

This is highly practical work, the most practical work there could be. Do we find these sorts of indispensable inner fruits in many other spiritual streams? Not too many, as far as I can tell. In a certain way, many other spiritual streams give us the promise that we can circumvent this whole process and still reach the deepest practical spiritual insights. I think if we pay close attention, however, we see that those practical benefits remain mostly at the personal level, and as Cleric said - "From the way we have described things, it also becomes clear why we can never gain consciousness of the depth of the World flow as a result of some purely personal development." It's not they don't talk about benefitting the whole of humanity at the content level, but the practices themselves don't progressively expand the interests to coincide with those of the Cosmic curvatures.

That Aun Weor claims to be the incarnation of an archangel is already quite suspect. It's interesting that this coincides with Cleric's last post where he writes - "The inner life of the archangel remains completely unknown to our consciousness unless we expand our interests to feel how our flow is superimposed with that of all people from a nation." It would be much more convenient if we could know the archangelic life by simply listening to some teacher like Aun Weor! As discussed above, neither can we know it by simply listening to Steiner. In fact, the whole purpose of the spiritual scientific concepts is not to chain our soul to their content, but to help us strengthen inwardly to the point where we can discard the conceptual content and explore the inner realities without relying on their support. We can then develop our own imaginative conceptual symbols to orient our intuitive existence and hopefully that of others. If we pay attention carefully to Steiner's ideas and manner of presentation, we will discover this is the underlying intention and aim of the communications, which is sometimes also made explicit by him.

PS - I do plan on studying Aun Weor's work more carefully and I do not doubt that its content can be symbolically mined for helpful orientation to the flow of intuitive experience.

[Güney27]

Ashvin,

He really goes deep into certain topics like the importance of occult sexual education (sexual magic).
He says that he is the incarnation (if I understand correctly) of an archangel (Samael).

He tries to bring unity to all religions and traditions and shows the similarities and points that they come all from the same direction so to say.


One good thing I noticed is that he couples the theoretical aspect with the practical elements for life of occult knowledge.


Another thing which he postulate is that he had the mission to reveal more occult knowledge for humanity in general, which was still hidden in the time of Steiner.

Overall I find him very clear and intelligible.
A lot of anthroposophical minded people are very close minded in relation to other spiritual masters, they see Steiner as the only source for genuine spiritual knowledge, but that seems to me like an idolization of the persona of RS.
It would be better to harmonize different cultures and traditions, to see how this knowledge manifests at different locations and time epochs.
At least this is my current opinion, of course I could be wrong.

I would recommend you to look up into his work.

Thanks, Guney. I think we should always remain as discerning as possible. It is true that we can become too closed-minded and instinctively reject other traditions or spiritual paths because they present things in a different language and concepts than we are familiar with. I see this happening in Anthroposophy as well. But, as always, we should be careful of polarizing to the other extreme where we simply flow along with teachings because, at the content level, they seem to speak of things that are highly spiritual and even align with what we have learned so far, or because they give us convenient spiritual 'binoculars' by which to peer into deeper strata of the intuitive World flow.

This is deeply related to Cleric's last post as well. In fact, we can take the post as an example. Do we think this sort of artistic phenomenological illustration can be born out of any spiritual path? Clearly not - it requires a certain level of disciplined cognitive development that is enthusiastically interested in exploring the most detailed aspects of our moment-to-moment flow of experience, from the personal scale all the way to the collective human scale and beyond. That is also what we get from Steiner's copious lecture cycles on the spiritual hierarchies, the mission of the folk souls, the stages of evolution, the impulses of the cultural epochs, the spiritual aspects of agriculture and medicine, etc. These are not simply informational details about "the nature of spiritual reality", but they are artistic expressions of intuitive modulations that, if effortfully participate with their gestures in good faith, are deeply transformative in our soul-life.

As Cleric says, it's not so much about reaching the "right/correct" concepts but continually outgrowing fully finished pathways of experience that our intuitive steering is normally merged with - to begin with, opinions, habits, inclinations, preferences, etc. - and steering within higher-order curvatures. We are already doing that to some extent when imaginatively working through Cleric's last post, for ex. We can then experience our spiritual activity realizing this prophecy from Isaiah in real-time:

I will bring the blind by a way they did not know;

I will lead them in paths they have not known.

I will make darkness light before them,

And crooked places straight.

We tend to approach a spiritual corpus of work like Steiner's with our default mental habits, trying to understand everything as informational content like when someone is communicating dates, times, places, etc. to us in normal life. It is experienced as a highly theoretical and academic discussion. We feel like Steiner keeps talking and talking and talking about the detailed "nature of spiritual reality", "how beings created the world", etc. It is exactly the sort of discursive intellectual process that most people criticize these days, but which they engage in when approaching Steiner's work, projecting it onto the content of that work, and then concluding he is engaged in the same process. It is like climbing on the branch of a tree, sawing off the branch we are sitting on, and then blaming the tree for not supporting our weight. This is something we will all do by default, simply by being born and raised in modern civilization. The way we redeem this habitual tendency is to become more sensitive to the inner movements we make when engaging with the text - we stop focusing so much on the content for its own sake but understand it as a symbolic tool for heightening sensitivity to archetypal movements that we are always participating in.

It is indeed problematic to use more and more concepts to metaphysically describe some 'spiritual reality' that is felt external to our inner activity, interacting with the Earthly spectrum through 'psychic photons'. Instead, when we use concepts like 'saturn, sun, moon, earth' or 'physical, etheric, astral, ego', 'intuition, inspiration, imagination, intellect', etc., we can use them as symbolic pointers to the intuition that our present state of being (including sensations, thoughts, emotions, impulses, intents, etc.) is contextualized by various mysterious inner constraints that lead us to direct our attention in certain ways and to certain ideas, to think in some ways and not others, to entertain some ideas and not others, to feel a certain way about the ideas we entertain, to act a certain way on those ideas, etc. This can also apply to higher-order movements as Cleric discussed, i.e. how 'folk' express archetypal intuitions through specific cultural practices, how nations rise and fall, how humanity integrated new impulses from epoch to epoch, etc. So the concepts are simply artistic symbols for something that we can explore entirely inwardly, by becoming more intuitively sensitive to the constraints on and possibilities for inner activity to explore various superimposed archetypal, mental, emotional, and sensory states of being. The concepts can be used to flesh out, orient, and refine our ever-expanding intuition of the experiential flow.

This is highly practical work, the most practical work there could be. Do we find these sorts of indispensable inner fruits in many other spiritual streams? Not too many, as far as I can tell. In a certain way, many other spiritual streams give us the promise that we can circumvent this whole process and still reach the deepest practical spiritual insights. I think if we pay close attention, however, we see that those practical benefits remain mostly at the personal level, and as Cleric said - "From the way we have described things, it also becomes clear why we can never gain consciousness of the depth of the World flow as a result of some purely personal development." It's not they don't talk about benefitting the whole of humanity at the content level, but the practices themselves don't progressively expand the interests to coincide with those of the Cosmic curvatures.

That Aun Weor claims to be the incarnation of an archangel is already quite suspect. It's interesting that this coincides with Cleric's last post where he writes - "The inner life of the archangel remains completely unknown to our consciousness unless we expand our interests to feel how our flow is superimposed with that of all people from a nation." It would be much more convenient if we could know the archangelic life by simply listening to some teacher like Aun Weor! As discussed above, neither can we know it by simply listening to Steiner. In fact, the whole purpose of the spiritual scientific concepts is not to chain our soul to their content, but to help us strengthen inwardly to the point where we can discard the conceptual content and explore the inner realities without relying on their support. We can then develop our own imaginative conceptual symbols to orient our intuitive existence and hopefully that of others. If we pay attention carefully to Steiner's ideas and manner of presentation, we will discover this is the underlying intention and aim of the communications, which is sometimes also made explicit by him.

PS - I do plan on studying Aun Weor's work more carefully and I do not doubt that its content can be symbolically mined for helpful orientation to the flow of intuitive experience.

Yes you right Ashvin.
But the things Steiner shared in his Esoteric work are not much different from the ones of other Christian initiates like BD, OMA, Daskalos, aun weor…..

It’s more that I could glimpse the direction you explained above, trough clerics work, not so much trough Steiner.
Of course there are pointing in a similar direction.

I don’t think that Aw says that we could understand the perspectives of an archangel through reading his work.
He’s works telos is to give humans in our current time, methods and knowledge for soul purification and initiation.
He warns people of false teachings in our age, and tries to give a safe path of self realization (so far I know by now).

"...we advise our disciples not to follow anyone. Let our disciples follow their own Self. Each of our disciples has to follow their resplendent and luminous Inner Being. Each one has to adore their own “I Am.” We beg, beseech, our disciples not to follow us. We do not want henchmen or followers. We have written this book so that you, our friends, listen to your own internal Master, your resplendent “I AM.” The Innermost is your Master: follow Him. [...] We humans are more or less imperfect, thus I, the one who writes this book, am not anyone’s master, and I beg people to not follow me; I am an imperfect human just like anyone else, and it is an error to follow someone who is imperfect. Let every one follow their “I Am.”" - Samael Aun Weor, The Major Mysteries

The above shows a really healthy approach. I think that a real master and teacher should say something like the quote from Aw to his disciples.

Another quote

When we see a symbolic image within the superior worlds and we instantly know its meaning, it is because we have attained intuitive knowledge; this is to know without any need for reasoning. The intuitive person knows everything without the need for reasoning. The new Aquarian Age is the era of intuition.

The mantra OM has the power to awaken the frontal and cardiac chakras, namely clairvoyance and intuition. We attain enlightenment by meditating on the mantra OM. Imagination, inspiration, and intuition are the three obligatory paths of initiation.

Warning: those who attain illumination and thereafter go around boasting to others about their esoteric achievements transform themselves into profaners of the temple. Instructors must severely admonish these types of “Gnostics.”

He oftens declares that he means internal phenomena when he speaks about higher beings for example.
In a lecture where he spoke about Lilith (a demon), he explained that “she” isn’t something external, but something that lives in our psyche (soul). It is one owns failure if one think that he speaks about some fantasy beings on the other side. I know a lot of people who think in a materialistic way about steiners descriptions too.


I don’t want to criticize Steiner. He’s work is profoundly detailed and his epistemological work is very important to gain an orientation of the occult description. So thanks to cleric and you for your years of explaining these in a more approachable way.

Trough this work I could change my perspective from “how does an angel look like?” To “how does an angel constrain my current state of consciousness?”

[Cleric]

Thank you, Cleric, very insightful as usual. I'm still wondering where the Free Will of individual beings fits into this picture. By stating that the individual experiences of beings is just a basis decomposition of the World Flow, aren't we denying the Free Will of the individual beings and basically smuggling the materialistic view of superdeterminism (Sam Harris, Sabine et al) into the World of Spirit?

Not at all. This could only happen if we imagine that the World flow is willed absolutely monolithically by a singular Godly ego, while the decomposed flows are merely passive 'views' (which happen to spectate the integration of a limited sense of being). But we can see things also in the other way - the unique intuition that integrates in the decomposed perspectives also guides the will in unique ways. Then the World flow can be seen as the total interference of the decomposed flows (of all scales, including Divine).

Of course, these are only intellectual gymnastics. What we strive for is the inner experiences, for which such words are only the artistic expressions. Only then we no longer feel that we build a theory floating in the air, but instead, we describe what reality feels like from within our realtime experience.

[AshvinP]

Then if we go even further than the national spirits, we can experience the common element in all human beings. This leads us too to a perspective of the World flow that is a coherent be-ing. And this is the be-ing know as the Christ. The intuitive curvatures that he modulates over the total World flow are that of the inner life of the Divine Man, bending the flow at Solar scales. It is fairly easy to see in this way, why the impulse that the Christ brought to humanity is that of Love. Only through it we can have the strength to find our superimposed flow with all of humanity.

Thank you, Cleric, very insightful as usual. I'm still wondering where the Free Will of individual beings fits into this picture. By stating that the individual experiences of beings is just a basis decomposition of the World Flow, aren't we denying the Free Will of the individual beings and basically smuggling the materialistic view of superdeterminism (Sam Harris, Sabine et al) into the World of Spirit?

Along the lines of Cleric's response, I think linguistic structure (the archetypal modulations of Archangels) is a great example of how our conscious activity also works back into the higher Will. To begin with, we have to admit that are born and raised into a native language that structures how we think-speak and therefore how we perceive, understand, and act within the one World flow. Most of us are at the mercy of this archetypal modulation for many years of life, perhaps our whole life. Yet we know that languages evolve and the way human souls conduct their thinking-speaking activity contributes to this evolution. A prime example within the English language, apart from the Biblical translation of KJ, is how Shakespeare's plays contributed so many new words and phrases.

So we can intuit from these facts that the way human souls conduct their linguistic activity, how they make use of the archetypal linguistic modulation, also feeds back into the Archangel's willed modulations. It is the same principle when we are willing our modulations, for ex. when driving a car and dreamily veering off to the side, and this feeds back as vibratory sensations from the highway bumps so we modulate our activity back in the other direction. The other thing to notice is how it is precisely our awakeness to the archetypal modulation, our intuitive sensitivity to that curvature in which our modulations flow, that gives us more and more potency to work back into the curvature and influence it in a creative direction. Shakespeare was highly sensitive to the archetypal soul life of the English language.

When we see things in this way, the theoretical questions of "free will" that most people concern themselves with (including BK) lose their meaning. We don't try to figure out some abstract picture of MAL and its curvatures in which we can make sense of its lawfulness while also maintaining our 'free will'. Instead, we realize that our will remains unfree precisely because it keeps weaving its imaginative modulation within the boundaries of such theoretical questions. If we redirected attention to becoming more intuitively sensitive to the real-time curvatures in which our activity flows, then we would experience the reality of our will becoming more and more free within the constraints that we normally flow along with in a dreamy or unconscious way.