On Attaining Spiritual Sight (Part I)

[Federica]

Taking the cross symbol that you introduced, it's not only the polarity that is important, but also the fact that we have horizontal and vertical aspects. Some time ago, I used the following image to clarify horizontal and vertical polarities to Lou (without much success )



If we speak about health-disease as a horizontal polarity, it is obvious that they are part of a dynamic system. Then, the one-sided pursuit of health (and the belief that the other pole can be eradicated) would be precisely what you warn about. The clearest example would be the materialistic pursuit of health, which in its end goal is the achievement of physical immortality. But we can also count the more new-agey pursuit of health, which still lacks the insight into the evolutionary process (and rather one expects to be evacuated from Gaia after their mission is done). I think we all agree that such a one-sided view on health is completely detrimental.

Yet, the dynamic horizontal interplay can only be rightly understood in the context of the vertical polarity. While in the horizontal polarity it can be said that we need to balance between the two poles (to avoid one-sidedness), the vertical polarity is different in that it signifies the great ebb and flow of existence - descent and ascent, involution and evolution, etc. As such, ever since the Central Event of human evolution, we're on the ascending path and will be so all the way to Pralaya. This means that a kind of vertical 'one-sidedness' is actually the norm in our case. We need 'one-sided' striving toward the Good, Life, Love, Wisdom, Truth, and so on - that is, the High Ideal. One may ask: but what about balance? This is not something that we need to worry about. It is enough to simply start orienting toward the summit. All the resistance will be there, even without asking for it. We're moving upstream. The counteracting drag will be there even if we do not want it. So there's no real danger of one-sidedness here. Of course, if we seek the summit only to feel good, to put our conscience to sleep by convincing ourselves that we are good, then obviously this turns into a horizontal polarity.

Such misunderstanding of horizontal and vertical, most often occurs in the context of good and evil. Today, it's almost a matter of fashion to say that good and evil are scales of a balance, and it is foolish if we try to eradicate evil. While this is true in the horizontal sense, we commit a serious error if we believe that it is within ourselves that we must balance good and evil. This leads to a very peculiar philosophy, where we believe that we must consciously do evil from time to time in order to avoid dangerous 'one-sidedness'. However, as soon as we attempt to direct toward the vertical Good, there's no need to do anything to balance it out - we'll have enough difficulties dragging us down as it is.

So, if we are to make proper sense of these things, we need to be clear about the two aspects. Our primary striving should be 'one-sidedly' toward the high ideal, which is not something that we can place our finger on and approach but, but the continuous shedding of the old and accommodating the new. Proper balance of the horizontal can only be accomplished in the light of the vertical striving. That is, our striving toward the summit (singularity) is what elucidates the horizontal imbalances and guides their dynamic interplay toward harmonization. As such, we can distinguish between the horizontal pursuit of health, and the vertical striving for the True Health, the Life Abundant - that which the Christ came to gift us with. When seeking the latter in the true way, there's no need to be worried of becoming 'too healthy'. It's only that what we receive freely, we must give freely. And, of course, it is this striving toward the high ideal that will gradually harmonize the horizontal oscillations to such an extent that they will no longer appear as disease and death.

I have already unequivocally acknowledged the evolutionary aspects in this question - the vertical aspects. I find it hard to believe it could go unnoticed (but I’ll spare you the self-quotes). And yes, “longevity” - or more explicitly said "immortality" - is the materialistic excessive health ideal which, ad absurdum, would require total renunciation to consciousness, total numbness. But I didn’t “warn about" the horizontal aspects. There’s no need to warn about them. It’s simply the nature of illness and health, not only as a dynamic polarity of opposite conditions (pretty much everyone understands that) but as what Goethe called a polarity of the third order. As far as I know, Steiner didn't say that, but I think so. These are mercurial polarities, in which one aspect transmutes into the other: a relation of full reciprocation is at play. Perhaps sun granules could work as metaphor for this sort of polarity:




Film by Luc.rouppe licenced under CC BY-SA 4.0



You say that this horizontal nature of the health-illness relation is obvious, but I don’t think it’s so obvious, as for example the course of this discussion shows. In any case, I am not warning about this relation, I am rather saying it needs to be progressively brought to clear consciousness. If not, how can the self-healing you speak of, that will become the major driver of healing, happen? That’s how I see it. In other words, there is a dynamic connection between what you have illustrated as crossing horizontal and vertical aspects. One can work vertically, purify the soul, seek moral intuition, but if the how of the third order polarity (in all its complexity, which reflects the complexity of the natural world) is not infused with consciousness, disease will continue to manifest. It's not enough to work towards the ideals and expect that, as a consequence, disease will subside. Rather, consciousness of the processes of illness needs to evolve in parallel, so that the connection between soul-self and illness can be illuminated. If healing recipes will consist of "concrete advice about where our ways of life are misaligned", but the deeper nature of illness remains ignored, and the concrete working of the human sheaths through the health-illness polarity are ignored, how can ‘vertical’ healing arise? I believe it was your image that today we can drive a car or use any complex tool effectively, without knowing what technology it’s made of, but in the future (spiritual) reality won’t work like that. And is there any better application area for this principle than the area of our human organization?

You say, the dynamic horizontal interplay can only be rightly understood in the context of the vertical polarity, and I would add, the reverse is true too. That’s the two-sidedness I am talking about. Not that one should promote evil to keep the evolutionary ascent into balance please believe me, such kind of two-sidedness did not occur to me. In this sense, I don’t think I completely agree with: “our striving toward the summit (singularity) is what elucidates the horizontal imbalances and guides their dynamic interplay toward harmonization.” I rather think both strivings elucidate each other and are equally primary Otherwise, instead of walking the middle-path between materialism and mysticism, we tend more towards the latter.

[Cleric]

It's not enough to work towards the ideals and expect that, as a consequence, disease will subside. Rather, consciousness of the processes of illness needs to evolve in parallel, so that the connection between soul-self and illness can be illuminated. If healing recipes will consist of "concrete advice about where our ways of life are misaligned", but the deeper nature of illness remains ignored, and the concrete working of the human sheaths through the health-illness polarity are ignored, how can ‘vertical’ healing arise?
...
In this sense, I don’t think I completely agree with: “our striving toward the summit (singularity) is what elucidates the horizontal imbalances and guides their dynamic interplay toward harmonization.” I rather think both strivings elucidate each other and are equally primary Otherwise, instead of walking the middle-path between materialism and mysticism, we tend more towards the latter.

It feels to me that we're not envisioning the same thing when we speak of the vertical ascent. To perceive how the ways of life are misaligned is precisely what the deeper knowledge of the human being is. Probably by 'advice' you infer something like 'smile more', 'walk more', etc., i.e., quite end-user tips. But this is not at all what I mean.

To understand this, consider the question: how does the horizontal polarity originate? Wouldn't the most exact and useful knowledge of this polarity be gained by reaching into the kind of existence from whence it originates? Without this, all knowledge about this polarity can only be a kind of heuristic knowledge. This polarity is not some interplay between abstract metaphysical poles dubbed health and disease. These are the actual interactions of spiritual beings, and the only way to have true knowledge of this deeper nature is by raising through the stages of consciousness. If we do not understand that, we'll secretly try to understand the polarity metaphysically, as some universal principles, say, in the way we try to understand electricity and magnetism. Then we may say, "Yes, we should work on our moral development, but unless we understand electricity and magnetism, we're ignoring the structure of the human being."

Things can be seen in this way only if we grasp this vertical development as a kind of 'soft' science - developing virtues, but lacking the scientific rigor. And to an extent, this is how things seem if we contemplate the lives of the Christian saints, for example. We may say that they focused on the vertical, on the moral perfection, but didn't yet have the science. This is not the vertical that we're talking about, however. That vertical is the gradient through the spheres of consciousness, where alone we can find the true spiritual being of that which at the intellectual level we intuit as polar principles. In the depths of reality we're dealing with beings. Thus, the deeper knowledge of the human being only comes when we come to know the inner life of the spiritual beings. And this purely spiritual life is by its very nature moral.

What does this mean? I remember that in the past, it was very puzzling to me when I read from Steiner that the higher worlds are woven of moral life. I simply couldn't understand what that meant. The reason was that I was still much under the metaphysical inertia, which in turn was under my materialistic inertia. In other words, at that point, I was still seeking the truth of reality as a kind of 'neutral' scene (even if 'made of consciousness'), while the behavior of beings and the contiguous morality only emerge as something secondary. This is also the mainstream understanding. It simply makes no sense to speak of the physical world as having something to do with morality. The latter is only an emergent phenomenon specific to human beings, who struggle to make sense of their behavior and what rules it should conform to. Things only began to change once I loosened my dependence on metaphysical concepts and could now see that fundamentally there's be-ing. There's no matter, no energy, no abstract laws. There's experience of willed intuitive becoming, which interferes not with matter and energy but with other be-ings. Thus, by its very essence, every push of spiritual activity is a moral act - simply because it fundamentally impresses in the life of beings. And in turn, these moral acts constitute the structure of the Cosmos (when seen from a more aliased perspective).

So, as said, the physical world, the body, the interplay of health and disease, can only be found in their true reality when we seek consciousness of the spiritual strata of existence. Learning about the interplay of health and disease in a principal way remains heuristic science. We do need it, it needs to be mapped out, but in itself, it can be developed only on the basis of experiment, that is, by recognizing past errors or successes (this is why I called it 'indirect'). Again, the vertical development that we talk about is not merely saint-like development of virtues but growing into the depth of reality, where we live together with the deeds of beings, which alone constitute the perceived interplay of health and disease. And this in itself means that the only true way of transforming human nature is by finding our being at the level where these polarities originate, and where we begin to take conscious part in the moral life. Because the physical world and its oscillations originates through moral (or amoral) deeds of beings, and its true redemption can only happen through deeds of like caliber.

Thus, in a few words, the vertical ascent is what leads us toward the true reality of what we otherwise grasp as polar principles in our thinking. That's why I said that the vertical ascent elucidates our concepts (because only the spiritual reality hidden behind the principles can elucidate them in the true way).

[Federica]

It feels to me that we're not envisioning the same thing when we speak of the vertical ascent. To perceive how the ways of life are misaligned is precisely what the deeper knowledge of the human being is. Probably by 'advice' you infer something like 'smile more', 'walk more', etc., i.e., quite end-user tips. But this is not at all what I mean.

To understand this, consider the question: how does the horizontal polarity originate? Wouldn't the most exact and useful knowledge of this polarity be gained by reaching into the kind of existence from whence it originates? Without this, all knowledge about this polarity can only be a kind of heuristic knowledge. This polarity is not some interplay between abstract metaphysical poles dubbed health and disease. These are the actual interactions of spiritual beings, and the only way to have true knowledge of this deeper nature is by raising through the stages of consciousness. If we do not understand that, we'll secretly try to understand the polarity metaphysically, as some universal principles, say, in the way we try to understand electricity and magnetism. Then we may say, "Yes, we should work on our moral development, but unless we understand electricity and magnetism, we're ignoring the structure of the human being."

Things can be seen in this way only if we grasp this vertical development as a kind of 'soft' science - developing virtues, but lacking the scientific rigor. And to an extent, this is how things seem if we contemplate the lives of the Christian saints, for example. We may say that they focused on the vertical, on the moral perfection, but didn't yet have the science. This is not the vertical that we're talking about, however. That vertical is the gradient through the spheres of consciousness, where alone we can find the true spiritual being of that which at the intellectual level we intuit as polar principles. In the depths of reality we're dealing with beings. Thus, the deeper knowledge of the human being only comes when we come to know the inner life of the spiritual beings. And this purely spiritual life is by its very nature moral.

What does this mean? I remember that in the past, it was very puzzling to me when I read from Steiner that the higher worlds are woven of moral life. I simply couldn't understand what that meant. The reason was that I was still much under the metaphysical inertia, which in turn was under my materialistic inertia. In other words, at that point, I was still seeking the truth of reality as a kind of 'neutral' scene (even if 'made of consciousness'), while the behavior of beings and the contiguous morality only emerge as something secondary. This is also the mainstream understanding. It simply makes no sense to speak of the physical world as having something to do with morality. The latter is only an emergent phenomenon specific to human beings, who struggle to make sense of their behavior and what rules it should conform to. Things only began to change once I loosened my dependence on metaphysical concepts and could now see that fundamentally there's be-ing. There's no matter, no energy, no abstract laws. There's experience of willed intuitive becoming, which interferes not with matter and energy but with other be-ings. Thus, by its very essence, every push of spiritual activity is a moral act - simply because it fundamentally impresses in the life of beings. And in turn, these moral acts constitute the structure of the Cosmos (when seen from a more aliased perspective).

So, as said, the physical world, the body, the interplay of health and disease, can only be found in their true reality when we seek consciousness of the spiritual strata of existence. Learning about the interplay of health and disease in a principal way remains heuristic science. We do need it, it needs to be mapped out, but in itself, it can be developed only on the basis of experiment, that is, by recognizing past errors or successes (this is why I called it 'indirect'). Again, the vertical development that we talk about is not merely saint-like development of virtues but growing into the depth of reality, where we live together with the deeds of beings, which alone constitute the perceived interplay of health and disease. And this in itself means that the only true way of transforming human nature is by finding our being at the level where these polarities originate, and where we begin to take conscious part in the moral life. Because the physical world and its oscillations originates through moral (or amoral) deeds of beings, and its true redemption can only happen through deeds of like caliber.

Thus, in a few words, the vertical ascent is what leads us toward the true reality of what we otherwise grasp as polar principles in our thinking. That's why I said that the vertical ascent elucidates our concepts (because only the spiritual reality hidden behind the principles can elucidate them in the true way).

You have described the future of healing as being mediated by instructors, providing healing recipes consisting of concrete advice. Indeed, I didn’t understand you meant that, basically, initiation was the content of such recipes.
When I say that consciousness of the processes of illness needs to be developed, I mean by a spiritual scientific study of occult physiology, pathology and therapy. As it seems to me, unless this is precisely studied as a specific field of spiritual scientific inquiry, the pursuit of the vertical axis would generate a deep understanding of the nature of illness and health only for the one who has developed clairvoyance to a very advanced degree. Another way to put it: why did Steiner (and others) emphasize so much the importance of developing the applications of spiritual science? (and he named physiology as possibly the most important). They taught that not as metaphysics, not as heuristics in the way of natural science, not through basic trial and error, but through spiritual scientific method. Why did they do that, since vertical development alone elucidates illness and health? Why didn't Steiner focus all efforts on teaching vertical development, knowing that deeper knowledge of the human being only comes when we come to know the inner life of the spirit? I would deem, he probably was of the idea that teaching students how to grow in consciousness in the detailed workings of occult physiology might elucidate a few things too. (Here you may say that one can only grow in consciousness in occult physiology once the experience of the vertical axis has begun. Yes, I know that. But I am attracting attention to the value of studying the horizontal axis of applications, as Steiner and others did, and to the power of elucidation such studies can contribute).

In other words, the answer to: “Wouldn't the most exact and useful knowledge of this polarity be gained by reaching into the kind of existence from whence it originates?” is yes. And I understand that the vertical is not a soft science, but the reality from which the working of the human organization and everything else originate. I understand that reality is made of beings. However, a rare power of clairvoyance is required for the one who aspires to supersensibly gain a complete picture of, say, occult physiology entirely by personal spiritual research, ignoring all previous results, such as Paracelsus’, Goethes, Steiners and others’. This is what I mean by saying that each beam of the cross elucidates the other.


PS: “I remember that in the past, it was very puzzling to me when I read from Steiner that the higher worlds are woven of moral life. I simply couldn't understand what that meant.” I am glad to read that A few weeks ago, I argued that the moral nature of reality isn't the first thing one grasps on the spiritual path, it’s simply not intelligible at first. You may remember that, for saying the exact same thing you are saying now, I was submitted to an epic burst of fire - by Ashvin of course - that covered pages and pages of harangues and lasted for days So I'm glad that’s been settled now, even if only in hindsight.

[Cleric]

You have described the future of healing as being mediated by instructors, providing healing recipes consisting of concrete advice. Indeed, I didn’t understand you meant that, basically, initiation was the content of such recipes.
When I say that consciousness of the processes of illness needs to be developed, I mean by a spiritual scientific study of occult physiology, pathology and therapy. As it seems to me, unless this is precisely studied as a specific field of spiritual scientific inquiry, the pursuit of the vertical axis would generate a deep understanding of the nature of illness and health only for the one who has developed clairvoyance to a very advanced degree. Another way to put it: why did Steiner (and others) emphasize so much the importance of developing the applications of spiritual science? (and he named physiology as possibly the most important). They taught that not as metaphysics, not as heuristics in the way of natural science, not through basic trial and error, but through spiritual scientific method. Why did they do that, since vertical development alone elucidates illness and health? Why didn't Steiner focus all efforts on teaching vertical development, knowing that deeper knowledge of the human being only comes when we come to know the inner life of the spirit? I would deem, he probably was of the idea that teaching students how to grow in consciousness in the detailed workings of occult physiology might elucidate a few things too. (Here you may say that one can only grow in consciousness in occult physiology once the experience of the vertical axis has begun. Yes, I know that. But I am attracting attention to the value of studying the horizontal axis of applications, as Steiner and others did, and to the power of elucidation such studies can contribute).

In other words, the answer to: “Wouldn't the most exact and useful knowledge of this polarity be gained by reaching into the kind of existence from whence it originates?” is yes. And I understand that the vertical is not a soft science, but the reality from which the working of the human organization and everything else originate. I understand that reality is made of beings. However, a rare power of clairvoyance is required for the one who aspires to supersensibly gain a complete picture of, say, occult physiology entirely by personal spiritual research, ignoring all previous results, such as Paracelsus’, Goethes, Steiners and others’. This is what I mean by saying that each beam of the cross elucidates the other.

You know that the bold is fundamentally incorrect, and Steiner did not tire of emphasizing it. The pursuit of the vertical axis would generate a deep understanding if we allow ourselves to experience what has been communicated, in the same way it is experienced by the clairvoyant. The most accessible analogy is mathematics. Not everyone is fit to discover calculus. Such events are not simply the achievement of a single individuality, but pivotal points in humanity's evolution where there's a specific conjunction of the influences of beings across the gradient, ultimately manifesting through the outlet of a human soul. However, when the concepts and ideas take form, they can be used by everyone else to guide themselves to the experience that the mathematician experienced. This is the critical point - we experience the same concepts and ideas. We'll be mistaken if we imagine that the mathematician experienced some special clairvoyant version of calculus and translated it down to some separate human-level calculus.

It's quite the same in actual clairvoyance. One of the recent thoughts-of-the-day was on that exact topic:

If a pearl is lying in the roadway and a chicken finds it, the chicken does not value the pearl. Most men and women today are chickens in this respect. They do not value the pearl that lies there in full view before them. What they value is something quite different. They value their concepts and ideas, but no one could think abstractly, could have thoughts and ideas, if he were not clairvoyant. In our ordinary thinking the pearl of clairvoyance is contained from the start. Ideas arise in the soul through exactly the same process as what gives rise to its highest powers. It is immensely important to learn to understand that clairvoyance begins in something common and everyday. We only have to recognize the super-sensible nature of our concepts and ideas. We must realize that these come to us from the super-sensible worlds; only then can we look at the matter rightly.

When I tell you of the higher hierarchies, of Seraphim and Cherubim and Thrones, right down to Archangels and Angels, these are beings who must speak to the human soul from higher spiritual worlds. It is from those worlds that concepts and ideas come into the human soul, not from the world of the senses.

https://rudolfsteinerquotes.wordpress.c ... -everyday/

What differs between the clairvoyant and ordinary man is of a similar nature as the difference between a person with experience in a certain field and one who has none. For example, let's say that you are a good cook and I barely have any experience. I say, "I'll put the ingredients in the pan, add a little water, and cook for 10 hours." You immediately say, "If you do that, the water will soon boil away and you'll end up with charcoal in your pan." So, to me, what I said is a free-floating image. For you, it immediately falls on the soil of your experience, and you see how it clashes with the intuition you have developed. Anything that can be said to you about cooking is experienced within the landscape of such intuition.

It is somewhat similar in clairvoyance. For most people, a statement like "The Spirits of Form manifest in such and such a way" is simply a free-floating arrangement of words. For the clairvoyant, it's an extract that was carefully triangulated through inner experience and finer rotation of the soul's 'dials'. However, and this is the key, if we allow ourselves to experience what is being communicated, we live in the same intuitive landscape as the clairvoyant. We live within the same Beings. I don't need to have your rich cooking intuition in order to experience for myself the boiling away of the water. And this boiling away is not some limited average-man version - it's the same reality as the one you may experience. The difference is the rich context that supports the experience in your case, and the lack of that context in my case. But the experience itself overlaps within the same World-depth.

This is very important to understand because otherwise, we get a completely misguided idea of what role the clairvoyant plays. We imagine that he lives in the higher spheres, where he deals with reality, but gives regular people some shadow-schema of things and says, "All you can ever access is the shadows. If you want the real things, you'll have to become clairvoyant yourself". We're at the question of study-meditation once again. The facts of spiritual science are not given to make a flat schema, but to be experienced within the same depth as the clairvoyant. Yes, this requires some effort, but it absolutely does not require us to have developed clairvoyance to a very advanced degree. The clairvoyant needs his skills to transform his full-spectrum being and traverse the ideal landscape, but when he discovers a pattern and communicates it, we can use the words as coordinates to reach the same pattern ourselves. We use the words as crutches to assume the pattern, while the clairvoyant had to localize it in free space, in an enormous search space, so to speak.

Why is this important? Because if we go on to apply the results of spiritual science in a flat way, the whole field will degenerate even faster than the physical sciences do. The latter at least still have their physical experiments to draw on. Such an application will actually be a very suitable job for LLMs because if we leave the experience of the vertical axis only to clairvoyants, we're left with nothing more than a flat tableau of abstract puzzle pieces. Yes, in the back of our minds we know that they have been projected down from deeper reality, but on our side it all reduces to intellectual combinatorics. We simply learn what token goes with what, and this is precisely what the LLM does. And we don't have to go very far to see that this is taking place. I've been told that there are plenty of Waldorf teachers today who simply go through their licensing, learn to apply the general teaching program, and start working. Some of them haven't even read a book by Steiner. I don't have firsthand information about physiology, but it's not difficult to imagine that the same thing could apply.

Does this mean that the teacher or the doctor cannot help people? Probably not. I guess we can still see good results, at least for some time. But I certainly do not think that this is what Steiner suggested a true anthroposophical teacher or a doctor should be like. And the first obstacle to overcome in this direction is the idea that there's a separate sphere of clairvoyant research, reserved for a few, and the web of floating concepts to be studied as a flat tableau of what goes with what, and then applied. Everything in these disciplines must be experienced from within the vertical axis, if they are to bear fruit, and this experiencing doesn't require us to have pre-developed the rich intuitive context that the clairvoyant has. In fact, such a context can never be 'pre-developed'. It is developed by experiencing fact after fact of spiritual research, which in itself begins to integrate our intuitive context, exactly in the way we cannot pre-develop mathematical intuition but the latter is built only by struggling with math problem after math problem (or cooking meal after meal if you like), until they begin to be sensed in their intuitive relations.

[AshvinP]

Euegne also felt like we need a separation of concerns, to balance the higher cognitive path with the dimension of oneness., to pursue both at the same time, and the focus on exploring the deeper scales was too "one sided". In other words, he couldn't perceive these were the same and true knowledge of oneness (or health-illness) only comes through the vertical expansion of cognition. The same thing is happening here. He would also "agree" with Steiner when the snippets appeared to confirm his narrative, and find rationalizations to dismiss Steiner's snippets when they appeared not to. Such patterns become transparent when we are genuinely interested in calibrating our inner orientation instead of winning points in some abstract debate.

Study of occult science is the vertical expansion when it isn't done in a mechanical, schematic way, simply building up correspondences between abstract tokens that we can repeat back to others. When we study the details conveyed as a means of fluidly exploring the imaginative depth axis of our inner being, then we begin to realize the higher states from which they were conveyed and why Steiner went through the effort of revealing them. The facts conveyed are presented pictorially and stir deeper soul forces that transform our very way of thinking. He didn't want to build up an army of robotic souls that simply amass conceptual correspondes, and physical applications of remedies, and confuse that for "understanding". Neither did he want to convey that the oscillaitons of health and illness should remain fixed in stone, like the current experience of death and illness and suffering is something sacrosanct that we shouldn't dare to transform and redeem in the near future unless we have the "rare power of clairvoyance". Indeed, the deeper capcities only remain so rare because so many souls are frozen by fear of stepping into the unknown and rationalize it to themselves by all manner of abstract argument.

That is why he wrote things like this in an introductory medical lecture:

"I want to emphasise that in referring to cosmic forces, far greater demands are made on man's personality than if we merely refer to so-called objective rules and laws of nature. The aim must be set before us to make medical diagnosis more and more a practice of intuition; the gift of basing conclusions on the formative phenomena of the individual human organism (which may be healthy or sick) can show how this training in intuitive observation of form will play an ever-increasing part in the future development of medicine."

We need to start taking these things more seriously. That seriousness comes from stretching our imagination along the intuitive depth gradient, which will surely feel uncomfortable and scary at first. But this is the only way spiritual science becomes something participatory and concrete, rather than only a set of correspondences we have picked up from reading Steiner and confuse for a deep understanding of health, illness, the nervous system, the circulatory system, or anything similar.

[Federica]

You know that the bold is fundamentally incorrect, and Steiner did not tire of emphasizing it. The pursuit of the vertical axis would generate a deep understanding if we allow ourselves to experience what has been communicated, in the same way it is experienced by the clairvoyant. The most accessible analogy is mathematics. Not everyone is fit to discover calculus. Such events are not simply the achievement of a single individuality, but pivotal points in humanity's evolution where there's a specific conjunction of the influences of beings across the gradient, ultimately manifesting through the outlet of a human soul. However, when the concepts and ideas take form, they can be used by everyone else to guide themselves to the experience that the mathematician experienced. This is the critical point - we experience the same concepts and ideas. We'll be mistaken if we imagine that the mathematician experienced some special clairvoyant version of calculus and translated it down to some separate human-level calculus.

It's quite the same in actual clairvoyance. One of the recent thoughts-of-the-day was on that exact topic:

If a pearl is lying in the roadway and a chicken finds it, the chicken does not value the pearl. Most men and women today are chickens in this respect. They do not value the pearl that lies there in full view before them. What they value is something quite different. They value their concepts and ideas, but no one could think abstractly, could have thoughts and ideas, if he were not clairvoyant. In our ordinary thinking the pearl of clairvoyance is contained from the start. Ideas arise in the soul through exactly the same process as what gives rise to its highest powers. It is immensely important to learn to understand that clairvoyance begins in something common and everyday. We only have to recognize the super-sensible nature of our concepts and ideas. We must realize that these come to us from the super-sensible worlds; only then can we look at the matter rightly.

When I tell you of the higher hierarchies, of Seraphim and Cherubim and Thrones, right down to Archangels and Angels, these are beings who must speak to the human soul from higher spiritual worlds. It is from those worlds that concepts and ideas come into the human soul, not from the world of the senses.

https://rudolfsteinerquotes.wordpress.c ... -everyday/

What differs between the clairvoyant and ordinary man is of a similar nature as the difference between a person with experience in a certain field and one who has none. For example, let's say that you are a good cook and I barely have any experience. I say, "I'll put the ingredients in the pan, add a little water, and cook for 10 hours." You immediately say, "If you do that, the water will soon boil away and you'll end up with charcoal in your pan." So, to me, what I said is a free-floating image. For you, it immediately falls on the soil of your experience, and you see how it clashes with the intuition you have developed. Anything that can be said to you about cooking is experienced within the landscape of such intuition.

It is somewhat similar in clairvoyance. For most people, a statement like "The Spirits of Form manifest in such and such a way" is simply a free-floating arrangement of words. For the clairvoyant, it's an extract that was carefully triangulated through inner experience and finer rotation of the soul's 'dials'. However, and this is the key, if we allow ourselves to experience what is being communicated, we live in the same intuitive landscape as the clairvoyant. We live within the same Beings. I don't need to have your rich cooking intuition in order to experience for myself the boiling away of the water. And this boiling away is not some limited average-man version - it's the same reality as the one you may experience. The difference is the rich context that supports the experience in your case, and the lack of that context in my case. But the experience itself overlaps within the same World-depth.

This is very important to understand because otherwise, we get a completely misguided idea of what role the clairvoyant plays. We imagine that he lives in the higher spheres, where he deals with reality, but gives regular people some shadow-schema of things and says, "All you can ever access is the shadows. If you want the real things, you'll have to become clairvoyant yourself". We're at the question of study-meditation once again. The facts of spiritual science are not given to make a flat schema, but to be experienced within the same depth as the clairvoyant. Yes, this requires some effort, but it absolutely does not require us to have developed clairvoyance to a very advanced degree. The clairvoyant needs his skills to transform his full-spectrum being and traverse the ideal landscape, but when he discovers a pattern and communicates it, we can use the words as coordinates to reach the same pattern ourselves. We use the words as crutches to assume the pattern, while the clairvoyant had to localize it in free space, in an enormous search space, so to speak.

Why is this important? Because if we go on to apply the results of spiritual science in a flat way, the whole field will degenerate even faster than the physical sciences do. The latter at least still have their physical experiments to draw on. Such an application will actually be a very suitable job for LLMs because if we leave the experience of the vertical axis only to clairvoyants, we're left with nothing more than a flat tableau of abstract puzzle pieces. Yes, in the back of our minds we know that they have been projected down from deeper reality, but on our side it all reduces to intellectual combinatorics. We simply learn what token goes with what, and this is precisely what the LLM does. And we don't have to go very far to see that this is taking place. I've been told that there are plenty of Waldorf teachers today who simply go through their licensing, learn to apply the general teaching program, and start working. Some of them haven't even read a book by Steiner. I don't have firsthand information about physiology, but it's not difficult to imagine that the same thing could apply.

Does this mean that the teacher or the doctor cannot help people? Probably not. I guess we can still see good results, at least for some time. But I certainly do not think that this is what Steiner suggested a true anthroposophical teacher or a doctor should be like. And the first obstacle to overcome in this direction is the idea that there's a separate sphere of clairvoyant research, reserved for a few, and the web of floating concepts to be studied as a flat tableau of what goes with what, and then applied. Everything in these disciplines must be experienced from within the vertical axis, if they are to bear fruit, and this experiencing doesn't require us to have pre-developed the rich intuitive context that the clairvoyant has. In fact, such a context can never be 'pre-developed'. It is developed by experiencing fact after fact of spiritual research, which in itself begins to integrate our intuitive context, exactly in the way we cannot pre-develop mathematical intuition but the latter is built only by struggling with math problem after math problem (or cooking meal after meal if you like), until they begin to be sensed in their intuitive relations.

Thanks, Cleric, for your efforts, but I can't help but wonder: how come we are now writing the third or fourth round of posts about the same exact perspective? Is it really that I am so bad at clearly formulating or rendering my thoughts, that they can’t be taken as I intended them? Sure, it could be, if it wasn’t that all other aspects of my life of communication do not confirm that. I will try again. Then if it still lands wrong, perhaps better to let it rest for a bit, because it wouldn't make sense to go any lengths continually rearranging the pieces, and I don’t want to tire you either, and force you to fill more posts with matters of course. Now I apologize if the following sounds pedantic, but you are forcing me to be, since my purposes have been read halfway, as it appears. In what you bolded:

“As it seems to me, unless this is precisely studied as a specific field of spiritual scientific inquiry, the pursuit of the vertical axis would generate a deep understanding of the nature of illness and health only for the one who has developed clairvoyance to a very advanced degree.”


there is “unless this is precisely studied as a specific field of spiritual scientific inquiry”. This is an integral part of the clause, that should be taken into account in retracing the meaning! I know that once calculus is discovered, the same concepts formulated by the teacher become available to the student for spiritual activity (as long as the concepts are imbued with the necessary effort, fluidity and feeling). What my sentence says, once the underlined part is not dropped, is this: the student on the intuitive path should try to come up with a treatise of occult physiology by themselves, without accessing all that Steiner and others have communicated in the matter. They will find that it’s impossible. That would require advanced clairvoyance. Similarly, as a student of arithmetics and algebra who ignores calculus, one may try to sit at one's desk, think hard about the practical problems which would benefit from treatment through mathematical concepts that fit the curves of phenomena, and somehow formulate them. Unless one is in touch with the same deity Srinivasa Ramanujan was in touch with, that will not happen.

The cook example doesn’t seem very fitting to me, since you, without any guidance, actually could improvise and try to put together some dish, using contextual, commonplace knowledge. Before you know it, you could possibly come up with a good dish, but anyway, I hope the meaning in the bold clause is clear now. I have to say, if there were any doubts about that meaning, the rest of my post should have worked to make it fully unequivocable. I’m stunned this didn’t cross your mind, and that instead you went down the road of “she still doesn’t get the basics”. For instance, didn’t you notice the following: “a rare power of clairvoyance is required for the one who aspires to supersensibly gain a complete picture of, say, occult physiology entirely by personal spiritual research, ignoring all previous results”?

To summarize my initial point, it would be impossible for the student on the spiritual path to come up with, for example, a treatise of occult physiology by learning and practicing concentration, meditation, devotion, soul work and all that is experienced when developing the vertical axis, at least until advanced clairvoyance is developed, in the cases it is possible to do so. Nevertheless, the horizontal, detailed applications of spiritual science are absolutely necessary to humanity, and to the student in particular, which is why Steiner and others communicated to the public the applied results of their advanced supersensible research. Study-meditation [not intellectual patching - notice this was explicit in my previous post] of the complex constellations of concepts and ideas comprising these applied spiritual scientific findings (the horizontal axis) is fundamental and elucidates, in a continual feedback loop, the vertical axis of spiritual development, just as much as it is elucidated by it. Because the student may have experienced meditative concentration and may appreciate the importance of the work along the vertical axis; still, if one day the student tries to direct meditative attention to illness and health, but without any guidance such as for example is provided in Steiner’s occult physiology material, I don’t think there would be much elucidation going on. I don’t think that knowledge of the manifold processes that constitute the nature of illness and health - deep spiritual scientific, non-heuristic, understanding of the matter, which includes all the horizontal details - can emerge in this way. The student would not realize for example: “such and such is what my I-organization is doing in my metabolism, which is causing such and such counterreactions, so I need a remedy made in such and such ways”. Conversely, if the student study-meditates some medical findings of clairvoyant research, he will be able to elucidate what's been intuited along the vertical axis, what the Spirits of Form, for example, are/do that affects his human organization, and how specifically this interferes with the bodies’ activity and their manifold reflection in the worlds.

In this sense, I don’t think I completely agree with: “our striving toward the summit (singularity) is what elucidates the horizontal imbalances and guides their dynamic interplay toward harmonization.” I rather think that both strivings (vertical and horizontal) elucidate each other. Otherwise - if all results of applied spiritual science are considered secondary, and devoid of elucidative power - instead of walking the middle-path between materialism and mysticism, the latter may become preponderant. Then, illness and health become at least oversimplified (as Ashvin said, "we don't need to complicate the matter too much" it's enough to know that moral development eradicates illness) if not mysticized, and the general ideal of eradication of diseases by spiritual development risks remaining unsubstantiated within the complexity of the earthly spectrum. That's why I said that the work along the vertical axis is not enough for illness to be penetrated with deep, substantiated understanding and eventually subside.

[Cleric]

In this sense, I don’t think I completely agree with: “our striving toward the summit (singularity) is what elucidates the horizontal imbalances and guides their dynamic interplay toward harmonization.” I rather think that both strivings (vertical and horizontal) elucidate each other. Otherwise - if all results of applied spiritual science are considered secondary, and devoid of elucidative power - instead of walking the middle-path between materialism and mysticism, the latter may become preponderant. Then, illness and health become at least oversimplified (as Ashvin said, "we don't need to complicate the matter too much" it's enough to know that moral development eradicates illness) if not mysticized, and the general ideal of eradication of diseases by spiritual development risks remaining unsubstantiated within the complexity of the earthly spectrum. That's why I said that the work along the vertical axis is not enough for illness to be penetrated with deep, substantiated understanding and eventually subside.

I guess we simply imply slightly different things in the vertical striving. What you say above in the bold seems to see it as a single-directed meditation on the summit, and expecting that one should find everything for themselves. As you have also written, things do not work in this way. Thus, what I imply in the vertical striving is the study-meditation, where we strive to experience the communicated facts of higher consciousness, of course, ideally with the attempt to discover them within a more and more organic wholeness (the summit).

So the claim is that spiritual science is only taken in the right evolutionary way if every communication is directly sought as experience along the vertical. In other words, every communication is like a mini guide for meditation, like descriptions of an inner asana that we need to assume (vertically) in order to understand the communication. Understanding things entirely in the horizontal would correspond to a completely abstract combinatorics of mental images. For example, for FB, Saturn, Sun, Moon are exactly such abstract mental images. We know that we think them, but ultimately we're unsure if there's something real that they point to. So I'm saying that SS is taken in the right way only if we seek the vertical experience of these concepts, that is, to find the (even if heavily aliased) experiences that are expressed with such names. As such, the pure horizontal would correspond to a fully abstract thinking activity. Patching of mental images, but the realities that these images supposedly reference, remaining completely opaque to our living experience. Thus, there's no question that SS invites us to immediately seek the vertical life that the mental images express.

Now that this is hopefully straightened up (that purely horizontal/abstract SS is detrimental, and that the vertical focus on the summit is not about expecting to find everything on our own), again, what are we arguing about?

[AshvinP]

I guess we simply imply slightly different things in the vertical striving. What you say above in the bold seems to see it as a single-directed meditation on the summit, and expecting that one should find everything for themselves. As you have also written, things do not work in this way. Thus, what I imply in the vertical striving is the study-meditation, where we strive to experience the communicated facts of higher consciousness, of course, ideally with the attempt to discover them within a more and more organic wholeness (the summit).

A big source of confusion for many people, from my perspective, stems from the sheer amount of spiritual research conveyed by Steiner throughout the years. We can take a look at a passage from Tomberg in MoT. This same way of orienting to the details of spiritual scientific research is, of course, emphasized by Steiner in various places, but it is more diffused across the lecture cycles, only hinted at here and there.

Hermetic philosophy is not composed of the Cabbala, astrology, magic and alchemy. These four branches sprouting from the trunk do not make the trunk, rather they live from the trunk. The trunk is the manifested unity of mysticism, gnosis and sacred magic. There are no theories; there is only experience, including here the intellectual experience of arcana and symbols. Mystical experience is the root, the gnostic experience of revelation is its sap and the experience or practice of sacred magic is its wood. For this reason its teaching—or the “body” of its tradition—consists of spiritual exercises and all its arcana (including the Arcana of the Tarot) are practical spiritual exercises, whose aim is to awaken from sleep ever-deeper layers of consciousness. Necessary commentaries and corollaries accompany this practice and constitute the “bark” of the trunk. Thus, the “key” to the Apocalypse of St. John is nowhere to be found…for it is not at all a matter of interpreting it with a view to extracting a philosophical, metaphysical or historical system. The key to the Apocalypse is to practise it, i.e. to make use of it as a book of spiritual exercises which awaken from sleep ever-deeper layers of consciousness.

Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism (p. 91). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

It is somewhat easier to embrace this way of inner orientation when dealing with the Tarot, the Gospels, and so on. Yet when it comes to Steiner's scientific lectures to doctors, teachers, farmers, and so on, it starts to feel like more of a stretch for most people. Surely all of these precise correspondences within the human organism weren't meant to be spiritual exercises that evoke inner experiences! Yet that is exactly how they were intended, even if it isn't explicitly stated at the beginning of each lecture like Tomberg did above. We simply need to keep that in the background context of all such lectures, feeling the organic wholeness from which those lectures took shape, and then our intellectual experience of the details starts to feel contiguous with the clairvoyant experience (mysticism and gnosis) from which the detailed inner relationships were originally perceived and painted in precise concepts. Then our contemplation of the communications is felt as more synonymous with vertical striving, rather than being experienced as two separate vectors where first moving horizontally for awhile as we study the details, before moving north via concentration and meditation. As long as we feel these two separate vectors exist, we haven't calibrated the proper inner orientation.

[Federica]

I guess we simply imply slightly different things in the vertical striving. What you say above in the bold seems to see it as a single-directed meditation on the summit, and expecting that one should find everything for themselves. As you have also written, things do not work in this way. Thus, what I imply in the vertical striving is the study-meditation, where we strive to experience the communicated facts of higher consciousness, of course, ideally with the attempt to discover them within a more and more organic wholeness (the summit).

So the claim is that spiritual science is only taken in the right evolutionary way if every communication is directly sought as experience along the vertical. In other words, every communication is like a mini guide for meditation, like descriptions of an inner asana that we need to assume (vertically) in order to understand the communication. Understanding things entirely in the horizontal would correspond to a completely abstract combinatorics of mental images. For example, for FB, Saturn, Sun, Moon are exactly such abstract mental images. We know that we think them, but ultimately we're unsure if there's something real that they point to. So I'm saying that SS is taken in the right way only if we seek the vertical experience of these concepts, that is, to find the (even if heavily aliased) experiences that are expressed with such names. As such, the pure horizontal would correspond to a fully abstract thinking activity. Patching of mental images, but the realities that these images supposedly reference, remaining completely opaque to our living experience. Thus, there's no question that SS invites us to immediately seek the vertical life that the mental images express.

Now that this is hopefully straightened up (that purely horizontal/abstract SS is detrimental, and that the vertical focus on the summit is not about expecting to find everything on our own), again, what are we arguing about?

Yes, the applications of spiritual science invite the student to take them as mini guides for meditation (they invite the student to pursue them through the spiritual scientific approach), but the point is, I guess, that they also invite to something else, which is not part of the vertical striving properly so called, yet is crucial to their function.

Like the Earth, man is a twofold being. From an evolutionary perspective, we aim to strive vertically, but from another perspective, we only can operate that striving within the context of the earthly spectrum. “The only way out is through", as the expression goes. Redemption requires processing through horizontal consciousness. Taking a future look at science - not today’s predominantly materialistic science, but a natural science in its way to become like Steiner envisioned it, a science that has gone some way toward becoming intuitive, in the right sense - I think that science will still be "natural" for a long time, and will still involve experimentation in the full depth of reality, through the material layer. The material layer (nature, in extensive sense) needs processing, and a natural science that progressively bridges itself to the Spirit will have to keep inquiring about it.

This is the difference I see between spiritual science as cognitive endeavor, whose pursuit is to develop the cognition that allows the scientist to experience freedom/loosening from the material layer, and a spiritually inspired natural science, whose endeavor is to give the creation back to the gods, through (non-heuristic) experiment, in order to recognize and redeem the images of the spiritual processes which generate the spectrum in the first place. Before all of science totally converges into singularity, scientists will have to do that. In this sense, the scientific striving and the purely vertical striving are, and will remain for long, orthogonal, in a way. I know you won't like the word, but please see what I try to illustrate. One striving is past-based (similar to the Dirac meditation), the other is future-oriented; one devotes itself to multiplicity, the other to singularity; one seeks the way through, the other seeks the way up, etcetera, and I think that conceptualizing the SS applications in this way helps maintain equanimity and practical balance between spiritual striving and the harmony of the facts.

Now that this is hopefully straightened up (that purely horizontal/abstract SS is detrimental, and that the vertical focus on the summit is not about expecting to find everything on our own), again, what are we arguing about?

Nothing, if the "too healthy" that made you jump in the discussion is straightened up, unless you disagree with the above

[Cleric]

Nothing, if the "too healthy" that made you jump in the discussion is straightened up, unless you disagree with the above

There are still things we may talk about, for example how the two aspects will revolve together (also I'm not sure what you imply about the Dirac meditation being past-based) but I'm again with limited access and will be able to write more in a few days.

The "too healthy" indeed drew my attention, because health is a synonym of harmony, resonance, etc. As such it is a feature of the high ideal. We agree that if it is taken in a one-sided way (as in pursuit of purely physical well-being) it can be seen as swinging the pendulum sideways. But Health in a higher sense is the musical expression of body, soul, and spirit in resonance with the Cosmos. As such, it is the High Ideal and there's no need to worry we may become too Healthy.

So putting aside the one-sided pursuit of health, what is the practical sign of getting 'too healthy'? At what point you become concerned and say "I'm getting dangerously healthy. I should take countermeasures." What would these countermeasures be like?