Philosophical Speculations

These thoughts from a parallel thread are worth noticing in this thread too. I think they illustrate what may happen when one is busy focusing on what one is thinking about - projected out of oneself into the object - rather than being focused on how one is TFW-ing, what one is doing with thinking.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Sun Sep 08, 2024 9:51 pm "Whoever does not see it needs to work harder on themselves"
"Your posts keep dripping with a soul quality opposite to humility"
"Get over your mannerism"




Yes, these are the thrifty comments of someone who doesn't stake spiritual science abstractly and tries to quietly live into virtues (instead of virtue signal)




Sorry, Federica, but I think I will stop conversing with you for a while, similar to others here. I don't know if you will continue to get any responses to your comments, or your threads containing just a title, if I bow out, but it's simply impossible to communicate in any productive way with you anymore. I can empathize with your situation. Lower impulses are ripping through your "I" without any resistance and I am sure that my way of interacting with you is only making the situation worse, making you feel more like a victim of some perpetual persecution by me. It's doing neither of us any good to continue this cycle and I know it will continue in the future no matter what my responses are or how they are constructed. You will scour each and every word, dissecting every sentence, to find "mannerisms" that irritate, insult, or offend you and use that as a reason to vent lower impulses.




Please know that I am not 'abandonding' you - you are still in my thoughts and prayers. And I hope others decide to continue dialoguing with you. Best wishes.

A critical lecture for more orientation to this theme of the inner functions of moral virtues, and how this must be a starting point for healthy advancement along the path of intuitive thinking, is GA 62, Lecture 13 given on Apr. 3, 1913 - Morality in the Light of Spiritual Research. It is not available to read on the RS archive yet, but is available to listen on the RS audio website.

When we begin the supersensible path and start delaminating the soul life, gaining cognitive distance on the personal soul factors of opinions, desires, preferences, habits, etc. we were previously merged with, this is the initial encounter with the lesser Guardian of the threshold. Unless we begin living into the moral virtues at this stage, we are at risk of projecting the Guardian outside ourselves onto other people and the World. Instead of becoming more sensitive to how these personal factors shape our sensing, thinking, feeling, and acting, so that we can begin to creatively refashion them and gain more cognitive degrees of freedom, we start adapting spiritual truths to suit our already established opinions and preferences. Then we are flowing along with the same habits of thinking and feeling and using the spiritual truths as vehicles for those impulses, but because we lose sight of that fact, we instead think that we are advancing along the inner path with new spiritual thoughts and ideas. We may even experience supersensible imaginations that are strictly reflections of our personal constellation but which we confuse for transcendent realities.

Steiner outlines how the virtues of truthfulness, moral courage, faith, and love, among others, are essential to inwardly explore and intuitively resonate with if we are not to go astray on the inner path, into deceptive imaginations and voices. As we have discussed before, it would make no sense to wait until we are already highly truthful, courageous, faithful, loving, etc. to begin working with the virtues, or to expect them to magically arise within us after we perceive higher spiritual processes. We should start working with them now based on an ever-increasing inner orientation to the functions they serve in cognitive development. Reading and writing about these inner functions of the virtues, in an impersonal and dispassionate way, based on intuitive experience of transpersonal inner realities (as opposed to personal opinions about who or what is 'virtuous'), as we have been doing on this forum, is a great way of living into them and becoming more sensitive to them.