Federica wrote: ↑Sat Aug 02, 2025 1:24 pmAshvinP wrote: ↑Sat Aug 02, 2025 12:23 pm Thanks for bringing attention to this lecture. Phenomenologically speaking, we can notice that the more we divest and mediate our inner movements into our mechanical creations, the more we lose sensitivity to those movements and how they participate in the lawful flow of World content. It even begins to dull sensitivity to our participation in the process of writing and reading, going from point A to point B, constructing our living spaces and artworks, etc. This further reinforces the out-of-phaseness the modern intellectual soul already experienced with respect to the natural kingdoms and various aspects of cultural life. Thus we feel more and more to be passive spectators confronting an 'independent' world. We feel like we are in control of our decisions, but we are often led on strings by the previous patterns we have imprinted into our creations and lost sight of (which is happening more and more quickly).
I think it's simply critical to keep this phenomenological perspective of the situation in view at all times if one is not to begin straying into some form of superstition, where the machines have 'actually' become independent (e.g. Levin). There will come a time when our machines will become more conducive to non-human spiritual activity (including higher forms of our own activity), but that's only after it is brought into a more living state that doesn't only allow for the expression of fixed-rule patterns. Linnell often points to this possibility of 'biomachines' in the future as well and I have no doubt that it is reasonable and in keeping with the overall progression of spiritual evolution. The critical question for me, however, is how resilient we will be in perceiving the truthful flow of spiritual activity in the shortly upcoming years and decades when the temptation for perceiving 'independent realities' in the previously imprinted flow of human spiritual activity will only grow stronger.
How do you see the difference between machines "brought into a more living state" and transhumanism / Levin's vision?
The former is when humanity grows its spiritual activity into the deeper scale from which it works creatively with the life forces, like it currently does with the mineral forces. Of course, this can only happen through the path of modern initiation. I am reminded of how Steiner speaks about how the material state of the embryo, digested substances, etc. should be 'reduced to chaos' before the living Cosmic forces can work into them. We do that as well at our more aliased intellectual scale when reducing perceptual content to chaos to bring meaningful order to them and grow our ideas.
Transhumanism, on the other hand, seeks to indirectly manipulate the life forces through the intellectual scale of symbolic replicas, which of course we have already been doing for some time now via modern medicine, agriculture, etc. We don't consciously explore those forces in their native element, as the intentional curvatures of beings, but our intellectual scale thinking still participates in them and can find indirect ways of manifesting some of their potential, yet still constrained by fixed-rule technologies and according to our myopic aims.
As we know, the adversaries seek to steer the human soul toward lawful capacities of the future or past and bring them into the present, once their 'shelf life' has expired or before we are ripe for them. This can't actually be done, but through their subconscious efforts, we get all forms of modern approaches to the meaning crisis like psychedelic mysticism or transhumanism. The great danger is that we never become ripe for them because we instead become enchanted with their intellectual scale substitutes. We can never attain something we imagine we already have.
