Güney27 wrote: ↑Fri Sep 06, 2024 2:35 pm
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.