Is the brain a computer? Is the mind the brain?
Cowboy Bebop
and the
physics* of thought as moral art
by Joel A. Wendt
[*The term physics is here
meant to suggest a set of general rules and processes that in part can
be labeled: the Way of a science of
thought and thinking. That thought and thinking are also moral and artistic
then too becomes part of a true physics of thought. This means that the three science, art, and religion cannot actually be separated, as they form in the soul
an organic whole.]
*
Cowboy Bebop (1) was
a Japanese anime
television show that was also made into a movie. It was short lived (1998-99), and critically acclaimed. The main character was a
bounty hunter working from Mars in the year 2071. Many sequences in this very original animation were
accompanied by music often dominated by a jazz and blues background. From the beginning this anime was a fusion of American
cultural influences and modern Japanese artistic sensibilities.
In a certain way this work of art carried both
instinctive esoteric Christian and instinctive Zen components, which to elaborate might
take a whole book, and therefore will not be attempted here. The Cowboy motif fits in
with the fact that the Western is the main mythical archetype of the
American Soul (2), and the use of jazz and blues rests the musical themes
within the creative heart/roots of American music, fostered mostly out of
the culture New Orleans. In fact, many
of the sequences or scenes in the show are basically spontaneous
dance. Feet and limbs often move to the underlying jazz and blues
bebop of the music.
The visual artistic style is very modern in a Japanese
sense, as are
the ideas which positive criticism has come to recognize, such as: philosophical
concepts including existentialism, existential ennui, loneliness, and the pasts influence (1, again). The main characters
morality is very much of the Western cowboy type - the
lone stranger doing good while entirely uncertain as to his own meaning
in the great schemes of existence. The dialog is clever, philosophical and pointed, in the same fashion as the American film-noir movies that
were common in the late 1930s
and on into the early 1950s. (3)
These undercurrents within the American Soul influence
the path of thought-creation in Americans. These undercurrents arise from the whole world in a way - each emigrating culture adding its distinct influence to
the whole. In
America is being born the People of Peoples. Cowboy Bebop is a good modern expression of certain
undercurrents that have greatly influenced the American Soul, beginning with the
Western in the 1920s, and then later in the 1950s
when Zen was brought to our shores in California by Alan Watts (4). California
then became a kind of stew pot of soul-themes, such that West and East met at that edge of the North
American continent and had cultural intercourse.
If we want to look for evidence of this subterranean
influence of cultures, we need go no further than the writings of the modern
crime novelists: Robert Parker and Elmore Leonard. Their dialogue is crisp and spare, zen-like in wisdom. Their characters are the
stranger-other - the Cowboy archetype who
rescues damsels in distress and lays down his/her life to do the right
thing.
That the heroes themselves are flawed, even criminal, really only points to the
fact that in America the soul also can take a path near and through the
Underworld - the ancient world of
Faerie, and
dark and dangerous impulses. America is the worlds most earthly culture, and this density of
fallen striving and suffering should not really surprise anyone paying
attention to social phenomena in America.
Not all Paths of development wander among the stars and
the clouds. The
American Soul gave birth, with the aid of Christ and the Holy Mother, to the Twelve Steps of
Alcoholics Anonymous in 1933, which is the most practical spiritual path for dealing with the
threefold double complex or the shadow in the soul. (5) Addictions
and their kin are not the only issues human beings may solve in the
company of others with similar flaws. The hungers for wealth and
power can be addictions. So can be lying - how many of us know
the individual whose every word is an exaggerated tale told to advance
their image, and impress their acquaintences.
The point of the immediately above is to set a tone for
what is to follow, for it will be useful and practical to understand from what well of wisdom do such writers as Parker and
Leonard draw their art.
Let us examine this carefully
Thought exists. Everyone knows this. Ordinary mind also is often naturally virtuous, and the below is what can
be understood if one makes a study of ordinary mind, in a scientific and
empirical fashion.
The brain scientist, never actually examining the intimacy of his own mind, does not understand the
art of how to come to an empirical knowledge of thought. To know thought, through thinking, we must investigate the
own mind. But
this journey is rooted in the challenges of the moral. It requires the
encountering of life-trials. There is no substitute for this is very personal
investigation, which
is often costly in terms of suffering.
We are dark and
light, which
fact makes any exploration of the basics of the life of the own thought
dependent upon an excruciatingly moral self-honesty.
Not everyone needs to do this on purpose. The modern biography, particularly in America which is at the cutting edge of the evolution of consciousness, is itself a spiritual
developmental Path. (6) The life-trials of the
biography lead to a natural spiritual development. The main difficulty is an
absence of the needed language to describe this fact of existence. Anthroposophy can provide
to modern culture this language of the Consciousness Soul era if we
tease apart the traditional reliance on the dead thoughts of Rudolf
Steiner, entombed
in books and in the tragic overuse of Steiner said (note the use of the past
tense of that verb). Steiner is well worth quoting, but to rely
on him as an authority is to violate his own stated wishes.
Anthroposophists must discover how to think for
themselves, outside
the past utterances of Rudolf Steiner.
That religious and moral metaphors might be practical
could be denied by many seeking an operating manual of the mind. The truth is otherwise, however, for the journey
begins here with
the washing of the feet. The
higher elements of thinking cannot be consciously known other than by
actions in the spirit-mind that are profoundly moral. To unveil the secrets of
the will-in-thinking begins and ends with appreciating the nature of the intention (or purpose) from which the thinking is
born - or, the Why of the How.
These moral/heart forces are the only way in which the cold and arid,
almost lifeless, thinking of the intellect alone can be mastered.
The intellect is brilliant, but not wise. Obviously we are a
mixture of light and dark. But to better understand the light we
have to also appreciate the dark.
Washing the feet means thinking must be put in the service of the Thou. Thought which is
self-directed, and
meant to only benefit ourselves, will lack the warm clarity and strength to find anything
other than superficial meaning. The cold thinking of the intellect alone - without the guidance of the heart - leads
only to the error of misunderstanding. For thinking to find the truth it must sacrifice personal
consequences for those results which are meant to benefit others.
The striving for empathy already is washing the feet. It is very important to
realize that the biography itself, especially in and among Americans, does this naturally. Here is Rudolf Steiner, from a lecture to the
workmen, on 3 March 1923:
This natural development happens because American
social-cultural forces tears the individual away from its original
language and cultural roots. We speak of a third generation American, for example. Our parents may come to
America bringing with them their cultural past, but generation by generation this past dies away, and the individual emerges. This is true even of the so-called: Native
Americans. Individuation will triumph, and tradition will fade
away.
The same process of development also arises because the
family and community matrix too is falling apart. Elsewhere in the world
what Steiner called the group-soul tends to rule, and the individual bows
to those social forces that define group behavior as against individual
and independent of family and community life choices. Growing up in America
takes away our cultural and language past, strips us of the normative rules governing families, and spits us out into the
modern world forced to stand on our own. Natural here does not
mean painless.
This is not an easy course of life, and once freed of the
past of our ancestors the washing the feet trial is only the beginning. Ultimately we will travel all of the Seven Stages of the
Passion of Christ: washing the feet; the scourging; the crowning with thorns; the carrying of the Cross; the crucifixion; the entombment;
and finally, the resurrection. Each
of these is an exact metaphorical archetype of the various arts of
thinking in the fullness of soul and spirit, and their related trials in life.
Christ warned us: Matthew 10:34-40:
Not only that, but these trials do not confine themselves to linear time - that is, they do not follow one after the other in sequence. In the same way a plant
lives in an ecology, the life of soul and spirit - in
the biography - lives in a psychological
and mental ecology of social existence, in which various events (trials) arise and become the center of our lives. The social, with respect to the biography,
provides both inertia and momentum. Life resists us, while at the
same time certain impulses and actions propel us onward.
For example, to become a mother or a father places before the soul the
trial of the washing of the feet in a quite natural fashion.
Parenthood creates a necessity, and the I in responding to this necessity can begin to learn to put the
other - the Thou - before
self. In
the same biography, family conflicts exist over life choices and meaning - do we do what our parents want us to do, or do we follow our own
star - the unfolding of this trial
of individuation in our family life will evoke scourging and crowning with thorns. Details will be described below.
These stages then do not always appear in sequence. Different life
experiences draw them out, although over time, the general pattern produces a transformation of the
artistic skill level of thinking, which starts as a natural skill, then (usually with maturation) becomes craft, and then finally wisdom
or art. Maturation, by the way, is not a given. Many there
are who never develop past late (early 20's) adolescence. When
such a person becomes a political or corporate leader, disasters happen.
The mystery of thinking is then trained by the moral
struggles in life - not just the successes but the failures as well. All experience can be turned to developmental
nourishment when the "I" reflects on its actions. The intention behind thought determines the nature of the
realm of the thought-world in which we travel.
This intention is instinctive (natural) in the beginning, becoming more and more
conscious over time. The path, which we in anthrposophical
circles conceive of as a path of development, for the American (and
others all over the world at this same leading edge of the
Consciousness Soul) occures in the biography. We do not have to
go to the Swiss Alps to engage it. We just live our life, for it
is - through Divine Intention - the very best School possible.
*
Recently I was saying some related words to my girl
friend, and
she wanted me to take the time for a more careful and somewhat formal
illumination of the nature of thought. What follows next is based in large part on her notes to
that conversation, which mostly consisted of me making an attempt at an
skeleton-like organized presentation, which on occasion was inspired by questions she asked me
during this verbal intercourse. These notes give order to what follows next ... and flesh has been
added to the observations of structure alone.
The plane or arena of matter is bound to space and time. You cant put your hand
through matter. Thats
how we know its exists. Two cars crash into each other on a highway, and the violence is so
powerful it crushes steel and human flesh, perhaps bringing death in its train of causes and effects.
We live in a physical body and act in a material
world. We also act in the non-material world of thought and
thinking. This non-material life survives death.
Above the plane of matter is the plane of soul, or consciousness. This astral plane (to use a more ancient form
of expression) is
bound to space, but
not to time. It
is also the plane of perishable or mutable spirit. We know this realm when
we use picture thinking or the imagination. The imagination needs space in order to appear before our minds eye. It is, we should note, not three-dimensional, but plane-like, or two dimensional. We can move around its
surfaces and sometimes right through it, but it remains in essence an arena of organic (living) thought that longs to be
investigated and known directly.
For now we see through a
glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as
also I am known.
In the final episode of Season One of the television show
Joan of Arcadia, the God character there says: You have to trust the world
behind your eyes, and, learn
to see in the dark.
Our biographies do not take place, in general, when we are alone (although a prisoner and a
monk or a nun, often
live lives of virtual isolation). We
live as members of a community. As we grow into the truthful possibilities of our
thinking, we
may often find ourselves needing to speak truth in circumstances where
others do not like it. In order to avoid what this truth has to mean to them, they will deflect, or act angry or many
other forms of finding a way to ignore what we have said or done (based on what we thought, independent of the cultural or social norms).
This deflection can often take the form of attacking the
truth-speaker, and
this is experienced by the truth-speaker as a scourging - the
own soul experiences a trial of emotional (astral) pain. Where someone confronts a gossip, for example, in a community that likes the false content of the gossip, the whole group may turn
upon the person who challenges these lies. Everyone who seeks to speak or act on the true and the
good experiences such trials, even though we yet have no vocabulary in our shared
social existence that recognizes this fact.
On a wider social scale, we have today what is called political correctness, which
are ways of individual doing or speaking that large portions of the
social body do not like. Modern social-media allows scourging of this kind to apply a huge unjustified condemnation of
acts or words of specific individuals. This public shaming is the problem of the mote and the
beam writ large, forgetting the admonition: he who is without sin, let him cast the
first stone.
Everywhere that we see social conflict, we see those naturally
occurring trials that for some individuals are best described in the
metaphors of the Seven Stages of the Passion of Christ. When the I-am is
authoring what it can of the Christ-Impulse, this produces social conflict - social
strife and heat. Not peace, but a sword.
The mental plane, or sphere of pure thought (or spirit), is
spaceless and timeless. We are an active creator in this sphere, and through a thorough
study of this capacity to create thought there comes to be one of the
best Ways we can learn to understand thoughts properties and nature -
however, only if we are so inclined. It is not necessary for
everyone to do this, and in fact the understanding of such facts is the
point of any science of thought or thinking. The scientist
of thought makes the journey and then shares that understanding with
others.
Rudolf Steiner writes in the first sentence of the First
Leading Thought: Anthroposophy is a path [Way] of knowledge [cognition] from the spiritual in man [the human being] to the Spiritual in the
Universe.
Human beings create thought, but we are not usually conscious of this creative
activity. When
we create thought we are active ourselves as a spaceless and timeless
spirit in the realm of the uncreated and formless. As thought then descends
from this formless state, it takes on form, ultimately descending into the words that comprise our
languages. To
be intuitive, in
the sense of Zen for example, is to always be awake in the creative act that results in
the flow of thoughts. Thats why it is difficult to get
Zen, because
its locus is outside the realm of naming, so the Zen masters speak
of no-mind or
no-name. (7)
Thought is also living. In the arena of the astral, where the imagination
resides, organic
thought as spirit is clearly perishable and mutable, for unless we maintain
the mental picture with our conscious intention and attention it fades
away. That
Goethe came to perceive the Ur-plant shows that he eventually entered
the realm of the timeless and spaceless and met a Being, through the gate of
recreating, in
the imagination, the changes in matter-based form over time. The arena of space and
time bound matter; and
the arena of imaginative space or astral space; and, the arena of
timeless and spaceless thought, - all
interpenetrate at their boundary conditions
The thought-world, or the ethereal world, has an upper and lower boundary condition. At the upper boundary we
experience the garments of non-material Beings in the form of Ideas, after the indications of
Plato. Steiner, in A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethes World
Conception describes an Idea as a complex of concepts.
As social beings we sometimes find ourselves in conflict
with others over the Ideas of the Good and the True. Here too we can be
attacked, for
our expression of this mental/spiritual world disturbs those who do not
agree with it, or
otherwise need a justification for ignoring our expressions or deeds. These attacks represent a crowning with thorns. Our head is where we
develop thought toward its higher qualities, and the socially induced crown of of thorns is meant to penetrate the idea-matrix we have offered,
and through pain banish our ability to express ourselves here.
The Beings of the super-sensible spiritual worlds wear (or appear) as Ideas so that we can
approach them without having to experience the full impression/power of
their real nature. At the upper boundary of the ethereal or thought-world (8), they step down their nature as an act of
loving kindness. This is also the meeting ground between the 9th Hierarchy, the realm of the Angels, and the 10th Hierarchy, the realm of human beings. Christ, as an aspect of His Second Coming, appears in the ethereal
in the form of an Angel.
Like our personal guardian Angel He is now available to speak
to us in the realm of discursive thinking - our inner wording - the
same way our Angel is able to speak to us there. Steiner called this
speaking inner thinking: Inspiration. But first we must learn to silence our inner discourse - to become poor in spirit, or
what in the cultural East might be called: empty consciousness, or no-mind. Our original experience of this
Angelic contact is via the still small voice of the conscience.
With practice (especially praying out loud and in private) we can learn
to "hear" other inner voices besides our own.
At the lower boundary of the ethereal or thought-world, we experience the living
aspect of this thought-world as a train of thoughts, in the form of discursive
thinking (inner
wording). The speed of the primal
or original thinking is infinite, and that takes place in the realm of the uncreated and
formless. In
this realm everything is simultaneous - in
the Now, in
the Eternal. This
is the gate to the Akashic Record. Everything that happens, happens Now. All things happened through
Him and not one thing that happened happened without Him.
When we bring a thought out of this realm, through the space bound
astral world of picture thinking, or imagination, into the realm of concrete words, we also bring it out of the realm of the simultaneous
into the realm of linear time - that
is, out of the
realm of timelessness and spacelessness, through pure space (the imagination), and
then into sequential time.
In life, when we do this, it is best called: carrying the Cross. The weight of the true and the good, as it is born in
naturally developing thinking, to become realized in speaking and doing, - this moral weight is a burden. At the same time we are not alone. Matthew 11: 28-30: Come unto me, all ye that labour and are
heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon, and learn of me; for
I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
In our ordinary thinking we experience all of this. We just dont notice it, because our thinking
usually has as its object some important (or playful) aspect of our day to day existence. Thinking serves our
existence, as
does thought. It
is just that we do not attend to it, or know yet how to practice our intention in full consciousness.
Thats why Steiner wanted us to
turn around in our consciousness (soul life) and wake up through the path or Way of an empirical and
scientific study of our own minds, following the map he created through The Philosophy of
Spiritual Activity, whose subtitle was: some results of introspection
following the methods of natural science, and
whose last sentence of the original preface said: One
must be able to confront an idea and experience it, otherwise one will fall into
its bondage.
Here is what Steiner said about
cognition, from
the preface to Truth and Knowledge, his doctoral dissertation:
We have today the concrete terms or words: consciousness and
self-consciousness. Two or three hundred years ago in Europe, they would have used the
words soul and spirit to mean the same experience. In between our Now and
this most recent past, as those terms - soul
and spirit - were translated into the
English language, the term/word for soul and spirit became mind. This
materialization of our concepts of our inner life has intensified so
that now people no longer use the term mind, but instead use the word brain, believing that there is
only matter, and
never spirit. (9)
The truth is that the brain is a material organ by which the spirit is able, with the aid of the soul - or astral body - in
a mediating fashion, to integrate itself into a physical body, much the same way
consciousness is moved around in the movie Avatar. The idea
that there is only matter, but no spirit, so common today is due to
the existence in the mind of
beliefs. A belief is an idea that has placed
the self-consciousness of our I (or
spirit) into bondage.
Steiner called such belief-like ideas aspects of the
Ahrimanic Deception, which I name (for artistic/aesthetic reasons)
the Ahrimanic Enchantment.
Errors in the act of thinking produces illusory thoughts, which realm of illusions
Tomberg has called: the Realm of the False Holy
Spirit. This is that portion of
the ethereal or thought-world ruled by the legions of Lucifer. It is at the boundary of
the ethereal and astral planes of existence. According to Tomberg, to get through this realm one needs to be accompanied by
the Holy Mother.
In this experience in life we begin to come to know the crucifixion. We die inwardly in order
to travel higher into the thought-world consciously, yet in this death we are caught by the Holy Mother, just as is depicted in
Michaelangelos The Pieta. The thinking I gives
up its self for the other - for the Thou, thus experiencing a kind of death in the astral.
Steiner has said there are more illusions in the
spiritual world than there are in the material world.
This is looking at the process of thinking from below
upward. When
we view this process in the fashion it creatively happens, we travel it from above
downward - from, as pointed out before, the realm of the
uncreated and formless, through the space bound world of imaginations (and mental pictures) into the space and time
bound realm of discursive thinking in the forms of words (language).
Belief is different from true Faith, the latter being an act
of trust in the Divine, not an idea of
the Divine. When
we encounter fundamentalism, of either the religious or the scientific kind, we are meeting a rigidly
held belief, which
possesses (or holds
in bondage) the
mind of the speaker.
MacCoun, in her book On Becoming an Alchemist, writes: that the belief in
absolute facts is ahrimanic (she doesnt actually use that name, but it is obvious she
means to refer to a Being), and
the belief in absolute truths is luciferic (again the same caution).
If people treat the works of Rudolf Steiner as an absolute authority on anything, they are falling into a relationship of bondage with those ideas. In a way this is a kind of self-generated entombment. This is different from social entombment, where the expressions of the good and the true are experienced by the I in the soul as an inability to effect the outer world. However hard we try to manifest the good and the true in the social world, it is rejected or otherwise not heard. We feel we are alone and powerless. Like someone buried alive (entombed, but living), we fight and struggle against the social world's refusal to hear us.
There is a way out of the Tomb. Our empathy must be so rich, that
we realize that the other -
the Thou - does not need to be like us. The Thou is entitled to
Its own version of the true and the good, and we must then sacrifice
that version which is ours, and learn, as Steiner pointed out in The
Inner Aspects of the Social Question: to hear the Christ Impulse in the
other's thinking. For our own biography we need the true and the
good in order to act the Consciousness Soul, but at the same time part
of the true and the good is that the
other - the Thou - is not seen, if Judged.
Thinking
as Perception:
This is not a commentary on the nature of sense
perception, but
only on the characteristics of thinking as perception - as seeing. (10)
In a crisis situation thinking is aided by the adrenaline
to focus and concentrate. We can ourselves learn to focus and concentrate without
this chemical (astral) support. Through either process we
can wake up in the realm of the uncreated and the formless. We will then see
with the thinking. To consciously experience this, and to also act in the world on the basis of this seeing
is the experience of the resurrection at the level of our inner life. The social world often compels our seeing.
The Zen master sees the
situation of his student. The mother, when thinking selflessly, sees what to do in a moment of crisis with her child. The soldier, or first responder, sees with their thinking
what the right action is. An athlete calls this: being in the zone.
The mind in this condition, which is generally completely spontaneous, is free - no longer in bondage to its old thoughts and mental habits.
This, when sustained while in contact with the world of pure
spirit, Steiner
called: Intuition. In our ordinary life we
call it likewise: intuition, without the capital letter. We are united with the Idea in either case, although Steiners
Intuition means a fully aware experience of the Divine Being, free of
our own body - or sense free (body free) thinking. In the more ordinary
types of consciousness, where our self-consciousness is seeing/perceiving, we have taken to having
our ordinary language talk about a bright idea, or in a cartoon we have someone with a light-bulb going
off over their head. The concentrated action in thinking lights up the mind.
"More light!" said Goethe on his death bed.
In spontaneous action we have what MacCoun describes as see, do. Perceiving and acting are
united. Because
our attention is focused on the needed action, we dont notice the inner activity of seeing/perceiving
because we are too committed to the outer world action to notice the
inner world lighting up. In the East, if this state of pure intuitive experience is constant, it is called: enlightenment.
I had the following personal experience one day. I was in my kitchen with
a friend, and
also with my youngest daughter, who was about 3 and
one half years old at that time. My daughter was skipping around the room, tripped over her own feet, and fell forward with her
chin striking the corner of the clothes dryer which was also in that
room.
I immediately picked her up, and sat her on the dryer, looking at her carefully to see her condition. She had not yet started
to cry, something
one ordinarily expects to happen very soon. I next immediately recalled that there was a bottle of
Arnica in a nearby cabinet. I quickly took the bottle out, unstoppered it and placed some on a finger tip, which I then placed under
her nose for her to smell. I next took another bit on a finger tip, and rubbed up between her
eyebrows over the astral/ethereal doorway to the pineal gland. Only after these actions
did I look at her chin, notice there was no open wound, and applied the Arnica there.
I had never before thought about any of these actions, other than the last one. All the same, I saw/I did. She did not cry at all, and was soon very calm, and sat in my lap for a
while before returning to play.
My visiting friend, who was also a curative eurythmist, said to my daughter: Your father is very wise. Perhaps. What I did know was how
to think - how to be empty or poor
in spirit. I
didnt need a content of knowledge already existing, stored somewhere in memory - I only needed to know how to think. I do not mean here to
denigrate experience and memory, but only to point to the capacities of the purely
intuitive mind.
I trusted the world behind my eyes, and saw in the dark.
This Pure Thinking is pure in three ways: It is pure in the sense that the attention of our I is oriented fully away from sense experience (we dont actually have to leave the body to do this). It is also pure in a consciously intended moral sense - that is our thinking is fully other-directed. We have no egoistic stake in the outcome of the thinking activity, for we do it for others not for ourselves. The third way such thinking is pure is that it is only of concepts and ideas - that is the object of thought is the thought-world itself.
Rudolf Steiner described this kind of inner
moral activity in The Philosophy of Spiritual
Activity, as moral imagination, moral intuition, and moral technique. This activity can be applied both in the outer world of
our social environment, and in the world of contemplative thought alone. To apply it
contemplatively, or while in a state of reverie or meditation, means to turn around and
enter into the thought-world on purpose - as
a place in itself.
The deeper (higher) we go, the more consciously we become able to wake up in the
realm of the uncreated and formless, where moral thought arises out of our own creative
activity. When
we live the true and the good from out of this realm of experience, then we are truly free - no bondage to the idea. Weve become a spirit-thought-creator, and then we are seen. Again, as pointed out by
Steiner in Truth and Knowledge:
Man is not a passive onlooker in relation to evolution, merely repeating in mental pictures cosmic events taking place without his participation; he is the active co-creator of the world-process, and cognition is the most perfect link in the organism of the universe.
Ordinary consciousness, as it faces the social-trials of the biography, is the naturally arising expression of the Seven
Stages of the Passion of Christ. This then is the science or physics of the life of thought as religious or moral art.
For the American Soul, we now have cowboys and cowgirls, as women more and more claim their rightful
places society. Again, following the mythical archetype of the Western as
regards the American Soul, and remembering that this Soul is the leading edge of
changes in consciousness occurring on a world-wide scale, those who "think"
their way to the true and the good, or live in what Steiner
called the Consciousness Soul, burn with a kind of fire for the true and the good that
involves them becoming Christ-like in their biographical environments, however small and
intimate.
As such fore-runners they then are destined to live the
Seven Stages of the Passion of Christ in their individual biographical
niche. This
can be true even if someone is in a prison, or works in a large Corporation, or is homeless.
In this biographical niche they will run into, and become
involved with, those individuals serving other impulses. Our Age then is an
epic social conflagration brought about by the naturally occurring
differences among individuals, which is bringing in its train that Age of Earth
Existence the Hopi Prophets called: the Day of Purification. As a first act in this
true New Age, Western Civilization is failing.
Those serving other impulses are not necessarily wrong. Each biographical Path
is perfect, and
overseen by the most profound Love (see note 6, again). Each follows their own
drummer - their own music. In my Father's House are many mansions.
Original thought is created by human beings, in the realm of the uncreated and unformed - a realm connected to the spaceless and timeless Now that is Eternity. From there it descends, through the realm of perishable and mutable spirit - the realm of the imagination and mental pictues, which arise in that mental/astral space bound existence we more easily experience. Then from there the descent is into the the inner wording of discursive thinking in the form of concrete language, and in that way finally, via speech (12), into the world of social space and linear time. Steiner's map of the mind: The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, via its practices of moral imagination, moral intuition, and moral technique mirrors this process just described. Moral imagination takes place in the middle realm of the perishable and mutable spirit, through which activity we ask a question of ourselves, and in forming the moral intuition that is the answer to that question, we rise into the realm of timeless and spaceless cognitive creation. Then through moral technique we once more descend, from our previous assent, into the process of incarnating the true and the good into deeds, which can include speech.
The Creator, named Christ in our current perception of the Now, has made a world-encompassing social organism in which the human biography unfolds, in such a way that each individual receives the Love that belongs to them to receive (see note 6, again). As an aspect of this organism, there also exists a Path, which we have called The Seven Stages of the Passion of Christ. The Creator became human and then went through the gate of death, because He could not ask of us something He could not himself do - namely be human. Many people believe falsely that the Passion is something we did to Christ. It is not.
The Passion is the mirror image of something humans do to themselves as a result of the Fall into Matter. Christ follows us in living out this Passion. It is our Passion for material existence that He imitates.
The social organism is so perfectly endowed, that what Christ experienced in the Seven Stages - during the Turning Point of Time as Steiner phrased it, we can now experience as well. This is possible because the social world reacts to us, and in reacting plays the same role as did the Romans and the Hebrews, in the moments when the Creator God became human. The profound Now of the Turning Point of Time reverberates through All Time - all Nows. The Seven Stages are also the ultimate process of metamorphosis. What Goethe observed as the various renunciations in the Plant, can also be seen in such a way that in that the totality of all the single renunciations also reflect the Seven Stages of the Passion. The Ur-plant, first as seed, washes the feet of material existence, burying itself into Matter, engaging in its own Fall. This Fall goes ever more deeper into matter, and the life of the Ur-Plant, on a planetary scale, experiences the resistance of matter to its generative powers as scourging, crowning with thorns, carrying the cross, crucifixion, entombment and then resurrrection in the masterful creation of the new seed. This life is yet without consciousness or self-consciousness. It is pure life-process, without even instinct.
The animal kingdom and the human kingdom too suffer the Fall into materiality - and in overcoming the density of matter in order to express their true spirit, they too go through this Passion. And the human kingdom, in forgetting its own true nature, adds to the suffering of the life (plant) process, and the instinctive consciousness pain of the animal kingdom - by our efforts to manipulate what we do not understand (the fundamental "sin" or error we commit by our efforts to genetically modify organisms - including ourselves). Not appreciating matter, we also harm spirit, including the spirit of life itself ("In it - the Word - was Life and the Life was the Light of the world").
The Light of the Sun does the same thing (see note 11, again). In photosythensis It dies into Matter to become food (energy) for the human being (take and eat for this is my body), only to return/become the inner sun-light of thought and the mind. The deeds and sufferings of light also mirror the Seven Stages of the Passion. Everything is part and parcel of everything else. Those people who vex us, and scourge us and help us be socially entombed - that's just us wearing a different face in a different aspect of the Eternal Now (13). Our biographical Time is not their biographical Time, which is one of the reasons Christ encourages us not to Judge, for it is ourselves we judge. The other - the Thou - is us wearing a different face and experiencing a different time-oriented biography. We only appear to share the same Time.
When asked what is the most important commandment, Christ spoke this way: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your spirit and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.
God is everything, everything is god (14). We are all Cowboy Bebops - stranger others - dancing and singing throughout all Eternity; and, seeking the true and the good is just one Chapter of many in our own eternal dying and becoming.
Notes
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboy_Bebop
(2) Learning to Perceive the American Soul http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/learning.html
(3) See the movie Payback starring Mel Gibson, for an updated film-noir
representation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payback_(1999_film)
(4)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Watts
(5) The Mystery of Evil in the Light of the Sermon on the Mount http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/mysteryofevil.html
(6) The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/artofgod.html
(7) see Zen Anthroposophy: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/ZenA.html
(8) The IDEA of the thought-world: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/thoughtworld.html
(9) The Idea of Mind: a Christian meditator considers the problem of consciousness: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/tidom.html
(10) Carl Stegmann, in his book: The Other America: the West in the Light of Spiritual Science" called this new thinking: clair-thinking: http://www.amazon.com/The-Other-America-Carl-Stegmann/dp/0945803281
(11) Electicity and the Spirit in Nature .. - a tale of
certain considerations of the present state of science, in the light of
a modern practical understanding of the nature of mind - http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/electricityandthespiritinnature.html
(12) The Gift of the Word (a poem - meant to be read aloud): http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/giftoftheword.html
(13) See the Beatles "I am the Walrus": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42luHhrsNhg
(14) also: All You Need is Love http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydfH7iuLR0I