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New Wine
foundational essays out of a Science of the Spirit,
in support of the coming
living metamorphosis of Christianity
by Joel A. Wendt
social
philosopher...and occasional fool
contents
author's brief forward: (p. 2)
[page numbers are approximate]
New Wine: the art of the
sacrament of reason on the altar of
devotion (p.6)
The Idea of Mind: a Christian
meditation
practitioner considers the problem of consciousness (p. 8)
The Quiet Suffering of
Nature:
humanity
cannot
be separated from Nature (p. 36)
A Matter of Death (p. 59)
a small meditation on the
spiritual path pioneered by
Ralph Waldo Emerson, including a report of some practical
applications:
delivered
on the
occasion of Emerson's 200 birthday, May 25th, 2003, at the
Alcott
School of Philosophy in Concord, Massachusetts (p.63)
this and that: some thoughts on the
Four Noble Truths ((p. 70)
pragmatic moral psychology (p.
76)
The Misperception of Cosmic Space As Appears In the Ideas of Modern Astronomy: and as contained in the understandable limited thinking regarding the nature of parallax and red shift. (p. 88)
Healing the
Insanity of Psychiatric Medicines and
Practice: what
common sense and a return to the knowledge of soul and
spirit might
mean for our mental health system and care
(p. 163)
Transcendentalism Comes of
Age* - the transcendentalist impulse, heretical Christianity and
American
Anthroposophy - (p.
182)
The
Arcanum of the
Loom: the
spiritual meaning
of the Internet (p. 191)
the next four are
recently added -
and can also be found in the published book at Lulu.com
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/new-wine/11927276
The Coming Metamorphosis of Christianity
Sam Harris and Humanity's Moral Future
Saving the Catholic Religion from the Roman Church
through deepening
our understanding of the
Third Fatima Prophecy
Barack Obama and the reality of the Anii-Christ Spirit
appendix
two essays published elsewhere, included
here as a help in the introduction to a rational
religious
impulse, and a religious scientific impulse
The Meaning of Earth
Existence in the Age of the
Consciousness Soul
In Joyous Celebration of the
Soul Art and Music of
Discipleship
**************************
author's brief forward
The essays collected in this tiny book were written over a
period of
almost two decades, and represent several provisional attempts
to lay a
foundation for a more rational Christianity. These
essays can be
read as a preparation for a closer examination of those
matters to be
found in my books: the Way of
the Fool: the conscious
development of
our human character, and the future* of Christianity - both to
be born
out of the natural union of Faith and Gnosis;
and, American Anthroposophy: a celebration of the American
Soul's unique ability to contribute to the future of
Anthroposophy, and
to the future of world culture.
The Way of the Fool is meant to
be an opening dialog between exoteric Christianity (the Way of
Faith,
or of the Shepherds) and esoteric Christianity (the Way of
Gnosis, or
of the Kings). American
Anthroposophy is meant to be a
corrective of
certain errors into which certain aspects of the practice of
esoteric
Christianity fell during the latter two-thirds of the 20th
Century.
The study of the essays below should provide a sound
basis for
later taking up either or both of the above two books.
I have, in
reviewing these essays for
inclusion in this little book, made a few small corrections to
their
original text, and as well began this small book with a
very
brief new essay as an introduction.
As this book is
introductory, you will
find that it mentions many other books and writers in the
individual
essays. That is what this little book means to do,
to
introduce the reader to a literature and work they may have no
idea
exists. They also may not know that such
literature and
work represents nothing less than New Revelation, for a great
deal of
this work is fully rooted in a conscious connection to the
Divine
Mystery.
This last needs
some more explanation.
The Divine Mystery is living (...in it was life and
the
life was the light of the world...).
It
is ever new, and when people try to fix such revelation in the
text of
a book such as the Bible, they kill this living revelation
that wants
to always be able to speak to us in our present.
People at
a certain time create these books, selecting what to include
and what
to exclude. They then justify this human activity
and claim
for it divine inspiration. For example, the Roman
Catholic Church
over the centuries often deviated from the truth and became
lost in
earthly temptations. At these moments the Mystery
would
inspire a corrective in the various Saints and the founders of
several
of the religious orders (such as the Franciscans). Those
who
understand this history will realize how little of these
correctives
were accepted and became fundamental reform in the
hierarchical social
form that was the institutional Church. The Mystery
found voices
to speak through, and while the hierarchical institutional
structure
was unable to hear, enough of the laity was able to listen,
such that
as time passed, at least a few individuals could deepen their
religious
experience in the religious orders.
Unfortunately,
even the orders would grow
old, and fix their rule into dogma. When you
couple this
with the Church's punishment of those who express supposedly
incorrect
doctrine, you get a social process where institutional power
is always
able to trump the work of the Mystery as it continuously
inspires
individuals. If we examine the institutional Church we
find it
lost in legalisms and a vanity of power and authority (instead
of true
humility and service). There is no room in such a
structure, or
in the souls of those who adhere to it blindly, for the
Mystery to
bring in the living, always modern and to the point, new revelation.
As the
scientific age progressed,
religious doctrine and dogma became more and more rigidly
held.
While science on the one hand opposed
institutional
Christianity, this same institutional power structure more and
more
tried to carve out a field of thought where it could claim
superior or
moral authority. During the advent of science (the
Copernican revolution), new revelation that was unable to
enter into
the institutional Church was punished as heresy, and those who
disagreed with doctrine were tortured and murdered.
As a
consequence, this constant and
ongoing living stream of wisdom hid itself, in the work of the
alchemists, the original Rosicrucian's and other similar work
and
individuals. A division was manifesting between Faith
and Gnosis,
for while Faith (becoming more and more an arid belief in the
institutional hierarchy) had potency for many, without ongoing
revelation (out of Gnosis - that is direct contact with the
living
Mystery), the ground underneath Faith more and more began to
crumble.
This reached a
high point in the early
20th Century, when the work of Rudolf Steiner was offered to
humanity.
Here stood a giant of inspired religious revelation,
able to
build a bridge between science and religion, writing books and
giving
lectures. Fully Christian in its fundamental nature,
this new
revelation (Anthroposophy and Spiritual Science) made no
effort to
force itself on the Church or to suggest that it was in itself
a
renewed Christianity (to understand a renewed Christianity,
read the Way of
the Fool the
conscious development of our human character, and the future*
of
Christianity - both to be born out of the natural union of
Faith and
Gnosis, noted above). The work
of
Rudolf Steiner, and his many companions, was in fact the
return of the
Kings stream of wisdom, which had been fully recognized in the
Gospels
(wise kings from the East).
Follow the
Incarnation this ancient
mystery wisdom and conscious approach to knowledge of the
Mystery
stepped into the background for a time, and then in the 20th
Century
returned (it had returned once before at Chartres in the 10th
Century,
but that is a whole other story). In the 20th
Century,
humanity was now fully under the influence of natural science,
and
religion was thought to be incapable of adding anything to
scientific
thought. Yet, with the return of the stream of the Kings
(especially Rudolf Steiner) science and religion were
reunited, by a
process that asked of science that it become religious, and
asked of
religion that it become scientific. The place the two
met in
individual souls was art.
During Rudolf
Steiner's life, this new
revelation gave birth to a new kind of education (Waldorf
Schools), a
new kind of science (Goethean Science), a new kind of
agriculture
(bio-dynamic farming), a new kind of medicine
(anthroposophical
medicine) and much more. All this during the 20th
Century
flowed out over humanity, and the institutional Church was not
asleep
to this, for it happened right in plain sight in Central
Europe.
But the
institutional Church, as with
much it had done over the years, turned a conscious blind eye
to that
which threatened its assertion of superior moral authority and
power
over its members, supposedly Christians all. This was
more than a
tragedy, it was a crime. New revelation was made
available to
humanity in a quite obvious way, but those in authority in the
Roman
Catholic institutional hierarchy love their own power and
privileges
more than they loved either their own laity, the truth or
humanity.
As we enter the
21st Century, it becomes
imperative that such treasures do not pass by those who
suspect that
science and religion do not have to be opponents. The
essays in
this little book are meant as an introduction to the more
scientific
aspects of the new revelation.
In addition to
work I have previously
written, I have also written an essay on the stars just for
this book,
given that perhaps one day in the not too distant future, we
will
realize that our present image of cosmic space, as a kind of
near
three-dimensional endlessness, will be eventually be seen as
the same
kind of fundamental flaw that led more ancient peoples to
conceive of
the Earth as flat. Yes, that's right folks, I am going
to suggest
that the heavens are in fact a representation of Heaven
that appears in the physical, and the ancients were right to
consider
the Earth the center of the Universe. At the same time,
I will
remain within the rational and the facts - the reader may be
surprised.
Given that most
people will find the
whole thing quite ludicrous, I hope the more discerning reader
will
enjoy that final essay in the wry spirit in which it was
written.
That essay is, as was often said in the 1960's: far out - man,
cosmic.
***************************
New Wine:
- the art of
the sacrament of reason on the altar of devotion -
The adventure
of reason into which my
life took me over 25 years ago, could not have been
accomplished
without the inspiration of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), on the
anniversary of whose birthday (Feb 27th, 2008) I write the
initial
version of this brief introductory essay. While my
earlier life
grounded me in Faith, circumstances in my biography, beginning
in my
31st year, brought it about that it became necessary to add to
the
practice of Christian Faith, a scientifically based Christian
Gnosis,
following the example of Steiner.
Christians have
forgotten that the Birth
of Christ-Jesus was attended by two groups: Shepherds and
Kings.
With Rudolf Steiner's work, the insight of the Wise (the
Kings)
has returned to benefit all of humanity. Steiner was a
radical
thinker, who still is hardly at all recognized by the general
culture
for the extraordinary genius he presents. This lack of
recognition is no doubt connected to the fact that to the
scientists he
said that if they wanted their science to really discover the
truth,
they had to become religious in their attitudes (the
laboratory is to
become an altar). To the religious he insisted that all
that was
of mystery and magic in the practice of religion could not be
sustained
unless the devotional practice became scientific and rational
in its
core. Scientific and rational pure thinking, he taught,
if
properly carried out could become exactly the modern path to
authentic
spiritual experience - the one path that would allow science
and
religion to rediscover their true inter-dependence.
The link
between the two was, however, to
be built out of the impulse to Art. Art, via the
imagination - or
the picture creating faculty of the soul, was the natural
bridge
between Science and Religion.
This
possibility, latent in thinking
itself, did not actually exist at the time of the Birth 2000
years ago.
Humanity's inner life evolves, and this evolution of consciousness has brought us
to where we are today - in a necessity of tension between
Science and
Religion. Our civilization will fall into terrible decay
if we do
not turn inward and discover the potential, latent in pure
thinking,
for spiritual experience. Science must become religious
and
Religion scientific. The balance point is to be found in
Art, for
it is only out of the artistic aspect of the soul that a
proper
language can be built bridging the other two great cultural
forces.
Science, Art, Religion. Truth, Beauty, Goodness.
Reason,
Imagination, Devotion. In the essays below will be found
details.
New Thinking
and New Mysteries for a
modern age.
"And John's students
came up to him and said, "Why is it
that we and the Pharisees fast a lot, while your students
don't fast?"
"And Jesus said to them, "The wedding party can't be in mourning while the groom is with them, can they? There will come days when the groom will be taken away from them, and then they can fast. No one patches an old cloak with a scrap of brand new cloth. It takes away the cloak's completeness, and a worse split results. Nor do they put new wine in old wine skins, because if they do, the skins break and the wine pours out and the skins are ruined; instead, they put new wine in new skins and both are preserved."
Matthew 9:14-17 translation from the original Greek by
Andy Gaus, as published in the
Unvarnished Gospels.
***************************
The Idea of Mind
- a Christian meditation practitioner considers the problem of consciousness - (originally written in the early '90's
and slightly
revised for this book in
2008)
For many people, having been raised in modern culture, mind is thought to be something that exists in the brain, and as a byproduct of basically chemical and electrical processes in cells and nerves. This essay considers this problem quite directly and finds that, for all its inventiveness, science has yet to ask and seek the answer to the most important question - "what is mind to itself". When mind considers itself directly, in its own inward environment, then the idea of mind, as a product of the biology of the brain, fails.
introduction
If laymen were
not intrigued by the
mysteries of the world, there would be little interest in the
constant
flow of books and magazine articles explaining modern
cosmology,
anthropology, paleontology, and so forth. While such
explanations are
often fascinating, far too many science writers unnecessarily
confuse
the boundaries between fact and speculation. For the layman
this
distinction, between what scientists truly know and what they
speculate
might be true, is not understood and has engendered in the
public mind
a scientific appearing, yet somewhat mythological, world view.
For example,
the once unanimous
acceptance of natural selection as the guiding principle in
evolutionary biology is slowly eroding in those circles where
the
problem is critically considered. Yet this idea, which is not
supported
by an honest assessment of the geological facts, remains a
staple of
the modern view of our evolutionary past. It is used in
countless
places to explain and support other speculations, and will no
doubt
continue for some time to be one of the main beliefs we have
of the
world. Its truth is not proven, however. The known facts do
not support
it.
In this regard,
when speaking of natural
selection, or "Darwinism", I am basically referring to the
general idea
which modern humanity is taught, namely that the human being
developed
through millions of years as a result of accidental processes
leading
from a mineral ocean, through a biological soup, to single
celled
organisms, then to invertebrates, vertebrates, mammals and
man. It is
this general picture which is not sustainable in the face of
the actual
facts, and the genuine pursuit of the truth.
The fossil
record reveals that between
when a geological age begins and when it ends the plants and
animals
have remained the same. The paleontologist calls this "stasis"
- over
the whole of a geological age there is no observable
evolutionary
change, particularly no evidence whatsoever of one species
being
transmuted into another. Whatever change does occur, appears
to happen
in the interval between ages, which for unknown reasons
remaining quite
mysterious, and leaves no trace of its processes.
An unbiased
thinking concerning the
geological record will see that what is presented to our
understanding
and imagination is a sequence of transformations which have as
their
main characteristic the living process of metamorphosis. A particular geological period dies into
a
condition of formlessness, soon thereafter to be reborn filled
out with
entirely new forms of life, totally new ecological systems and
niches.
Moreover, when the record is grasped by the imagination
as a
single whole (which it quite rationally has to be), it is not
only not
discontinuous, but speaks plainly in the language of life that
the
Earth is a living organism that has undergone a long unbroken
chain of
metamorphic processes. It is only an analytic thinking,
that
concentrates on the parts instead of the whole, that fails to
perceive
this synthesis.
This is an
objective instance where the
theoretical speculations of science have not stood the test of
time,
yet our ideas of the world, once captured by this speculative
conception, are unable to disentangle themselves. Natural
selection is
such a strongly held article of faith, both within and without
the
scientific community, that it will continue to be a dominant
idea for
many many years. In human psychology it has more kinship with
myth then
it does with truth.
It is this myth
making capacity of
scientifically authored speculations that concerns us. It is
such a
powerful force on the ideas we hold about the world, that we
can fully
expect, for example, that many readers will not believe what
has been
said here about natural selection. Dozens of books and
articles
supporting what is said could be cited, yet most people would
rather
dismiss these statements as the prejudices of perhaps a
"creationist",
then risk their own belief system and actually look into what
is being
discussed in those circles where this question is genuinely
being
considered. (See for example: Dogma
and
Doubt, by Ronald H. Brady
[http://www.natureinstitute.org/txt/rb/dogma/dogma]).
Several years
ago, in a popular critical
examination of evolutionary biology, Darwin
On
Trial, Phillip E. Johnson, (1991,
Regnery
Gateway), the whole problem was carefully examined with an eye
to
aiding the layman in understanding the difficulties that
"Darwinism"
represents. The standard, however, is not to test modern
evolutionary
biology against some kind of competing theory, but rather to
see
whether it is good science. It is this which "Darwinism" fails
at. It
is simply bad science, and as a consequence results in two
very serious
and dangerous results.
The first is
that it holds still the
advancement of the biological sciences in that these might
discover
important facts upon which a more realistic theory could be
advanced.
As long as "Darwinism" is held to, biology is blind when it
looks to
the past, trapped in an illusion of its own creation.
The second
danger is that this untestable
theory (see Brady above) is used to support other kinds of
speculations
in other realms, most significantly for our purposes, the
investigation
of human consciousness. Important questions, which otherwise
would
suggest alternative ways of thinking about consciousness,
cannot be
asked because "Darwinism" is already presumed to answer them.
At
various places, as we proceed with the text, we will encounter
this
danger. When this occurs as we run into this speculative and
myth
creating impulse, I will endeavor to point it out.
The Idea of
Mind
Recent advances
in neurophysiology, in
computer science, and in cognitive science and related
disciplines,
have produced numerous books, as well as major television
series, on
the workings of the mind. For the most part, when I read these
books I
find my morality, my heart-felt concerns, my idealism, my life
of
prayer, of meditation and contemplation - all these most
precious, most
subtle inner experiences - increasingly explained as mere
electrochemical phenomena, as products of brain activity in
the most
material sense, and nothing else. Here is the speculative myth
making
power of science in action. In saying this it should be noted
that it
is not so much that I am against science, but rather that
science has
only asked one-half of the essential question, namely what is
consciousness viewed from the outside. The other half of the
question
is: What is consciousness viewed from the inside.
The views put
forward by the vast
majority of workers in these fields are materialistic,
deterministic,
and ultimately anti-religious, although often not consciously
so. These
questions of the ultimate truth of human nature, in so far as
the mind
sciences consider them, are being decided without really
debating them
in a forum in which the broader implications are considered.
Neurophysiology, for example, really only asks certain limited
kinds of
questions (chemical happenings in brain cells, or how cells
cooperate
to apparently accomplish computation), yet appears to assume
that inner
states of consciousness are produced exclusively by these cell
processes.
"It is old hat to say
that the brain is responsible for
mental activity. Such a claim may annoy the likes of Jerry
Falwell or
the Ayatollah, but it is more or less the common assumption of
educated
people in the twentieth century. Ever since the scientific
revolution,
the guiding view of most scientists has been that knowledge
about the
brain, its cells and its chemistry will explain mental states.
However,
believing that the brain supports behavior is the easy part:
explaining
how is quite another." (Mind
Matters:
How the Mind and Brain interact to Create Our Conscious Lives, Michael S. Grazzanica Ph.D. pp 1, Houghton
Mifflin,
Boston 1988).
For a more
modern statement of the
problem, this from an article on the World Science website, in
2008:
Trying to
understand what creates consciousness-the sense of being alive
and
aware-is one of the all-time most exasperating problems in
science. The
key stumbling block: even if one knew every brain mechanism
underlying
consciousness, there would still be no apparent way to see or
measure
the actual production of consciousness.
We should
perhaps note two things about
the first quotation above. First the words "common assumption" and "believing", by which
Grazzanica
tacitly admits that we are not here dealing with proven facts,
but
rather with the "belief system" held in common by some unknown
portion
of the scientific community. Secondly, he clearly admits that
moving
from facts about brain chemistry and related phenomena to an
explanation of consciousness, free will, morality etc. is a
gigantic
undertaking (still a problem 20 years later - see second
quote).
In that portion
of the scientific
community supportive of Grazzanica's "common assumption",
brain and
mind are considered a single phenomenon, and one popular
science writer
even goes so far as to say that the recent advances in
neuroscience
establish conclusively that there is no human spirit, and that
all
states of consciousness are caused electrochemically. "There will of course
be a
certain sadness as the "human spirit" joins the flat earth,
papal
infallibility and creationism on the list of widely held but
obviously
erroneous convictions." (Molecules
of
the Mind, Jon Franklin, p 202,
Atheneum,
New York, 1987).
There can be no
doubt that if a human
being ingests certain chemical substances, whether for
recreational
purposes or as prescribed medicine, the state of consciousness
is
altered. Electrical stimulation of the brain also produces
effects,
whether it is simple stimulation of certain brain centers to
cause
pleasure or to bring out memories, or whether it is the more
invasive
electroshock therapy, still urged today for certain
intractable mental
disorders. In one part of our society we say free use of
chemicals to
alter mental states is a crime and in another part forced use
is
advocated in order to control deviant behaviors. (c.f. Deviance
and
Medicalization: from Badness to Sickness,
Conrad and Schneider, Merrill Publishing Company, 1985).
The point of
this is to realize that we
are not only dealing with serious questions of truth, of
whether
scientists actually know what they claim to believe, but also with
the social policy consequences of this
knowledge. The central question remains, however: what is the
relationship between mind and brain? As we proceed, I would
like to
show how to extend our knowledge of human consciousness by
considering
what one can come to know from what might be called: Christian
meditative practice. In such a practice, what one can know
about mind
is quite different from what science knows. In such a
practice, mind is
explored from the inside rather than from the outside. Even
though,
unfortunately, those who have explored mind from the outside
have
pretty much concluded: "...it has long been recognized that mind
does not exist
somehow apart from brain..." (The
Mind, Richard M. Restak M.D. pp ll,
Bantam Books, 1988);
"My fundamental
premise about the brain is that its
workings - what we sometimes call mind - are a consequence of
it
anatomy and physiology and nothing more." (The
Dragons of Eden, Speculations of the Evolution of Human
Intelligence, Carl Sagan, pp.7,
Ballantine Books, 1977). [note in the
above the use of the terms premise and Speculations]
Quite other
conclusions are possible, in
fact, may be said to be mandated, if one takes the trouble to
examine
consciousness from the inside, as is possible for anyone with
a more or
less intact mental health, and the requisite good will.
At this point I
would like to proceed in
such a manner that it is provisionally allowed to use the
words spirit
and soul, but in a way that acknowledges the legitimate
requirements of
science for exact, empirical and logically rigorous
consideration.
These two words are essential to understanding mind from a
Christian
contemplative view and can be put forward in a way free of
metaphysical
or mystical implications. The problem is in part confused by
the fact
that today, when we use the word mind in normal language
usage, we mean
only the brain and as well confine this aspect of our nature
within the
boundaries of the skull. Mind (in modern usage) means brain,
means
within the head.
Soul and
spirit, on the other hand, are
not thought of this way, and while many people do not even
think such
entities exist in the same sense as mind and brain, at least
these
words have the advantage of being capable of a usage meaning
something
beyond the spatially limited confines of the cranium.
The problem is
one of relating personal
experience through language in a situation in which the
practices of
science have tended to already fix the meaning of certain
words. For
example, the poet will refer to heart with regard to the
phenomenon of
human feeling. Our whole language is filled with related
expressions
(heart-felt, warm-hearted etc.). On the other hand, the
scientific
community tends to see emotion (feeling) as a function of
glandular and
brain chemistry, and therefore as an aspect of the
mind/brain/body
nexus. Yet, an electrochemical explanation seems to deny human
experience, which has produced language implying that the
center of our
"feeling" life is not connected to the brain, not located
specially in
the head, but rather finds is primary locus in the chest. We
say, "I
have a gut feeling", or "my heart got caught in my throat".
The point of
this is to notice the denial
of this imagery (derived from human experience) by the
processes of
scientific thinking which have over the last few hundred years
more and
more confined the source of these experiences to the head and
to
material causes.
As a general
trend in science this is
called reductionism and involves a process which Eddington
called
earlier in this century: "Knowing more and more about less and
less." Our body of knowledge about
cell chemistry and neural
networks in the brain grows, but often at a cost to genuine
human
understanding (I say this from direct experience, as one who
has worked
in a neuropsychiatric unit in a private hospital). Perhaps it
is time
to pause and consider whether or not it is necessary to go the
other
way for a while, to reintroduce the study of the soul, from
the inside,
as it appears to direct human experience.
This can, I am
certain, be done with due
regard for the demand of science for reproducibility. I
recognize this
is not the usual approach by religious thinkers, yet in this
case our
mutual respect for the truth seems to require it. This ethical
demand
of science for reproducibility, namely that whatever is
asserted here
concerning mind (soul/spirit) be discoverable by another who
is willing
to follow the procedures, the experimental protocols, as it
were; this
demand I believe is perfectly justified.
In "new age"
circles one hears frequently
about mind, body and spirit, meaning, I suppose, that these
are three
distinguishable human characteristics. In modern mind sciences
we hear
of mind and brain. Are these differing perspectives talking
about the
same things at all? It will be useful to note in passing that
when
Freud's works were translated from German into English the
words
"geistes" (spirit) and "seele" (soul) were both translated as
mind
(c.£ Bruno Bettelheim's Freud and
man's soul, A.A.Knopf, 1983), even
though
English did have the correct dictionary terms. This really
only shows
that for the English consciousness the inner life was already
thought
of as mind even though Europe had had a long tradition of
referring to
inner life in terms of soul and spirit (Freud thought and
wrote out of
that tradition).
Modern American English still uses these terms as in: soul power, soul brother, soul music, or in noting the distinction between the spirit and the letter of the law.Yet such usage's are more metaphorical, more imaginative, than the exact language usage which science demands, in fact depends upon. Even so, while brain has a very concrete physical existence, mind does not; it is much more ephemeral. It can't be touched, nor can consciousness, or inner life, or feeling, or even idea. Yet, these apparently non - sense perceptible - phenomena are all recognized intuitively. We accept loss of consciousness in sleep and in certain conditions of trauma or illness. We moderns are in love with feelings and their expression, about which have recently been written more books than one can read. The practice of science would get nowhere without ideas and in fact the principle foundation of science's logical rigor is mathematics, which has no sense perceptible existence at all, and is nowhere observable in nature, even with instruments.
That nature is
organized along
mathematical lines confirms the utility of mathematical
insight, but
the creation of mathematical insight comes first. The
mind
produces these ideas out of its own nature, before they are
ever
applied to the natural world.
Imagine that
Descartes invented analytic
geometry while high on dopamine (a neurotransmitter identified
as a
factor in drug use and satisfaction). How are we to relate the
chemical
state of the brain and the simultaneous ideas? Is one producer
and one
product? And, if the productive cause is then questionable,
can we
accept the product?
Descartes has
recently joined the
(illustrious?) group of historic personalities to be diagnosed
has
having a psychiatric disorder (depression in his case) by a
psychiatrist who never personally met him. If true would this
make
analytic geometry a dubious discovery, or a hallucination
(i.e.
unreal)? Our electrical technology is impossible without the
calculus
that followed (and its relative differential equations), so
there is
something very different about this non - sense perceptible -
phenomena
called mathematics. It is somehow part of the world yet only
knowable
through mind.
It is clear
that accepted scientific
ideas are not being disputed because their producer has been
at one
time categorized as having been either physically or mentally
ill. Yet,
one can find in the literature (in the brain sciences) the
idea that
so-called mystic states and other kinds of religious
experiences
represent, or are caused by, unusual chemical states; i.e. are
not what
those who experience them say they are: experiences of God.
But, how
can this be? How can one make such a distinction that
the
discovery of a mathematical truth is different from the
discovery of a
religious truth, merely on the basis of the possibility that
chemical
happenings in the brain can induce hallucinatory states of
consciousness?
Now the working
scientist should have an
argument here, which is, at first blush, quite reasonable.
That nature
conforms to mathematically oriented models at least
establishes (I
won't say proves) that this formal relation exists. Granted
calculus
can't be seen, but it does allow prediction of physical
phenomena.
Nature acts in conformance with mathematical principles. Where
is the
evidence it acts according to the principle God - this the
working
scientist should ask. After all, this is the habit of mind of
the
scientist to form such questions. Or, perhaps to put it
another way,
what predicted observation would permit the logical inference
of the
entity God?
Even so, such a
response has not really
appreciated the problem as I have been trying to state it. All
the ideas of
science are first and foremost mental phenomena.They
appear in mind as a product of mind, not in sensible nature. I
don't
see gravity or even light. I see falling objects and colors. I
infer
the law of gravity and the existence of light from these
experiences
and, if I am a scientist, I make rigorous my observations
through
experimentation and precise instrumentation. But natural
selection and
the big bang are in each case mental creations, they proceed
from the
act of thinking, not from sense perceptible nature.
What this means
to me is that if I am
going to prefer one kind of mental phenomena over another
(e.g. the
idea of accident in the creation of life versus the idea of
God) then
I'd better be clear as to why I have such a preference. Yet,
before I
can make such choices, I need to understand mind, to
understand the act
which makes such a choice. But to understand mind don't I
first need to
understand understanding, to think about thinking?
To the
philosophically sophisticated
reader this may seem to be running backward in time. Modern
academic
philosophy (linguistic analysis), from Quine to Ayer to
Wittgenstein is
no longer thinking about thinking, at least in the way someone
such as
Fichte or some other 19th century German philosopher
approached the
problem. For the lay person the question might be put this
way. How can
I look to current work in linguistic analysis, in
neurophysiology, in
cognitive psychology, in order to build up my idea of mind,
when these
systems are already products of mind? Is not the cart before
the horse?
Don't I first have to have clearly
before me what
thinking is to my own experience of it, before I apply it in
practice?
I have mind directly before me. What might I understand if I
investigate the nature of my own experience first?
This is a
crucial point. If we were to
examine each of these disciplines we would find some idea of
mind,
either being assumed or derived from the particular work. In
some cases
very explicit statements are being made about what thinking
is, how it
is caused, how it proceeds, what its potential is and so
forth. Yet, it
is thinking which is producing these ideas. How might such
investigations evolve if first it was clearly before the
thinker, just
what thinking was to his own experience?
There are other
reasons for making such a
question the foundational step. Earlier in this century, the
physicist/novelist C.P. Snow pointed out the existence of two
cultures,
the cultures of science and of literature (or the humanities).
These
cultures did not speak the same language and did not consider
the same
problems. Moreover the scientists seemed to believe that only
their
method produced objective truth, and that the humanities only
produced
subjective truths. Alan Bloom (in his The
Closing
of the American Mind) observed how
the distribution of assets in the modern university reveals
the
domination of the sciences today, at least to governments and
businesses, who provide most of the funds for research. When
was the
last time a President convened a panel of poets to help him
define a
problem? (This is not to say that this is a bad idea by the
way. I
suspect in many instances our poets and troubadours would give
much
wiser advice). My own view is that Snow did not go far enough,
although
his being a scientist/novelist makes this limitation
understandable.
There are, I believe, three cultures (or three constituent
spheres to
Culture): a culture of science or Reason, a culture of
humanities or
Imagination and a culture of religion or Devotion. Reason,
Imagination
and Devotion are related to the older ideas of Truth, Beauty
and
Goodness, in that the former are human capacities of the soul
and the
latter are the outer expressions of those capacities. Reason
engenders
truth, Imagination engenders beauty, and Devotion engenders
goodness.
In reality this
is a complex
relationship. On a certain level, or from a particular
viewpoint, these
soul capacities are also capable of being called powers. The
romantic
poet S.T. Coleridge called imagination the "esemplastic power" and felt it was not just an aspect of human
consciousness, but was a force of Nature as well. Reason, for
example,
could be called Truth, as that appears in the soul as a hunger
first,
then a question, and finally an answer. Reason is then a
dynamic
process which is intimately connect to Truth. In a way they
are a
mirror of each other.
The difficulty
for both Snow and Bloom is
that they have no practical depth experience at devotion; they
didn't
really understand it or appreciate its role in their own soul,
or in
the world. Most Christian contemplatives are cloistered and
are not
encouraged to either prove their claims (in fact they make no
"claims")
or to exhibit works. Certainly no science curriculum, and few
humanities curriculums teach the works of St. John of the
Cross, or St.
Teresa of Avila. Our secular age is filled with writings and
teachers
who believe religion is superstition, but who have never
tested it on
its own terms. When Christ Jesus says "No one comes to the
Father
except by me." it doesn't seem to
occur to
people that knowledge of God might depend upon method just as
much as
science does. Perhaps the reason the scientist doesn't find
God behind
creation is because he looked in the wrong place. God being
ephemeral
(spiritual), perhaps God can only be observed (known) by the
ephemeral
in man. Perhaps only to mind in a pure state is the
supra-sensible, the
Invisible, apparent.
I have written
briefly here of reason,
imagination and devotion because I wanted us to remember that
mind
(soul/spirit) produces much else besides technical wonders. So
that
when we think about thinking we will remember all the kinds of
things
which flow from mind and appreciate that skill and effort are
as much
involved in the discovery of truth as in the creation of
beauty or in
traveling on the stony path to goodness. Moreover, there seems
to be
evidence that our greatest geniuses are often active in such a
way that
combines these qualities. Are not the true scientists and
artists
devoted to their calling? Einstein was mathematical, musical
and
faithful. Michael Faraday, who was the founding theoretician
of
electrical and magnetic phenomena, was a man of special
religious
devotion. Teilhard de Chardin is a very obvious case in point,
and so
is Goethe, whose scientific work was impeccable, although
today much
under appreciated. Here is what Roger Penrose, a major thinker
on the
problem of mind and science, had to say in his The
Emperor's
New Mind, pp. 421, Oxford
University Press, 1989:
"It seems clear to me
that the importance of aesthetic
criteria applies not only to the instantaneous judgments of
inspiration, but also to the much more frequent judgments we
make all
the time in mathematical (or scientific work) Rigorous
argument is
usually the last step! Before that, one has to make many
guesses, and
for these, aesthetic convictions are enormously important..."
And here is
Karl Popper, whose work on
scientific method sets the standard (for many at least), in
his Realism
and the Aim of Science, pp. 8, Rowan
and
Littlefield, 1956:
"...I think that there
is only one way to science - or to
philosophy, for that matter: to meet a problem, to see its
beauty and
to fall in love with it;...".
Or as we might
add to Mr. Popper's
thought: "...to meet a problem (reason), to see its beauty
(imagination) and to fall in love with it (devotion);..."
I'd like now to
introduce the ideas of
Thomas Taylor, as expressed in the introduction to his early
18th
century book: The
Theoretic Arithmetic of the Pythagoreans. He
observes there an interesting fact and draws from it an
intriguing
conclusion. He starts by deploring the increasing emphasis in
education
on the practical side of mathematics instead of the
theoretical side,
i.e. teaching math only with the idea of enabling people to be
good
accountants or engineers. The theoretic side has special
characteristics for Taylor, which should not be lost to the
process of
education. In Nature, says Taylor, we do not find the perfect
circle or
the straight line. All the beautiful (or elegant in modern
mathematical
parlance) characteristics of mathematics arise not from the
contemplation of Nature, which is imperfect, but rather are
products of
the soul which thereby reveals its perfection.
Or to restate
Taylor's observation in our
terms: mind (soul/spirit) in showing its capacity to think the
idea of
the perfect, the elegant, the beautiful, as that appears in
mathematics, reveals its own nature. Mind could not produce
the quality
of these ideas except as that reflects the quality of its own
condition. Yet, we know that the brain is a physical organ,
and is no
less imperfect that any other aspect of material nature. How
then does
this electrochemical machine come to the ideas which are
clearly beyond
its own structure? While you might say that God is an
illusion, and
therefore some kind of mental dream or hallucination, I don't
think you
can get very far arguing the same way about the circle, or
other
geometric, and algebraic formulations without making a
complete mockery
of the scientific and technological achievements which depend
upon
these ideas.
Taylor's
observation, which I make my own
as well, is simply this. What the human being produces,
through his
soul capacities of reason, imagination and devotion, namely
truth,
beauty and goodness, necessarily reveals that the human spirit
possesses a reality clearly transcendent of a mere brain bound
existence.
With this
background then I would like to
return to the question of what is thinking, and what the
answer to that
question can reveal for us about the nature of mind. I don't
expect to
answer this question here in the way it must ultimately be
answered. No
written work ever convinces, even scientific papers. The
reader must
make his own investigation and draw his own conclusions. This
is
fundamentally what truly constitutes proof, even in science.
My
obligation to reason is to state clearly my conclusions and
observations and to explain adequately my methodology in order
that
another can test my results. My reader's obligation is to
honestly
carry out the instructions, otherwise there can be no
scientific
validation or invalidation. This will not be easy, and few
will even
try for the truth is that years of effort have gone into the
understanding I presently have of mind. In fact it is not the
point of
this essay to establish or prove the idea of mind that might
be held by
a fully modern and scientifically rigorous Christian
contemplative, but
rather to expose it, to make it known, and to do so in a way
which
accepts as authentic and justifiable the scientific
requirement for
reproducibility. That the effort at replication may well be
beyond the
will power of those who agree or disagree is a situation over
which I
have no control.
This is not a
cop out, by the way. That
it takes years of study and development to be able to
understand
"Hilbert space", in no way lessens its mathematical truth.
Likewise, do
we have to be able to paint the Mona Lisa in order to
appreciate its
beauty? So, as well, we can marvel at the goodness of the idea
of mind
as a moral/spiritual act, even though we may lack the ability
to
completely engender in practice a full understanding of such a
condition ourselves.
On the other
hand, and if we are willing,
we can learn fundamental mathematical and scientific truths,
without
just having faith in the scientist's teachings. We can, as
well, take
up artistic activity and discover our own creative potential;
and
certainly we might devote ourselves to prayer and
contemplative
thinking in order that we learn to encounter the threshold
between the
visible and moral (invisible) worlds.
For my own
purposes I now want to put
aside (for the most part) the word mind and use instead just
the terms
soul and spirit. These two words are to mean no more and no
less than
what the reader experiences in his own inner life. Such a
process is
called introspection or looking within. It is a most ancient
discipline; the meaning of the Greek admonition: "Know thyself
". This
does not mean, by the way, to know ones subjective individual
character
traits as is often thought, but rather to discover the
universals of
human nature as they appear inside our own being. On
this matter
Emerson made a cogent observation in his lecture, The
American
Scholar: "For the instinct is
sure,
that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He
then
learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he
has
descended into the secrets of all minds..."
Earlier in this
century there was briefly
a psychological "school" which sought to discover truths about
the
psyche (soul) through introspection, but this work did not
make much
headway, did not seem to contribute scientifically. and was
abandoned.
Its flaw was to pretend there was no tradition, no previous
exploration
of inner life, of psyche (soul) which might offer some
experienced
insight into the problems involved. This pretense is
understandable in
that invariably those disciplines which actually know
something
practical about inner life are spiritual disciplines and the
general
trend of scientific thought has been to view spiritual ideas
about the
Earth, Cosmos and Man, as mere superstition. It is no wonder
then that,
when science seeks to investigate inner life, its
anti-spiritual
assumptions and preconceptions become an impediment to the
discovery of
just those facts sought after.
Every human
being experiences
consciousness, which includes sense experience (sight,
hearing, touch,
taste and smell etc.), varying degrees of well being (health,
vitality
and illness), thoughts, dreams, feelings, impulses of will,
desires,
sympathies, antipathies, and so forth. Our language is full of
a
variety of words for different inner experiences, or states of
consciousness, and these usages can often be very instructive.
For
example, why do we call someone "bright" or speak of "flashes
of
insight" or draw cartoons in which having a "bright idea" is
depicted
by a light bulb going on over someone's head? We do this
because we
instinctively know that certain kinds of thought activity
(intuitions)
are accompanied by phenomena of inner light. This is not light
as seen
by the physical eye, but light experienced by the "mind's
eye", the
individual human spirit.
In our ordinary
state of soul
(consciousness) this experience is not paid attention to
because we are
focused outwardly on the problem, whose solution the "flash of
insight"
represents. Moreover, the activity by which we produce the
"in-sight",
lies below the level of consciousness. It is unconscious. Now
the fact
is that within many spiritual disciplines exists the knowledge
by which
this unconscious activity can be made conscious, the inner eye
strengthened and intuitions can be produced more or less at
will. Even
so, not all spiritual disciplines are the same, have the same
world
view, or the same purposes. It becomes necessary then to say a
few
words about this, in particular the differences between
Buddhist and
Christian depth meditation practices, the principle paths of
Eastern
and Western forms of spiritual life.
Buddhism today
enjoys a certain
ascendancy in America.
"The Buddhist movement
has become a regional phenomenon.
It is pervasive. And it is quietly transforming our North
American
culture. This is the golden age of Buddhism. Right here. Right
now. " (Don Morreale, quoted in
Masters of the Universe,
Pamela Weintraub, Omni, March 1990.)
Examine, for
example, the book by William
Irwin Thompson, Imaginary
Landscape. This is a book straining
to
realize ideas about man and the world by combining reason,
imagination
and devotion. Thompson is a cultural historian fascinated with
the
cutting edge of the new sciences such as chaos research and
cognitive
science.Thompson has clearly been influenced by Buddhism
(apparently
the Tibetan Llama Choygam Trungpa), and this reveals itself in
the
ethereally vague, almost ungrounded character of Thompson's
prose. If
you were to follow reading Thompson's book by reading Speakers
Meaning by Owen Barfield, who is a
student of
the Western spiritual teacher, Rudolf Steiner, the different
effect of
the style of meditation and related practices on the thinking
of the
two writers is clear. There is a mystery here concerning the
effect of
meditation styles on cultural life.
I do not say
this because I am opposed to
Buddhism as a spiritual path, but rather as an observer of
culture and
the ebbs and flows in the dynamics of a civilization's
cultural
existence. Years ago I had a profound experience of Buddhism,
for which
I am ever thankful, yet I believe there must arise an effort
on the
part of the leaders of both Western and Eastern cultural life
to work
together, in mutually supportive ways. There is, I believe,
hidden in
the mysteries behind both Christianity and Buddhism, a higher
unity,
which ought to sought for; all the while remaining mindful of
the
different effects on the soul life of the individual which are
due to
the different practices, and the natural consequences these
must have
in the life of a culture. Just like political leaders,
humanities
spiritual leaders owe the individual certain responsibilities.
The orientation
of Buddhist and Christian
inner disciplines toward the act of thinking is quite
different. The
reader who begins to take an objective look at his inner life,
at his
soul (which includes all that appears inwardly, both conscious
and
unconscious), will find that there is an actor, a self, an
egoity. To
this we refer when we think or say "I". Buddhist meditation
takes the
view that this "I" is the cause of suffering, the cause of
life's
difficulties and that it (the "I") needs to be abandoned,
eventually to
disappear into an experience of self merged and lost within
Self.
Christian
meditation sees the "I" as the
point of creation, as the image of God, which can be redeemed
from its
fallen nature, so as to produce the mysterious and paradoxical
Pauline
dictum: "Not
I,
but Christ in me."
The Buddhist leaves the act of thinking, the "I"'s spiritual activity, to take its own course, believing that this activity only produces illusions. Christian meditation sees the act of thinking as capable of being metamorphosed, altered through discipline, into a new organ of perception, an organ which can then perceive deeper into the mysteries of creation.
Lest one
believe this is an
inconsequential matter, just consider the following as
reported in the
Boston Globe newspaper in December of 1990. The story reveals
that a
Carthusian priest, a monk in a Catholic contemplative order,
has just
completed seven years training in the meditation practices of
Vipassana
Buddhism. This priest, Rev. Denys Rackley, is quoted as
saying: "What
Western Christians
need...is practical knowledge...of preparing the mind for the
spiritual
experience, something almost entirely unknown in the West." It is understandable why he believes this, but
it is
not true. The depth meditative practices with Christian
understanding
are not unknown, but one does have to look for them in the
West, rather
then look to the East.
Father Denys is
also quoted as saying: "...as long as you're
functioning at the level of the rational thinking mind, you're
not
really into the heart of the spiritual life".
This is the Buddhist view, but one of the purposes of this
essay is to
suggest that thinking can in fact lead to direct spiritual
experience.
And that for the Christian, to abandon his cognitive
capacities in the
manner of Eastern meditative practices is to miss developing "Not I, but Christ in
me."
This short
consideration hardly exhausts
what would be a proper examination of these differences, nor
does it
deal with the complex and difficult relation between modern
depth
Christianity and the current theological beliefs of many
Christian
churches. I did feel it necessary, however, to note briefly
these
themes as part of giving as rounded out a picture of mind
(soul/spirit), as that exists for the modern, scientifically
rigorous,
Christian meditative practitioner.
The reader may
then consider the soul to
be all that appears before him inwardly as his consciousness,
including
as well sense experience. While we feel, and have been taught,
that
sense experience is caused by outer nature, the actual
experiencing of
these so-called stimuli occurs within the soul or conscious
awareness.
For example, if one whose normal environment is urban were to
be
transported suddenly to a grand vista of nature they would
experience
the soul's expansive movement deeper into the senses. Normally
in urban
life the soul withdraws as far as possible from its sense
experiences
which are so chaotic and immoderate. We tend to hear, see,
smell,
taste, feel (as in touch) with less sensitivity while we lead
an urban
existence. The opposite is also true. If an urban dweller, who
has
spent a month or so in raw nature were to suddenly return to
downtown
Manhattan, they would experience a sudden contraction of the
soul, a
rapid withdrawal from the senses, and a constriction of the
diaphragm
(so as to breathe less deeply the toxic air).
Soul includes
as well that which exists
in the unconscious, and which manifests over time, such as
mood,
character, temperament and other like phenomena. Within the
field of
soul, within the totality of psychic life, the "I" or spirit
appears as
the experiencer, the actor, and the creative or initiating
cause.
Now please
remember that this way of
describing soul life comes from the process of active
objective
introspection. It does not try to infer from outer perception
as do the
sciences, but seeks to objectify the direct experiences of the
observer
of his own self. Just as science then points to technological
products
to validate its views, so can these practices point to
reproducible
effects in the inner life brought about by the disciplined
activity of
the "I" through self development exercises, such as
concentration,
meditation, contemplation and prayer. I would like to put
forward a
model here, just as science does, but in this case I want it
to be
clear it is only a device by which to convey an idea, a mental
representation of a real process, which can be known, but
which can't
be described by the concepts we are used to.
Imagine if you
will that you are holding
a "stick" between the palms of your hands. If you move your
left hand
in such a way as to push the "stick", your right hand will
move as
well. Move the right hand and the "stick" will push the left.
This then
is the idea I want to suggest for the brain-mind relationship,
or the
body/soul/spirit relationship. Brain chemistry can cause
changes in
consciousness, but as well the "I", the spirit, can cause
changes in
brain chemistry. In Mind
Matters, Grazzanica, having already
likened
brain to a mechanism, then says paradoxically: "A thought can change
brain
chemistry, just as a physical event in the brain can change a
thought". My question for Grazzanica
is: what does he think
causes the thought which changes the brain chemistry?
If I ingest
substances, food or chemical,
I alter my state of soul, of consciousness. There is no
ignoring the
fact that brain chemistry effects states of mind (soul).
However, the
opposite is also true. My active spirit can also effect states
of soul,
and in some circumstances brain and body chemistry as well
(c.f. the
capacities of Jack Schwartz who is able to control consciously
a number
of so-called involuntary bodily processes including blood
flow.).
Moreover, any conscious physical movement is initiated by my
spirit
which first imagines it. Ordinarily we are not aware of how
our "I"'s
will brings about this physical movement. The "stick", as it
were, is
hidden deep in the unconscious.
With regard to
the act of thinking,
however, the whole activity lies within the reach of my self
conscious
spirit. Thinking takes place in the conscious parts of the
soul and
with training one can become aware of and be active in the
whole
process.
Ordinarily we
experience thinking as an
inner dialog, a flow of words. This talking to ourselves
(don't we say,
"I can't hear myself think") is the end product of unconscious
processes. In this instance it is the spirit which initiates
the silent
wording and the soul which hears. This act of thinking (which
is
unconscious ) produces thoughts or trains of thought (the flow
of
words) of which we are conscious. The training disciplines of
a
specific spiritual practice can, stage by stage, uncover and
make open
to experience, and will activity, what remains otherwise
hidden in the
unconscious.
I will now
describe some of the
consequences of such a discipline in terms of capacities and
experiences. This is not meant to be exhaustive, only
indicative. Later
we will discuss certain books which have much more to offer in
this
line, books which I have used (tested) myself. The stream of
"words"
can be brought to a halt. The act of thinking can then be
focused on a
single concept. The discovery here is that concept and word
are two
different experiences. This is another crucial matter, but its
main
difficulty for the reader's understanding is that it cannot be
put into
words. It is completely a function of experience.
Now ordinarily
we think of concept and
idea as the same as the word which we experience in our inner
dialog.
The true experience of the concept is beyond language. It can
ultimately be experienced in a way analogous to that in which
a sense
object is experienced. The difference is that I am in an
unusual state
of consciousness, which can be described as "sense free". Only
to my
mind's eye, my spiritual eye, does the concept appear.
Moreover, as an
experience it is more vivid, more intense, than sense
experience. It
touches, as it were, my whole soul, filling the soul with
"sensation",
with image, sound, tactility, engagement (I am pulled toward
it, it
seems to rush toward me). In addition the experience can only
be
sustained if my "I" is active in a certain way. In the face of
sense
experience I can be passive. In the face of the supra-sensible
experience of the pure concept, I must remain active inwardly.
Roger Penrose
in his The
Emperor's New Mind relates how as a
mathematician (recall what had been said previously about
mathematics
by Taylor) he is beginning to think mathematical truths have
their own
independent existence. "...I cannot help feeling that, with
mathematics the case
for believing in some kind of ethereal, eternal existence, at
least for
the more profound mathematical concepts, is a good deal
stronger..." (pp. 97). Mathematical
thinking is a very concentrated
activity, is good practice for meditation and contemplation
and can
easily evolve into the contemplation of the pure concept.
When we think,
then, in the ordinary way
(stream of words), our unconscious thought-creative activity
is within
the realm of the pure concept, but our conscious awareness is
only of
the words which fall out, as it were, like autumn leaves blown
free of
the living tree of our mind.
As with mathematics, so with music. Consider the poetic intuition out of the imagination of the writer Kim Stanley Robinson in his novel: The Memory of Whiteness:
"A music leads the
mind through the starry night and the
brain must expand to contain the flight like a tree growing
branches at
the speed of light."
Thinking cannot only focus on the single concept, it may also suspend itself just before the act which produces the awareness of the concept. Thinking can take up a question, but not proceed all the way to an answer. We can live in the question, in a condition of heightened anticipation. A great deal can be learned from appreciating the qualitative difference of the "I"'s activities of "focus" and "question".
Up to now
little has been said here of
the Christian nature of such practices. Consider then that the
Christian contemplative's practice is to think in a
concentrated and
focused way ever and ever again on the Being of God. If
Penrose has
begun to suspect that mathematics is derived from an
experience of
something that is "there
already", are we to be surprised
when the
contemplative finds God as an experience in his consciousness
(soul)
and as a consequence (in part, we will have to avoid
complicating
things with the problem of Grace) of the activity of his
thinking
(spirit)? Prayer is another form of question, and by
combining
question and focus, or prayer and contemplation, the
contemplative
proceeds in an exact, disciplined and rigorous fashion.
The summa of my
own investigations (which
is not by any means to be considered more than the work of a
beginner)
is the discipline of sacrifice of thoughts. I have found it
especially
important to learn to give up any tendency to fixed ideas.
Always it is
necessary to approach the situation ignorant, to sacrifice all
previous
ideas. "Blessed
are
the poor in spirit. " is the
Beatitude.
Only in a condition of humility, of not knowing, can I come to
the more
subtle, more intimate inner experiences. One of my favorite
teachers
calls sacrifice of thoughts: "...learning to think on your knees...".
This leads us
to the consideration of the
core problem, that of morality and conscience.
Many people
today think of education and
character development as having to do with pouring something
into an
otherwise empty soul. To my experience this is mistaken.
Rather it is
always a question of development, of unfolding. A human being
becomes.
True morality then involves the development of a capacity, and
is not
merely a matter of instruction. You can get people to conform,
but real
morality comes from the inside out and is not a response to
expectations of right behavior. (This appears to be a new
condition for
mankind. Previously, in human development, morality, to a
great extent,
was set for the individual by the outside social structure,
through
codes of behavior, traditions, and other socially enforced
expectations.
Depth
introspection of the act of
thinking will discover that the outcome of thinking is
significantly
affected by the moral intention of the thinker. Just as the
act of
thinking needs to be made conscious, so the moral intention
connected
to the object (or the why) of the thinking needs to be fully
conscious.
If, for example, I am a business man looking for a solution to
a
certain problem, the answers I get will vary according to the
moral
intention. Ultimately the practitioner of such thinking will
come to an
appreciation of the activity of conscience within his own soul
life.
This is a
special experience. The "voice"
of conscience needs to be carefully distinguished from the
more
subjectively incorporated authority figures. The conscience,
for
example, never endlessly nags us, does not make us feel
inferior.
Conscience is the experience of the higher element of our
nature, which
is normally in the unconscious. In the awakening and the
development of
conscience we begin to develop within us this higher element
(What St.
Paul calls: "Not I, but Christ.in me."). The conscience does
cause
pain, "pricks of conscience", because it forces us to
recognize the
true moral consequences of our actions. The truth hurts and
our voice
of conscience reminds us of the truth. The conscience,
however, loves
us, which is why it makes us conscious of the truth, but does
not seek
to destroy our self image or impair our self esteem.
Now just as one
can evoke certain kinds
of inner experiences through various types of thinking
disciplines, so
can one evoke the voice of conscience and thereby come to
certain moral
knowledge. This understanding of the life of the soul and the
activity
of the spirit, this part of the idea of mind, involves the
most subtle
inner discrimination; and, since it places morality within the
realm of
individual knowledge, it represents a threat to authoritarian
organizations, religious or otherwise. No one, who eventually
learns
this fine discrimination, will ever assert to another that
they possess
a more perfect moral knowledge. Each individual must make his
own
experiences.
This does not
mean that morality is
subjective, or that it is relative and changeable. The problem
is more
subtle and more complicated. The
conscience
is an organ of knowledge - of
understanding the true moral qualities underlying human
action. Two
individuals with the same choices, the same life questions to
balance,
if they strive for the same depth of understanding, they will
arrive at
the same knowledge of what is right. However, the reality is
that, in
life, two individuals seldom have to face the same choice. Our
lives
are very individual, regardless of superficial similarities.
What needs
to be weighed and balanced is unlikely to be the same. So when
the
individual problem is presented to the organ of conscience, we
often
get an individual result.
This can be
very confusing. In part the
confusion is due to our usually thinking of morality as a set
of
immutable principles, and the teaching of most religious
authorities of
quite definite rules and codes. For example, to many murder
and
abortion are absolutely prohibited. In these instances, to
suggest, as
the above seems to suggest, that the individual has some kind
of free
choice, is to appear to go against these most obvious and
traditional
moral restrictions. Such thinking, however, misses the point.
First we should
remember that most of us,
in many situations, do not follow the indications of our
conscience, to
the extent we become aware of them. Conscience gives us
knowledge; we
choose to act, or not, upon that knowledge. That we often
choose to
ignore conscience in no way takes away the power of conscience
to know
what is moral. Secondly, what is often forgotten, is that one
of the
most common ways we ignore conscience is in judging other
people. If we
put to conscience whether we should judge another's morality,
what
answer do you think conscience will give? "He who is without
sin, let
him cast the first stone.".
In the process
of coming to this
understanding of the role of conscience, or moral intention,
and the
consequences of these acts upon the activity of thinking, we
also come
to a practical understanding of many of the lessons of the
Gospels. The
teachings of Christ Jesus, in that they have a practical
psychological
effect, in that they concern matters of "mind", conform
exactly to all
that has been said above. In spite of what religious dogma
might say,
this knowledge, which is derived from the direct experience of
a
Christian meditant,and which is also representative of a
community of
such meditation practitioners, in no way conflicts with true
Christianity.
Certain
implications flow from this idea of mind.
We might ask the question: where is the "there"
where
the "already
there" is? When the mathematician
Penrose
proposes that mathematical ideas are "already there", where is
this
"there"? Inside the physical space of my skull? This is our
habit of
thought, but does that "habit" have to be true?
It will help to
consider a parallel
problem/question. Which comes first in evolution/creation,
mind or
matter? We assume matter, or at least such is the fundamental
assumption current in science today. The basic belief is that
at some
point in evolution the complexity of the nervous system
reaches a point
where consciousness arises and ultimately what we know as mind
(soul/spirit to the Christian meditative experience). We have
no proof
of this. It really hasn't even been seriously investigated, if
it can
be investigated at all. That mind arises spontaneously, out of
some
accidental physical condition, is an axiom (unproven
assumption) of
many mainstream scientists.
Such a supposed
event, lying as it does
in the distant past, cannot even be the subject of an
experiment, or
any other direct observation. This alleged event must be
inferred, but
from what? The fossil record only gives us bones, hardened
substances.
The soft tissues are always dissolved. And as to the thoughts?
We do have a
picture of stages of
development, one that we have been indoctrinated in from our
earliest
years in school: single cell plant, to multi-cell, to
invertebrate, to
vertebrate, to mammal, to man. We have an idea of mind
(soul/spirit) as
solely reason, and therefore connect mind and tool making.
This picture
itself is an inference. Are we justified in building inference
upon
inference. The fact that the majority of scientists believe
this to be
the case is of no moment whatsoever. We don't vote facts into
existence, and at the very least the history of science itself
reveals,
not an unbroken advance, but rather a series of "beliefs", a
series of
substitutions of ideas often quite at odds with each other
(c.f. T.
Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).
Is there any
reason for inferring the
opposite? Is there something which suggests mind preceded
matter? As a
matter of fact there is. The discipline of philology, the
study of
language as developed by the mind (soul/spirit) of Owen
Barfield
reveals that what we call thinking was experienced by
certain
ancient peoples as outside them. The whole way they used
language,
their references to muses and to genii, shows that they
experienced
thoughts as coming into them from the outside. (c.£ Owen
Barfield's Speaker's Meaning, also his Poetic
Diction, History
in
English Words, and Saving
the
Appearances: a Study in Idolatry).
Barfield's
investigations, which represent deeply profound and scientific
studies
of the history of meaning and the meaning of history, suggest
unequivocally that modern assumptions regarding the nature of
consciousness, both historical and prehistorical, must
certainly be
rethought; and if that is done, the inferred idea of matter
proceeding
mind in evolution will be replaced with its opposite, that
mind is
prior. Moreover, this philological research shows that mind
(soul/spirit) has over the course of history (that is the
period of
man's evolution for which we have records) only just finished
a long
period of contraction; thinking, having first been outside the
human
entelechy, is now inside.
This is not the
place in which to give a
full recapitulation of the relevant trains of thought
(arguments) which
Barfield makes, nor to go into the supporting evidence that
can be
found in the field of art history (c.f. Art
and
Human Consciousness, Gottfried
Richter,
Anthroposophic Press, 1985). Rather I wanted to point out the
question
and as well to point to work which finds a satisfactory
answer. Where
is the "there" where one finds ideas already? It is in the
great field
of Mind (Soul/Spirit) which encompasses all of Nature (sense
perceptible as well as supra-sensible), to which our
individuality, our
"I", has access through its own disciplined inner activity.
Just as it
is quite unreasonable to expect the imperfect to conceive the
perfect
(the material brain to imagine the immaterial and elegant
truths of
projective geometry), so it is non-reason to assume that mind
(soul/spirit) is not born out of its own likeness. Matter
cannot have
given birth to consciousness, to thinking, or to certain moral
knowledge (conscience). Our inwardness (soul/spirit) can only
be the
progeny of the Universe's Inwardness.
How do I know
this? Because I have
explored my own inwardness, and found there much more than I
had been
lead to assume was "there" by the scientifically oriented
education of
my youth. It has become a matter of experience, an empiricism
of
inwardness. In fact, such is the nature of this experience
that the
idea of mind as solely a product of brain electro-chemistry
cannot be
sustained. Moreover, there is a community of practitioners
which
replicates (repeats) this experience, the whole activity being
conducted with the rigor and discipline justifiably required
in this
scientific age.
I would like to
remind the reader, as we
draw this exploration to a close, that the intention has never
been to
prove an opposite idea of the mind/brain nexus to that one
currently
held in science, but rather to give as clear as possible a
picture of
the idea of mind which can be held by a Christian meditation
practitioner. Further, to do this in a way which at least
offers the
reader the opportunity of testing for him or herself the truth
of this
idea.
Ultimately, I
believe it will be most
healthy for our culture and our civilization, if what is
understood as
the powers of reason, be supplemented by the faculties of
imagination
and devotion, as well. What is offered then, in this theme, is
not a
disagreement with present day mind sciences, but rather an
attempt to
extend them, to evolve them by adding to their considerations
what can
be discovered about the nature of mind from a disciplined
investigation
which proceeds from the inside, from what appears to our
direct
experience of mind.
We need to
remember that these questions
are fundamental to the future course of our civilization. It
is
crucial, both for the health of our social order, and the
meaning we
attribute to our existence, that we have a true idea of human
nature.
Our culture is deeply psychologically split, in a quite
unhealthy way,
by the confused idea we have of human nature which raises
Reason above
the capacities of Imagination and Devotion, and which makes
so-called
scientific knowledge the only truth worth considering. This is
a
prejudice which grants an illegitimate power to what is really
far too
often only another belief system.
In the hospital
where I worked for over
seven years, powerful drugs are routinely administered to
individuals,
without sufficient consideration for these individuals
spiritual nature
or needs. That their "depression" might instead by caused by a
life
crisis with moral and self definitional (spiritual meaning)
dynamics,
is not really considered. At the same time, just down the
hall, in the
chemical dependency units, where the alcoholics anonymous
model is
practiced, meetings frequently end with the Lord's Prayer, and
spiritual self transformation is considered an absolute
necessity in
order to deal with the relevant problems.
What a picture
this gives us of the deep
inconsistencies that exist in our culture!
We can do no
better than to begin to end
our considerations of this theme with these remarks by a
spirit
(individual) in whom reason, imagination and devotion were
maintained
in the soul in a remarkable balance. From Emerson's essay Nature: "Nature
is
the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as
ice
becomes water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the
volatile
essence is forever escaping again into the state of free
thought. "
Here, with
remarkable intuitive powers,
Emerson sees to the heart of what we have been attempting to
suggest.
Contrary to the assumptions of the scientific age, namely,
that there
is no correlation between human thought and the world, the
world itself
is a product of Thought, and the human being, in that he or
she thinks,
has directly before him, in the experience of his own mind,
the like,
but rudimentary, capacity. We were Thought into being, and we
also can
think.
In the
preceding, I attempted to show how
one could begin that exploration which will validate, in a
scientifically acceptable way, the proposition that human
consciousness
and the act of thinking are not the product of material
happenings in a
physical brain, but the products of acts of soul and spirit.
Whether
critics of such an idea will be willing to struggle with the
difficult
work of replication, I cannot say. At the same time I will
insist that,
without such an effort, any argument to the contrary need not
be
listened to or heeded.
For those who
will wish to take this
challenge seriously, I recommend the following two books: The
Philosophy
of Freedom, Rudolf Steiner,
Anthroposophical Press; and Meditations
on
the Tarot: a journey into Christian Hemeticism,
author anonymous, Amity House.
**********************************
The Quiet Suffering of
Nature
"And while they were
eating,
Jesus took bread, and blessing it, he broke and gave it to
them and
said, "Take; this is my body." And taking a cup and giving
thanks, he
gave it to them, and they all drank of it; and he said to them
"This is
my blood of the new covenant, which is being shed for many..." Mark 14: 22-23
Where is humanity without the Earth? Without air, water or food we die. What then is the true name of that extraordinary Earth-Being whose nature it is to sacrifice Itself for us, and in whose own living substance we are nurtured from birth until death?
*
For many people
today, within the
environmental movement and without, the treatment of the
Earth, by much
of humanity, is understood to be a terrible tragedy. The
destruction of
the rain forest, the over fishing of the oceans, the casual
production
of toxic wastes, the continuation of atomic testing - the list
is
almost endless of the crimes committed against the natural
world and
not coincidentally, also against humanity. A central thesis of
those
concerned is that these excessive activities are unnecessary;
those who
carry them out have alternatives. Yet, if we honestly look at
what is
being done, and especially at the conceptual context in which
these
deeds are carried out, in most cases we will have to admit,
that from
the point of view of the apparent destroyers, their acts are
necessary.
The truth is that the conflict is over what these acts mean,
not over
the acts themselves.
Most of the
time those, who seem to be
abusing the natural environment, are acting in pursuit of
their self
interest. They are business people, whose obligation to their
corporate
stockholders is to maximize profits. If they don't act, they
lose their
jobs, their livelihood and all that that implies. For example,
loggers
and tree lovers collide over national forest policy. One wants
to use
in order to continue an existence already set on a certain
course, the
other wants to preserve out of an
appreciation of what will be lost when it all
is gone. In an odd kind of way both are conservationists. One
wants to
conserve and existing way of life,
the other, a
rapidly disappearing kind of life. Both are
expectable moral and human responses to a situation where no
agreement
is possible, because the contexts of meaning, in which the
situation is
viewed, are opposed. Each, given the quite different
assumptions under
which life is pursued, acts forthrightly. At the human level
both sides
are right.
This is not to
say that there are not
individuals and/or companies who act immorally or criminally,
who take
what they want in defiance of convention or good sense. But
these
aberrations are the exception. For the most part, the conflict
over
environmental policies owes its existence to opposing life
paths and
world conceptions, and not to any intrinsic or objective truth
about
what is right and what is wrong. Both sides, being human, can
be
understood.
However, there
is something missing.
While one can understand the human elements, how each view is
appropriate to its adherents, there is something that is not
understood. Nature is not understood, because neither side
grants to
the natural world the same effort at understanding they could
grant to
each other.
It is the
thesis of this essay that the
environmental movement, for all its passion and good
intentions, is
simply not radical enough in its understanding of the natural
world.
Concepts, like ecology and preservation and save this and save
that,
are impotent before the truth of Nature. What Nature truly is,
is quite
beyond such an incomplete idea as "save the rain forest".
Nature is more
than a physical living
environment which we find necessary for our survival as just
another
species. In solemn and sacred truth, Nature has consciousness
and
being. As a consequence, the environmental movement will only
begin to
do that which is needed, in the face of the terrible tragedy
befalling
the natural world, when those who would lead it realize that
the Nature
they wish to save is filled with just as much will and
intention as a
human being, and is just as much deserving of being treated
with
personal dignity and respect. Environmentalists need to find a
new way
of approaching Nature; namely to come to Nature as someone,
rather then
something. The only relationship which will be effective for
achieving
the quite worthy goals of the environmental movement, is the
relationship of I and thou. For there is an immense unasked
question: what
does
Nature want? And no human being has
the
right to impose their personal point of view over that of
Nature
Herself.
We must again
learn to approach Nature as
someone with whom one can communicate, and who is better able
to advise
us about what to do than we can imagine. We need to begin to
recognize
how trapped we are in the confines of the lifeless and
materialistic
mental images (conceptions) provided by the one-sided
scientific
education of Western culture. Even the Indians, the
aboriginals, the
original peoples still living within the bosom of Nature, have
lost,
for the most part, that intimate connection and conversation
by which
the Spirit of the Natural world is perceived, appreciated,
understood
and listened to. What is left, namely tradition, although
quite
wonderful in its wise conception of the Earth as our Mother,
as a
conscious being, this tradition is itself inadequate for the
tasks
which need to be done.
Moreover, this
consciousness, this being
of Nature is not singular, is not simple. The being of Nature
is
multiple and complicated, diverse and specialized. What has
been
conveyed to us out of the deep past is not superstition.
Stories and
tales of the elemental beings, of undines and gnomes and
fairies and
sprites, all this seemingly legendary material owes its
existence to
the fact that in the past human beings did in fact experience
more
directly the world of the spirit, the world which lies
presently
separated from humankind by a kind of veil. And recognition of
these
Nature beings is just a beginning, for the world of the spirit
extends
quite beyond that realm of mere earthly Nature, but to cosmic
Nature as
well.
Even so, this
bold assertion of the
consciousness and being of Nature in itself is insufficient.
The reader
of this essay is entitled to more. It becomes necessary, then,
to
explore not only the sterile quality of the conceptions of the
natural
world provided us by the processes of Western science, but
also to
suggest the means by which these ideas can be overcome and a
true
communion with the Spirit of Nature reestablished.
The reader
should be cautioned that in
this single essay there will no proof of what is asserted.
Such a task
would be impossible. What can be done, however, is to show
briefly how
it is that science came to such a narrow view of the natural
world,
what personalities resisted this process, and how then that
resistance
matured so that today one can find once again a way toward an
intimate
conversation with Nature. There is already existing much work
about
Nature by those who have begun this difficult and much needed
task.
*
Even though
this essay will endeavor to
show that the conceptions of modern science have failed to
find their
way to the truth of the natural world, this is not to be seen
as a
criticism of that science. In the main, scientists follow
quite
rigorously and with great diligence a path of seeking which
shows every
chance of leading them to the truth. Science stands upon an
excellent
moral foundation when it says: anyone who asserts the truth of
a thing,
must be able to show others that means necessary for them to
find this
truth for themselves. Experiments must be reproducible.
Theories must
be testable.
It is also necessary to be brief, so to the extent the reader may wish for more the author at once apologizes. Many books will be referred to, however, which if read and appreciated will more than satisfy the questing human spirit.
*
We all will
perhaps remember from school,
at least somewhat, what has been called the "Copernican
revolution",
the early struggles of science against the doctrines of the
Catholic
Church. This often resulted in various practitioners of the
new
discipline called natural philosophy (eventually to be called
science)
being excommunicated, and in some instances burned at the
stake as
heretics. We may think we are past this now, but anyone with
an ear for
these things is aware that even today those who espouse views
sufficiently outside main-stream science (the Church of our
time) are
rebuked by their peers, shunned in the communities of their
specialization, and at risk for having their funding, i.e.
their
livelihood, taken away. Some of these "arguments" are more
public, e.g.
"cold fusion", creationism vs. Darwinism and so forth. Less
perceivable
to the general public is what can happen to someone who looks
today for
the spirit in nature, or otherwise seems to think that some
"superstitions" may have been based upon the truth.
In the
beginnings of science the
problematic philosophic problems were more out in the open.
But since
the materialistic ideas won the day, theirs are the views in
the
histories of science in which the ordinary person is educated.
As in
politics and war, so in science; the winners write the
histories.
Several of the "romantics" and the "transcendentalists" had
grave
problems with the course science was taking. The poet Goethe
was a
vigorous opponent of Newtonian optics. The poet Coleridge had
a much
different approach to early biology. Emerson wrote in his
essay Nature:
"Nature
is a
thought incarnate, and turns to a thought again as ice becomes
water
and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile
essence is
forever escaping again into the state of free thought." Kepler, who gave us the fundamental laws of
planetary
dynamics was also an astrologer, and warned repeatedly about
the danger
of "throwing out the baby with the bath water", i.e.
abandoning
whole-sale all the hard won wisdom of the previous ages in the
rush to
make everything "scientific". One could go on...Ruskin,
Howard,
Faraday, the list is long of those who opposed a completely
mechanistic
view of Nature.
For an
excellent examination of the whole
flow introduced into scientific thinking with the idea of
Nature as a
mechanism, and related problems, the reader of this essay
should become
acquainted with Evolution
and the New Gnosis: Anti-establishment
Essays on
Knowledge, Science, Religion and Causal Logic,
by
Don Cruse, with Robert Zimmer. See also Cruse's website.
The essential
thing to realize here, is
that, as this "war" over what was the true picture of Nature
was in its
beginning stages, there were few "pure" scientists. That
Goethe is
remembered mainly as a poet is true only because the winners
wrote the
histories. He was in fact an extraordinary scientist, as
anyone will
realize who studies his Theory of Color. That Kepler and
Faraday had a
lot more to say than what is taught in school today is a
simple fact.
Faraday gave us the fundamental laws of electricity and
magnetism, but
he did so in the context of observations which lead him to
consider
that a distinction between "ponderables" and "imponderables"
in Nature,
i.e. between matter and spirit, was essential. Both were
present, both
were necessary.
Clearly one
view won the day. The "why"
of this is not simple, and cannot be found in the idea that
one was
true and one was false. We can perhaps get a slight feel for
the
underlying dynamics by realizing that at the time when all
this was
happening, the whole of Europe was emerging from a world view
dominated
by the ideas of the Roman Church. Thus, for many, to strive
for a
spirit-free view of nature was to also strive for freedom from
a no
longer desired authority which had for centuries been telling
people
what was true and what was not. To find spirit in Nature would
have
been to grant power back to an institution many were violently
struggling to leave behind.
More crucially,
scientists were led in
directions that were determined by the yet unknown nature of
what they
discovered. Ultimately, with the discovery of electricity,
scientists,
understandably following carefully the trail as it appeared
before
them, were led rapidly into what one author has called "a
country that
is not ours". As part of this process a concept concerning
"force"
arose, which was very different from the way past ages looked
at the
problem of causation. This new concept of force was abstract,
and
completely divorced from any idea of being
or consciousness. No longer were the happenings in the natural
world the
product of the activity of beings, the
product of intended
activity. Thus more and more the possibility, that Nature may
have a
spiritual foundation, disappeared.
For a wonderful examination of the times in which this "battle" was being waged, read Neal Stephenson's three books collected titled: the Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver; the Confusion; and, the System of the World). For a remarkable historical imagination of these issues, read in the System of the World, the chapter Library of Leicester House.
For a deeper
and more modern examination
of these problems, read Owen Barfield's fascinating book: Worlds
Apart. Barfield creates
an
imagined three day conversation in this book, involving what
he
describes as: a solicitor with philological interests; a
professor of
historical theology and ethics; a young man employed at a
rocket
station; a professor of physical science; a retired
schoolmaster; a
linguistic philosopher, and a psychiatrist. What the
dialog
reveals is that even these modern men, educated in our
universities,
where the scientific paradigm is dominate, can't actually talk
to each
other. The fundamental concepts of each individual
discipline can't be brought together.
People today
think that the argument
between the creationists and the neo-Darwinian biologists over
the
theory of evolution, is the real battleground between an
interpretation
of reality over whether there is spirit, or only matter.
The folks involved in this argument don't even
actually
know the history of ideas that is relevant to their discussion
and most
of what they say is useless and completely superficial.
If one wants to
get into the heart of the
question of matter versus spirit, the collective genius of
Stephenson
and Barfield is the best path. Only those who work
with the
history of ideas can speak to these questions, for the current
state of
our understanding of these questions has deep roots that need
to be
included if we are ever to resolve these matters and remain
rational
and devoted to the truth.
As everyone is
aware, it is pretty much
assumed today that older conceptions of Nature are purely
superstitious; that a Nature with being and consciousness is
an
impossibility. With the arrival of DNA research and genetic
engineering, the difficult problems in biology are believed to
be
mostly solved, and few new conceptions are needed. Physicists
routinely
act as if the mind of modern man has little problem forming
true
concepts of events billions of years in the past. Zoologists
accept
Darwinian evolution as a settled matter, and resent deeply the
struggles of the "creationists" to suggest otherwise.
Neuro-physiologists are convinced that the secrets of the mind
are
shortly to be theirs. While the clockwork is complicated,
Nature is
clearly a mechanism, made up of very small parts acting in
understandable ways leading from a remote "big bang" through a
long
period of evolution to the arrival of life, and ultimately
consciousness (mind). Unfortunately, they've probably got it
mostly
wrong.
It would be
possible to make an argument
about this "wrongness" solely from the history of science
itself. In
Thomas Kuhn's The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
it is
established that science, rather then being a carefully built
up
structure, erected on a sure foundation, is instead a
succession of
points of view, the newest one substituting for the preceding,
rather
then being built out of it. Science is somewhat like a rat in
a maze,
convinced at every point it has solved the puzzle only to
discover
another dead end which has to be abandoned. Based merely on
behavior
one would have to assume that what is believed to be true now
about
these great questions (what is life and consciousness, where
did they
come from, how did the universe begin) will, in its own time,
be found
false and replaced by other views.
Or to take
another tack, one could argue
that most of what is said, about these big questions (does
Nature have
consciousness or mind, and which comes first in evolution,
mind or
matter), by modern day science, is itself pseudo-science, i.e.
a modern
form of superstition, because the theories are not testable.
See in
this regard, Karl Popper's Realism
and the Aim of Science; Darwin
on
Trial, Phillip E. Johnson, (Regnery
Gateway,
1991); and, also, Natural
Selection, and the Criteria by which a Theory is Judged, by Ronald H. Brady, Systematic Zoology,
28:600-621,
1979 (now called Dogma and
Doubt, it can be found on-line at:
http://www.natureinstitute.org/txt/rb/dogma/dogmadoubt.htm).
This
last is the best by far, for it is deeply informed on the
history of
the relevant ideas, and is carefully and subtly thought out.
While the above discussion has been unnecessarily brief, it should have hints enough so that the reader wanting more can find his own way. It remains then to find some process by which these questions can be answered in ways which satisfies our human desire for testable and reliable truths. What can be said about this, as briefly as possible, will be related next.
*
We can perhaps
begin by asking what kind
of an approach to the spirit would be necessary, what pathway
to
finding out the truth about Nature and Spirit, will meet the
quite
reasonable demands of science for reproducibility and
testability. In a
sense we need a science of the spirit, or perhaps to put it
another
way, a spiritual science.
Those who know
the foundations of science
are aware that science stands basically upon two touchstones,
one being
a philosophical point of view, which at one time was called
logical
positivism, and the other being mathematics, which provides a
rigor and
discipline to the practice of science which is very
beneficial. So we
can anticipate as well that our spiritual science needs a testable philosophic basis (the
King of
the Sciences), and a reproducible mathematical structure (the
Queen of
the Sciences), or perhaps better said, skeleton.
Another aspect of modern science which supports its reliability is the technology which proceeds from it. This suggests then that our spiritual science will have to show some results, will need to have produced observable effects, somehow people will have to have been able to take from this spiritual science and acted upon and changed the world.
Well, that is
quite a lot, and I believe
enough. We should now, perhaps, cut this spiritual science a little slack, and not expect some
other
things. We ought to allow it to be different in certain ways,
after all
that is exactly what it has to be given the basic assumptions.
Certainly we can't expect it to be widely known or popular;
for
mainstream science has to have been constantly resistant to
such ideas.
Therefore, we ought to allow it to be young. How could it be
otherwise,
or wouldn't we already know of it?
Certainly we
have to allow for some
controversy, after all the ideas it produces will be different
from the
mainstream. As well, we should not expect to understand it
immediately,
nor expect that we will come to the necessary understanding
without
some, in fact perhaps, a great deal of effort. After all we
have been
educated into the mainstream. We think those ideas
automatically, and
most of our words take their meaning from this quite dominate
way of
thinking about the natural world. Let us take a sample
problem, and see
if it can help us better appreciate what a spiritual science
will need,
how it will be different and the kinds of struggles necessary
to
understanding what it might be able to communicate to us about
the
natural world. With this problem, by the way, I am not
attempting to do
something definitive, but rather to use it to give us a more
concrete
sense of what such a science needs to be, and how it might be
different.
Consider for
the moment the idea of
space. When we think this idea on a very large scale we
usually think
of the great universe of stars; and, having been influenced by
television and films we will have an image of movement between
stars,
as if we were a star-ship traveling at light speed across the
cosmic
spaces. While the "spacial" world is three dimensional, and
seemingly
endless, for the modern physicist, there are certain problems.
Was
there "empty space" before the "big bang", before matter
erupted from
its supposed birth point and exploded into the evolving
universe? Or to
put it another way, was space itself "created"?
For all of
humanities history, up until
the last four or five hundred years, very different ideas of
cosmic
space existed. To the naked eye the starry heaven is a
remarkable
vista; a place we cannot go, a place of mystery whose rhythms
and
movements seemed to announce great and small events in the
lives of
peoples and kingdoms. Our ancestors did not have the idea of
endless
three dimensional openness; for them the heavens were the
abode of the
Gods. But the early natural philosophers thought otherwise,
and with
the new tools, first the telescope, and then later the
spectrometer,
the computer, and so on almost endlessly, the old vision was
shattered.
The theory of parallax gave us distance, red shift gave us
velocity,
the universe was expanding and enormous. And we? We were small
and
insignificant. The Earth as the Center of the Universe?
Hogwash!
Who would dare
doubt this? To suggest
otherwise, to some, would be evidence of an unstable mind. To
believe
that this endless emptiness might have consciousness and being...get a life,
better yet,
go see a psychiatrist.
One hesitates
to bring bad news...but...
First off, most of astronomical-physics, or what is sometimes
called
cosmology, is not testable by the ordinary means we have and
use, say
in geology or zoology. We can't go to the nearest star and see
if it is
in fact made up the way spectrometry suggests. We can't go
there in
such a way that confirms whether the distance we develop from
parallax
is accurate, nor can we go off to the side, so to speak, and
measure in
some other way the velocity to confirm what we think the red
shift
tells us.
Our methods are
limited. What certainty
of belief there is comes in large part from the fact that each
step has
been rigorously examined by many scientists, and carefully
repeated
over and over again, and whenever possible each part was
worked upon in
such a way that it could, if possible, be used as a double
check
against any other part. If it isn't true, it isn't because our
best
efforts haven't been spent working it out. If it isn't true
it's
because we missed something, or haven't yet discovered
something or
maybe assumed something was a certainty that will later turn
out not to
be so.
The point to
note is this: our idea of
space, even to the extent developed by modern cosmology, does
contain
speculation (although as sound as humanly possible) and
elements that
can't be confirmed directly, but which have to be inferred.
Anybody got
a better one?
At this point
we should perhaps examine a
particular aspect of this discussion a little more closely. By
and
large for the ordinary person, that cosmic space is a three
dimensional
endlessness is an idea, or better yet an imagination created
through
education and further developed through the experience of
films and
television. We don't have a direct personal experience of this
seeming
fact. Our whole culture believes it. We are raised to think
it.
In this, it
(the idea) bears an odd
relationship to an older idea, that of the flat earth. For the
naive
consciousness of the time in which people believed in a flat
earth it
was an obvious fact. The earth was observably flat. Yet the
time came
when people became convinced the earth was round, and thus a
different
belief was taught and became part of the general cultural
imagination
of what was real. Only after this did humanity receive the
gift of
seeing from space the beautiful blue-white globe of the world.
Now what we are
trying to notice here is
not the particular fact of the three dimensionality of cosmic
space,
but rather that we know it as an idea, as part of the general
cultural
imagination of the world's reality. We do not know it as an
experience,
but rather as one part of a very complex system of ideas in
which we
are indoctrinated through education. This complex of ideas, of
which
large parts are believed to be absolutely true, constitutes
for modern
educated humanity a new myth. Just like the ancients, whose
myths we
now call superstitions, we have our world view, our socially
indoctrinated concepts of what the world is, how it is
organized, what
fundamental principles caused it to be, and how those
principles cause
it to behave in the present. The most comprehensive name for
this myth
is scientific materialism, and even though many scientists
understand
the limitations of their work and ideas, for the ordinary
person, these
ideas are reality.
To say that the
modern scientist is
similar to the old priests of the ancients is not to overstate
the
case. For the ordinary person the protocols and methodologies
of
science are a protected mystery. Only after long preparation
and
education is one admitted to the sanctuaries of modern science
as a
co-worker. And there are secrets, things kept hidden from the
general
public. For example, Darwinian evolution (i.e. natural
selection) is in
serious trouble, but the "priests" don't want the creationists
to know
it. The physicists studying quantum theory are beginning to
use the
word "intention" in describing the quantum behavior of certain
kinds of
small "particles". No one should be surprised if scientific
materialism
is slowly coming apart, because as long as the scientist is
rigorous in
his pursuit of the truth he is bound to discover the role of
spirit in
Nature. It's there and thus it must be eventually found.
Hopefully we
will now have sufficient
preparation to look at what exists today of another point of
view,
another "imagination" of the world that again finds mystery in
the
processes of the natural world. Again, this caution. At best
all this
essay can do is expose this approach to the natural world to
the
reader. Its fundamental works can be cited, its relationship
to the
general trends of science noted, and its basic ideas and
principles
briefly referred to. Beyond that one cannot go. It remains for
the
reader to investigate this ongoing work with an unprejudiced
eye and an
open mind, for its is a certainty that nothing new will be
discovered
if one already knows the questions and the answers.
*
I am going to
approach the following more
in the form of a narrative story then as an expository essay.
This
personality lived and did this, this other personality did
that. The
pictures conveyed will necessarily only be partial. Our
problem is not
unlike that of the five blind wise men who chanced to meet an
elephant.
One, who touched the tail, thought of it as like a twig. The
one, who
touched the ear, believed it was a large leaf. To the one, who
touched
the leg, it was a tree, to the one, who touched the side, it
was a rock
and to the, one who touched the trunk, it was a...well I can't
remember
all the story, but I think you get the point. If you draw
instant
conclusions from this article you will not get the
understanding you
otherwise might if you instead investigate carefully and
directly for
yourself.
I would also
like to add a special
contextual fact, one of which many in the environmental
movement will
have some awareness. Many today look to aboriginal peoples for
an
example of a healthy relationship to the natural world. Among
such
peoples are a number of prophecies, and I would like to direct
the
attention of the reader to a particular one: that of the Hopi
Indians
of America's Southwest. Part of the Hopi Prophecy is an
expectation
that there will arrive someday among them someone or some
group which
they call the Pahana, or the True White Brother. This
individual or
group is to bring purification, to inaugurate the Day of
Purification,
and to provide the "life plan for the future".
Mankind's loss
of conscious knowledge of
the being of nature, as that has occurred over the course of
our
history, is also the descent of a kind of darkness. It should
surpris
e
no one, who bothers to think carefully about it, that the
return of
such an understanding, a kind of broad social enlightenment,
must
necessarily be accompanied by an extended, and cultural-wide
rite of
passage - quite aptly named by the Hopi: the Day of
Purification.".
Without going into the very complicated details, I would like
to
suggest that the following will eventually be understood to be
part of
the fulfillment of this ancient prophecy.
*
In 1861, while
the American Civil War was
just beginning, in Kraljevec, a village on the border between
Hungary
and Croatia, a man by the name of Rudolf Steiner was born. By
the time
he had died in 1925, he had laid securely the foundations for
just that
spiritual science we have imagined must need to exist, if we
are to
find our way again to the being of Nature. Among the several
biographies of Dr. Steiner can be found this one, written by
A.P.
Shepard: Scientist of the Invisible, Rudolf Steiner, a biography. To those who know and clearly understand his
work, this
is a most apt title.
We can get an
early measure of Steiner's
genius by noting that at the age of 23, he was invited to edit
and
write the introduction to Goethe's scientific writings. For
those of us
raised in the cultural West, it is difficult to realize what a
remarkable honor this was, because Goethe has not the same
significance
for us that he has for Central European culture. During the
course of
this work, Steiner realized that Goethe's views of nature
depended upon
a philosophical position quite different from that of main
stream
science, and one which Goethe himself had never articulated.
Steiner
therefore undertook to remedy this situation and produced in
1886 a
remarkable philosophic text: A Theory
of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception.
In 1894, in a
more formal way, and also
fully cognizant of the philosophical ideas and temper of the
time,
Steiner produced a deeper philosophic text, which was an
expression of
his own personal work and not just the elaboration of
something implied
in Goethe's scientific books and papers. Called The
Philosophy
of Spiritual Activity, it also
carried the intriguing subtitle, "some results of
introspective
observation following the methods of natural science".
What is
expressed in these two books it
would be quite impossible to even summarize. In one sense they
approach
the same fundamental question: how do we know what is true?
The basic
difference, between modern philosophy and Steiner's, may be
broadly
painted this way: For the mainstream, the activity of human
consciousness, of the mind, is subjective in nature and, in
combination
with our senses, is not a reliable way to the truth of the
world. For
Steiner, as for Goethe, the opposite is true. The human being
is so
designed that our senses, when properly trained, can give us
all of
Natures secrets as long as the mind is disciplined as well.
For the
human being is of nature, and what appears inwardly to a properly
trained
human thinking is the essence of Nature Herself. Here are
Steiner's own
words from Theory of Knowledge:
"It is really the
genuine, and indeed the truest, form of
Nature, which comes to manifestation in the human mind,
whereas for a
mere sense-being only Nature's external aspect would exist.
Knowledge
plays here a role of world significance. It is the conclusion
of a work
of creation. What takes place in human consciousness is the
interpretation of Nature to itself. Thought is the last member
in a
series of processes whereby Nature is formed."
(emphasis
added).
The central
question, these books pose
and proceed to answer in a quite empirical way, is: what do we
make of
human thought? The approach, while expository, if read
carefully,
reveals that the reader is challenged at each step to observe
in his
own mind those universal processes leading to the production
of
thoughts, so that by an empiricism of thinking, and
observation about
thinking, the human being finds that in the activity of
thinking one
stands upon the threshold to a yet unknown world. An internal
process,
which once stood in darkness, and which went on without any
thought
given to its nature or meaning, now begins to unfold new
possibilities.
When this is pursued fully one comes to realize that the inside of the human
being is a thing much greater and
more
significant than the outside of things as these appear to the senses.
Let us try to
work with an analogy.
Imagine opening up the hood of an automobile. There before one
is a
mass of complicated wires, hoses, machines and other strange
and
unknown devices. That is for most of us. For the master
mechanic, the
view is something else altogether. We both see the same thing,
but the
ideas we bring to what we see are quite different. The master
mechanic's understanding and experience allows him to identify
and see
relationships where to most of us there would just be chaos.
The
reality and significance of those man made objects is not in
what
appears to the senses at all. Only to the mind does the
essential arise.
It was Goethe's
insight to realize that
something similar was true of our relationship to Nature. With
this
very significant difference. Man made objects are created
according to
our intentions; we give them purpose. This can itself be
taught. But
what is the purpose of a flower; who is to teach us that?
Over many years
of work Goethe came to
realize that one could trust the senses if one did not add
ideas to
what was observed. Rather one observed all the manifestations
of the
object of study (for example the world of plants), until one
could
recreate in ones own imagination the observed processes. For
example,
over the course of its birth from seed to its flowering end, a
bush
will produce a variety of types of leaves. The early ones
quite often
different from the last. What Goethe did was to recreate in
his
imagination this process of movement, from the earliest form
of the
leaf to the latest. (This is very much an oversimplification
of his
work, by the way.) Over time, Goethe began to experience
something
which seemed to stand behind the transformations from one form
of leaf
to the next, but which did not arise from his own activity. In
a way
his mind became a sense organ into another realm. Through the
discipline of his thought life, and the devotion to what came
to him
through the senses, Goethe began to experience inwardly what
he called
the Ur-Plant, the spiritual Archetype from which all plants
are formed.
In a like
manner Goethe examined the
animal kingdom in addition to the kingdom of the plants. He
found his
way of working there to be successful as well. He called his
activity: "learning to read in the Book
of Nature". What Nature presents to
the
senses, if appreciated in a disciplined way, "spoke".
Even
so, the history of science passed this work by, and other ways
of
thinking became the established methodology.
It remained
then for Rudolf Steiner to
rescue this overlooked work and restore it to its deserved
place in the
history of human thought. As a consequence of Steiner's
activity there
has come to be born: Goethean Science. Its practitioners are
few, and
the number of its published works also small. But in their own
way
these works offer the beginning of a whole new way of
understanding,
and teaching, about Nature. And when Goethean Science is put
into
relationship with Steiner's more mature work, Spiritual
Science, the
means to commune with Nature emerges as well.
Let us at this
point simply become aware
of a few of the published works of Goethean Science. Many
readers of
the various versions of the Whole Earth Catalog will be aware
of the
book: Sensitive Chaos,
(The
Creation of Flowing
Forms in Water & Air), by
Theodor
Schwenk, Anthroposophic Press. Here, with beautiful text,
pictures and
drawings, some of the basic laws by which form arises in
Nature are
uncovered, simply through the careful exploration of how water
and air
move. I will say no more here, for those who genuinely want to
investigate Goethean Science will trouble themselves to become
acquainted with its basic works.
About the realm
of the animals can be
found this: Man and Mammals, Toward a Biology of Form,
by Wolfgang Schad, Waldorf Press. Here is expressed one
of the most profound ideas, first put forward by Steiner, yet
consistent with Goethe's studies, about the relationship
between
function and form which appears everywhere as a threefoldness,
a
remarkable law of organization of both the organic and the
ideal
according to laws of polarity.
With the idea
of polarity we brush up
against one of the things we noted above as a precondition for
a new,
yet spiritual, science, namely an appropriate mathematics. The
Goethean
Science movement and its more spiritually complex relative,
the
Anthroposophical Movement, have produced many works exploring
a
remarkable form of mathematics called Projective Geometry.
Here are
just a few of the available texts: Physical
and
Ethereal Spaces, George Adams,
Rudolf
Steiner Press. Projective
Geometry, Creative Polarities in Space and Time,
Olive
Whicher, Rudolf Steiner Press. The Plant Between Sun and
Earth,
George Adams and Olive Whicher, Rudolf Steiner Press. The
Field
of Form, Lawrence Edwards, Floris
Books.
With these and
other related texts, as
well as with the two philosophic texts of Steiner noted above,
our new
science stands upon all the necessary foundation it needs, as
we
indicated earlier - that is an appropriate mathematics and
philosophy
of knowledge.
For those who
legitimately may need to
understand how main-stream science took the path it did, and
what can
be done about it, there is: Man or
Matter, Ernst Lehrs, Anthroposophic
Press.
The description, in the Anthroposophic Press Catalog about
this book,
reads as follows: "Now
a
classic, this is the fundamental text for those seeking a
spiritual
understanding of nature on the basis of Goethe's method of
training
observation and thought. Working out of a detailed history of
science,
Lehrs reveals to the reader not only how science has been
inescapably
lead to the illusions it holds today, but more importantly,
how the
reader may correct in himself these misconceptions brought
into his
world view through modern education."
It remains for
us then to link up
Goethean Science, and Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy, or
Spiritual
Science. This, however, is not so simple, for in really
considering the
spiritual we run also into the religious, which for many is
either a
grave difficulty or a profound and untouchable belief. If we
proceed
carefully, we can nevertheless walk through this potential
mine-field
without too much harm. Hopefully these guidelines will help.
It is not the
intention of this essay to
argue for or against any religious belief, including, broadly
speaking,
agnosticism or atheism. The point is to remain true to the
principles
of modern science which require reproducible experiments and
testable
hypotheses. However, when we approach the spiritual we have to
be
realistic about what is involved in "reproducing" and
"testing". In the
realm of the spirit such matters are more difficult because in
large
part they require of the individual a far greater effort and
self-mastery than ordinary experimental science.
Consider this
analogy. If I were to
attempt to reproduce current work in particle physics, in a
scientific
way, I would need access to the appropriate devices
(regardless of how
complex and costly). Further I would need an appropriate
education and
familiarity with the current work and theories. These are all
a given.
So it is with research in the realm of the spirit. One needs
to develop
the techniques of the inner capacities and to have mastery of
the
ongoing work. Thus, to attempt to dispute or criticize
spiritual
science without such effort is to defy the scientific spirit
of the
age, and to make a mockery of reasonable human discourse.
With this
needed understanding in mind
let us begin to enter more deeply into the realms of a modern
spiritual
science.
A personality
not mentioned so far, and,
in the view of many, certainly Steiner's peer in the science
of the
invisible (spiritual research), is one Valentin Tomberg. In
his
remarkable lectures published under the title: The
Four
Sacrifices of Christ and the Appearance of Christ in the
Etheric, (Candeur Manuscripts),
given in Rotterdam in the turn
of the year 1938 to 1939, we can find the following:
"You see, the
transition from all that is most prosaic
produced by the nineteenth century to what the future holds is
offered
by the spiritual manifestation of Goetheanism - Goetheanism
is, in
fact, a bridge on which the transition can be made from the
quantitative thinking of the nineteenth century to a
qualitative,
characterizing thinking. Now, where this transition leads is
to
Spiritual Science. Here it is not only a matter of being able
to think
qualitatively, but of placing the moral element in the
thinking into
the foreground. And by way of comparison, one could say that
Goetheanism is related to Anthroposophy, to Spiritual Science,
in the
same way as the organic world is related to the soul world.
The organic
calls for qualitative thinking; the soul world, for the
formation of
moral concepts.".
For some
readers, right at this point
there will be a difficulty. Having used the word "moral" at
once we
encounter all kinds of preconceptions about what that means.
If there
is anything which seems to lie outside of the realm of the
scientific,
of the objective, it would be the question of what is moral.
(Although,
interestingly enough, there are some who think there can be an
objective "ethics".)
However, in the
understanding of Steiner
and Tomberg and their many students, the core need of modern
humanity
is freedom. And not just political liberty, but more
importantly
freedom in thought, freedom of spirit. Steiner's The
Philosophy
of Spiritual Activity is sometimes
called The Philosophy of Freedom, the
problem being how to translate from the German, Die
Philosophie der
Freiheit. One translator invented a new English word to stand
in for
Freiheit: namely Freehood, which is obviously very clumsy and
unattractive. My poet-self leans toward a freer translation,
namely The
Philosophy of Free
Becoming.
The key to this
problem lies in a general
confusion of our time regarding human inner life and the role
of
conscience. An objective introspection of human consciousness
comes to
realize that there is an equally objective experience which is
the
"voice of conscience". Just as the darkness, which inhibits us
from
truly understanding the production of our own thoughts, can be
lifted,
so can the darkness which makes dim the "voice of conscience"
be
eliminated. "Conscience" is an aspect of our spirit, and it is
this
higher element of our nature which knows what in any given
situation it
means to be moral. This places morality outside the realm of
doctrine,
dogma or rules or anything other then our own higher judgment.
Steiner's The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity calls this part
of human
potential: ethical individualism. Morality then becomes as
much an act
of freedom as any other.
There can be
difficulties here. Freedom,
Steiner pointed out, is something different from license. Of
course we
can do anything, but whether we should or not is a whole other
question. In the past the problem has been who is to make the
judgment
of what we should or should not do. In Goetheanism and in
Spiritual
Science, it is the individual himself who makes that judgment.
Given
the gift of "conscience" we have a capacity for certain moral
knowledge. The difficulty is whether we pay attention or not,
not
whether we can know what is moral or not. Conscience can be
ignored and
often is. But that is a whole other issue.
Hopefully this
discussion will have
helped some regarding the confusion that can arise when one
suggests
that with Goetheanism we leave behind quantitative thinking
for
qualitative thinking, and that with Spiritual Science we go
onward to
moral thinking. In each case it is a question of what is to be
the
object of our search for knowledge. With quantitative thinking
we gain
a mastery of the material-mechanical aspects of existence,
thus our
civilizations technological successes. With qualitative
thinking we
gain a mastery of the living aspects of existence and with
moral
thinking we gain a master of the invisible aspects, the
aspects of soul
and spirit. In each case we can have an "objective" knowledge,
because
we chose a method appropriate to the purpose we pursued, and
because we
acted in a disciplined way, so that our investigations
remained
"empirical", reproducible and testable.
It is then with
Spiritual Science that we
enter on that path that can lead to a real knowledge of the
being and
consciousness of Nature, to a communion with that which lies
behind the
veil of the sense world. From one point of view, anthroposophy
or
spiritual science, as founded by Steiner, has two main themes.
The
first theme is how to attain knowledge of what aboriginal
peoples might
call the world of the invisibles. The second theme is the
results of
that research. In the literature of both Goetheanism and
spiritual
science one finds both these themes well elaborated. Yet, when
criticism of these disciplines is presented, it is usually
made by
ignoring the how and arguing instead with the what, the
results. This
is rather easy, because the results very often contradict what
is
already thought by the main streams of both science and
religion.
A good way to
appreciate this problem is
to imagine that what is being experienced today, by the
arrival of
these disciplines, Goetheanism and spiritual science, is the
way of
thought of the future making its first beginning appearances
in our
present. Think what it would have been like to have been a
contemporary
of Galileo. What he taught directly contradicted the views of
the time.
Think what it is like to change our habits, say ways of
writing and
speaking, for example. For most of Galileo's contemporaries to
change
their habits of thought is impossible. And not just because
they are
habits, but also because of the social pressure. The habits of
our way
of thinking and the social dynamic which supports them are
extremely
powerful forces. No one, therefore, should expect these new
disciplines, Goetheanism and spiritual science, to overcome
the modern
version of this mental and social inertia very easily.
These problems
are made all the more
complex by the fact that even within those groups which
struggle with
spiritual science (such as the Anthroposophical Society) in an
attempt
to learn it, there is not a uniform approach. The groups which
support
and practice these new disciplines are made up of human beings
and
there are many difficulties, disagreements and confusions. I
point this
all out, so that those, who might choose to investigate more
closely
these disciplines, will approach Goetheanism and spiritual
science with
a certain carefulness.
If what has
been written so far,
especially as regards the possibility of learning to commune
with the
spiritual realities behind the natural world, has meant
anything for
the reader, then I will close with these words of guidance.
Be methodical and patient. Face the challenge of the philosophical problem contained in the books mentioned concerning it. Do not fear encountering the mathematical aspect, projective geometry. It is usually presented in ways far easier then we can imagine - not by abstract algebraic formulation, but through drawing and visualization. At the same time become acquainted with the practitioners, the people carrying out the various fruits of this work. Remember what was said regarding the need for a new science, a spiritual science, to have produced results, just as materialistic main-stream science has? Have you heard of Waldorf Schools, biodynamic agriculture, Camphill Communities, Eurythmy, anthroposophical medicine, curative education, the Christian Community, astrosophy, psychosophy, rhythmic massage, Werbeck singing, anthroposophical nursing?
Beware skipping
past Goetheanism. That
way leads to an illness. Thinking must go through a
transformation,
from the quantitative, to the qualitative and then to the
moral. It is
a process of inner metamorphosis. Each stage is essential. The
goal is
spiritual science, which stands upon the philosophic work and
the
mathematical work. Out of this disciplining of the thought
life, then
can be grown a disciplining of the sense life, the life of
perception.
Expect
obstacles. The moral thinking
depends upon that moral training which only arises from the
life we
live, the immediate moral challenges of our own personal
existence.
There is nothing abstract here. It is all too painfully real.
Do not become
confused by and in love
solely with the results of spiritual research. It is much more
important to master the how. With the how we are then free to
choose
just what we will think about. If we become too involved in
the what,
the results, it is possible to become captured by the rich
conceptual
world there unveiled, and then to lose sight of the necessity
of making
all concepts our own work product. Those, who encounter the
Anthroposophical Society in their search, will meet many who
have
fallen into this error. Remember, the only ground on which we
can stand
as a free spiritual being in the world of the material and the
immaterial is those qualities of being that arise from The Philosophy of
Free
Becoming.
The purpose of
this essay has been to
introduce a question into the environmental movement (What
does
Nature want?). The secondary purpose
has
been to point out an ongoing work which is laying the
foundation
(Goetheanism and spiritual science) for answering just that
question -
a foundation which does not require the abandoning of the
principles of
science. To those who may wish to travel this path, I add
this: You
will not travel it alone. Many there are who seek to reunite
the Circle
and the Cross. See The Mystery of the True White Brother, on my website.
Then, as a free
spirit among other
spirits we will come to that communion with Nature, which we
seek and
desire, a silent Eucharist of the Invisible.
addendum
This essay was
written over 10 years ago,
and I have become since that time more clear as to certain
subtle
distinctions, that I did not know at the time I wrote the
above.
Today, I can still stand behind the above, but would (if
I were
to rewrite it today) emphasize even more clearly the role and
importance of Steiner's The
Philosophy of Freedom. It is
in the
mystery of the new cognition (see the essay In Joyous Celebration
of the
Soul Art and Music of Discipleship
in the
appendix to this book), that Anthroposophy finds its truly
scientific
basis.
***************************
A
Matter
of Death
Recently there
has been much public
discussion about the problem of a possible right to die,
sometimes
called assisted suicide or euthanasia. This small essay is not
directed
to those issues, at least directly. Others have examined these
questions much better than this writer, who does not consider
that he
has anything to add.
However,...there
is always a "however".
In all these
discussions, I have read
almost nothing about death itself. The fundamental questions
always
were about rights, or mental health, or the role of physicians
or
lawyers or legislators, and, of course, about suffering. Yet,
no one
seems to be willing to consider just what death is.
What is being
avoided? What is being
embraced? If people are to be assisted, toward what end?
The failure to examine death is understandable. We have no real knowledge of death, although many beliefs. Even so, to my mind at least, there are facts which can be assembled, and, as is the nature of facts, there are implications. I offer here no argument, no attempt to come to definite conclusions - just facts and their natural consequences.
The essential
core, of the first set of
facts I would point to, was suggested to me in an unusual work
(anonymously written), called Meditations
on
the
Tarot: a Journey into Christian Hermeticism.
These facts are nothing more than basic simple physics.
When a person
dies, respiration stops and
blood flow ends. Under these circumstances metabolism ceases,
and the
body loses heat (which is just reabsorbed into the general
ambient
thermal mixture of the surrounding environment). If we take
the body of
the deceased out into nature, as certain native peoples do,
and leave
these natural processes to continue, the body will eventually
dissolve,
except for the bones which may be eaten.
Through the
activity of microbes and
insects (excluding in this instance those animals that are
carrion
eaters) that aspect of physical existence which we call the
body is
de-constituted and its smallest parts redistributed throughout
the
various cycles of nature.
Nothing has ceased to exist -
to be. Due to the operation of the laws of conservation of
matter and
energy, all that has disappeared is form; that is the
particular
arrangement and interrelationship of matter and energy, which
we
recognize as the human body.
The whole
difficulty comes when we
consider that aspect of the human being we call consciousness,
particularly consciousness of self.
The matter
changes form and continues.
The energy changes form and continues. It seems most likely,
given
these uncontroverted facts, that self consciousness also
merely changes
form and continues.
Setting this
aside for the moment, let us
take up another thread. The essence of these next observations
were
suggested to me in the works of the largely unknown genius,
Rudolf
Steiner. Again it is a matter of simple known facts.
The human
organism contains a number of
different kinds of organs and arrangements of matter and
energy. In
such a living organism, the most common sub-division is the
cell, of
which there are certain various types. One type, the nerve
cell,
exhibits unusual properties.
These unusual
properties arise when we
examine nerve cells in association, that is in those organs
which we
call nerve bundles, which stream throughout the body and which
concentrate in one large center (the brain) and two smaller
centers
(the spine and the solar plexus).
Contrary to
other cell types, which are
organized in various ways throughout the body, nerve cells do
not
repair themselves when damaged. A severed spinal cord will not
heal
itself, while a severed muscle sheath or a blood vessel will.
There is a
second difference. Our
consciousness is only associated with the "nervous system". If
the
correct nerve bundles to a limb are cut, sensation (i.e.
consciousness)
to the limb ceases.
What is even stranger is the fact that some nerve bundles are necessary for movement, that is conscious directed action, but can be destroyed (as in polio) while sensation remains.
What is implied
by these facts?
They suggest
that whatever life
is, in a general sense, it is not of the same order or kind as
consciousness. That is, when the cell/organ complex is capable
of self
repair, which is certainly a process filled with life,
this
same complex excludes consciousness. While on the other hand,
when
the life processes of the organism are reduced (i.e. the
capacity
for repair is no longer present) then, and only then, does
consciousness appear.
There are two
other generally reported
phenomena, which, while anomalous and anecdotal, conform to
this
arrangement.
The first is
the so-called "phantom limb"
pain. The matter and energy arrangement, which had been the
absent
limb, is completely dissolved, but consciousness, to some
degree,
remains.
The second is
the many and remarkably
consistent "near death" experiences, which accompany temporary
cardiac
and respiratory failure.
There are, of
course, physical
explanations put forward regarding these two oddities. If you
read them
carefully, they are all essentially arguments directed at an
assumed
conclusion, and are not an examination of the natural
implications of
known facts.
We have so far
noticed that consistency
requires a law of conservation of consciousness to accompany
those of
matter and energy. In addition, we have observed that first life
must withdraw to a significant degree before consciousness
appears. If
we extend this last fact in its natural direction, the
implication is
that if life recedes even further, even more consciousness
will
arise. Death, then, rather then being the extinguishing of
consciousness, would actually mean its complete expansion, no
longer
being inhibited by the effort at maintaining life.
This
last is, of course, what all deep spiritual (enlightenment and
initiation) systems teach.
To the above
two general considerations I
would like to add one more, for which I will have to take
responsibility; at least in the sense of being the only one I
know of
who has observed certain well known facts and yet assessed
these
particular conclusions.
The facts are
as follows:
Before the
moment of birth, the mother
and the child suffer and labor. After birth the physical pain,
the
trauma, has not disappeared, yet when the baby, now cleaned
up, is
given to the mother and first put to the breast, powerful
emotions
(states of consciousness) cover over the pain with feelings of
joy and
contentment.
There are
exceptions of course, but, by
and large, these are uncontroverted facts concerning the door
into life.
In the case of
death there is, as well,
labor and suffering. Death is often work of an extraordinary
kind. The
only reason we do not know, that on the other side of the
threshold of
death there is also joy and contentment, is because this
presently lies
outside our ability to observe.
Now one thing
Nature certainly reveals is
its tendencies to symmetry, balance and harmonious order
(beauty).
Given these clear facts, it seems to me that the much more
dubious (in
the sense of the absence of reason) view is to assert that
consciousness does not survive the death of the body.
This being the
case, it is not so
surprising that all the great religions and myths conceive of
an after
life. Rather what is surprising is that many advocates of reason do not.
*
The careful
reader may wonder what side
this material may fall on in the current controversies around
the
suffering of the disabled and dying as that relates to
assisted suicide
and euthanasia.
I can only
answer in a personal way,
quite mindful of the many women who take days to deliver, days
of pain
and labor, and who resort to drugs to mask this suffering;
and, as
well, the work of suffering which precedes death, and the
quite natural
desire to be relieved of it when it has gone on for what seems
like
such a long period of time.
I only hope,
when confronted with the
suffering accompanying my own demise, to comport myself in a
manner so
as to be worthy of the joy and comfort I expect to find beyond
the gate
of death. I already know I don't do well with pain, and I have
no
desire to be a martyr, but I can't help feel that the labor
and
suffering which accompanies the end of life has just as much
meaning
and significance as that which accompanies its beginning. The labor preceding
the gate
into death is worth enduring, because, like the labor
preceding the
gate into birth, it has a purpose.
************************
a small meditation on the spiritual path
pioneered by Ralph Waldo Emerson,
including a report of some practical applications
delivered on the occasion of Emerson's 200 birthday,
May 25th, 2003, at the Alcott School of Philosophy
in Concord,
Massachusetts
I am not a
scholar of Emerson, and have
read only a small part of his works. Yet, what I have
read has
made clear to me that for the last 30 years I have walked in a
land in
which he walked before me. We are forced, mostly by the
current
limits of language, to use such words as soul and spirit and
inner life
to point toward this land, but none of these words serve as
more than a
mere hint of this world, so different in nature and kind from
the world
we know through our senses.
I first became
aware of this inner
landscape through the discipline of psychology in the early
1970's in
Berkeley California. Shortly after my initial
encounter
with what was literally a magical territory, I studied
briefly a
multitude of various maps to this land, most of them
traditional in one
way or another - such as Zen Buddhism, Sufism, Tibetan
Buddhism, the
magic path of Franz Bardon, the remarkable teaching stories of
the
Plains Indians, coming eventually to the work of a man named
Rudolf
Steiner, the founder of what is called Anthroposophy or
Spiritual
Science.
It was through
Rudolf Steiner that I was
introduced to an objective study of thinking, principally
through his
works on epistemology. I very much needed this
practical
work, because my main interest at that time, and since, has
been in
trying to understand the nature of the social and political
existence
of humanity, particularly in relationship to our divine
nature.
It was already by then clear to me through experience
that we are
spiritual beings, living in a material world, and it was
important to
me to understand society in relationship to this and yet
remain within
the scientific spirit of the age. Rudolf Steiner set
before me
the means to do this, particularly in what he called the
practice of
Goetheanism.
Goetheanism in
this sense is a kind of
training of observation and thinking, and has some
relationship to what
others call phenomenology. What is done is that thinking
remains
within the appearances, rather than to invent theories or
seemings
behind them. For Nature, this disciplined thinking
produces a
remarkable understanding. What I tried to do was to
translate
this same discipline into an examination of the social and
political.
I approached the basic phenomena of our shared existence
as if in
how it simply was - without adding or subtracting anything -
this given
reality was all that I needed to know.
This work was
not easily done by the way,
although much was obvious right from the beginning. It
took many
years to bring to thinking and observing our social existence
the
needed discipline, and to eliminate from my own inner life,
conditions
of prejudice and assumption that frequently stood like a dark
cloud in
between my thinking-observation and the phenomena of social
reality.
I was also aware that I kept adjusting what I was doing in directions away from Steiner's work and what I knew of Goethe. I felt comfortable in these adjustments, particularly since I would find confirmation in the improved results of my research. Nonetheless, I made changes away from what I thought of as pure Anthroposophy and Goetheanism.
Let me also be
honest in another way, for
this work was produced in many fits and starts. I
was not
an academic, but a family man. I worked at whatever jobs
I could
find, for example, for the last three years I worked in a
factory, and
the ten years before that a mental hospital. I mostly
raised
children and lived life with all the successes and failures
one
ordinarily finds.
Now I have had
the great fortune for the
last 16 years to become a friend of Stuart Weeks, and through
him to
find a connection to the Transcendentalists, particularly
Emerson.
At the same time these last 16 years have not been
scholarship of
the bookish kind, so I didn't read a lot of Emerson. I
mostly
worked at developing my thinking and my observational skills,
and at
gathering what might be called all the basic facts and
experiences that
I could.
I had
discovered over time that it was
important to love the object of ones thinking. I don't
mean by
this to become overly sympathetic, but rather to have an
intention
willed into the thinking such that we care and honor and trust
those
matters which we want to understand. In this way the
essence of
the object of our interest, and our own essence, these
two
essences draw nearer to each other.
This meant, for
example, that I watch a
lot of television, and a lot of movies, and partake of all
that could
be called American Culture with a kind of relish.
Obviously this
Culture isn't representative of the whole of human social and
political
existences, but it was the nearest at hand, and I drank deeply
of its
nature. You might say that I read this Culture in much
the same
way one learns to read a book. And, of course, watching
television and going to movies wasn't all that I did - its
just an
example of where the intention to love can lead someone.
Now to return to Emerson for a moment, before going on to some of the results of my own work. A couple of years ago I read for the first time his The American Scholar lecture. This was really a wonderful experience, for in this lecture I saw, not only a reflection of Emerson's path to inner discovery, but what was essentially an exact description of my own path. All those ways, in which I had instinctively adjusted what had been initially work that emulated Steiner and Goethe, were here described by Emerson.
Now this is, at
first blush, a curious
thing. Not having studied Emerson, how did I come to
follow where
he had gone before. Well, the explanation is simply
enough.
We both read the same instructional text, which is not
out there
in the world, but inside ourselves, within our own inner life.
And because we are both Americans, we share something,
for
Peoples are not the same all over the world, but have inner
differences
of no little import.
So when Emerson writes, as he did in The American Scholar, that: "In self trust all virtues are comprehended", I knew this because I had been there and done that. And when he says in his essay Intellect: "You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then knowledge, as the plant has root, bud and fruit. Trust the instinct though you can render no reason. It is vain to hurry it. By trusting to the end it shall ripen into truth and you shall know what you believe." This too I understood, for it was where I had walked.
You might
recall that I said above: "This
work was not easily done by the way, although much was obvious
right in
the beginning." Here you see was my instinct, things I
sensed
right in the beginning, but to fully realize them I had to
keep at it
for a long time, to let it ripen inside, until there it
finally was -
as truth.
Now I'd like to
speak of my research into
the social and political. By the way, there is no
possibility of
more than hinting at this work, so that if you want details
and more,
you should just do a Google search for my name and this will
lead you
to my websites.
The essential
aspect of social and
political existence is not in the stream of events, what we
tend to
call history such as the recent war or the current political
troubles
in America, but rather in the individual biography. The
individual biography is the rooted axis around which all else
turns,
because it is only the experiences acquired by the "I am",
within its
life path, that endures.
All the rest
passes away over time -
governments, social ideals, legal systems, religions, even
spiritual
paths, but the "I am" or spirit endures and during its
biography
acquires those transforming experiences that become an aspect
of its
Eternal nature.
Our social life
does have a great deal of
order to it, however, but this order comes to it from within
the
biography outward. Our social existence is fully
determined
by the individual and common elements of our human nature, not
unlike
the way a piece of just melted wax receives an impression from
a signet
ring. Our nature is expressed onto the social organism,
giving it
all its essential qualities. This means that we learn as
much
from the study of ourselves as we learn from the study of the
social.
You might
notice that I just used the
term organism, for that which we ordinarily speak of as social
existence and form, that is civilizations, kinds of
governments, types
of communities, the nature of families, these are all aspects
of a
whole which is quite alive. How could it be otherwise,
given that
all the component parts, are individual living human beings?
It is possible
then, through a
disciplined thinking and observation, to learn to see with the
thinking, how it is that life processes move though our shared
social
existence, giving us all the dynamic life conditions, and
more, that we
know from biology, such as birth and death, growth,
development,
reproduction, and even metamorphosis. We discover how to
know
this by learning to move the thinking in a way that it
follows
inwardly how it is that social form changes over time.
We don't
just look at any social condition in its static present state,
but need
to learn to think it in terms of its own biography. For
example,
the family has changed considerably since the 14th Century and
the
whole of these subtle developing changes have to be thought,
exactly as
they unfolded in time.
Not just that,
but we also have to think
any particular stream of changes in such a way that we don't
take it
out of its context. To continue the example, families
are
embedded in communities, which in turn are embedded in
nations, which
themselves are embedded in languages and cultures, while the
whole
ultimately is embedded in something we call Civilizations.
My
major work, by the way, a book not yet finished, is called: Strange
Fire:
the Death, and the Resurrection, of Modern Civilization. [no longer the case as of 2006 ed.]
Once we can see
this, then we know that
part of the difficulty of understanding our own Age, is due to
the fact
that we are within a metamorphosis-like social crisis wherein
Western
Civilization is passing away, and something is being created
that will
replace it. It is almost impossibly difficult to
appreciate
something like this when we are so intimately connected to it
while it
unfolds. Yet, if we want to forge a more human future,
this is
the very matter we need most to understand.
Part of our
problem is that we can't,
using the scientific thinking of our Time, take hold of the
living,
because this scientific thinking has limited itself to the
countable
and the sensible. The living, whether it is a simple
biological
organism, or, to put a crude name to it, the Life Sphere of
the Social
Organism, these can't be thought on the basis of what is
merely seen
and allows itself to be calculated.
The driving
impulses of social existence,
fear of death, joy in life, - all the virtues and the vices
that
inhabit human beings - these are invisible, and none of them
can be
reduced to merely physical causes without killing the very
thing we
want, and desperately need, to learn to understand.
Rudolf Steiner,
in a quite remarkable
book called: A Theory
of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception, wrote: "What takes place in human consciousness
is the
interpretation of Nature to itself. Thought is the last
member in
the series of processes whereby Nature is formed.", while Emerson wrote in his essay Nature:
"Nature
is a
thought incarnate and turns to a thought again as ice becomes
water and
gas. The world is mind precipitated and the volatile
essence is
forever escaping into the state of free thought."
What happens
when we learn to properly
discipline our thinking and observing capacities is that the
Ideas,
which are the outer garment of the Beings who are the essence
of what
we lovingly seek to know, these Ideas - this outer garment -
appears
spontaneously within our consciousness as part of a
cooperative Art in
which the Creator Being of the World Himself participates.
We ask
and seek and knock, after which we are given, and find and all
is
opened to us.
Where this
leads is to an understanding
that knows that human social and political existence, which in
the
cultural East has often been called Maya, is better understood
in the
Cultural West as the Creative Activity of the Word come to
living
equilibrium. As it says in Genesis: "God blessed the
seventh day
and made it holy because on it he rested from all his work of
creation."
That, my
friends, is where we live, and
have lived and will live as long as our Eternal spirit needs
incarnate
existence - within the living being of the Seventh Day.
God has
rested, having given us a most remarkable gift - not just
outer Nature,
but something much much more, of which the heart of it is the
dynamic
and enveloping womb of our social and communal existence
- a
living and self evolving growth environment for the human
individuality, Itself ever changing and becoming as our needs
and wants
themselves change and grow.
The human
biography, with all its ups and
downs, tragedies and joys, is always held within the loving
embrace of
a great and wise Intelligence, and if we pay careful attention
to our
own lives, to all that lives and breaths there, we will learn
to see
this for ourselves.
In the
beginning of such a journey we
might have to overcome something. For mostly we tend to
think in
this Age along the lines that science has developed, wherein
all the
accidents and chance encounters in life are just that -
moments without
meaning, happening for no intelligence reason whatsoever.
Yet, there is a
counter-image to that, an
impression that the Ancients spoke of when they used the ideas
of Fate
and Destiny and Karma - ideas that still might be true.
The
intriguing thing is that we don't have to go backward and
abandon
reason to discover the truth here. Rather we just have
to
heighten the degree to which we pay attention - to change the
quality
of the nature of our observation. Then we think about
it, in our
own personal Emersonian way, trusting more to our own
instincts,
than to what we have been taught and told to think.
We free
our thinking from the binding assumptions of culture and
religion and
ask ourselves - what is true here? Is there wisdom
enfolding my
life? What is its nature? How does it work?
If I look
back in my biography, what has been there as a gift that
helped me
become who I am today? What about tomorrow - is there
some
surprise of special meaning? What about this moment,
right now?
How do I contribute? What is the meaning of evil?
How
do I understand freedom in this context?
So many
wonderful questions - each one
filled with life, for when we really start to see and think
here on our
own, in that same inner land walked years ago by Emerson, all
the
mundane ways of past thinking that have blinded us to the
endless
treasures of each day start to fall away, and we find once
again - as
we did first in childhood - that the world is filled with
magic and
with love. Thank you...
*************************
this and that
- some thoughts
on the Four Noble Truths -
This is an
essay on the mind in the light of the Four Noble Truths of the
Buddha.
In my own studies of Buddhism, I found more
satisfaction in
considering these very basic questions myself than I did in
any study
of all the rich literature that follows, whether in Zen or
Tibetan
Buddhism, or whatever. I did find it helpful to study these
questions,
however, not just for their practical understanding of mind,
but also
for how this understanding created a much better possibility
for
appreciating the mental processes of the "other", the thou.
It is this last which is such a ripe fruit of the
Buddha's
basic teachings - namely the growing in the own soul of
Compassion.
*
According to John M. Koller's, Oriental Philosophies, the short version of the Four Noble Truths is as follows: "1. There is suffering; 2. Suffering is caused; 3. Suffering can be extinguished by eliminating the causes of suffering; and 4. The way to extinguish the causes of suffering is to follow the Middle Way constituted by the Noble Eightfold Path."
The same text
gives these as the supposed
actual teachings, or words of the Buddha:
1. "...birth is
suffering; decay is
suffering; illness is suffering; death is suffering; presence
of
objects we hate is suffering; separation from objects we love
is
suffering; not to obtain what we desire is suffering. In
brief, the
five aggregates which spring from grasping, they are painful."
2. Suffering
"...originates in that
craving which causes the renewals of becomings, is accompanied
by
sensual delight, and seeks satisfaction now here, now there;
that is to
say, craving for pleasures, craving for becoming, craving for
not
becoming.".
3.
"...concerning the Cessation of
Suffering; verily, it is passionless, cessation without
remainder of
this very craving; the laying aside of, the giving up, the
being free
from, the harboring no longer of, this craving."
4. the path
which leads to the cessation
of suffering, "...is this Noble Eightfold Path, that is to
say, right
views, right intent, right speech, right conduct, right means
of
livelihood, right endeavor, right mindfulness, and right
meditation."
I would be a
complete fool to suggest
that I can add anything to this, or to further suggest that I
could add
anything to all that the great teachers of, say, Tibetan or
Zen
Buddhism, have said about these fundamental teachings of the
Buddha.
Rather, the
purpose of this essay is
state simply how these ideas have influenced me, and in what
way I try
to order or structure my life, based on my understanding of
this great
message.
*
Being an
American means that I tend to
the pragmatic, the practical. So my approach, when I spent
some time
considering these Four Noble Truths, had the tendency to be
directly
related to my personal existence. No theories, just what was
happening
in my life that these Truths could lead me to understand.
I was aided in
this quest by having heard
some lectures, read several books and known several students
of Chogyam
Trungpa, teacher of Tibetan Buddhism, now deceased. My
favorite book of
his is: Meditation in Action, Shambhala Publications. In this
book is a
statement that has, over time, became my central principle
when
considering knowledge: "...and in that sense Buddha was a
great
revolutionary in his way of thinking. He even denied the
existence of
Brahma, or God, the Creator of the world. He determined to
accept
nothing which he had not first discovered for himself." (ibid.
p 5)
This became my
motto, and, as regards the
Four Noble Truths, I would only understand what I could
determine for
myself. The Truths became, in this sense, questions to put to
myself
and to life.
1. There is
suffering
This seems
fairly obvious. Life is
suffering. Yet, what does that mean? What is suffering and
what is life
in this sense? And, I don't mean to approach this by means of
some
philosophical definition, but rather simply by observing
myself and
life. I did think about animals and other kinds of beings for
a time,
which seemed to have life (plants etc.), but since my
knowledge was
only of my own consciousness, I eventually decided to confine
myself to
the consideration of my own suffering, and that which I could
observe
around me in those other human beings with which I came in
contact.
There seemed to
be a lot of it. Friends I
knew were raped, hurt in cars, lost children, lost the
capacity to bear
children, lost jobs, lost loves, needed love and had none.
Everywhere I
looked, within myself and outside myself, there were
experiences of
pain.
But the Four
Noble Truths are not just a
logical sequence, they are a whole. The meaning of one effects
the
meaning of the whole...
2. Suffering is
caused
After a time
there seemed to me to be two
kinds of suffering: self caused and caused from the outside,
by an
agency (others, fate, god, divine providence, whatever). But
the more I
explored self caused suffering the more I realized that to
think some
was caused by others was an error. The error arises because of
this:
Every event in
life which came to me from
the outside, that is what we might call fated suffering,
rather than
self induced, had a certain quality to it. This quality of
fated
suffering depended upon how I related to the situation. The
fated
matter was in itself neutral. If it was experienced as a
matter of
suffering, that arose because of how I related to it. It was
not within
the fated experience itself.
Before we get
confused, let me deal with
physical pain, such as perhaps results from trauma. Certainly
physical
pain seems on the surface to be fated suffering. However, pain
in such
a case is not suffering, but increased consciousness. The body
is
demanding our attention. When we resist, when we desire to not
experience the pain, then we have the pain and suffering.
The point of
this is to make a
distinction between the experience of physical pain, and the
suffering,
that arises because we are experiencing physical pain. The
former is an
inescapable physical reality, and the latter is a relationship
of the
mind to that reality.
Life is
suffering and suffering is caused
by the relationship of mind to life.
3. Suffering
can be extinguished by
eliminating the causes of suffering
How I relate to
suffering is an act which
takes place within my own mind, and for which I can be
responsible. But
just here we start to get to the tricky part, because we start
to come
face to face with the problem of mind, and the problem of the
I, or the
Ego.
Throughout the
various teachings of
Buddhism, from Zen to Tibetan, to beyond, here is where the
nitty
gritty comes in. To understand this part, there has to arise
some
degree of self awareness, some degree of inner awakeness. It
is my
belief (and only that, because I don't know the whole of
Buddhism, only
a very small corner), that all the commentaries, all the
Sutras, all
the koans, and the whole purpose of the various styles of
meditation,
have to do with this problem.
This is tricky
because to some degree the
Ego can't take a hold of it. Merely by grasping, by trying to
find a
strategy, the Ego steps off the deep end and just repeats what
it is
always doing. Desiring not to desire just leads to more
suffering. This
is why we find in the various teachings such ideas as
no-thingness,
no-mind, mindfulness, instant satori, and hundreds of other
ways of
making an idea about something which doesn't have an idea.
So Buddha, in
order to help the crossing
of the threshold of this problem provides the Eightfold Path,
as a
means to cut through the confusion.
4. The way to
extinguish the causes of
suffering is to follow the Middle Way constituted by the Noble
Eightfold Path.
The Eightfold
Path has a very interesting
structure, in that each element is preceded by the word
"right", as in:
..."right views, right intent, right speech, right conduct,
right means
of livelihood, right endeavor, right mindfulness, and right
meditation."
Now what is
that? What is meant, in this
context, by "right"?
This is where
we get to the title of this
modest mediation: "this and that". Mind has certain qualities,
and one
of the main ones is what we might call "discrimination", or
the
capacity to form distinctions. This is up, that is down. This
is right,
that is wrong. This is enlightened, that is unenlightened.
This is Ego,
that is not. This is desire, that is not. This is suffering,
that is
not. This is my Buddha nature, that is not.
Of course, you
don't have to be a
Buddhist to have this difficulty. This is Christian, that is
not. This
is moral, that is not. Or if you are an anthroposophist:
Steiner said
this, he didn't say that.
Same problem.
This is what I
have learned as a
practical matter about this problem - the problem of "this and
that".
In any given
moment, I may not like the
what is, the this. The this could be myself, my feeling life,
what
someone else is doing, my thoughts, what someone is saying,
the price
of an object, my lack of health, another driver, my salary,
the way the
world is, my son's haircut, my wife's spending habits and so
forth.
Against this this, I will imagine a corresponding that, which
will be
the what is not.
Between the
what is and the what is not
there arises a tension, namely my desire for this to change
into that.
My discriminatory mind by creating the this and the that, also
at the
same time necessarily creates the tension, which is the
suffering. I
suffer precisely because I conceive, as an act of mind, of the
this
(the what is) and its difference from the that (the what is
not).
It actually is
that simple to conceive,
but the real problem is practice. What do I do about this? How
do I, if
that is what I decide to do, eliminate the this and the that?
Of
course, just in conceiving the problem this way, I am still in
the this
and the that, but with this one change. I am now aware of
Ego's tricks
(or at least the most recent ones).
The practice
then comes down to coming
back, ever and again, as a matter of slowly developing
discipline, to
the this and living wholly within the this, which does not
stand still,
but is rather constantly creative. Trungpa calls it "crazy
wisdom". The
reason it is crazy is because it (spontaneousness - the this)
can't be
predicted, can't be stratigized, and can't be controlled. It
is a
complete intuitive relationship to the this. You could say
that the Ego
is constantly going beyond its previous condition, rather then
remaining stuck in one of its past points of view.
Of course, we
should again return to the
Sutras, the koans, or whatever practices we have discovered in
Buddhism
that seem right for us. These practices are the various paths
by which
one moves from living this and that, to just living this.
However, each
of us must find their individual way/means through to the
this; so it
is a great goodness that so much help exists, and in such
great variety.
One last
comment: The this comes not from
the past, but is born in the future. In any given moment, even
though
"I" am (past looking), "I" really am not (unborn, no mind and
so
forth). At this level, there really is no difference between
Buddhism
and Christianity, in practice: " Matthew 18:3: " ...Verily I
say unto
you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye
shall
not enter into the kingdom of heaven."
And this
is all I have to say about that.
*****************************
pragmatic moral psychology
Many people
have trouble with the idea
'moral". This is understandable given the history
of
Christianity (for example), which has included so many
attempts at
dominating the moral thinking of others.
Especially
in our age we don't like being told what is right to do.
We
would rather follow our own judgment. It will come
as no
surprise to many, that the Christian Gospels actually support
that
latter view (personal moral judgment) instead of the
view that
allows someone else to tell us what is moral. But
this view
of the Gospels is not appreciated until we have penetrated, in
practice, the psychological teachings these remarkable Books
of Wisdom
contain. Many so-called Christians have failed to
live the
Gospels, and for this reason have never come to understand
what they
teach about mind, about soul and spirit in a practical and
pragmatic
sense. This essay is the result of my own
explorations of
these Books of Wisdom as they apply to life, to thinking and
feeling,
and to how the world is ordered in both its social and moral
realms.
For it is here, in such practices that the real facing
of the
problem of Evil comes toward us. It is only in the
brutal self
honest examination of how we introduce Evil into the world,
that we
learn what we need to know in order to appreciate how Evil
works in the
social. For a deeper examination of this problem, see my
book The Way of
the Fool: The conscious
development of
our human character, and the future of Christianity - both to
be born
out of the natural union of Faith and Gnosis.
*
Social morality
is the highest form of
art. Remember: the social world is the moral world, and we
need to move
from a state of sleep with regard to this, to a state of
awakeness. The
material below is offered in support of the reader's struggles
in this
regard, and not as a statement of an activity which the reader
must
undertake. How one proceeds as regard these matters is very
personal,
and the following material, based on the author's own
experience, is
given only as an example of how one might proceed; should they
choose
to make some efforts in these directions.
The political or community leader, and certainly the story-teller who wants to encounter the Mystery, should realize that some kind of practice, some kind of personal effort at inner growth, of a kind similar to that described below, is essential to carrying out the responsibilities undertaken. We are not born virtuous, but rather human, with all the normal failings that implies. The author can state, with some surety, which he hopes this book demonstrates, that such practice does bear fruit that can be obtained in no other way. The Mystery draws near that which strives toward goodness.
*
This is not an
essay meant for
psychologists. Nor is it about mental health per se, although its reflections may touch
related
problems.
This essay is
based on an understanding
of human inner life that developed out of the necessity of
solving
certain real problems of personal experience. It represents
the fruit
of many years of practical work derived from a struggle, only
occasionally successful, to live according to certain
teachings of
Jesus Christ. It is the latter aspect which brings in the
moral element.
When this work
was begun, almost
twenty-five years ago when I was in my early thirties, it
first
appeared as an instinctive awakening to certain problems, most
notably:
what was the relationship between my own thinking, and the
world I
experienced through my senses? A secondary question, more
subtle, but
quite definitely related, is what was the role of conscience
in the
solving of this problem?
Over a few
years investigation and
practice, I taught myself to: work at bringing discursive
thinking to a
halt (no inner dialog); to think with my heart, instead of my
head;
and, to think in wholes, or, what I called at that time,
gestalts.
Subsequent to
this, I discovered that
essentially the same problems had been confronted by the
genius of a
man named Rudolf Steiner, in his 1894 book, The
Philosophy
of Spiritual Activity. When I read
this book, I found therein, not only a much clearer statement
of the
problems I had already been examining, but what turned out to
be an
introspection of human consciousness that was in accord with
the
methods of natural science; and which was therefore, at the
same time,
quite compatible with all those academic characteristics of
philosophy
that ordinary people find so confusing.
A few years
later I encountered another
book of Steiner's, The Theory
of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception, which, although again compatible with academic
philosophic standards, is nevertheless much simpler in its
language.
Both books were extremely helpful in making it possible to
examine
these questions (the interrelationship of thinking, experience
and
conscience), with all their possible subjectivity, in a
completely
objective fashion.
I mention
Rudolf Steiner, because he has
had an enormous influence on my thinking, and those readers,
who may
wish for a more academic justification for certain themes in
this book,
should begin with the above materials. Most people, however,
will be
satisfied by their own common sense.
I use the word
psychology in the title of
this essay because this same struggle has also taught me that
Christ's
teachings are grounded in a complete understanding of human
inner life.
They are, in fact, a moral psychology par excellence; that is,
an
understanding of human nature which both fathoms and
appreciates our
true moral reality and potential. This is so regardless of
ones
conclusions regarding His religious significance.
Those readers
who might have some
discomfort with the religious matters below, should be advised
that all
that I can do is reflect my own experience. If the reader, for
whom
this may be some kind of problem, is careful, they may be able
to
translate the materials below into their own understanding and
belief
system. The person of Christian faith, who feels there may be
matters
of even deeper significance, is invited to read: Meditations
on
the
Tarot: a Journey into Christian Hermeticism,
author anonymous.
*
Matthew 7: 3-5:
Judge not,
that ye be not
judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be
judged; and
with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
And
why behold-est thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but
consider-est not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or
how wilt
thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine
eye;
and, behold a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite,
first
cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou
see clearly
to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.
The pragmatic
psychological realities I
have so far discovered in this teaching are as follows:
When we meet,
or interact, with another
person there may arise, within our own soul life, antipathies,
feelings
of disliking. Perhaps we will not like how they look, their
class, the
nature of the ideas they present to us or the values they
express.
Maybe they are of another race or culture, or believe in
abortion, or
believe in choice, or have a selfish political agenda, or a
thousand
other categories by which we may define them or weigh their
moral or
spiritual qualities.
In each and
every instance where we
experience an antipathetic judgment (or sympathetic for that
matter),
we do not perceive the individual before us, but rather only
that
classification or label by which we have identified them. This
is so
even though it is someone we know well. In fact, those in our
most
intimate circles are more likely to be the object of judgments
we have
made and continue to make, yet sleep through. These last have
become
ingrained habits of thought, a (perhaps too rigid) soul lens
through
which we view the world of our daily relationships.
We also apply
this judgment to ourselves.
Just consider how much we do not like about ourselves. It will
even be
possible to turn the material in this essay into another
reason for
unwarranted self-judgment.
This judgment is the beam in our own eye. By it we become then blind, confusing our judgment for the "mote" in their eye, the character fault we believe we have identified.
Should it
actually be possible that we
could help them, the existence of our beam
nevertheless disables us. We lack the objectivity (which is
neither
antipathetic or sympathetic, but is rather empathic) by which
we could
actually understand them.
In fact the
Gospel promises us that when
we can succeed in setting aside the judgment and can instead
empathize,
i.e. know them from the inside-out objectively, then we may
actually be
able to be of service to them (then shalt thou see clearly to cast out
the mote out of
thy brother's eye).
From Rudolf
Steiner, I was lead to
understanding, that the most common types of such judgments
are in fact
reflections of our own weaknesses and failings. Our normal
psychology
is so ordered that our common antipathies are mirror images of
our own
defects. We often most strongly dislike, in others, our own
worst
flaws. So Jesus Christ advises us: "Thou hypocrite, first cast
out the
beam out of thine own eye..."
This being the
case, how do we work with
this in a practical manner?
The first step
is to wake up to it, to
notice each and every act of judgment. This is painful. A
wonderful
help is found in an spiritual exercise Steiner taught, the
daily
review. This exercise, which the reader is free to use or not,
involves
taking time at the end of the day, and remembering it,
backwards, from
the most recent events just before beginning the exercise, to
those
events surrounding our awakening early in the morning. In this
way we
reflect upon our day, and will begin, after a time, to
discover matters
which need our attention. When, for example, we have begun to
notice
these judgments, they can become an element of the review.
They are
"unfinished" soul business.
During the
review feelings of remorse and
shame are good signs. In these self reflective feelings the
conscience
awakens. Out of the impulse of conscience we can utter a brief
prayer
to the guardian angel of the one we have judged, so that the
next time
we meet, our perception will be more objective. The angel of
the
"other" wants to help us do this. Those who doubt such an idea
are
simply asked to carry out such activity with full sincerity.
Practice
will, itself, establish the truth of these matters.
In this way we
slowly refine the impulse
to judge, and gain thereby (small bit by bit) control of our
thoughts
and mastery of our feelings. The soul area, in which these
unconscious
antipathies and sympathies have previously tended to pull us,
can now
become an ever growing arena of spiritual freedom.
One of the
mysteries of our inner life
that this work, the refining of the judgment, uncovers, is
that we are
often captured - enslaved - by these repeated
thought-judgments. Once
having made them, our continued repetition of them, or
habitual use of
them, becomes then a point of view, a kind of judgmental
colored glass
through which we view the world. To refine the judgment in the
manner
being described in this essay, is to no longer by possessed by
it - to
be inwardly, spiritually, free.
These pragmatic
understandings have
applications in other areas as well. The reader, who works
patiently
with these soul-lawful realities, will discover other possible
uses for
the skills developed.
We can in fact
be glad of those
personalities who irk us so, who bring out of us these strong
and
unredeemed feelings. Their lives are a great gift to us and we
appear
to have sought out these relationships just so they could
awaken us.
Here is good cause for a prayer of thanks during the review.
Sympathies
represent a similar problem to
antipathies. How often does life teach the tragedy of those
who fall so
in love that the excessive sympathies and its resulting (love
is)
blindness leads eventually to confusion and terrible pain,
when clarity
finally returns.
To raise
another up in excessive praise
is also a beam of great
proportions. Whenever we do this, we are just
as blind to an other's real humanity as when we live in
antipathies.
Our judgment is not a source of true understanding when it is
derived
from unconscious and unredeemed feeling-perceptions.
In the case where we are turning this unredeemed judgment upon ourselves, this can become another aspect of our search for spiritual freedom. In our inner life, once we become awake there, the voice of the conscience and the voice of the judgment are not the same. Conscience "hurts" because it expresses the truth, and we "wince" inwardly in this perception. The judgment dislikes, or excessively likes, but it is not expressing the truth. Learning to distinguish between these - between truth and dislike - can be very helpful.
While this
does not begin to exhaust all
that could be said about the beam and the mote, nonetheless,
let us
take up another thread.
John 8:5-9: Now Moses in the law
commanded us, that such should be stoned; but what say est
thou?
This they said, tempting him, that they might have to
accuse him.
But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the
ground as
though he heard them not. So when they continued asking
him, he
lifted up himself, and said unto them. He that is without sin
among
you, let him first cast a stone at her. And again he
stooped down
and wrote on the ground. And they which heard it, being
convicted
by their own conscience, went out one by one...
We all know
this story, but we don't stone
people anymore; or do we ? Obviously physical violence,
retribution,
against criminals continues. We understand these issues, to a
degree. Is
there then some more subtle meaning? This is what I have
found to
be true in practice.
When an
unredeemed judgment is spoken,
that is, when it passes from the inner life into the social
world,
through speech, it becomes a stone. The
flesh is not wounded
by this stone, but the soul surely is. Our ordinary language
in its
natural genius recognizes this, for don't we speak of "hurt
feelings"?
Yet our
ordinary personal life is full of
just these acts of stone throwing. Tired
and upset
we throw them at our children and our partners. Believing too
much in
our own righteousness we will throw them at work, or at play.
The pragmatic
teaching it this. Be
silent. Remember, Jesus' response in this story is first to
say
nothing: "But
Jesus stooped down and with his finger wrote on the ground, as
though
he heard them not". Examine our own
thoughts
more rigorously than that of others. Not every thought must be
spoken.
An ancient middle-eastern aphorism goes this way. There are
three gates
to speech: Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind? Any
thought that
cannot pass all three gates should not be spoken. And there
may be even
other reasons for not speaking those thoughts which otherwise
could
pass.
Further
questions are these. What is the
moral purpose for our speech? Why have we said what we have
said? What
is the objective? Do we speak to be self important? Or do we
have the
possible benefit for others as our purpose? How do we know it
will be a
benefit, rather than an interference in their freedom or a
hurt? Do we
believe we know the truth, that our knowledge is superior to
others?
Hidden here are all the judgments, the consequences of the beam.
Are we so sure of ourselves, that all our thoughts are worthy of being spoken? Silence is golden is the cliche. In truth, outer silence is just the beginning.
Matthew 5:3 Blessed are the poor
in
spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
If my mind is
not quiet, empty, poor in
spirit, what can enter there? Inner silence has two valuable
moral
consequences.
The first
benefit of inner silence is
that it is essential to listening to someone else speak. If we
cannot
quiet our own mind when we are listening, if our whole
concentration is
instead on our anticipated response or on what we think, then
our
attention is not focused at all on the other person or what
they are
saying.
In some
lectures published under the
title: The Inner Aspect of the Social Question, Rudolf Steiner suggests the practice of seeking
to hear
the presence, of what he calls "the Christ Impulse", in the
other's
thinking. This is very difficult. It is not just listening,
but a
feeling-imagining of the heart felt purposes living in the
speaker.
What brings them to speak so? What life path has brought them
to this
place? Even if they are throwing stones at us, we must still "actively" listen;
otherwise, there
will be no understanding of their humanity.
There is a
wonderful experience possible
here, when we have won past our antipathetic judgment and
actually have
begun to hear what lives in the other speaker. Each of us has
learned
in life some wisdom, and these little jewels lie every where
around us,
often in the most improbable places, the most unsuspected
souls. These
treasures are often hidden only by the darkness we cast over
the world
through our unredeemed thought-judgments.
The second
benefit is this. Unless I am
silent, and empty, that is poor in spirit, how will it be
possible for
the Mystery to touch me?
John 3:8 The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit
The Mystery
goes where it wills. If we
are not listening outwardly, we well may miss it when it
appears
through others. An inflated sense of self righteousness will
certainly
interfere. How much have we missed in life because we did not
listen to
what was being offered? Even a piece of an overheard passing
conversation on a bus, which seems to jump into our silent
waiting, may
have an import just for us. And inwardly? The Mystery is
silence
itself, quiet, like an angel's beating wings. How much has
been offered
to us just there as well, a barely audible whispering that our
own
internal rambling dialog has covered over in its insistent and
restless
commentary.
"It thinks in me" spoke Rudolf
Steiner. The Mystery has its own will. "It" comes like a
gentle wind,
when "it" wills, and we prepare the way by "learning to think on
our knees", as Valentin Tomberg,
another passionate seeker I find
very helpful, has advised. Two acts, only one our own.
Matthew 11:
28-30: Come
unto me, all ye that
labor 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.n For my yoke is easy, and my
burden is
light.
Two acts, only
one our own. Something
comes to meet us and does not bring weight, but rather eases
our
burdens.
Pragmatic moral
psychology is not meant
to be heavy labor. We are working together with the world of
Mystery.
We make an offering of what lives within; we offer it up. In
the
Celebration of the Mass, the Offertory precedes the Eucharist.
The soul makes the same rite of gesture, when the unconsciously created judgment is perceived and then let go, after which the empathic understanding is yearned for. When this has been done we are then met by grace, by the work of others. Moreover, this grace is so quiet, so silent, we may not be able to distinguish it from our own yearning thinking.
Since the
Mystery seeks no gratitude for
its acts, we should not mind when it has invisibly carried us
to subtle
heights, breadths and depths. To expect this, is faith.
However alone
we may sometimes feel, we are, in fact, never alone.
*
Let us review
and synthesize, perhaps
adding a few new thoughts.
We are born
into a culture and a
language, a family and a destiny. In our youth we draw into
ourselves a
way of seeing the world, consistent with those who raise us,
and,
without which we would have become incapable of being a member
of
society.
Each of us has
an inborn faculty of
judgment which finds its center in the feeling life, but which
leaves
its most conscious traces in the life of thought. We do not
want to
eliminate this faculty, but it does need to be refined if we
are to
evolve it into a capacity for perceiving the true, the
beautiful and
the good. As the poet Goethe pointed out, particularly in his
scientific works, it is not the senses which deceive, but
rather the
judgment.
The fundamental quality, latent in judgment and from which its evolution may proceed, is our moral nature, our moral will. Let us consider this in a more practical way.
What do I do
with antipathies (or with
excessive sympathies for that matter)? Something enters my
consciousness and my "reaction" is to not like it. The first
thing
(borrowing a term from more recent popular psychology) is to
own it. It
is my reaction, it arises in my soul, and it is not (in any
obvious
way) in the object to which the reaction attaches. There does
seem to
be something, a seed perhaps, that does exist in the judgment
and that
does belong to the object of the judgment, but this seed only
comes to
flower through processes like those outlined below.
The
antipathetic reaction, which is a
"feeling", then draws concepts toward it, clothes itself in
thought
forms, and in this way enters our conscious thinking life,
usually as a
stream of inner dialog (discursive thinking: our spirit
speaks, our
soul hears). Above, we considered how to become alert to these
judgments using the daily review, and noted there, as well,
that to
feel remorse and shame for having so unconsciously and
hypocritically
categorized our fellow human beings, is a sign of an awakening
conscience.
Once we have
become more awake in the
moment, it is possible to work with this process during the
day, not
waiting for the daily review. The antipathy arises, we notice
it. We
have learned not to speak it, not to allow it across the
threshold of
speech into the social world. We behold it inwardly, this
thing, our
judgmental creation. This objective perception of our self
created
thought-judgments is an act of spiritual freedom, inner
freedom before
the concept.
There are two
very practical acts we can
do in regard to this object within our consciousness. One
precedes the
other, and the second is born out of the first. The initial
act is one
of sacrifice. Steiner calls this: "sacrifice of thoughts". We not only allow it to die, we participate in
the
process of its dying. We give it up, we detach ourselves
emotionally
from this no longer desired judgment.
Doing this has brought our will into play. Using this same will we now engender a new becoming of the act of judgment. Dying has preceded becoming. We actively engage the process of metamorphosis inwardly in the soul life. The caterpillar of our antipathetic judgment can give birth to the butterfly of our empathic understanding. The crucial act is our moral intention. We recreate in the newly freed soul space the object of our judgment as an act of spiritual will. We choose to behold the "other" with the forces of resurrection. We clothe the object of our previous antipathy in a freely chosen word-picture created in the crucible of a struggle to know them empathically. We redeem them in thought.
The most
essential matter to recognize
here is that in this activity one is not acting alone. Two
acts, only
one our own.
One last
thought. In that activity by
which we transform unconscious judgments into conscious ones,
we inform
the world with new meaning. We adorn the world, and the
individuals
which inhabit it, with self-created significance. The
difference is
that this new meaning-significance is neither arbitrary or
capricious.
The world means what we choose it to mean. In this act,
however, it
makes a great deal of difference whenever we have invited the
cooperation of the invisible world.
With regard to
this problem of meaning -
the creation of new meaning - there is much more yet to say,
as this is
one of the principle ways for crafting the resurrection of a
new
civilization from the decay and debris of the old and dying
culture.
Unto the reader
then, I place these gifts
of twenty-five years of practice, with all their flaws, for
whatever
service they may give.
**************************
The Misconception of Cosmic Space* As
Appears In the Ideas of Modern Astronomy
- and as contained in the understandably limited thinking embodied
in the
conceptions of the nature of parallax and redshift -
- introduction
-
Before entering
on to the main body of
this essay, we should consider briefly the nature of thinking
and of
the imagination. In this little book there are a
number of
different comments on thinking and on the imagination, coming
from
different directions, but here I want to point out some basic
facts as
a foundation for the coming work.
The first is
that human beings think, and
that there is no science without the activity of human
thinking.
Thinking determines which questions the scientist
asks,
what experiments he conducts, and then ultimately how the data
provided
by the experiments is interpreted - that is what does this
scientific
activity mean. For this
essay we are confronted with the
scientific meaning created by human thinking in relationship
to some
considerable portions of the data accumulated by scientific
work
centered on questions concerning the stellar world. We
are asking
here in this essay whether what science thinks today of the
meaning and
significance of the stars is what we ought to continue to
think, in the
future, or even today to assume is still a reasonable
understanding.
As part of the
process of examining the
underlying questions, we will be using a particular capacity
of the
mind, which might be called the imagination, or
picture-forming
capacity. We make all manner of mental
pictures in
the normal course of ordinary thinking, and in scientific
thinking we
carry out this activity in quite specific directions.
Certain
astronomical ideas, for example the idea of parallax, are
specifically
grounded in the picture-thinking connected to Euclidean
geometry.
While we sometimes use a pencil and paper to work
out the
details of this geometric picture thinking, the fact that
should not be
ignored (but often is) is that it is the mind of the human
being that
contributes the fundamental activity from which our modern
astronomical
conceptions arise. In fact, our interpretation of the
meaning of
astronomical data is entirely a result of mental processes, a
number of
which are expressly born in the imagination.
Yes, we
carefully observe the stellar
world with all kinds of remarkable instruments. We
also use
a great deal of mathematics in how this material is
interpreted, but we
must never, in the process of unfolding this scientific
investigation
of the world of the stars, forget the centrality of thinking
and of the
imagination to the whole process. If we take
thinking and
the imagination away, there is no science of astronomy.
Why
this is so important will hopefully become more clear as this
essay
unfolds.
- main body -
*"Our Father in the
skies..."
are the first words of the Lord's Prayer, as translated
by Andy
Gaus in his book The
Unvarnished Gospels. I start
here to
point out the fact that the people living in ancient
Palestine, at the
time of the Incarnation, had a different kind of consciousness
than we
do today. When they looked at the heavens, they
understood
(and were taught by their wise elders) that the sky was the
abode of
the Divine Mystery. In fact, they understood the whole
of
Creation to be en-souled with Being and Consciousness. Since that time a different
conception of
the heavens and of the earth has come into existence for large
portions
of humanity. How did that original conception change and
what can
we learn by observing carefully the nature of that change?
In
this last essay in the main body of New
Wine, we'll look primarily at a
crucial set of ideas related
to the field of astronomy that were a significant part of
these changes.
Everyone
understands that if we make even
the slightest error in the aim of the bow and arrow, by the
time the
arrow reaches the end of its journey, it doesn't take much of
an
original error to cause the arrow to have completely missed
the target.
Human beings are flawed, and science is the activity of
human
beings. In the following essay I am going to concern
myself with
clearly amateur* researches and thinking into the problems of
parallax
and red shift, as these ideas are used to create for us a
conception of
the world of the Stars.
*[While I am
not a member of the
priesthood of the religion of Natural Science, I do know how
to observe
carefully and how to think objectively, so just because
astronomy isn't
my profession, the reader should not automatically anticipate
they will
be misled. The reader should, however, themselves
test the
themes outlined below in their own careful picture-thinking.
The
tendency of scientific thinking has been toward too much
analysis, and not enough synthesis,
while the return of
a focus on the imagination will help us move forward in the
future
toward a needed balance between these two basic gestures
in
thinking.]
The fundamental question is this: the current generally understood idea of cosmic space is that it is essentially a three dimensional endlessness - a very big box, which while it must have some unusual properties as a container, it is nevertheless organized such that everywhere inside it one can expect that the same rules of physics we observe in the laboratory on the Earth, will be true all that way out there...one upon a time in a galaxy far far away. Is this conception of endless three-dimensional space true?
Let us consider
a rather simple geometric
thought experiment, which everyone (trained mathematician or
otherwise)
can do.
Make a picture
of a small perfect sphere
in your mind. It has a center and a periphery.
One
can use the terms radius, circumference and diameter with
respect to
this sphere, but they really don't have any exact meaning
unless we
define one of these characteristics by giving it first an
exact
measure. For example, if we said the radius of our
mental sphere
was one meter, well understood rules of the geometry of a
perfect
sphere would give us diameter and circumference (as well as
other
related characteristics, such as the degree of arc of the
curvature of
the surface, the area of the surface, etc.).
Now keep in
mind that we don't have to
conceive of this sphere in terms of measure. It can just
exist in
our mind as a measureless perfect geometric form.
Next, we
imagine the radius line, from
the center of the sphere to the periphery, increasing.
We
again don't have to measure it, we just make the picture in
our
thinking of this imaginary sphere as something that is slowly
growing
through an elongating radius line. The radius line
grows.
As that line grows all the other characteristics of the
sphere
grow as well.
We could also
mentally cause the same
effect by changing any other properties. For
example, if we
cause with our picture-thinking the area of the surface to
increase, we
change at the same time all the other relationships.
Now lets return
to the increasing of the
radius line. In your imagination now picture that
intersection between the radius line and the periphery of the
sphere.
At this intersection there is a degree of curvature of
the arc of
the sphere. We can notice as we do this thought
experiment
that as the radius line grows, the tightness of the curvature
of the
surface lessens.
To help this,
lets imagine the radius
line decreasing. We shrink it, and as we do this
the
curvature of the periphery of the sphere gets tighter and
tighter,
until we make the radius line zero. When we make
the radius
line zero we have lost the sphere, and it has disappeared into
a
dimensionless point.
Yet, since we
are working without any
need for measure, a zero radius sphere is simply a point.
Once we
give measure of any amount to the radius line of a zero radius
line
sphere (a point), the sphere returns. A radius
line of a
nanometer takes a point and makes it a sphere.
Seeing this clearly with our geometrical imagination (which is quite exact and precise, by the way), we now do the opposite and complete the earlier exercise by increasing the radius line to infinite length. Instead of a radius line of zero, it is now infinite. What then happens to the curvature of the sphere when the radius becomes infinitely elongated?
Well, if we
carefully follow out our
precise and exact geometrical imagination, we will be able to
observe
this process unfold. As the radius line increases in
length the
original tightness of the curvature of the surface of the
sphere
lessens, until at the moment the radius line is infinite there
will be
no curvature at all. The sphere has disappeared, and
undergone a
metamorphosis into a plane. If we think carefully
about
what we have learned here, we will see then that any sphere of
any
measure of radius line is always an intermediate geometric
form arising
in between a dimensionless point and a plane at infinity.
This fact is
already well known in the
profound mathematical science of projective geometry, and we
have now
ourselves discovered what is called there: the Plane at
Infinity.
The sphere then is geometrically in between the
infinitely large
and the infinitely small, or in between the plane at infinity
and a
geometric point (which has no measure at all, unless we put it
into
relationship with something else). A point by itself is
just that
- nothing else. It occupies no space at all.
Well then, what
is the point
of this exercise?
There are
several. First it is
crucial to realize that we can think geometrically without
using any
measure at all. If one is lucky enough to come upon a
copy of
Olive Whicher's Projective
Geometry:
creative polarities in space and time*, one
has the possibility to study this wonderful geometry using
only a
pencil, a straight edge and some paper (large sheets are
easier for
some constructions). Measure has been done away
with, and
the creators (or discoverers) of this mathematics describe it
is all
geometry - meaning by this that
every single other geometry is a
special case of projective geometry.
*[check Waldorf
Schools or other Rudolf
Steiner institutions for copies of this book. At present
it is
tragically out of print.]
The difficulty for Natural Scientists has been how to apply this beautifully symmetric, measure free geometry, to the natural world. Science is rooted in measure, and while the ideas of this geometry are recognized as significant, what could they mean in a world that is already hopelessly entangled in a science which has to use measure for everything?
With this
riddle in the background, let
us now examine the history of ideas by which the old view of
the
heavens as an abode of the Divine Mystery came to be
supplanted by a
view in which space is conceived as a near endless three
dimensional
container, punctuated with mass caused curvatures (the
space-time
gravity ideas following after Einstein, using the Reinmann
geometry -
again a special case of the more general projective geometry).
Giordano Bruno,
who was burned at the
stake as a heretic in 1600, is credited with having first
suggested the
idea that a star might be like the sun. Would that our
histories
were more accurate, because what we think of as the sun today,
and how
he thought about such matters (he was, among other
disciplines, a
deeply thoughtful meta-physician*) is not quite grasped by
believing
his idea, that a star and our sun were relatives, in fact
mirrors in
anyway our modern conceptions. For Bruno, the idea that
a star
and our sun were related, was a completely different idea than
we hold
today. The details of that, however, is a whole other matter.
*[Meta-physics,
contrary to modern views
that it is not a science at all, was really always seen as a
product of
a synthesis of ones total understanding. Modern
physics comes
from taking things apart, from analysis.
Meta-physics always had the task of make the parts
of all
human knowledge into a single whole.]
Bruno did agree
to a degree with
Copernicus, and so in those years the ideas being produced by
natural
philosophers (the grandfathers of natural science) came to be
at odds
with the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church. While the
previous
age of careful thinkers (the Scholastics), would have
understood
(keeping to Aristotle) that there was a difference between quantities and qualities, the
scientific
impulse coming to the fore in those years more and more felt
it could
only deal with that which could be counted or measured - that
is quantities. The various categorical qualities of Aristotelian meta-physics more and more
dropped away
from consideration (although this was a long term process and
many
thinkers (Kepler and Faraday for example, thought this was an
error of
thought to do so).
In any event,
pure astronomy slowly freed
itself from the meta-physics connected to astrology and
related
disciplines, by a process in which the qualitative problems were left aside and everything was more
and
more rooted in only what could be counted (and measured).
Kepler,
it has been forgotten, was an astrologer as well as the
discoverer of
the three fundamental laws of planetary motion*. Not
only that,
but Newton was an alchemist. The tendency has been to
frame the
history of these thinkers as if they thought as we do today,
when
anyone who actually reads what they wrote discovers they did
not. (For
a comprehensive examination of this overlooked history of
science, read
Ernst Lehrs' Man or
Matter:
Introduction to a Spiritual Understanding of Nature on the
Basis of
Goethe's Method of Training Observation and Thought. Also read Arthur Zajonc's Catching
the
Light:
the
entwined history of Light and Mind.
*[Kepler believed, for example, that his formula and ideas regarding the Third Law of Planetary Motion was a rediscovery of the ancient's idea of the Harmony of the Spheres]
As this process
matures, it reaches a
kind of high point in the 19th Century, and two important
ideas are
given birth out of the context of this leaving aside of the
problem of qualities, and resting
all theories of the starry world only on
what can be counted and measured. These ideas are
parallax
and redshift. Such concepts don't emerge on their own,
so we have
to work carefully with them, still keeping in mind how
dependent they
are upon measure alone.
The idea of
redshift doesn't come by
itself, for example, for it is really based upon spectroscopy.
This science is itself not based initially on stellar
observation, but on work in the laboratory where various
fundamental
elements are combusted (burned) in such a way that they
produce
"light". This "light" is measured according to the
quantitative
ideas of Newtonian Optics, and so we get the "spectral" lines
for such
basic elements as hydrogen.
As a result
stellar light phenomena,
including light phenomena from our sun, are used in such a way
that it
is assumed that this light from the stars and our sun is
produced in
those places by a burning process similar in kind (but not
degree) to
what was done in the laboratory. If the light from a
star, or our
sun, has a certain mathematically accurate vibration
(frequency), that
is like or essentially similar to the hydrogen line obtained
in the
laboratory, this light frequency is then seen as showing us
that in
that star, or our sun, hydrogen is being burned up, which
combustion
process gives off that particular light frequency.
This is so
important a fact (actually
assumed to be universal) that in the movie Contact, the frequency used to send the message to Earth
from
the fictional stellar civilization is the hydrogen light
frequency
times pi. That is, it is a material constant multiplied
by a
geometric constant.
All the same,
there was a problem with
the hydrogen light frequency, for example, from the stars.
The observed light frequency in the normal range
for
hydrogen (assumed to be an exact universal constant) isn't
actually
quite so exact to observation. Various stars' hydrogen
lines are
discovered to be a bit off center, so to speak, such that they
can be
described (in the assumptions of physical astronomy) to be
either red
shifted or blue shifted. The greatest number of stellar
objects
are red shifted (only a very very few are blue shifted).
Following
Newton, color is a spectrum of
light frequencies, with a red end point, where beyond which it
becomes
invisible to the eye, or a blue end point (actually violet,
but
convention names that end of the spectrum the blue end) where
beyond
this end it also becomes invisible to the eye. We see
with our
eyes a normal color Newtonian spectrum (so it is assumed) and
at the
edges of this visible spectrum the light is no longer visible,
although
it still can be observed and measured with instruments (the
red end
becomes infrared or heat, and the blue end becomes
ultraviolet, leading
then to such as x-rays). The wavelength of the frequency
at the
red end is longer and longer (elongation), and the wavelength
of the
frequency at the blue end is shorter and shorter (compaction).
These questions
arise: what does it mean
that light from the stars is not exactly showing us the
precise
hydrogen line we came to know in the laboratory, and what do
we make of
the fact that this shift toward the red (the dominant types of
shift)
itself varies? Some stellar objects show small
redshift and
other's quite large redshift.
The original
dominating idea for the
meaning of the phenomena of the redshift (elongation) of such
as the
hydrogen line frequency was arrived at by creating an analogy
between
light waves and sound waves, in 1842. We all know (or
experience
at least) the so-called Doppler effect - the shift in sound of
a train
horn as it comes toward us or away from us. This movement toward or away produces a change in the pitch
(auditory
frequency), even though we know that the actual pitch the horn
is
making never changes. The change in pitch is heard
because of the
movement of the source of the sound (which compacts or
elongates
the frequency, as perceived by the ear,
which is relatively stationary).
By analogy
then, redshift was thought to
give evidence of the movement of the object away from the
observer on
the Earth. Whatever was going on, most of the stellar
objects had
this redshift phenomena (in varying degrees) and from this
analogy was
born the idea that the Universe is expanding (which then later
is
supposed to logically give us the Big Bang - an explosion
which creates
an expanding Universe). I point out this last to
urge the
reader to notice how interwoven are all the ideas we have
today about
the physical universe, such that if, for example, redshift
doesn't
really mean what we think it means, then this idea of the
expansion of
the Universe loses one of its main supports.
The first
problem to arise after the more
or less universal acceptance of this theory, was the
recognition that
while light was superficially a wave phenomena (a
movement
propagating in a medium), similar to sound, the analogy didn't
really
hold, so a lot of thought went into how to revisit the
redshift
phenomena and appreciate it better. Unfortunately,
while
many scientists feel certain older kinds of ideas ought to get
dropped
away from any current point of view, some ideas seem quite
unwilling to
be abandoned, so the Doppler analogy remains, even though
contemporary
physics sometimes sees light as both particle and wave
simultaneously
(depending on what questions you ask, and which experiments
you do).
One of the
newer theories as regards
redshift (moving away from the Doppler analogy) is that it is
partially
a consequence of the temperature in the star. Another
sees some
redshift phenomena as reflecting the influence of gravity
wells.
I point this
out only to suggest that
theories themselves are in constant motion (a kind of social
Brownian
motion among different minds). I am not so much
interested in the
current theory here, because it is my view that the resolution
to the
fundamental question lies in a quite different direction.
Let us now
leave redshift behind, and go
on to the idea parallax, which arose a few years before
redshift
historically (1838, so it says on-line).
The basic idea
of parallax is that it
enables us to measure (remember what was said above about
measure) how
far a star (or other stellar phenomena) is from the Earth.
Basically this is done by coming up with an
observational angle,
that can be measured on the Earth, and is made possible in
large part
by the orbit of the Earth around the sun. Since I can't
put in a
drawing here (the reader can go on-line if they desire) I'll
try to do
this with words.
Place on the
grass of a football field,
in your imagination, two poles. One pole is at the
center of the
goal line, and the next at the center of the 10 yard line
nearest that
goal line. Now go down to the goal line at the
other end of
the field, and set up a transit (a device for taking the
measure of an
angle of changes in a sight line). Move the
transit
from one side of the field to the other, stopping every yard,
and make
observations of the angle of observation between the two poles
obtained
by viewing them from the moving transit.
As we do this
the angle we are measuring
changes. This angle is widest at one side of the field,
and then
contracts, until we are right opposite the two poles (at which
occurrence the near pole occults the other, or stands in front
of it),
and then the angle expands again as we move toward the
opposite side of
the field.
Now imagine
such an activity taking place
with respect to the light phenomena of stellar objects.
The
transit is actually the earth, which moves constantly,
changing the
observational "angle" with respect to distant objects.
As this
earth-transit moves, some of the distant objects seem to
occult each
other, as if one was in front, and the other behind.
However, since
these objects are so far
away (apparently), the angles that are measured are very very
very
small (small fractions of seconds of degree of arc). One
writer
suggested that if you took a quarter, and looked at it from a
distance
of three miles, measuring the angle between a transit
observation of
one side of the quarter, and then the other side - this
picture
suggests how small an angle is actually being measured by this
method
(parallax) with regard to the nearest star to the earth (for
stars
believed to be further away, the "angle" is progressively
smaller).
Using this data
(the angle measurements
coupled with our knowledge of the diameter of the Earth's
orbit) we can
use the basic rules of Euclidean geometry to determine the
length of
the sides of the resultant triangle. This information
(with a
couple of other geometric ideas rooted in measure) then gives
what we
think to be the distance of the stellar object from the Earth.
Now since
redshift is believed to tell us
that most stellar objects are moving away
from us, these distances change over time, which then appears
to give
us a kind of confirmation of the parallax. The problem
is that
some of these observations came in conflict (an inconsistency
between
redshift and parallax). One of the most obvious of
these
was discovered by the astronomer Hal Arp, who as a result for
a time
found himself to be seen as a heretic by his fellows, and was
temporarily shunned (couldn't get telescope time to continue
his
research (see his book, Quasars,
Redshifts, and Controversies).
Basically what
he observed (using
conventional astronomical ideas and methods), was that Quasars
(quasi-stellar objects), while they had a very high redshift
(suggesting they were traveling very fast away from us, and
since they
were thought to have been doing this for some time - no
changes in
rate of velocity and/or acceleration were assumed, they were
also thought to be quite far away) the parallax measurement
seemed to
imply they were much nearer. Quasars seemed to occult
(get in
front of) much slower (less redshifted) stellar objects).
The two
phenomena could not be reconciled. Were Quasars near or
far?
I'll not go
into what were the
conventional adjustments made (its all very complicated, and
unnecessarily so in my view) in order to preserve the basic
set of
ideas of modern astronomy, but we can (with
justification)simply step
past these ideas. Why?
Because
fundamentally the problem is due
to the fact that phenomena of redshift and parallax is
organized in
accord with Euclidean geometry and the need in science to
measure.
In effect, at every point in the development of
these ideas
(though scientific thinking and imagination), we exported to
Cosmic
Space those conceptions that were true here in the center (the
Earth),
and further, we assumed that these conditions were an
invariable
constant.
For example,
the distance we measure
using the idea of parallax can't actually be tested
empirically.
In essence, we export from our Earth reality the concept
of
Euclidean three-dimensional space to the apparently farthest
reaches of
the starry world, but at the same time have no way of testing
the set
of assumptions behind the activity of exportation of such an
idea.
We can't go off to the side of the container in which all stars are held, and measure from
another
quarter whether in fact the distance the parallax formulation
gives us
is correct.
For another
example, we find the hydrogen
frequency line by a laboratory experiment here on the surface
of the
Earth, and then assume that nothing of physics changes at
cosmic
distances, and that the universe will obey the same laws way
out there
that it obeys here. Under the influence of these
assumptions we
export our earthly picture to cosmic spaces, something that
really
isn't justified if science wishes to remain properly
empirical.
All our
observations are made on the
Earth or from near-earth space. It is really only in our
mind
that we go outward toward cosmic space. If that is
the
case, then we must be very very careful in how we let one
thought grow
from the other. Clearly if there is an error in
thought
(remember our arrow to the target analogy at the beginning of
this
essay), then the further
out in space our imagination, of the
picture
of the meaning of the data we collect here goes, the more a
small error in our thought will produce
a quite large miss in our understanding of the truth.
While there
were many small mistakes made
(such as the assumptions observed regarding the hydrogen
line), there
is one single idea that saves the situation as it were.
We set
aside Euclidean geometry and substitute for it Projective
Geometry -
the fundamental geometry of which all other geometries
(including
Euclidean) are a special case. Let us next then try to
apply this
geometry to the image creation aspect of our thinking, because
after
all it is the image we are making of cosmic space that is
important.
It is the mind that travels to cosmic space, riding the
ideas we
have created from the data only empirically observed here.
We,
who live today, have traveled far down the historical path of
one kind
of mind-created image, and now it is time to perhaps
deconstruct it and
create something new.
Lets recall the older (or current) image first, namely of a three dimensional emptiness, filled with stars which are like our sun, some surrounded by planets like our planet. It is a powerful image. Science fiction, books and films, tell all kinds of tales. If one were to suggest that this might not be correct, most people would think you were crazy.
Return now to
our earlier work in which
we expanded the radius line of the sphere to infinity and
observed how
the sphere became a plane at infinity (or the reverse, where
if we
contract the radius line the sphere disappears into a
dimensionless
point). Also keep in mind that the geometric form never
changes
its basic nature - it just transforms at
the different
extremes (the infinitely large and the infinitely small radius
aspect).
A lot of people
should have some trouble
here, because they conceive of infinity as something much
larger than
say the multiple light years of measure we have applied to the
distance
between the Earth and the stellar objects. In this
regard, lets
look at some apparent facts so far developed under the old
methodology.
For example,
the so-called nearest star,
Proxima Centuri is thought to be 4.2 light years away (its
degree of
arc in parallax is .77233 seconds of arc - which is by the way
the
largest degree of arc using parallax measures, for every more
distant
object will have a smaller degree of arc). 4.2 light
years (this
next is an amateur calculation) is 24 billion miles (that's
24,000,000,000, or 24 thousand million). The
farthest
distance objects are high multiples of that. We'll
return to this
a bit later.
Remember, we
have exported an idea to
cosmic space which we can't empirically test. Science,
tied to
the idea of counting and measure, has exported to cosmic space
a
measure (huge light year distances), which idea can't be
checked by any
other means. As a result, we are quite right to
challenge this
exportation of measure to test whether it is a thought that is
properly
rigorous. Since we cannot empirically test the assumed
measure,
we are left with the quite definite necessity to even more
carefully
and rigorously subject that idea to the tests of logic.
Here is a very
important question.
If at the center of our infinitely small sphere, the
point, there
is no actual space, once we have created any measure of radius
distance
(a nanometer, for example), we now have three dimensional
space, then
what happens at the infinite radius, when the sphere
disappears and
becomes the plane at infinity? Is this transition as
apparently
sudden as the one from the point to the very very small
sphere?
If we actually
think very carefully about
this we will notice (using our geometric imagination) that
even the
transition to the very very small is not sudden. There
is a lot
of work on theses themes in mathematics, and you can Google it
by
starting with Zeno's paradoxes. In any event, at
the
infinitely small end of the transition, from the sphere to the
point,
the process
itself is likewise smaller and
smaller in
nature, while the transition from the very large sphere to the
plane at
infinity must be, by virtue of laws of symmetry, larger and
larger in
nature. Keep in mind we are thinking here of the transformational
process, from one geometric state or
form to another state or
form.
The plane at
infinity doesn't appear
suddenly out of nowhere, but as we approach it the nature of
three-dimensional space is slowly undergoing a metamorphosis.
Three-dimensional space is becoming plane-like in
its
fundamental nature, but not all of a sudden. Space
itself
is changing, and the rules of physics applicable to a purely
three-dimensional sphere (Earth conditions) will no longer, at
these
extremely large distances, apply.
What are huge
light year imagined
measures then (such as the 28 billion light years assumed for
diameter
the visible universe - there being thought to exist a greater
universe
we cannot yet see even with our instruments)? They are
simply a
fantasy or myth, born in the assumptions of the scientific
imagination.
Since we cannot conceive of anything as knowable
scientifically,
without measure and counting, we presently are unable to
conceive of
the universe without measure either. Again, an
assumption that
causes the arrow to miss the mark. The question right
here then
is whether the current limits of our imagination and thinking
reflect
the actual limits of reality. Confined for a time in the
limited
box of Euclidean Geometry, we stand on the cusp of
transcending those
limits by applying the more universal Projective Geometry.
This should not
surprise anyone, for we
already know that in particle physics, where the transition of
matter
endowed space becomes infinitely small (remember the sphere
collapsing
into the point - which has led us into all the paradoxes of
quantum
physics) the conditions there are suggestive of all kinds of
alterations of the rules observed at a more (relatively) macro
scale of
matter. At very small dimensions, the rules of physics
change, so
why would we be surprised that at very large dimensions, the
rules of
physics will also change.
In fact, in the
wonderful movie Mind Walk, the character of the physicist describes matter
as a
huge emptiness, punctuated with geometric points, where fields
of force
intersect. In effect, there is nothing there at all in
terms of
substance (or what we call matter) but this organism of
intersections
of fields of force in various kinds of pure geometric points
(no
space). No space at the infinite periphery, and no space
in the
infinitesimal point. In between, the perfect geometric
sphere
mediates between the greatest and the smallest. "Think on it: how the
point
becomes a sphere and yet remains itself. Hast thou
understood how
the infinite sphere may be only a point, and then come again,
for then
the Infinite will shine forth for thee in the finite." Rudolf Steiner.
Now if this is
true, then as macro cosmic
space becomes more plane-like and less like the normal
physical
conditions of the Earth, we ought to be able to observe
phenomena (just
as we do in the very smallest dimensions revealed by quantum
experiments) that reveal to us that this condition of space itself has altered. Space, being no longer
three
dimensional at the plane at infinity, must become something
else.
Before we
believe this is a poor idea,
recall that already we have been taught about the so-called gravity wells (especially near such objects as our Sun).
Many of
us have seen images, either on TV or in a page in a magazine,
which
suggests that near a massive object, space itself is distorted. Light, we are told, traveling near this
imagined
state of a gravity well, can't travel in a straight line.
This is
thought to have been proved by Einstein's predictions
regarding light
from Mercury as it passes toward us from the other side of the
sun
(when Mercury's orbit causes it to hide (be occulted) behind
the Sun.
Using the Reinmann geometry (a special case of
projective
geometry) Einstein was able to calculate exactly the amount of
the
bending of light by the gravity well our our Sun.
Since we
already know how to imagine a distorted near
space around a massive object like our Sun (recall
that Bruno thought our Sun and stars were of a similar nature)
it is
not too great a leap to imagine a fully transformed space at the transition from the very large
sphere to
the Plane at Infinity. In a sense, the image of
gravity
wells is already a transformation of our ideas of space
itself,
although not going so far as to free itself fully of the need
to
measure. What I am suggesting is that we take our
spacial
imagination faculty all the way, and also bring projective
geometry
itself all the way into play as descriptive of the natural
world.
Which is of
course exactly what our
observations of light, and other phenomena of the stellar
world, can
tells us if we let them. Once we overcome the one-sided
Euclidean
geometry previously applied in parallax, and substitute
Projective
Geometry principles, then all the anomalous problems of
redshift are
resolved.
The reason the
hydrogen line is different
is because it (the light) originates in a kind of space which itself is
different). A star isn't a sun
(unless we change our ideas of our near sun-space - going back
to
Bruno, which is entirely justified but a whole other problem).
Those stellar objects with large redshift
characteristics (such
as Quasars) are deeper (a presently necessary poor choice of
words, for
it implies a continuation of three dimensions) within the
transformed
plane-like space. In fact, if we make a picture only of
the
redshift (disregarding Euclidean parallax) phenomena by itself
(and
related other astronomical facts of stellar radiation
phenomena), a new
kind of picture emerges.
Think for a
moment on all the pictures we
have been graced with of the starry world from the Hubble
telescope.
Everyone has seen these. Rich colors
(actually
computer enhanced far too often, but that is a whole other
problem).
Marvelous shapes and forms. Just looking at the
redshift
characteristics we can make a picture of an object that is
remarkably
active. It is not static or at rest in relationship to
the Earth,
but dynamic. Its relationship to other stellar objects
is more
fixed (perhaps musically harmonious, because there is a dance
of such
objects - including our solar system - all based on the
projected
geometric form of the vortex*), but the light phenomena, which
our
instruments observe, suggests (since we observe this variation
of
redshifts, x-ray stars etc) that stellar objects have dynamic
properties. The various kinds of radiation, pouring
toward the
earth from the cosmic periphery, are not constant, but rather
always
changing and dynamic.
*[A vortex is,
in terms of projective
geometry, a dynamic form.
That is, it is, in its actual nature, in
movement. A tornado funnel cloud is a vortex, and we see
a vortex
every time we flush a toilet. A vortex is also a
relative of the
cone of light, which is how we think of what light does when
it enters
the eye through the lens. These cones of light are well
described
in all their geometry properties by the rules of projective
geometry;
and, a vortex is simply a dynamic (moving) cone-like form in
nature.]
Many stellar
objects are extremely
dramatic (x-ray and neutron stars, for example). Keep in
mind
that these pictures are created by a thinking which has
removed all qualities, remaining
only in quantities. To better appreciate this lets make a
little
analogy.
Consider a
flower garden in full late
summer bloom. Vivid colors, lots of insect life and
birds dancing
and playing. For some almost violent growth (how fast
does a sun
flower grow, on its way to a height of 12 to 14 feet in three
months
time). Of course, to the gardener it makes no sense to
disregard
the way such a garden makes us feel (its qualities), but if
astronomical thinking were applied to a flower garden, all
that would
disappear. We'd end up with a bunch of numbers (how
many, of
which kinds, what frequency of light were the colors, what was
the
speed of growth etc. etc. etc.). Our actual experience of the garden is washed away by the process of
limiting
our thinking only to the quantitative.
Now think (if
you can remember) of a time
when you were deep in Nature, away from city lights, and lay
on your
back in a meadow looking up at midnight at the night sky.
Thousands upon thousands of stars, and your mind
naturally
saw everywhere patterns. Moreover, we feel awe.
The
starry night touches something deep inside us, that can only
respond
with marvel and wonder. We forget this living in our
cities, and
we have also forgotten (and losing) even the ability to have
such a
view because the atmosphere itself is so polluted that less
and less of
the stellar light passes through it to our eye.
This is what we observe - what we experience. What we think - what is our mental image or picture - having been formed by modern astronomical ideas, is that this endless emptiness is filled with objects like our own planet and solar system. But now we are discovering in this essay the possibility that deep space is not three dimensional at all. Cosmic space is a peripheral plane of light, alive with dynamic processes creating what? What is this new kind of space, the plane at infinity, from which stellar light pours down upon the Earth?
Lets take a
small side trip here, to
consider light itself. The book mentioned above, Catching
the
Light:
the
entwined history of light and mind,
goes into
remarkable detail and history. Keeping our projective
geometry
idea in mind, we might then make a relationship between the
sphere that
has collapsed into a point, and what is now called light
quanta or
photons. As mentioned above, these quanta exhibit all
kinds of
properties that normally spacial (in a three dimensional
sense) objects
do not.
For example,
the world we see of trees
and clouds does not reveal the micro world of light quanta and
the
other many strange particles known to modern high energy
physics.
The scientist doesn't see much of this either, except
with his
instruments and the image making powers of his mind.
We could say
(from our more naive point
of view - which has a special validity) that it is as if light
quanta
have stepped outside of time and space (this is one way of
viewing what
the experiments with light show to us today through quantum
physics).
To help here, let me add another idea from projective
geometry.
We know in
Euclidean geometry this
general rule: parallel lines never meet. In projective
geometry
(of which, remember, Euclidean geometry is a special case)
parallel
lines meet at infinity. To appreciate this better we
need to
practice another imagination, for we can with our picture
thinking
follow quite easily in thought the wonderful paradox expressed
here.
Picture two parallel lines (I can do this here):
_______________.________________
________________________________
Now imagine the
top line, in the center
of which is a point, rotating around that point.
Picture, for
example, the top line crossing the bottom line at about a 45
degree
angle toward the left side of the page. As we rotate
this line
further to the left, the angle of crossing gets smaller and
smaller,
until at infinity it no longer crosses the line. Yet, if
we keep
rotating the line in the same direction of rotation, as soon
as it goes
the smallest possible distance further, the top line starts to
cross
the bottom line at the farthest distance to the right.
When we couple
this idea with our
appreciation of the plane at infinity, we can with our
geometric
imagination feel (picturing it is hard, but logically we can
feel this
is right - and all these ideas have been proved by those
working with
the rules of projective geometry using algebraic formulas and
calculations) that these two lines, which could be seen as
parallel
lines contained in a sphere, will at infinity arrive at the
same point
on the plane at infinity, because as we saw before, when the
radius
line of the sphere is infinite it is no longer a
three-dimensional
space. The rounded sphere has become a plane, an all
encompassing
plane to be sure, surrounding from the infinite periphery (the
unseen
universe imagined by cosmologists) all that was at one time
interior.
The surrounding geometric quality remains, but since space itself is transformed,
it
accomplishes a kind of paradoxical miracle.
To travel to
infinity in one direction
(in terms of the spherical three-dimensional nature of
ordinary space)
means to return from the opposite direction, for once within the plane at infinity, the line that intersected
the
ever flattening arc of the sphere is now simultaneously a
point that is
everywhere. The point, in the center dimensionless,
expands,
first becoming a growing measureless sphere until it
ultimately
becomes a plane. Our geometric imagination never has to
leave the
proper and logical train of geometrical thought. Once
more: "Think
on it: how the point
becomes a sphere and yet remains itself. Hast thou
understood how
the infinite sphere may be only a point, and then come again,
for then
the Infinite will shine forth for thee in the finite." Rudolf Steiner.
If we then
appreciate that the night sky
is the plane at infinity, and that the measure we exported
from our
earthly perspective is not valid out there in cosmic space,
then the
light quanta, existing there outside of time and space,
radiates toward
us from this cosmic periphery, only becoming space-bound when within three-dimensional space. At
the
periphery, light quanta are not limited by the so-called speed
of
light, but are everywhere at the same time, yet somehow
differentiated,
for that is what we see, not just with the eye but with all
our
instruments as well.
Light comes
towards us from the stellar
reality. If that reality is not spacial in the sense
that we
previously assumed (rooted in three-dimensionally matter based
bodies
like suns and planets), then what is it? What can
exist in
the transitional space in between a true three-dimensional
sphere, and
the pure plane at infinity? If out there is not an empty space in which three
dimensional
matter arises, what does arise there in that space that, like
the
infinitesimally small, will not allow itself to conform to
Earth-like
physical laws?
These are the questions that have to be faced if we apply projective geometry to the relationship between our Earth center, and the peripheral plane at infinity. If we look at the stellar phenomena, such as redshift, then what meaning can be attributed to that kind of existence which creates light that violates the rules we know at the Earth center?
Perhaps it
would be better (disregarding
the word "deeper" above) to think of these objects as more
filled with
Life. The plane at infinity, as transformed space, reveals a high level of dynamic properties in
all its
light radiations. Could that dynamism be Life? Why
could we
think that and remain within reason?
Something is
happening out there that
comes here. Light is created out there and comes here.
Our
science has made all kinds of pictures for us of what is
happening out
there, yet these pictures are not empirical, but entirely
theoretical.
Moreover, they are entirely material and assume that the
laws of
physics at cosmic distances will be the same as they are on
the Earth,
which already we have noticed is not justified for the very
very small.
If we work from
the idea of the plane at
infinity first (for which projective geometry grants us every
right),
then we might ask whether or not space
itself is created out there.
We see the
light coming toward us from the cosmos, and we notice its
dynamic
properties (all the various intensities of redshift, among
others -
Quasars, neutron stars etc). If we discard measure
(which
projective geometry doesn't need), then the plane at infinity,
with its
inward radiating light is perhaps creating space itself, not
from a
point center (such as the Big Bang), but from the cosmic
periphery.
The plane at
infinity (transcendent of
matter oriented three dimensionality) creates three dimensional space and time, by radiating
light
inwardly from the cosmic periphery. Redshift is not old
light
receding, but its opposite - new light becoming space and
time.
This is exactly the idea of a student of Rudolf
Steiner's, George
Adams Kaufmann, in his 1933 essay on cosmic theory (rooted in
projective geometry): Space and
the Light of Creation, which essay's
first
chapter is Radiation
of
Space (the second chapter is The Music of Number, and the third and last chapter is The Burden of Earth
and the
Sacrifice of Warmth).
What kind of
power could create Space
itself? Our point centered assumptions, working from
only
quantities, have only been able to think of a spiritless
matter filled
Universe, born in a Big Bang. Certainly, working
inwardly from
the cosmic periphery (the plane at infinity) which the new
geometry
gives us every right to do, what is that which can be out there that rays inwardly the creation of Space itself?
"...and in it was life
and the life was the light of the
world..." The power
(fiat lux - let there be light) surrounding the Universe, is
Life, and
the Life creates the Light, and the Light rays inwardly
creating Space
and Time, in the center of which the Earth of living matter
and
substance arises, itself a narrow spherical band, for Earth
life is
only on the surface - go too deep and it is fire and there is
no life,
go too high and it is airless and again no life.
From the plane
at infinity, through the
inward plane-ward sculpted spheres of light, resting for a
moment at
the Earth periphery, where humanity unfolds its evolution,
then
eventually still collapsing to smaller and smaller spheres,
ultimately
disappearing into pure point centered geometric intersections
of fields
of force and the mysterious light quanta we discover in our
laboratory
experiments in quantum physics. But is it light
quanta that
is born first in the cosmic periphery, and then flies inward
ultimately
dying into very very tiny points from out which are built
living matter
and substance?
Should not,
according to the laws of
symmetry so essential to projective geometry, there be both a
similarity and a difference between the infinitely large and
the
infinitesimally small? If life is created at the cosmic
periphery, does it die into the very very small, only to be
reborn
instantaneously once more in the cosmic periphery?
Recall
our imaginative experiment with the parallel lines. If
time and
space rules don't apply to light quanta (photons), this will
be true
both at their point of first appearance and then again at
their point
of disappearance.
Yet, something
not quite right here.
The measureless sphere exists in between the infinitely
large and
the infinitesimally small. Appearance and disappearance
are the
same process in a way. Here again is Rudolf Steiner: "Think on it: how the
point
becomes a sphere and yet remains itself. Hast thou
understood how
the infinite sphere may be only a point, and then come again,
for then
the Infinite will shine forth for thee in the finite."
Created out of
the uncreated and
formless, generating space and time, falling then inward
toward the
center from the periphery until collapsing into the
nothingness once
more of timeless and space-less point centers, before
returning
instantaneously again to the cosmic infinite plane of life.
And, the
simultaneously opposite:
Arising out of the uncreated and formless nature of the
mysterious light quanta, radiating outward from an infinite
number of
point centers, spreading out toward the cosmic periphery,
there to
disappear into the remarkable spaceless and timeless plane at
infinity.
A mystery aptly
caught in the image of a
mobile imagination of the gesture in space that creates the
form we
know as the lemniscate.
Moreover, of
all the mysterious facts
quantum mechanics has discovered, it seems that it is the mind
itself
that determines the nature of the collapse from potential
becoming
(probability) into manifestation. Consciousness is
crucial.
Without consciousness there is no manifestation,
only
probability. Could not a Larger more Infinite
Consciousness
exist at the Periphery, where time and space themselves are
first
manifested? Then too, if the Great Mind can do that,
what then is
involved in the small mind, when it thinks and acts so as to
unfold its
own creative imagination and exact picture formation in
learning of and
practicing the measureless beauty of projective geometry?
In the
Beginning was the Word, and the Word was toward God, and God
was what
the Word was. It was with God in the Beginning.
All things
happened through it, and not one thing that happened happened
without
out it. In it was life, and the life was the light of
the
world....*
So Christ
advises us to pray: "Our Father in the skies..."
*translation
from the Greek of a part of
the prologue to the John Gospel, from the book, The
Unvarnished
Gospels by Andy Gaus.
Of course,
currently Natural Science
hasn't the capacity to appreciate such a change in their
understanding
of the Cosmos. But this book isn't written for
scientists, its
written for those Christians, who might like to have a sense
that one
can still be deeply religious and not abandon the rational.
What we have
done, by the way, is look at
the image building processes of the fine minds at work in
natural
science, which have created a kind of myth regarding the
stellar world
- a myth quite different from that held by more ancient minds
in ages
long ago. We have not returned to those ancient myths so
much, as
taken up, out of the advancing progress of natural science
itself, a
particular discipline (projective geometry, or all geometry),
and
applied it to move past the current astronomical myth to what
perhaps
might well be the kind of truth the physicist pursues when he
chases
his holy grail of the so-called: Theory of Everything.
Most versions
of the Theory of Everything
rely on highly abstract mathematical complexities - a kind of
near-secret symbolic language only useful to the priests of
Natural
Science. Would it be possible to construct a Theory of
Everything
using ordinary language? Can the symbols of words on a
page and
simple concepts, understandable by ordinary consciousness,
produce a
better Theory of Everything? May it not be necessary in
fact to
reintroduce qualities and mix those with quantities, if we are
actually
going to have a true Theory of Everything? Doesn't such a Theory not only have to
explain
consciousness, but our form of consciousness - why we live in
the world
in between the very very large and the very very small?
We have
constructed this essay in a way
that makes it possible for the naive consciousness to behold
in their
own minds something that so far has been presented to the
world as a
secret mystery only knowable to the mathematical adepts of the
religion
of natural science.
We live in a
time when there are to be no
more priests, of the religious or the scientific kind.
No more
claims that the ordinary and naive mind has to be dependent on
another
for their understanding of the world and of the universe.
The Universe wants to be known, just as we want to be known. "You see, for now we look as if in a mirror, shrouded in mystery; but then we will see face to face. Now I partly discern; but then I will perceive the same way that I was perceived all along. And so we will have faith, hope and love, these three: but the greatest of these is love."*
*[Andy Gaus, Unvarnished
New
Testament - end of chapter 13, of
St.
Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians.]
addendum
- many questions remain -
No reader
should consider that the above
has exhausted all the remarkable possibilities of projective
geometry
in advancing our understanding of the Nature World as it
appears to
both our senses and our scientific instruments.
All I have
really done is try bring to light aspects
of thinking and
the imagination that many don't yet appreciate.
Nor is the
above perfect by any means,
for it is clearly the work of an amateur. That fact,
however,
should not stop us from going onward and asking all the many
questions
that still need to be asked.
For example,
does the plane at infinity
collapse into one point, or into all points? We can
think of the
very smallest, as we observe them in the local conditions of
the earth
in our laboratory experiments, as a very huge number of such
point
centers. All matter and substance seems to be built up
out of
light quanta, and other oddly named particles.
Now a plane,
which has no measure, is
infinite in all directions. It can also be
constructed,
under the well known rules of projective geometry, of points.
There is, in this geometry, a plane of points, a
plane of
lines, a point of lines, a point of planes, and a line of
points and a
line of planes. If we recognize that the Plane at
Infinity is
made up of all possible points, then what keeps it from
radiating
toward our Earth-Center that which becomes all the many point
centers
from which matter and substance arise. Once there, in
this
infinite number of point centers, that which has first
radiated inward,
returns once more to the periphery. This our geometric
imagination can experience.
A deep study of
projective geometry
reveals several kinds of processes which arise according to
the basic
relationships of plane, line and point; or, the source or
origin of
light (the plane at infinity), light becoming space and time
(radiation
of space) and light dying into the source once more through
its
collapse into the infinite number of point centers quantum
physics
discovers. To this we add the process of that which
radiates out
from point centers towards the periphery. In the light of
understanding this, we can come to
quite new conceptions of how
crystals grow, and what is happening at the growing point of a
plant.
Such work has been done, in fact, by the Goethean
Scientists
pointed out in the above essays.
In addition to
these questions then we
are right to ask another: what is the nature of the space
occupied by the imagination
itself? We know this exists, and
not
only that it exists, but that we create it. We consciously create imaginative
space
ourselves. What are we that we can do something that has
such
kinship with the space and time creating activity of the
Mystery at the
Plane at Infinity?
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand." Albert Einstein [emphasis added, ed.]
- healing materialism -
The human being
possesses a remarkable
power in that he (or she) is able to make images and share
them with
others. Meaning streams from
one to another upon this product of the
picture-thinking imagination. We are taught science out
of this
image creation capacity. We tell the wonderful stories
of our
ancestors out of this same image creation capacity. What
we
frequently don't do well, is find a way to be scientific about
this
image creating capacity itself.
Of all the
scientific disciplines that
will enhance this image building capacity, in a logically
rigorous
fashion, it is the discipline of projective geometry (as
taught by such
as Whicher above) that will be the most fruitful.
At the
same time, the human being is more than rationality - much
more.
That human
culture produces art and
religion, as well as science, ought to give us a significant
clue.
Whicher's book takes account of this, to a degree,
by
including a number of pictures of art, including religious
art.
What is less appreciated is the role of human intention,
of human
will, in all this (the will is the
point center of the
same consciousness which the quantum physicist recognizes is
needed for
the potential to collapse into the real).
At the end of
the main body of the essay
above, I tried to remind the reader that we are part of
reality.
Quantum mechanics has seen this, for the potential of
quantum
events only collapses into actual space and time when our
consciousness
participates. The genius of Owen Barfield discusses participation in detail, in his book Saving
the
Appearances: a study in idolatry.
In this book,
through a wonderful
examination of what the deeper study of human languages can
reveal,
Barfield shows us how there is an evolution of consciousness, to go along side the physical evolution so far
discovered. For Barfield, the quite ancient times could
be
called: original
participation. This was a time
when the
human consciousness was instinctively one with reality, thus
giving
birth to all the ancient myths.
This original
participation eventually
faded away, giving us an intermediate state, called by
Barfield (and
others): the on-looker
separation. Humanity is
pushed
out of the condition of original participation by the Gods
themselves,
so that we can by this independence learn to experience our
freedom and
our ego (self) consciousness. The on-looker
separation is
itself marked by special changes in language, in art and also
gives
rise to natural science. It is as on-lookers
(forgetting
our role as thinking observers) that we build the images of
the natural
world, both earthly and cosmic, as only matter and never
spirit.
But the natural world will not submit for long to that false view, and so quantum mechanics finds that it must reinsert human consciousness into its concepts of the basic physics of the world. With this now well established basic scientific knowledge, to which we can add the discipline of projective geometry (especially with its understanding of visual cones of light), the path is laid out of science itself toward what Barfield called then: final participation.
Quantum
mechanics tells us that our
consciousness is needed for the potential to be able to collapse into the real.
Projective
Geometry tells us not just rules about the light cone
of physical space, but as well the light cone of internal
imaginative
space. Rudolf Steiner's introspective science (outlined
in A Theory
of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception and The
Philosophy of Freedom) shows us how
to
experience the world of image building (organic form) and
concept
creation (pure thinking) in a fully mature participatory way.
At the same
time, I don't participate
solely as a rational being, but as a being to whom art and the
sacred
have meaning. If I add these dimensions of my being to
my imaging
building and conceptual formulations, what kind of picture of
the world
will I paint? Given this question, I will end with a
couple of
stories as a kind of demonstration.
In the
mid-seventies I was traveling with
some friends in Northern California. We were a group of
adults
and children, and during the day a few of the adults were
designated
camp-parents, while the others were free to wander farther.
Thus I found myself, on the evening of the Summer
Solstice,
sitting on a beach in Northern California watching the Sun set
over the
Pacific Ocean.
As the Sun set,
the sky slowly grew
darker and stars slowly appeared. This is what I
observed
as I continued to watch the horizon where the Sun had set.
Together, as a group, at the precisely same arc of
the edge
of the ocean, there appeared three stars in a somewhat
vertical line.
The Sun goes down, and soon thereafter where it
went down a
vertical line of three stars appears.
Now the reader
should realize that I was
at that time quite convinced of the spiritual reality of
things, out of
my own direct experience. As a consequence, when I
observed
our natural world I perceived it as a teaching. For example, we can observe that of all
the many
inorganic and organic beings that appear in visual space,
there are a
variety of forms. Of this variety of forms, only
one form,
one shape, has hands that have been so creatively freed by our
ability
to be able to stand upright.
Moreover, this
human
being changes his living environment in profound ways.
We act
upon the creation, as if it was within us that the creative
power
itself was slowly incarnating. To my thinking then,
there existed
a kind of dialog between the world of the senses and my own
inner being
(the teaching). Here I was on a beach watching the
Sun,
itself a very special form (we receive light and heat from it
that are
necessary for life - without the Sun we do not live). As
this
form set on the Summer Solstice, the first stars to appear
(the night
teachers), were three.
This then is
what the teaching sang to me
on that beach: one becomes three. So the Mystery of the
Trinity
was written right there in the most simple events of the world
of the
senses. One becomes Three.
The ambient
light became slightly dimmer,
and not too soon thereafter, above the three was four, in the
shape of
a kind of box, standing on one of its corners above the last
star of
the three. The One becomes Three and then Four is added
to become
Seven. Those who know what is sometimes called the
occult
significance of Numbers will recognize here all manner of
analogies,
about which nothing more need be said. (for the more
traditionally
fixed of mind, the Sun set and in the order described, the
constellation of the Great Bear emerged, standing on its tail
above the
same place on the horizon the Sun had set on the night of that
particular Summer Solstice - yet this constellation did
not
appear all at once, but in a very definite sequence as the day
light
faded and the night lights manifested themselves).
In this way I
was initiated more deeply
into the Mystery of the Night Teachers, and while I wished my
life
would have allowed me to study over many decades this teaching
by which
we noted not just the starry sky, but when and in what order the stars emerged, I did then realize that those
who
observed from such as Stonehenge saw a world of wonder we have
still
yet to fully appreciate.
One more
similar picture. If the
shape of the sense world is from a Creator, and this Creator
is such
profound Mystery that we have hardly yet begun to appreciate
all the He
has done and is doing, should we be surprised by the manner
and depth
of the teaching that awaits us both within and without?
Consider, sunrise and sunset.
Something that
happens all over the world everyday, and has done so for eons.
If we, as an aspect of final participation, re-ensoul the world of the senses with being and consciousness, might we not then begin to see that when the Sun sets, when the shape representing (in its speaking-teaching) the Highest of the Mystery, recedes from our sight, at that moment the stars, one by one and then in groups, slowly emerge, slowly appear in the dark and by their order of appearing and by the shapes and forms they thereby render, they can be seen as singing praises to this Highest. He sets, and they rise and sing.
Then the night
ends, the regular
night-singing has passed, and as the Sun begins to once more
return to
shed Its light and warmth and life on humankind, the stars
recede, and
kneeling down, in groups and then one by one, they give way to
that
which they honor above all else. Yet, this is not all.
For the shape
of time and space, of stars
and suns and the world of humankind, is also teaching. We are there too, and what are we, we
human
beings, that the Highest and all the Angels look down upon us
-
surround us and gift us with such Love we hardly appreciate
it.
Not just that but more, for we are not only looked down
upon from
Above, but we are also carried through cosmic space by the
Earth -
Father Sky and Mother Earth - as the world's oldest peoples
and
cultures well know.
The dark moist
earth is the Mother, from
which all that grows and nourishes flows. The waters
that give
life, the very air we need to breath. There in the
center
of all, looked down upon by Father Sky, upheld and nourished
in the
Womb of Mother Earth, sits the human being, the upright shape
with the
hands and the creative and curious mind. That is the
real
question of final participation: Who
are
we?
recent news concerning Red Shift
Sept. 12, 2008
Port Angeles, Wa. This
week, dozens of leading astronomers,
researchers and other scientists from around the globe met
for a
Cosmology conference.[1] The conference provided eight
panels composed
of experts in every facet of cosmology including the reality
of
expansion, quasars, dark matter, dark energy, “black holes”,
and the
true nature of the microwave radiation from space. One
astronomer made
his presentation live from Germany using video-link
technology.
Organizer Tom Van
Flandern said “This was a thrilling
success. We heard and discussed three new mechanisms
explaining
redshift and a new equation modifying our understanding of
gravity. If
any of the redshift proposals passes experimental tests that
would mean
we do not have an expanding Universe; that the Big Bang
theory would be
without its strongest foundation.
Physicist John Hartnett
from the University of Western
Australia said “it’s amusing that our conference occurred
just as they
fire up the Hadron Collider in Europe. Most of our
presenters showed
the deep problems with the Big Bang while a 40 billion
dollar project
starts up to trying to find an elusive particle to keep the
Big Bang
story from collapsing.”
Redshift
in the light from galaxies led to the belief that
the universe is expanding, and this belief has persisted for
80 years.
But modern observational evidence, especially from NASA
European Space
Agency space telescopes and satellites, has clouded the
picture and
raised many doubts. In 2004, an open letter was published in
New Scientist magazine,
and has since been
signed by over 500 endorsers. It begins: “The big bang
today relies on
a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we
have never
observed-- inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the
most
prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal
contradiction
between the observations made by astronomers and the
predictions of the
big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this
continual
recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way
of bridging
the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the
least, raise
serious questions about the validity of the underlying
theory.” (http://cosmologystatement.org)
From the many lines of evidence presented at the conference, It now appears that those concerns were justified. Presenters also outlined the principles that a good cosmology should be based on. Chief among them is that it should not require a series of miracles to remain viable.
*****************************
the Natural Christian
the world is full of people whose heart
is Christian through and through, but who
cannot, with good justification, grant themselves
this name,
for that name has been stolen by others
this is for them
Contents
introduction:
part one: how may we describe the consciousness of an ordinary human being, in ordinary terms?
part two: what does Science Believe it Knows about Consciousness?
part three: ordinary consciousness studies itself.
part four: Is Science Limited to its Present Methods of Investigation?
part five: the psychology of the moral life of a natural Christian.
part six: the relationship of Natural Science to Thinking.
part seven: the relationship of the natural Christian to thinking.
part eight: culmination and integration: becoming scientific about our own consciousness and self-consciousness.
part nine: arguments with God; a personal view, offered ...
addendum: BICYCLES - a
Children's
Christmas Story, which is also for Adults -
- introduction -
First ... I
can't answer all questions
here, but I'll try to point out some things that might be
helpful to
people, especially those who say something like: well, I'm not
religious, but
I am spiritual.
What I have
in mind here, by the idea of
a Natural Christian, could even include Sam Harris, the
author of the End of
Faith, who believes himself to be
more of a
atheist, than a religious person. The God he
finds
described in most religious texts (especially as interpreted
and
practiced by modern individuals who consider themselves to
be believers
of Christian Faith) seems to him to be completely
irrational. I
think Harris is quite justified in this view.
The practice
of religion, by many who
name themselves Christians, is often irrational, and what is
often
worse - even more often hypocritical. This is not to
suggest, by
the way, that anyone who calls themselves Christian is of
this
tendency. The reality is more difficult to apprehend
and come to
terms with. Which is why this essay is being
written - to
help anyone who stumbles upon it to perhaps orient their own
nature and
life with greater surety of purpose.
One of the
peculiarities of the present
time, especially with connection to those organized
religious
institutions that call themselves Christian, is that while
there are
many who have beliefs, few actually practice the teachings.
To
actually follow the teachings of Christ, as most anyone who
bothers to
read the Gospels knows, is rather difficult. A
lot is asked
for.
As a
consequence of this difficulty,
Christianity has become today mostly a system of beliefs,
with
different institutions espousing radically different points
of view,
from the Roman Catholic Church to the Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter
Day Saints (the Mormons). Holding beliefs is a lot
easier than
following those oh so difficult teachings. Not to say
there
weren't a lot of people who tried to follow the teachings,
it just that
a lot of them got killed for heresy* by the Roman Church, or
if they
agreed (submitted) to correct institutional doctrine, had to
end up
living in domiciles for the members of Religious Orders
(Franciscans,
Carmelites etc.).
*See the
essay the
Transcendentalist Impulse
and Heretical Christianity,
included
with this essay in the book: New
Wine.]
Since most
systems of belief became rigid
(rules and doctrines and dogmas), one could ask whether this
had any
value at all. This question really has
significance when
one considers the meaning of Faith in the psychology of a
human being.
In the prologue to the Gospel of John, we find these
lines: "...There was a man sent from
God, whose name was John. He came for testimony, to
bear witness
to the light, that all might believe through him.
He was
not the light, but came to bear witness to the light."
Even Christ
understood this: "Blessed are those who have
not seen and yet have believed."
Most religions make a great deal of the idea of
Faith, but
perhaps get confused when they insist that it has to be
Faith in their
version or system of beliefs. Even Harris, mentioned
above,
called his book, the End of
Faith, but if you read him
carefully, he is
actually highly critical of beliefs. We could
say that
people today don't understand the distinction, or the
importance given
to all this by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 13: "And now these three
remain:
faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is
love." Faith is as much an
act of trust in the Divine
Mystery, as it is anything else. To equate Faith,
however, with a
system of beliefs, is to mistake the superficial (beliefs)
with the
depths of religious practice (Faith).
Why can I
say: that
people today don't
understand?
It is mostly
a question of the difference
between reading about something in a book, and learning to
actually do
it - to practice it. Obviously we can recognize
that a
person who reads all kinds of books about the martial arts,
knows a
great deal less than a person who has become a master of
their
practice. The same is true in religion.
Reading about
religion in a book, and actually practicing it for a
lifetime, are two
very different things.
Someone who
goes to Church on Sunday and
prays the Lord's Prayer in public (as most Christian
Churches do)
doesn't understand the first thing about the Sermon on the
Mount, which
very clearly says to say the Our Father in secret. Out
loud and
in secret. To actually follow Christ's instructions
(say, for
example, about the mote and the beam in the Sermon on the
Mount) leads
to experiences,
the same way the practice of martial arts leads to experience.
No pain, no
gain is the modern cliche.
Same is true in religion. Its easy to have
a belief
system. Its comforting. It doesn't ask too much.
You
hang out with a bunch of folks who all believe the same
thing.
Sort of like a club. Thing is Christ
didn't say
join a club. In fact He said kind of the opposite: He who loves father
or mother
more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or
daughter more
that me is not worthy of me; and he who does not take his
cross and
follow me is not worthy of me. He who finds his life
will lose
it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.
He who
receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives
him who sent
me.
Then, of
course, there's the example.
You know the one. Preaching what was essentially
a bunch of
ideas contrary not only to the dominant local religion
of the
time (according to the Hebrew Priesthood), but also all
kinds of social
ideas not exactly in accord with how Rome conducted its
political
business. We know not to talk at dinner about
religion and
politics. Christ didn't seem to know that one.
He
thought the truth was more important. Then they killed
him.
Afterwards -
well in the beginning
anyway, there were a lot of people running around telling
the good
news, telling the story. Churches were founded (of a
sort).
Women were often leaders. The story didn't
agree with
the beliefs of the Hebrew religion. Disciples were
martyred, both
for religious reasons and political. People,
ordinary
people, liked the story. It was impressive.
The
Disciples were impressive. The Romans were often jerks
or thugs
and the Hebrew priests often hypocrites.
Then comes
Emperor Constantine, who
unites the declining Roman Empire with some of the bishops
of the emerging Christian Church.
Institutional politics and institutional religion make
for good
authoritarian bed partners, and the teachings of Christ
starts (had
already started, but here it gets serious) getting
re-interpreted.
For example, the Gospels, in the original Greek,
don't have
the word sin (the Greek word means missing the mark, or
making an
error). Where Christ (again in the Greek) says
you are to
love God with all your mind and all your heart and all your
spirit, the Roman Church drops the idea of an
immortal spirit,
and substitutes the idea of the soul (you are to love your
God with all
your heart and all your mind and all your soul).
Not
only that, but the New Testament gets organized,
leaving out a whole bunch of books that talk about things
like Gnosis
(how to have direct experience of the Divine Mystery), as
well as
Faith. I could go on.
Periodically
certain personalities try to
refocus on what Christ actually said and did, and that maybe
we should
be worried about living the way he taught, and no so worried
about
whether our system of ideas is officially approved by the
head guy (and
his cohorts) in Rome (or other places). The so-called
Christian
religion slowly more an more loses its connection with what
Christ
actually taught. Yet...
These moral
ideas have become part of the
general cultural background of Western Civilization.
When science
arises, those who want the truth instead of doctrine again
become
martyrs to the truth, only this time to the truths of
science, which in
the beginning was just another heresy to the Roman Church.
Are you
getting the picture yet?
Now not everyone in an organized Church is a fool, or stupid. Many scientists are quite religious, in all kinds of ways. Kepler was an astrologer. Newton was an alchemist. Faraday was a deeply religious Christian. Einstein, born a Jew, reacted to the probability theory in quantum mechanics by saying: that God doesn't play dice with the universe.
A lot of
people get turned off to
organized religion, yet are very concerned about what they
call ethics.
The belief systems are weird (as Sam Harris and others
have
observed), but even the new atheists are inclined to ethics.
Some
scientists are so convinced that people are often moral,
that they try
to find a way to explain this using evolutionary psychology
(which believes something
got hardwired into the brain in evolution,
including moral behavior, which has to have a survival
utility, or so
it is often assumed).
If we look at
what people do, and not
just at what they believe, we often find that many people
struggle to
do the right thing. While some find the idea of
the right
thing as an aspect of their religious beliefs, many others
want to
decide for themselves what is right to do.
Fundamentalists speak
of moral relativism, and find evil where their particular
interpretation of morality is violated (mostly biblical -
that is in a
so-called holy book, which as we know was very much edited
by
institutions with other agendas). Even though warned
about the
mote and the beam, preachers of absolute biblical moral
truths
(e.g. all abortions are murder), still don't get
it.
No practice,
and all beliefs, is not
following Christ. You follow Christ, you get in
trouble.
You join a comfortable club, you get to hate everyone
that isn't
in it with you. Apocalyptic end times eschatology
isn't Christ
based. Its human mistrust of the actual world, and a
vain
delusion that only the true believer has it all right.
The rest
of us can go to hell, literally.
So are there
real Christians out there?
Of course, and many are in organized Churches.
There's also
this other group. People with a personal ethic,
that if you
trace the history of their particular ideals, you'll end up
with the
influence of Christ's teachings on Western Civilization.
What's weird
is that because the
institutional Churches made a primacy of belief (instead of
practice),
the focus of modern critics has been on the irrationality of
the ideas
in the beliefs. The Churches have leaned far too
long on
rigid doctrines, and not having actually practiced the
teachings of
Christ, don't have a clue where the real meat is.
Where's the beef?
said the lady in the commercial. In the
practice folks. Want to know the real meaning of
what
Christ taught - follow the teachings.
In a sense
there is a considerable
difference between a world view or a cosmology
(thus the arguments between creationists and neo-Darwinian
evolutionists) and the experiences provided by the practice. Our ideas and beliefs about the
fundamental
questions of reality are one thing, while the religious life (the practices) are quite another.
Modern
scientists are right to question (as they did 500 years ago
when
natural philosophy first appeared), whether the
world-pictures espoused
by the Roman Church (and other similar religious
institutions) are
true. What is the truth about human origins is one
question.
How do I be a moral person (should I so choose)
is a
different question.
The truly odd
thing, however, is that if
one really practices the teachings a new state of being
arises.
In the cultural
East, this is seen as the pursuit
of enlightenment. In the cultural West,
the following of
the teachings of Christ will lead to a related state of
being, but one
which is more appropriately called: initiation. The John Gospel, for example, is a
description of
a path of initiation - a path leading to Gnosis or direct
personal
experience of the Mystery (when we are practicing, that is
being truly
moral, our life more and more takes on the following
qualitative
characteristics:
washing the feet, the scourging, the crowing with thorns,
the carrying
the cross, the crucifixion, the entombment, and the
resurrection - that is, the true
moral life becomes a Path or Way).
In the midst
of these apparently
conflicting views over cosmology and the goals of the
religious life,
there are the countless biographies of ordinary people,
whether they
are living in the East or the West in the wider cultural
frames of
reference. What does all this mean for them?
Does
being a member of a church have anything at all to do with
the moral
life of the individual heart?
Hopefully now
the reader will appreciate
that there are many questions, some a bit strange, others
quite down to
earth and practical. This essay (and booklet), the
Natural
Christian, seeks to shed some
light
on these questions. Hopefully this process will
enlighten the
reader as well as initiate them into the deeper aspects of
the true
Christian religious mysteries, without leaving behind the
rational
nature of the human mind.
In order to
proceed carefully, and
logically, it will be necessary to give some order to the
themes to be
elaborated. This book then takes the course of
trying (one
can always fail) to proceed by sticking to knowable facts as
much as
possible, well all the while not forgetting that even though
we may be
involved in very practical aspects of human psychology, we
will also
have living in us fundamental questions due to our
experience of the
teachings of natural science.
This then is
the basic structure - to
alternate the subject matter of the chapters or parts.
We will
start with psychology, of the sort everyone can appreciate,
and then
move to the scientific riddles which so enchant us.
Close
personal questions and wider questions of meaning and
significance,
will then be elaborated in the different parts, in a kind of
alternating rhythm.
To make this
all a little more concrete,
consider the following:
We all know,
in ourselves, that we have
something we call: mind. We think,
and out
of our thinking we make decisions. Scientists
study this,
as do psychologists. So one kind of question is very
personal and
concerns our own understanding of our own inner life, or
mind.
How do we operate our decision making process? Not
just what
do we think (the content), but how do we think?
Is there somewhere an operating
manual for the mind, and how do we make moral decisions with
our own
mind and remain free? That would be the theme of the
one sequence
of parts.
The other
sequence of parts would concern
the wider questions. Where does mind come from?
What
is the relationship between consciousness and the physical
brain?
Are we only matter, or are we also spirit?
With
these many questions in mind, let us begin...
*********************
part one
How may we describe the consciousness
of an ordinary human being,
in ordinary terms?
One of the
interesting things life has
taught me is that quite often the simplest matters are the
most
important. Not only that, it is frequently the case
that the
simplest matters are subjects about which there is sometimes
the
greatest confusion.
For example,
there is sleeping and
waking. This, it would seem, is all very obvious, but
hopefully
as we go forward in this first part, the reader will
discover that
these obvious and simple matters, when carefully thought
about, can be
remarkably instructive.
When we are
awake, that is conscious,
certain processes go on within our minds. When
we sleep,
these process may or may not cease, but at the very least it
is clear
that we are unaware of them. Certain kinds of
injuries
cause unconsciousness. We can also faint from
not eating
right, and then experience momentary unconsciousness.
So we know
two quite different states.
Being awake and being unconscious. Yes, there
are dreams,
but keep in mind that dreams have a number of odd
characteristics.
In them we are aware, but of what.
The world of
dreams is quite unlike the world we know when we are truly
awake in the
normal way.
When we are
conscious in a normal way, we
are conscious of some object. We experience through the senses. We hear
sounds, see
things, smell smells and so forth. We are also aware
of inner
states - things others can't see. Our thoughts for
example - no
one (apparently) sees/knows our thoughts, but us.
We are also
aware of our self as a
subject. We are ourselves, and then there is the
world that
is not us. So there is not only, when we are
conscious, that
which we
experience, but also that which experiences. Most of us call that which experiences
our I.
We say: I saw the cat scratch the dog. Or,
I
experienced a certain idea.
We also have
feelings, which also tend to
be invisible, but sometimes these are so expressive that
others can
read them in our face, or in our posture. Of
someone we
know well, we could notice when they are angry or afraid.
Other
times we need to speak of our feelings, for others to know
of them.
In certain
times of developing intimate
relationships, our anxiety over the possibilities will make
us tongue
tied. We have thoughts and feelings of which we are
conscious,
but we can't express them. Our language is full
of such
descriptive phrases as tongue tied.
If, to
continue the example, we have to hold in our anger we might
say: I
had to bite my tongue.
We could say
that we have both an outside
(which others experience through their
senses) and an inside which only our I experiences.
Thus the
wonderful phrases: you can't tell a book by its cover. Or, beauty is only skin deep.
Or, still
waters run deep.
Now we all
know these very simple things,
don't we. Our whole social life and a great deal of
our language
takes account of these very simple observations.
Where
things get interesting is when we try for more detail,
especially when
we go for more detail about the experience of our inner
world by our
own I.
Some of this
is also embedded in our
language, although occasionally in odd kinds of ways.
We have,
for example, the word insight.
We can even
describe a person as insightful.
We also speak
of some people as bright, or that
someone had a bright idea. In
a cartoon, when a character has a bright idea
the cartoon has a picture of a light bulb going off above the
person's head. Then there is the word enlightened.
We have
another word: intuition. We
also speak of gut feelings.
Some people today, who a few decades ago would
have described themselves as a psychic, will now call
themselves an intuitive. In a
recent New Yorker magazine I just read there
is an article called: The Eureka
Hunt:
why do good
ideas come to us when they do? (by
Jonah
Lehrer).
Of course we
have such words as:
thinking, thoughts, ideas, concepts and so forth. Our
inside is
rich, and somewhat mysterious, for while we have learned
more and more
about the brain (see the next chapter), the scientists of
consciousness
still have to confess that they do not know just quite how
the material
brain produces this assumed subjective state known as
consciousness,
much less why we have this sense of the I itself (self-consciousness).
Oh, there are plenty of theories,
but real accurate scientific knowledge
is hard to come by.
Now lets take
the mystery all the way out
there, as far as it can go (perhaps), with this quote from
Christ in
the Gospel of Luke: "The kingdom of God doesn't come with
watching like a
hawk, and they won't say, Here it is, or There it is,
because you know
what? the kingdom of God is inside you."
The
Unvarnished
Gospels, by Andy Gaus. [emphasis
added]
Of course,
among scholars of the Gospels
(and the Bible in general) the version above is disputed
(what isn't
disputed in the Bible?). Recall, however, from the
introduction,
the difference I pointed toward with making a distinction
between
systems of belief (which has to include any effort at interpretation), and what is learned by practice. If we
read the
writings of the truly religious, as against the writings of
the true
believers, what Christ says in Luke above makes a lot more
sense.
Serious practitioners of Christ's teachings have experiences via their inside.
So that we
may make one fundamental
question obvious: Do good ideas come from God?
That would
be one reasonable question, although there are many many
more.
This being the case, perhaps we should now move
to a short
part more explicitly on science, since many readers will be
somewhat
familiar with those ideas concerning these kinds of
questions.
***********************
part two
What does Science Believe
it Knows about
Consciousness?
The first
thing we have to recognize is
two general assumptions common to scientific thinking in
this field of
interest. They are somewhat related.
1) The world
only consists of physical
matter and all phenomena will be discovered to the based
upon matter
(no spirit).
2) The mind
and consciousness are
products of the nervous system in the human being,
particularly the
physical brain. (although no one presently has a
satisfactory
explanation for how the physical brain produces
consciousness, or
self-consciousness).
A lot of
behavior is also thought to be
rooted in our evolutionary past. The general idea here
is that
through processes of natural selection, various behaviors
become hard
wired in the brain, or are the result of a similar process
occurring at
the genetic level. Again, in these ideas science is
consistent,
with the result that solely physical explanations are
arrived at for
how and why we act as we do.
Some
theorists even go so far to say that
self-consciousness (our sense of an I) is an illusion
produced by
electro-chemical processes in the brain. We really
don't have an
I according to this view, it is just a convenient illusion
manufactured
by the brain for the purpose of ... well, here the
explanations
(theories) get a bit fuzzy.
The article
mentioned above (the Eureka
Hunt) describes some current
research, and
certain aspects of the method used in that work are quite
common today.
Various individuals are wired up to EEGs or put in MIR
tubes (or
both at the same time), and then images (or other kinds of
sense
experience) are shown to them, while the scientist records
data on
which parts of the brain show greater activity when
stimulated in this
way. In the essay in the New Yorker they showed their
subjects
puzzles, and tried to map what happened in the brain when
the subject
had a "aha!" moment when they solved the puzzle.
Science has also
worked with people with various defects and injuries, where
the brain
seems not to function normally (in part), and thus this data
adds to
the total pictures created.
Basically all
modern scientific research
into consciousness takes this same general path.
Subjects are
studied and data accumulated. The scientist approaches
the
subject through his own senses, stimulating the subject and
measuring
electrical and other physical changes in the brain.
There
are of course also purely psychological
studies conducted
often in the form of interviews, but again the scientist
comes to the experiment with a
certain formal approach.
We need to keep in mind that research of this kind is held to certain standards (unless it is part of government black operations or similar secret and probably illegal corporate research); and, we also need to keep in mind that in most scientific disciplines funding is needed. A lot of research on the brain is also done by looking at the chemistry. The basic question here is what happens in the nerve cells at this level. The pharmaceutical industry supports, or itself carries out, a lot of this research, especially with regard to developing medications for what we call: mental illness. Multiple motives drive the nature of this research - it is not always purely done for the purposes of seeking the truth.
The totality
of the work, legitimate and
otherwise, is extraordinary. Detailed maps of the
brain have been
created. Left hemisphere, right hemisphere, spacial
sense, motor
skills, language areas, what happens when we think, what
happens when
we run - the terminology is almost endless.
Of course,
the two assumptions mentioned
above are the overriding ideas determining everything else.
The
very tricky problem of causality (what causes what) is not
well
understood. For example:
"It is old hat to
say that the brain is responsible for
mental activity. Such a claim may annoy the likes of Jerry
Falwell or
the Ayatollah, but it is more or less the common
assumption of
educated people in the twentieth century. Ever since the
scientific
revolution, the guiding view of most scientists has been
that knowledge
about the brain, its cells and its chemistry will explain
mental
states. However, believing that the brain
supports
behavior is the easy part: explaining how is quite another." (Mind Matters: How the Mind and Brain
interact to
Create Our Conscious Lives, Michael S. Grazzanica Ph.D. pp
1, Houghton
Mifflin, Boston 1988). [Emphasis added]
and, from the
same book:
"A thought can
change brain chemistry, just as a physical
event in the brain can change a thought."*
*[pssst,
Michael, I think you goofed
here. If a thought can change brain chemistry,
what causes
the thought if not the I? Oh, yes well, don't actually
know that
do you. We'll come back to this riddle later.]
Now this book
quoted above is 20 years
old, but these problems remain unresolved today.
20 more
years of research into consciousness has not rescued natural
science
from the mystery of how the brain produces consciousness and
self-consciousness. Of course as Grazzanica admits
above, for the
working scientist this causal problem is resolved by a common assumption. Mind and brain are assumed to be one
thing.
Perhaps the
scientist has not yet asked
the right question, because his assumption stands in the way
and blinds
him.
There is one
very very big peculiarity in
modern consciousness research. The dominant thinking
(there are
tiny exceptions) assumes that the present nature of
scientific method
will yield results, and further this thinking acts more or
less as if
nobody ever studied consciousness before.
This last is
a major paradox.
Human beings have always wondered about their
minds, and
any look at the history of human thought, in the cultural
West and the
cultural East, finds not just all kinds of philosophical
examinations
of mind in great detail, but also rather elaborate
disciplines where
the fundamental truth of mind is sought to be known through
what are
essentially experiments (practices that teach).
There is a
difference, however.
What the older mind sciences do is something
quite radical
in relationship to modern consciousness studies. Mind,
in these
disciplines, is studied from the inside, not from the outside.
Those who lead
the consciousness studies in modern natural science look
upon another
person as a subject to be studied. The more
ancient (and
far wiser), and some modern disciplines, require of the
subject that he
study himself.
Know thyself
said the Greeks. The Zen Master practices
meditation daily for hours. The Carmelite Nun
prays for
hours every day. A serious student of Anthroposophy (a
modern
Christ-oriented spiritual discipline) spends years thinking
about
thinking. All study their inside, although the methods differ.
**************************
part three
ordinary
consciousness studies itself
Don't be
shocked, we already do this.
Who is more curious about our self than us? If
there is a
limit, it is a bit natural too. Most of us forget our
adolescence
with all its "who
am I" questions, ambiguities and
uncertainties. We are, as we grow psychologically, inventing our self. We
participate, as an I, in the construction of
our personality. If we can stand the pain of
remembering this
time in our psychological development (adolescence), we can
become
aware in detail just exactly how we constructed our
personality - how
we created a kind of mask by which we lent to the world one
image of
who we are, and kept private a great deal of the rest.
There is a
lot that shapes this, of which I'll remind the reader soon,
but lets
make this first point as clear as possible.
The natural
or instinctive elements of
psychological growth run out of steam in our 20's.
This is why so
many adult men and women seem to remain emotional children.
To a
degree this is an artifact of culture. If our cultural
experiences don't teach us that we can continue to grow and
psychologically mature, we end up just letting the
development of our
personality become fixed - become a set of habits.
Now culture
itself grows and develops.
What we remember as the 1960's was (among much
else) an
explosion of ideas whose essential common center (from
multiple points
of view) was that we could continue to grow spiritually
and/or
psychologically. We take up meditation.
We go
to encounter groups. We join AA. We
enter
therapy. The result is that there is a near endless
list of
transformative processes in which people can be engaged
today.
Many people
do more than one.
Sometimes they'll do several at the same time, and
other times
they will do them serially - one at a time, but still be
always
involved in personal
growth. Those who didn't do
this, would
often make fun of it. Stuck in their own
post-adolescence stasis
they talked of the me generation, or new agers, or moral
relativism, or
family values or culture wars - demonstrating all kinds of
ways to
label the natural curiosity to become something more and
something new,
possessed by others, as some kind of defect.
Many people
are afraid of change, and
they seek others of a like taste and relationship to life.
They
form different kinds of clubs, and these clubs often resist
the natural
movement of culture and of human nature. Many of
these
clubs sought to label themselves as Christian, or found in
certain
Christian sects a warm safe home. At a psychological
level what
they really were looking for was something fixed, just as
their
personality was fixed. Some even went culturally
backwards.
They tried to bring alive in the present
something of the
past. The ambiguities of the 1960's frightened such
people, and
they wanted the family to be just like their romantic idea
(probably
taken from television) of family life in the 1950's or
earlier.
Once you take
such a view, which is at
its roots driven from fear of change, it becomes easy to use
a text
like the Bible to provide justification for the need.
So
our society itself devolves into factions - those moving
forward, those
holding still and those trying to run backwards.
Underneath
this are fundamental
questions, which some are willing to face as they mature,
and which
others can only find comfort in relationship to, if they
hold still and
get answers from the outside. They don't want to think
and decide
their own beliefs, they want to be told what to believe.
Who am I?
What am I? Why do I
exist? What do I believe? How do I find
love?
How do I find comfort? How do I avoid
pain?
How do I be moral?
These
questions began for many in
adolescence as our own thinking woke up. We
wanted, we
hungered, we were uncertain. It was so painful finding our self in the midst of
all those hormonal changes and inner
psychological developments. Our parents wanted
one thing
and our teachers another. So did our friends.
Everyone around us had an idea of who we were
supposed to
be. But what about me - what did I want?
Everyone
knows today that their High
School experience seriously sucked. It sucks even
worse today,
since we live within a culture with a lot of aspects which
are decaying
and dying. When I was an adolescent (the
1950's), the world
wasn't so sexualized or so full of drug temptations. I
have
raised five children through adolescence now, and it always
amazes me
what they have had to face - the older ones with less
troubles of a
certain kind, the younger with issues I never could have
imagined
possible. The miracle, however, is that they seem
equipped to
handle these experiences. I would not be able to do
what they do,
for they endure a much tougher adolescence (rite of passage
to
adulthood).
Social change
today is accelerated.
The structure of society is falling apart. In
other places
in my work I write of this time being the end of Western
Civilization.
Whether you buy that or not, I don't think many
people
today think we live in simple times. Who we are
is affected
by this social context. The context pushes more
questions at us.
If we reflect on this we can see that there seem to be
laws in
operation here.
My self understanding is
influenced by my cultural experience.
One of those simple things, that we know in such
an obvious
way, is perhaps far more important a fact then we realize.
We
will return to this later.
*******************************
part four
Is Science Limited to its
Present Methods of
Investigation?
Lets move
away from the direct study of
consciousness by science, and take a look at modern physics,
in
particular quantum theory and mechanics. If one
appreciates
how basic aspects of science advance, physics is generally
the leading
edge. As a general observation we could say that
it takes
sometimes as much as 30 or more years before a discipline,
such as
microbiology for example, is able to integrate into its
fundamental
ideas what the physicists have already learned.
One of the
more interesting scientists to
look at this is the mathematician Roger Penrose. To
call him a
mathematician is a bit lame in a way, but he is quite
skilled at the
pure and abstract thinking of a leading mathematician.
He
takes these skills and tries to integrate knowledge from
other
disciplines. At the same time he is very open
minded.
He is more interested in discovering the truth than he
is a
proving a favorite theory can't be touched or changed.
For example, in his book The Emperor's New Mind he wrote (in 1989):
"It seems clear to
me that the importance of aesthetic
criteria applies not only to the instantaneous judgments of
inspiration, but also to the much more frequent judgments we
make all
the time in mathematical (or scientific work) Rigorous
argument is
usually the last step! Before that, one has to make many
guesses, and
for these, aesthetic convictions are enormously important..."
and:
"...I cannot help
feeling that, with mathematics the case
for believing in some kind of ethereal, eternal existence,
at least for
the more profound mathematical concepts, is a good deal
stronger..."
A very open
mind indeed...
Following
this early book, which was
rather popular, Penrose began to speculate that what goes on
in the
brain, if connected to ideas about quantum states of matter,
might
begin to explain consciousness. These were
controversial themes,
but lets look a little at quantum theory to see what it says
about
substance or matter, for after all the brain is matter and
the
assumption of science is that consciousness arises from
matter.
What is
matter to modern physics?
If you've never run into these ideas, don' worry.
However,
they are a bit strange if you are not familiar with them.
All the
same we need to dip into the past a little bit, for a lot of
ideas grow
out of earlier ideas.
For example,
it used to be thought that
at the fundamental smallest level of matter there was a
thing. An
object. Very tiny yes, but you could with
instruments
perhaps see it. Some scientists even did (or
thought they
did). But then the idea of fields came into play (Faraday). You
know, like the
magnetic field that organizes a bunch of iron filings.
There is no tiny thing there, in the field.
But
anything that enters the field is affected by it.
The next idea
was that when we spoke of a
particle (like the kinds of particles that are smaller than
atoms, and
from which atoms are made) this particle was a result of the
intersection of various fields. Where the fields
intersected,
this point in space (which was not fixed, but moved)
resisted being
penetrated. So while a rock, for example, seems very
dense and
full of what it is made of, in reality it is mostly empty
space
punctuated by intersections of fields of force.
A
sub-atomic particle began to be more and more conceived of
as no longer
a thing occupying space, but as a dynamic (moving and
changing)
point center created by intersecting fields of force.
It gets
worse.
Experiments
with photons (split beam
experiments and the like) suggested some very odd ideas.
Indeterminacy theory emerges, and theorists decide you
can't
predict anything at this level anymore. Its all
probabilities. (Thus Einstein's comment that God
doesn't play
dice with the Universe - he couldn't believe these ideas).
Not
only is matter mostly empty space (that is there is no there
there),
but even worse, whatever it is, it only exists as a
potential, as a
probability. It might be here, it might be there.
It
definitely isn't yet. Something has to intervene
before the
probability collapses into definiteness. For something
to
actually be, and to have a there (mass
or being-ness and position
or there-ness) consciousness has to influence
it.
Did he really
write that?!?!?
Want your mind to start to fray at its edges?
Google
"consciousness and quantum mechanics" and start trying to
read that
stuff. Is this a problem? Not really.
In my
view it is better understood as a limit.
Science has
followed carefully the
examination of smaller and smaller conditions of matter
until matter
disappeared, first into the interactions of fields of
mysterious forces, and then
finally into conditions of indeterminacy. Of potential. Of not yet.
Of a
constant state of becoming, in which the I or self-consciousness of
the experimenter was the final contributing factor.
The fall
from potential into manifestation only arises when the
experimenter
goes looking for either the being-ness (position) or the
there-ness
(movement) of an object, which to his mind has none of those
qualities* until he acts).
*[Physics, in
spite of its efforts to
deal only with data that could be counted and measured, that
is with
only quantities (but never qualities),
has been unable to
fully abandon qualities (being-ness
and there-ness). In spite of
generations of effort to eliminate the subjectivity of the
observer as
well, physics has ended up discovering that this very
subjectivity is
essential to maintain its present line of experiments.
This
subject we'll take up in more detail later.]
One thing is
certain, if you read what
these physics writers try to say about consciousness.
They
don't know much about it. They mostly live in
the same
assumptions as those scientists studying consciousness
directly from
the outside - which is that at some point we must figure out
how to
show consciousness emerging from the matter (which
simultaneously
doesn't become determined without consciousness?). Did
you get
that?
At a
fundamental level there is a huge
circular system of reasoning (a tautology) at the root
intersections of
modern quantum physics and theories about how the brain
produces
consciousness. We study the brain, but can't
figure out how
it makes consciousness from matter. We study matter
and observe
that it needs consciousness to become determined. Yet,
of
consciousness itself we are very very ignorant.
We know
consciousness directly, but we
never study what is right before us in our own minds.
We study it
indirectly, using others as subjects, but avoid our own
mind.
Perhaps there is a reason for that.
*******************
part five
the psychology of the moral life
of a natural
Christian
A main
difficulty for those engaging in
the self study of their own mind is those nasty moral
questions.
Right at the beginning of such a study we already know
the own
dark within. That is, if we have what is called:
a
conscience (some folks don't appear to have one).
This fear
of facing the own shadow is what keeps many from being
willing to look
within.
This is
partially why Alcoholics
Anonymous has the forces for true change it has.
The Twelve
Steps help you take that journey of facing the dark inside.
Hitting bottom is a life experience that tends
to wake
people up and confront them with a choice. Do I take
my life
(particularly my inner life) in hand,
or do I just continue to let it spiral
out of control, destroying all those I love in its wake.
Those
are powerful moral questions, and the process of AA's Twelve
Steps
walks you through this minefield in a very healthy way.
The fact is
that AA is universally valid
as a Path, and need not be confined to just people with
obvious
addictions and flaws. Everyone is flawed,
everyone. A
lot of so-called Christians, for example, are addicted
(selfishly in
love with and hooked on certain systems of belief, by which
activity
many others are harmed). There could well be a
recovery group for
former fake Christians. Lets look at the Twelve Steps
a bit and
see if we can appreciate their deeper nature.
Twelve Steps,
twelve Disciples, twelve
Signs of the Zodiac. One Sun in the Center, shedding
light and
warmth on All.
From a
certain point of view, the Twelve
Steps can be conceived of as three processes, through which
the soul is
mastered (its dark and its light integrated - healed and
made whole).
These three processes elevate the spirit for the
mastery of the
soul. The self-consciousness (the spirit) becomes awake in
the
consciousness (the soul). What was fallen in the soul
is
redeemed, by the forces of the own I.
The first stage of this total process is surrender.
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol -- that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a
searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
The first
part of surrender is directed
at our egotistical idea that we can, out of the present
state of being
of our own I, rule our life of soul, in particular its
shadow elements.
The second part of surrender is to recognize
that something
other than our own I can help us. The third part
of
surrender is to choose to include this other-ness consciously as a force within. The
fourth part is
to surrender the I's defenses of its own dark truths about
itself.
In a way the 4th Step and the 1st form a circle.
In the
surrender phase (and keep in mind
people don't always get it the first time or the tenth time)
we circle
around ourselves, trying to create a true attitude of
surrender to the
truth. Admitted powerlessness, sought help from
something
greater, let this something greater have more influence over
our self
than our own egotism, and began the work of understanding
that egotism
(too much I, not enough Thou) in brutally self-honest
detail.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a
list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to
make amends to
them all.
Having
learned surrender, we now move
away from egotism toward the Thou, via the higher nature of
our I.
In this process surrender becomes confession and
contrition. We include others - we confess to
ourselves, to
another and to God as we understand him (maintaining our
freedom to
think for ourselves). We ask for help. And, we
get ready to
face our responsibilities. This is the central
process, and
it takes us away from our self as the egotistic center of
our life, and
involves us in community. Confession and
contrition makes
us better social beings. AA is a social process
- we don't
do it alone, but as part of something greater.
In a certain
way this gesture of movement
away from self and toward community is the heart of the
Twelve Steps.
It is clearly, to those who actually become able to
experience
it, the hardest step of all, and the one most difficult to
maintain.
We don't get perfect. We don't
recover.
We continue to have a dark inside, as well as a
light.
Yet, to help us maintain (continue one day at a time
our
recovery), we have the process of the last four Steps.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having
had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we
tried to
carry this message to others, and to practice these
principles in all
our affairs.
The process
of the last four Steps is:
practice leading to service. We need a daily
practice, just
as a monk or nun, or meditating Zen student needs. One
day at a
time, - but to do that we have a form as it were - a Way of Life.
The beginner in AA is encourage to do 90
in 90, that is to make 90 meetings in 90 days. A lot
of those
well into their recovery and able to help others go
everyday. If
things get tough, you go more than once a day.
If things
get really tough in the dark of the night, you call your
confessor,
your sponsor and they will come and sit with you.
We don't have
to be alone in our trials.
We redeem the
past, and as there is
always more past as we walk into our future, and as we are
in recovery
and not recovered, we will continue to screw up.
We never
stop making amends, we just get used to being occasionally
idiotic
(making mistakes and missteps) and learn how to deal with
it.
So, three
processes. Surrender. Confession and
Contrition
(social acts as part of a community).
Practice
and Service. If you re-read
the steps you will see that 4 and
5 together meditate between those two processes, while 8 and
9 also
mediate between those two processes.
Everyone has
a Way, everyone.
We think of it as our routine. A prisoner
has a
routine as does his jailer. The wonderful movie Groundhog
Day is a beautiful modern fable of
what can
be done if we take the right attitude to the Day.
This
movie understands that we do wake up everyday the same
person, and that
there is no change or development (growth past the end of
adolescence)
unless we use each given Day to move, one step at a time,
forward on our Way.
part six
the relationship of Natural Science
to Thinking
Recall Grazzanica above:
"A thought can
change brain chemistry, just as a physical
event in the brain can change a thought."
We now need to explore more carefully the paradox observed here by a leading neurophysiologist, as that might illuminate the problem of causality in our thinking.
The scientist
of consciousness studies
the brain by stimulating this physical organ in another
human being
through the vehicle of the senses (although sometimes
directly by
electrical stimulation of parts of the brain - a course of
action I
find a bit reprehensible). This is done in part
because of the
idea the scientist has about his own subjectivity.
Scientific
method, with its experiments, seeks to overcome human
subjectivity by
designing experiments that can be repeated and requiring
that all
conclusions be open to argument and logical reasoning by
peers in the
scientific community. In a sense, the scientist
surrenders his
own subjectivity to the community activity of peer review,
and through
this process hopes to discover objective truths.
The
scientist's relationship to this
method is his belief system. He believes he will more
and more
approximate the truth (he confesses a limit to his
knowledge, when
forced to so confess).
The
scientists in the Eureka experiments noted previously, stimulates the
puzzle
solving ability of the brain (his assumption) and tries to
measure in
which part of the brain there is increased measurable
activity when the
puzzle is solved. The scientist's subjectivity asks
something of
the subjectivity of the experimental subject. He
says (essentially): I am going
to give you
a puzzle to solve, and then I am going
to measure what
happens in your brain when you solve it.
Notice the pronouns above, which are essential in order to communicate his ideas about his experiment to the ego of the subject. The scientist makes a kind of appeal, from his I to the Thou of the subject: please cooperate with my experiment by helping me, through your trying your hardest to solve this puzzle. Even a scientist convinced (theoretically) that there is no self-consciousness never actually uses language in such a way, or probably even thinks in such a way. Ask yourself this: can he even think about his own brain or your brain, without a subjective pronoun? Nobody can do this. Nobody can form a thought that does not contain the subjective pronouns in some variation of I and Thou.
The activity
of mind cannot think
discursively (more in a minute) and at the same time deny
its own
subjective nature. There is no social speech without
pronouns,
all of which parts of speech are rooted in the commonly
shared obvious
truth of the existence of self-consciousness.
In a way it
is impossible for the
self-consciousness of any thinker to deny that
self-consciousness,
because once we become awake to this during our
psychological
development, the existence of an independent self as against
a world of
others is, as the Founders of the American Experiment said:
self
evident. "We hold these truths to be self
evident", they said.
At the same
time, and during the same
period of history that gave birth to the American
Experiment, natural
scientists recognized the existence of flaws in the
subjectivity of the
human being, including themselves. All the arguments
in which
they engaged are silly unless they are based on the
recognition of the limits of human
thinking in relationship to the discovery of
the truth. Out of this emerges scientific method, so
that at
least there is a community of discipline (surrender,
community and
practice) among seekers of the truth (scientists).
As we have
seen so far, however,
consciousness and self-consciousness retain a degree of
mystery, both
for the researcher on brain function and processes, and on
the
researcher into the real nature of matter (of which the
brain is
supposedly composed). Grazzanica above
recognized the
fundamental paradox, for if the researcher asks of his
subject that he
undertake certain kinds of inner activity, this thinking activity will
produces measurable effects to the instruments
observing the brain. Different kinds of thoughts give
rise to
effects in different parts of the brain. Memory in one
place,
language in another, puzzle solving in a third and so on.
The
subjectivity of the research subject
is often a necessary and needed participant in the
experiment. It
is the subjectivity of the research subject that lets
Grazzanica write:
"A
thought can
change brain chemistry, just as a physical event in the
brain can
change a thought."
In both this
realm and the realm of
quantum experiments, the subjectivity - the self-consciousness -
of someone present (the experimenter in
physics and the experimental subject in brain studies) is an
essential
part. Also in both case thinking activity plays a role.
The experimenter must choose
to seek either
knowledge of mass or position, thus bringing about by his
intervention
in the experimental process, the collapse of potential into
actuality.
While in the other case, the experimental
subject must choose some
inner activity (such as to solve a puzzle) in order
for the observer to have something to measure.
As we
observed previously, the thinking
subject, even if they believe there is no
self-consciousness, can't
actually engage in discursive thinking (the inner dialog we
all
recognize as the first stage of conscious thought) without
using
pronouns, which by their very nature have to be based in a
conception
of the subjectivity of I and Thou. Some scientific
thinkers as
noted above, will put forward their view that the I is an
illusion of
the matter based material processes in the brain, while at
the same
time be incapable of using language (either in thought or in
speech and
writing) that is able to divorce itself from personal
pronouns.
In fact, by
asserting the ability of the
brain to create an illusion of self-consciousness (a
fundamental
operation of the brain, apparently), they open all thought
into
question, including their own. If self-consciousness
is an
illusion, could not everything the scientist thinks be an
illusion?
Perhaps there
is here not an illusion, be
a delusion. In the face of illusion we are perhaps
more passive,
but a delusion is more actively created. Why do some
scientists
want to get ride of the self-evident fact of
self-consciousness?
Why does it trouble them? Is it perhaps that
they
instinctively recognize that self-consciousness (the
presence of a real
subjectivity within the human being), suggests that
something other
than matter is involved?
Recall once
more Grazzanica's remarks: "A thought can change brain
chemistry, just as a physical event in the brain can change
a thought."
What causes
the thought that changes the
brain chemistry? In this problem of causality, which
is
everywhere present in many studies of brain activity (the
subject has
to be a participating actor), the paradox of imagining that
there is
only matter and no spirit more and more manifests itself.
The thinking of the scientist of the brain is
running into
the same problem (but from a different direction) that the
quantum
physicist did. The brain researcher can't figure out
how matter
produces consciousness, and since a large part of his
experimental
process includes him having to ask a subject for participating
mental activity (puzzle solving
for example), the researcher confronts
his own inconsistency. If it is only matter that makes
a human
being, why does he need to require its cooperation?
Would you ask
a rock to move and expect it to do so? A plant?
Animals can
be trained (domesticated), but everyone knows the difference
between
cats and dogs. The cat is indifferent to our commands,
unless its
own instinctive self interest is involved. The dog
lives for our
attention, and readily obeys (when so trained).
We have the
wonderful expression noting how much some human beings are
like cats.
We say: To get this group of people to cooperate is
like trying
to herd cats.
part seven
the relationship of the natural
Christian to
thinking
When we try
to practice Our Way each Day
in Life, we run into moral and ethical dilemmas more or less
constantly. Some are very ordinary, such as if
we are given
too much change at the store do we return the overpayment?
Some
are potentially catastrophic, such as do I start an affair
with my best
friends spouse.
Further, we
know we are inconsistent.
In one mood we are more generous and naturally ethical
and more;
and, in another mood we are downright dangerous and
propelled toward
risks almost without any control of our emotions at all by
our I.
That inner dialog I have called discursive thinking
(we talk
inside our own minds to ourselves - that is our
self-consciousness
speaks into our consciousness) is often in forced flight,
and seldom
calm and collected. Life-demands propel us through the
day: wake
to the alarm, feed the children and get them to school, go
to the job,
hassle with the boss, come home, argue with the spouse and
on and on
and on.
So much seems
out of our control,
especially in the present times of seemingly more and more
social chaos
world-wide. It really is not surprising that some
groups just
want to check out of the world, and form communities of zero
change or
even try to enliven past social forms and realities.
Other
individuals can't find a club, unless it is the club of
checking out
into one kind of addiction or another. For some it is
shopping,
for others overwork. Even madness beckons to a
few - they
hide inside their own minds and become completely
disconnected from
social reality.
At the same
time, everyone thinks or has
thoughts. Sometimes thoughts are intrusive and even
illusory.
The whole field of mental health, and as well
criminal
justice, deals with social and individual problems that
manifest out of
something whose causal reality is within the own inside -
the
consciousness we see that others do not.
We worry.
We get depressed.
We get high, we use downers. We zone out on TV.
We
escape into books or sex.
Yet, for most
of us, there are a few
simple facts (remember those I talked about in the very
beginning of
this little book) worthy of noting. Our thoughts have
a content,
which we sometimes call ideas or concepts or mental pictures
or
whatever. The activity of the self-consciousness
produces a
mental or conceptual product via the discursive thinking.
We know
these are our thoughts, and we often guard them quite
carefully.
They are very personal, and rare is the other - the
Thou - with
whom we will share.
Oh, we do
have all kinds of glib chatter.
Hello,
how
are you, how's your sister and so forth.
Most of the time we don't expect the truth, and
often are
shocked if we get it. Actually screw you and I'm going crazy
and I just killed
my sister.
A lot of the
content is culturally
produced. We suckle it in in childhood simply by
learning
our native language. We are raised in families
and churches
and schools, all of which try to forge our beliefs and the
content of
our thoughts. As noted previously, in pre-adolescence
and
adolescence proper we start to free our thoughts from these
influences,
and sometimes can't do this until we leave home, and move
far far away.
Our self-consciousness wants freedom in this most
intimate aspect
of our consciousness - our thoughts. Don't we say: I'm entitled to my
opinion!
At the same
time, even as adults our
social environment often requires conformance of thoughts.
The
work place, in spite of our being in a so-called country
with free
speech, is not a place we can afford to speak freely.
Remember above where we noted the phrase: I had to bite my
tongue. Spontaneous speech,
while often a true
representation of our thoughts and feelings, just as often
can get us
in a lot of trouble.
What happens
when our boss (or a close
relative) requires of us an action we know (to our own view
of things)
is not ethical or moral?
Now the point
of this is not so much that
these obvious things go on all the time, but rather that
they go on all
the time for all of us. Each individual human being,
as a
thinker, is born into a world of concepts and values, from
which they
may or may not emerge into some kind of personal or
ethical/moral
freedom. What is especially odd, is how often we
forget
that all of us have values, and ethical and moral rules that
are
different.
We easily
become angered when someone
doesn't act like we would act. We know what is right
to do, don't
we? Shouldn't they know this too?
We normally
don't think carefully about
this particular fact, which is so important (see my little
story Bicycles in
the appendix) to understanding the world in which we
live. When we do, however, (and many do) there is a
shift in our
relationship to other people. Usually we call this:
tolerance.
We accept that others necessarily think
differently, and in
our own thinking we find a way to live with this when we
can.
Sam Harris's
book The End of
Faith (noted at the beginning)
makes a big
deal of this. He finds the tolerance of moderate
Christians
of the irrationality of so-called extremist Christians, a
worse moral
failure than the irrationality he describes. He
doesn't tolerate
this, so why should they?
Mr. Harris,
who is a natural scientist of
a sort, doesn't yet know what to do with human social facts
he doesn't
like. He seems to believe that there are purely
rational ethical
principles (in this he is not alone) that are so soundly
reasoned that
everyone ought to agree. His difficulty is one typical
to us all,
and which we noted above on our way to looking at the Twelve
Steps.
We all have a
dark inside, all of us.
If you pretend you don't, you'll make false
assumptions, often
hypocritical ones. If Our Way doesn't include some
confession of
the own dark inside, as well as the light, we will make
missteps along
the Way. Christ in the Sermon on the Mount called it
the problem
of the Mote and the Beam, and while a lot of these teachings
are
present everywhere as ideas in Western Civilization, not all
of them
are practiced. Remember: surrender, confession
and
contrition in community and practice.
At the least,
we should recognize that
while many of us are natural Christians, because we
have taken in certain fundamental values that are sourced
out of
Christ's parables and teachings, we are not finished yet.
Life
growth can stop or can go on, and this too is a moral or
ethical choice
that belongs to our own freedom to decide.
There is a
kind of a trick here, or
perhaps a puzzle that needs to be perceived and then worked
with.
This puzzle is with our own thinking.
We think
instinctively. That
is we don't generally think about thinking, or study our
internal life
as a puzzle, we just do it. We swim in the sea
of our mind,
not paying much attention at all to the content, mostly
because life
makes so many demands we just don't have time to be
reflective or
introspective.
That a lot of
people don't think the same
thoughts, we already know. That is pretty obvious.
What is
less obvious (except perhaps to professional educators or
others who
work with people intimately) is that not only is the content clearly different, but how
people think is sometimes also radically different.
There
are a lot of different ways in which this has been observed,
depending
on the context and the discipline making the observations.
It is most
obvious to those teachers in
the field of special education, however. The
ADHD student,
or the dyslexic student or the autistic student or the
aspergers
student - all these children have a different how
of thinking. Artists tend to think differently as
well. A
couple of examples: the emotional relationship to color is
for one most
important, while for another it will be the tactile
relationship - how
their medium of art feels to the sense of touch.
A lot of
people end up in jobs where
their naturally different how of
thinking finds a place.
A highly disciplined abstract thinker (who lives only
in
conceptions, and hardly in their senses at all) might become
a
mathematician. Someone who thinks with their
limbs might
become a dancer. Someone who thinks with their hands
might become
a carpenter, or other kind of craftsman.
If you walk
through your own life, asking
this question: what
ways
or way does this person think and feel that are different
from my
own? - a whole other world within
the social
environment will light up before your own thinking. In
a way, you
are letting what you can observe about their outside (not just how they look but how they act and
in what
kind of environment have they come to live), show you a way
to see
deeper into their inside. With
this kind of question (and its variations)
you will begin to understand (in practice) how to come awake
to the
Mote and the Beam. It is our semi-conscious reaction to the outside that comes from the own Beam, while our
self-conscious seeking
after
the inside takes us much nearer
the Mote.
part eight
culmination and integration:
becoming scientific about our own
consciousness and
self-consciousness
Lets first
look at something we passed by
above, namely our recognition that our life pushes our consciousness and self-consciousness all
the time.
Life makes demands. Life is suffering is the
first Noble
Truth of the Buddha. People get martyred on a cross of
truth all
the time, sometimes not so obviously, but all the same, they
get fired
from jobs and/or are left by a spouse.
The wise
cliche is that god never gives us more than
we can handle, but a lot of people
who check
out certainly don't seem to be handling life at all.
Wasn't there
a Country and Western song
about giving someone an attitude adjustment? A
lot of us recognize the importance of attitude. When we form our personality we take on
a costume
of attitude
(or what an acquaintance of mine
Catherine MacCoun, in
her book called On
Becoming an Alchemist called style.
Everyone
has a style or attitude (a personality), that originates
in the self-consciousness (which some call our: immortal
spirit).
These are all
individual and unique in
their formation, but often imitative in the presentation.
Right
from the start our personal biography pushes at us, and as
we grow we
create this response: the attitude or style we present to
the world.
We don't expose all, except in very significant
personal
relationships, because we are taught by life that such
exposure often
leads to pain (we get hurt).
Natural
Science hardly talks at all about
this. Hard to quantify a hurt, or a style or an
attitude. When Natural
Science did
approach this it first did so in the soft sciences (as
against the hard
sciences such as physics or chemistry), such as psychology
or history
or sociology. In recent years such disciplines as
evolutionary
psychology have tried to imagine that they can think
reasonably to the
roots of human behavior, inner and outer, by supposing some
kind of
adaptive mechanism, sometimes getting all the way into the
DNA.
The brain and the genetic code adapt
to evolutionary pressures (the pushes of life). A lot of
work wants to compare us to the higher mammals, and
certainly we have
the idea of the human
animal.
That last
phrase, while common in our
language, is a kind of very subtle oxymoron (a figure
of speech
that combines into a more or less contradictory set of
terms).
What's the point of the word human in that phrase: human animal? We often use the terms quite
separately and
everyone understands in those uses the distinction. We
also have
the variation: humane. Would
we ever call an animal humane and
have such a sentence mean anything?
Animals, for
example, aren't moral.
They are instinctive. They don't create art or
language.
We can project on them human qualities (and often do
this to our
pets), but no one is every going to call a tiger in the wild
humane. The confusion between the human and the
animal is
just a result of very sloppy thinking.
Now human
beings can forget their
humanity. We even have a phrase recognizing this: man's inhumanity to
man. Or, he was such an
animal. In
the latter case, the term animal is more of a metaphor than
it is a
rational judgment. But Natural Science seems to be
committed to
this idea, and finds rationale for it in such well know
facts that the
difference in the nature of the DNA between a higher order
mammal and a
man is slight.
Remember,
however, that this train of
thought is completely based on the assumption that only the physical is real.
Hopefully, in the
above parts, we have somewhat deconstructed this idea in our
examination of consciousness and self-consciousness.
This problem
then leads us to something that is a kind of socially sloppy
disagreement: Intelligence Design vs. Random Evolutionary
Processes.
I say sloppy, because most of those involved in these
arguments
haven't bothered to look at the history of the development
of science.
In that history this issue was originally
everywhere, and
it has never gone away. Its just gotten buried under
more and
more assumptions as time went on, and as Natural Science
seemed more
and more to occupy an intellectual territory that was
increasingly
abandoned by orthodox religions, as they lost themselves in
the vanity
of their belief systems, at the expense of the actual
practice of their
teachings.
Another
acquaintance of mine, Don Cruse,
writes about the development of ideas that have led to the
conceptions
of Darwinian Evolution: random processes and so forth.
He has a
web site and a book: Evolution
and the New Gnosis: anti-establishment essays on
knowledge, science, religion
and causal logic. On the web
there is a
wonderful essay Dogma and
Doubt by Ronald Brady
[http://www.natureinstitute.org/txt/rb/dogma/dogmadoubt.htm]
that
thoroughly unzips the basis of evolutionary biology as a
rational
system of thought.
Cruse puts
the whole thing quite simply.
For long time in the history of science, the
scientists used
metaphorical language to communicate their understanding,
such: as mechanism.
Nature was a randomly created mechanism. The problem, says Cruse, is that that
word, mechanism, means only one thing, something created.
Human
beings make mechanisms, and to
export, from our understanding of the creative
activity by which a clock is made, to nature the idea that
nature is a mechanism is to
define it as designed and created. He
actually challenges them, in his book and in letters to
scientists, to
forgo (if they can) the use of such metaphors to describe
what they
observe. Create, he insists, a language that isn't
based on an
analogy to human creativity, but which truly describes
evolution as a
random accidental process. They can't do it.
Whenever they
stop the process of
analysis to take up the task of synthesis (making a whole of
the data
or parts discovered in experiments), they always use
metaphors rooted
in one way or another in human intentionality. The hand
of natural selection. Even the term selection involves a meaning of human intentionality.
A
truly random process can't select
anything. It
doesn't - it can't - make choices.
Hopefully the
reader will now see that
Science has reached limits. It has very definite views
(assumptions and ideas), but in the brain biology (the study
of
consciousness) and in quantum physics (the question of what
actually is
matter), and even in evolutionary theory, some element of
human
intention - participation - can't be gotten rid of. If
then,
self-consciousness is spirit - the I is spirit, and
consciousness is
soul, then the need to use the idea of some kind of
intention in
explaining the facts of evolutionary theory leads only to
one place: a
Divine Mystery. Moreover, the story of Christ's
teachings in the
Gospels, when practiced, lead to the same place.
If one goes
to what is described in other
essays of mine (and in books), and studies there either
Anthroposophy
or Goethean Science, then it is clear that New Revelation
was poured
over humanity in the 20th Century. How? Why?
Good
questions, not all of which can be answered here.
part nine
arguments with God;
a personal view,
offered
Among the
ideas that reality teaches is
that the human being is being born more and more into a
co-creative
role with the Divine Mystery. In fact, something
of the
Divine Mystery itself lives in the ego or I of the human
being, and to
be co-creative, as Owen Barfield suggested in his book Saving
the
Appearances: a study in idolatry,
is to
engage in final
participation. In Ages Past
the human
being was more passive and less free (original
participation). Now we are
more free and more potentially
active. This, to my experience, has brought certain
consequences.
One of these
is quite odd, and I was
surprised to discover this mood of soul. The more I
understood
the design of the creation (at least this present part - see
my book the Way of
the Fool), and even more and more
appreciated
it, the more certain aspects of it bothered me. These
next
paragraphs then come from such a mood. I start
by
recognizing my antipathy towards certain elements of the
what some
might call: Gods Design. In effect I recognize that
Lucifer was
not entirely wrong to go through a period of rebellion, and
I have
begun to think that part of developing fully the Divine
Mystery of the
own I is to (on occasion and quite deliberately) approach
our
observations of the design with a critical faculty.
We are, after
all, quite intimately
involved in this situation. To just sort of roll over
like a good
dog and always love everything the Master does and did, is
to loose
something that is part of being human. Like a
child
becoming truly free and responsible, I am finding that part
of the
separation, that has to precede the choice and pursuit of
reintegration, must include taking the attitude of whether
we find
everything just perfect.
Some urge
upon us the idea that the Gods
make no errors, and this is becoming more and more to me one
of those
truths that paradoxically can be seen from a totally
different
direction to be false. In point of fact, a fair
reading of Rudolf
Steiner's researches into the supersensible worlds will come
upon many
comments where it is clear that the communities of spiritual
beings
that have led the way so far were not in agreement on all
aspects of
the Creation.
We could actually say that our critical examination of the design is quite necessary if we are to ultimately become responsible for many of its future aspects. In the light of this I want to share an odd thought that has come to me many times now, and which I confess I find to be more and more true. Let us call this: the mobius strip incarnation idea.
First call to
mind what a mobius strip
is. If I have a belt-like form, and make it into a
circle by
joining the two ends, I have two surfaces and two edges that
don't
exactly connect. If before I join the two ends
together, I give a
half twist to the form, I end up with one continuous surface
and one
continuous edge. If I make the form
geometrically perfect,
by having the edge be without measure - that is it is zero
in
thickness, I can still have a geometric form that is
plane-like, and
circular, while at the same time endless - that is without
two sides.
Now lets
apply this idea to the Creation,
to repeated earth lives, to reincarnation, and to what
appears to be
the separation from God which ancient ideas of the cultural
East often
considered to be an illusion. Some readers will have
noticed the
goal of ego-lessness, which is urged by teachers from the
cultural
East. They say things like there is no ego,
there
is no I, there is no am.
In the cultural
West we have the opposite idea (in a way). Here in the
West we
say there is an ego, the I-am is what God named Himself in
the ancient
texts, and that in that the individual human being has an I,
another
name for it would be: immortal spirit.
In different
words: we all come from the
same Source and to that Source we will return.
With the
Mobius Strip Incarnation Idea, I mean to suggest that the
truth is that
both East and West see the same reality from different (and
necessary
directions) and that for developmental purposes the idea of
each of us
having a separate ego is important for some purposes and not
so
important for others. I mean to suggest here that
there is just
One Ego, and as it enters Time and Space (the Creation) it
separates
into distinct parts in order to learn. And, that
if we
followed each part in Time we would
find that like the Mobius Strip there
is only one continuous surface.
I am you.
You are me.
We are Christ and the Buddha and the Holy
Mother. But
in Time and Space we are sequential, like the Mobius Strip.
We are to live all these apparently separate
points of view
in Time and Space in order to become at the end of Time and
Space, when on the other side of the Last Judgment we all
unite in
Eternity - in timelessness and spacelessness, something that
only
arises because of this becoming and
that was
impossible before the Creation. Through this process
of
sequential becomings, the Father Principle and the Mother
Principle
will not only have become something they were not before,
but they will
also have lived all the lives, of all the parts, from the
human part to
the dog part to the tree part to the atom part to the gluon
part and on
and on and on.
Thus Christ
says: Whatsoever
ye do to the least
of these my brethren, ye do so also unto me.
In the
meantime, in order to fully
separate from the Divine Mystery (from a human perspective),
arguing
with God about the design is a natural and necessary act.
This
necessary spiritually adolescent attitude is in fact
everywhere already
(what after all is scientific materialism and atheism).
This has often led at various times to so much
fear in
certain egos, egos that imagined themselves as superior
religious and
moral authorities, that they murdered and tortured heretics
(non-believers in their doctrines). Sam Harris, and
those of like
mind, are right to see such an attitude as the height of
irrationality.
These new atheists, however, just don't get it that
that guy over
there that is making (to them) so much trouble has a quite
valid
aspects of his point of view and an equally valid state of
being.
(Love
God
with all your heart and all your mind and all your spirit, and
love
your neighbor as yourself.)
Getting the picture yet?
"I am he as you are
he as you are me and we are all
together.", sang the Beatles in I
am the
Walrus (Lennon/McCartney - Lennon,
according
to Wikipedia got the idea while on a acid trip).
But who is
this I that is we? Our
discovery of this I goes through it, that is through
individuality.
Developing our I fully is how we come to any deep
spiritual
realization. The Narrow Gate. Where
people, who want
to put down new age and other religious ideas outside their
own limited
vision Christian beliefs get confused, is where they think
you arrive
at the goal by being saved. And then, by saving others
by
teaching them to give themselves to God. Not a bad
idea, were
they just the opening bars of the song of development.
Thing is
most fake Christians stop there. They cherry
pick the
Gospels for what serves their own ideology, and either feel
the rest is
superfluous, or too hard.
Beliefs are
assumed superior to practice
(not by works alone). This would make sense if all
fake
Christians had the same beliefs, but the very fact of their
constant
bickering over these matters, sometimes leading to horrible
wars and
other crimes, pretty much ruins such an idea as anything
reasonable at
all. But the idea of not by works alone also doesn't
say being
saved alone. Belief, in the form of true Faith (trust)
belongs
together with practice. Ora et labora is the Latin for prayer and labor. Prayer is the main practice of Faith,
and
meditation in action the main faith of Practice.
Meditation
in action is another way of saying prayer in action, or
acting from the
center of our heart, or acting out of moral grace. It
is my
prayerfulness (meditative inner attitude) that enables me to
know the
Good, and to act on that knowledge.
But this is a
bit more complicated and
has to be read elsewhere: The
Meaning of Earth Existence in the Age of the Consciousness
Soul; and, In
Joyous
Contemplation of the Soul Art and Music of Discipleship.
In this essay (booklet) I just wanted to walk the reader through some basic questions and ideas, as a help to prepare them for discovering their Own Way.
Blessings and good luck.
addendum
BICYCLES
- a Children's
Christmas
Story, which is also for Adults -
This
story is
dedicated to Gabriella, Catherine Rose, Ross Gregory, and
Adam, who
were on my mind Christmas Eve, 1996, as their fathers (of
which I must
confess I was one) were absent from home for the Season. It
was written
the following Christmas Morning.
*
There once was a girl, who
found herself weeping in the dark, alone in her room.
This is nothing unusual. Many people, not just children, can be found weeping, alone with their pain in the dark of the night.
But
there
was a difference. Although it was not a difference as
infrequent
as we might imagine.
And
the
difference was this. While she was weeping an Angel
appeared,
sitting quietly at the end of her bed.
It was quite a while before the girl noticed the Angel. Yet, this did not bother the Angel, who had been, if we do not mind, created out of patience and joy.
After
a
time the girl stopped weeping, and the two simply looked at
each
other for a while.
Finally
the
Angel
reached out and touched the girl on the shoulder, and asked:
"What is troubling you child?".
Now it is true that the Angel already knew the answer to this question, but the Angel also knew that the girl needed to talk about her grief.
This
was
the girl's answer.
"It
is
Christmas Eve." she said, "My father and mother have
quarreled and
my father is not here. I don't even know when, or if, he is
coming
home."
At this the girl, who was at that very awkward age between being a child and being a young woman, began to weep again, even more deeply then before.
After
a
while she stopped, looked at the Angel and asked: "Why?"
and, then
began weeping some more.
Now
you
may wonder why the girl wasn't troubled or confused by
someone
being in her room at night. The fact is that when you meet
an Angel
there is no question about what is happening. No doubt, no
confusion.
Angels aren't like anything else except Angels.
This
is
how the Angel answered the girl.
"Are
you
ever bad?" asked the Angel.
"Yes",
she
said,
a bit hesitantly.
"Are
you
ever bad on purpose, knowing you are being bad?"
"Yes",
she
said,
almost whispering now.
"Are
you
ever bad by accident, not having thought about what might
happen?"
"Yes",
she
said,
a little more confident.
"Do
bad
things ever sometimes happen even though you were trying as
hard as
possible to do something good?"
"Yes",
she
said,
back to herself finally.
Then
they
sat together for a while. She was thinking and the Angel
just was.
"O.K.",
she
eventually
said. "Mother and father aren't trying to hurt me, and I
didn't do something wrong."
"Right",
said
the
Angel.
"But",
she
said,
having just reinvented philosophy, "Why is the world such a
terrible place?"
After
a
very long pause the Angel said, "It's because of the
bicycles."
Now
this
was said with a straight face, as much as an Angel can be
said to
have a straight face, their normal countenance being filled
with
patient joy.
Even
so,
the girl's dark mood broke and she laughed, and then caught
in this
odd feeling she tried to stop and ended up almost falling
out of bed
because she was giggling so much.
Again there was a passage of time, so that the girl could ask her next question without breaking up. It actually took several attempts before she could get the question out.
"What
do
you mean by "it's the bicycles"?" she said, pulling up the
hem of
her nightgown, as much to distract herself as to dry the
tears of both
suffering and mirth.
"Well",
said
the
Angel, "As you have guessed the bicycles are invisible,
being
made out of ideas and dreams, hope and despair, all stuck
together with
bits of conscience and just plain stubbornness.
"Everyday
people
wake
up and ride around on their invisible bicycles, forgetting
the bicycles are there and then because they have forgotten
them,
people just keep banging into each other.
"Soon
all
the bicycles are in great disrepair. Some with flat tires,
some
with crooked wheels, and some without even handlebars to
steer by.
"It
takes
a great deal of courage for people, for mothers and fathers,
to
get up in the morning and ride their bicycles out into life
each day. A
great deal of courage."
Then
the
Angel was quiet again and so was the girl.
After
a
while the girl, having graduated from philosophy to
theology, asked:
"Why does God let this go on? Why doesn't he fix the
bicycles or make
people learn how to ride them without banging into each
other?"
"Hmmm."
said
the
Angel
Now
before
you imagine the Angel is pausing to think, I should tell you
that is not what was happening. Angels do think, but when
they do
something happens. For Angels thinking creates. The reason
the Angel
said "Hmmm" was so the girl would first reflect a little
about what she
had said, before the Angel answered her.
"Do
you
ever talk to God?" asked the Angel.
"I
think
so," said the girl, tentative again, and rightly so.
"You
should
you know.", said the Angel. "You can't interrupt him, or
bother
him when he's doing something else. He always listens.
Always. And when
you talk to him he never interrupts you, never tells you
he's heard it
before or done it himself or knows more than you. You
couldn't ask for
a better listener. And when you're done he doesn't give
advice, or tell
you what to do, or criticize what you've done or tell you,
you aren't
adequate. He just listens, and accepts you and loves you,
whatever you
have to say."
Then
the
Angel asked another question.
"Do
you
ever get angry at God?"
"What!"
exclaimed
the
girl. "Get angry at God !?!"
"Of
course."
said the Angel. "God loves you and wants your love. People
who
love each other get to be angry with each other. It's a way
to care.
God doesn't mind your anger. Now your indifference? That's
another
matter."
"O.K."
said
the
girl, now a little more in touch with her own frustration.
"But you still haven't said anything about repairing the
bicycles or
giving lessons on riding them."
'Didn't
need
to"
said the Angel. "All kinds of excellent repair and riding
manuals already out there. There's the Bible, and the Vedas,
and the
Torah, and the Koran, and the Sutras, and the..."
"O.K..
I
get
it." she said, interrupting the Angel, who didn't mind at
all.
Then she paused and thought a little.
"All
right."
she said. "This is what you've said. The reason the world is
so
difficult is because we all have our own ideas and dreams
and
conscience and stubbornness, and when we go out and ride
these
"bicycles" in life we bang into each other, or ride over
each others
feet, because we have forgotten about these invisible
things. But if we
want riding lessons and repair instruction, that information
is already
there. We just have to use it. Right?"
"Right."
said
the
Angel.
"O.K."
said
the
girl, after a very deep sigh, "Just one more question."
"Granted
God
is
the best listener in the world, always available and never
critical. But how come he never answers me?"
This
last
was spoken with a great deal of anguish, as only the very
young
can feel at the impossible burdens they sense when they
contemplate
growing up and being really free and responsible for
themselves.
Again
the
Angel waited for a while, as silent and beautiful as a
starry
winter night.
"How
well
do you listen?" the Angel answered. "He always answers you,
always. You just don't always hear him. He answers in many
ways. With
the continued breath of life, or with a fading sunset. With
the touch
of a breeze on the cheek or a crash of thunder. In the most
quite place
inside yourself he whispers to you. More softly then the
endless beat
of your heart he sings to you in the voice of the dancing
colors that
delight the eye. You eat his answers for breakfast and when
you walk
barefoot through the dew wet grass his answers touch your
feet.
"Do
you
have eyes, ears? Or if not even these, you have the thoughts
you
choose. You believe or not. Is that not a great gift itself?
To
have faith or not, hope or not, charity or not, according to
your own
will. God does answer. With life, with freedom. And yes,
with sorrow
and with pain. Are these not gifts as well?"
Again
there
was a harmony of silence between the two of them. Then the
girl
smiled and looked mischievously at the Angel.
"Do
you
have a bicycle?" she asked.
Then the Angel laughed. And outside the girl's window the birds sang to greet with joy the first hints of dawn on Christmas morning.
***********************************************************
Healing the Insanity of
Psychiatric
Medicines and Practice
It is
one thesis of this small paper that
common sense thinking, applied to the question of the efficacy of
modern
anti-psychotics and similar medicines, will reveal
that such drugs cannot generally be healthy
for either the mental or physical health of the human
being. They only seem to work, and then only
if you
define the goal of the application of such medicine in a
quite limited, and anti-human, fashion (behavioral modification
instead of healing).
This
is not to say no good at all comes
from the lifetimes of effort put out by many professionals
in these
fields, but rather that the picture we have of this work
is spun, just
as politicians spin their versions of the truth.
Spin is not the
truth, and in this essay we are trying to come nearer to
the social
reality represented by our institutional mental health
systems.
They are mostly not about mental health (those
problems of the mind are not being adequately
researched or solved), but rather about power, wealth and
social
control.
It may
help some possible confusion in
the reader to distinguish the psychiatric profession, from
the
psychological profession. Most psychiatrists no
longer
participate in talk therapy (classical analysis on the
couch), but by
and large engage in the practice of diagnosis of mental
illnesses
according to the DSM* V (a system of labeling various
symptoms into a
name that can be recognized by the mental health system
for purposes of
insurance payments and other institutional processes).
Following
such a diagnosis the psychiatrist (being also an MD)
prescribes
medications designed to adjust the behavior of the
patient. More
will be said about this later.
*[Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders V,
for interesting details look it up on Wikipedia.]
Psychologists
almost universally engage
is some form of talk therapy, although often in connection
to some kind
of prescription medicine, and as well often using the same
classification system as the DSM V.
The
important point above concerns the general
method of thinking involved in
the practice of this discipline (psychiatry), for that is
where the
failure begins and ends.
It is not so
much the individual thinking, but rather the institutional
thinking -
the generalized paradigm which serves as the context and
background to
all the rest. Let us begin
the examination of
this method of thinking, by first looking at something with which most
of us today
are quite familiar: the movement toward organic food.
Some history ...
In the 19th Century natural science reached a kind of
pinnacle of
sorts. Great
advances in knowledge were seen everywhere, and technical
devices of all kinds were being created in
the hope of solving any number of humanity's pressing
problems. The industrial
revolution was a seeming success, and not a week went by without some scientist
somewhere
announcing another
breakthrough, in
either
pure knowledge or in some practical art.
In
agriculture the plant had been studied in the laboratory
very
carefully, and
how it was composed of basic elements, such as
carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen
(plus a few trace elements) was
now assumed to be quite clear. Farms as a
result
started to become more and more modeled after factories, where what is
now called
mono-culture started to flourish.
Machines planted the
seeds, watered the plants and artificial fertilizers
were added
to the soil to make up for any missing elements such as
are related to
the plant's need for clay, silicon or calcium.
Large
corporations grew into existence, many of them chemical
factories creating pure and ofttimes synthetic substances
that were
applied at the farm or then later during procedures by
which food was
processed, manufactured
and
distributed to consumers via grocery stores.
Needs of commerce became
important and shelf life required new chemical methods of
preservation. Foods were enhanced, adulterated, preserved, and supposedly purified. Flour was
bleached. Sugar was too (keep in mind you wouldn't, yourself, directly
drink bleach).
In
many places, however, things were not coming out so well. Large farms
using
mono-culture and artificial fertilizers found themselves
more and more
attacked by insect life (nature, sensing something dead or dying or ill, sends its
littlest
workers to take it apart, and return it to the whole). This
required the application of poisons to kill the
insects, and
also to kill any weeds (unwanted plants). The farm became essentially a chemical
factory siting
astride the land. Ordinary farmers couldn't compete, and the whole
of
agriculture, as
a
way of life, changed
radically.
Eventually, people began
to question whether this was sane. After some
time organic
farming (which is
really only a return to the pre-industrial farm)
became important, as ordinary
common sense was applied by ordinary people
to examine the assumptions of mono-culture and corporate
industrial
food processing and practices.
This
is a brief, but I believe quite worthwhile picture. What is the
nature of
the thinking that produced this history of farming
practices that
ultimately have failed on such a huge scale to provide
healthy food?
The
first step was in natural science
itself, which
has followed primarily a method of analysis (taking things
apart). For example, the plant was
burned in the laboratory to produce ash. Then the ash
was
analyzed to see what were the basic elements of which it
was made (the burning only eliminated
the water from the harvested plant - although that
is not precisely true, for the combustion
process creates many products such as light and heat, but which
come from where - the burning takes something
less quantifiable away from the once living plant.).
In any event, the modern
scientist looks at plant biology on the farm
as a process by which the plant was created by the DNA of
the seed out
of certain basic elements available in the soil. Already, before DNA, if the soil
was lacking
something, these
could
be added later (fertilizers etc.).
This
turning of the farm into a chemistry
factory was before the need for ecological or holistic
thinking was understood. Pure analysis needs to
be followed by wise synthesis.
After you take something
apart, you have to know how to put it back together, in order to
prove you
actually learned something.
The later discovered flaws
of mono-culture have pretty
much proved that the original thinking about plants
and foods was
in error.
To
this analytical thinking was added the
thinking involved in mass production. Machines
were seen as useful replacements for physical
labor and the farm became large and mechanized
(leading to mono-culture or
farms sowing and
reaping only one plant, such as wheat or corn). The profit
motive was added to the search for scientific
facts, with
the whole thing becoming a bit distorted because as
agricultural
colleges grew in size (and developed more research capacity),
a great deal of the
funding for
research in these schools was provided by business (and sometimes
government), neither of which had pure agendas and
motives.
Ultimately, regulatory
bodies such as the Food and Drug Administration became
less the
defenders of the public interest, and more the creatures of the lobbyists for
big
agricultural and chemical corporations.
Everyone
today is more or less aware of
these facts and tendencies.
As
common sense was applied, it became clear that the
earth in which plants were grown was itself alive with
microorganisms
and worms etc. The
more
chemical fertilizers and anti-weed and insect poisons were
added
to the farm, the
more “dead” the soil became. A kind
of vicious
cycle arose, which
required
more and more chemicals on the farm,
that has since resulted in more
and more a
denaturing of the food itself.
We could try to look for
laboratory evidence for this, but since it was the
human population itself upon which the experiment (denatured and
processed food) was conducted, we need only look at
people to see the results.
Now it
is not usual to relate to this
certain other facts, but it is clear to a holistic thinking that
modern
diseases of the heart, and many cancers began to arise at the same
time as
changes in farming. In fact, the so-called obesity epidemic in America is
clearly
related as well. True experts in nutrition realize that the
real reason so
many people are fat is because there is no actual
nutrition in the food
you get at the grocery store.
As a consequence the body
keeps telling people to eat
more, but the
only thing in the food is empty calories which the body
then stores (converts the excess of sugars
into fats) if one
has a certain body-type (an endomorph). Other body types burn all the calories, but need
stimulants such
as caffeine and cigarettes in order to function at work
and in home.
What
is worse is that many today in the
medical field want to castigate the consumer, and leave
aside or ignore the responsibility of the
producer of the food, as well as the role of the government (or absence of a
role, might be a better way to
phrase it). Wealthy corporations and
corrupt government officials get a free ride, but the fat
person has to take the whole blame for his
choices. Somehow
we
are to be able to overcome corporate and
government power, and the
influence of
advertising, while
at
the same time raising the children and creating through
our work all
the wealth.
So to
the flawed excess of analysis
without synthesis, and the flawed excess of corporate greed, we must now
add the
flawed reasoning which wants to blame the consumer for
buying products
that should never have been sold to him in the first
place.
Now
why did we bother to look at this, in an article
partly on
problems with mental health medications.
The reason should be clear
to the
reader with common sense: the same flawed thinking that debased the
food supply has
come alive in the realm of soul-healing, and is currently
debasing the physical and mental health of
millions.
Natural
science remains locked in an
excess of analysis, and an absence of wise synthesis.
Corporate greed in the
creation of
pharmaceuticals has led to a need to force the sale
through
advertising of products after products whose side
effects kill
and injure. If these so-called medicines were truly
healing,
there would be no need to sell them - they would sell themselves.
Government
has become corrupted, as are
many universities and hospitals where research is
conducted. In
the absence of holistic thinking, suffering is produced
directly on
many minds. Lets look at some examples.
The
writer of this essay has 18 years experience in the
trenches of the mental health field, including ten
years as a mental health worker in a
for-profit psychiatric hospital in Nashua, New
Hampshire. I could tell a lot of stories, but I'll just
tell one, after making a few basic observations.
First
of all it was clear, to my observation and
experience, that
psychiatrists
working at the hospital were basically poorly supervised
experimenters. I
seldom
saw a diagnosis made at the beginning of an admission
remain the
same over the whole course of treatment (unless the
patient had been in the system for years).
It was routine to order
one medication (or more) in the beginning, and then change that as
treatment went forward.
The goal, of course, was not to
heal the patient, but to modify behavior. The
diagnosis defined certain behavior as socially
undesirable, and
then
the psychiatrist experimented using various medications
until the
desired behavioral result was reached.
During
this process the subjective inner
life of the patient was often not a factor, although many
patients came seeking help with their inner
states of being. Of course, such inner states often led to deviant social
behaviors, such that people would
come recommended by various agencies (social services, the police, the family
etc.). The new
patient would have a complaint, of sorts, but the social matrix
surrounding this person would also have its own separate
complaint.
The
patient was worried about their state
of mind, and
the family or job was worried about their behavior. What
we did was
modify behavior, often by what was essentially a chemical
restraint on
some aspect of the patients subjective state of mind. We pressed
down the
personality with drugs in order to make them more easily
fit into their social
environment. Obviously
there
went with this process a number of side-effects
(physical and mental
collateral damage is probably a more accurate term), some of which
were more or less permanent (such as tardive dyskinesia).
Now in
appreciating what I write here
about the psychiatrist as an experimenter, the reader
should be clear that I am pointing out a great
deal of ignorance and some degree of arrogance
(just as was done to the farms
we need for the food we eat).
At the same time it is the
institutional system of mental health that perpetuates
these problems, because these flaws are
well known and are everywhere criticized, although
unsuccessfully
(Google: psychiatric
polypharmacy; psychiatric and organic
reductionism; ecology
of
mind; and
anti-psychiatry, for example). Psychiatry is a “soft” science, not a “hard”
science.
It is more art than
science, and a lot of people practicing it clearly
don't have any
talent.
Lets
do the horror story now ....
The
hospital where I worked had a Chief
of Psychiatry (a
different job than the business head of the facility).
He was also paid outside
money by
various pharmaceutical companies to manage research
projects. When a new experimental
drug had to be tested, we were one place such tests were done. This
process costs
a lot of money (the
drug company paid the full admission costs of all patients
in the study
as well as additional staff time needed to support the
study, such as through frequent
blood tests, physicals
etc.).
The
Chief of Psychiatry maintained “professional” relationships with the
Nashua community, and was in fact already the “doctor” for a number of
individuals with chronic mental health
issues. All
these individuals were provided living support through
local social
services agencies, as they couldn't work and often needed help
just with
basic living skills.
A new
drug for schizophrenia was to be
tested, and
shortly thereafter a number of regular patients of the
Chief of
Psychiatry were admitted to the hospital to participate in
the study. They were not in
crisis, but
were admitted solely for the study. Because the
study was a double-blind study, some would get a placebo, instead of
the
experimental drug.
One
patient, clearly receiving a placebo, began in a
couple of weeks to show severe symptoms. He had been
taken off
the medication that helped him live (with aid) in the
community, and brought into the hospital for the study. He was, in the jargon
we used, decompensating.
He
began to be awake for 50 hours at a time, and then crash for about 16 hours and
then be awake
again (I
know this
because I was the one who went carefully through his chart
to develop
these and other facts in order to confront the Chief of
Psychiatry with
the torture of this individual). He wasn't eating and existed mostly on coffee
and
cigarettes. His
behavior
was erratic, and
his speech pressured (speedy and incoherent). He pestered
staff and other patients constantly. Fortunately
he was
not violent, just
a
terrific nuisance to others, and of course miserable inside himself (for which his “madness” - as it were - offers him no
understanding).
We forget, or ignore, that the
world seen from inside such a mind is not the
same world we see at all.
Lets
look at what happen here - the reality. People with known mental
health issues were brought into the hospital to suit the
convenience of
the Chief of Psychiatry and the drug company, and used as
guinea pigs. This is not only shameful, but it ought
to scare us that such callous and
indifferent impulses fill in the structural nature of the
mental health
system, such
that no one objects on an institutional level.
Of course, the
professionals put a good face on all such activity, because as
anyone knows, we can with our thinking
justify anything.
Even
today in the food industry, that system still lives
in denial of what has been done
(and is being done that is worse)
to the food supply.
The same attitude is
rampant in the
field of mental health. Natural science does not understand what it
is doing. Commercial interests
mine this field of confusion for profit making purposes. And, the human
beings, the patients and their
families (as well
as society) are
not being well served.
One
really doesn't need to be an expert, but just use
common sense; and, in fact recognize that the expert has his own
agenda, which is often the
preservation of his status and his income.
The only way to stop the
insanity of
the mental health institutional system is for public
opinion to marshal
its common sense, and ask of their representatives in
legislative bodies to
use their common sense as well.
Human
beings shouldn't be the subject of
experiments by psychiatrists no longer interested in their
subjective
inner well being, but only in changing the behavior, all supported
by a
pharmaceutical industry which has proven it will lie and
cheat in order
to make money. There
are
alternatives as everyone who looks at this question knows.
To
come at this from another direction ...
There
is a field of science that is called (or was called) coal tar
chemistry. Basically this field
(and its related industries) took something
that was
already quite dead (petroleum in the ground) and killed it some more (took it apart on
a massive scale). Those smelly gasoline making plants you drive
by were at
one time called “cracking
plants” because
what they do is heat the oil to very high temperatures, while keeping
it under
pressure (crack the
petroleum coal tar into pieces that don't exist in nature) and then as the
various
vapors rise, they
cool
them and make gasoline, kerosene etc. (a kind of distillation
process). From this same chemistry
we have ingredients for plastics, cosmetics and even
medicines. These are
all synthetic, which among other things means nature didn't
make them, man did (with all his selfish motives, and his
ignorance and
arrogance).
We are
aware today of all those allergies
that comes with the proliferation of these products
throughout human
society. Cigarettes
are
full of this stuff. It has a lot of uses, of which one
is that it makes some people a lot of money. Lets make a
synthesis, a common sense picture.
As
science matures in knowledge, human impulses everywhere
look for personal advantage.
The industrial revolution includes a
chemical or synthetic revolution where all kinds of
substances are created that never before existed in
nature. Human beings now swim in
a sea of synthetic (artificial) chemistry, for which their bodies
were never originally adapted.
Nature made us, we made
synthetics and synthetics are ruining our food, changing the
climate and
torturing mental patients.
Seen
as a whole social process, we've essentially
conducted a huge set of experiments on the human
population of the
world. That's
right, we are
the experimental subject of a lot of badly thought out
theories, acting in collusion with
profit making industries.
We played with the world in ignorance and arrogance and now must reap the consequences. Yes, a lot of the time we were trying to solve problems and meet genuine human needs. But at the same time we were not humble. We believed we could try anything and fix any mistake. We were childish, and as all of us learn growing up, when you are impulsive and childish, you screw up, and sometimes ruin the rest of your life. Humanity, as a group, has been doing the same thing on a very large scale for some time.
Here's
the rule that is frequently
violated: Just because you can do a thing, does not mean
you should do a thing.
At the
beginning of this small paper I
made an off-hand remark regarding modern psychiatric
medicine, which now needs some
elaboration. I
said: “They only seem to
work, and then only if
you define
the goal of the application of such medicine in a quite
limited, and anti-human, fashion.”
I have
watched all kinds of people
receive all kinds of medications over my 18 years
personal experience in the trenches of the field of
mental health. By “trenches” I mean direct patient care (the psychiatrists
see their patients briefly, sometimes not
even daily).
It is people
like me who see them all day long and talk to
them as one human being to another (instead of as
treating doctor to insane patient).
What
we call “mental patients” are individuals of great personal courage, who suffer
inwardly in
ways few of us can imagine.
They live in an Age where
they are not understood. They are often lucky to
have caregivers (nurses
and
mental health workers) who treat them as human beings - with
sympathy
and compassion. The mental health system treats them
as things and as numbers on summary sheets. If they are
really lucky
they sometimes get compassionate doctors, but these
doctors are themselves caught up in the
institutional system, which has a quite distinct life of its own.
Years
ago an acute observer of the
business world (Peter
Drucker) put
forward something called “the Peter principle”, which
stated
that: in a hierarchy
people
naturally rise to level of their incompetence.
A
truism for sure, but certainly not always
true. Sometimes
people
are competent, but
the nature of that competence can often be solely for
their own benefit. The present-day financial crisis in America
is an example
of that truism. Our mental health institutional systems, and their
related
pharmaceutical allies, are full of folks not very good at anything
but serving
their own interests. We really shouldn't expect them to produce
something that
helps mental patients - that's
not
the agenda under which they operate.
John
Maynard Keynes wrote this about our
economic system: “Capitalism is the
extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest
of reasons, will somehow work for the
benefit of us all.” A similar statement can be said about the
mental health
system. But we (patients, and families of patients, and Society, and state and
federal
law-makers) fool
ourselves if we expect the institutional mental health
system to
benefit those unique individuals we label "the mentally
ill". The evidence showing
this failure is overwhelming.
Hopefully this paper will
reveal that even common sense
can know and understand this, and that we need to not be dependent upon
so-called
experts to realize something is badly wrong.
Further, we need to
realize that only we can fix it.
The system won't fix
itself.
Of
course, we often think of certain
people as violent and aggressive, and with good judgment
want to
exclude them from our communities. This need to
exclude is a
theme we'll come to at the end of this paper.
Lets
add another approach to our
consideration ...
Above
we noted that the scientist in the
laboratory sought to understand the plant through reducing
it to ash. He did not study the
living plant in its natural environment, but removed
it to the laboratory and disassembled it. The
medical doctor
in this same period of scientific development spent a lot
of time
taking apart the cadaver - the dead body.
He did not concentrate on
the living organism, but on the dead organism.
A
similar kind of thinking has gone on in
brain studies, where
the
physical apparatus is assumed (if we read the literature carefully) to be the basis
for all
mental activity. The scientist studied dead brains, and if he
studied living
brains, he
often studied ones with problems
- that is ill or dysfunctional
brains (such as people with the split
brain problem).
If we
do a survey of psychological
literature, we
find different attitudes there as well. Some study
optimum states of consciousness, others only diseased or
deviant states of consciousness.
Recall the Chief of
Psychiatry, and his allies in the pharmaceutical industry - he tests his
drugs on an already ill (socially deviant) population, who can't truly consent, because the real nature
of their abuse by the system is not apparent to them. Like most
people in the
field, he and
his allies consider their activity (the use and
abuse of the unfortunate in the pursuit of limited goals, such as behavioral
modification, knowledge
and
profit) to be
normal - that is okay.
Remember, the
psychiatrist and the
pharmaceutical company are not even trying to heal the
patient, but
only modify behavior.
In the
background here is a very deep
question, upon the rocks of which Western Civilization now
founders.
Natural Science has taken the course where it has
rigorously
decided that there is no spirit in the world - no spirit
in Nature, no
spirit in the human being. All we are, to this
materialistic outlook, is matter.
In
large part this view comes from an
unfortunate truth in the field of psychological studies:
that the
investigator never studies his own mind, but only that
of others, and then only through processes which take
apart (destroy
or eliminate the
living element), or which only look at a
dysfunctional consciousness.
From an ontological (or basic premise) point of view, natural
science mostly uses death processes and disease
processes to try to wrest, from the once living and healthy, its secrets.
Were natural scientists to study their
own minds objectively, the presence of the spirit would
soon be quite
apparent.
The
application of a little common sense
logic might suggest that the secrets of the living and the
healthy will
be found in the study of those elements of existence, where they
arise - that
is in the family and social environment. This is not
easy,
however. While certain thinkers in these fields have
looked to
the positive (Abraham Maslow etc.), the institutional system does not take such an approach.
There
is a view held by some in the field
of psychology that speaks of the "identified patient".
This
is the person who comes to a soul-healer (the
psychologist) in order to
resolve certain personal problems, and many mental health
professionals
realize that the so-called "identified patient" might be
the most
mentally healthy person in that family. At the least
this person
recognizes a problem, but the root of the problem may not
be discovered
in the individual, but only in the family-matrix.
A
related theme ...
It
took a while, but women finally understood that this same
method of
thinking had led doctors to think of birth as a disease
process, and such views had to be
opposed and eliminated (a struggle not yet over). In a similar
way, we have to resist taking the so-called
deviant out of
Society in order to study them in isolation, but rather we
need to keep the whole together, and recognize that they
aren't so much deviant, as unique and highly individual.
It is in fact Society that
needs to be
healed of the assumption that unusual mental states (and their related
behaviors) are an "illness".
That
is the true insanity - to take the living personality and treat it
like the
plant in the laboratory where we first destroy it before
we can
understand it. To
repress
the unusual personality through powerful and intrusive
artificial (not
living) chemical
forces, simply
to coerce changes in behavior, is not healing.
It is
in fact the worst kind of tyranny - the tyranny of the majority (who declare
themselves superior psychologically) over an
essentially helpless
minority (the
different). It says more about us, as a Society, than it does
about them. It reveals our "us and them" assumptions, and our moral
weaknesses in shunning them and setting them
outside our company, all the while pretending as if we were
helping them, when the raw truth is
that we are only helping ourselves.
It is
Society that lacks the sanity of
true charity, and
an
honest impulse to help (and or heal) the weak and troubled. Its far past
time for us to grow into a greater maturity
in our social relations with the different.
Lets
come at this once more with a
slightly different emphasis ...
Healing the Healer: the first steps in a sane future
evolution of psychiatry and psychology
-
When
Freud's
works were translated into
English, from the
German, the terms geistes and seele were
translated as mind, and
not as
spirit and soul, which
easily
could have been done (c.f. Bruno
Bettelheim's Freud and man's soul, A.A.Knopf, 1983).
Thus continued
and deepened the materialization of the underlying
thinking of those
who sought during the 19th
century
to treat problems of human inner life - of
the psyche - the soul (which
as
everyone knows is the root term for the words psychology
and psychiatry).
Modern
scientific
thinking on the brain now seeks to explain all inner
states
of the human being today as consequences of material
causes. Mind and brain
are now seen as equivalent.
The Fall, from
a one
time appreciation of the human spirit and soul dimensions
of existence, is, within
scientific
thinking, nearly
complete. At
least at
the level of assumptions.
"It is old hat to say that the brain is
responsible for
mental activity. Such a claim may annoy the likes of Jerry
Falwell or
the Ayatollah, but it is more or less the common
assumption of
educated people in the twentieth century. Ever since
the scientific revolution, the guiding view of most
scientists has been
that knowledge about the brain, its cells and its
chemistry will
explain mental states. However, believing
that the brain supports behavior is the easy part: explaining how is
quite another." (Mind Matters: How the
Mind and Brain interact to Create
Our Conscious Lives, Michael S.
Grazzanica Ph.D. pp 1, Houghton Baffling, Boston 1988).
[emphasis added]
This
process
of materialization of our ideas of human inner states of
being
has now gone so far that some believe today that there is
no "I"
, or "ego"
or "self
consciousness", and
that this
perception of self by the brain
is nothing but a chemically manufactured illusion.
Into
this
minefield today come those who feel called to what remains
of the
profession of "soul
healer".
Even
Grazzanica, in
a recent
dialog with the writer Tom Wolfe, when
questioned
on this very issue, was
loath to
admit such could be possible.
This interview, broadcast
on C-Span
Books, shows
Grazzanica rising from his chair and moving around so
certain was he
that the I or ego was real.
All the same, he
had to confess
that some evidence more and more suggested otherwise.
To
appreciate
the depth of this problem for modern humanity, the
reader is
urged to try to speak
or write
of human interactions without using personal pronouns, for
this is
the ultimate implication of this train of thought: If
there is no
I then there is no you, nor
he, or she.
All is simply it.
This
last
was dramatically portrayed in the film the Silence of the
Lambs when the
serial killer commands the "it"
to rub on the
oil and for "it"
to obey all commands.
If it is an
imagined serial killer madman that refuses to acknowledge
in his victim
the reality of an I, how
equally
insane then has become certain kinds of thinking in
natural science
that would, in
the name of
some kind of hyper-objectivity, declare
as a
complete illusion the idea of any human subjectivity at
all.
In
a
very real sense, we
can see
that scientific thinking has run up against a wall of
sorts. At the same
time, a careful
review of the research reveals that this wall only really
exists in the
conceptual frame of reference in which all this research
is conducted. It
is not the
facts of experience that are flawed, but
the thinking
that makes the errors. It
is the paradigm
itself that
has reached the limit of its viability (c.f. Thomas
Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).
Now
the
writer of this little essay is not unfamiliar with these
fields of
interest, but
as
previously noted was in his work life drawn into them, albeit
not at
the professional level of the doctors.
I have 18 years
in the
trenches mental health, from
lay
therapy in California in the 1970's, to
group-home
work with adolescents in the 1980's
to ten years
in a for-profit psychiatric facility in New Hampshire in
the 1990's.
I've been a
counselor, an
orderly and
a mental health worker. Nor
am I
uneducated, but
I have
degrees in pre-seminary (B.A.)
and Law (J.D.)
My avocation (now
full time
in retirement) is
philosophy, and
this at a
level far beyond ordinary academic philosophy.
With this
aside set out, let
us
continue.
These
limits
of the paradigm of scientific materialism have been
reached
everywhere. The
studies of
consciousness and how that might arise from a material
brain still are
unable to explain how this happens or what consciousness
is. There
are
theories, but
nothing
testable. In
reality for
this thinking, the
sacrifice
of the idea of self-consciousness is just a cheap and easy
way to get
rid of a very big problem.
Over
in
physics, the natural scientist
has
his own problem with consciousness, for
his
split-beam experiments prove in this field that the
fundamental
indeterminacy of states of matter does not become "real"
until the
observing subjective self-consciousness acts upon the
experiment. The
observer
can't actually keep any longer his own subjectivity
outside the work - the
two remain
interconnected.
This
is
true also with regard to a great deal of research being
done on the
brain. The researcher
in these fields often has to ask the subjectivity (the "I")
of his subject
to engage in certain "mental"
actions, in
order for a
brain scan to have something to look at.
The subject is
to look at pictures, try
to access
memory and so forth. The
problem
comes when the experiment is thought about afterward, and
researcher
tries to create his "model"
or theory, and
not
include the facts that the subjectivity of the researcher
and the
researcher's subject, first
had to
make a social agreement before the "mental"
act even
arises.
The
physicist
knows he can't do this (refuse
any
longer to recognize the participation of his own
consciousness and
self-conscious choices) anymore, so
perhaps it
is time for those who do research on the mind to recognize
the same
fact.
In Mind Matters, Grazzanica, having
already
likened brain to a mechanism, then
says
paradoxically: "A thought can change brain chemistry, just
as a physical event in the brain can change a thought". My
question
for Grazzanica is: what
does he
think causes the
thought which changes
the brain chemistry?
Clearly
to
the naive experience of any thinking subject, it
is their
own self-conscious activity that directs thought.
In point of
fact, there is no
experiment and even no theory, without
the
thinking of the scientist.
Where
this
leads us then is to this:
Since
the
psychiatrist and the psychologist are human, and
flawed (as we all are
flawed), can
it not be
possible that hidden
within
modern theories of consciousness are assumptions that are
no longer
justified precisely because we have arrived at the above
noted limits?
To
make
the question as stark as possible: Can a
researcher or "healer"
in the field of "mental"
health, subject
his
patients to treatments
he
would not do
to himself
or to his own children? Have
any
doctors prescribing ECT, for
example, actually had
ECT?
The
easy
answer is that it seems necessary to engage in this kind
of
treatment in
order to
help the patient. But
this is
falsified by the fact that quite often the soul healer no
longer
believes he is healing a subjectivity or
self-consciousness, but
in fact is
really only altering behavior.
Certainly, in
many
circumstances, the
subjective
self-consciousness of the patient wants some kind of
relief from inner
torments, but
simultaneously
the social order surrounding the patient seeks and needs
a change of behavior, which
this
same social order considers to be deviant, or
outside the
acceptable norm.
Further, since
the soul
healer no longer thinks of the subjectivity as real, but
only the
material brain, then
all kinds
of gross processes and adjustments become possible, because
one is
really only dealing with the alteration of a mechanical
system. Biological to
be sure, but (and
this with
a kind of unrecognized denial)
essentially a
thing, not a person.
The system of mental health seems to run itself these days, and the soul healer is just a cog in a unhealthy aspect of the social organism, whose purpose more and more requires of its participants that they not feel either sympathy or empathy with their patients.
Is
it
not one of the costs to the psyche of those who work in
this field
that they have to stop having normal human feeling, and
basically
dehumanize their patients on some level in order to
subject them to
such powerful forms of suppression of the individual
spirit? Mental health
professionals routinely subject their patients to chemical
restraints
on behavior, while
at the
same time never actually believing they are curing the
patient of a
treatable illness.
Remember, please, psychiatry
has
become almost entirely behavioral in its approaches.
No longer is
the subjective inner state of being of the patient
relevant. All
is driven
by the need to define certain
behaviors
as undesirable (the
DSM-V), and
then to
attempt to modify them without respect
for
the subjectivity of the patient.
The
subjectivity (how they feel
about the
treatment) of the
patient is
less and less a concern, and
modification
of unwanted behaviors the entire goal, for
the
individual spirit is here being sacrificed to the assumed
needs of the
social organism for
order. Any individual
unable to conform to social order is quickly defined (already
in
school, and sometimes
even earlier in the family) as
either
criminally or mentally defective.
(for a
sociological perspective on this read: Deviance and
Medicalization: from Badness to Sickness, Conrad
and
Schneider, Merrill
Publishing
Company, 1985)
Is
there
a way out?
Before
trying
to answer that question, lets
take a
look at the whole situating in its basic form.
Are the individuals crazy, or is Society crazy
First lets step back a bit and think about growing up in modern culture. What was it like to live in a family and go to school and then join the work force?
Some
examples:
Suppose
you
didn't like to sit still in class.
You were
curious and perhaps gregarious.
You wanted to
touch things, and
play with
them and talk to the other kids, and
do fun
stuff. You were full
of life and full of spirit.
But
the
adults around you had, even
prior to
your arrival, already "conformed"
to the social
norms, and so they
expected you to "conform"
too.
In
the
family, if
you didn't
behave you were probably physically and/or emotionally
punished, although
no
one likes to admit how much this still
goes on
today.
When
you
survived your families rules and the school's rules, you
went to
work. At work you
had a boss and he had his rules too.
These also you
need to survive, because
in
order to live you had to eat, in
order to
eat you had to have money to buy food, and
in order
to have money you had to work for a boss.
Unless
you
were criminal or crazy, that
is
deviant and non-conformist - that
is
irrepressible of spirit in one way or another and wouldn't
follow
normative social rules "just
like
everyone else".
Everywhere while growing up some "authority" (with a great deal of practical power over you) demanded you do what it wanted you to do, and not what you wanted to do.
We
all
go through this and it seems to make a lot of sense.
Everyone more
or less agrees this makes a lot of sense, and
it is the
normal or standard thing to do, so
most
everyone does it.
Shouldn't
be
a problem, right?
Except
for
a couple of things we tend not to connect to growing up
and
learning to conform to the social authority which has
spent this
enormous amount of effort to get us to be what it wants us
to be and
not to be what we want to be, such
as:
STRESS
and
ILLNESS, both PHYSICAL
and PSYCHOLOGICAL!!!!!!
Opps?!?!?
All
that
energy and spirit that gets pressed down during growing
up, through the
power
exercised by the "authority"
towards the
social conformance urged upon us by society, moves
into our
psychological and physical organism and causes stress and
illness.
So
for
all the good we believe we do by using our authority on
children to
get them to conform to social norms, maybe
that's
not such a good idea after all.
The
spirited
nature of the child has a kind of kinship with water and
similar fluids (there
are other kinships as well).
The one I have
in mind here, however, is
concerned
with a well known physical law: the
incompressibility
of fluids. This
is how
your brake system on your car works. Because
the
brake fluid is incompressible, when
you push
your foot on the brake pedal, this
fluid, trapped in the
tubes of the brake system, pushes
the
brakes (whether disc or pad).
Because of
other laws of physics the force of the foot gets
multiplied, either
by
changes in the diameter of the tubes or assisted by engine
power (this makes no
difference to the analogy).
What
this
means is that when we use authority, either
in the
family, and/or the
school and/or the work place to repress the spirited
nature of the
individual, we stress the rest of
the
"system" of
our being
and nature, both
physically
and psychologically. [See
the film The Village, by M. Night
Shyamalan, for a fairy tale like metaphorical look at
these kinds of
social issues.]
Then
later, when the
stressed individual acts "mental", or "criminal", we
treat this
problem with those social systems, which
are even
more
authoritative
and not less. Even
with
physical illness we do the same - the
medical
profession uses its "authority"
to get us to
take drugs, and
the drugs
are a "physical authority"
applied to our
bodies and minds. Instead
of
offering more freedom from stress, we
increase
the stress (remember all those
nasty "side effects"?).
Maybe we really need to think out the whole damn structure of our social culture better from top to bottom, and in the meantime we ought perhaps to stop whacking the "mentally" ill (overstressed spirited human beings) over the head with more authority to conform (whether the rules of a hospital or the physical rules of a drug).
From
this
point of view, its
just might
seem like society
is more crazy
than the individual; or, that
the
collective is more stupid than the one.
To
return
to the question of what might be done...
The
point
of this little paper is not to attack those called to the
professions of soul healing.
They are, in
fact, caught in
between. On
the one
hand there is the social order that wants something done
about "them"
- the
deviants.
On another
hand is the massive presence of the paradigm of scientific
materialism, which
will not
tolerate any mention of spirit or soul, but
rather
insists (with less and less
evidence everyday) that
all is
matter, and all
explanations of human existence must be based upon
materialist or
physical conceptions.
Some
even
create prophecies about the end of the human, and
the supplanting of
the human with the biomechanical. They imagine we
will discover
how to transplant the consciousness of the human being
into the memory
chips of a machine, thus giving us imperishable bodies and
immortal
consciousness.
At
the
other end are those - the "them"
- the
deviants. We
still don't
know how much behavior is derived from Nature and how much
is derived
from Nurture. What
we do
know, those of us
lucky enough not
to be
caught up "in
the system", is
that we
don't want someone messing with our inner life.
This most
personal sphere of autonomy - our
own
thoughts, feelings
and
impulses of will - this
we will
guard even to the point of violence if necessary.
We
understand
the American and
French
revolutions. We
applaud the
iconoclast, who
manages
their individuality without getting
too deviant
- we
even often
call them artists.
We worry about
tyranny, especially the
tyranny of the majority. We
even have
gone so far today, that conformance
itself is
often seen as a
character flaw. That
is, until your non-conformance
goes too far.
Today
more
and more the parents and friends of psychiatric patients
find what
is done to their kin to be unjust, even
criminal. Since
the
patient is often unable to advocate for
himself, others must
take up the task.
Pressures
then
mount on the soul healer. If
we step
back from this, and
look at it
as a kind of an organic process in cultural development, we
could ask
whether or not the soul healer is in fact just that person
who can do
the most for all parties, given
that the
soul healer is already in the
center of
the storm. If
the soul
healer takes a stand, then
all will
be forced to pay attention.
the weight of scientific materialism
+
need for social order -> the soul healer <- the kin of the patients
+
the
patients themselves
The
soul
healer is himself a spirit struggling to be scientific, a
member of
the social order, kin
of some in
need, and perhaps
has even been a patient. All
which
surrounds the soul healer socially should help the soul
healer, instead of
demanding that the center conform to their one-sided point
of view. If we find a
way to heal the soul healer, we
might well
begin to heal the whole.
Some
practical
suggestions:
First, concerning scientific materialism: This approach, in that it seeks knowledge of consciousness, makes one glaring fundamental error. It assumes nobody has studied consciousness before. The whole cultural history of mankind is full of such studies, all of which are practical and experimental and rational. Some seem to lean toward a vague mysticism, but this is only when see from the outside. The more modern are eminently scientific. A partial list: the Middle Way of Lua Tzu; Yoga; Tibetan and Zen Buddhism, Quabbalah; Gnosticism; Sufism; Alchemy; Rosicrucianism; Transcendentalism; Christian Hermeticism; and, Anthroposophy (this last is the most modern and scientific).
The
soul
healer will find much to aid his ability to help
scientific
materialism overcome its own one-sidedness, by taking
in hand
his own path to self
knowledge.
Second, concerning
the
social order: the
soul
healer needs to speak plainly to power, and
recognize
that while political
power
can want almost
anything, a
great deal
it wants is not possible, and
let us
still have a free society. Go
too far in
eliminating deviance (something
more
and more hard to define), and
all other
freedoms will be eroded. The
soul
healer, being in the
middle of these social forces, needs
to have
his views particularly respected, for
only he
sees and knows certain aspects of the
whole. The social
order needs to follow the guidance of the soul healer in
how money is
spent and on what.
Third, concerning the kin of the patients: more and more the kin must accept that they are often (but not always) the best caregivers. Their hearts are most open and committed, but such care must be cooperative in nature ... all four groups, who surround the soul healer in the center have to work together. In practical terms this means that families and communities in which special individuals have been born and raised, perhaps need to stop wanting to send these individuals away, and hide them in institutions.
Fourth, the
patients
themselves: they
need to
realize that the more they want to
indulge in
socially deviant behaviors, the
more
necessary they
make it
that they be isolated
from
the rest. No
one, the conformist
or the non-conformist, can
force
themselves on another individual
human
being. Actions will
have consequences, and
no one
will have a perfect life.
What
becomes
essential, for
all five
parts of this organism directed at soul health, is
mutual
trust and cooperation.
Each has a
role. All must sit at
the same table.
Nothing can
change
overnight, but
with
patience and agreement the whole can make progress, one
day at a
time.
This
following
also needs to be said to the soul healer:
Immediately
you
define deviant behavior as symptomatic of a disease (mental
or
otherwise), you
have
locked in a box a whole other set of questions that need
to be asked.
Predominant
among these questions are whether the social order itself
is healthy. If
the social
order breeds deviance, then
why do we
blame the deviant? If
all causes
are material, why
do we even have a
debate about Nature and Nurture?
The
main
problem, from a
philosophy of knowledge point of view, is
that we
live in a time where there is an excess of analysis, and
hardly any
synthesis. Remember: the
scientific
enterprise (at the present, this
can change) is dominated
by analytic thinking - thinking
which
takes apart what it observes in order to make it
easier to
analyze. The fewer
variables, the
easier to
define the experiment.
Eddington
called
this, at the
beginning of the 20th
Century, knowing more
and more about less and less.
Detail
multiplies far faster than wise synthesis.
So for
example, physics,
having confined itself to dealing only with what it could
count (quantities
to the
exclusion of qualities), can
only
create a world view (the
big bang) based upon
number relationships - no
other
relationships having been investigated or understood.
The soul
healer, trapped in the
scientific model which only counts and takes apart, can't
any
longer understand his patient whose subjective psyche is
complex in the
extreme, and completely
inter-related and inter-dependent - not
just
inwardly, but
more
crucially socially.
For
the
soul healer there are almost too many variables,
at least in
the sense of what is acceptable science today.
Thus, everything
has
become dependent on material chemistry (in
its widest
sense), while
the
reality the soul healer faces is obviously a mixture of
material
chemistry and emotional or social "chemistry".
Perhaps we need an entirely new discipline: social alchemy,
which would
be concerned with how we transform the soul-lead of human
weakness and
darkness, into soul-gold for the benefit not just of the
individual but
the community as well.
Part
of
the problem is the pursuit
by the
soul healer of pure objectivity, following
the
lead
(in
a
sense) of physics.
By various
kinds of rules (developed
over time in the history of soul healing such
as the problem of transference), the
soul
healer more and more abandoned his own subjectivity.
Yet, and
everyone
in this field knows this, the
best talk
therapy work is often done in groups, and
involves a
great deal of perception on the part of the soul healer of "feelings".
Unperceived
emotional
chemistry has to be brought into the open.
In order to do
this, the best guide
is actually the self-awareness of the soul healer's own
feeling life. A
therapist
not seeing his own therapist on a regular basis is not
upholding the
necessary standard of self discipline.
An explorer of
the spiritual dimensions of human inner life, that
is not
studying with someone more experienced, will
also fall
into error. If
the soul
healer combines his work (that
is he
studies his own mind and the art of soul healing), will
need to
work not only with other soul healers, but
with those
whose spiritual practice is mature.
Those
who
want to move in this direction will find, obviously, a
mine field. Therapists
are
human and subject to much temptation - sexual
manipulation
of the patient being an obvious case in point.
The soul
healer who pursues real self knowledge in an objective
fashion, will discover
that his best guide is his own moral attitude, a
problem that
is not at all simple.
Feelings
are
best perceived when we develop the ability to think with
the heart. Thinking
with
the heart, however, is
best done when our
conscious
motive is to realize the good.
We will the
good, and then think
with the heart. Moreover, the
gesture of
what is the good begins in the head.
We think first, what
is the
good, then we will
the good and let the heart be what it was designed to be: an
organ of
perception.
Why
does
this work in the realm of soul healing?
Because
what
every human being wants is to be known and cared about
non-judgmentally by other human beings.
This is where
the child begins its life, and
where all
the deep pain of growing up is lodged.
At the same
time this is a very frightening want.
We want our
truth to be known, and
our social
order discourages us from expressing our truth.
The social
order already in the family doesn't want the truth of who
we are, but rather
some kind of mask. Everyone
there
is already wearing masks, and
this we
imitate from childhood onward.
The very first
thing deep psychological art we learn is to put on a mask.
That
is
the fundamental nature of childhood and it leads easily to
the
correlative creation of an outer personality - it
is a mask
designed to navigate troubled emotional seas.
We have how we
behave, and then who
we really are inside - known
to our
secret self. Conflict
arises
between the two modes of being - the
mask and
the reality. Everyone
solves
the conflict in unique ways.
Some parts we
mask, other parts we
share. The
variations
on the mixture are remarkable, and
once we
really appreciate the nature of individuality - the true
spirit of the
individual human being - we
will
discover that scientific materialism has been itself a
mask hiding our
fear of religious domination for a long long time.
The
social
order itself put on a mask.
The whole
advertising industry
exists
to manipulate this
conflict
for the benefit of commerce.
The soul
healer will find that in order to truly heal the
individual, he
must
simultaneously help to heal the social.
And, all
the keys
to this vast work lie within his own humanity.
We discover
and heal the truth of ourselves, and
we at the
same time discover and heal the truth of the world. Fully
half of
what the soul healer can know is available to him only
through a
scientific and objective introspection.
At present the
soul healer only knows what is available through his
senses. What lies
interior, a
vast
landscape already explored by many others, remains
potential. Unexplored, the
rest of
the world is incomplete. Once
explored, no
secret is
prohibited.
What happens when we do this
Consider
now
two common problems: hearing
voices
and serious depression.
From
the
side of scientific materialism, these
often
reported phenomena are diagnosed as defects at the level
of brain
chemistry. The
mind, as a mechanism, is
seen to be producing
such effects because those who are not seen as deviant
supposedly do
not experience them. The
sub-conscious
thought of the soul healer is that since I do not
experience voices or become paralyzed with depression, such
phenomena
must be a flaw in the brain chemistry itself.
The logical
conclusions then is that if I can change the brain
chemistry with drugs
or ECT, I have fixed
the problem.
This
is
very reasonable, as
long as we
refuse to recognize the inherent contradictions and
present day limits
of scientific thought about consciousness.
Suppose, for
example, we do
something very dangerous (only
at this
time, and in this
essay, as a thought experiment), and
consider
the possibility that the paranoid schizophrenics'
report of
hearing voices is in fact accurate.
They are
hearing voices that are real.
Granted this
is not a normal condition for a human being, but
why do we
assume that because it is abnormal, it
is not true. The
one fact
does not automatically follow from the other.
Further, if we turn to the understanding of the historical (and recent) mind sciences (who dangerously don't accept that the mind is based in matter only), we will find all kinds of explanation for the voices. So as to not complicate things, let us just consider such a view as might arise in the West, and is modern and scientific: Anthroposophy.
If
the
voices are real, what, possibly, is
the patient
hearing?
To
say
invisible people is to mock the experience of the
individual having
the experience, but
at the
same time, this
is
precisely what we see when we notice a paranoid
schizophrenic walking
down the street, seemingly
talking
to the air - talking to
someone that is apparently not there (we don't see
anything).
Our
culture
defines this as insane and seeks to rid this individual of
this
experience. Yet, in
Western
mind sciences, two
clear
possibilities are recognized. One
is that
the schizophrenic is talking to the dead, or
that they
are engaged in a kind of spiritually abnormal dialog with
the double or
the shadow. These
mind
sciences would not say that the individual talking to
invisible people
is behaving in a spiritually healthy way, yet
at the
same time they would say that what the schizophrenic
experiences is
real, and not
illusory (albeit warped by psychic imbalances).
This
turns
everything on its head, certainly.
Yet, it
also
redefines the problem, and
in a quite
significant way. The
problem at
once ceases to be one of ridding the brain mechanism of a
mechanical
dysfunction, but
of actual
soul healing, for
something
is out of sorts in terms of the self-consciousness of the
individual. The
inwardness
is out of balance, and
what is
out of balance can be restored to harmony.
Nor
does
this exclude physical therapies.
Rudolf Steiner, the
discoverer
of Anthroposophy, gave
a series
of lectures to an audience of both pastors and doctors, which
he
called Pastoral
Medicine. He
talked at
length and specifically about mental illness, putting
forward
the idea that many such individuals needed both medical
care
and pastoral care, simultaneously.
Just
to
give an example from personal experience.
I was working
on a woman's unit at a for-profit psychiatric facility
where was
admitted a nun. She
was a
member of an order that teaches children and she no doubt
was
exhibiting anomalous behaviors.
What struck me
as particularly tragic, was
that while
she was in the hospital, the
inner
ground of her spiritual life (daily
prayer
and Mass etc.) was
ignored. If fact, I
was the only
one who would talk to her about her spiritual life, and
it was
clear how much she hungered just to have someone listen to
that aspect
of her soul.
Of
course, the reader may
now say this is ridiculous, but
the reader
no doubt has not practiced meditation and other inner
disciplines for
years. Had they
engaged in such practices, the
schizophrenics' experiences
then take on an entirely different meaning.
Hearing voices
and seeing things that supposedly aren't there is a common
stage of
spiritual development well know to those on a meditative
path. When mind
becomes sufficiently inwardly silent, it
also
becomes receptive to that which is otherwise too subtle to
be
experienced by ordinary consciousness.
Our
self-conscious
subjectivity is actually more real than matter, and
when it
wakes up to itself sufficiently, it
discovers
another world along side the one we normally experience
through the
senses.
It
would
go too far here to give meditation instruction, but
at the
least lets revisit some of what science thinks is knows.
For example, it
is common
in an experiment, where
the
brain is being watched
with a CT scan, to
observe a
certain sequence: the
subjectivity
is asked to perform a certain mental function (solve
a
puzzle, for example), and
then at
some point there appears to the scan a great deal of
activity in some
part of the brain, after
which
the subjectivity reports the solution.
These
observations are seen as demonstrating not only that the
brain solved
the puzzle (after all the observed
electrical activity occurred in
time prior to the report of the solving of the puzzle), but
also what
part of the brain was involved.
The
problem
here isn't the observations being made by the
investigating
scientist, but
rather
with the interpretation of their meaning.
Remember above
that we pointed out the tendency in brain studies to leave
aside the
social agreement between the investigating subjectivity
and the
subjectivity of the one whose brain is being studied.
The physicist
knows he has to reinsert this into his appreciation of
what happened in
his split-beam experiment, so
lets do the
same here.
Causally
the
first thing that has happened is the social agreement by
which the
self-consciousness of the scientist asked the
self-consciousness of the
research subject to
engage is certain activity (solve
the
puzzle in this case).
Without that
request, nothing
happens.
Just
as
with the indeterminacy problem for the physicist, there
is no
brain activity to observe without the social agreement
asking the
subjectivity of the one whose brain is being studied to
engage in
self-conscious mental activity.
The next thing
observed is the electrical discharges in the brain.
Prior to this, however, the
subject
has inwardly acted (which the subject certainly
experiences, and the
scientist if he is honest about his own introspective
knowledge of his
own mind also regularly experiences).
The causal
train is: scientist
asks > subject acts
inwardly > brain activity
is observed > then
the
subject reports the solution to the puzzle.
The actual
brain activity is surrounded by four self-conscious
subjective acts, and
it is only
our preconceived paradigm that makes us isolate the brain
activity as
if it is causally independent.
The fourth act
is the scientist's subjective act of interpretation of the
meaning of
the experiment.
1) scientist asks
2) subject acts inwardly
3) brain activity is observed
4) subject reports a solution to the puzzle
5)
scientist
interprets the meaning of the experiment
Clearly
the
observed brain activity is caused by the inner activity of
the
puzzle solving subject, and
therefor
the observed brain activity is a consequence of, not
the cause of, this
inner
puzzle-solving act. What
is
actually being observed, once
we free
ourselves of the constraints of the paradigm, is
a spiritual
act which needs a material brain to act in a material
world.
The
research
subject can't hear the voice of the scientist asking for
his
cooperation, without
the
physical ear, nor
can the
research subject report the solution to the puzzle without
the material
apparatus of the voice box.
If, for
example, we wired the
scientists up as well, we
would see
the whole sequence of events quite clearly.
But every time
there was observable brain activity, there
is prior
to that the spiritual activity (thinking)
of the
participants in the experiment.
Yes, I
know, there are lots
of brain activity going on without the self-conscious
intervention of
the thinking subject, but
all that
just goes to prove the observation of soul healers in the
centuries
prior to the full materialization of scientific thinking, when
Freud and
others re-discovered the existence of the sub-conscious
and unconscious
elements of human inner life (something know to ancient
mind sciences
for centuries). The
self-conscious
subject has to be coaxed into sufficient self observation (talk
therapy) in order to be
able to report, what
has
otherwise been hidden from the I, or
self-consciousness.
If
this
process of self examination is aided by the modern mind
sciences
rooted in deep inner disciplines, then
it is
possible to go even further in the direction of needed
discoveries that
can shed a great deal of light on the soul health of many.
What the
Freudians etc. discovered
was
just the surface of a plane of existence already well
known to
Alchemists, and
others, for centuries.
The
sub-conscious and unconscious aspects of human inner life
are already a
well explored territory.
If
this
understanding is then integrated with all the remarkable
research
on brain physiology and chemistry, a
whole
unknown world of soul healing can result, such
that ECT
and overly powerful drugs then become completely
unnecessary. The
scientists
of the material world have done a great work, which
is only
limited in its
application by the restrictions imposed by the no longer
workable
paradigm of strict scientific materialism (all
is matter, there
is no
spirit).
Let
us
come at this once more, this
time with
respect to depression, instead
of
hearing voices. What
do the
deep explorers of our shared human inwardness already know
about
depression?
What
is
the basic phenomena of depression?
It is a
paralysis of the will, and
this a
varying degrees. The
deeper the
mal-ease, the
more
immobile the patient. Some
would
take to their beds and never leave, if
not
otherwise treated.
The
mind
sciences of the Occident (as
opposed to
those of the Orient - who
are
differently oriented in terms of goals)
have long
recognized what is to be called: the
doctrine
of the temperaments (the
choleric, the
phlegmatic, the
sanguine
and the melancholic).
These are
quite apt objective observations of general human
characteristics, and
can be
quite useful in their application.
Depending on
the temperament the course taken by depression will be
different. A
choleric
might ignore it until some crisis ensues, while
the
melancholic will find self-satisfied glory in it, for
it proves all his worst
fears.
What
is
similar to all is the influence of the double or the
shadow. There really
is no understanding of the human being without
appreciating not only
soul and spirit, but
also the
dark side - the shadow.
One writer (see
Meditations
on the Tarot, Arcanum
XV The
Devil), speaks
in
quite practical terms of the tempter, the
prosecutor
and of egregores.
Egregores
are
older (and wiser)
terms for what
addicts know as “the
monkey on my back”.
I have taken
to abandoning that name (it
is clearly
too archaic), and
substituting
the idea of “wounds”.
We bear wounds
in the soul (psyche), some
of which
fester in such a way that they overwhelm our conscious
will. I point out
the temperaments and the three-fold nature of the shadow
simply to
suggest that this way of thinking is as equally complex
and rich as is
the present day conventional view.
Not only that, but
what is
being offered here is meant to supplement, not
replace
the conventional view.
I
also
mean to suggest that depression is complicated, and
one has to
in any event carefully observe and examine whoever has
such a problem
with attention to a lot of detail, for
not only
is everyone quite individual, as
all soul
healers appreciate, the
situation
is delicate, and
the
patient very vulnerable and unsure -
they won't
know what facts to share, and
may often
hide relevant phenomena for a variety of personal reasons.
If
it
is clear that the basic problem is a paralysis of the
will, and a related
experience of “life
is too much”, then
we can be
fairly sure that the shadow, in
the form of
the prosecutor is in play. In
the soul, the
ego (or spirit)
is overwhelmed
by the dark.
A
major
aspect of the problem is that we tend to think that this
is an
experience that should be eliminated -
people, we
often
believe, ought to not
suffer, but should be
happy. A choleric, who
can more
easily ignore a deep case of the
“blues”, will
look down
upon a melancholic, who
revels in
this mood. Since
our
culture teaches no coherent inner disciplines (materialism
doesn't
recognize their need), people
do not
think that the ego can be taught how to manage their soul
life out of
their own inner will. Thinking
the
brain is the cause of all inner states, we
don't
really following those lines of thought that would lead us
to
appreciating other possibilities.
At
a
cultural age where some think the self-consciousness is an
illusion, we
will no
doubt never consider that this very self-consciousness can
become the
master of its
feeling
life. Of course, all
kinds of
people engage in serious self-help or self-development
disciplines, with
success. Some people do
manage, through such
as the 12 Steps, to
overcome
addiction and alcoholism, using
a
discipline that sees the whole process as spiritual in
nature. Our culture is
full of examples where the I masters something of the
inner life, unless
you get
in the mental health system, which
isn't
permitted (in general)
to apply any
other treatment modalities but medications.
I
always
found it the strangest kind of paradox, in the hospital
where I
worked for ten years, to go from the adult unit to the
substance abuse
unit, where two
entirely different paradigms were at work.
What was even
stranger was to watch how those labeled dual-diagnosis were treated.
A bi-polar
addict was a odd creature indeed (you
just have
to read the treatment plans and the doctors intake
interview, to
see just
how weird this can be).
For the addict
especially, the
problem
was very acute, for
what most
troubles them (their
addiction) tends to
require that they take no drugs at all.
But if they
are simultaneously described as bi-polar with an
addiction, and
mostly
depressive (those with mania
aren't so bothered by their so-called mental disease)
there is a big
problem.
How
to
you prescribe to an addict an upper to defeat their
depression?
If
we
survey the field over the last 40 years, we
will see
how just at this juncture
the
profession itself created addictions to mood altering
drugs. Have a
mood disorder (that
is have a
soul state the culture defines as deviant), why
lets give
you a happy pill. Oh, sorry, you've
become
an addict to Valium now? Gosh, you
sure are a
wreck. (The system and the
doctors are not responsible -
right?)
To
summarize:
The
soul
healer who
undertakes a
serious study of
his own
inwardness, following
a
modern mind science, will
find
their ability to help people greatly increased with every
step they
take in self knowledge and understanding.
Details
can
be found in my books: the Way of the Fool;
and, American Anthroposophy.
the forces opposed to the self-development
of the soul healer
Social
institutions
acquire power, and
their
leaders gain wealth and prestige.
Pharmaceutical
corporations have a lot at stake in manufacturing drugs to “help”
the mentally
ill.
Politicians like to be seen as “doing
something”.
People in
general don't want to be bothered by deviant behavior.
Patients cry
out for aid.
Like
many
people, the soul
healer is confronted with a house of mirrors of choices.
He can swim
with the pack, or
plot his
own course. One
way is
easier, the other
harder. Which way does
Society need him to swim? If we
define Society by its power structures, those structures
will certainly
need the soul healer to provide services that lets the
powerful take
action. In the Soviet Union, hospitalization for a
"mental"
illness was a political tool of a totalitarian State.
Recently
during the Bush II administration, psychologists were used
to oversee
torture and to help in its application.
As
I
pointed out above, the soul healer is in the center of a
surrounding
set of forces, and this fact then reveals something else.
While
we can urge that a whole society move in a certain
direction, if we
understand the practicalities of how social change
actually arises we
realize that such change occurs one individual at a time.
It
can't happen by fiat from Washington, but only organically
out of
individual free choices.
Think
globally,
act locally. Only the soul healer can give us the
example and from there suggest what others can and ought
to do.
The coming revolution is personal and biographical.
We do it from within our own lives. My
novel America
Phoenix begins with
the following discussion, which is entirely relevant here
and a good
place to end (with a bit of Art):
"Synergy?" said Hex-man.
"Right, synergy" replied J.C. "Things happen together. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. We tend to think that political and social change requires that we organize movements. Remember when we always talked about the "movement".
"Sort of, that was really before my time".
"Yea, right, okay. So anyway, synergy is about multiple things happening together to create something they can't accomplish alone. Its one of the main organizing principles living in the social organism. Just one, by the way, but for our purposes it will help to understand it.
"Yea, I get it. You and I, we do something together. Get better results than if we do it alone. Plus, other people, people we don't even know. They do stuff, and it interacts with our stuff synergistically. Is that a word?"
"I think so, but you get the basic idea. The thing is we can count on it. In fact we need to become highly aware of it. Think of us as trying to navigate the seas of history. In these seas are currents, and if we can ride some of the currents, stuff happens in a better way, than if we are trying to steer across them or against them. So we have to learn to make mental maps of the seas of social existence, and then find that place we want to work, and with whom - keeping in mind that we aren't alone and that others have similar goals and it all works together synergistically. "
"Okay, I get it I guess. But can you explain a little why this works, especially when people aren't really organized into mass movements?"
"Well, actually, mass movements are kind of dangerous. The more mass the less consciousness. We get mobs and violence. Small groups appreciating that each other exists do better. They concentrate more on what they really can do, and less on ideology. The phrase "think globally, act locally" understands this.
"Try it this way. Lots of people today want to decide for themselves what is true and what is right to do. Think of this impulse, a very common modern human impulse, as a kind of emerging social force in the evolution of human consciousness, or human nature as some might say. But everyone doesn't always agree about what is right, yes? Yet, what happens is that when a lot of people are struggling to do what is right, and not just hiding under the covers, you get a lot of right things being done in a lot of places. The way the social organism works, in its synergistic sense, is that all these right things add up to something more than the individuals can often imagine.
"Everyone has a place, the place right where they are. In that place they seek to do what Plato might have called the Good. This ideal of the Good is like a wonderful landscape, seen from many different directions. So each one of us, seeking to do the Good, helps bring this wonderful landscape more and more into real social existence. Each of us is like a kind of small sun, shining into the social organism our own striving for goodness."
"Okay, I can see that. But how do we know what the Good is?"
"Well, everyone has their own Way of course, but if I was to try to put the how of it into words, it has to do with when we think with our hearts and not just our heads. If we think just with our heads we get a kind of cold and calculating idea, generally one more selfish. But we need to think with our hearts, that is we need to think in a warmer way, more empathic, more caring of the other person, the thou. So we will the good and think with our hearts. Everyone can do that, don't you think. Or at least try."
"Yea, I get it. Don't need somebody to tell us what to do. We do our own thing, and if we will the good and think with our hearts, something happens all over the country or the world because of the synergy principle, something we can't imagine."
"Right, you got it Hex-man. Oh, one other thing. Ever see the movie Six Degrees of Separation?"
"No, what's it about?"
"Well, the story is kind of funny, but it has this idea behind the title. The idea is that between ourselves and any other person there are only six relationships. You know someone, and they know someone else, and so on for six relationships, until each of us is connected to any other person in the world by only six such relationships, or six degrees of separation."
"Crap. Can't be true. You think between me and the President are only six people separated? Shit, no way."
"I don't know, its just the idea. Maybe some math people invented the idea. But there is some truth. We are connected in ways we don't see. You know me. I was in Vietnam, and I knew this CIA guy. Maybe now he works in Washington and his boss knows a Senator, and the Senator knows the President."
"Christ, that is weird."
"Yea, I know. But think about it in a different way, along the lines of what we have been doing with the synergy idea. These connections are real. We influence each other. You need something from me, or I need something from you, then these relationships become important. Things spread like splashes on a pond. Who knows what energy flows along the connections. "
***********************************************************
Transcendentalism Comes of Age*
- the transcendentalist impulse, heretical
Christianity
and American Anthroposophy -
*this title
follows the trail blazed by Owen Barfield's book of essays
called: Romanticism
Comes
of Age,
which sought to show how the romantics were a preview in
time of the
impulses connected to European Anthroposophy.
Here we
do the same thing, only this time seeking to show the same
essential
connection between the transcendentalists and American Anthroposophy
introduction
Some readers
of this will have no idea
what “Anthroposophy” is.
Rudolf Steiner, its scientific
discoverer,
defined it as follows: “Anthroposophy
is
a path of cognition from the spirit in man to the Spirit in
the
Universe.” It
will help to appreciate what I mean by “scientific
discoverer”.
Anthroposophy
is a name given by Steiner
to a universal human capacity.
This potential is developed
naturally in some cases, and only by hard work in
others. In
some individuals there is a mixture of both.
Details can be found in my
book American
Anthroposophy.
This development involves
the awakening
of the will in human thinking (cognition), such
that
this will is able to bring about the metamorphosis of human
thinking from its present state to the new (previously
potential) state.
Thinking then
becomes able, following this
metamorphosis, to
connect
human consciousness to the Spirit, or Universal Consciousness (Emerson's Over-Soul). Emerson
developed this capacity more self-consciously (through hard work
and instinct) and Thoreau was was able to
do it more naturally (instinctively). We know, for example, the degree to which Thoreau was able to be awake within the true
thoughts
of the natural world.
Emerson
described this condition (from one point of view)
in this way, in his essay Nature, written
at
age 33 in 1836: Nature is a thought incarnate and turns to
thought once
again as ice becomes water and then gas. The World is mind
precipitated, and the volatile essence is
forever escaping into the state of free thought. Rudolf Steiner, at age 25, 50 years later in 1886, wrote this in his book A
Theory
of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception: Thought is the last
of a
series of processes by which Nature is formed.
For our
modern conscious, we might describe the
situation this way: The assumption of natural science is that thought is
disconnected from
the world (a kind
of naive dualism). Further, under the remnants of the
once popular doctrine of logical positivism, such as
analytic philosophy and various philosophies of
language, thought
itself (in
consciousness) is
believed to really only be available to be observed and
analyzed when
it enters language in sentences (this is justified by our naive experience of
thinking in
its discursive form, as if we were inwardly speaking to ourselves).
For both Emerson and
Steiner, thought could be
appreciated best right where it appeared before us in our
own
consciousness. And
someone
like Thoreau, didn't
so much think about this, but rather did it.
That is, he thought, and wrote down, or spoke, what he
thought.
Steiner, in particular, described his
book The
Philosophy
of Spiritual Activity as: some results of introspection following the
methods of
natural science.
One was to think about
thinking - to cogitate about cogitation, using as much
as possible the methods of natural science: objective
observation and
experimentation. We are to seek an empirical knowledge of
thought and
thinking, as appears
directly
within our own consciousness. Why?
Because in
that most intimate sphere of
our experience all the secrets of thought and the world as a
co-joined
unity (not
a
dualism, but a
monism) can
be
perceived.
The 19th Century was the full flowering of natural
science. Parallel to that
development, the
Romantics
and the Transcendentalists offered an alternative to the
materialism (all is
matter, there
is no spirit) then coming to dominate the
thinking of the educated Western world. In America, the
transcendentalists appeared at the beginning of the 19th
Century most strongly in Concord, but by the end (the 1880's) the power of that impulse
wained, and by 1890 the Concord School of
Philosophy had closed.
Research by
Steve Burman, presented recently at the
Concord Convocation (directed
by
local Concordian Stuart Weeks), showed
that
even though the Concord School ended, it ended with
the knowledge that something was about to
be born in Central Europe out of German Idealism (Hegel, Schilling, Goethe etc.) This
assessment was
correct, for
simultaneously to this waining (for a time) of the Concord School in America, in Europe
Rudolf Steiner (as a young man) was bringing in the culmination of the work of
German
Idealism and marrying it to the scientific impulse (to the practical application of
this work
he later gave the name Anthroposophy).
In the early 20th Century the idea (but not its practical
realization) of
European Anthroposophy became known in America.
Unfortunately, this took the
course of too much study of things Steiner
wrote and said, and
not
enough practice of inward disciplines.
This confusion of practice
and study is
where the transcendentalist impulse becomes related to
heretical
Christianity.
Traditional
Christianity has become
dominated by systems of belief (rooted in an excess of biblical study), and few people
actually bother to suffer the trials of
practicing fully what is taught in the Gospels.
Heretical Christianity has
always
emphasized practice over dogma, which is why the Roman Church so often declared
these
folks heretics and tortured them and then killed them.
The Gospels
themselves always hinted at
the fundamental problem, by identifying two groups at the Birth: the shepherds
and the
kings. The
kings were related to the old pagan mysteries, which
sacrificed their prior eminence (symbolized by the gifts of
gold etc.), so that the Way of the
Shepherds could begin to live into the world.
This new Way of Faith was
rooted in the
social form of Pastor and Flock.
The stream of kings' wisdom (the more ancient
Way of Gnosis)
did not leave completely, but remained
active
wherever some kind of direct experience of the Divine Mystery was
cultivated
and taught. The
kings
taught that the individual human being did not need a
pastor, and that all individuals
were able themselves to be priests.
This stream
of kings' wisdom, such as the Essenses, Gnostics, Manicheans, Pagans, Alchemists, Rosicrucians, some early natural
philosophers, Christian
Hermeticists, Anthroposophists
etc., was more
interested in the truth than in an official
institutional point of view. By the
time
transcendentalism appeared in Concord, for example, the power of
traditional Christianity to severely punish
heretical thinking had been lost, although the capacity of traditional Christian
authorities to studiously ignore contrary ideas remained.
Such was the
fate of European
Anthroposophy as it slowly emerged in 20th Century Central Europe - the traditional
Churches ignored it. In a similar fashion, Stuart Weeks' effort, through the four years
here in Concord of the annual Concord Convocation, seeking to
unite
transcendentalist thought and Anthroposophy, is basically
ignored by local Concord Churches.
Most lovers of the work
of the transcendentalists here in Concord look to the past - to Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and so forth, and not to the
present, or the future. Even the Convocation
didn't quite know what to do with itself, for like most
of the Anthroposophical Movement worldwide, the Convocation
was
unable to maintain the scientific discipline which Steiner
modeled and
taught.
Enter
American Anthroposophy, or Transcendentalism
Comes of Age. What
does
it mean: Comes
of Age?
This could be
answered in several
different ways. I write that last sentence (thought) so one doesn't
assume that the next sentences tell the
whole tale.
We all know
that time is rushing by at an
almost breakneck speed. Change forces us toward ends we hardly seem
ready to see, much less master.
Both Anthroposophy and
Transcendentalism need to be American - that is practical
and pragmatic.
We are far past a time when
mere good
thoughts and idealism are to be of much use.
Americans are doers of
deeds. We create and invent and accomplish.
American
Anthroposophy, if it actually is
Transcendentalism Comes
of
Age, must be useful to our present social crisis. What then is
American* Anthroposophy as a practice, rather than a
dogma or a
doctrine? What
can
one do with it?
[Steiner
recognized there would come to
be an American Anthroposophy, see my book for details.]
Interesting
enough, Steiner described
Americans as natural
anthroposophists, and being English speakers, they were also
instinctively in what he called the
Consciousness Soul in their life of rights (their public life
of law and politics).
This last means that we
Americans, in spite of our human
flaws, are also at the
leading
edge of social transformation.
We insist, for example, that politics
be moral. We get confused (obviously) by what that means in practice, but we need our
public life to be more than just a vanity
of the power hungry - the sharks, wolves and pirates.
The Republic was founded on
such a need and view, and if American
Anthroposophy can't help with that, then sorry, but come back later when we have the time to be “philosophical” (in the sense of
contemplating our collective navels).
If what was
hinted at above about the
difference between the naive dualism of natural science (thought is disconnect
from the
world), and if Emerson
and
Steiner's appreciation of the fact that thought and world
are a unity (a monism) were better known, we could then begin to
see something practical. The instinctive wisdom of think globally, act locally can become a
science.
Our personal
thoughts are not
disconnected from life, but rather represent a perception of the living
inside of
existence. In
fact, we often
are conflicted because so much of modern life suggests we
can't
personally know, but have to rely on experts and scientists. Everywhere
this is
rebelled against, in small ways and large. As the world
continues its movement toward increasing
social chaos (an
intermediate stage of an ongoing metamorphosis toward a new
civilization - that is, Western Civilization is
in the process of dying into a new becoming), we
are
more and more being thrust on our own powers of observation, judgment and
thought.
We live the immediacy
of our
biographies, not
some
guy in Washington, or some academic in an Ivory Tower. We have to deal
with the
effects of each other's increasing stress driven craziness, and it will be
our own
thinking and judgment that pulls us through.
Emerson could not have put
it more
succinctly: In self trust all virtues
are
comprehended.
Yet, we are wise to
be cautious.
We know we often make
mistakes, and that frequently our
thoughts turn out to not be true.
Science wants to tell us
that we are just material brains, whose impulses were
mapped out millions of years ago by a blind chance
evolution. That's a reasonable (but false) idea, with the existential
problem coming when we face what to do when there is no food
and water
in our house, while
our
neighbor appears to have plenty.
Survivalist and militia
groups are getting ready to treat
this as if we still lived in caves.
What was once called Social
Darwinism is not pretty in
practice, and
many of us expect more of ourselves. The age of
paternalism (dominion over) is giving way to a rebirth of maternalism (communion with).
As this time
of less and less material
wealth descends upon Americans (joining us to social conditions already common
among the
majority of the rest of the world), we
will
face difficult choices. Is Emerson's seeming idealism of self trust and
self
reliance a fiction?
American Anthroposophy is about how to think. Not what, but how. It is practice
not
theory. It is
a science of thinking that gains for the individual all the
confidence
they need in their own capacity for sound judgment in a time
of seeming
social madness. The lessons of Katrina are to be multiplied. We can't
expect the
government to save us, but must learn to rely on ourselves and each
other. As a consequence this new how of thinking has both an
individual and a community component (when necessary, such as when
faced with a personal moral choice, we do it ourselves -
we can also do this new how
of thinking together, through conversation).
While many
will want a kind of simple
Mac-version of this new how of thinking, its deeper
reality is not to be gained like service in a
fast food place. All the same a brief sketch of this new
thinking can be
provided.
Properly
called: Living Thinking (In The Acts of the Apostles this is called the
experience
of holy breath), this transcendental
form
of cognitive activity involves
four
stages of development. These may be identified as thinking about, thinking with, thinking within and thinking as. Each stage
morphs out of the prior condition through an
inwardly willed sacrifice (renunciation), coupled
with
an intention to love more and more selflessly the object of
thinking.
To continue
briefly: Ordinary consciousness is
basically thinking about. We generally think about other people, for example. When we try to see the
world from their point of view, we are moving from thinking about to thinking with. This act, however, requires the
conscious or
instinctive renunciation of our natural inclination to
re-actively like
or dislike another person. If we like them too much (an excess of
sympathy), we
will
not see them truly (a
kind of love that is blind). If we dislike them too much (an excess of
antipathy) we also will not see them truly
- which lesson is described in
the Gospels
in the Sermon on the Mount as the problem of the mote and
the beam. To think truly with another, we have to renounce these
reactive feelings, and consciously (willfully) make new (redeemed) mental pictures that seek to know them from
their point
of view - to think with them.
The
transition from thinking with to thinking within is more difficult.
The mind must learn to
empty itself entirely of its given thought content as
regards the
object of thinking. In the Sermon on the Mount this is expressed in
the
Beatitude: blessed are the
poor in
spirit, for theirs is the
kingdom of
heaven.
To be poor in spirit
means to not have a thought content
to which we are attached. We have surrendered our personal and individual
point of
view - renounced
it. When
consciousness is empty of its old coagulated thought, the duality
discussed
above is overcome, and the first stages of a true new and living
monism
arises. Mind
is no longer separate from the inside of sense experience, but within the inside of
sense
experience. Just
as
we have an inside of which we are deeply self aware, so does
everyone else, including Nature.
Remember: “Nature
is
a thought incarnate,...” wrote Emerson.
After
learning to let “it
think
in me”, which is the
way Steiner
puts it, or by
learning to “think on our knees”, which is the
way the author of Meditations
on
the
Tarot: a journey
into Christian Hermeticism puts it - by stepping so
strongly
away from our own point of view, we are now on the threshold of learning to think as, not just within.
This final struggle involves
renouncing
the centrality of our own self. We think fully of
the other, as if the self didn't exist.
Now this
process of learning to think about, then with, then within and finally as is circle and spiral-like in
nature. Ordinary
consciousness
does not disappear, but the will in thinking is
strengthened. Moreover, something already
possessed by
ordinary consciousness becomes
raised out of
instinct and into full self-consciousness.
When, for example, a mother
selflessly thinks for and about the needs of her
children, she
instinctively can intuit what she needs to do that is the good, or that moral
action
called for by the circumstances she faces.
When our consciousness is
focused on other-need, to the
exclusion of what is for our own benefit, we become knowing doers (Steiner's phrasing). We find, by this selflessness, those thoughts which the situation calls forth. We know the inside of the
circumstances of
our lives.
Natural
science, for example, stops at thinking about
Nature. The
scientist keeps his own consciousness and nature apart (having assumed
already a
disconnect). He doesn't even conceive
that Nature could have consciousness. Not looking
for it, he cannot find it.
Were he decide to look for
it, the
door to the inside of Nature is through his own
inside. We
don't approach any kind of real intimate relationship with
another
human being by focusing solely on their surfaces - what we see
through our
senses. To
know them, we
have to learn of their inside, which we call: getting to know
each other. The same
process is required with regard to Nature.
We know today the moral emptiness of thinking of another human being as a thing - as an object without an inwardness or its own meaning. We have mostly overcome making slaves of other human beings. We have not yet overcome making a slave of Nature. We are working Nature to death, and because we are interdependent with Nature, we are in effect murdering ourselves and our posterity. As Einstein pointed out: "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
This then is Living Thinking (holy breath), which
is
precisely what is needed to deal with the crises of our
time. We have to learn to not
just think about
the elements of existence (the living people, the living social processes), but with, within and as these elements. Existence has
an inside, just
as
does each human being we meet. That inside can be known.
With the
above thoughts we can now
appreciate more deeply something hidden in the instinctive
wisdom: think globally, act locally. To think globally means not just to think and
try to
understand the whole world, but to think holistically - to
grasp
with thinking the whole situation, including its inside.
To think globally means to
go beyond the stark tendency
of natural science to concentrate solely on analysis, but instead to
consciously practice synthesis.
In fact, science doesn't
know at all what to do with the social
crisis of the world, for it never asks the relevant questions. Religions
doesn't do all
that well in this realm either, tending to believe they have a monopoly on
spiritual
truths (although
their
tradition of social good works and service accomplishes much) .
Government, as Katrina
taught us, is also mostly useless. We are on our own. What will we choose to do?
In point of
fact, the movement from a dead and dying paternalism (dominion over) toward a new and
living
social maternalism (communion
with) includes
a
movement away from I toward Thou.
What I can or cannot do
alone is far outweighed by what
we can do together.
Thinking, which
frequently has to be individual (in order to be truly moral), when it is
applied to the needs of several has to acquire
another quality. We have to think-together, to take council
together. I-thinking acquires morality through selflessness, but at the same
time we-thinking requires not just
selflessness, but
a
capacity to weave the thoughts of many into a whole. In our we-thinking
conversations we
have to unite the separate thoughts into a unity. An individual
trying to
dominate the conversation does not serve the whole, but only
himself as an
isolate. He
raises his thought above the
potential of the unity of
all present thoughts.
We know too
that this isn't easy. There are whole
disciplines connected to how to achieve what some call
consensus. First Nations
communities would often discuss for days at a time serious
issues which
were to affect the whole. No individual was expected to sacrifice their
individual
judgment and freedom to the whole
- everyone was still free to go
their own way. But whatever community
there was, that
had
to find some level of shared agreement through social
processes of communion with.
A lot of
common place sayings are
relevant here. The whole is
greater than the
sum of its parts, for example. Many hands make light work is another. The 12 Steps of AA are fully rooted in community
practices. So is the social process
called: non-violent
communication. Everywhere
we
look at the social commons (the social below, which is more and more separate from the
influence of the
dying hierarchical organizations), group
social
processes are coming to the fore precisely because they are
more
effective. They
work!
The core of
this working is conversation.
True conversation at
this level is a skill, perhaps even an art (some call it the Royal Art). This was the
heart of the transcendentalist impulse - the circle of
friends. Community (shared) problems need to be solved
by that particular community itself, through the
conversation of social equals.
What is being suggested
here is that in this practice of the Royal Art of
Conversation, we together find the true
inside (thoughts) of the social
immediacy we
share. Not
only its truth, but
a
kind of truth which is co-creative.
We
(together)
participate in this socially
creative art, by
the
which the many crises of the coming times are solved in ways
never
before thinkable, because we didn't yet need to think them. Another common
place
saying comes to mind: necessity is the
mother of
invention.
This then is
Transcendentalism Comes of
Age: Finding
the needed true thoughts through those conversations as are
made
necessary by our shared trials of life, in each circle
of friends of which we are a member.
***********************************************************
The Arcanum of the Loom
by
Joel A. Wendt
Something from a distant and masked future lays its seed in our present. Is it Beast or Angel? How will we raise it, educate it, nurture it? Will we be in charge of it, or will It be in charge of us?
How can we know what lives in this erupting electronic entity? The number of people on-line has been doubling every 6 months, more or less. Web pages are growing at a similar rate. Is it a cancer? Or an intervention divine?
When America was being born in revolution, electricity was almost a magician's art. Some felt that in discovering this energenic power, they had finally found the soul!
Many are writing about this unusual phenomena, which is to accompany us on our journey into the third millennium. In the pages that follow is just one more picture, perhaps ...
first iteration
Lets start by just trying to hold in our imaginations a picture of these events from a certain point of view.
Picture the Earth, a blue-white sphere in space, the human habitat, embedded in a field of stars. Now form a close-up of this surface, using the inner camera of your imagination pan inward, until you see just a part of the globe, the details of the clouds, and a mere slice of starlight darkness off to one side. Next paint on this part of the sphere millions of tiny tiny light points, places where individual human beings sit before a computer screen. Next, draw very thin lines joining these light points, a seeming image of the physical bindings, the wires and other transmission links, joining these computers together.
From this view, the blue-white Earth is interwoven with a very thin weaving of light, bringing countless humans into contact with each other.
Now picture the human beings, sitting before the screens. What is outer physical is only partially relevant. More significant is what is invisible, the mind, the spirit and soul, sitting before the screen. From this inner landscape comes thoughts, feelings, activity. Two aspects of this product, this generative consequence of the inner human, are very important.
The first is this. The material structure, the computers, the links, the software, all that which exists as tool was first imagined, then created by the human being. So when I sit before my computer, this tool which I am using, owes its origin to human creative deeds, to imagination, thought, heart, will, labor, stress - all that humans have done, so that computers exist and are joined together in this weaving of light. Human consciousness has extruded from its own nature certain possibilities onto the physical world. Much like a plastics factory takes liquid plastic and molds it, so human consciousness has taken the physical world and molded this tool.
The second aspect is this. When these woven joinings are used, that is when I "surf the web", "explore the loom", send e-mail, download software, play games, buy products - all that is done via the Internet, does not involve the physical, except as tool. It is my inside, my mind, my soul and spirit, which "surfs the web" and so forth.
Now consider two human beings, joined by the woven light. The physical is irrelevant. Only the soul and spiritual, the mind, the inner life, is involved. Someone sends e-mail. The next reads it. A very special process happens in these most simple acts. When I compose e-mail, before my fingers type, my inner voice speaks, and my feelings and will are involved. When I read e-mail, again my inner voice speaks, and my feelings and will are involved. The most significant acts are all invisible to the eye. The only trace left in the physical is the image-symbols, the letters, mere lines of dark on light. The meaning attributed to these symbols is all an internal act. If I mis-speak, or if I mis-read, this is my responsibility.
Not easy to communicate, one mind to the other, on the loom of woven light. Understanding the word*, both in its inner and outer manifestations, is crucial, if true communication, community and communion is sought for.
Truth can be ignored. False statements are commonplace. Abuse is not unknown. The use that is made of the loom of woven light is a moral act. The loom itself is neutral; it is simply a tool.
Imagine now the content on the loom. Web pages, websites, home-pages, commercial sites, game rooms, chat rooms, talk (most written), content, pictures, information. How does it get there? Why is it there?
Certainly that which is done for the purposes of commerce is fairly clear. But much that is on the loom, comes to be there because of love, even that which is on commercial sites. Love? Yes, love.
Go take a look. Ask about orchids, for example. Do a search for orchids. Many sites, beautiful pictures. Why is this there? Because someone loves orchids and wants to share that love with others. Much that is on the loom is there because of time and effort which is completely unpaid. No money is earned, yet the "information" is there, free, for the asking.
Suppose you thought you might have adult onset diabetes. You hear that diet can manage this disorder. You go to the loom, and behold, site after site. Information on diet, food, advice, doctors, medicines and more. Commercial sites, some, but mostly just ordinary people who have faced this problem themselves, and who, out of love, place this information, that they have won through hard labor and suffering, on the loom so that others can find it.
Now, let us imagine again our picture. The blue-white globe, nested in the field of stars, covered over with individual stars of its own, individuals, fallen stars, living on the Earth, joined by weavings of light, singing to each other, sharing, offering, giving ...
*For more insight into the moral use of the word, see Speech ; and, pragmatic moral psychology .
second iteration
Rub your feet or shoes or socks across a carpet, and touch another person to see a spark. Heat and light and sound appear, a miniature lightning flows from our finger to leap the gap between that and another object, person, wall, whatever.
On a desk, bigger than a breadbox, a computer sits. Subdued, channeled, perhaps mastered, that spark runs effortlessly, faster than thought itself, performing a million tasks a second, often in a space not much larger then a postage stamp.
What is that spark? What is electricity? One very deep thinker calls electricity "fallen light". Let us for the moment assume this is true. What is this person trying to say to us?
Lucifer is called a fallen Angel. Prideful, independent, disobedient, Lucifer could no longer face God, and fell, from Grace, from heaven. So if electricity is "fallen", or graceless and prideful and disobedient, separated from the Divine, what was its original state? What is unfallen light?
In Goethe's Farbenlehre (Theory of Color), he speaks of the "deeds and sufferings of light". What kind of physics is this which sees "light" as Being? "Fiat Lux!" spoke God, in the Creation: "Let there be Light!".
Would you like to experience this light personally?
We only think we see light, when in fact true light is invisible, and we only see color. Think on this. Look around for yourself. Look! At night, while the moon is full. During the day, when the shadows move. Yes, I know what your physics book says, but, there is a revolution coming, and it is coming right at science, and its name is: magic. (See also: Catching the Light: the entwined history of light and mind, Arthur Zanjonc)
Stand in a narrow doorway, facing into the room. Move your arms out until the backs of your hands rest against the side of the doorway. Now begin to press outward with your arms. Press hard, it needs to hurt some. Hold this pressing tension with all your strength for at least a full 60 seconds. Then quickly step into the room and completely relax your arms. Place no will in these limbs at all. If you've done this correctly, your arms will rise of their own accord, then fall, then rise again, but not quite as high as before, then fall, then rise again. Usually at least three risings.
In this way you can experience for yourself a force called levity, which is the counter pole of the gravity force. This levity force works from the cosmic periphery in toward the center as a drawing or suctional force. The rising of the sap in all plant life comes from the action of this force. However, this force is not light itself. In the science of the future, which already is appearing in this century, this force is also called the ethereal formative force, in its biological ramifications. It is the force which takes the plastic malleable nature of the biological organism and gives it form. Its existence is a by-product of the existence of light. It is our will which impels the levity force into our limb muscles, so that when we relax, the excessive levity is strong enough to overcome gravity, until it is used up. It is our will that is of the light.
Take a magnifying glass and look closely at the palms of your hands. The lines there are produced by the streaming in and out of your body, through the hands, of the ethereal formative forces. The Beings who create these forces are what the aboriginal Americans honored in their Ceremonies connected to the Four Directions.
Form an image in your imagination. Try to hold this image, not letting it slip away, or dissolve. Not at all easy to use the light, is it?
Modern materialistic science posits a completely consciousless and being-less universe. This science is only able to do this by systematically excluding data from its experiments, so that at each new stage the knowledge produced is more and more about less and less. Science can't find soul and spirit, consciousness and essence, at the basis of the universe, because at each turn of its examination it has eliminated and reduced the facts it would admit for consideration. Having excluding all that was difficult to control and count, of course it could only find a universe that was controllable and countable. Science didn't find the truth of the world, it just invented a new myth. To see the history of this, get and read: Man or Matter, by Ernst Lehrs.
Sit quietly in a chair, upright, relaxed, yet alert. Imagine that you are breathing through all the pores in your body. Don't control or alter in any way the natural semiconscious rhythm of your breathing, just form the imagination that as you inhale, light is also drawn into your body through the pores, then out again when you exhale. With some practice, you will learn to breath in and out of your body, the light. See Step II, Initiation into Hermetics, Franz Bardon.
This is unfallen light. What then is fallen light, or electricity?
Matter arises from the condensation of the elements. This condensation has occurred over time in rhythmic pulses. The elements in this case are the magical-classical ones: fire, air, water and earth. This rhythmic condensation produces in its wake an organism of a variety of types of matter, ordered according to the elemental gravity-levity balance therein - gravity and levity being by-products of the activity of the elements during this condensation. This produces the well recognized table of chemical elements. See in this regard: Radiant matter: decay and consecration, by Georg Blattmann, and The Nature of Substance, by Rudolf Hauschka.
The elements are the product of the activity of beings - invisible cosmic beings. In the human being, the seed of these cosmic powers is found in will (fire), intellect (air), feeling (water) and consciousness (earth).
Matter then is magically enchanted Being. Gurdjieff describes this in All and Everything, as the sacrifice of a group of beings who forever then accepted complete passivity. Woven into this arrangement is another class of beings, who joined in the rebellion against heaven lead by Lucifer. It is their nature which appears then in matter as cohesion. That matter has the quality that it coheres is due to the presence of these fallen light beings, as their part of that great sacrifice from which the acceptance of eternal passivity creates solidity out of pure spirit. That I have a physical body and can't put my fist through the wall next to me is due to this sacrifice.
Our technological civilization - our electrified civilization - is made possible by the unconscious breaking of this enchantment, and the freeing of this fallen light from its true and natural place and placing it instead into seemingly man made devices, so as to perform services for us. Lest you think this is completely crazy, just recall for a moment some comic book magic grimore you have seen with its strange style of writing, the symbolism of incantation and spell weaving, and then look at an electrical diagram, or wiring diagram, and realize that without the acts and symbolic thinking that has gone with this development, electricity would have remained an obscure and misunderstood element of science.
Faraday perceived the polaric and reciprocal arrangements of the energies of electricity, but his concepts regarding ponderable and imponderable natures was discarded as those who followed preferred a more spiritless set of conceptions. Clerk Maxwell's equations are not possible without Faraday's laws. Thus, the understood (by Faraday) spiritual nature of what he was working with disappears, and mankind gains some apparent mastery of electricity, but no true understanding of its nature.
Perhaps, you who are reading this, are sitting in front of a computer, and you have had some experience of what in electrical circles are called "glitches". Electricity does not always behave, and we do not always understand when it does not, because when it misbehaves it acts contrary to our assumptions about its nature. We dismiss these acts and ignore them because they do not fit the pattern we assume is true. But anomalous electrical phenomena abounds, and there are deep mysteries for those who are willing to be open to them. Keely, Russel, and Tesla, created works difficult to reproduce, which yet inspire others to follow into many places outside the mainstream thinking of modern physics (which has trapped itself in the repeating loop of the quantum assumption).
We use a tool we do not understand, and about which we hold tragic illusions. In our minds lives a false idea, a ghost, a shadow of the truth, and if we are to master the next phase of the electrification of our civilization, the so-called information revolution (a big misconception by the way) we have to begin by understanding the nature of electricity first.
A computer is a dark servant, just waiting to be even more freed from its bindings. A copper wire is not a hollow tube through which little bubbles of electricity dance. The word "current" is a misconception. Electricity does not flow. When electricity is present in an object, such as a copper wire, the deep nature of that wire is altered. The matter (the copper) exists in a different condition then it does when electricity is not present. This is why "superconductivity" is aided by extreme temperatures of cold. Consider:
We are told cooling lowers the electrical "resistance" of the matter cooled. The truth is not so difficult. Water freezes and becomes ice, that is it "crystallizes". Which means that the deep structure (what we imagine as "atomic", and "molecular", that is as very small bodies, are in fact not material bodies at all, but "points of intersection" of forces - forces being the passive will of enchanted beings) of super cooled matter is pushed in the same "direction", i.e. toward the crystalline - that is the tension in the matter between the tendencies toward chaos and the tendencies toward order is overbalanced in the direction of order. In matter so overbalanced, so placed in an "unnatural" state, "fallen light" has more freedom.
The brain has electricity in it. Our nervous system exhibits some qualities similar to electrical systems. Are our thoughts the movement of these electrical impulses? Are our thoughts some form of fallen light?
No. Our thoughts are of another nature entirely. As a by-product of that activity which produces thinking, the material apparatus of the brain (which doesn't think by the way) displays the release of "fallen light", which is also in the matter of our bodies. Our material bodies also have "coherence", and when thinking occurs, the matter ages, loses some small part of its coherence, and "electricity" appears.
The brain is an organ which mediates between the spiritual and the material. One of the ways thinking is thought about today, uses the computer as a model. Our brains are seen as similar to a computer, hardwired systems, with software built in. There is some value to this image, as long as we are careful not to make too much of it.
Consider this: A computer consists, apparently, of hardware and software - material apparatus and programs that run on that apparatus. The mind, in the view of some, is similar, just that instead of inorganic matter, it is organic (whatever that is). This view is in error, but the analogy might work if a missing parts were not left out.
Someone made the computer, thought it up, created it, and wrote the software. In addition someone uses all this in order to accomplish something, to express something. So, if this analogy is to mean anything, we have to keep the whole thing, and not believe the computer and the software evolved through blind chance, or that it operates itself purely on the basis of its internally determined structures.
So the human being has aspects which are given. He/she has other aspects which are self determined. You doubt this, you think the human being is a bio-chemically determined thing? Elsewhere on this site are materials, which if followed, will show the individual the true nature of their inner (spiritual) freedom.
Thinking is a transcendent act, not a material one. As an aid to the discover of this I refer again to The Quiet Suffering of Nature , especially the aspects concerning the study of projective geometry. Consider this:
Many years ago, Abraham Lincoln is said to have studied Euclid's Elements of Geometry, an early classical geometry text, in order to discipline his mind. Now and in the future we might study Olive Whicher's Projective Geometry: Creative Polarities in Time and Space, seeking by this study to bring a whole other level of discipline to the mind. This is the key to so many things, which are not possible without it.
Everyone understands the need for physical exercise. The mind needs exercise as well, both in terms of "stretching", such as the study of the above geometry, and "discipline", which is to tame its (the mind's) excesses with true moral understanding (see again, pragmatic moral psychology , this site).
When this stretching and discipline become common practice, then mind transcends ordinary thinking, and the idea of mind as an electro-chemical physical organ disappears (see also: The Idea of Mind: a Christian meditator considers the problem of consciousness , this site). There is no other way of it but to walk the path and discover matters through one's own experience. To argue about what has been written above is deny discourse and scientific method, which requires reproducible experiments and protocols. To acquire the stretching and discipline refereed to above is to accomplish all that.
third iteration
Which comes first the chicken or the egg? Which comes first the big bang and evolution, or our ideas that these should or could be? Can mind arise spontaneously by accident? Or must mind come to be born of something of like nature? Can anything exist, which was not first conceived? Consider this:
Nothing a human being has created (which is not real creation anyway, just a re-arrangement of the already given) was not first thought. That is, all material re-arranging flows from a prior invisible act. In this, is it not possible that an echo exists of something which has preceded it.? Does not our process of creation - even just in re-re-arranging - mirror our own creation? It is said that before we became, we were first thoughts in the mind of God. For the purposes of this, the third and last iteration, let us consider this an axiom.
In another place of this part of the loom (my cyber-home) can be found a description of God's "splitting", the initial process of creation (see Earth Ranger 2323 , this site). Creation in this sense has more to do with music then with things "blowing up".
Music has themes, melodies, counterpoints, changes of rhythm and texture. In that God has split Himself in the Creation, the music has now more that one Instrument. Some Instruments never leave the Realm of the Invisible to live and learn in the realm of the visible. Some of God's children, the human beings, do. But as Instruments, these children are incomplete. Other Instruments are more complete - but in thinking this we must not conceive of these instruments as material. Earthly music is only a poor echo of the Music of the Spheres, and the instruments with which we make earthly music are only poor imitations of the real Instruments, the cosmic spirits, the hierarchies, angels, archangels, archi, and on, all the way to the sublime Cherubim and Seraphim.
The given world, the material world, is the Creation out of the Deeds of the Instruments - an Echo, as it were. In a way, we can look at the material world, the world of the senses, and recognize that it reveals something hidden. Just like the pattern in the iron filings given by the field of the magnet unveils that invisible field, so does the material world (at a much greater level of complexity) unveil the invisible within the visible. Evolution, in that as an idea it attempts to portray creation as a kind of accidental combining and re-combining, looks but does not see. The Natural world expresses, in material form, the Music of the Spheres, and it is no wonder at all why nature is so beautiful, endlessly fresh, rhythmic, melodious, and full of all the mirth and drama we find so astounding in the great symphonic works of classical music. Moreover, we, as the children, are essential and central to the scheme of things.
Of what point music without an audience? A sunset without a human being to see it has no meaning. We also are a theme, expressed from out of Cosmic Music. Not only that, but only within us, within our own invisibleness is the symphony completed. Outer nature is but a part of something which is not whole unless the human being forms the thoughts, gives the names, utters the inner word, without which meaning would not exist. And in that we give meaning, we but echo that larger Word from which Meaning comes.
So what part of the Music is the computer? What has the human being expressed in his mastery of the re-combining of the given material world in creating a machine that uses fallen light to perform so many calculations a second that it stands on the threshold of becoming able to mimic the human mind?
Consider what is missing in this image. Unfallen light is missing. Life is missing. Real intelligence is missing. The work of the human being is incomplete. Can we give a machine a conscience? Do we dare, or must we finish the work begun, and learn first to understand light and life and intelligence and conscience, before we attempt to truly echo the Creation?
Perhaps, the final arcanum of the loom is a question mark.
?
Look at the symbol carefully. Start at the upper left, where we start when we write this symbol. A small sphere, a symbol of wholeness, leaps into movement and then descends, disappearing into a point, before leaping a gap and ending in a second sphere. The first gesture disappears, sacrifices itself, before recreating another image of its basic form. Consider: "God said, "Let us make mankind in our image and likeness;..." Genisis 1:26
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appendix
Next are two essays which I include in many of my books,
as they are of special import for reasons that will be obvious
to those that
read and understand them.
The Meaning of Earth Existence in the
Age of the Consciousness
Soul
This next
essay was abstracted from my book, the
Way of
the Fool,
in
order to submit it to the Newsletter of the Anthroposophical
Society in
America in the winter-spring of 2006, where, as is typical of
my
offerings there, it was ignored. For this book it has
been
carefully rewritten, with entirely new material added in
certain
places. By the way, the Way of
the Fool
is, at
its core, the beginning of a courtship between that reality
referred to
by the terms esoteric and exoteric Christianity - between
Gnosis and
Faith (Kings and Shepherds), and this essay is the final
thought-picture in the main body of that book.
The Meaning of Earth Existence
in the Age of the
Consciousness Soul
*[John 16:
12-15 "I
have much more to say to
you, but you can't bear it just yet. But when the other
comes,
the breath of truth, he will guide you in the ways of all
truth,
because he will not speak on his own, but will speak what he
hears and
announce to you what's coming. He will glorify me,
because he
will take of what is mine and announce it to you.
Everything the
Father has is mine: that's why I said he will take of what is
mine and
announce it to you."]
*
from the
book: the Way of the Fool:
There yet
remains a small effort to make
a synthesis this work - to make a whole out of seemingly
disparate
parts. I will try to be brief.
A principle
aspect of the great Mystery
of our Time is the Mystery of Evil, both outwardly in the
structural
backdrop to the shared social world of humanity, and inwardly
in the
depths of our own souls. I have tried above to point out
how it
is that the essential matter is not the outer social world,
but the
inner soul world, and the trials and education of the i-AM,
in
the biography. The context, which we need to call the maya
of history and current events, and which is receptively
held everywhere from below by the
Dark
Mystery of the Divine Mother, all passes away, and only what
is
Eternal, that is what becomes an aspect of the developing i-AM,
continues;
and, this inner realm (the whole Inwardness of the Creation,
which includes human souls and spirits) only exists because of the Heavenly Mystery of the penetrating
thoughts of the Father, while the
whole (the
outer social maya and the eternal inner mind) is created, loved,
overseen and
mediated (wherever two are more
are
gathered...), in all its Grace
filled and
Artistic interrelationships, by the Earthly [new Sun] Mystery
of the sacrifices of the Son.
We (humanity)
now begin to move out of
our spiritual childhood, and in making our way through the
Rite of
Passage that is Life as it leads us toward our spiritual
maturity we
need to take hold of the complex of the doubles and the karma
of
wounds, as these thrive within our souls, and which encourage
human
evil through temptation and inner prosecution. Even so,
this task
of meeting the Mystery of Evil within the soul is not as heavy
as we
think, for through the Shepherd's Tale
[Charles
Sheldon], the
King's Tale [Rudolf Steiner], the Healers' Tale [the community-created Twelve-Steps] and the Sermon on the
Mount, we have all the practical
instructions that we need.
In seeking to
understand in ourselves
these three: moral
grace,
freedom and love [each of these is
elaborated in great detail in the book], we set before
ourselves what
is required to be learned in this Age and it is with these
three
naturally unfolding capacities that we are Graced and
strengthened so
as to be able to meet with courage the Mystery of Evil.
If we do
dare this path, and seek for the deepest instruction in
Christ's Sermon
on the Mount, then will come to us a change in the nature of
our
biography, such that it more and more takes on the pattern,
described
in the John Gospel, as the Seven Stages of the Passion of
Christ (the
washing of the feet; the
scourging; the crowning with thorns; the carrying of the
cross; the
crucifixion; the entombment and the resurrection) (for a careful exposition of these Seven
Stages, see
Valentin Tomberg's [anthroposophical] book: Inner
Development).
Whereas Christ
lived this in an
apparently mostly physical way, those, who truly follow In
His
Steps [the name of Sheldon's
book,
as well as a critical phrase** in Ben-Aharon's The
Spiritual
Event of the Twentieth Century - a profound
Imagination of
the True Second Coming], will in the
main
feel these trials in their souls, as aspects of the joy and
suffering
in the human biography.
**["Now when they
identified
themselves with the situation of earthly humanity, the souls
who
remained true to [Archangel] Michael prefigured,
in their
planetary Earthly-Sun life, the great Sacrifice of Christ.
They
walked again in His
steps [emphasis added] as they did in
former
earthly lives, only now the order of following was reversed.
They
went before Him, showing Him the way, acting out of free and
self-conscious human decision, and He followed in
their
steps [emphasis added] only after they fully united themselves
with the divided
karma of Earth and humanity. Only then could He offer
His
sacrifice as the answer to the new, future question of human
existence:
the question concerning the mission and fate of evil." Jesaiah Ben-Aharon, The
Spiritual
Event of the Twentieth Century.]
These trials
may seem difficult, but the
truth is they are merely human. It was Christ becoming
human that
went to the Cross, for how could He place an example before us
we could
not do out of our own humanity (just as Sheldon wrote in In
His
Steps). [something written by a
Shepherd (a
pastor) in America, at the same time Steiner (a King) was
writing his The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (Freedom)]
It is the human in Christ that asks in the Garden of
Gethsemane
that the cup be taken from him, but if not, He accepts the
Father's
will. While later it is the even deeper human in Christ that
says on
the Cross: "My
God, my God, why did you abandon me?".
Who
among us, in the trials and sufferings of life, has not
uttered these same thoughts? [That Steiner teaches an esoteric
meaning
for the end of life statements of Christ, in no way
contradicts their
exoteric meanings, which are also true.]
It is here that
Christ's teachings
strongly diverge from the Wisdom of the Buddha, for the Buddha
would
have had us overcome suffering by learning not to know it (one
version
of the third Noble Truth of the Buddha reads as follows: " ...concerning the
Cessation
of Suffering; verily,it is passionless, cessation without
remainder of
this very craving; the laying aside of, the giving up, the
being free
from, the harboring no longer of, this craving.",
whereas
Christ asks us to embrace our human pain so that we can pass
through the Narrow Gate of suffering to then know our deepest
self, the
true i-AM, and then through this burning trial of
knowledge of the
true-self, ultimately come to Him. If we would follow In
His
Steps then we too must take on
ourselves the
errors (sins)*** of the world, and the tasks of forgiveness
and love,
for every love
engendered free act of moral grace
takes up a
small part of Christ's suffering, so that we too participate
in the
deepest creative acts of the Seventh Day of Creation - the transformation of
evil
into love. [This is for
anthroposophists the teaching attributed to Mani, but the
reason such a
personality even knows this is because the transformation of
evil
into love is modeled for us in the
deepest
felt actions of the Divine Mother and the Son. When we
know
intimately these actions of the Divine Mystery, we know the
true
spiritual meaning of the Mystery of Evil, and that this
Mystery is
Itself the real source of the earthly doctrine connected to it
that is
sometimes called Manichaeism.]
***[The word
sin does not appear in the
original Greek, from which the Gospels were translated into
the other
languages. The Greek word hamartia, misused to indicate sin, actually means "missing the mark" (it is a term from archery). See in
this
regard the Unvarnished
Gospels by Andy Gaus.]
Is this
foolish? Of course, but we
need not fear this Way of the Fool, for
our Faith
in Christ's Promises will always be fulfilled, as we ourselves
can
learn to become the fulfillment of the law and the prophets.
Yes,
this Way is full of trials, but whoever has lived life, and
reflected
upon their experience, knows that in the meeting of our
biography's
trials with courage we discover what it truly means to be
human: to
struggle, to fall, to get
up and to learn - and, through this process, gently and
humbly, begin
to take up along side and with Him, Christ's kind and light,
Yoke of
Love.
Having said all
this, it becomes
necessary to make one last picture for the reader, for
clearly, in that
we read the news and hear of the horrors of man's continuing
inhumanity
to man, we ourselves face a terrible trial. How are we
to
understand a world seemingly so filled with Evil?
Picture, for a
moment, the surface of the
Earth. Below dense matter and fiery substance, while
above,
airless space. Humanity lives out its Earth Existence
only in
this narrow spherical band of Life, whose diameter is just
under 8,000
miles (and whose height is just three to four miles, because
above
15,000 feet above sea level, the atmosphere starts to not
contain
enough oxygen to support our breathing). The total
surface area
of the Earth is 196 million square miles, and the habitable
land area
43 million square miles Six billion plus human
beings must
find all that they physically need, which when we consider
actual
available arable land (land that could be cultivated for food,
and
other necessary resources), means that each individual only
has a
square 161 feet on a side from which to grow what they need.
This
then is the
physical spacial
aspect
of the social organism of the whole world.
Yet, we know
that this spherical space is
itself often unwisely distributed, for human social
arrangements,
whether rooted in dominance and selfishness (dominion over) or generosity and sharing (communion with), these social arrangements seem to determine
this
social order. This stream of moral gestures (choices),
of good
and/or of evil, moves out of and through human beings,
organizing the
physical one.
As to this moral aspect
of the social organism of the whole world, it has reached in this Time a kind of climax of
development,
and it will be important to appreciate the true nature of the
logos order in which
Christ has set modern human existence, through
His creative powers as the Artist (Lord) of Karma (the precise
and love
based placement of individual biographies in relationship to
each
other). Here is something Natural Science cannot
do, for
the meaning
of
existence is beyond the weaknesses
of their
yet fanciful and spirit-empty images. This will also
help us to
understand why so many (falsely, but with some degree of
reason)
believe we live in the End Times.
In the
Twentieth Century the world was
woven together into a single social organism, not just via the
globalization of economic matters, or the personal
interconnections
offered by the Internet, but most centrally by the Media. At the
beginning of the 20th Century, few knew
what went on elsewhere the world, in any detail or with any
immediacy.
At the end of the 20th Century, at the same time that
the
returned Kings' were unfolding the New Revelations of Christ
[the
story of the 20th Century involves a return of the
meaning-essence of
the Three Kings of the Gospels - that is a return of the
knowledge of
Gnosis, hungering to be woven again into a single whole with
true Faith
- an event which clearly had to accompany the True Second
Coming], the
world itself was woven into a whole in the sense that no macro
social
event was not to be almost immediately known everywhere the
same day
(if not the same hour) that it happened.
We live in a
time when has arisen a
Culture of Media - a kind of knowledge commons, in which vast
resources
are used to create for us pictures of the meaning of the world
and of
events. The more developed the country, the greater our
daily
experience can be saturated with the messages coming from this
Culture
of Media.
Moreover, great
effort and expense is
gone into by those who would force us to believe what they
want us to
believe. Between advertising, political propaganda,
outright
lies, weak or lame reporting, and other similar failures to
reach the
truth, this saturation of the soul by the Culture of Media
would seem
to fail to offer us any service at all. What is not
appreciated is that
the Christ is far wiser than even the deepest believers
imagine.
Every evil is eventually turned to good, and next we
will explore
the prime example for our time.
Recall what has
been pointed out many
times now, that the
individual biography is the
central reality of life on the Earth.
What happens inside us as we experience life is
much more important and enduring than the outer events which
surround
us. That Stage Setting (all the world's a stage....) is
but epiphenomena to the reality of the life of the soul.
To help
us appreciate this then, let us explore these matters from the
point of
view of the individual biography.
In this time,
there are over six billion
plus of these biographies woven into the tapestry of the
social
organism of the whole world. Six billion lives held
delicately
and exactly within the Love and Divine Justice of the Mystery.
Within these biographies, all the individual i-AMs
experience that precise and personal instruction that hopes to
lead
them to the realization of their own divinity and immortality
of
spirit. [The epoch (rite of passage) of the Consciousness Soul
is 2100
years long, going from the time of the beginning of the
on-looker
separation (and the creation of Natural Philosophy - Science)
in the
1400's, until the years around 3500 AD.]
To understand
this we need to think it
from the inside out, and not from the outside in. The
Culture of
Media only provides context, never essence. True, life
is hard,
even harsh, even terrible. The naive consciousness wants
to turn
away from this suffering, and cannot understand how God (the
Divine
Mystery) could allow such things as torture, child abuse and
the
genocidal acts which are dumbed down by the terms: ethnic
cleansing.
The reality is
that what the Divine
Mystery does is to allow for freedom. This most precious
gift is
essential to the immortal spirit during its Rites of Passage
we are
calling: Earth Existence. Moreover, the Mystery also
makes
certain there is a true Justice through the post-death
passages of
kamaloka and lower and higher devachan, in a manner no human
social
structure can provide. Christ has told us this in the
Sermon on
the Mount: "to what sentence you sentence others,
you will be
sentenced". All this should be kept in mind as we proceed.
As a single
ego, I wake in the morning.
From the night I bring the remainder of yesterday,
perhaps worked
over. Surrounding me, as I live the day, are the lives
of those
with whom I have a karma of wounds - with whom I have a debt
of meaning
to creatively work over. This we carry together, each
bearing a
part, each bearing their own wounds. These are
wounds from
the past, from the present and from the future.
To observe the
world of today, as we walk
the walk of our lives, is to observe trials of fire and
suffering -
rites of wounding and being wounded. But not just this, for
also there
is healing. Where we let love thrive, wounds become
healed.
Thus flow all
our days, often too fast to
even notice the beauty and wonder of the sea of personal
relationships
and shared trials. Yes, there is misfortune, and evil
deeds.
But do we really imagine Christ and the Divine Mother
lets this
evil happen without recourse or justice? We may not know
this
directly through Gnosis, but we also can
have Faith.
Gnosis without Faith
is empty of Life; and, Faith without Gnosis is empty of the
Truth. Only when we join
them together, do we get: the Way (the
Mystery of living the Good), the Truth (the Mystery of knowing the
Good) and the Life (the Mystery of union with the
Good).
This then is
the wonder of the outer and
inner biography, for often the wounds are not visible.
Yes,
sometimes the wounds are visible to our eye or ear for we see
people
too fat, too thin, too lamed in body, too poor, too physically
or
mentally deficient. Often, however, so many of us suffer in silence that we really do not know the nature and
personal
meaning of their wounds - only our own are visible to the eye
of our
heart, unless we first learn to exercise and unfold certain
powers of
soul and spirit.
Amidst all this
visible and silent
suffering, we find ourselves woven into the Culture of Media.
Images and sounds flow around us, pictures of a world on
the
verge of chaos and madness. Yes, we have the intimacy of
our
personal biography, but through the Culture of Media we are
drawn into
the painted backdrop of the whole world - a backdrop we all
share.
War in Iraq. Global warming. Governments out
of
control. Pandemics waiting in the wings. Local
economic
recession, and even world-wide depression.
What lives in
this painted backdrop - in
this Stage Setting - in the wise relationship of the Culture
of Media
to the unfolding of our personal biographies?
The answer is
this: the
mirror of our own inner darkness
and light...
Inside us the
double-complex - our
feelings of judgment, our temptations, our addictions and our
sense of
failure. Inside us the darkness that belongs personally to us,
and
outside us, carried to us by the Culture of Media, the mirror
of that
darkness. But also inside us the Good that we would
author.
Think on it.
Do we not experience
the images and sounds brought to us by the Culture of Media as
something that is filled with what we like and we dislike?
We
live our biographies and the Culture of Media confounds our
souls with
pictures of dark and light to which we all respond
individually.
The great masses of humanity do not make the News.
The
great masses of humanity experience the News.
What is News?
News is exactly what
the reporters and television personalities call it: stories. The Culture of Media provides us stories
(tales)
of the world, which are often presented as if these stories
are true,
something most of us have come to know they are not.
News stories
reflect all kinds of bias, and in some cases the bias is
deliberate.
Moreover, news stories reflect conditions of commerce
living in
the agency reporting them.
For example, it
is well understood that
in the last third of the 20th Century in American television
the news
divisions of the major networks disappeared, and the
entertainment
divisions took over the responsibility for the news. The
opportunity to inform and educate the receivers of news
stories became
secondary to the need to keep them interested so as to be able
to sell
commercial time and make a profit. In addition, the
stories are
mostly about dire and tragic events, and little is
investigated or
reported that is about the positive and the creative.
We are right
then to wonder sometimes
about the News, about its harsh nature and artless excessive
attention
to the dark deeds of many. Humanity in general bears
within it
the beam that is not seen, while the mote
is exaggerated. But the world itself is not this beam,
is not
this darkness. The greater part of darkness is inside us
- in our
own souls, and from there projected onto the world. The
Culture
of Media exaggerates this darkness further, at the same time
it gives
us much that also arouses our own unredeemed antipathies and
sympathies.
Once more for
emphasis...
The world in
its reality is not this
Media generated excess of darkness (so out of balance with the
light
that is also everywhere present), which we all project from within
the soul - the beam. Yet, in
the Culture of Media this whole processes of dark projection
is
exaggerated so that the mirroring
nature of the social
world itself begins to bother us. This logos
order of the social world is complex
and rich, and worth a
deep study.
Pictures of a
distorted and untrue
meaning of the world abound, and while we share these
pictures, we make
personal and individual our reactions. Just as the
intimate
events of our biographies have a personal meaning, so does the
shared
stage setting have a personal meaning. In a more general
sense,
for example, many Christians today are confronted, via the
Culture of
Media, with pictures of individuals whose actions as
self-proclaimed
Christians either inspire us to imitation or cause us to turn
away in
shame. The same is true in Islam. The terrorist who
frightens us
in the West, also causes many ordinary Muslims to turn away in
horror.
Everywhere fundamentalism rises, to continue the
example, the
great mass of humanity, that are not so tied to such arid
rigidity,
shrink away in antipathy. Do we not assert quietly,
inwardly to
ourselves: this
is not me, I am not that - I will not be that!
In our
biographies then, we are
confronted in the intimacy of our personal relationships with
what are
sympathetic and antipathetic reactions to that which we would
choose to
admire and imitate, and that which we would shun and refuse to
be like.
Via the Culture of Media, we are met with that which
approaches
us in the same way, yet on a larger scale. Just as
we as
individuals have a Shadow (a double-complex), so nations,
religions and
peoples have a Shadow, and the Culture of Media puts in our
faces these
pictures and meanings with which we can identify or from which
we can
turn away, often in shame.
Christ has
arranged, in this particular
moment in time (the cusp of the 20th to 21st Centuries, which
is also
the Dawn of the Third Millennium) to place in the dying away
hierarchical social forms of humanity, those biographies which
do two
main forming gestures within that history. This is all
connected
to a process in which social chaos arises in order to cause
these old
hierarchical [third cultural age] social structures to let go
their no
longer valid hold, and in many instances be eventually
replaced with
new social form arising out of the social commons [fifth
cultural age].
In the first
instance, these biographies
living in the decadent social hierarchies (such as government,
corporate and church organizations) portray strong images, via
the
Culture of Media, to which we react equally strongly out of
our likes
and dislikes. For example, one of America's wise women,
Doris (Granny
D) Haddoch, has said that we should
be grateful for such
as George W. Bush, because he causes us to awake from our
sleep as
citizens. As a consequence, in our individual
biographies we
react to the extremes of these dominant religious, business,
cultural
and political personalities, and this brings about in us as
individuals
certain inner judgments and calls to action.
The second
effect of those biographies
unfolding in the now decadent institutional social hierarchies
is to
drive the social order further into a needed condition of
chaos,
something all 6 billion plus biographies require in order to
birth the
moral dilemmas necessary for the Age of the Consciousness
Soul.
This social chaos sweeps traditional moral
authority aside,
and forces us as individuals into situations where we must
rely on the
own I in order to properly face the moral crisis. In
that human
beings are incarnating in massive karmic communities in order
to have
these sometimes shattering moral experiences, this causes the
present
world social organism to have the strong tendency to
completely
dissolve into a condition of near total social conflagration
[thus my
website: Shapes in the Fire].
The moral
aspect
of the logos ordered social organism of the world requires crisis in order for the individual biographies to live, not just intellectually,
but fully
and dynamically and existentially into dilemmas of moral
choice.
Only true moral choice can awaken in us what is offered
in this
Age to the development of the Consciousness Soul.
Nothing in the
world is not touched by
the Art of Christ, who as Lord of Karma - Lord of the
Satisfaction of
Moral Debt and healer of karmic wounds, arranges in majestic
harmony all the biographies so that even from the smallest
detail to
the grandest historical event, meaning is put to the service of our development - the
leaving
behind of our spiritual childhood followed by our birth into
spiritual
adulthood.
The world
historical crises of this time
are a complex and rich Stage Setting, against which 6 billion
plus
souls live out the dramas of their individual biographies.
Thus, in this
birth from spiritual
childhood to spiritual adulthood, the Time - the Age of the
Consciousness Soul - is a Rite of Mystery, a Baptismal Mass
for all of
humanity, just as was told to us by John the Baptist. [in
Matthew 3:11]
"Now
I
bathe you in the water to change hearts, but the one coming
after me is
stronger than me: I'm not big enough to carry his shoes. He
will
bathe you in holy breath and fire."
(emphasis added)
Consider now
more closely what happens inside
us as we experience the intimacy of
our
biographies, and the shared pictures that come via the Culture
of Media.
Choice
confronts us. Do I be
like that, or like this? From what place inside do I
choose?
In a time so filled with chaos that rules no longer
apply, I
discover that I can rely only on myself. Out of myself I
must
author the Good in response to the world of meaning that
surrounds and
confronts me. So powerful, in its personal immediacy,
are these
experiences, images and meanings, that we cannot turn away
from them.
It is as if the World itself is on Fire, wanting to burn
and burn
and burn until we run from it in terror, or stand up to it and
give the fullest of our participation
to its moderation and its healing.
Yet by Grace, I
contain the means to know
the Good that my biography and membership in the shared fate
of
humanity draws out of me. What I source becomes a part
of the
world, and I know that this is so. I know my
freedom to
enact the moral grace that my heart comprehends in its deepest
places.
Deep inside my soul my very own heart hungers to sing: Love will I give.
Love
will I create. Love will I author.
So now we think
away the physical - the maya
of the sense world, and let our picture thinking gaze only
upon this
inner, invisible to the physical eye, moral act. An act
more and
more emerging everywhere, for while in America, and the
Cultural West,
the Consciousness Soul is first widely appearing, it
will and
must appear everywhere that human beings let the world touch
their
wounds, while they seek to share with others the trials by
fire of
their biographies.
Invited by the
Love and Art of Divine
Circumstance to look within and to reach into the depths of
our own
being in order to source and author that Good which we know to
be
right, we touch something spiritual and are Touched by
something
Spiritual. In this time of the True Second Coming, in
the
inwardness of our souls and invisible to all outer seeing, a
Second
Eucharist is being enacted - the Good offers Itself - Its own Being - to us (Moral Grace).
For the
Good we know is not just known in the soul as what we tend to
think of
as a mere thought, but if we attend most carefully, it is true
Spirit,
just as the John Gospel writer told us that Christ spoke:
[John 3:6-8] "What's born of the flesh is
flesh, and what's born of the breath is breath. Don't be
amazed
because I told you you have to be born again. The wind
blows
where it will and you hear the sound of it, but you don't know
where it
comes from or where it goes; its the same with everyone born
of the
breath."
[The existence
of a Second Eucharist, to
accompany the True Second Coming, in no way means to diminish
or change
the Original Eucharist. On the contrary, we will find
that via
the Second Eucharist our understanding of the meaning of
the Original Eucharist (the transubstantiation of matter) will
deepen.
See in this regard, the small pamphlet: Radiant
matter:
Decay and Consecration, by Georg
Blattmann. From the transubstantiation of matter we are
being led
onward to learning how to participate also in a
transubstantiation of
thought.]
Thus we are
being truly and continuously
born again today (each act of moral grace is another Second
Ethereal
Eucharist and birth), from out of our spiritual childhood and
into our
spiritual adulthood, baptized outwardly by the fires of the
times in
our biographies, and by holy breath within - a Second
Eucharist where
Christ gives of His own Substance that biblical knowing of the
Good -
His own Being. For us to truly know the Good, requires
we join
our own soul to the Good. Our yearning to author the
Good out of
ourselves is how we participate in the Baptism of being truly born again, and
how we participate in the sacrament of
the Second Eucharist. Christ also participates by giving
to us,
out of Himself, this very Good - this Moral Grace. When
having
received within ourselves this sacrament of the Second
Eucharist, an
act that only arises because we seek it and form its actual
application, we remain free - we create moral law - we author
the
fulfillment of the law and the prophets. Given to us
within by
Christ as a capacity, we then author its incarnate nature and
pass it
on to the world of our biographies, - from out of us thence
into the
outer world (or into the inner world), do we then ourselves
author this
Good: love
engendered
free moral grace.
But how does
Christ do this? Is
this Good offered to us in this Second Sacrament as if it was
a thing,
passed by hand from one to another?
No.
Christ as holy breath breathes
upon the slumbering burning embers of our own good nature,
just as we
breath upon a tiny fire in order to increase its power.
He
sacrifices His Being into this breath, which gives Life to the
tiny
ember-like fire of our moral heart. The holy breath
becomes
within the soul of each human being who asks, seeks and knocks
a gift
of Living Warmth that enlivens our own free fire of moral
will.
The Narrow Gate
opens both ways, making
possible thereby the intimate dialog and conversation of moral
deeds
and thoughts that is woven between the i-AM,
the
Thou and the Christ (wherever two or more are gathered...),
which
intimate conversation leads ultimately to the consecration - the character development - of the soul.
In this way our
thinking can now behold the Meaning
of Earth
Existence in the Age of the Consciousness Soul:
A
macro-cosmic Rite, a Second Ethereal Eucharist, in which we
give
birth out of ourselves in the most intimate way possible,
knowledge of
the Good, not as mere thought, but as Life filled moral will,
breathed
into greater power by the sacrifice of the true ethereal
substance of
Christ's Being in the form of holy breath.
The outer world
is but a seeming, and
what is brought by the Culture of Media mere pictures of the
Stage
Setting for the World Temple that is home to our biographies.
When we think away this outer seeming - this logos
formed and
maya based sense world, and
concentrate only on the Idea
of the moral grace (Life filled holy breath) we receive and
then enact
out of the wind warmed fire of individual moral will - as
individual
law givers, as the fulfillment of the law and the prophets - we create this Meaning of Earth Existence.
Every act of moral grace, given greater Life
within in the deepest intimacy of our life of soul, is an
ethereal
communion with Christ, even though we may only experience it
as what to
us is a mere thought of what is the Good at some moment of
need in the
biography.
Christ gives us
this Gift, by Grace,
freely out of Love, and with no need that we see Him as its
Author.
We hunger inwardly to know what the right thing to do
is, and
when this hungering is authentic, we receive Christ's Holy
Breath.
This does not come so much as a thought-picture of the
Good in
response to our questing spirit, but rather as the contentless breathing substance of Christ's Being. We
are
touched (inspired) by Love, and at this touch we shape
that Breath into the thought that we then know. The nature of
its
application and form in which we incarnate this thought is
entirely our
own. We shape the thought completely out of our own
freedom - our
own moral fire of will, for only we can apply it accurately in
the
individual circumstances of our lives.
As the Age of
the Consciousness Soul
unfolds accompanied by this Second Eucharist, the Social World
of human
relationships begins to light and warm from within. For
each free
act of moral grace rests upon this Gift of Christ's Being to
us - an
ethereal substance received in the communion within the Temple
of the
own Soul, freely given in Love whenever we genuinely: ask, seek and knock
during
our search for the Good. Our
participation in this Rite, this trial by Fire leavened by
Holy Breath,
leads us to the co-creation of new light and new warmth - the
delicate
budding and growing point of co-participated moral deeds out
of which
the New Jerusalem is slowly being born.
This
co-creation is entirely inward, a
slowly dawning Sun within the macro Invisible World of Spirit.
Moreover, we do it collectively (as humanity).
While each
of us contributes our part, it is our collective conscious
celebration
of the Second Ethereal Eucharist (creating the Good) that
begins the
transubstantiation of the collective (presently materialized
and
fallen) thought-world of humanity into the New Jerusalem.
Thought is
real, and it is as equally
real as is matter. The Original Eucharist transforms the
already
divinely given now-dying substance of earthly matter into
Life-filled
Spirit through our ritual invitation of
the active
Grace of the Divine Mystery; and, our participation in the
Second Ethereal Eucharist transforms dead thought
into living ethereal Substance, through the mystery of our
individual
spirit's active and embryonic grace, that becomes united into
the
collective co-creation of humanity.
In the
Invisible World of Spirit, we
co-participate, out of the own moral fire of will, in the Dawn
of the
New Sun that is to become the New Jerusalem.
Let us now slow
down here for a moment,
and take a deep breath, for these last thoughts above may seem almost too big - too idealistic -
to be
easily contemplated. To ease our understanding and
gently ground
it, let us consider this situation once again in it most
ordinary
aspects.
The world of
our biographies places each
individual into the fires of experience.
These are remarkable gifts that lead us toward moral
questions -
often deep and troubling. We yearn to know what to do,
and in
this circumstance we may ask, seek and knock. What
has been called earlier in this book Moral Grace is available
to us,
yet the mystery of this practice of inner activity is where we
ourselves
create moral law - where we become the fulfillment of the law and the prophets.
In the King's
Tale, we saw that Rudolf
Steiner's book The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity
showed how
to come to this knowledge through the practices of Gnosis - to
knowledge -
in the form of moral imagination, moral intuition and
moral technique. In the Healers' Tale, we saw how the 12
Steps
helped us to master the soul through the elevation of the
spirit, and
in this way come to know God's Will as we understand it.
Finally,
in the Shepherd's Tale we came to understand that by
asking What
Would
Jesus Do out of Faith, we could
also
come to the needed individual moral beliefs.
Three different
paths (among perhaps many
more) all leading to those individual invisible depths that
each of us
must uniquely experience, which we have now seen must be
properly
called: the
Second
Eucharist of Holy Breath. So
we
come now to perceive the Time - this Age of the Consciousness
Soul -
where, if we seek it, we have made ourselves available to be
baptized
with Fire
and
Holy Breath, just as John the
Baptist us told
Christ would do, 2000 years ago.
Even so, we
still have to truly want to know the Good -
to authentically ask, seek and knock.
*************************
Ideas such as
the above, and in the rest of the essays in this little book,
need to
have behind them a rational
method,
in order
to be in accord with the times and the scientific spirit.
This
last essays outlines that problem,
albeit more
in the language of Anthroposophy proper. Anthroposophy
(a path of
spiritual development) and Christianity (a religion) are not
the same
thing, although they both have an underlying relationship
which may be
apparent to the readers of this last offering.
In Joyous Celebration of the Soul
Art and Music of Discipleship
- a moderately serious introductory sketch unveiling
a mostly
American way of understanding the New Thinking -
first some necessary context
Recently in the
News for Members of the
Anthroposophical Society in America (late 2005), was published
a
wonderful lecture given by Dennis Klocek, elaborating the
alchemical
foundations living in Rudolf Steiner's spiritual scientific
work.
The essay below means to be something from just one
voice out of
another of the streams that seeks to find its home within the
Anthroposophical Society and Movement - the stream of discipleship, of those who are karmically related to the
original
Twelve and the direct participation in certain aspects of the
Mystery
of Golgotha. [See the essay above (The Meaning...) for why I write in this way.]
In the essay
that follows, it might help
the reader to understand that it is mostly written for, and
out of, the
American Soul. About this Soul, Rudolf Steiner spoke in
different
places and in the following ways, which I will paraphrase:
The
American comes to Anthroposophy naturally. English
speakers are
instinctively in the Consciousness Soul in their Life of
Rights.
There is a hidden and unique form of Anthroposophy that
is to
develop in America in the future, and one should look to
Emerson and
his circle of friends to appreciate it.
The reader, of
whatever Soul background
and gesture, who would seek inner stimulation from
actively
engaging this essay, should understand that for the American
Soul much
of what is described below is already instinctively present.
This
instinctive relationship to the art and music of discipleship
appears
first in the American Soul in the dominant tendency to be
directed
outwardly toward the world, fully engaged in social reality,
and
sometimes (often more frequently than appears on the Evening
News)
seeking to heal the social world's wounds. Part of the
hidden
mystery of this Soul is that it is possible to take what is so
present
instinctively, and awaken it by gradual degrees into full
consciousness. This task may turn out to be far easier
for the
American Soul, than has so far been imagined within
Anthroposophical
circles.
To fully
inaugurate this gradual
awakening, however, does require turning from the outer world
and its
worries and wonders for a bit, and to look within - to
practice
introspection. When looking within becomes a normal part
of soul
life, American anthroposophists should not be surprised to
find that
they already live instinctively in their wills in ways with
considerable kinship with the path of discipleship - the path of
moral action in
the world through renunciation and love.
With the addition of this introspective looking within,
we add to
the thinking we already do about the field of outer-world
social moral
action, a complementary and much needed thinking about the
soul-field
of inner moral action. Outer world thinking and action
are
enhanced by everything we learn from the practice of looking,
thinking
and acting within.
By the way, it
is not the point of this
essay to encourage any divisive distinction, such as might be
assumed
because of the emphasis on matters American. Nor is it
being
suggested here, for example, that Americans are any better at
Anthroposophy in any way. On the contrary, we are just different. Each
Soul gesture in the Threefold World has
unique gifts to offer, and this essay means to serve the
potential
freeing of those yet untapped American gifts from a kind of
child-like
imitation of things European. This tendency, to model
our soul
practices on a kind of European anthroposophical idealism of
the soul,
was a natural impulse connected to our admiration of the work
of our
European brothers and sisters. It is time to grow past
this
however, to discover our far more earthly and pragmatic way to
the
Spirit. And, to do this not only for the benefit
of the
American Soul Itself, but also for the benefit of the
Anthroposophical
Movement world-wide.
There are then
two themes, which while
related are also quite separate. The relationship
of the
Alchemical stream and the Discipleship stream is one theme,
and the
relationship of the American Soul to the wider world is
another.
The point of intersection, between the Discipleship
stream and
the instinctive capacities of the American Soul, shows only
that the
Rosicrucian and Manichean streams of the Old World, and their
connection to Initiation, does not quite have the same meaning
for the
American Soul as does the natural Christ Impulse inspired in
Americans,
and revealed by their relationship to the outer world of
social need
(in part a consequence of the fact, that due to its rampant
individualism, the Consciousness Soul is developing faster
here - See
Ben-Aharon's "America's
Global Responsibility: individualism, initiation and
threefolding").
The Alchemical
stream is a stream of
studied spiritual knowledge and of initiation. It is
more of the
Kings and of Gnosis than of the Shepherds and of Faith.
The
Discipleship stream is more related to that moral work in life
that
comes from following the Teachings of Christ, and thus is more
of the
Shepherds than of the Kings. The disciples, who were
meant to be
fishers and shepherds of human beings, were not (in general)
of the old
mystery streams as were the Kings (St. Paul, remember, was not
a
disciple, but began was an enemy of Christ prior to his
initiation on
the road to Damascus). The Shepherds belong to what was
being
newly created - to the future Mysteries that are to arise from
the
social commons. These future Mysteries are not to flow out of
the old,
now impotent and dysfunctional hierarchically organized
Mystery
Centers, but from finely and homeopathically distributed
Branches and
Discussion Groups - that is the New Mysteries are to be born
out of and
in ordinary social life where groups of individuals draw
together (wherever two or more are
gathered...).
At the same
time, while the America Soul
is more naturally of the Shepherd stream, - of the
discipleship stream,
because of its orientation to outer world moral action, it can
by
turning inward and seeking a pragmatic introspective life,
begin to
draw from the wisdom-well of renewed European spiritual life.
Rudolf Steiner, in his works on objective philosophical
introspection ("A Theory
of Knowledge Implicit In Goethe's World Conception"; "Truth and
Knowledge"; and "The
Philosophy
of Spiritual Activity") gives us a
quite useful generalized map to this introspectively
investigated inner
territory - a territory that for the American Soul has many
different
and unique characteristics. With Emerson, we get a
similar map,
not as exact and scientifically rigorous, but one which
nonetheless is
more in harmony with the actual landscape of the American
Soul.
We can then
read Steiner to initiate us
into our introspective soul voyages, in the most objective and
scientific fashion; and, read Emerson for that travelogue,
which is
more attuned to the unique scenic beauty to be actually found
there,
given that the American Soul, like the other soul-gestures of
the
Threefold world, is differently oriented in its fundamental
nature.
I have tried
here to distinguish two
problems that ought not to be confused. This
article is not
saying that the American Soul and the Discipleship stream are
identical, only that there is a definite kinship. What
is also
being said is that for those in this discipleship stream (of
which
there are no doubt many - Americans and otherwise - within the
Society
and Movement, and for whom this article also aims to provide
greater
self-understanding), they will tend to be less attracted to
exercises
aimed at spiritual development, and more called to moral
action in
life, which incidental to its true deeds, produces the after
effect
called: character
development.
"For every one step in spiritual development, there must be three steps in character development". Rudolf Steiner: "Knowledge of Higher Worlds and How to Attain It".
[Keep in mind,
when thinking about
character development, this question: To what aspect of
character
development do we relate a good sense of humor, laughter,
foolishness
and dance? Please also note that at one time the word silly
meant to be possessed by the sacred.]
This is not to
suggest that specific
spiritual developmental exercises are unimportant, but rather
just to
point out that if the moral (character) development lags
behind, it
more and more becomes a danger that spiritual experience will
come
toward us in a one-sided way. Further, we need to understand
that
true heart thinking is almost entirely a consequence of the
extent to
which the
will
to do the Good
(that is to be moral) is the foundation for all feeling and
thinking
activities.
To make some of
this a little more
concrete, we might notice that it would not be uncommon for
those drawn
to the Discipleship stream to find that their biography
involves a need
to encounter the 12 Steps of AA, or to have to undertake some
similar
deep moral-Trial work. Challenges to character
development
are common in biographies with a strong kinship with the
discipleship
stream. Which thought then leads us to the essential
point.
Moral or character development does not result from
spiritual
exercises, but only from inner and outer actions in the
biography, and
their related moral dilemmas. The practice of exercises
builds
capacities in the Soul, while moral
actions, both inward and
outward, apply these capacities in life (which then purifies the Soul). Christ puts it this way: Blind Pharisee, wash
out the
inside of the cup and saucer first, if you want the outside to
end up
clean [for the whole theme, see
Matthew 23:
25-28]
Let us review a
bit: From a certain
point of view, the Alchemical stream is very European, and
thus has a
tendency to put forward the incarnation of an Ideal as a goal,
leading
to the emphasis on spiritual exercises, knowledge and
initiation.
Americans, on the other hand, tend to face the social as
a
problem to be solved through moral action. This is very
pragmatic, for it is not the purity of an ideal that matters
as much as
being able to do something to help others. In this
sense, the
stream of Discipleship is more natural to Americans because,
in harmony
with our engagement with and in the world, as social helpers,
discipleship is rooted in moral action - in doing the Good ("...and
crown
thy Good, with Brotherhood...").
[Isn't this
Brotherhood also partly
related to our ability to help each other experience the
katharsis of
laughter, especially under dire circumstances.
Conversation does
have a higher function than light, but then what about a well
encouraged giggle? The Shadow cannot abide humor, and
runs away
when we make fun of it.]
In a sense, the
idealism of the European
anthroposophist has blinded the American anthroposophist,
first by
suggesting there is only one way to be anthroposophical (a
European
soul idealism), and second by failing to appreciate that the
American
Soul is considerably different. The result is that
instead of
coming to true self knowledge, we (in America) have been
pursuing what
is at best a temporary illusion (a goal we really can't
achieve),
instead of our developing, more consciously, the earthly
(including
humorous and joyous), socially oriented and pragmatic instinct
that is
our given nature.
I hope the above has not been too confusing. Mostly I just wanted to point out certain contextual themes, and leave to the reader's own thinking precisely what to make of these ideas. In what comes next, where we get more deeply into the pragmatic and the concrete, I hope then that these contextual matters will, as we proceed, begin to make a more practical, and a less abstract, sense.
*
[a brief biographical note: My interest in introspection began around 35 years ago, in 1971, as a result of a kind of spontaneous awakening in my 31st year. I didn't call it introspection at that time, but I had become quite awake inwardly, and was only able to orient myself to these experiences using the Gospels. Seven years later, in 1978, I met the work of Rudolf Steiner, and gravitated to his writings on philosophy, particularly A Theory of Knowledge..., and The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. I also became very interested in Goethean Science, projective geometry and all the Steiner material on the social problem, which was my own main outer-world interest. It was over 25 years later, in 1997, that I wrote my first effort at describing what I had learned about the moral nature of the Soul under these two influences: the Gospels and Steiner's writings on objective philosophical introspection. That essay was called "pragmatic moral psychology" and can be found on my website . At that time, however, I did not yet know enough about the Shadow, and only now, almost 10 years later, can I write the immediately below with some confidence in my appreciation of the intricacies of these problems in the light of an intimate experience of the threefold double-complex.]
substance, or better yet,
selling water by the river*
*[The river of
the soul lies inward in
everyone. To teach, as it were, about the soul, is to
sell water
by the river, to give to someone something that is already
right in
front of their own true face. In spite of all that
exists, for
example in our home libraries of Steiner texts etc., there are
really
only two essential books for the study of the soul: the Book
of Life,
and the Book of our Own Soul. Learn to read those, and
you'll
know the core of what you need to know. A text, even
this text,
can at best be a word-map describing a territory you'll only
really
know by direct experience, however many other books you ever
read.
The
reality
of matters spiritual is, however, not found in reading, but
only in
action. We can acquire a lot
of
concepts by reading, but we need experience (the consequences
of action) more.]
We should keep
in mind as we begin, that
what is described below is essentially very human and very
ordinary.
It is one possible descriptive word-map, as it were, of
the soul
engaged in the dynamics of inner awakening via the path of
discipleship. As a map, it will be somewhat abstract and
defined.
The actual territory is something else altogether -
human, messy,
inconstant, prone to emotional ups and downs - that is all the
wonders
of ordinary consciousness. All a word-map tries to do is to
point out
various significant features. Look out for these
mountains,
notice those valleys. Here is a pure spring, there is a
hard and
dangerous rock wall. It is my hope that the reader will
find
below some guidelines which will help them to chart their own
path
through the pristine forests and dark swamplands of the soul.
Keep in mind it takes courage to explore there, but at
the same
time there is no other adventure quite like it.
Recall then
what Dennis Klocek gave in
his lecture to the 2005 AGM, and then published shortly
thereafter in
the News for Members (or if you didn't hear or read it,
try
to find a copy as soon as you can): On the blackboard a
mandala:
a circle, expressing a series of alchemical relationships:
earth
(freedom); water (phenomenology); air (silent practice) and
fire
(dialog). The circle form suggests a return to earth
(freedom) at
some new or higher kind of level. But before considering
that,
first some deep background.
If, from a
certain point of view, we
think of the above four elements in Dennis Klocek's lecture as
notes in
a rising scale, we could also find that in between each note
is an interval. While the note is in itself more of
a step
in spiritual development supported by spiritual exercises, the
use
in
life (the interval) of the acquired spiritual skill/capacity is
more of a
moral act - an aspect of the process of character development.
The soul is fallen - it is an out of tune instrument,
yet we
hunger to return, to rise up and to experience reintegration,
and to
give voice to the joy of coming Home, which the Story of the Return
of the
Prodigal Son tells us leads to
celebration
and feasting.
Because the
spiritual development
exercises are so well known, and so completely covered
elsewhere in
Steiner's basic books, as well as Dennis Klocek's books, I
will not be
discussing them here. This essay assumes a general
knowledge of
that work, and some practice in their use. Here we are looking
at the
development of the Soul solely with regard to its struggles
with the so
very messy, personal and human moral questions of the
biography.
In case there
is some confusion here, in
Steiner's Knowledge of Higher Worlds, the
moral is approached mostly through a series of admonitions,
encouraging
the student to orient him or her self in life in certain ideal
ways.
Only in The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,
with the
discussions of moral
imagination,
moral intuition and moral technique,
did
Steiner confront the moral problem directly and
exactly.
The details
that follow I have derived
from my own (naturally messy and human, stupid and silly, and
when I
really get serious - pretentious) introspective investigations
of the
moral dimensions of the soul, but it should be kept in mind
that while
it is prudent to describe these phases and Trials as if
separated in
time in the soul, they are much more likely to be layered over
each
other - and often simultaneous in a variety of ways. It
also
needs to be clear that what is to follow wishes only to add
another
dimension - another view from a different direction - to what
Dennis
Klocek gave, and not to contradict it in any way whatsoever.
It is
particularly crucial to note here
that we are mostly discussing those moral acts that take place
in the
Soul, not those in the outer
biography. There is a
relationship to be sure, but it will help to understand that
we are
moral in both worlds: the outer world of our biographies, and
the inner
world of Soul practice and art.
I emphasize the
word Trial
to add another quality to our understanding. Moral
development
takes place in the biography through Trials. These
challenges to
the life of soul and spirit are meant to be difficult.
We become
deeply engaged in our karma of wounds
with others in
these Trials. Moreover, these are called Trials
precisely because
there is great pain, suffering and effort (as well as not
enough fun)
connected to them, and because the Shadow plays such an important and often decisive role.
Furthermore, various aspects of the Seven Stages of the
Passion
of Christ (as described in the John
Gospel)
are enacted in the Soul via these biographical Trials: the Washing of the
Feet, the
Scourging, the Crowning with Thorns, the Carrying of the
Cross, the
Crucifixion, the Entombment, and the Resurrection. There is nothing abstract about these
difficult
processes of soul transformation, and this should be
kept in mind
as we go forward, namely that: every time I use the word Trial
I am
speaking of quite human, difficult and sometimes years
long
life-crises.
There is, in
this regard, something of a
kind of spiritual law involved. Just as the world of the
senses
has its laws of gravity and color, so the soul world has its
laws.
The ones to keep in mind here are the karma of wounds in
the
outer biography, as well as the outer and inner moral Trials
to be
faced there, which bear an exact and direct interrelationship.
To
face a challenge in life, to face a Trial, means to engage in
just that
personal teaching which belongs specifically to that baptism
by
biographical fire* most needed for the development of
our
individual character.
*[see previous essay]
Consider a
marriage for example, or the
children to be raised there. These relationships are not
trivial
distractions to any spiritual development, but rather are
precisely
those riddles and mysteries of life belonging particularly to
our own
ego's character developmental needs. One can read all
kinds of
spiritual books, practice all manner of spiritual exercises,
and still
not advance because the biographical tasks are ignored.
To begin
to awaken within, and to appreciate that we are surrounded in
our
biography with just those moral tasks and Trials we
individually need,
is to recognize just how precisely and miraculously has
Christ, as the
Artist of our karma of wounds, woven us into the world of
personal
relationships. So when Christ advises that unless we
become again
as little children, we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven, He
is, among
other matters, telling us precisely who our deepest spiritual
teachers
in life often are.
This world of personal relationships, and their corresponding moral Trials, whether of family or work, or even wider world challenges, is also very elastic in a sense. We are quite free in it, and it has a quality that can respond rather exactly to only those tasks which we choose to take up. Part of true Faith is to accept what comes to us as challenges, yet at the same time to recognize that our freedom also allows us to choose at every juncture, which way to turn, what burden to carry and when to laugh at ourselves.
For example,
the interval from earth
(freedom) to water (phenomenology) involves the skill:
thinking about.
This
skill we receive as a natural aspect of living in this age,
in that we are inwardly free to decide what to think; and, in
accord
with the Age of the Consciousness Soul, we are also becoming
more and
more able to form individual free moral ideas as well.
The
Consciousness Soul really just means
that if we inwardly wish to know the Good, in any particular
moment of
moral demand, crisis or need, we can in fact know what the
Good is.
Yet, in order to have this knowledge, we first have to ask, seek and knock. We have to inwardly form the question,
and
struggle there to let ourselves answer from the higher nature
of our
ego. The Good is what we make it to be, and as this
essay
proceeds, we will get deeper and deeper into this Mystery.
This
is why my book (found for free on line at
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/twotf.html or which can be
purchased at
www.lulu.com) "the Way of
the Fool" calls this capacity to
know the
Good: Moral
Grace.
[As an aside,
for those more familiar
with Steiner's terminology, you should keep in mind that by
necessity
he was required to cognitively form his research and
understanding into
the language of the Intellectual Soul, as that was the
condition of his
audiences. In this book we are writing out of the
language of the
Consciousness Soul itself (something toward which American's
are
instinctively gifted). So, for example, when in the
opening
lecture of the book The
Challenge of the Times Steiner
speaks of the
need for people to work out of an experience of the threshold,
he is
using Intellectual Soul terminology. In the essay above,
where I
have elaborated carefully on the Second Ethereal Eucharist
experience,
this has been a quite concrete and exact picture of human
intercourse
across the threshold in the language of the Consciousness
Soul. I
also mean to suggest here that it is quite possible to take
many of
Steiner's works and translate them from
Intellectual Soul language into Consciousness Soul language.
The attentive reader of this text, who takes to
heart the
suggested practices, will in fact eventually find themselves
able to do
this translation process themselves. Once able to do this,
the
reader will be able to confirm not only their own experience,
but all
that is written here in Steiner themselves, for nothing here
is
contrary to what Steiner offered.]
Now in this
thinking about
there is the object of our interest, in relationship to which
we are
the subject. As subject, we think about
this object. This thinking is also essentially (and
initially)
discursive to our inner experience. We appear to
inwardly
talk to ourselves. Our spirit seems to inwardly
speak that
which our soul then hears.
It is with the
skill thinking about
that we first enter on the problem of the Water Trial of
phenomenology.
Thinking about naturally
contains something of the shadow forces of the
soul, in that our feeling life is, in the beginning, dominated
by
antipathies and sympathies*. These natural likes and
dislikes of
our individualized soul color all that we think about.
Through
them what we think about
acquires an individualized (non-objective) meaning for the
spirit - the
i-AM, in the soul.
*[see R.S. lecture 4, Social and Anti-social Instincts, in The Challenge of the Times, where you will find the following discussion approached indirectly through the language of the Intellectual Soul.]
[The use of
this form of the term "i-AM",
is
meant to lessen the emphasis on the being
nature of the ego - its noun-like aspect, and to place more
emphasis on
the action nature - on the verb-like aspect of the ego.
The being
nature of the ego tends to be more related to the teachings of
the
Buddha, while the action nature
of the ego tends
to be more related to the teachings of Christ.]
In the light of
Steiner's The
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,
the
experience (the percept) is, in the beginning, distorted in
its meaning
(the thought, the concept) by the shadow elements lingering in
the yet
unredeemed antipathies and sympathies. By the way, the
reader
should be clear that only their own personal introspective
observations
can adequately discern what is going on within ones own soul.
We
have little business believing we can make such determinations
about,
or for, another.
Noticing these
excessive and unredeemed
aspects of antipathy and sympathy will give us our first vague
perceptions of the work of the threefold double-complex, the
Shadow in
the Soul. Thought
is
a flower rooted in the soul-soil of feeling, and filled from
within
by the blossoming life of the will-in-thinking.
Where an excess of unconsciousness infects this soil and this
life, the
Shadow is given free play.
In order to
progress properly through the life passages that comprise the
Water
Trial, we have to learn to renounce the unredeemed antipathy and sympathy. This is the central moral act that makes
possible
the transformation via the Water Trial from thinking about
to thinking with. We enter
the Water Trial knowing how to think about,
and
we can leave the Water Trial knowing how to think with.
The
essential moral nature of this Trial is outlined in the
Gospels in the Sermon on the Mount, in the teaching concerning
the mote
and the beam. In the biography, when we learn to
struggle with
the covering over (or painting in thought via the unconscious
Shadow
driven creation of mental pictures) of the persons that we
meet with
our individual unredeemed antipathies and sympathies, we are
learning
about the beam in our own eye. We see not the person,
but our own
soul as that lives in our projected sympathies and
antipathies.
To learn to see past the beam, to meet the true
phenomena of the
other, to learn to think with them
rather than about
them, this is the moral craft to be
discovered during
the Water Trial.
The biography
gives us just those
experiences that challenge this learning. The spouse,
the child,
the co-worker, the boss, the neighbor, the relative, or the
stranger-other, all will evoke the beam, the unredeemed mental
pictures. We must learn how not to paint our
experience
with this already unconsciously given thought-content, and
instead
learn to let the experience itself speak
into the soul, and to become consciously
active as a creator of the free thought in relationship to the experience.
Again, one way
to banish the Shadow
influence here (when we discover our thinking to be possessed
by the
beam) is to laugh at ourselves - to see the essential
silliness of our
dark inner depictions of others, as well as those depictions
which are
too sympathetic (that is where we raise another up to the
level of a
kind of minor deity, such as how too many view Rudolf Steiner
- and
others - out of a soul mood of ungrounded and unrealistic
admiration).
Sobriety, for
all its virtues, must be
balanced with play, otherwise the soul becomes an arid desert.
So, for
example, when we look at another
person and recognize that they are, in themselves, not just
that which
we observe in the moment, but rather that they are their whole
history
- their whole biography (in fact a sequence of biographies),
and when
we learn to consciously set aside the reactive feelings of
antipathy
and sympathy, only then can we start to think with
who they truly are, and not just about
them. Our folk wisdom calls this learning to walk in
another's
shoes.
This thinking with
can of course be applied to anything living, anything that has
a life
element to its nature, not just human beings, plants or
animals.
This includes the history (the story) of a social form,
such as a
family, or even an Anthroposophical Branch. When we recreate in
the
imagination, free of antipathy and sympathy, the story-picture
of
something, we are then learning to think with the object of our
thought.
Goethe taught
himself to think with
the plant, and to this organic way of thinking Rudolf Steiner
later
gave the name: Goetheanism, which is a
thinking that leaves behind the discursive
aspect of thinking about, and replaces
that with a
thinking with - a qualitative
characterizing picture thinking
(Tomberg's formulation). We do this by learning to make
inner
images (mental pictures) consciously. We still retain
the ability
to think discursively about these
inner images -
thinking about does not
disappear, but remains a skill which can be
applied when we choose and where we feel it is appropriate
(which is
why I wrote earlier of the layered nature of these soul phenomena).
Two additional
aspects of soul phenomena
need to be understood here - the attention and the intention and
their
relationship. The moral act of renunciation is more
related to
those actions of the will-in-thinking that
determines on which particular object we focus our attention.
When we are lost to the beam in our own eye, part of our
attention is unconsciously focused on our own soul's reactive
feelings
of antipathy and sympathy. To the act of renunciation of
these
interfering aspects of our attention, we need to join the
intention to
love the object of this phenomenological (story-picture)
thinking.
After subduing the impulse to live imprisoned and in the
thrall
of the beam in our own eye (reactive feelings of antipathy and
sympathy), we use our first stage (necessarily awkward and
tentative)
understanding of how to love the other in such a way so as to
redeem
them in thought. We
consciously
create a new picture to replace the old unconscious and
reactive one.
As part of the
Water Trial, we don't just
set aside the reactive feelings, but we learn how to create in
the soul
cultivated feelings. We create freely chosen cultivated
moods of
soul - that is intended feelings of reverence, wonder and so
forth,
which then have a salutary effect on the thought content that
is to be
produced according to where we let our attention come to rest.
This is an example of where the exercises bear fruit.
If we
have practiced these exercises, this will be a great help when
we then
need to apply the newly learned ability to form cultivated
moods of
soul, as a prelude and foundation for thinking with
someone in a new way.
With a cultivated feeling we transform the soul-soil from which the thought is born and then flowers (which is also why the ideal is expressed as: thinking with the heart).
In a certain
sense, what is renounced,
love replaces. What is given up, becomes transformed.
What
is dark, is turned to gold. What is evil - our dark
habits rooted
in the unconscious fear and mistrust of the other - the Thou,
are
beginning to be transformed into love. And, best of all,
what is
too sober, particularly in our Self, can - as is necessary -
be made
silly.
The
renunciation of unredeemed antipathy
and sympathy does not, however, mean their elimination.
The will
acquires the capacity to master this somewhat base song of the
soul.
We cease attending to it unconsciously, and turn that
attention
(and the related intention) elsewhere. We master the
unconscious
soul gesture that leads antipathies and sympathies into the
forefront
of the soul, and like a good choir director, silence it so
that we can
concentrate on other instruments of soul potential, other
voices.
Transformed and conscious feelings of antipathy and
sympathy
become a valid means of discernment. But we need to be
awake to
the arising and becoming of these feelings, if we wish not to
give the
shadow element free play.
The
will-in-thinking (an awake and more and more morally pure
intention and
attention) fills the thought with life (which is why I add
to the
ideal of thinking with the heart, the ideal also to will the good).
In this way we
also refine the gold that
is latent in antipathy and sympathy - their capacities for
discernment
and truth are enhanced, because we apply them with more
consciousness -
a more awake attention and intention. In the teaching on
the beam
and the mote, Christ, in Matthew 7:5, ends it this way: You fake, first get
the log
out of your own eye and
then you
can see
about getting the splinter out of your brother's eye.[emphasis added]
Again, one of
the best ways to eliminate
the log is to learn to laugh at it. The log arises from
the
Shadow side of soul life, and in the light and warmth of our
learning
to laugh at ourselves, the Shadow's hold dissolves.
In Steiner's The
Philosophy
of Spiritual Activity, we are
taught the importance of the moral basis for our actions,
whether
outwardly in the sense world, or inwardly in the soul.
Only that
action, which is preceded by a self-determined moral reason
(intention), is truly free. Even so, no one should be
surprised
to discover that they are already trying to do these
activities in some
fashion or another. Emerson said this: In self trust all
virtues are
comprehended. The purpose of
this essay
- this word-map - is to help us raise out of the realm of
instinct,
step by step into full consciousness, our already existing
natural
goodness.
[Another brief
biographical note: As I
shared previously, I underwent a kind of spontaneous awakening
at age
31, and one of the by-products of this inner infusion of
light, was
that I became hyper-aware of judging people. I could see
myself
putting them into various boxes and categories, and being now
awake to
this beam in my own eye, I could also see that this was not
right - it
violated conscience, so that I struggled to learn how to not
do it.
That said, learning how not to do it, does not mean that
we
always apply this newly learned moral craft. On the
contrary, I
often fell back into old ways many times over the years,
although there
did slowly dawn a kind of sensitivity, that let me see that I
had been
again in thrall of the beam. Stepping outside the prison
of the
beam does not become automatic - a habit, but must always be
applied,
in the moment, consciously, with intention and attention (the
will-in-thinking).]
After we have
learned to renounce
(consciously and for specific and individually freely chosen
moral
reasons) our soul gestures of yet unredeemed antipathy and
sympathy, in
order to learn how to think with that
object of thinking
which we are learning to love, do we then move out of the
Water Trial,
via more necessity, to the life passages of the Air Trial.
This
movement from water (phenomenology) to air (silent practice),
which
before (at the entrance to the Water Trial) began with
thinking about,
now
begins with the newly learned craft of thinking with.
We
start with that which we have now discovered as a spiritual
development in the course of the Water Trial, and then apply
that new
level of moral craft (capacity of the will) of renunciation
and love to
the Air Trial. The will-in thinking, which has
learned to master the unredeemed aspects of feelings of
antipathy and
sympathy, and to replace these with thoughts born out of
cultivated
moods of soul, is
now
strengthened. It is this strength that then lends itself to the life lessons of
the Air
Trial.
Dennis Klocek
described the Air Trial as
a learning to think backwards - of unraveling, or unrolling,
the
thought content produced by thinking with.
The
Discipleship stream sees it from a slightly different
direction,
one which, however, is not in opposition, but which instead is
once
more intended to be complementary.
Via the Water
Trial we have learned how
to think with, and that has
produced a thought content in the soul.
It
is this
content that must now be renounced in the Air Trial. When Steiner wrote of this he called it:
sacrifice
of thoughts. We learn how,
again in meeting people, to not
have a thought content at all. We become inwardly
silent.
Strong forces of will are needed in order to subdue the
already
achieved thought content, which we have wrapped around another
person
(or any other object of thinking), even if this content now
lives free
of unredeemed antipathies and sympathies. We can also
renounce,
during the life passages of major aspects of the Air Trial,
those
thoughts produced only by thinking about.
Further, in the
feeling life there live attachments to
the thought content. We have, after all,
produced it. It is our creation, and we like it (most of
the time
- where the Shadow has unconsciously produced the thought
content, we
can learn to relate to this soul phenomena out of a healthy
antipathetic
discernment - we can come to not
liking it
that we have such a thought). Sometimes, however, we
can't even
separate our own sense of self from this thought content.
Nonetheless, to traverse the Air Trial we need to
renounce our
collection of mental pictures (thoughts). Remember, the
self
development that accompanies the sequence of alchemical Trials
is not
just related to spiritual exercises, but also to moral or
character
development; the chief features of which are acts of sacrifice
- acts
of renunciation, and acts of love (the beginnings of: Not I, but Christ in
me).
Steiner also
calls this attachment to our
thought content, in certain circumstances: being in bondage to
the
concept "One
must
be able to confront an idea and experience it; otherwise one
will
fall into its bondage" (The
Philosophy
of Freedom, last sentence of the
original Preface). It can be a savage inner struggle -
this Air
Trial - to learn to forcefully set aside our favorite pictures
of the
world, a seemingly negative artistic act, sometimes taking
months to
accomplish. At the same time, their essential nature
does not
disappear, for the very same qualitative aspects of our true
nature -
our true i-AM - can once again
call them forth. Thought does not
disappear, it only becomes latent and goes into a kind of pralaya (the state of being uncreated, unformed).
The
will-in-thinking is strengthened by this act of renunciation,
and when
we choose to think again concerning this same object of our
thought,
the penetrating new powers of the will-in-thinking (attention
and
intention) can call forth from this pralaya an ever deeper understanding of the underlying
meaning
and truth of that about which we have chosen to think.
[another
biographical note: I first
explored this process during my many long years of the Water
Trial,
which really began when I discovered that I had become
captured by a
psychological paradigm, or world picture. I had come to
view
everyone, after a time, through the lens of this
psychologically based
world picture. I discovered that the best way to become
inwardly
free of this capture, was to undo any relationship to this
paradigm, an
activity that took several months. A year or so later, I
let
myself be captured by a similar world picture, this one
connected to
Tibetan Buddhism. Again, many months were needed to
become
inwardly free - to break the chains of the teaching - to be
able to
only experience these thoughts when and if I consciously
called them
forth. Subsequently, upon encountering Anthroposophy, I
gave
myself wholly to it - became intoxicated with it in a way, and
spent
three years drinking in all that I could manage, eventually
once more
finding myself inwardly lacking the spiritual freedom before
the
concept that I knew by then was essential.
Only after many
months of work at
sacrifice of thoughts, was I able to stand in relationship to
the
massive and marvelous thought content of Spiritual Science,
inwardly
free. Through this activity of sacrifice of thoughts, I
eventually stood in relationship to concepts, acquired from
Steiner, in
such manner that they only appeared in my consciousness when
called
forth. From this free perspective (which I was then able
to
survey as a whole), I then could see that Anthroposophy was
not a
thought content at all, but rather just the method of awake,
and fully
conscious (intended and attended) free thinking I had been
instinctively seeking for many years.]
As the shadow
elements (unredeemed
antipathies and sympathies - Water Trial, and emotional
attachments to
our self-created thought content - Air Trial) are being let
go, we now
begin to have another experience connected to the Gospels.
This
is again related to the Sermon on the Mount, specifically the
beatitude: "blessed
are
the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven".
The rolling
back, the sacrifice of, the
renouncing of the previously created thought content, makes
the soul
inwardly poor in spirit. As we
empty out the soul, we begin to learn a new
spiritual activity, which might be called thinking within. The Air Trial passages of life are
taking
us from thinking with toward thinking within. This opens us to
the delicate first stages of the conscious experience of the kingdom of heaven as It begins to appear with greater clarity out of the
general
background noise of the soul, and on the wings of our natural
instinct
for the embryonic New Thinking. The Air Trial is
developing
that which is meant to take us upward and onward to the Fire
Trial, or
dialog. When we are poor in spirit, empty of the
previously given
thought content (and master of silent practice*), then we can,
to a
degree, experience directly the
inside of the object of our thought.
In
personal relationships, this is the capacity for the
beginnings of true
empathy.
*[Tomberg, in
his Anthroposophical
Studies
of the New Testament writes: Exercise thy forces
so thou
mayst create thine inner Kingdom. Surrender this kingdom
after
thou hast created it. Resign thyself as a beggar
to the
Spirit!"]
In a sense, the
base elements of
unredeemed antipathy and sympathy are a foundation in the
soul. They
are of the earth. In the Water Trial, we rise to a more
subtle
and plastic condition in the soul. To think with,
to
know the phenomenology of the object of thought, is to bring
the
thinking into movement with its
object. The
earth aspect is more solid and crystallized, while the water
aspect
more fluid and more mobile. The discursively produced
thought is
dead (the instinctive living element necessary for any thought
remains
in the unconscious), while the consciously created
picture-thought is
more living. With the air element, the soul becomes more
expansive. Thought that is renounced in the Air Trial
dissipates,
disperses and dissolves into the general spiritual background
of the
soul - the previously noted pralaya (uncreated, unformed)
condition.
The will-in-thinking does not any longer call it forth,
nor does
it let the thought call itself forth. When we are in
bondage to
an idea, it calls itself forth, and the Air Trial teaches us
to break
the chains by which we have let our unconscious feeling
attachment tie
us to the concept/idea. We break these chains of feeling
by
dissolving them, and Dennis Klocek's metaphor of rolling back
the
thought is quite apt. We untie it from its attachment to
the
soul, and without doubt the practice of the spiritual exercise
of the
Ruskshau is a great help here.
Only then, when we are truly empty, can thought, in the sense that it is the true inside of our object of thinking, come toward us. The true idea of the object moves toward us, as we learn to open ourselves to it, such that it then thinks in us. As Christ says in Luke 17: 20-21 "Asked by the Pharisees when the the kingdom of God was coming he answered: "The kingdom of God doesn't come with the watching like a hawk, and they don't say, Here it is, or There it is, because, you know what? the kingdom of God is inside you."
Steiner writes
at age 25, in "The Theory
of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception", published in 1886, that: What takes place in
human
consciousness is the interpretation of Nature to itself.
Thought
is the last member in the series of processes whereby Nature
is formed.
While Emerson
writes at age 33 in the
essay "Nature"",
published in 1836, 50
years before Steiner wrote the above: Nature is the
incarnation of
a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water
and gas.
The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is
forever
escaping again into the state of free thought.
Thus, having mastered (to a degree) silent practice (learned how to be poor in spirit), we are at the beginning of the Fire Trial, and similar in kind to our previous renunciations, the soul now begins to discover how thinking can be in deepest kinship with its object, by abandoning the Self - by no longer seeing ourselves as the center of the universe. Instead we begin to love the object of thinking more than we love ourselves. This deepening intention to love, in that our own i-AM learns to stand out of the way, allows the i-AM of the other more room in the soul - we begin to see them not just from their inside - true empathy or thinking within, but as them, united with them. Again, anything living that can be thought empathically, can also be even more deeply known when we learn to unite with it in thought. But this requires more than our own action. The art of true empathy, or thinking within, now, as we let go our own centrality of being, becomes the chalice in which It can think in us - and the life passage of Fire Trial begins to unfold.
This is the
fruit of the Air Trial now
carried further - the spiritual developmental capacity to have
dialog
with the realm of the invisibles, for true empathy free of
self
importance and rooted in inner silence, now lets the inner
being of the
other - the Thou - speak. Having understood how we
become in
bondage to the concept, and emotionally attached to it, we no
longer
repeat those actions, with the result that thought tends not
to come to
rest in the soul, to coagulate there. Instead, thought
now passes
through the soul - flows like a living stream.
[In 1999, seven
years ago, I wrote this:
My
method
basically now consists (when life circumstances allow it) of
sitting at
my desk and writing descriptive passages of social and
political
realities. Inwardly the experience is analogous to
looking at a
clear stream. The surface of the stream results from my
inner
activity in sacrifice of thoughts, fact gathering, picture
forming and
artistic expression (more or less done simultaneously).
At the
same time as my thinking sees this clear surface, I can
perceive that
there arises, on the other side of that surface, activity
which does
not belong to my own will, but which appears there
spontaneously of its
own accord. The clear surface is then a product of two
activities
acting in concert. With my writing I record what appears
there.]
With this art (thinking within), which
was earlier
merely a skill
(thinking about)
and
then a craft (thinking
with), we now are in the midst
of the Fire Trial. But before discussing this Trial more
deeply
from the point of view of Discipleship, we need to look ahead
a bit and
understand what lies on the other side of the Fire Trial.
We need
to have a picture of what happens in between - in the moral
interval
between fire (dialog) and the new earth (new freedom), as the circle gesture
spirals
around in a kind of completion, before moving on to a new
level of
experience.
[a bit more
biography: the material next
to be presented, regarding what can happen after the life
passage of
the Fire Trial, is a little bit speculative on my part.
While I
have had quite definite experiences of the kind: Imagination,
Inspiration and Intuition (mostly by Grace from Above), I am neither naturally clairvoyant nor an
initiate. I
am not even sure most of us need anymore to strongly seek such
a goal,
at least certainly not in a single lifetime. When I get
deeper
into the Fire Trial material itself (below), especially given
the
layered nature of the soul capacities and experiences of all
the
Trials, and as well the true mystery nature of ordinary
consciousness,
why I encourage a consideration of the more modest goal of a
kind of sacramental
thinking (as against initiation)
especially for Americans, will
be made more plain.]
This
culmination of the Fire Trial is
described in Steiner's John Gospel lectures, in lecture
twelve, as: The Nature of the Virgin
Sophia and of the Holy Spirit (when
reading
this lecture, keep in mind that it was addressed to the
Intellectual
Soul, not the Consciousness Soul). The previous
spiritual
developmental tasks, interwoven with the moral and character
developmental intervals, or Trials, produces a katharsis, or
purification
of the astral body, such that the
Rite of
Initiation may now be enacted, and the seed organs of
clairvoyance may
now be impressed on the etheric body. I emphasize the
term may,
because
while a great deal of the development leading to this stage is
rooted in our own actions - our own will-in-thinking, as the
Fire Trial
progresses we become more and more interdependent with the
will
activity of the invisibles.
We do not, as I
understand it, so much
initiate ourselves, but instead are initiated in a cooperative
dance
necessarily involving Another.
On the other
side of the Fire Trial, if
initiation is to be the result, we have acquired new faculties
of
perception. The spiritual world is now there to be
experienced
directly, and the soul has fully developed that spiritual
freedom,
which The Philosophy of Freedom (or Spiritual
Activity) contemplates, for we have
renounced unredeemed antipathy
and sympathy, we have renounced our emotional attachments to a
given
thought content and we have renounced even the significance of
our own i-AM
in relationship to others; all the while learning to love ever
more
deeply the objects of our perception (beholding) and thinking.
[From this
point onward, I will be often
using the term beholding instead of
perception (in certain cases) and for this
nuance I am grateful to Clifford Monks, who provided this in a
recent
conversation between the two of us.]
Now before us
stand new objects of inward
beholding. The world of Imaginations is faced with this
new
freedom, but it stands inwardly over there, as it were, such
that once
more we have something which we think about,
only
this time it is not a sense object but a spiritual object.
Moreover, the perceptual element of an Imagination has
required
our co-participation; and, the thought content produced by our
cognitive capacity, during the experience of the
supersensible, arises
simultaneously with the experience. Contrary to a
sense
object, which has as an aspect of its nature what Steiner
called the
necessary given, a spiritual
Imagination as an object of clairvoyant
beholding does not exist independently of our own will-on-fire
in
thinking. We have authored and sourced (for this
language, grateful thanks to Harvey Bornfield) it in
cooperation with
spiritual beings.
Our new thinking about has
participated in the
creation of the Imagination. We experience the
Imagination in
infinite internal space (ethereal and peripheral space) as an
object,
whose existence comes about because our own activity is
coupled with
the by Grace activity of higher beings. The intention
and
attention are involved in a Parsifal question* to which the
Imagination
is an answer (producing a kind of wordless knowledge).
Subsequent
in time to this wordless knowing experience (which includes a
conceptual element), cognition then produces the word forms,
either
written or spoken, in which the living Imagination dies into a
crystallized word-picture**, such as what is given to us in
many of
Steiner's lectures and writings. When we actively (not
passively)
read these word-pictures, recreating them in our own
picture-thinking,
the soul harmonizes with the Imaginative aspect of the world
of spirit,
creating out of this harmony a rudimentary chalice in which
later
spiritual experiences can arise.
[*A Parsifal
question is a question that
if we didn't ask it when we could have, we may have to wait a
long time
to later receive an answer. **Steiner's many notebooks
offer
evidence of the first stage of this process, by which he
incarnated
into language his sublime supersensible experiences. He
has the
experience, with its wordless conceptual element, and then
makes a record in language (or drawings) in the notebooks.
There
reason there needs to be a record is that
the sublime
experience does not enter earthly memory - it can only be
known again
by returning to the Source.]
So we begin
then to repeat at a higher
level the previous Trials, but this time facing experiences we
have
never before had. We travel once more around the mandala
of the
circling spiral of soul metamorphosis, learning in new ways to
think about
(Imaginations), then on to new thinking with
(Inspirations) and finally to new thinking within (Intuitions). [There would seem to be here
a great
mystery, about which I have not (yet) any experience, but at
the same
time a great curiosity: do angels etc. tell jokes or laugh and
dance?]
This full new thinking, however, is itself at a higher stage. It is thinking transformed into willed creative and participatory beholding. The normal thought content, which we know as an aspect of our original state of consciousness (earth and freedom, in discursive thinking about), only arises in the soul after the clairvoyant thinking perceiving/beholding. This thought content falls out, as it were, during the period of time the spiritual experience is fading away. The spiritual experience does not continue in earthly memory, but at the same time, the thought content produced (that is, how the experience was initially cognized as it fades away) does remain in earthly memory.
Let us now
return to a deeper
appreciation of the life passages we are calling: the Fire
Trial.
All the work we
do, through the various
Trials and passages of our biography, more and more purifies
the soul,
making it ready for clairvoyant spiritual perception. At
the same
time, there is constant spiritual music in the soul - the song
of the
wind and of the breath - even as far back as when we are only
being
newly born out of the first Trial of earth and freedom.
Ordinary
consciousness is already full of
spirit. Our problem is how do we pick the gold out of
the dark
shadowy and leaden dross of the soul, normal to its given
fallen state
of earth and freedom. Two factors are clues. These
are
discovered during the early stages of introspection in the
idea of
needs and the idea of choices. The wind - the breath -
the living
river of thought - blows through the soul constantly, but always in accord with
need
and most often in accord with other-need,
that is the needs not of the Self, but of the Thou. To
live into
this Grace given always present intuition-like breath, we need
to
choose. When
we
do choose service to other-need, then true, good and
beautiful intuitions flow on the wind of Grace into the soul,
even in
its ordinary and fallen state of consciousness.
How else are we
to understand the natural
and harmonious state of grace always potential in such
relationships
as: mother and child, comrades at arms and true lovers.
Other-need also helps
keep our ambitions in check. One of the
temptations that the Shadow offers to us is to let us believe
we can,
for example, out of reading a Steiner text speak with
authority about
matters concerning which we have had no other experience than
the text.
Absent the real experience - the percept - true thought
(the
concept) cannot arise. Only in conjunction with actual
clairvoyant experience can we, in full conscience, speak of
such
matters with the same confidence as did our Teacher, Rudolf
Steiner.
Yet, in the face of other-need, and our choice to devote
ourselves to this need, spiritual contact (experience) does
appear in
the soul. The
spiritual
percept (experience) arises within the soul as a response to
the Parsifal question which our intention and attention have
created
out of our relationship to other-need; and, the modest nature of our choice to
serve this need makes our soul a suitable chalice to receive
that
thought content which then serves this need.
For example, we
have no need (besides a
vain curiosity) to know who was the 20th Century Bodhisattva
incarnation of the future Maitreya Buddha. Yet, on the
other
hand, there is a deep need to know how to love those intimate
others in
our biography, so that we can learn to heal our shared karma
of wounds.
With this in
mind (and also keep in mind
the layered nature of soul development, as against the
one-sided idea
that it is a mere linear progression) let us look at the Fire
Trial,
which Dennis Klocek has described also as: dialog; and which he related to meeting with the dead,
who come
to us through our encounters with others. From the
standpoint of
the Discipleship stream, this is once more perceived a bit
differently,
yet again in a complementary fashion.
Having passed
through the previous
Trials, our will-in-thinking now possesses certain capacities,
certain
inner arts, the essence of which are moral in nature. The self
development spiritual exercises are secondary to, but
supportive of,
the character (moral) developments. We have learned in
the Water
Trial to renounce unredeemed antipathies and sympathies and to
replace
those with a redeemed thought-content produced in a chalice of
freely
chosen cultivated feelings - that is we have learned to think
with
the object of thought. In the Air Trial we have renounced as
well even
this self-produced thought-content, in order to live in the
silence,
that is poor
in
spirit - thus beginning the
experience we
have been calling: thinking within.
In Fire Trial,
which begins with its
capacity of thinking within won in the Air
Trial, we
now enter into dialog on the wings of a renunciation of self
importance. That which is not-Self is to become more
important
than that which is Self. Love of the other
fills the
attention and intention, and the work toward Not I, but Christ
in me
matures. In this case, the
dialog
element for the Discipleship stream is more accurately
characterized as
Steiner's "it
thinks in me", albeit this form of
expression
is lacking a certain artistry (Intellectual Soul, not
Consciousness
Soul). A more beautiful phrase would be: the delicate and
subtle
presence of Fullness and fullness of Presence (Holy
Breath).
[another
biographical note: I learned,
over many years of hard experience, that the essential matter
was the
Parsifal question - the deeply felt question, coupled with the
absence
of personal ambition in this question. The knowledge I
seek must
be consciously intended to serve others, not to serve my vain
curiosity. In fact, my success in my researches into the
social
(see other essays in this book), seems to have been entirely
related to
my renunciation of the possibility of initiation in order to
more
deeply be led to an understanding of the social, an act which
occupied
my prayer life for a number of years in the mid-'80's.
As a
consequence, I began to experience this wind, this delicate
and subtle
presence of Fullness and fullness of Presence in response to
my
Parsifal questions concerning an understanding of the social,
which I
had sought in order to serve other-need. My biography
led me to
working, from my mid-thirties onward, as a member of the
working poor.
I cleaned toilets, washed dishes in restaurants, worked
in mental
hospitals, and the last three years of my work life (59-62), I
worked
in a factory. This led me to not only a personal, but a
shared
experience of the suffering in the world due to the Age of
Materialism,
which has led the i-AM not to appreciate
itself or the causes of its suffering,
and which gave me such pain of soul that the only way I could
think to
alleviate this was to seek, via the New Thinking, the ability
to tell a
new story of the
world and of human meaning.
This was my
Parsifal question in its broadest form, and the wind would
come at
anytime It choose as I lived out these experiences, so that
I had
to learn to be sensitive to this wind,
and
to serve It, even by pulling off the road when driving and
taking
notes, or getting up from bed at night and writing when
called.
The success of this inner work also made me on more than
one
occasion, an obnoxious moral nut case, filled with excessive
moments of
grand hubris - my own Shadow intoxicated and inflamed.
Fortunately, the Trials would knock me down whenever I
got too
drunk with the seriousness of any luciferic fantasies of
having a
mission.]
The moral art of thought not only
comes to
the truth of the object of thinking, but also knows its
goodness and
its beauty. In intimate relationships, where we learn to
love the
will of the other - the Thou, and to see the beauty, not of
their
physical appearance, but of their deeds - in this selfless
perception
we then start to live in their true Fullness and Presence.
Thinking within, as it traverses the Fire Trial, begins to
experience
the spiritual world as a thought world, via a pure thinking,
which is a
cooperative art - Grace will be present. This purity is
three-fold. It is pure in the sense that it is only
thought -
that is it is sense free. The attention is so focused
only on
thought, that the outer sense world recedes far into the
background of
consciousness. That is one aspect. The second kind
of
purity is moral in nature. The soul is pure in its
intention and
attention. The intention and attention are chaste, as it
were.
Modest, or moderate. Without ambition of any kind.
Not even seeking initiation or enlightenment.
Insight
increases in the soul, but each time as a surprise - as a
wonder.
The third kind
of purity is as regards
the thought - the concept itself. It is only
pure concept or idea and in this it is thought as Being, as
Presence
and Fullness. Our earthy
grasping of
the thought, which in the beginning tends to render it into
mere mental
pictures or generalized concepts, has been gone beyond.
We have
sensed thought unconsciously in this beginning, and caused it
to fall
into our earthly and darkened consciousness from out of its
original
living environment. When we learn how to return thought
to its
true realm and nature, then our sense-free thinking, and the
purity of
our intention and attention now lets the pure nature of the
Being of
the Thought think
in
us (dialog).
At the same
time, this conversation has
what seems at first blush an odd quality to it, in the sense
of our
freedom. As discussed in the essay above, on The
Meaning
of Earth Existence in the Age of the Consciousness Soul, just as Christ gives his Being to our need for
knowledge of the Good as an act of Grace in such a way that
the thought
of the Good is entirely ours to shape, so also that which thinks in us does not answer our knock with any authority
whatsoever.
This Holy Spirit (the wind in the soul
spends (exhausts) Its will into us in a
way. Its participation with our i-AM
in the nature of the thought's form is such that, while the
Holy Spirit elevates our perception of truth, we remain the
final
author and source. The Holy Spirit's participation is
also a gift
and becomes the wind to the wings of our soul. Borne on this wind we see
from
whatever height, depth or breadth that must be there for other-need. We serve the Thou and the Holy Spirit
serves us
both.
The soul is now
grateful for whatever
wills to dialog with it, and has
no need for anything other than the
occasional, but profoundly nourishing, experiences of Grace,
all of
which it had already begun to know, even coming in the
beginning in the
wonderful mystery of ordinary consciousness, and in accord
with other-need and choice.
Yet, in this
same beginning, the karma of
wounds, and the unredeemed aspects of the astral or desire
body move us
forward in life, and we are guided by the Shadow into and
toward our
necessary biographical experiences. In the processes of
the Fire
Trial, we learn to let go these drives, to move with and
within the
stream of Providence in Life. The soul now tends to want
only to
be content and at rest, no longer driven. We love the
necessity
that Providence brings us, and devote ourselves to that task,
recognizing that the Great Whole of Life is in Other and far
more
competent Hands (Christ's Love).
There can be,
by the way, either (or
both) an outer necessity and an inner necessity. Self observation, with an
evocation of
conscience applied to the question of whether we are being
truthful to
ourselves,
will
reveal whether an inner necessity is to have the same weight
as an
outer one. This essay, in
fact, was
very much produced out of an inner necessity in connection
with the
delicate and subtle presence of Fullness and fullness of
Presence,
brought into the stream of Time, because of a Parsifal
question that
occurred to me regarding the pending conference on Ben
Franklin (August
18-19, 2006), where I lived in Fair Oaks, California.
Yet, even
in this work, I encountered Fire Trial elements, for latent
and
unredeemed ambitions limited and distorted my first versions
of this
essay. Only after I had recognized these ambitions and
laughed at
myself for them, did matters begin to acquire a satisfactory
to
conscience moral clarity.
We need to keep
in mind that we remain of
the earth, even when the wind - the kingdom of heaven - is
blowing
through the soul. In our earthly dialogs, one with the
other, we
need to learn to just listen and not to always impose our own
opinions
upon the others' freedom of thought (for parents of children
and others
in a teaching necessity, this will be different, sometimes).
We
can let the soul rest in wonder at what the Thou will say and
do.
So also with the invisible other-presence in the soul. In this way the outer
biography and
the inner biography more and more consciously harmonize their
naturally
interwoven music.
Life itself -
the biography - will demand of ordinary layered consciousness,
and in
harmony with the necessities of our karma of wounds, those
experiences
to be faced in which other-need and choice appear.
If
we think with the heart and will the good, Grace will come in
the form
of those other-needed intuitions - the deepening consciousness
of what
other-presence wants to say into our inwardness, in
concordance with
our slowly growing and developing capacities, as is necessary
for
service to the Thou.
This is the
essence of the Fire Trial - a
burning away purification of self for other. Just as in
the Air
Trial we set aside attachment to a given thought content, so
in the
Fire Trial we give away our attachments to our own meaning -
we
dissolve the self descriptive concepts with which we
previously adorned
our i-AM, as if wearing a costume. Instead, we just
are.
In all our actions and choices, we are (if we think on
it)
always: "In
the
Beginning...".
We no longer
are this or that, but just
are (i-AM). Each favorite self-name: father, mother,
anthroposophist, alchemist, lawyer, ditch digger - all these
names of
self are let go, using the craft and art acquired in the Air
Trial.
We do this in order to get ready for the first part of Not I, but Christ in
me - the Not I part. We burn away
the I concepts, which by their very nature are limiting and
mark us as
not-free and are a beam in our own eye-inside, directed at
ourselves.
We don't have
to think of ourselves as a
father or mother, for example, since the necessity of the
biography
places those tasks before us already. The inner
biography too,
with its ambitions, hopes, dreams and wishes, pulls us forward
as well.
There is as yet no traditional clairvoyant spiritual perception - the astral body is still being purified during the Fire Trial. What was the lower ego, or that which begins its path accompanied by the Shadow or threefold double-complex, has more and more merged and identified itself with the higher ego - the self-participated aspect of conscience.
When we live
purely in Parsifal questions
(that is, poor
in spirit), in the artistic mastery
of our
antipathies and sympathies, having set aside self-importance
and
attending to the object of thinking with the intention to
love, then
thinking is meet with other-presence,
as needed.
This is the quite definite inner experience of the
delicate and
subtle presence of Fullness and fullness of Presence, which is
described in the John Gospel as follows: What's born of the
flesh is
flesh, and what's born of the breath is breath. Don't be
amazed
because I told you you have to be born again. The wind
blows
where it will and you hear the sound of it, but you don't know
where it
comes from or where it goes; it's the same with everyone born
of the
breath John 3: 6-8
This Fire Trial is all the more painful, because we have become exposed via the previous layers (stages) of spiritual and character development, to a much deeper introspective understanding of our own desire body - our own astral body. We can now not only think within the other - the Thou, but also we can now think much deeper within our own soul - we are naked before our own introspective clarity of perception. That which remains unredeemed, and still yet outside the full and completed Fire Trial of purification, lies inwardly exposed to us. The descending conscience (like the descent of the dove in the Gospels) meets the rising lower ego, both seeking union and marriage; and this light from above, a kind of deep moral Grace, illuminates and warms all that is yet shadow in the soul. Emerson has put the bare bones of it like this in his lecture, The American Scholar: "For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds..."
*
Just as we learned to think about, with and within the other - the Thou, so we learn to think about, with and within ones own soul. Each skill, craft and art of thinking emerges from its corresponding Trial. The Earth Trial is a given, it is where most of us start. The Water Trial requires our first struggles with renunciation and the beginning, and delicate, expressions of love. The Air Trial takes us even further, to the abandonment of our favorite thoughts. Then we also renounce our excessive sense of Self, in the process of facing the Fire Trial. There we are also most exposed to our own other-Self, - the Shadow - which is now fully illuminated - no secrets whatsoever.
Let us
consider, briefly, some hints on
the encounter with the Shadow, from the point of view of the
Discipleship stream.
When Valentin Tomberg was writing as an anthroposophist, he described in his book "Inner Development", three aspects to the Shadow: a luciferic double, an ahrimanic double and a human double. Later, in his profoundly Christian "Meditations on the Tarot: a Journey into Christian Hermeticism" he wrote of the tempter, the prosecutor and of egregores - that is of self-created psychic parasites in the soul (Steiner called these latter creatures, in Man as Symphony of the Creative Word: cancers or tumors of the soul).
When we think
discursively - talk
inwardly to ourselves, the unconscious works into the soul.
That
is, both the higher and the lower unconscious are present.
No
true thought, for example, can arise in the soul except for
its having
come to us via the living stream of thought (see Kuhlewind
here).
But, because in ordinary and fallen soul consciousness,
we are
bound (intentionally by the Gods so as to give us true freedom
on the
earth) into an inner darkness of spirit, we only can know
thought as it
falls out and down into the soul from its original living
element.
In discursive thought the living element has died.
Conscience,
another higher element of the
unconscious, also speaks into the soul via discursive thought,
as that
whispering still small voice.
At the same
time, the Shadow is active
here as well. When we struggle with our own
temptation or
tempt others (the luciferic double), or when we hurt
ourselves, or
others (prosecute ourselves or others) with mean thoughts (the
ahrimanic double), these too come from the unconscious into
discursive
thinking. When we fall, over and over again into
temptation such
as addiction or alcoholism, part of the soul becomes
excessively free
of the ego, for the ego is weak in many ways. This part
can be
called an egregore or a tumor of soul.
However, since
all manner of bad habits
(an ill temper, an abusive tongue) are also connected to tiny
tumors of
soul, I have began to feel that this language lacks what art
and a
sense of beauty needs to give to our conceptions, so above I
wrote only
of wounds, of our karma of wounds.
In the
case of egregores or serious tumors or cancers of the soul, we
can call
these self-generated
wounds.
What the life
passages of the Trials give
to us is ever greater consciousness. We draw out of the
unconscious, through a more and more awake intention and
attention,
not only its lower elements, the Shadow and darkly cold
side of
temptations, prosecutions and wounds, but also the Light and
heart
warmed side, the stream of living thought and participated
conscience.
So, in facing
the Water Trial of the mote
and the beam we begin the work of discipleship, the work of
seeking
reintegration and reunion with the Divine Mystery Itself.
So also
with the Air Trial and the Fire Trial. Bit by bit we
perceive and
then let go what is dark in the unconscious, thereby
separating and
drawing into the light the gold of our growing
will-in-thinking.
The fruit of
each Trial remains with us,
and at each passage becomes deeper. The soul becomes a
rich
texture of layers of inner song and music in the form of ever
unfolding
capacities of will, in the corresponding creative cultivation
of
sublime elements in the feeling life, all interwoven with the
arising
and passing away of the breath-stream of living thought.
The purified
will (an appropriately moral intention and attention) creates
heart
warmth in the soul-soil of feeling, out of which the light and
life
filled flower of thought is born.
And,
because we are first born into this process out of the Earth
Trial of
freedom, our whole passage in these Life Trials goes forward
in
freedom. It all evolves out of our choices. Recall
Emerson:
In self
trust all virtues are
comprehended.[emphasis added]
Nothing
renounced has disappeared, but
rather the soul becomes an instrument, which the i-AM
in freedom learns to play. The notes and intervals
become primal
dynamic expressions of soul forces and capacities, many
generated out
of spiritual exercises. Just as we must practice
the use of
a material musical instrument, so we must practice the
capacities of
the soul. At the same time, many forces and capacities
(if not
more) have a quality that comes only from the moral tone of
the soul.
We purify the instrument of the soul as much as we learn
how to
use it. Both are needed, both are necessary. The
spiritual
exercises, that is the how as in
technique, has more
kinship with the teachings of the true Alchemists - the stream
of the
Kings, while the moral purity of the soul has more kinship
with the
teachings of Christ - the stream of the Shepherds.
Steiner's The
Philosophy
of Spiritual Activity is the
modern transformation of the Christ-in-me
moral essence of
the John Gospel, while Knowledge
of Higher Worlds is the modern
transformation
of the Rosicrucian Ideals of spiritual developmental
exercises.
While the latter has more kinship with the soul
nature of
Central Europe - the seeking to incarnate the Ideal, the
former
has more kinship with the soul nature of the American - the
need to act
morally in the world. Both are present everywhere in the
world,
it is just the mix and their proportions that vary from one
soul
gesture to another, in the wonder and mystery of the Threefold
World.
Let us now seek
to make a whole.
We become more
and more inwardly free as we renounce and
transform sympathies and antipathies,
then as well the very thought content itself, until finally we
sacrifice our own importance. Each act of renunciation
is
accompanied by a corresponding and deeper capacity to love.
Each
act of love, beginning with the most simple appreciation of
the other -
the Thou, creates inner purity: inner light and warmth.
We are in
the process of learning to make of the soul a temple, and to fill it with created and cultivated
feelings of
reverence and wonder at not only the world of nature, but also
the
world of social community - the stream of karmic wounds and
free
destiny meetings with our companions in life.
Ultimately,
this inner and outer moral
work leads us to becoming fully inwardly naked to ourselves in
the Fire
Trial (where there is no longer the possibility of escaping
the
Shadow), and as well fully and consciously naked to the other-Presence (the kingdom of heaven is within you). But
even in
the face of the
other-Presence we are nevertheless
completely
free. The nature of the breath (the other-Presence) is to bring
not only a new depth of comprehension, but ever more freedom,
for we
never stop being the principle willful agent of the
thought-content
that arises in the soul. Overtime we become even freer
and more
creative - a true artist in thought.
The creation of
a human thought content
is the sole province of the 10th Hierarchy. Only in us,
and
through our love, does the Cosmos know Itself in the beauty of
human
thought. We were told this as long ago as Genesis
2:19-20, with
the symbolic picture that unto Adam is given the power of
naming every
living creature. We name the world, give it its human meaning, with every thought we source and author.
Here we can now
come to understand more
deeply the truth, beauty and goodness hidden in Christ's
comments in
response to the question of what is the most important
commandment: He
said to them, "You
are
to love your lord God with all your heart and all your spirit
and
all your mind. That is the important and first
commandment. [love other-Presence] The second one is
similar:
You are to love those close to you as you love yourself. [love the Thou, the companions in life] All the law
and the
prophets hang from these two commands"
.
Matthew 22: 37-40.
What we really
learn is to participate
sacramentally in the arrival of the thought-content in the
soul, which
becomes then ever new each time we truly think. We are,
in this,
inwardly born again and again and again. This living thinking is a
perpetual rebirth of thought, which comes
into being and dies away - a constant dying and becoming.
We
learn to unite with this living stream of thought, the living
stream of
breath within. We give ourselves over to it, in a
participatory
Rite - an artistic soul dance of sacred-heart thinking, and
then
discover the true secret of the Fire Trial, which has been
hidden out
in the open in the Gospels, just in this: Now I bathe you in
the water
to change hearts, but the one coming after me is stronger than
me: I'm
not big enough to carry his shoes. He will bathe you in
holy
breath and fire. John the
Baptist:
Matthew 3:11
leading us, through His Grace (holy breath within)
and His Love (as Artistic arranger of the Karma
of the Fire of Trials in our biographies), to:
Not I, but Christ in me.
*
* *
As a
kind of preview, here are the titles of the first
sets of videos (keep in mind that because YouTube limits the
videos of
most of us to 10 minutes it is not yet possible for me to
present
material except in this kind of broken up fashion - that is as
sets of
videos - in order to adequately cover any particular theme) -
these are
(the active link leads to the essay as written - the video
involves the
reading of the essay to the camera):
Sam
Harris,
and humanity’s moral future -
which
is a reply to Harris’s recent TED conference speech.
Saving
the
Catholic Religion from the Roman Church:
through deepening our
understanding of the Third Fatima Prophecy,
the writing of which was prompted by the current abuse scandal
in
Europe and the relationship of the present Pope to that
scandal.
Barack Obama and the reality of the anti-Christ spirit - which concerns a confusion that is too much entertained by too many regarding what this term (the anti-Christ spirit), taken from the Letters of John in the New Testament, actually means.
Here is
a link to that section of my YouTube
Channel
(joel232001) containing the videos
on
the
Coming
Metamorphosis
of Christianity in playlist form.
I should
not fail to mention that I have written two
books so far on this theme of the metamorphosis of
Christianity: The
Way of
the Fool:
the
conscious development of our human character, and the future
of
Christianity - both to be born out of the natural union of
Faith and
Gnosis; and New
Wine:
foundational essays
out of
a Science of the Spirit, in support of the coming living
metamorphosis
of Christianity, a collection which
includes
an important piece called: The Natural Christian, written
especially for those many people who would say something on
the order
of: “I’m not religious, but I am spiritual”.
The fact
is that the Christianity that many see today is
much confused, as most people with common sense realize when
they
compare the actions, of many who give themselves the name
Christian, to
what is actually the teachings of Christ as represented in the
Four
Gospels. There are many other matters of import
regarding this
situation that need to be developed carefully, but with this
brief
message I wanted to lay out somewhat why this theme of the
Metamorphosis of Christianity has been added to my other video
and
written work.
Mostly
it should be kept in mind that this work of mine
that is presented here is grounded in practice, such that
through
practice the inner life of thinking, feeling and willing is
transformed. As a result when we produce any cognitive
content
(the themes) it has been thoroughly informed with
many years of experience and is not a mere exercise of the
intellectual
arts.
For a more careful elaboration of this cognitive development, see my essay/booklet Living Thinking in Action.
This
year of 2010 was one of those seventh year climaxes,
and since part of this aspect of soul life is enhanced when we
consciously participate in it, then you might be able to guess
that I
had to become very involved in a review of the past aspects of
my soul,
and an evaluation of whether they should be allowed to die
away.
In terms of the inner life of thought, one will find in
my works
in various places a discussion of the practice of sacrifice of
thoughts, and some years during the Season of Easter, this
process can
become rather deep in nature, and including then habits
of
feeling and will as well as thought-content.
We could
say that the more we identify with the teachings
of Christ and the more we manifest those teachings out of our
own free
will, the more deeply the soul feels the rhythm of the Year,
especially
the process of Death and Resurrection representative of the
Easter
Season. What we let go of that which within us has
become old and
now dying is then reborn in a new way during Easter Week,
usually
beginning as early as Good Friday. Resurrection is
something new,
not a return to the old.
As my
soul underwent this transformation in 2010, there
followed various changes in my life that included taking up
more deeply
in thought that aspect of the future of humanity that is
connected to
the future of Christianity. This is not a simple
matter on
the one hand, yet very simple on another.
Once
more
in
different
words: the present day
religious expression of the teachings of Christ, which we tend
to call
Christianity, does not reveal, in far to many instances, what
is
potential when one follows more fully those teachings as a
spiritual
practice. This is not to say that those who call
themselves
Christians are in particular any kind of spiritual failures, only that the teachings of Christ, in practice,
are as
difficult as everyone realizes. As a result, the
religion
of Christianity can only grow and become over time, as people
discover
how to better incarnate the teachings. Mostly the
problems
come when we institutionalize small parts of the teachings,
and reduce
them to human-created fixed dogmas and doctrines, thus driving
out of
them the living substance of Christ’s own always ongoing
participation,
as He promised: Whenever two or more are gathered in my name, I
am there; and, I will be with you
until the ends of time.
It may
be useful to those who hear this to consider the
possibility that we do not yet have the full richness of
understanding
of the true Being of Christ, even in the conceptions put
forward by
present day institutional Christian Religions. The
contemporary Idea of God and the Reality of God are much
different,
especially since scientific materialism has come to seem to
explain
physical reality with such force of conviction.
Contemporary
natural science is itself quite limited in
its appreciation of existential reality, given that this
science has
systematically reduced itself to only that which can be
represented by
numbers - that is quantities - by leaving outside of its
considerations
all that is qualitative and which is also part of our
experience.
This approach, to only making scientifically real
that
which can be counted, has warped the conclusions of natural
science
away from reality in a very large way, and as we go into the
future
this religious-like scientism of the mere countable-physical
will have
to be overcome.
Should
we find our way, over time, to a true idea of the
nature of God and of the significance of the Christ
Incarnation within
that understanding, we will come to realize that the same
Divine
Mystery named by the ancient civilizations of the Vedanta
type, or
Hindu type or Egyptian type is the same Being throughout time
-
what aboriginal Americans call: the Creator. The Mystery
of 2000
years ago was that the Creator, in the form of the Son, so
loved human
beings, that He could not but follow us into material
existence, and
left for a time the higher worlds of the Divine Mystery to
become human
and then go through the gate of death as all of us must do.
Through this action He committed Himself to being fully
with us.
The Son
aspect of Creator-God then lived as a human being
for a time in between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea, and
left
behind teachings which are for our benefit. Following
this, and
in accord with His promise to be with us to the ends of time,
He became
the Spirit of Earth existence as part of His Death and
Resurrection, which among other matters means that we now live
literally inside the Son aspect of the Divine Creator Being,
which
surrounds us and permeates us. The work on this theme of
the
Metamorphosis of Christianity will go into this fact in some
detail,
and show how even through the activity of the scientific mind,
we may
come to a deeper knowledge of the meaning and utility of our
religious
nature.
Let me
just reference something here which may seem a bit
odd, yet which is a clue for a great deal that is to come in
the future
to our understanding.
In the
famous Prologue to the John Gospel, which begins: In the Beginning was
the Word
... we find this phrase shortly
after those
first words: In
it was Life and the Life was the Light of the World. Once we understanding our existence, out
of a
science that does not systematically exclude the investigation
of the
spirit- of qualities, we will come to see that this phrase in
the
Prologue is precisely and exactly true, even in a scientific
and
rational sense. In the Word - in the Divine
Creator-Being - was
Life, and this Life has manifested right into our
material-physical
existence as the Light we see by everyday. So when I
write, as I
did above, that the Spirit of the Earth - that is the Cosmic
Christ -
surrounds and permeates us, I mean this literally, and
perceptually.
When we walk in the Sunlight on a warm spring day,
we are
not only spiritually inside the Creator-Being, but we are
physically
within the manifestations of this Creator-Being, and the many
hierarchies of Beings that serve the larger elements of the
Mystery.
When we
breath we are filled with this Life, and that
manifests as our experience of being alive. When we have
thoughts
and imaginations that are filled with inner light and life, -
this too
is a participation within the Divine Creator-Being. Let
me begin
to end this introduction to this new theme for my video work
by quoting
some verses by the Moody Blues, which shows that they too
understood
this, out of their own Way of learning to see:
From the
Album Octave
released in 1978, the words of the song: One Step into the
Light
One step into the light
One step away from night
It's the hardest step you're gonna take
The ship to take you there
Is waiting at the head
Of the stairs that lead up
through your opening mind
Above the dark despair
Shines a light that we can share
Close your eyes and look up in between your brows
Then slowly breathing in
Feel the LIFE FORCE streaming in
Hold it there, then send it
back to him
All the old things are returning
Cosmic circles ever turning
All the truth we've been yearning for
Life is our saviour, saviour,
saviour, save your soul
The river of LIVING BREATH
Is flowing through the SUN
He was there before the earth began
The world will drag on you
Use his love to pull you through
Find the mission of YOUR LIFE
and start to BE
All the old things are returning
Cosmic circles ever turning
All the truth we've been yearning for
Life is our saviour, saviour,
saviour, save your soul
There's one thing I can do
Play my Mellotron for you
Try to blow away your city blues
Your dreams are not unfound
Get your feet back on the ground
The TRUTH will set us FREE, we cannot lose
We cannot lose, we just have
to CHOOSE
It is
then my hope in these videos on the theme of the
Metamorphosis of Christianity to take us into a realm of
thought and
understanding that is becoming more and more common today, and
which
does not leave outside of its substance the aspect of our
human nature
that is rational and scientific. Certainly in my videos
on the
Songs of a True White Brother of the Hopi Prophecy, I have
come at this
same truth from one direction, and now in this additional
material I
will be able to focus on ongoing transformations of
Christianity
itself, as these too manifest the coming spiritual processes
that are
living so strongly in the events of our time.
One
final thought, prompted by the reading of an
interesting article in a recent New Yorker magazine. A
problem
for a long time in Christian thought has concerned the idea of
the End
Times, and the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven, and other such
ideas
based upon statements of Christ collected in the Gospels, and
then
re-imagined in the writings of such as St. Paul and the author
Revelations.
Perhaps
this idea will help.
The Christ Incarnation occurred at a moment in Cosmic time when the Creation was at its mid-point, and certain up-building processes of a material nature were mostly finished. This is particularly true with regard to material reality and is marked in our scientific observations by a change in the state of matter such that it could no longer become more dense in accordance with those processes of rhythmic compression that accompanied the Creation. We noticed this change, in scientific language, when we discovered the property of matter that we name: radiation.
During the process of the precipitation of more and more dense
elements, there finally came a time, at what we call
erroneously the
atomic level, when the forces we name abstractly as gravity
could no
hold matter together and it began to spontaneously decompose.
This is the secret hidden in the periodic table of
elements,
which reveals the order of the creation of the elements,
starting with
the smaller and more universal first, until such time as it
becomes
impossible to maintain this tendency to increased material
density
given the other forces (will of Beings) at play in the
Creation.
Just as
Christianity is undergoing a metamorphosis, so is
all of the Creation, including materiality, subject to the
laws of Life
- the principle one being: metamorphosis, or the continual
unfolding of
the new out of the old.
This
beginning of the end of the material earth existence
corresponded with a change in the nature of humanity’s
spiritual life,
where we started to leave our spiritual childhood behind and
begin the
long hard road to spiritual adulthood; and, where at a certain
stage in
the future we will leave behind material existence itself.
Thus the
seer Rudolf Steiner described the Incarnation of
the Son aspect of the Creator as: the Turning Point of
Time. At this point then began
the end of earth
existence, a long process from a human perspective, but a much
shorter
one from a cosmic perspective. At this point of
maximum
density, such that the physical Earth would now begin to age
and then
die, the Son aspect of the Creator Being incarnated to join
His Being
to our future in such a way that we would have His company for
all
future time to come.
The
central point of these above comments is that we need
to realize we have yet a great deal more to learn about
ourselves and
about cosmic and human past and future existence. What
is in the
Gospels is only an introduction, and the understanding of
natural
science of material reality only a prelude to a much more
magnificent,
and scientifically rational, appreciation of the true nature
of the
Creation and the Beings that brought it about.
As these
videos unfold we will enter into how to attain
knowledge of the true Second Coming, which has already begun,
and much
else besides. However, as these matters require that
they be
approached from multiple directions and in a kind of subtle
and
delicate fashion, the watcher of these videos (and the reader
of the
related essays) ought not to expect all will be made apparent
in any
kind of easy or simple way. Whenever new knowledge, or
in this
case new revelation, comes toward us, our ability to
understand it and
eventually work practically with it in our lives - this
ability
is entirely dependent on the attitude and thoroughness of a
disciplined
inner life that we bring to what is offered.
The apt
cliche is: no pain no gain. Without a
corresponding effort on the part of those who receive these
words,
little of the truth will become known. Or, to return to
how
Christ put it at the end of the Sermon on the Mount: without
practice,
we build the house, of our soul and spiritual life, upon sand.
Sam
Harris, and humanity's
moral future
by joel a. wendt
I am a writer, not so much a public speaker. So I hope you won't mind too much if I read this to the camera*, instead of trying to render it seemingly spontaneously. I can do spontaneous, but not on this subject matter and in this context. Basically I have written a response to Sam Harris's talk given at the recent TED conference ...
*exists also
as a Youtube video.
As I
watched Sam Harris prowl the stage
at the recent TED conference, via the YouTube video, I
was struck (in
part) by how much he resembled a protestant preacher.
His
religion was different, but it clearly meant the same
thing to him that
a preacher's systems of beliefs mean.
For
Sam Harris this belief system
included a kind of hyper-rationality, coupled with a
faith in the
teachings and processes of natural science, which from
his point of
view saw itself as superior - as a truth process - to
any world view
that might challenge it. The approach to moral
issues that he
proposed and defended bore little difference in style
and felt passion,
to the views of someone whose Bible was the Old and New
Testament.
Except in Mr. Harris's case, the content of his
Bible included
evolution, big bang theory, and modern research on the
brain.
Lest
the listener of this piece think I'm
just another lame-brained Christian fundamentalist, they
should
actually read my works, which are available for free on
the Internet.
The difficulties with modern evolutionary
theory are
discussed in my essay: the Quiet Suffering of Nature;
as regards the big bang theory one can read about those
problems in my
essay on The
Misconception of Cosmic Space as Appears in the Ideas of
Modern
Astronomy; and, my examination
of the limits
of brain research - that is discussed in the essay The Natural
Christian.
Just
like a preacher, Mr. Harris was
filled with a kind of self-righteous fervor: asserting
that his was the
right view; that his kind of science could ultimately
answer all deep
moral questions with what was right and true; that the
world should
follow him; and, that this would put an end to those
religious views he
despised. Now I do not exaggerate here, for
despise was clearly
what he felt, as he mocked and criticized religions and
peoples for
whom he had no real empathy, although in his own view he
saw empathy as
a human characteristic of high value. Asked at the
end his talk
by a kind of moderator, to reconsider his critical views
of others, and
to reach for a more empathic understanding of what it
might mean to be
born and raised in a region of the world, with a highly
different
culture and language, he refused.
He
was not interested at that point in a
rationality counter to his own, and clearly spoke in an
effort to
convince not just his audience but himself as well,
through what he
seemed to feel was rational argument, that the mocking
and despising of
large groups of people that he exhibited was itself
morally defensible.
Although he did not directly refer to it, as one
who follows his
work I am aware that he regularly includes, in those who
should be
mocked and found morally wanting, Christians and others
who would be
tolerant of different religious views. Mr. Harris
has no
tolerance for tolerance, which is a classic form of
hypocrisy that
while allowing no acceptance of others, yet
hypocritically finds its
own similar in nature views entirely acceptable.
It
does not seem to enter into his
consciousness that when Christ teaches in the Sermon on
the Mount that
we should be cautious about judging others and watch
more closely the
beam in our own eye, and less closely the mote in
another's eye, that
right there in that teaching is the very core of a moral
and ethical
principle that is fully rational and scientific.
The thing is
that this principle needs to actually be practiced, a
personal moral
discipline with which Mr. Harris does not seem familiar.
At
the same time we should be aware that
Mr. Harris is not alone, and that many Christians do not
themselves
practice it, nor do many of those in other religions,
including the
religion of atheism. That Mr. Harris takes of the
scientific
enterprise and does exactly the same thing - that is
fail to see the
beam in his own eye first - only continues and compounds
the flawed
human characteristic so many of us share, that wants to
judge, but not
recognize in that impulse something profoundly weak and
unloving.
Mr. Harris wants us to believe that his religion
of science will
produce moral teachings that will rival what the Great
Teacher of Love
offered to the world, while at the same time Mr. Harris
is entirely
unwilling to love those he mocks and despises.
Trying
to be rational, Mr. Harris
proposes certain concepts as a basis for his prejudices.
For
example, he asserts that what one ought to do is to
answer the deep
historical questions of the problem of good and evil by
holding as the
highest values a kind of human rationality (similar to
his), and
that the goal of any such limited rationality should
express itself
within our communities in an effort to promote what he
calls the
flourishing of the human being. He presents a
fantasy of an
idyllic future in which his style of rational morality
will replace
those values he mocks and despises, which fantasy is
nothing new in the
history of thought, but just another Utopian dream that
is bound to
fail because it lacks a willingness to enter into a real
understanding
of what it means to be a human being.
The
Great Teacher of Compassion, Gautama
Buddha, proposed what he called: the Four Noble Truths,
which Mr.
Harris has to know of as a modern educated man.
But in Mr.
Harris's universe, the first truth can't be seen, which
Gautama Buddha
put forward as: Life is Suffering.
This
true down to earth observation of
the human condition is essential for understanding
existence, and lacks
the dreaming idealism and Utopianism that pervades Mr.
Harris's
thought. Moreover, the next three Noble Truths
involve solving
the problem of suffering within ourselves, and not by
going out and
demanding the rest of the world change to accord with
our own view.
For all his search for true moral values, Mr
Harris seems not to
have discovered Gandhi's dictum: Be the change you want
to see in the
world.
Assuming
as another of the highest
values, Mr. Harris believes in the rational
perfectibility of the human
being, and that if we just were as rational as is he,
most all
suffering would be eliminated from life because out of
science would
arise a moral expertise that would reveal, as if from on
high,
universal moral laws which all should then be taught to
obey.
In Mr. Harris's universe, the religious demagogue would be replaced with a scientific demagogue, who of course would not recognize his own hypocrisy at all. Yes, I am a little bit exaggerating his argument, but only a little. The core of it remains as described, and we will seldom find in Mr. Harris's work a value we might call: human freedom. The behaviorist B.F. Skinner got so wrapped up in his limited view of human nature coupled with an adoration of science that he wrote a book called: Beyond Freedom and Dignity, arguing for using scientific methods to modify human behavior, and thus supposedly producing happier people. Sadly Harris seems to want to resurrect this horrible way of viewing human beings as perfectible clay for a moral molding by natural scientists.
As a
social philosopher I am not
surprised that Mr. Harris's views are popular and
thought by many
others to be highly rational and appropriate. We
do exist in an
Age when there has arisen a religion of natural science
that has been
aptly described as scientism. Its believers accept
uncritically
the theories of natural science, and given that this
same Age also
contains a falling apart of many institutional
religions, who are
justly criticized for their own obvious hypocrisies, it
is no wonder
that at the intersection of scientific and religious
debate there is
little resolution - but rather a lot of seemingly heated
conversation,
which displays yet little real light or true human
warmth.
Not
only that, but many today who are
fans of his work are themselves unfamiliar with the
great history of
ideas in Western Civilization in which all these matters
have been
discussed and elaborated with far greater wisdom than
Harris offers.
The
reality is that the public debate now
going on between those whose beliefs involve the
teachings of modern
materialistic natural science, and those whose beliefs
involve
religious principles that they will not allow to be
rationally examined
- this debate is deeply flawed because both sides are
seldom willing to
be at least a little bit self-critical (look to the beam
in the own
eyes), and for the most part don't bother to be
historical - that is
they don't recognize that these questions are not new,
and in fact the
way the present day debates are conducted, their
superficiality becomes
obvious whenever we look to that aspect of the
past where these
questions were more thoroughly examined.
Both
sides today tend to act as if no one
before them thought about these matters.
Now
it is not my place here, or is there
the time here to do so, but it is possible to elaborate
more fully
about how to deepen the debate. I wrote of this on
my website in
the essay: Does
God Exist (which is not a
proof of God but
rather a proof of the superficiality of the modern
debate).
Instead of deep discussion, we mostly get the
disputants
preaching to their own semi-educated choirs. What we
need is instead to
renew our acquaintance with what the past has thought
and taught, and
from there go forward with each side seeking not to
justify its own
biases, but rather with a willingness to understand each
other better
(less beam, more mote), and more importantly to actually
be seeking the
truth.
Rather
than pronounce willy nilly the
possession of the truth, the sides come together to seek
the truth
together, recognizing in true humility that to be
authentically wise is
to cultivate ignorance. While this is unlikely,
given that
self-importance and egotism easily attaches to one who
proclaims to
know better than the other guy, it remains possible to
do so, however
improbable. For the reality is that both science
and religion, as
presently practiced, were they to actually seek the
truth together,
would find that they share a similar kind of one-sided
flaw.
The
claim of Harris's kind of
scientism for an exclusive power in the realm of
truth is
excessive, in the same way that the claims that many
religions assert
of being a primal moral authority is excessive.
Both are
out of balance, and both are filled with the clinging
death grip of a
fundamentalism that cannot image it could ever be wrong.
This
is partially why Mr. Harris's
performance (again lets not miss the fact that it is a
performance)
seems so similar to that of a preacher. Just as do
the
hyper-religious, the hyper-rational assumes
self-righteously a superior
point of view. Mr. Harris firmly believes he knows
more than
others, and that his approach is better, and there is no
reason
whatsoever for him to reconsider his views. He
wants to rid the
world of the religious bigot, all in the name of himself
as possessing
a superior moral position.
Now
the mystery of evil can be thought
about carefully. It can be understood how it is
that suffering
exists. It can be known that the human being is
(in a small way)
perfectible. At the same time, to come to such an
understanding
will require of both science and religion a sacrifice,
because the
truth is not only good (that is moral), but it is also
beautiful.
The poet, through Art, is closer to the meaning of
existence than
either the hyper-rationalist or the hyper-religionist.
It
will not be fruitful for the future of
humanity for the scientific mind and the religious mind
to be at war
with each other. In taking such a one-sided
approach, both fail
in their utility for helping the human condition.
Religion must
become in its essential practices scientific, and
science must become
in its essential practices religious. The impulse
toward meaning
of the artist needs to marry the two sides, who only
through mutual
love and compassion toward each other will then rightly
lead humanity
into the future. At war with each other,
they will only
increase the divisions that if unchecked are to be the
destruction of
life itself. Partially this means that as
individuals, if we want
peace to exist between our own rational and moral
strivings, we need to
do this by evoking the artist within.
If
Mr. Harris wants to attack the
religious and reveal the moral superiority of his
version of science,
he really needs to do this with regard to the more
proven teachers, not
with the weakest and most troubled. When he feels
up to taking on
the Buddha and Christ and Gandhi, as well as their true
students, then
Mr. Harris will have shown himself capable and worthy of
being listened
to as an authority on the moral life. But he
doesn't do that,
instead he goes for the cheap shot, the easy and lamest
prey, such as
the father who under social pressure wants to kill his
recently raped
daughter, as if somehow Harris is superior and deeper
than someone weak
and confused and brought low by cultural circumstances
many more resist
than fall into.
Humanity's
deepest teachers of the truly
moral life all share a particular moral fact in common,
as the bedrock
for all other moral development, and it is this: moral
development is
not an act of the intellect, but of the will. It
is not about
having the right idea, but about having the right force
of will.
That will works on itself first, before it ever
looks upon the
world as something that needs to be changed.
Otherwise, we are
nothing but a self-righteous hypocrite, and having
learned nothing of
the true nature of self, or of compassion or of love, we
will only
effect the world as a destructive force, not as a
creative one.
This
is sad and I as said before, a
tragedy. Mr. Harris is not a moral authority, but
simply a
confused soul, who can't distinguish the truly good
among religious
teachers from the fundamentalist lost in the arid
dessert of rigid
belief. In attacking those, Harris reveals himself
to be their
kin, lost in his own fundamentalist relationship to a
kind of natural
science related to in the soul as a system of belief,
but certainly not
as the harbinger of future moral leadership in a world
of suffering he
can't trouble himself to really empathize with, or
understand.
Christ could not have been more plain, when He
said: we need to wash out the
inside of the cup our self first before we can ever make
the outside of
who we are truly clean.
The
basic problem for Mr. Harris, and his
theories about morality, is that he doesn't actually
know
anything about the real religious components of the
moral life.
Lacking practice and experience he, like the
fundamentalist
religious preacher, is just an opinionated scientist
wandering in a
field where he is completely out of his depth.
Just
consider the reply he wrote recently
to his so-called critics. No mention there
of the teachers
of compassion, love and non-violence. Not
even his critics
seem to grasp what is at issue, which suggests that the
heart of the
religious and the moral life has escaped them as well.
Perhaps we
have here a situation that is cultural-wide, so one
might be tempted to
cut Harris some slack.
Once
more the Catholics are up to their
necks in the child abuse scandal, this time focusing on
Europe instead
of America. Clearly institutional religions in the
West have
somehow not really learned to live out of the teachings
of Christ.
It should then be clear that I don't cut organized
religion any
more slack than I refuse to cut Harris. If you are
going to
engage yourself in seeking to assert a moral
superiority, whether based
on religious or scientific doctrine, you had better be
ready to engage
the real depths of these teachings, and not the
superficial and
hypocritical ways in most practice their religions.
Much
more could be said, but given the
complexity of an authentic search for moral reality all
I can do is
refer to my own work, which work will refer to others as
it should.
If the viewer of this video is interested in
transcending his own
biases, especially the biases he shares with Mr. Harris,
then they may
receive some help from my works, the directions in which
they point,
and which they can begin to explore by just visiting my
website Shapes
in the Fire.
Thanks
for listening.
Saving the Catholic
Religion
from the Roman Church
- through deepening our
understanding
of the Third Fatima
Prophecy -
- by Joel A. Wendt -
Everything lives and dies - everything,
even God. Remember, the Son came to Earth,
became human and then
died.
Remember too what He said: I and the
Father are one; and, no one gets
to the Father except by me.
Dying is not an end, but rather a
transformation from one state to another state, so
we could say with
truth that everything lives and then transforms into
something new.
Dying is not an end.
The poet-scientist
Goethe called this: dying and becoming, and we know
the general idea as: metamorphosis. As nothing
is beyond God, then God too can become.
Knowing the truth
of this explains the creation of human beings - a
vehicle for God's
becoming.
In the light these ideas now recall the
words of the Third Fatima Prophecy:
"I write in obedience to you, my God, who command me to do so through his Excellency the Bishop of Leiria and through your Most Holy Mother and mine.
"After the two
parts which I have already explained, at
the left of Our Lady and a little above, we saw an
Angel with a flaming
sword in his left hand; flashing, it gave out flames
that looked as
though they would set the world on fire; but they
died out in contact
with the splendor that Our Lady radiated towards him
from her right
hand: pointing to the earth with his right hand, the
Angel cried out in
a loud voice: 'Penance, Penance, Penance!'. And we
saw in an immense
light that is God: 'something similar to how people
appear in a mirror
when they pass in front of it' a Bishop dressed in
White 'we had the
impression that it was the Holy Father'. Other
Bishops, Priests, men
and women Religious going up a steep mountain, at
the top of which
there was a big Cross of rough-hewn trunks as of a
cork-tree with the
bark; before reaching there the Holy Father passed
through a big city
half in ruins and half trembling with halting step,
afflicted with pain
and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses
he met on his way;
having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees
at the foot of the
big Cross he was killed by a group of soldiers who
fired bullets and
arrows at him, and in the same way there died one
after another the
other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious, and
various lay people
of different ranks and positions. Beneath the two
arms of the Cross
there were two Angels each with a crystal
aspersorium in his hand, in
which they gathered up the blood of the Martyrs and
with it sprinkled
the souls that were making their way to God."
Christ said: I come not
to bring peace,
but a sword ... Are
we then not to be
surprised when the first image above is of an Angel
wielding a sword?
But even this action, by the Son, is moderated
by the Forces of
the Divine Mother. Are we not ready now to say
it is past time
for the Mother to take her rightful place in the
Catholic Religion?
Not off to the side, in a small chapel, but
right in front of the
whole congregation. Is it not time for women,
who were in the
beginning of the Christian Religion leaders and
Bishops, to once more
be the equal of men in the Catholic Religion, if not
in the Roman
Catholic Church?
Who then, on Earth, is being exhorted
to
give Penance? Certainly not just the laity,
the women, and the
nuns and the religious. Who has most
demonstrated their disdain
for authentic morality but the male hierarchy of the
Church, again and
again and again over the Centuries? Who
leads
the parade through the ruins of the City and up the
Mountain?
What does this image teach, but that death is
to come to the
patriarchal structure of the Roman Church so that
new life may come to
the Catholic Religion - blessed with the blood -
with the life essence
of the all to often martyred faithful - to be
sprinkled over the souls,
who in following the Catholic Religion are making
their way thereby to
God.
And the
first
shall be last and the last shall be first.
Those who lead may not always be rightful
leaders, but rather
with their ambition and their arrogance instead be
of a lessor moral
stature and nature. And those who are humble,
and go last by
choice and inclination, they will be first in their
moral nature.
The order of the parade in the Prophecy is not
without its own meaning.
The City half in ruins is modern times,
where Western Civilization itself is undergoing a
dying and becoming -
a metamorphosis to something new. Within that
broader
conflagration lies another, the death and
transformation of the Church
itself, where all from Pope to the laity pass
through the fiery baptism
of Christ (as John the Baptist said: the one
coming after me will
baptize you with fire and holy
breath), which fire is the
times in which we live. The
castigation of the current Pope is part of his
personal biographical
fire, as no one of any religious rank or
accomplishment is to escape
this Baptism.
The Catholic Religion is foremost a Christian Religion. The Roman
Church is a religious institution, arising in
connection with political power and compromise,
which by that means was
founded on sand about 1600 years ago. When
certain (but not all)
of the bishops of various early Christian sects
united their efforts
with the dying Roman Empire, the resulting earthly
institution could
not but be defective - it was a house build not upon
the truth, but
upon sand. Recall the last words of the Sermon
on the Mount.
"Therefore everyone who hears
these words of mine and puts
them into practice is like a wise man who built his
house on the rock.
The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds
blew and beat
against that house; yet it did not fall, because it
had its foundation
on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of
mine and does not
put them into practice is like a foolish man who
built his house on
sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the
winds blew and beat
against that house, and it fell with a great crash." Matthew 7: 24-27
Following its founding the Roman
Catholic
Church soon fell to earth, and became corrupt.
At every crucial
stage of its history, this religious institution
failed to practice:
that is, to follow In His Steps, but instead made political and social
compromises in
order to preserve its growing patriarchal
authority and the
earthly wealth and privileges of its all male popes,
cardinals and
bishops. These sought not to follow Christ,
but to seek earthly
power and position. We forgive them because
they are human, but
we cannot continue to support anymore their
continuing confusion
and its ever more deadly effects.
Recall that the rule of celibacy came
to
be because of concerns that the children of church
leaders might seek
to inherit Church property, even though Christ
taught voluntary
poverty, not the seeking wealth.
Throughout the history of the Church,
sainted individuals, both men and women, having
engaged in the practice of the true teachings of Christ, went
on to found
religious orders where practice was the core rule.
Within the Church hierarchy, knowledge of the
moral life was at
the same time gradually lost, as those within it
became more and more
tempted to protect the structure of the Church itself. The
egotism of the Church
leaders became confused, and thinking that Christian
Religion was
identical with the dogmas of the institutional
Church, the preservation
of the Church was assumed a higher moral value than
the practice of
the religion - the practice of the moral life. A code of
obedience to earthly
fallen men became more important to Church
authorities than obedience
to the teachings of Christ.
Christ in fact did not teach obedience
to
men (or to Himself), but humility and service
through beginning with
the gesture of the Washing of the Feet. How
often, however, in
spite of Christ's clear teachings did these voices
of asserted
patriarchal authority and power speak to us of the
Church? The
Church, the Church - we must protect the Church -
meaning there not the
Religion, but the seats of their institutional power
and privilege.
Recall as well the stories of what St. Francis
did complain.
In the present day scandals, regarding
the abuse of children by priests (and others higher
up as well), we see
clearly how for generations the hierarchical
structures of the Church
sought to maintain itself against any loss of
authority, which might
have resulted from having to confess that the male
priesthood had
become horribly dysfunctional, and that celibacy
itself (something not
at all a part the beginning) was asking too much of
human beings.
Certainly voluntary celibacy is a wonderful
virtue to practice,
but as a compulsion it should never have been asked,
for then it is no
longer a virtue but a human imposed trial.
The real question here, however, is not
so much concerned with recognizing the true
defective history of the
Church, but rather in making it clear that the
institutional Church is
a failure, and continues to lead the faithful - the
Body of Christ -
into error, not into truth. What else is the
Third Fatima
prophecy telling us, gently to be sure for it is
after all a message
from the Mother, but still showing us the coming and
now present end of
something that is necessary in order for new life to
arise. When
the prophecy was first opened and read in 1960, we
are told that the
then Pope was so ashamed at the recognition of his
own guilty role that
he fell into a swoon, and the Prophecy withheld from
the faithful for
decades beyond the time it was supposed to have been
released.
Who knows what additional folly was born
in that failure?
While the earthly institutional Church
is
fallen (too earthly), the life of prayer and
other aspects of
religious practice are
not. When, for example, the Mass is practiced
(even if the state of soul of the celebrating priest
is flawed), Christ
does unite this earthy Church with His True Church
that remains in
Heaven. The heavenly Church is perfect,
and while the
earthly Church is fallen, Christ has not abandoned
His children, so
that when they call to Him in prayer and through
ritual, He Comes.
He is there in the Mass and will be there in
the Mass on into the
limitless future, just as He is there, with the
Father, whenever we
pray in secret as He taught in the Sermon on the
Mount (Matthew 6:6)
Did He not say: I will be
with you unto the ends of time?
It now becomes necessary to add to the
sad and already tragic aspect of the many errors
over the Centuries of
the fallen institutional Church an even greater
spiritual crime,
although yet unknown. But first some
background, for this crime
only delayed the arrival among the faithful of the
knowledge of
something wondrous - it did not stop it from Coming
at its appointed
time.
While many of the correctives, to the
continuously errant course of the Roman Church, were
offered over the
Centuries by the lives of the saints and by the
founding of the various
orders, another stream of Christian wisdom was at
the same time
intensely excluded right from the beginning.
This was the stream
of the Kings, the representatives of the ancient
mysteries, who with
the Shepherds had also attended the Birth. The
stream of the
Shepherds became the disciples and then became the
bishops of the early
Church - that is: they reflected the pastoral
impulse which uses the
image, as given to us by Christ, of the shepherd and
his flock.
But the magi - the teachers of the ancient
mysteries who too had
knelt before Christ - their wisdom became lost for a
time.
Even in the creation of the New
Testament, Roman Church authorities excluded many
other Gospels and
sources besides the usual four, in particular that
which was connected
to the stream of wisdom of the Kings, such as the
Gospel of Thomas.
While it was maintained that there was
justification for this,
this exclusion mostly existed as a way of defeating
competing ideas and
views. In drawing to itself earthly social
power, the early Roman
Church grossly edited the possible knowledge and
understanding of the
meaning of the Christ Event, to accord with its
human and flawed
determination to make its own limited views simple
and clearly under
institutional control.
The early Church murdered as heretics
many speakers of truth, and destroyed libraries and
other centers of
spiritual learning, all in order to dominate.
This attitude
toward the destruction of seemingly competing views
continued for
centuries, and it wasn't until secular society and
the various kings
and queens of the late middle ages no longer
instantly obeyed Church
authority, that the murder of the holders of
heretical views began to
wane. Finally with the arrival of the
Reformation and then
of the Romantics in Europe and the
Transcendentalists in America, did
the male dominated Church become sufficiently
powerless to enforce
widely in social life its rigidly held views through
violence.
Of course most know that the Church has
routinely silenced independent thinkers within its
own ranks for
centuries, and the current Pope Benedict the 16th,
before assuming that
office was in fact the dominant authority over what
were to be the
right ideas of the Church through his former
position, which is called:
Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith.
In a sense we need to see the
institutional Church as trying to maintain its
power, first through the
destruction of competing thought, and the killing
and silencing of
heretics (including the founders of Natural
Science), both within and
without the structures of the Church itself.
Then as time passed,
the Church lost more and more its prior public
authority as the various
Nation States no longer supported it as the official
religion, with the
result that tighter became its grip on ideas within
the Body of Christ.
The still too Roman
Church now strangles much
needed ideas, such as the ordination of women, with
the same deadly
intent it once burned heretics at the stake.
But the Body of Christ, the laity and
the
religious orders, are more and more less inclined to accept that Rome should
have such authority.
This should not be a wonder, because Christ
said: I am Way, the Truth, and the
Life. The Church has
never had anything
to fear from the Truth - never, although every act
of repression and
control was a demonstration of this fear.
The reality is that the strangulation of ideas is evidence of an absence of real Faith. True Faith, which is essentially trust, has nothing to fear from science, for example, and never has had to fear knowledge, or other Ways, including the ancient Ways and Traditions of the wisdom of the Kings. Yet, in its efforts to dominate ideas, to compel what is allowed to be thought by its members, whether in terms of moral teachings or doctrine, the Church itself has become the opponent of Christ. To oppose the Truth is to oppose Christ.
We describe as totalitarian a political
State which wants to control thoughts and ideas.
How then should
we describe the institutional Roman Church?
One way to understand this fall from
Grace into corruption and totalitarian thought
control, is to
appreciate that social forms (such as an
institutional religion) can
begin in a state of alive-ness and then over time
become sclerotic or
hardened, the same way the human body can become
hardened over time.
This can also happen to religious
orders
within the Church, after their founder has crossed
over. For
example, the at one time independence of the Jesuits
was lost, and they
became essentially an intellectual war-like arm of
the Pope.
Results were more important than means, and
the true significance
of the practices of the Ignatius meditations, or
essence of the Rules
of the Order, becomes confused. The history of
the Roman Church
is littered with such ruins. Fortunately, some
will keep the
practices of the various religious orders alive, so
there are always
pockets where hardening and dogmatic fundamentalism
is kept out.
Now with this background we can begin to consider the even greater, though yet mostly unknown, spiritual crime that the Church recently committed (in the 20th Century).
Let me first put this forward as a
sequence of hypotheses - as several "suppose thats".
Suppose that as natural science began
to
dominate the thinking of the world, in its
conclusion that all was
matter and that there was no spirit, natural science
became what in
John I would have been called: an aspect of the
spirit of the
anti-Christ. In that long ago language, we can
still today find
the right modern idea if we do not make too
exaggerated our approach.
What does that language in John I say, but
that the anti-Christ
spirit will deny the existence of the Son and of the
Father.
This is what natural science does
today,
in that it teaches that there is only matter, never
spirit. Do
not be confused by those zealots who think the
anti-Christ is a person
who will bring destruction and end times. This
is not so.
The anti-Christ spirit simply penetrates
human
consciousness in the absence of Christian practices, and then denies the Son and the
Father, as the writer
of John I understood through the examples he saw in
his time. It
(this anti-Christ spirit) expresses itself as an
idea contrary to the
Truth.
But Christ is the Truth, as our Faith
would tell us. If then science denies the
Father and the Son,
then somehow it has failed to find the truth.
It may know a great
deal, but something must be missing. Let me
repeat this in
another way.
Christ is the Truth. Science
denying spirit and saying all is only matter, denies
the Father and the
Son. Our Faith then tells us this kind of
science must be flawed.
But where do we find a science that knows the
spirit? He
promised to be with us to the ends of time - is He
with us in this
dilemma now?
Most religious institutions believe the
situation is one of debate, say between a scientific
thinker such as
Sam Harris, and between someone of a more religious
persuasion.
It is argued by some religious that religion
has as its proper
territory the question of morals, and they are
willing to leave to
science the question of facts. But Mr. Harris
is relentless, and
now asserts that this flawed science not only should
dominate the
question of facts, but can give us morals as well.
If we look to the leaders of the
institutional Church, we don't get much of a moral
example, so what can
be done? Wel, Faith would suggest that Christ
would act and not
leave us alone in this failed situation - would not
leave us bound to
the materialism (all is matter, there is no spirit)
of present day
science.
Suppose He did. Suppose
during the early parts of the 20th Century Christ
found a voice for New
Revelation. That not only did Christ
find such a voice
crying in the wilderness of scientific materialism
(all matter, no
spirit), suppose the exercise of that voice
predicted Christ's true
spiritual Second Coming (just as the first John the
Baptist predicted
Christ physical Incarnation). Further, suppose
that all this
happened in a way in which the problems that might
face such acts of
Christ could be meet with the standards of inquiry
common today to
natural science. Suppose that in this
2nd voice crying in
the wilderness, existed the capacity to unite
science and religion,
without damage to the true nature of either Way of
being in the world.
In addition, suppose that the true
Second
Coming began its principle effects upon the world,
during the darkest
horrors of the 12 years between the burning of the
Reichstag (1933) and
the exploding of the Atomic Bomb (1945) - the time
when millions of
Jews and Russians and Germans, and hundreds of
thousands others, were
murdered in war. And suppose that true to what
Christ had
predicted, that He would come again in a certain
form or way, this He
actually did: Jesus
replied,
"You have said it. And in the future you will see
the Son of
Man seated in the place of power at God's right hand
and coming on the
clouds of heaven." Matthew
26: 64
Suppose that the stream of ancient
wisdom
- the Kings of the Gospel stories - are at work
again today.
Given the opportunity to give birth into life
a new revelation -
new spiritual truth belonging to the age of science
- something happens
in the world right in front of the male dominating
hierarchies of the
fallen Roman Church, and they ignore it, just as
they ignored the
priests who steal innocence, and just as they
ignored the holocaust,
and just as they ignored the countless other crimes
within the Roman
Church, in order to preserve the institutional
Church at the expense of
the practice of the Religion.
And suppose that this true Second
Coming
is not the End Times Second Coming, but something
else, something more
needed and wanted by the Faithful. Those who
want to judge all
matters of Christian Religion by reference to the
Bible, want
essentially to confine the Divine to words in a
book, and in particular
words as interpreted by fallen human beings.
The Divine cannot be
so confined, but is free to speak in any way and in
any how It chooses.
What does it mean: to unite science and
religion? How could we know about this
so-called true Second
Coming in the spirit - in clouds of
heaven? What
can be made of facts and morals that combines into
something both and
neither - something beyond the limits of each?
And, more crucially: What has this to do with Saving the Catholic Religion from the Roman Church?
A story ...
In 1861 was born a man in Central
Europe,
by the name of Rudolf Steiner. He was to
become the voice
crying in the wilderness of scientific materialism,
and those who he
had Baptized with the true scientific spirit (the
one that does not
deny the Father and the Son) prepared themselves for
the true Second
Coming of Christ, not in the material physical body,
and but in a
spiritual body. In the age where science
mistakenly assumes all
is matter and there is no spirit, where else would
Christ - the Truth -
come again in this Now, but in the spirit - in the
future you will see
the Son of Man seated in the place of power at God's
right hand and
coming on the clouds of heaven.
This then happens in the 20th Century
to
a degree all over the world, although the
announcement of this event
was right in Central Europe and right under the
noses of the Roman
Church, with its vast intellectual prowess via the
Society of Jesus.
New Revelation of how it is that behind matter
lies spirit, and
not only the idea of that, but how to go about
reconstructing science
itself so that this can be known without ever
violating the best that
already justly lives in natural science.
Nor is this Revelation dependent upon
mere belief. All the work of this Revelation
points to facts,
which can be sought and discovered and which lead
ever and again toward
not only a true scientific practice of Religion, but
toward a truly religious practice of Science.
Right under the noses of the self-serving male
dominated
hierarchical structures of the Roman Catholic Church, New Revelation was/is given and then
criminally ignored.
How would medicine, education, social
science, natural science, agriculture, art,
philosophy, theology, - how
would all the vast fields of human knowledge change,
if real scientific
knowledge of the spirit were joined to the already
huge scope of the
scientific knowledge of matter?
There are here a thousand stories, as
this transformation of New Revelation into practical
Arts has been
slowly begun (we are only in the beginning of the Second Coming - the Copernican revolution took almost
400 years to
dominate human thinking, and now its counter
revolution - the true
Second Coming, will as well take Centuries to emerge
into full
flowering). Here let me tell just one such
story (there are far
too many), with a small preliminary introduction.
In order for the scientific spirit to
enter into the already centuries long scientific age
and participate in
some kind of extension of the arts of science so as
to include the
spirit, the crucial subject of inquiry first has to
be the human mind.
It is the human mind that is the primary
tool out of which
materialistic science has been given birth, and it
is through the human
mind that the New Revelation and the true Second
Coming are to be
perceived.
Those who aspire to elevate rational
thinking are on the right track, but they are
mistaken in their
assumption that our instinctive thinking is all that
mind can manifest.
Yes, we do think, but we sleep inwardly
through the real
processes of thinking, and it is out of the renewed
Kings wisdom that
the real nature and understanding of the full
spiritual potential of
thinking has been born. Let me repeat: has been born.
The counter-revolution has begun, and
Christ has come again. To the consciously
developed and fully
willed thinking, Christ is perceivable.
Mind is spirit in
action, and this personal spirit in action that
lives potential in our
thinking can be brought to a condition where it
perceives Christ.
In his religious role (among many other roles) as the
John the Baptist of
the true Second Coming, Rudolf Steiner first
elaborated in three books,
at the end of the 19th Century, precisely how to
give birth to this
spiritualized thinking. Not only how, but he
explained exactly in
what ways this spiritual revolution in thinking fit
within the existing
stream of philosophical and scientific thought.
In the third of
these books: called The Philosophy of Spiritual
Activity, the subtitle
was: some
results of introspection following the methods of
natural science.
To become baptized by the second John
in
preparation for our true full baptism by Christ
during His Second
Coming means only to become fully awake a bit ahead
of something that
will arise over time in all human beings who seek
it, which yet is
available already today for those willing to
undertake the practices.
The at one time falsely declared
heretical wisdom of the Kings has now returned
unfettered, and
presently makes possible the metamorphosis of
thinking itself.
There are many ways to approach this
transformation, some more
instinctive and some more conscious. In all
cases where some
degree of the new thinking mystery arises, human
knowledge is extended
in such a way that the reality of spirit is added to
our understanding
of matter.
What happened in Central Europe in the 20th Century, right under the noses of the Catholic institutional hierarchies, and its scholars in the Society of Jesus, was nothing less than the beginning glory of a Christ centered spiritualization of all human knowledge. Those who took up this new understanding of the potential of the human mind, inspired by (baptized by) Rudolf Steiner, gave birth to knowledge very much needed by present day humanity. One can not overstate how much this knowledge is needed, and what a crime it was then (and continues today and into the future) for the institutional Roman Church to deny the truths the live right in front of them, and of which they were and are aware.
Steiner called his work Anthroposophy,
and as a Kings wisdom he expressly differentiated it
from the Christian
Religion. Anthroposophy was simply the science
of the new
thinking cognition, and like any such science it was
meant to live in
service to human needs - not itself become another
competing religious
impulse. Pope John Paul II knew of this work
during his early
years in Poland, and as Karol Jozef Wojtlya, he
participated in
anthroposophical work. On the Internet one can
find a picture of
him as Pope with a book on his desk by a former
student of Steiner's.
Steiner wrote over 30 books, was quite
famous in Central Europe at the beginning of the
20th Century, giving
over 6000 lectures, while often during his last
years these lectures
were attended by thousands. There was no
way the Church was
unaware of this voice crying in the wilderness of
scientific
materialism.
Remember: Christ is the Truth and we
have
nothing to fear from seeking it.
Let me now take up some small examples
of
this ongoing work, which are related to each other
although sometimes
separated as if involving different fields.
Just as modern
science often over emphasizes the distinction
between disciplines,
their reality is only truly understood when they are
integrated.
So we have as a ripening fruit of the
new
thinking, what are called in separation: Biodynamic
Agriculture,
Anthroposophical Medicine and Goethean Science.
All three of
these are joined in their contributions to the
health of the human
being, and are filled from within by knowledge of
the spirit which has
now been added to knowledge of matter.
The human being,
while on the Earth between birth and death, is both
matter and spirit,
and many problems of humanity today cannot be solved
without first
understanding and then realizing in practice the
integration of the
relevant spiritual facts with the relevant material
facts.
Below I can only skip across the
surface
of this knowledge like a flat rock thrown
horizontally onto the surface
of a pond or a lake. The details are too vast,
which is why those
who take up this work make for themselves new
religious-like careers.
What was formerly heretical thinking is no
longer to be confined
to the monastery or the convent, but comes now full
born into the light
of day.
The more general of these inner related
disciplines is called Goethean Science, and one can
find excellent
examples of its practice on the website: The Nature
Institute.
The new thinking mysteries begin with the
metamorphosis of
ordinary cause and effect abstract thinking into
what is best called
organic thinking (and sometimes called Goetheanism,
after the
poet-scientist Goethe who was among the first who
instinctively
practiced it). This organic
thinking naturally grows
into pure thinking, which is similar in a way to the
high level
concentrated thinking of the pure mathematician, but
which is a more
conscious type of pure thinking because it is filled
from within by a
fully intended moral impulse.
On the Nature Institute website, one
can
come upon many works, and here is just a good
example: by Stephen
Talbot: On Making the
Genome Whole,
were current advances in the investigation of the
nature of the cell
reveal more and more that the natural scientist can
no longer hold to
the view the DNA is the cause of living processes,
but that if we
honestly view what goes on in the cell (as
understood today), the part
does not determine the whole, but rather the whole
determines the part.
This idea is significant for all human
knowledge, particular that concerning our health.
As well, the human being needs food in
order to live. We are all aware today how
poorly run is the
social system that delivers food to our tables.
Nutrition is a
core aspect of health, particularly of the physical
body. A
doctor acquaintance of mine, deeply familiar with
biodynamic
agriculture and anthroposophical medicine has made
the following
statements in conversation (I've highlighted these
in italics),
concerning which I will then offer my own
elaboration.
1) The chief cause of death in
America is the American doctor. This is
not meant to morally blame, but to point out the
fact that the
ignorance of the relationship between spirit and
matter that so
pervades modern medicine - this ignorance kills.
The modern
doctor frequently mis-diagnoses, and then compounds
that error by using
a sledge-hammer when a butterfly kiss is more
therapeutic.
All we have to do is listen to the ads
for modern medicines
and all their deadly side-effects to realize that
whatever the
understanding of medical science is today, it
actually knows a great
deal less than it pretends.
Because this ignorance is a culture-wide - that is most everyone assumes that it is the best understanding - scientific materialism lives inside modern medicine as a kind of religion, and just like the Catholic Church in the 16th century, when its beliefs were challenged by the early natural scientists, modern science will brand all spiritual views as heretical and seek to punish those who disagree. But medicine is more art than science, and the true practice of healing requires more than arid facts, numbers and countless tests with machines.
2) The reason people are obese
is not because they eat too much, but because they
are starving. The
physical body is a work of wonder, about
which we still have a great deal to learn (see the
essays one the
Genome mentioned above, where if you want to get at
the core of this
drastically incomplete knowledge, just consider that
at the cutting
edge of cell biology the idea that DNA in the cell
is the chief cause
of bodily function and form is not longer
recognized. Rather
researchers into cell biology now recognize that the
parts do not
determine the whole, but rather that the whole
clearly determines the
parts. This confounds them, for it makes of
the living once again
a mystery.
In the light of this, from the side of
a
spirit oriented understanding of nutrition, my
doctor acquaintance was
pointing out that the body knows that there is
almost no real nutrition
in the foods agribusiness provides through our
grocery stores. As
a consequence, the wisdom of the body is always
telling us to eat more
and eat more and eat more, because we are
nutritionally starving.
All of us eat food with little nutrition, but
the obviously obese
are just those with a body type and typical internal
chemistry that
more readily transforms sugars into stored fats.
Everyone,
whatever body type, can't get real nutritious food
in the regular
grocery store, and this is a cause of a great many
illness, both
physical and mental.
Processed foods, which are too often
agricultural waste transformed into profit making
highly advertised
junk (with a lot of sugar added so we get the
illusion of renewed
energy and a lot of salt added so we get the
illusion that these things
taste good) are killing us in the same way the
doctor is killing us -
through greed and and arrogant ignorance.
Food grown on farms is meant to keep us
alive, not kill us. To keep us alive, it has
itself to contain
life - the food has to be itself alive. Modern
farming practices,
as the organic movement fully knows, produce foods
that look good (with
a lot of help from added fake color and surface
oiling). but which
don't deliver actual nutrition. The
materialist will argue that
there is no proof of this, but his idea of proof is
confused. The
real experiment is being done on a massive
world-wide scale on all
human beings, and while we may not yet fully
appreciate the exact
causal mechanism (what the materialist demands as
proof), the history
of last 150 years reveals clearly the arriving of
all kinds of
illnesses in connection with changes in the growth
of food and the
simultaneous creation of the picture of the human
being as a mechanism
- as only matter.
You can't see what you don't look for
and
having assumed away spiritual concepts of the human
being, it is no
wonder that today this is hard to find.
In Biodynamics the situation is
developed
further than in organic practices, for the
agricultural processes
(modern huge farms) of today actually are killing
the soil and the body
inheritance characteristics of the animals we eat as
well. The
living Earth, on which we depend as a fully
integrated organism in its
totality, is dying, and we are killing it. The
arrogant and
ignorant child is killing its Mother.
In order to return life to the Earth, we have to recognize that it is itself integrated into the Cosmos, into the extra-telluric fullness of the whole Solar System. Nothing is separate from anything else, and it is only the over-use of the presently limited thinking processes of analysis (without wise synthesis) by natural science that has led to this false perception of independence (parts unrelated to wholes). The moon and the planets do influence plant and animal growth, and we need to include these realities (out of a scientifically oriented new discipline of observation and thinking - Goethean Science) in our understanding of the underlying nature of living agricultural processes. This is Biodynamic Agriculture.
Biodynamic produce has now become the sought after prize of many gourmet chefs, and as well biodynamic wines are seen as exceptional. Why - because those who know foods and wines know taste, and nothing - nothing - tastes quite as lively (as full of life) as biodynamic foods and wines, to the carefully developed and cultivated senses of a gourmet.
In a similar fashion as to farms and
food, the human organization is not merely physical,
but spiritual as
well. We have in fact four bodies, not one: a
physical body; an
ethereal or life body; a soul or psychological or
astral body; and, a
warmth or ego or spirit body. A properly
disciplined thinking can
learn to perceive these less visible elements of our
reality and
nature, and while each part is healed in a subtly
different way, all
are yet interdependent.
My doctor acquaintance has produced a
book, which I recommend as an excellent practical
and pragmatic doorway
into this realm of the union of knowledge of spirit
and matter.
He doesn't know everything, but he will be a
good start, on a
valuable subject for all, to coming to the
appreciation of the facts of
which I have been writing here: New Revelation is
making its way into
the world, and the true Second Coming is upon us.
These changes
leave traces in human cultural developments -
fingerprints as it were,
and in Dr. Cowen's book: The
Four-Fold Path to Healing,
we have one quite
outstanding fingerprint.
For example, he describes how with good
nutrition, we heal the physical body. With
good therapeutics
(butterfly kisses instead of sledge-hammers) we heal
the ethereal or
life body. With good movement exercise we heal
the soul or
psychic/emotional or astral body, and with
meditation (good mental
exercises) we heal the spirit body.
This is just one, by the way, of
thousands of books and works and human activities
that have begun to
come into the world through the New Revelation and
as part of the true
Second Coming in the spiritual. Education is
being transformed,
as is Art and Psychology and Science and Social
Science and beyond.
The presence of these fingerprints is far
greater in Central
Europe, and has been going on there longer than in
America. The
ignoring of this Christ presence, and its offerings
to humanity's
deepest needs, is the ultimate spiritual crime of
the now very much
needs to be dying institutional Roman Church.
Unfortunately, it will not die an easy
death and with that theme I will next approach a way
to understand how
to save the Catholic (or Christian) Religion from
the no longer viable
patriarchal dominance of old Christian religious
institutions, for all
institutional hierarchical structures must
eventually undergo the dying
and becoming described in the Third Fatima Prophecy.
A question that may arise, in those who
hear or read these words, is: what about
me? If Christ
has come again, how am I to know this? If He
promised to be with
me until the ends of time, how I am to see Him in
the spirit today?
Doesn't he make himself available to
all?
As an aspect of the true Second Coming in the spirit - in the clouds of heaven - in the inwardness of the human being - there has also come to be a Second and purely spiritual Eucharist. In Luke Christ says: the kingdom of heaven is inside you. So, look inside yourself and you will find Him there. This second Eucharist does not eliminate the Original, which has to do with the transubstantiation of matter, but does add to that of matter the transubstantiation of thought. This is the essence of the new Mystery of Thinking.
The Original Eucharist is communal and
requires thereby guiding hands, which no longer
needs to be a priest,
however. It is simply a practical problem.
To celebrate the
transubstantiation of matter - its
respiritualization as it were - as a
community, requires many hands. We do not feed
ourselves, but
each other.
The Second Eucharist in the Ethereal
(in
the clouds of heaven - in the inwardness of our own
Life Body) is
entirely personal and takes place between our own
spirit (our own I-am)
and the Divine, within the temple of the soul or
mind. The
practice of the transubstantiation of thought is
religious in intention
(that is an aspect of our will) and scientific in perception (that is
an aspect of our
introspective thinking) and artistic in practice (that is an
aspect of the
contribution of the heart or of feeling). Some will call it thinking
with the heart,
although that is an oversimplification.
This potential for the Second Eucharist
was known from the beginning of Christianity, and
the disciples in Acts
called it: Holy Breath. Recall John the
Baptist: the one coming after me, I
cannot even carry His sandals; He will baptize you
in holy breath and
fire.
The practice is fairly straightforward, and was described by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount, although since that time it has fallen into confusion and earthly excesses.
When Christ gave the Our Father, He
said
to pray it in secret. "But when
you pray, go into your room and shut the door
and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your
Father who sees in
secret will reward you."
Matthew
6:6
This is the true spiritual mystery of
prayer - to pray in secret, not in public. The
practice of public
prayer is the practice of institutional coercion and
religious
totalitarianism. We are meant to be shamed by
this, and its chief
fruit is the further empowerment of the priest as a
necessary
intermediary between us and the Divine. That
time is over.
During this prayer in secret, be all
the
same bold: say it out loud. There is no need
to be so loud as to
be heard in the next room, but it is more a matter
of authenticity.
You are in secret, but not hiding. Speak
it with your
normal voice. Let this spoken tone carry the truth of how you actually
feel in the moment,
even if filled with doubt and despair. Prayer
is about truth.
Speak truly, and then listen inwardly.
Listening inwardly can be difficult,
especially if we have had little practice. It
is, after all, an
art of sorts - first a skill, then a craft and then
an art. Holy
Breath does not shout, for it is of Life, just as
the prologue to the
John Gospel describes: "In Him was
Life and the Life was the Light of men"
Contrary to doctrine and ancient ideas,
neither the Son or the Father (or the Mother) is
about obedience.
Their love grants us full freedom as its
highest currently
expressed meaning. In our time, however, there
has arisen,
because of the flaws and fallen nature of
institutional and patriarchal
religious practices, the idea that there are
absolute moral principles
to which everyone must be obedient. One can
even understand that
there may have been in the past some degree of
necessity for this
approach, because the human being was not fully
developed - did not
possess entirely what is potential (and this remains
true to a degree -
we can yet be more). For that reason a
religious culture urging
obedience to high moral ideas may have been in the
past a bit justified.
Yet, the timing of the true Second Coming in the spiritual is about acknowledging that we are now capable of becoming morally free. The whole point of Christ's present day Baptism of human beings, by fire and holy breath, concerns this moral freedom. This idea too is found in the images of the Third Fatima Prophecy which we have been studying.
The City is in ruins - Western Civilization is undergoing dramatic metamorphosis. What could be more clear from contemporary events we see on the evening News? Institutional religion must as well transform. The Holy Father leads the procession up the Hill to the foot of the Cross, there to die in violence not unlike what is being visited all over the world. The spiritual essence released by this act - the blood - is to be saved by Angels and then offered to us in the future as we continue to struggle to make our way toward God.
Rudolf Steiner, out of the Kings
wisdom,
taught us in detail how to have a practical
relationship to the dead -
to those that have crossed over. They remain
interested in our
lives, and available to help. At the same
time, nothing that we
need is to be hidden from us, if we but rightly
understand what Christ
tried to teach us about prayer.
When we pray the Our Father in secret,
we
have made of the mind and soul a temple for our
immortal spirit.
This mood of prayer, and the seven petitions
of the Our Father,
when practiced (remember what Christ said about
building our house upon
rock) leads us further. In this temple and in
secret we now say
whatever is on our mind, out loud and authentically
giving voice to our
true feeling nature as we are at that time. We
hide nothing.
Ask, seek
and
knock, He said.
If we have a question spoken aloud, and
the more modest the question (the more humble), we
will receive an
answer in the inward silence of our own mind/soul
temple. A
voice, like in form and texture our own inner voice,
yet so so soft,
will reply in the clouds of heaven inside us.
The reply will be
nearly instantaneous, and almost simultaneous,
because even before we
speak out loud, the question has lived first in our
hearts, and its in
our hearts that we are known ("...but then
I will perceive the same way that I was
perceived all along."
St. Paul, 1
Corinthians 13).
Because we live in the time of Fire,
the
time of the ruination of the City, where the Angel
with the Sword is
acting (remember He said: ...I come not
to bring peace but a sword),
and because we strive to walk up the Hill - up the
Mountain - to the Cross - that is because we
strive to be moral -
Christ's Baptism of us by Fire is that struggle to
walk up that Hill -
to be moral in a time of great troubles - that is in
this time - this
present. If we wish to follow In His Steps, we
will not be able
to hide from moral trials.
But the institutional Church is fallen.
What moral authority can it present to us,
when clearly the male
institutional hierarchy can not lead by example?
Christ answers
this in all the practices He taught, and which we
can follow. One
of these is prayer, and when the fire of our
individual biography
forces us to confront troubling individual moral
questions, we can no
longer lean on the Roman Church, but must instead
reside in the
Catholic (Christian) Religion. The Religion
says pray in secret
and find your reward in secret; or, ask, seek and
knock.
Good and humble questions take the form
of how may I help this other person. How may I
love them.
These good questions are other-directed.
Self-directed
questions, such as get me out of jail or what is the
right number for
the lottery - these questions we already know in our
hearts the Divine
should not answer. But if we alter them in the
right way, so that
we ask (to continue the example) how do I live with
being in jail or
how do I live with being poor - these questions can
be answered.
However, if we put among many possible questions a straightforward moral question into the intimacy of prayer something rather remarkable and powerful, and initially frightening, happens. If we ask, as did the character in the movie Million Dollar Baby, should I help this person who wants to die, die? We do not get an answer, but Silence.
The Silence speaks thus: you already
know
what the right thing to do is. There is in the
Silence no
abandonment, but rather a gift of freedom and most
remarkably - the
gift of trust. You know, you decide, you act,
says the Silence.
The same Faith we have in God, God has in us.
The Silence also says: you cannot hide
here by making the Divine responsible for what life
and the baptism by
fire of your own biography has already made you
responsible.
Don't in prayer come to shift the blame to the
Divine, or to a
book or to another person in the form of a priest or
a bishop or a
pope. Its your life, and you decide.
This is what it means
to be Baptized by Fire, and to walk up the Hill, or
Mountain of moral
trials, through the ruination of the City and toward
the Cross.
But what then about Baptism by Holy
Breath? What is that about?
Next in prayer we share what we have
decided to do. We take responsibility, and we
let the Father
know. We accept the Cup, and with
gratefulness. This Christ
lived and taught by example.
Now comes the miracle - now comes the
reward - now comes Holy Breath.
We will find that we are stronger -
that
our course once chosen is joined by Another, who
walks beside us.
We walk up the Hill following our self chosen
course, and we do
not walk alone. Remember: I will be with you
until the ends of
time. Even if we drop the Cross, another picks
it up.
This is true for everyone, whether
Catholic or Christian or whatever. To
take full human
responsibility for moral choices is to be Graced by
Holy Breath, which
comes not as an idea, but as a renewed strength of
will.
All of this, by the way, can happen in
an
instant. Life confronts us with many moral
dilemmas and choices.
The more we practice taking responsibility,
the more confidence
we gain in the practice of our version of religion.
Even the
atheist will be graced in this way, because the
event of the Second
Eucharist is invisible, and cannot be known unless
we start to look for
it. Not having the idea of it, the atheist
will not see it, but
this grace is not denied anyone who choses to be
moral out of their own
insight.
Lest someone think this will lead to
all
kinds of moral relativism and all the other
complaints made by modern
priests of institutional religions, the facts of
experience are
otherwise. These, who assert moral authority,
judge, when having
been taught in the Sermon on the Mount not to judge.
We pray in
secret and are rewarded in secret and it is no one
else's business.
Now don't think you are going to get it
right all the time. Life hasn't ever taught
such a lesson, and to
live truly in life is to live in Christ. To
learn authentic
prayer and to discover and have confidence in our
own capacity for
knowing the right course of moral action is to bear
a Cross - to follow
Him and take up our own cross.
Nor are such ideas anything fully
mysteries and hidden. One need only watch
these two films of
Clint Eastwood to see how artists perceive this
reality, without ever
having to grasp it in ideas: Million Dollar Baby and
Gran Torino.
Eastwood plays in both these roles the human
face of someone who
can't quite get it what the priests of the Roman
Church have to say.
His deepest questions, they can't answer.
Not because they
lack experience, so much as they are not him.
The Baptism by fire in our biography is
personal. Its not for another, its just for
us. We are
individual and loved as an individual which is why
moral choices have a
very tricky time coming down to universal principles
to which all must
be obedient. For example, all abortions take
place in an
individual context and it is that individual which
must deal with the
question - the meaning of the moral question is
meant for them, and
this includes the dilemma of those who want to
preserve life.
Their dilemma too is individual.
There is a caution, however.
Which again is related to the absence of
actually practicing
the Catholic (Christian) Religion. The
anti-abortion movement frequently shapes itself in
the form of a mob.
Not always, but frequently. As a mob it
is more like the
folks in the Gospels who Christ appears before and
says: He who is without sin, let
him cast the first stone.
Its a
teaching story that gives a concrete example of the
problem of the mote
and the beam - the problem of judging lest ye be
judged. An
anti-abortion mob really ought to look to their own
beam, first.
Once they understand that, then Christ says,
will they be able to
help the person with the mote.
A similar thing is true when we think
about the current Pope and the innocence shattering
priests.
Let's not become a mob. Let's instead
understand that
within the larger scale of things, it is time for
the Body of Christ,
the laity and the religious, in the Catholic
Religion, to do something
the institutional Church cannot do. Walk up
the Hill and
consciously let the old die. Stop leaning on
the institutional
Church as a moral authority, and take up the Cross
yourself.
There doesn't need to be a reformative
mob-like revolution in the Roman Church for there to
be a metamorphosis
of the Catholic (or Christian) Religion. Carry
your own cross,
don't throw stones and have faith. The rest
will take care of
itself.
The Roman Church will then become more
and more irrelevant. Already it has had to let
go all manner of
buildings, because the material costs of the tragedy
of child abuse
have been so high. All over are empty spaces,
some once Churches.
The City is falling into ruin. Who said
God only shows up
in a Cathedral? Nothing prevents the laity and
the religious from
gathering together in small circles to actually
practice the Christian
Religion.
Certainly we can expect the male
authority driven hierarchies to threaten
excommunication - that
is to deny the celebration of the Mass and the
transubstantiation of
matter during this rite. Let them.
Christ doesn't follow
the Pope, or the Bishops or the Priests. They
have no authority
whatsoever over Him.
Join in community with others and once
more struggle to practice the Religion. Let the Church
built on sand wash
away in the storms of the present times. Walk
up the Hill.
Carry the Cross. Keep company with
others of a like
intention. But pray in secret. He will
be with us, and She
will be with us. The Religion is
actually very simple.
Savor its simplicity.
Pray in secret and individually.
Meditate (have thoughtful conversations about
the Truth) in
community. And last, but certainly not least:
Love each other.
Barack Obama
and
the
reality of the anti-Christ spirit
- what might happen if you begin to insert
reason into Christian discourse,
on
questions of public life -
by Joel A. Wendt
The purpose of the following material is to help Christians, and others, appreciate that there are alternative views which might help our public life - our life of shared social and political discourse and action - alternative to those ideas that tend to dominate what is thought to be a Christian view of how to participate as a member or a citizen of any social order such as a State. In order to lay out this alternative, however, it is also necessary to deepen the reader’s understanding of the potentials of true Christian practice - what actually happens when we take up the Cross and follow Christ, instead of just uncritically accept certain ill-thought out systems of belief.
* * *
Among some right wing and
fundamentalist individuals,
claiming to speak as Christians, one can find
the idea that the current
president of the USA, Barack Obama, is the
anti-Christ.
Their interpretation of the meaning
of this biblical idea
is in error, although by seeking the true
meaning of this idea, that we
know of through the Letters in the New Testament
as John I and John II,
can actually help us understand better political
life through searching
for the deeper understanding of: "render
unto Caesar the things
that are Caesar's and unto God the things that
are Gods". This
is to say that if we deepen our
appreciation of this idea of an anti-Christ
spirit, we can at the same
time deepen our understanding of our shared
public life, which we call
politics.
This will not be easy, for we have
many confusions here,
so we need to proceed carefully and look at the
situation from multiple
and flexible directions. Here is what the
Bible actually says
about the anti-Christ spirit, for it appears in
only one place - the
first two Letters of John:
1 John
2:18-19 "Children, it
is the last hour; and just as you heard that
antichrist is coming, even
now many antichrists have arisen; from this we
know that it is the last
hour. They went out from us, but they were not
really of us; for if
they had been of us, they would have remained
with us; but they went
out, in order that it might be shown that they
all are not of us."
1 John
2:22-23 "Who is the
liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the
Christ? This is the
antichrist, the one who denies the Father and
the Son. Whoever denies
the Son does not have the Father; the one who
confesses the Son has the
Father also."
1 John 4:2-3 "By this you know the spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God; and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God; and this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming, and now it is already in the world."
2 John
1:7 "For many
deceivers have gone out into the world, those
who do not acknowledge
Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh. This is the
deceiver and the
antichrist."
Biblical speculation by
error-capable human beings has
created an idea that conflates these passages in
the first two Letters
of John with images from Revelations, as well as
certain ideas in the
Old Testament. It is amazing the
number of supposed
thinkers who don’t bother to find out that
Revelations and the Old
Testament never mentions the anti-Christ spirit
in their wide ranging
representations of prophecies of coming dark or
evil spiritual
influences. It is then through this lame
and undisciplined
thinking that the anti-Christ spirit (a kind of
attitude of the human
soul, living in most human beings) is morphed
into the picture of a
single person or an evil Being. This
extreme exaggeration then
disables us from actually appreciating what
might be learned from this
idea in the Letters of John, were we less
inclined to want to find the
world inhabited by fearful and evil
bogeymen. As with much
today that masquerades as Christian practice,
this hysteria itself is
of the anti-Christ spirit, for it denies the
Son, not intellectually
but by deed, by refusing to recognize,
understand and practice the
teachings and follow the deeds of the Son, and
substituting instead of
true practice a vain allegiance to ill-reasoned
systems of belief.
In this article I have chosen to
write of the anti-Christ
spirit (small s), and not of the anti-Christ
Spirit (capital S), hoping
to make the following distinction. In the
latter case, with the
use of the term Spirit capitalized, a Being is
implied, as if these
words anti-Christ Spirit were the name of
someone, perhaps visible,
perhaps invisible. In using the term
anti-Christ spirit
(not capitalized) instead, my intention is to
use the term small s
spirit to refer to an attitude of soul. So
throughout this
article the term anti-Christ
spirit is to represent
a general attitude of
the human soul and not an evil Being. This
is fully consistent,
in my view, with the basic idea in the letters
of John.
Another principle example of this
anti-Christ spirit in
contemporary Christian thought is the idea that
something, in order to
be spiritually true, must be Biblical.
That is, for example, the
idea that it can’t be true that human beings are
immortal spirits
experiencing a sequence of incarnations over
long periods of time (the
idea of reincarnation and karma). As
this idea of the
cultural East came to the fore in America and
elsewhere in recent
decades, Christian religious thinking denied it, and based its denial on an
absence of this idea in
the Bible. This idea is not absent from
the Bible by the way, but
those who oppose it force various possible
biblical interpretations
toward their own doctrines - that is, they make
Bible passages fit the
meaning they have already decided it ought to mean.
As regards the idea of
reincarnation and karma, we need
only realize the profound meaning hidden openly
in Christ’s comment
that we are forgiven seventy times seven.
Such a level of
complete forgiveness, by the Divine Mystery, is
most clearly manifested
in those circumstances when we are allowed to
return in the body again
and again in order to have as many chances as
possible to resolve our
errors. To believe that we can learn the
lessons of Christ in
just one life-time is to imagine that Christ has
little patience for
his Children and for whom He has
demonstrated so much Love.
The Divine-Father Mystery would not deny
us all the time we need
in order to learn what life has to teach.
God is the God of all, not just
those living in Western
culture. In bringing the idea of
reincarnation and karma from out
of Eastern culture, to Western culture, is God
not speaking: here is an additional idea
by
which to more deeply understand the Creation.
Yet, we deny God the capacity to speak to
us from another
quarter, by our limiting all that we can know
and think to only what is
taught in the Bible.
This fundamentally legalistic and
theological practice of
arguing about a truth, such that if it cannot be
found in the Bible it
cannot be true, is also a denial of the Father
and the Son.
This is accomplished by the
reduction and confining of the
Divine Mystery to only what is contained in a
book, clearly of human
origin however inspired, and limited as well in
time to the Past.
To rest our systems of understanding
on a book is to deny
the true Glory of the Creation, and to limit God
to never being able to
say anything more to us (that is we make God
incapable of new
revelation). To look to a book,
instead of to the reality
of life as it daily surrounds us, is to deny the
authentic presence of
Christ in our lives (succumb to one of the
temptations of the anti-Christ
spirit).
Yes, many do assert a Christ
presence in their lives, but
only in the sense that it can be found first in
a book - in the Bible.
Christ is not to be allowed by these views
to appear to us as He
wishes, but must only appear to us as
error-capable human beings choose
to interpret a text. This is another form
of hypocrisy.
Many claim to believe in the Divine
Mystery as the Author
of our existence, and at the same time limit
that God to never being
able to say anything new, or to never being
capable of speaking to us
from any other direction than out of a book,
which we should never
forget must be constantly interpreted by human
beings.
This anti-Christ spirit among those
claiming to be
Christian is also often of the same nature as
the mob concerning which
Christ said: He
among you who is without sin, let him cast the
first stone.
Finger pointing, and asserting that Christ
will
come at the End Times and destroy human beings
is to be not in touch at
all with the Creative works of the God of Love.
Here I do not
have the time and space to deal with the
confusions spread by these
so-called Christians as to the true meaning of
the deep symbolism of
Revelations (that is dealt with elsewhere by
others and mostly with
great depth), and instead I here choose to work
more carefully with a
single idea - the idea of the anti-Christ spirit
as appears in
contemporary life; and, as may or may not relate
to the deeds and ideas
of our shared public life, which we call
politics (which Christ
referred to when he made the well known, but not
well understood,
distinction between the realm of Caesar and the
realm of God).
It will help as well to note in
passing the work of the
Russian philosopher, Vladimir Soloviev. He
wrote a significant
book near the end of his life, with the title: War,
Progress, and the End of History: Three
discussions, which
included "A Short Story of the
Antichrist".
Soloviev
had
unusual
views on the relationship between thinking
consciousness and experience which are well
worth investigation in
their own right, and which were at the time,
being very advanced, quite
controversial. For example, he considered
individual human
cognition to be capable of direct knowledge of
the spirit behind all
existence, and given that approach, we might pay
some attention to his thinking as expressed in this Story.
Soloviev basically tells the tale
of a charismatic
individual who rises to political and cultural
power in an imaginary
state. He is very popular, and nearly
everyone loves him,
including all but a few religious leaders.
While this is an
oversimplification, we could say that this
individual's main flaw of
character is his egotism. He is not so
much evil in a demonic
sense, but rather evil in that he is more for
himself and his own power
than he is for anyone else. He wraps
himself in the mantle of the
Good, through his words, but in his actions he
serves no one but his
own egotism. This does not mean he is a
dictator in the classical
sense, ruling with an iron fist. On the
contrary, he seems to
accomplish a lot, as long as we don't notice the
texture and quality of
his rule given that it is based in his love of
his own self above all
else.
To return to the two Letters of
John (of the three that
are in the New Testament), where the anti-Christ
spirit is mentioned:
Clearly John means to point out to
us what can live in
people that is anti- or against the spirit of
Christ - against the
spirit of sacrifice and love (in I John 4:2-3 The
spirit of God).
Christ is fully selfless, so much so that
if we
ask why Judas has to kiss him so that the
soldiers could arrest him, we
realize it is because when He and the disciples
taught, it is clear
that only His most intimate disciples knew which
single individual was
the
center, for all, under his influence were
capable of speaking and
teaching. Christ is the paragon of
egolessness or lack of any
self-centeredness, and it would seem that
Soloviev wished to express
his view that the anti-Christ spirit is not only
in denial of the
Father and the Son, but more in love with its
own Being than any other.
There is no I and Thou for this
anti-Christ spirit, there is only
I.
Let us, at the same time, not fail
to appreciate that
while Christ's Life sets the bar high, He would
not, as Charles Sheldon
the author of In His
Steps knew, put any
task beyond human
capacities. While few attain any where
near to the full
expression of this yoke of love through selfless
self-sacrifice, many
express the essence without any need to preach
to or condemn others.
So when we go about perceiving in modern
culture the presence of
this anti-Christ spirit, we need to see it as
everywhere, not just
isolated in those individuals, groups, ideas or
processes we do not
like because they are different. In point
of fact, that very
psychological process of judging and labeling
others, as wrong or evil
because we do not like them, is itself a form of
the anti-Christ
spirit, denying as it does the core of what
Christ taught about not
judging in the Sermon on the Mount.
It should also be noted that these
aspects of the Letters
of John bear a critical resemblance to our time,
in a peculiar way,
because of his pointing out that "it is
the last hour."
While he understands the existence of an
anti-Christ spirit, he can't quite see it in
himself - he can't quite
notice that his act of judging is itself of the
anti-Christ spirit.
Those today, who conflate this
spirit with the images
from Revelations, are often also filled with a
dread of the present.
There is to this weak thinking so
much perceived woe in the
world, so much that they judge to be wrong and
evil, that they think
then how can it not be the
last hour. The
problem is that this view, especially today,
fails to appreciate the
lessons of history, in which nearly every crisis
of Western
Civilization brought out the assumption that
that particular crisis was
the last hour - was the End Times. What
justification is there
that makes modern End Times believers hold that
they are the ones that
have finally got it right?
The reality is that such a view is
all beam and no mote,
and sees the world not as it is, but only as
something wrong because it
is different from what we in our self-righteous
vanity assume it should
be.
The fundamental problem is one that
has been true all
along. Lets call this problem: the
absence of Christian
practice.
Here is Christ from the end of the
Sermon on the Mount: "Therefore
everyone who hears
these words of mine and puts them into practice
is like a wise man who
built his house on the rock. The rain came down,
the streams rose, and
the winds blew and beat against that house; yet
it did not fall,
because it had its foundation on the rock. But
everyone who hears these
words of mine and does not put them into
practice is like a foolish man
who built his house on sand. The rain came down,
the streams rose, and
the winds blew and beat against that house, and
it fell with a great
crash." Matthew
7: 24-27
The dominance of the need for
systems of doctrine and
belief, and their supposed importance over
Christian practice, is what
leads to all manner of errors. Of
significance here is an idea
that I can’t find a source for, but which is as
follows: The world cannot be cured
of
error by rational argument. The world
is not just rational, it is also irrational
(emotionally impulsive) and
trans-rational, that is capable of being
transcended.
Partly the idea here is that when
politicians compose
what appears to be a rational argument for their
view of what
government policy should be, they act as if this
argument should win in
a contest or a debate. A similar kind of
event occurs in religion
when supposedly rational argument is used to
distinguish one set of
beliefs from another set of beliefs.
People who do this
professionally are often called theologists, and
sometimes
philosophers. In the political world they
are often called
lawyers.
Yet the fact is that the idea of
Christian practice is
about the will, not about the intellect.
Although, ... one can
come to experience that the substance and
content of the intellect may
be made to rise and transform through acts of
the will applied to the
mind. Confusion often arises, however, in
Christian practice when
we hear someone make this kind of reference in
an argumentative way
against the importance of Christian practice: It is
not by works alone, but
only by the grace of God that we are saved.
First: ... it is significant for
experience to make a
distinction between the Four Gospels and the
rest of the New Testament
(including Revelations) if what one wants is to
understand what Christ
means in the Sermon on the Mount by practice. For all that is valiant and
righteous in the
Letters of Paul and others, the true potential
of the soul is to be
found foremost through the efforts to practice Christ’s teachings directly from
the Four Gospels,
recognizing that these are not to be
theologically interpreted away
from their plain meaning, by the use of argument
based on something in
the rest of the New Testament, or even in the
Old Testament.
Paul, for example, interprets Christs teachings, but he is
clearly not Christ Himself.
To make this as clear as possible:
We make a great
confusion if we place on the same level of
importance any of that which
is in the Bible that is not directly the sayings
of Christ in the Four
Gospels. In those sayings, God clearly
speaks if we but put
into
practice what is said. Only
through such practice will we
find
the way to rightly interpret the rest of the
Bible.
If, for example, one were to try to
invent a
counter-argument of an intellectual nature
against the importance of
the practice of the teachings in the Four
Gospels, we are then trying
to modify what Christ taught by reference to the
error prone
interpretations of the disciples. For all
else that they do, and
this includes the Letters of Paul, it is what is
remembered and taught
about what Christ actually said and did that is
the most important.
Whatever else is in the New Testament must
be measured against
Christ’s actual words and deeds.
Raising up the idea, that
works alone cannot lead to salvation, is to
follow a human
interpretation of the meaning of the words of
God. The teachings
of Christ can only be fully understood when
practiced - they are not
matters of the intellect or lawyer-like
theological or philosophical
debate.
Keep in mind that what is being
said here, is not
argumentative and reasoning toward a different
intellectual conclusion,
but rather based upon what becomes understood of
Christ’s teachings
through a will which practices. What the
disciples understood was
limited by their human nature, and this human
nature can only be
transcended through practice. What
you have here then is a
confusion of different themes and realities that
must be
distinguished.
The intellectual problems are many
for the theological
impulse multiplies possible interpretations of
doctrine and dogma
endlessly, while the way through their confusion
is to focus on
practice first. The historical Arianism
controversy, for example,
was an argument about matters which someone who
practices would realize
has no real practical meaning if we are to
follow In His Steps.
We follow as best as possible Christ’s
clear teachings, and
through the resulting life trials and
experiences our ability to
understand and know is enhanced. From this
enhanced state we then
gain a better insight into the meaning of
Christ’s teachings, and as
well a better ability to appreciate the limits
of what was later added
by Paul and others according to their own
interpretations.
For example, the general tenor of
Paul’s letters is often
critical of others, whose Christian practice he
judges as wanting.
We have to ask then to what degree did
Paul practice the work of
understanding the beam in his own eye first,
before he tries to help
someone with the mote in their’s. Remember
Paul was not only not
a disciple, but at one time a rabid opponent of
Christ and Christ’s
teachings. Once converted by his
experience on the road to
Damascus, he doesn’t lose his excess of zealotry
(which true practice
would moderate), but merely applies it in a
different direction.
As a consequence, from outside the Four Gospels, the discussion
of not by works alone focuses on two matters: one is the
common practice at
the time of people asserting they followed the
law. This boasting
is rightly recognized as problematical in John’s
letters, but even in
that the John of these letters remains himself a
hypocrite for not
recognizing his own boasting (my words here are
also colored with the
temptation to boasting). The second
matter is Grace (or
salvation). Without doubt Christ’s love
(or Grace) accepts us,
whatever our practice, but this is not the
meaning of the last verses
of the Sermon on the Mount. These last
verses simply explain the
consequences of an absence of practice - without
practice the house we
build in our souls and spirits will fail in any
times of troubles.
We might consider that we will need
less to be saved if we actually tried harder to practice.
What
is
it that protestant Churches do today, but in
essence sell indulgences when they preach that simply by
confessing to having had
an encounter with Christ, we are saved from our
errors, past and
future. Confess, join our church, give us
money and lets all hate
the unbelievers together. What kind of
message is that? It
is certainly not something Christ would say or
do.
It is clear to the common and
accepted examination of the
history of Christianity, that the religion was built by Paul’s Letters, even
though scriptural
interpretation contains the idea that Christ
authorized this creation
of a church to be done by Peter.
Remember Paul was not even a
disciple, but rather was an opponent of early
Christians. The
newly converted are often excessive in their
passions. Also
keep in mind that the verse about Peter uses the
term rock,
and
the
verse
about practice as well uses the term rock.
Yet, the first
actions of this supposed rock, Peter, is
to deny Christ three times. Clearly at the
most crucial moment he
wasn’t much of a rock in practice. He
saved himself, via an
impulse rooted in the anti-Christ spirit - that
is he denied the
Christ. This aspect of the Stories in the
Gospels is itself an
important teaching, worthy of much discussion.
The Roman Church, for example,
borrowing from the
historical ideas of a ruler’s succession, has
used the idea of the laying
on of the hands to
maintain the fiction that all Popes are Peter’s
successors, forgetting that when the time of
testing came, Peter denied
Christ. Was he then the rock which Christ
hoped for, or did the
Roman Church built itself upon sand from the
very beginning?
All of these kinds of actions, such
as the wanting to
link the Roman Church to Peter, failed because
they are rooted
primarily in the intellect - they are ideas
first, and never entered
deeply enough in the soul to become
self-transformative acts of the
will.
True Christian practice, however,
trains the will.
We choose practice or not, according to
our own insight. If
we don’t practice, that which results from
practice will not arise in
the soul and spirit. Just as an athlete
must exercise the
physical body, so must the soul and spirit be
exercised.
Our belief in one or another
doctrine of so-called faith
(an act of belief, but an act of belief is not
the true act of the will
and trust that is properly called: Faith) - our
beliefs are of no
meaning
here, in the same way an athlete doesn’t get any
change in his
capacities for what he believes are his skills,
but only for what he
actually becomes capable of doing when the trial
of performance comes.
Do not forget that we divide ourselves
against each other most
often over our passion for our personal beliefs,
when every detail of
Christ’s teachings, as practices - as efforts of
will, would have us
love, tolerate and forgive each other.
To make this discussion more
concrete, let us return to
the beginning, for we are here working with the
idea of the anti-Christ
spirit. Most people in applying this term,
apply it to others,
not to themselves. In this they are
throwing stones.
The anti-Christ spirit appears in
the soul as a sense of
egotism and self-importance. We all bear
the anti-Christ spirit
within, and the long long process of the
elimination of this spirit is
only possible through our own continuous
activity. We rid
ourselves of the beam in our own eye first,
before we can learn to make
viable and useful any observations about others.
This egotism can even happen (and
most often does) to
someone who likes to boast of how much they are
serving the Father and
the Son. In many Churches we find the idea
that this or that
person is more godly than any other.
In Catholicism, the
members of that belief-system are encouraged to
call the Pope: His
Holiness. The denial of the Father and the
Son described in the
John Letters is not a doctrinal matter but a
matter of will and of
practice. We deny the Father and the Son
whenever we raise
ourselves, or another, up in status over others
(that is we refuse to
practice
washing the feet). Recall that He said: Whatsoever
you do to the
least of these my brethren, you do so also unto
me.
The use of Christian ideas and
categories in politics
will always be a failure of practice. It
is impossible to form a
truly Christian political idea that is
exclusive, or judgmental in its
nature, without violating most of Christ’s
teachings. Which is
why Christ gave us a great hint for our practice
when he said: Render unto Caesar the
things
that are Caesars, and unto God the things that
are Gods; and, why so
many who strive today for Christian
practice concern themselves with issues of
social need and justice,
without any need to assert this or that person
is more godly and thus
will be a better politician.
Our relationships with each other
and our relationship
with God are not the same, although Christ gives
another great hint
when He said upon being asked what was the most
important commandment: The
most important is to love
God with all your heart and all your mind and
all your spirit; while
the second is like unto it, which is to love
your neighbor as yourself. Among those who struggle
with these problems,
such as Catherine MacCoun in her book On
Becoming an Alchemist (a book concerned with
practice above all else following the Kings
stream of wisdom - see also
my book The Way of the
Fool) - in her
book the human being can be described as living
an existence at the
center point of a kind of Cross. The
vertical element of
this Cross is our relationship to the invisible
Beings of what she
calls the upper and lower vertical (who we are
to love following the
first part of the great commandment). The
horizontal element of
this Cross concerns our social relations with
each other (who we are to
love following the second part of the great
commandment).
The realm of Caesar is the social-political world of humanity, and this horizontal life operates according to different rules than does the vertical - the realm of God or the Divine Mystery. Would that this could be stated in a very simple fashion - unfortunately human social life is exquisitely complicated. All the same this next needs to be said:
Christ’s love manifests most
strongly in human existence
in the individual biography. We are
individuals and Christ loves
each individual with the same Grace. No
so-called holy or godly
person is more loved by Christ than even those
who are most fallen
(recall that Christ teaches to look after the
lost sheep, not just the
found ones). Christ’s Grace is not even
limited to only those who
profess to believe in Him. We do not love
our children based only
their profession of faith in us. We
love them as they
are.
The circumstances of our individual
biography are
embedded in a social-political context, however.
Whenever we pray
(in secret) and seek contact with the Divine -
that contact is
available. Christ is not somewhere in a
kind of hyper-cosmic
spiritual realm outside us, but rather, as was
understood by the
disciples, He was/is Imminent. He says in
Luke: the kingdom of heaven is
inside you.
Here we can better understand the
confusion of many when
they thought that the coming of the kingdom
meant a radical change in
outer social existence. The immediate
coming of the kingdom, as
taught by Christ, concerns what happens when we
actually practice.
The narrow gate to the kingdom is inside
us, and by cleaning out
the inside of our own cup, we come through that
gate to the kingdom.
Outer social life and life in the
kingdom are two different
things. The nearness of the coming of the
kingdom never was meant
to be about Christ’s earthly world rulership.
Recall that He
said: my kingdom is not of this world.
Contemporary Christian practice, in
that we speak of
letting Christ into our lives and the rich
experience reported by those
who manage to actually do this, is valuable and
real. The
problems come from the errant sea of theological
(argumentative)
meaning in which this event of having a direct
encounter with Christ is
placed. Ordinary Christian practice
(social service, going
to church, prayer etc.) does produce effects and
can lead to
experiences of Christ, but the biblical based
interpretations of this
personal event, colored with doctrines and
dogmas that divide us into
different sects and rites, - these
idea-structures lead us astray in
our thoughts. Our heart finds the
right place, but our mind
is over-influenced by systems of vain belief
everywhere at odds with
each other, most of which were born in the
judgmental beam in our own
mind’s eye. The multiplicity of
Christian faiths or beliefs
ought to cause us to ask questions about their
validity, a worthy
criticism many contemporary thinkers apply to
what they perceive as a
Christianity filled with systems and doctrines
completely at odds with
each other.
If we deepen our practice, we will
come to know this
Christianity of the heart (as against one of the
mind or intellect) as
an experience
of the subtle and delicate presence of Fullness
and the
fullness of Presence - what in Acts is called
Holy Breath. As
John the Baptist foretold: The one
coming after me, I’m not big enough to carry his
sandals. While I baptize you in the waters
of repentance, He will
baptize you with Holy Breath and Fire.
Before going deeper into this quite
accurate and
prophetic statement of John the Baptist, let us
make a small but
significant digression.
In our age, particularly in America
but common as well
all over the world, there seems to many to be a
new spirituality in the
wind (so to speak). As part of this
new spirituality we can
come upon websites and blogs and books and all
manner of sources, where
are quoted all kinds of wise sayings, mostly out
of the cultural East,
although other sources are used as well.
People will share
these wise sayings with each other on the social
networks such as
Facebook, and then for a moment entertain these
sayings as personal
thoughts. With such thoughts in mind (as a
kind of background
conceptual music in the soul - in the gateway to
the true
inwardness), people will go through their days
believing that they are
becoming more and more spiritual, and more and
more spiritually
developed as a personality.
Many who style themselves as
Christian do a similar thing
- they share what they believe are wise sayings.
Communities, in fact, tend to
develop special individual
vocabularies of such seemingly wise sentiments,
which everyone is
socially encouraged to accept as true.
From an objective point of view of
the intimacy of soul
life, we have to characterize such wise sayings
as mere sentimental platitudes. The world has been,
especially through its
fascination with Eastern cultural thought,
occupied with these
sentiments (which speak of kindness and love and
oneness and such) as
if by having such thoughts in the soul one has
attained a kind of
renewed spiritual grace. This is not
so, but rather is a
kind of horrible illusion that is suffocating
the individual human
spirit in a kind of self-satisfying pretense
that has been aptly
recognized when one remembers this phrase from
Western culture: the
road to hell is paved
with good intentions.
These sentimental platitudes -
these seemingly good
thoughts, which often give us a nice warm
feeling about ourselves, are
a trap for the spirit. The nature of
the trap in the good
intentions that pave the road to hell is that we
can then believe,
because our soul occupies itself with nice warm
platitudes on a daily
basis, that we have accomplished something in
the realm of the
spiritual. This is not so, unless, we take hold of that warm thought
in such a way that
our will becomes different. True spiritual
development has little
to do with the content of the mind, as a aspect
of soul life by itself,
without the good thought causing us to activate
the will in such a way
that we start to change our Way of Life, down to
its most intimate
core.
While our will can cause a change
in the cognitive
process itself, such that we learn to produce
our own wisdom (no longer
needing to immerse the soul in the sea of
borrowed sentimental
platitudes), the crucial matter is the change in
the will itself, by
the will itself. This will is in fact the
higher element of our
spirit, and as long as we let it slumber in the
warm bed of sentimental
thoughts, it will not wake to any of the soul’s
true potential
spiritual capacities.
In the light of these thoughts, let
us now consider more
carefully: The
one coming after me, I’m not big enough to carry
his sandals.
While I baptize you in the waters of
repentance, He will baptize
you with Holy Breath and Fire.
Most of us acquire our picture of
the world in a mediated fashion. We don’t experience
it directly, but
through the actions and communications of some
other source.
World news, for example, we get
through news sources.
We in fact call these sources: media.
We
also
get
news (of a sort) about our family or our work
place
also through others. We are given stories,
which often are not so
much truthful, but rather are gossip.
The story teller
frequently has an agenda.
From these mediated sources we
construct inwardly in our
consciousness pictures of the meaning of the
world. In greater or
lesser degrees this constructed inward
collection of mental pictures is
flawed, for both the story teller, and our own
biases, infect the
qualitative nature of this inner understanding
(all beam and little
mote).
This process of meaning-creation
begins in our childhood
and continues throughout the rest of our lives.
Some aspects are
more formal such as are created by what we call
education, and as well
by that which we may or may not be taught
through religious sources.
We swim in a sea of stories of the meaning
of the world, and by
reflection, the meaning of our selves.
In the present it has become
particularly important to
human beings to determine for themselves this
meaning of existence.
We rebel against the control of our
thoughts, although
paradoxically we often feel so incapable that we
turn to others in such
a way as to give to them power over our own
thoughts. We do this
whenever we succumb to a talking head on cable
television, or the
rantings of a preacher in our church, or the
ideas of the priests of
natural science. Any where we feel a lack
of personal or
individual capacity, we are prone to surrender
to others the creation
of the mental pictures we hold regarding the
reality of our own
experience. We let others tell us what our
own
experience means.
Basically we are then not very
awake to the fundamental
questions regarding this meaning-creation
process. All the same,
certain characteristics of the world can be
observed.
Each biography has an outward set
of circumstances unique
to it, and is as well inwardly individual and
unique. While we
all, as human beings, have consciousness (soul)
and self-consciousness
(spirit) the content of those are unique to our
individuality.
That certain aspects of what calls itself
natural science tend to
think our physical biology is determinative of
this, that idea itself
is a modern world view mediated by dominant
aspects of the culture of
natural science, which would unjustly impose its
meaning on our free
understanding.
If we survey the world carefully,
without bias, we see
many many different languages and cultures and
social-historical
circumstances. One person grows up
in South L.A., becomes a
gang member and dies young. Another grows
up street poor in
Bombay, finds a way to obtain an education of a
sorts and ends up
working as a telephone clerk serving Western
businesses, all the while
raising a family. I could go on, but
the important point it
to recognize that each unique individual also
lives within a unique set
of social-cultural-political circumstances.
Yes, there are many
similarities, but once we get into the details
these assumed
similarities fail to encompass the true nature
of the totality of any
individual biography.
Part of the inward mental pictures
of each individual
includes some kind of meaning of the world, both
in a personal way, and
as a recipient of media - that is, most of us live
somewhere where we acquire,
through mediated processes - that is through the
stories of others,
mental pictures of what the rest of the world is
like, and how our part
of that world fits into the larger whole - that
is: its meaning.
Shakespeare took hold of this in a
rather pithy (but
one-sided) fashion when he wrote: All the
world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits
and their entrances; And one man in his time
plays many parts, ...
As we each have a different mental
picture of the wider
world and its meaning, and how that relates to
our personal existence
and meaning, we will behave in accord with those
mental pictures and as
well due to and out of our individual nature.
All the same we do
share certain very special elements of this
structure or order to and
in the world.
The surrounding circumstances of
each biography are a sea
of troubles. Again Shakespeare: To be,
or not to be--that is
the question: Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to
suffer The
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Or
to take arms against a
sea of troubles And by opposing end them.
To die, to sleep--
Each unique individual is embedded
in certain fires of
experience (sea of troubles), which cause them
to have to make certain
choices (the sea of troubles doesn’t cause the
choices themselves - we
still choose, but the necessity of choosing - that is caused by
the sea of troubles).
While often such choices can be seen to be
similar, they are not
the same, if
we carefully observe the details as against the
superficial
similarities, - each choice is unique.
While all
abortions and all murders seem to be similar
acts, the context and meaning in which any individual carries
out such actions is
unique.
Yet, so-called Christians judge
others, not having
learned to practice the teaching of the beam and
the mote, and form
mobs as well and then throw stones having
determined someone else is
not as morally perfect as are they. But
even this flaw and the
related mob action are also an example of the
fire of all biographies
today, because a major cause of this fire
belongs to us. Our
actions (the consequence of our choices) produce
effects and the
effects on others come back toward us (the folk
wisdom is: what goes
around comes around).
The whole world burns in a sea of
troubles, and seeing
this rapidly destructive sea many Christians,
with some small
justification, believe this is the End Times.
The world
does burn, but when our view of this burning
lacks the skill and
practice of mastering the beam and the mote, our
mental pictures of the
meaning of this burning will be distorted by our
beam. Acting on
the world through this beam will contribute to
the general social
conflagration. We only can come to the
cognition of the truth of
this situation by learning to overcome the beam
in our own mind’s eye -
overcome the semi-conscious judgmental feelings
by which we see the
world according to our own biases.
Everywhere we see, in the stories
mediated by the news
sources, the consequences of the beam of
judgment of all of us as this
judgment creates more problems than it solves.
The political life
of America, with its blogs and its tea parties
and its shouting heads
on cable television and its Christian right
groups and its liberal
knee-jerk groups - all this chaos and confusion
of different screaming
voices of points of view is born in the beam of
judgment.
How did this baptismal fire arise?
Christ also said: I come
not to bring peace but a sword, to separate
father from son, and mother from daughter ...
He
did
this
by giving us individuality, by creating us
unique and
supporting us in being unique. By His
sword of the gift of
uniqueness He divides us into individuals, and
by the fire born in our
conflict generated by our individuality and its
unredeemed judgments
born in the beam, we are then faced with the
trials of the times.
These trials are three-fold in
their nature. The
first comes from our reactions to the nearby
conditions of our
biography - our work life, our family life, our
economic life - all our
intimate social relations. This is the
intimate element of our
portion of the sea of troubles.
The second comes from our reactions
to the Stage Setting
in which our biography arises. This
perception of the Stage
Setting - of the meaning of present day
historical events - is rooted
in our own judgments and understanding of the
world. We have
created mental pictures of the world, about
which we have deep
feelings.
In acting and choosing concerning
what we see as modern
historical events, as well as what we see of our
intimate social
relations, we tend to join groups - we seek like
minded communities for
mutual support. We join churches,
political parties, the army, -
we give money to Doctors without Borders, we
serve in helping the
homeless, we join survivalist militias - the
choices are endless.
The third trial concerns our
inwardness. We have
thoughts about which we can be obsessive.
We have feelings to
which we become attached and won’t let go.
We have impulses of
will that we do not restrain. The beam is
rooted in this
inwardness, with the same tenacity as the roots
of a well formed and
very vital tree. It is no accident Christ
speaks of this as a
beam or a log - that as wooden.
The feeling judgment is part of the
needed skills of our
soul life. We do not want to get rid of
it, but we do very much
want to master it. The beam element or log
comes from the
thoughts, feelings and impulses of will that we
let become old and
rigid. A young tree is growing,
vital and alive. Only
a dead tree falls in the forest and needs to rot
in order to serve the
whole. When we are children we do not
possess this old soul
structure - everything is vital and alive and
magical when we are
young. Here is the clue to why
Christ says: Lest ye become again as
little children, ye cannot enter the kingdom of
heaven.
The more inflexible we let become
our personality - the
more we are burdened with dead logs in the soul
- the more dead and dry
this old timber is - and the more easily it can
be consumed in the
fires and trials of the biography. Wash
out the inside of your
cup, He said, if you
want the outside to be
truly clean.
To learn to deal with the beam is
to undertake a
house-cleaning of the temple of our own soul.
To recognize the
beam and how it arises in the soul is to begin a
great work - a work we
do not have to do alone. Remember: Wherever
two or more are
gathered; and, I will
be with you to the
ends of time. It
is no accident that 12
Step work requires a community, and that in
America these are often
oriented in a somewhat Christian Way (meetings
end with the Our Father).
Since this work on the beam is
within the inwardness -
within the own soul, it is work of the spirit.
When we work out
of our own spirit in the right way, seeking to
actually practice what
Christ taught, He then keeps us company.
In this company we
now begin to know that other part of the baptism
spoken of by John the
Baptist - Holy Breath. Not only are
we to be baptized by
the fires in our unique biography, coming toward
us from the outside -
from the social-historical community-family
context in which we live
our life - we are also to be baptized within by Holy Breath.
Now this deepening of our modern
understanding of this
baptism is accompanied by New Revelation, as
this prophecy of the first
John the Baptist recognized, because we live in
the time of the True
Second Coming. Christ brings this Baptism
as part of His coming
again. In other places I write in more
detail of how Rudolf
Steiner (1861-1925) was the second John the
Baptist figure - the one
announcing the True Second Coming - the voice
crying in the wilderness
of scientific materialism. This True
Second Coming in “clouds of
heaven” - in the heaven within us as Christ
points out in Luke - in the
depths of our own conscious inwardness or soul
life - leads to a Second
Eucharist to accompany the Original.
This too is
experienced by modern disciples who follow the
practices. See my
essay/video on Saving
the
Catholic
Religion
from the Roman Church.
The experience of Holy Breath comes about this way, as is described in my essay: The Meaning of Earth Existence in the Age of the Consciousness Soul, an essay that can be read for free in many places on my website, and which is the summa of my book: the Way of the Fool. Here is part of what I wrote there:
Thus we
are being truly and
continuously born again today (each act of moral
grace is another
Second Ethereal Eucharist and birth), from out
of our spiritual
childhood and into our spiritual adulthood,
baptized outwardly by the
fires of the times in our biographies, and by
holy breath within - a
Second Eucharist where Christ gives of His own
Substance that biblical
knowing of the Good - His own Being. For us to
truly know the Good,
requires we join our own soul to the Good. Our
yearning to author the
Good out of ourselves is how we participate in
the Baptism of being
truly born again, and how we participate in the
sacrament of the Second
Eucharist. Christ also participates by giving to
us, out of Himself,
this very Good - this Moral Grace. When having
received within
ourselves this sacrament of the Second
Eucharist, an act that only
arises because we seek it and form its actual
application, we remain
free - we create moral law - we author the
fulfillment of the law and
the prophets. Given to us within by Christ as a
capacity, we then
author its incarnate nature and pass it on to
the world of our
biographies, - from out of us thence into the
outer world (or into the
inner world), do we then ourselves author this
Good: love engendered
free moral grace.
But how
does Christ do this?
Is this Good offered to us in this Second
Sacrament as if it was a
thing, passed by hand from one to another?
No.
Christ as holy breath
breathes upon the slumbering burning embers of
our own good nature,
just as we breath upon a tiny fire in order to
increase its power. He
sacrifices His Being into this breath, which
gives Life to the tiny
ember-like fire of our moral heart. The holy
breath becomes within the
soul of each human being who asks, seeks and
knocks - a gift of Living
Warmth that enlivens our own free fire of moral
will.
The
Narrow Gate opens both
ways, making possible thereby the intimate
dialog and conversation of
moral deeds and thoughts that is woven between
the i-AM, the Thou and
the Christ (wherever two or more are
gathered...), which intimate
conversation leads ultimately to the
consecration - the character
development - of the soul.
In this
way our thinking can
now behold the Meaning of Earth Existence in the
Age of the
Consciousness Soul: A macro-cosmic Rite, a
Second Ethereal Eucharist,
in which we give birth out of ourselves in the
most intimate way
possible, knowledge of the Good, not as mere
thought, but as Life
filled moral will, breathed into greater power
by the sacrifice of the
true ethereal substance of Christ’s Being in the
form of holy
breath.
The
outer world is but a
seeming, and what is brought by the Culture of
Media mere pictures of
the Stage Setting for the World Temple that is
home to our biographies.
When we think away this outer seeming - this
logos formed and maya
based sense world, and concentrate only on the
Idea of the moral grace
(Life filled holy breath) we receive and then
enact out of the wind
warmed fire of individual moral will - as
individual law givers, as the
fulfillment of the law and the prophets - we
create this Meaning of
Earth Existence. Every act of moral grace, given
greater Life within in
the deepest intimacy of our life of soul, is an
ethereal communion with
Christ, even though we may only experience it as
what to us is a mere
thought of what is the Good at some moment of
need in the biography.
Christ
gives us this Gift, by
Grace, freely out of Love, and with no need that
we see Him as its
Author. We hunger inwardly to know what the
right thing to do is, and
when this hungering is authentic, we receive
Christ’s Holy Breath. This
does not come so much as a thought-picture of
the Good in response to
our questing spirit, but rather as the contentless
breathing
substance
of Christ’s Being. We are touched (inspired) by
Love, and at this touch
we shape that Breath into the thought that we
then know. The nature of
its application and form in which we incarnate
this thought is entirely
our own. We shape the thought completely out of
our own freedom - our
own moral fire of will, for only we can apply it
accurately in the
individual circumstances of our lives.
As the
Age of the
Consciousness Soul unfolds accompanied by this
Second Eucharist, the
Social World of human relationships begins to
light and warm from
within. For each free act of moral grace rests
upon this Gift of
Christ’s Being to us - an ethereal substance
received in the communion
within the Temple of the own Soul, freely given
in Love whenever we
genuinely: ask, seek and knock during our search
for the Good. Our
participation in this Rite, this trial by Fire
leavened by Holy Breath,
leads us to the co-creation of new light and new
warmth - the delicate
budding and growing point of co-participated
moral deeds out of which
the New Jerusalem is slowly being born.
This
co-creation is entirely
inward, a slowly dawning Sun within the macro
Invisible World of
Spirit. Moreover, we do it collectively (as
humanity). While each of us
contributes our part, it is our collective
conscious celebration of the
Second Ethereal Eucharist (creating the Good)
that begins the
transubstantiation of the collective (presently
materialized and
fallen) thought-world of humanity into the New
Jerusalem.
Thought
is real, and it is as
equally real as is matter. The Original
Eucharist transforms the
already divinely given now-dying substance of
earthly matter into
Life-filled Spirit through our ritual invitation
of the active Grace of
the Divine Mystery; and, our participation in
the Second Ethereal
Eucharist transforms dead thought into living
ethereal Substance,
through the mystery of our individual spirit’s
active and embryonic
grace, that becomes united into the collective
co-creation of humanity.
In the
Invisible World of
Spirit, we co-participate, out of the own moral
fire of will, in the
Dawn of the New Sun that is to become the New
Jerusalem.
Now that we know of the True Second
Coming, of the
meaning of the baptism by Fire and by Holy
Breath, and the true meaning
of the anti-Christ spirit, we can turn our
thinking more directly and
concretely to our public life, and its shared
trials in the social
realm of the social-political existence of
humanity, and the mystery
there of Render
unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and
unto God the things that
are Gods.
At the time that Christ taught,
people were less
intellectually sophisticated in some ways and
naturally wiser in
others. The human impulse that
was to produce natural
science had not yet been born. Yet, it was
also a time that stood
at a very important cross-roads. We
were in danger, not so
much from Beings of Evil as the End Times folk
obsess about, but from
ourselves.
We were ignorant and impulsive.
The Divine Mystery
knew what was to come, as we began to shed this
ignorance and start to
learn to master the world of the Creation.
Yet, we were also
deeply loved, and above all this love valued our
freedom. We
don’t raise children to be copies of ourselves
(unless we are flawed
and don’t love them), but to be themselves.
So on the cusp of
humanity’s journey, from out of its spiritual
childhood toward its
spiritual adulthood, the God came to live like
us, to die like us, and
to give Himself to us in the form of what
teachings we might then
appreciate and find helpful as we grew and
matured.
Being God, the future was (in a
way) an open book, so we
were given a lot which was to prepare us for
what was to come.
Our psychological nature and our
moral nature and our flaws
were obvious to Divine insight. Deep
guidance was offered
and it was left to us to do with this, out of
our own freedom, whatever
we would choose to do. It was assumed we
would make errors of
judgment. Read once more the final words
of the Sermon on the
Mount: "Therefore
everyone who hears these words of mine and puts
them into practice is
like a wise man who built his house on the rock.
The rain came down,
the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat
against that house; yet
it did not fall, because it had its foundation
on the rock. But
everyone who hears these words of mine and does
not put them into
practice is like a foolish man who built his
house on sand. The rain
came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew
and beat against that
house, and it fell with a great crash."
Matthew 7: 24-27
Out of our freedom and maturation,
among many things, we
have produced various kinds of versions of
social order, or what some
call: the
State. This is
what Christ referred to
when he said: Render
unto
Caesar
the
things that are Caesars.
He was not referring to a person, but to a
common social
necessity - for community life requires shared
work and some degree of
order. Here Christ is pointing out to us
that what this shared
order becomes, depends upon what we give to it,
or render it. The
State
-
our
shared social order - is a human creation.
Some will assert otherwise, and even insist it must be otherwise. If we listen carefully to these, however, we will hear that what they really assert is that the State be what they think it should be, and they claim in support of their view that this is what God wants. We are fools to believe them, for what human being can know the mind of God, ever.
We can know parts of the mind of
God, however. We
gain some of this knowledge the better we
understand the Creation
itself. We gain other parts by better
appreciation of ourselves -
for we too are a part of the Creation.
Yet, our freedom grants us
our own sphere of creativity, and this in it
broadest sense is what we
do that provides social order. We do this
in two ways.
The first way we do this is by self
discipline. We
rule ourselves first. I act in the outer
world and I act there
upon others. I also act in my own gateway
to the inner world - in
my own soul. There I create thoughts,
meaning and understanding
(knowledge in all its forms). There too I
can be free.
The second way we provide social
order is through
cooperation - or not. We either work
together or we do not.
This includes any one-to-one relationship,
all family situations,
and work situations, as well as larger more
complex social forms, such
as large local communities, and Nation States.
We participate in
all these simultaneously and in complicated and
differentiated ways.
Christ gave us teachings entirely
directed towards
self-rule. There is no better advice than
these teachings for the
purpose of self-rule - not anywhere else in the
world. This is
because of the Divine Love that is at the root
of these teachings.
Now don’t get confused thinking I
am putting the
so-called Christian Religion as superior to all
other religions.
Christ never suggested that.
For example, He said: I am
the Way, the Truth and
the Life.
He did not say I am the
best way, or a certain belief, or a specific
kind of life. He
also said: In my
Father’s House are many mansions. If we
practice His teachings, we will see directly
with our own mind that
such statements are meant to be inclusive, not
exclusive. There
is a Christian
Religion because human beings created it. God
did not create it.
If we follow a Way (in one of the included mansions or religions in the Father’s House), and if we follow the Truth (as against parochial institutional religious dogmas and doctrines), we will come to true Life. That is: His Being encompasses, and is, all Ways, all Truth and all Life. He never urged us to judge other Ways and other Truths, but rather He asks us to not judge at all. Where conflict arises among people following different Paths and religious doctrines - that is a human problem created by the absence of self-rule.
To appreciate more this mystery:
... I have an
acquaintance of deep and penetrating spiritual
experience, and she
relates that due to certain attitudes of the
Greeks and the Hebrews, at
the time of Christ’s Incarnation, neither group
(as Paul almost noted)
could fully bring to life. in the family and the
community, the social
teachings of Christ. As a consequence,
these were deflected into
the future a bit, and arrived as an aspect of
the coming into existence
of the religion of Islam. But because
Western culture lives so
lost in the beam in the mind’s eye, it sees only
the most flawed and
degenerate aspects of that religious impulse.
The true social
life of members of the Islamic faith is
invisible, in part because it
is consciously protected (hidden).
Would that those who think of
themselves as Christians
could be more open minded and inclusive, the
seeming clash of
civilizations could take an entirely different
course, for both the
Muslim world and the Christian world have much
to teach to each other.
The idea of Christ, as taught in
most so-called Christian
institutional religious systems, is not the
Truth, as should be obvious
by the exclusive nature of those systems.
We are here striving to
come to a real idea of Christ, through
participation and practice in
the teachings He has given us. We follow
and build our house on
rock and then we will learn how to truly see.
This is why these
collections of videos and writings are all made
in relationship to the
Coming Metamorphosis of Christianity - this new
Christianity will be
completely unlike the former.
But this problem is a digression
from the core question: What
can the above do to help
us appreciate what is going on in our present as
regards our public
life?
Everywhere in public life we see
its domination by the
anti-Christ spirit. This takes the form of
egotism, boasting,
judgmentalism and all kinds of lack of
self-rule. That various
so-called Christian sects assert a more
righteous point of political
view is even more disturbing and destructive of
the needed harmony in
social existence. Cooperation for
the purposes of a healthy
social order is necessarily rooted in the
impulse to moral
self-rule.
How often, recently, have we found
out that the leaders,
of a so-called Christian group that is really a
mob - that through
self-love throws stones at gay people - these
turn out to be gay
themselves. Lost in the beam, in their
judgmentalism of moral
self-righteousness, individuals are unable to
either learn to forgive
themselves or others. As a practice,
it is self-forgiveness
that is the foundation for all other
forgiveness, by the way.
Remember, wash out the inside of the cup
of the soul-life first.
This then helps us understand the
state of the realm of
Caesar today, for what is mostly rendered it is
nothing less than the anti-Christ
spirit. Our
public life burns in a conflagration of beams
of judgment - beams of self-righteousness,
mostly involved in the
self-love of our own egotistical boasting of
public virtue. I’m
right,
he’s
wrong is the basic
refrain.
Nearly everyone needs to join a 12
Step group to deal with
that addiction.
In this conflagration our
civilization is falling.
Western Civilization is failing, and out
of its dying there is to
appear a new becoming. The qualitative
nature of this new
becoming - this new civilization - will depend
upon what is rendered
it. If we render unto Caesar, without at
the same time rendering
unto God, we will create one kind of
civilization.
Now the rendering unto Caesar is a
mixture - a totality
of many actions across a wide spectrum of
possible choices. The
social question in part is how does this mixture
become a sum - what
are to be the dominant influences.
Christian practice is the rendering
unto God part of
Christ’s teaching of the relationship between
the Divine Mystery and
the social realm. When we actually practice,
we change. To render
unto God is to learn self-rule
according to the teachings of Christ. The
teaching of the realm
of Caesar and the
realm of God reveals a reciprocal relationship.
By practice (rendering unto God what is
Gods) we become capable
of matters of which we were not capable before.
As we become - as
we develop by our practice - so also increases
our ability to render
unto Caesar what is Caesars. Learning to
leave aside the beam
(rendering unto God) enables us to better render
unto Caesar, because
we have changed from egotistical
self-righteousness into a human being
that now can clearly see the mote in the eye of
the Thou and are thus
better able to help them with their mote
(instead of throw stones at
them).
The qualitative nature of our
shared social-political
existence varies according to the degree that
those who want to engage
in Christian practice actually succeed in
carrying out that practice.
The less self-righteously and
hypocritically so-called Christians
judge others, the more the heat of political discourse
decreases. The less heated (hateful) the
rhetoric, the more
accessible are workable compromises.
That so many in public
life claim to be believers in Christ, yet at the
same time fail at
Christian practice, reveals how much hypocrisy
still rules the lives of
those who boast that they are followers of the
law - that is how much
the Letters of John still unveil to us the
presence of the anti-Christ spirit in our lives.
Of course, as this act of judging
is a universally human
gesture of the life of the soul, all, including
what I call Natural
Christians in my essay
of the same name, we
all can
raise the qualitative nature of what is rendered
to our shared public
social-political life by the same practice.
Many do, as we
all know. Would that many of our political
leaders would be more
willing to act as true Christians than to claim
(boast) to be
Christian, for the anti-Christ spirit that lives
in such hypocrisy
harms us all.
So is Barack Obama the AntiChrist?
No. Is he,
like most of us however, of the anti-Christ
spirit - that is
egotistical, judgmental and boastful? Yes.
Should he be thrown out of office
for being just like us?
The real questions of political discourse
are, as I noted above,
exquisitely complicated. What is
fundamentally true is that which
Christ observed: What we render - what we give
to our shared public
life - that is what it will become. If we
are superficially
judgmental, egotistical and caustic, then
Civilization will continue to
burn to the ground. If we become the
change we want in the world
by striving for self-rule, and if we are
cooperative, we just
might give birth to a Phoenix out of this
growing pile of presently
active fire, still burning embers and coals, and
smoking ash we call
the modern social world.