I have a very strong feeling that we are on the verge of a complete reformulation of EVERYTHING, and our current paradigm is getting increasingly questioned more and more by each month. I really sense that in the collective consciousness people are really tired of how things are, everything is breaking, and the tendency it has been going on since the renaissance is at its end point and the impacts of late stage capitalism on society is much more apparent now with much more mainstream attention. With the rise of AI and the end of forced work, the spiritual renaissance and the necessity to change the system otherwise everything (not just the planet itself) will collapse, I cannot see how things will continue this way until the end of this decade at least. Such changes wont amplify capitalism, it will change it into something fundamentally new. I have faith that we will get through this giant mess we got, and I sincerely hope, not just the population but my own personal life, that I am right and we will be living in a world we never thought would be possible in 2030. That we might be living in the most extraordinary moment of all human history. I can really see the collective consciousness vastly changing very rapidly, and it makes me excited and hopeful that all this bullshit will end very soon, maybe sooner than we expect.
I think a spiritual renaissance is nice to think about, but I wouldn't hold your breath. I have a sense about the collective as well, and my sense is one of mass uncertainty with a sincere lack of vision all characterized by a never-before-seen level of decadence. I take decadence to mean a certain lack of agreement about the underpinning common values of the society (and the word "agreement" is doing heavy lifting, "comprehension" may be more appropriate to our times). There is no road map beyond the critical moment, yet this future, predicated by downfalls and collapse, has somehow come to have been characterized as "just what we need," like the catalyst for our redemption, and I think a measured response is to feel dubious about that notion.There's this sort of idealistic strain of thinking that envisions a future in which all that needs to happen is that we need to reach the incontrovertible societal failure, let the system buckle under its own weight, and live through to see, what, nobody knows the specifics, but something great. I think that what is going to happen is that we are going to figure out what's at the core of human nature, and that we will figure that out right as we skate passed the point of no return. Is mankind good? To the Earth and to itself? I feel so within my heart that we have an immense capacity for benevolence, so much so that all could be undone if we could just come together. But I don't "know so" given the weight of the counterevidence that suggests that we have about us a pernicious malignancy that is not honoring of humanity or the Earth. I notice your Alan Watts profile picture, I believe he called this the "irreducible rascality." There's a resonance between what you are saying, and what I perceive as a trend in contemporary politics although it may not be where you expect. This belief that all that needs to happen is system dismantlement for a new epoch of spirituality to naturally promulgate. Well, this is essentially what the Republicans and the far right have been playing at for some time in America, but now more than ever. I mean, the Trump cabinet wants to abolish the department of education. If this isn't visionless cryptoanarchy, then I really don't know what is. Just a maximal faith that things will work out as long as what has been established is torn down. But, do we want the department of education to be shut down in America? I'm not so sure. If I recall correctly, he made a remark during a debate where he said he had something like "concepts of a plan" in reference to one serious issue or another, and I think this is emblematic of the lack of vision. But of course, everyone lacks vision, this isn't special to them, top English political thinkers are left inarticulate and barren whenever someone questions them about the insoluble issues, just for example. I'll leave you with what I've been really chewing on in regards to this topic. I came into this game of thinking and considering thanks to psychedelics which left me with the notion that we were so close to the spiritual utopia that all it would take to edge us into it, all that we lacked, was one half-decent rhetorician who could manifest before us a new cultural modality for us to imbibe in together that outdoes the culture that perpetuates our sorrows, and as we'd imbibe, the gradual and natural reconstitution of our society would fall into place, and slowly we'd look around and begin seeing marked communalism, people becoming more liberated for themselves and eventually into each others arms, and this would culminate into a lasting celebration of being itself in naked parades with all people knowing well the ground of spirit that binds our new society. So, my intellectual journey has been one of seeing reason as I come to terms with why this isn't happening. I've been thinking about the takes of a few different people throughout history and their opinions about human nature. First, there is Mencius, a Chinese philosopher who supports the idea that humans are inherently good, and that it is society which is the great corrupter. If Mencius's arguments turn out to be correct, then these are indeed hopeful times, and our task should be to subdue paranoia in ourselves and others, and to hold fast through uncertainty into the golden present. Mencius, of course in line with, like, Rosseau. I also think of Freud, who I don't jump up and down about, but I do think his idea that societies require a level of repression to function is true to a pretty big extent, and the implication in a time of crisis would be that when the veil lifts, the beast comes out. And this line is pretty much Hobbesian. On one extreme is the notion that society makes a bad individual and that natural goodness rebels against societal impositions, and the other extreme is the notion that civilization... civilizes! And turns a beast into a rather repressed gentlemen. Balancing these extremes in my thought, especially since one can accumulate a wealth of evidence for either extreme throughout the course of history, helps me consider the situation with eyes slightly less clouded by my hopelessly idealistic notions than when I started my foray. Since the video we are mutually commenting on features a Whiteheadian scholar, I'd like to share this quote from Whitehead about religion. I find this quote heavily implicated in a lot of my thinking about what spirituality means to me nowadays. Whitehead says: "Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realised; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest."
@GodLandon I am very inclined to see salvation as inevitable in history. The argument is that our deepest moral intuitions, and intuitions about great stories, fantastical worlds and breathtaking narratives, which are all universal, are in the methaphysical estructure itself (because everything is continuous), and so they must be in history. I honestly believe that humans are inherently good, our essence is pure infinite Love. "Evil" is the lack of good, when our feelings are repressed because "we must be strong enough to face the world", so we alienate ourselves from the world as the ego (our sense of separation) increases and this makes our essence and sensibility to other's energies clouded by darkness as we lack empathy with others and suffer due the difficulty in repressing more. I truely believe that authenticity reveals who we really are, our own essence and our purpose, we do things not because we must by force but because we intrinsically want. Society should adopt the great principle of focusing on looking for the causes for the problems, not on punishment, not on preventing, and not controlling, by actually helping people we solve all our problems. People hurt each other not because they intrinsically want, but because they think they must, either to punish the other, or a manifestation of their repression or because they think it justifies a greater good. Our principles cannot be done by force and coersion (even tolerance and "love" can be coercive), but by doing it by intrinsically will, by identifying the problem before you force the "solution" into others. Just imagine an educational system where since children, people practice meditation, compassion and presence. We would be so much happier and evolved as a species and our own good nature would reveal itself. Humans are spiritual beings, even our villest actions have spiritual conotations. This is why secularism is problematic, it is too empty and you can see how lacking philosophy became when it became secular.
Caught the end and can’t WAIT to restart to get more context. You two aid me tremendously in stimulating the new, and concretizing the existing scaffolded concepts in my own thinking. Keep these going!
This was fantastic. Because of Matt I've gone deep into Steiner and am completely floored and in awe how humanity has evolved. It stirs something in one's soul where every epoch of life unfolds on repeat right in front of our eyes in real time ( in various condensed forms within our own physical lifetimes). You see the fractals appearing all over the place within creation. Kehlan got me into Gebser, Bergson and others who have their own overlapping narratives. I feel so connected to our past which makes me feel tuned in better in shaping the future. I was sharing with my Mom the other day that we need new Steiners today. As Kehlan said, not to mimic or follow but to press deeper. Humanity needs to reconnect and start building upon the great thinkers of the past once again. Even Christ said we were going to do greater things than him and that we were not ready to receive all that he wanted to share because we were just babies still within our newly formed consciousness. I believe all depression, fear and emptiness comes from feeling disconnected and separate. Nothing will connect oneself with both humanity and creation more than learning about our past and our evolution from all kinds of perspectives. We usually resort to one culture, one religion or one lineage to feel that connection. This can help give some grounding, but it robs us of the full experience of knowing and experiencing "Team Humanity". A deep reverence for all that was and is still to come is planted within you when you read deep and wide. The tree of life is not exclusive to one lineage. One must feel all its roots in order to see the whole tree blossom in above ground within your own life. Its like plugging in your entire being into the eternal becoming of all life. You will feel every part of history in you and humbly come to the acceptance that all knowing will always be a mystery. Isn't it the hubris of all knowing that leads to our dead end thinking, toxic divisiveness and quest for the throne? See how little kids always resort to imagination and inspiration to fill in the blanks of what they lack? Or is it us that lacks as our blanks become rigidly filled ,or worse yet, filled in by people we entrust to avoid the responsibility? These trees are single rooted, planted very shallow and get wiped away when the first storm comes. The irony is that learning more should foster greater imagination, inspiration and innovation that matters. Yet we are not taught to learn, but to mimic , memorize and follow. We plant our minds narrow and shallow. Which sucks out all imagination out of ones soul. Makes one's inner being completely oppressed to the questions it so direly wants to scream out. But you can hear all of humanities primal cry even if you can't face your own and see how we triumphed through it. How we transcended into something more than an unconscious dream state of existence. How every thought and every feeling we have can help shape our future. That's when the real journey of becoming begins:)
Beautifully put! I like to view every single idea that humanity has "produced" as akin to an atom or a musical note, and humans as the instrument or medium through which these notes are supposed to fit together to create harmonious or dissonant assemblages. The next step in our evolution shouldn't be necessarily "novelty", but "harmony". You see this exact dead end playing out in classical music, where they play with dissonance and noise so much that you can't tell the difference between noise and music anymore. The same goes for humanity. We're producing more and more "thoughts" every day, yet fail to harmonize them and suffer from listening/experiencing their dissonance. It's time to bring it all together into a coherent "whole", a balanced ecosystem of ideas/paradigms/philosophies. 🙂
@SpiritualBrainstorm I love the music analogy. I once heard humanity is best defined as a jazz band rather than an orchestra. Jazz still harmonizes, but it can weirdly do this while others bring in their dissonance of play and even notes. Jazz gives space to every individual in the band to fully express their individuality because everyone in the band is reverent to the whole. Each member plays within this overarching flow of order. Kehlan and Matt were talking about this idea of not going back to our archaic form of oneness (without ego or awareness), but how do we bring our individuality into the song of life that is playing? Its incredible to witness the flow state within a good jazz band. Each member brings their own idiosyncrasy and quarkiness yet it all flows beautifully. It still follows and reveres an order even when it seems it can be pushing the boundaries of chaos. I believe this is the challenge of humanity. How do we become fully sacrificial to the whole while becoming fully individual? If our individuality did not matter than it would have all formed in vain. When i look at my daughter grow, i never say i wish she could always stay in the state of being a baby. I take in every different stage of her becoming with awe and wonder. Try to play the song of life to her stage of development and imagination. Which ends up challenging me to find a new form of imagination to be in flow with her. Making me play notes i didnt even know existed or would have worked within the song. Stuck to my own indivuality i never woyld have found that within. Its through our sacrificial nature towards all members of the band in order to make them shine that challenges our inviduality to expand. But it has to start with some form of honor to a rythym and beat. We as individuals need to hear and feel that rythym within our entire being. To the point it posesses our full awareness and completely locks us into the song. Where all we are here to express can come out in unison with all our fellow band members. Learning our instrument (our individuality) is only a fragment of the journey. Its all in vain if we cant feel that beat and tap into the only song in life that matters. We each must tap into that beat and just start playing into it. Let others join in and highlight what they bring to the song as it gets expanded. How do we get Team Humanity to feel that groove?
@@BryanMoss33 I think there is no escaping the groove, so long as we are developing "unconsciously". That's the key here. TRUE free will is when you are exercising it consciously. Consciously CHOOSING to do evil/good. If you're doing it "automatically", then you're in the karma wheel, and soul just balances out it's polarities through you. I compare our state as that of a baby still inside the womb. The various cells inside the body are following an unconscious "program" to harmonize and form organs in order for a being to emerge that can have a coherent experience of the world. Only once the baby is outside of the womb do the cells start to have real "freedom" (the number of experiences available to cells inside a healthy growing baby is exponentially higher than the experiences available to cells inside a still born one). The pattern is quite simple: we are meant to become cells inside a planetary consciousness, not in the "transhumanism" way which would be like a conscious singularity type AI that takes control of all human minds via a chip in the brain and creates coherence through mind control (which would basically be symbolically, the human rational mind married to the materialist paradigm trying to "lock" itself and take control of the universe), but rather through manifesting a global decentralized collective planetary intelligence via blockchain tech, self-governance, a network of self-governed cities and towns, using AI and other tools to facilitate coordination and coherence without loosing diversity. It's all just a fractal pattern. Baby stage = tribal animism, infant/child stage = monarchy of divine right, teenager stage = representative democracy, and young adulthood = self-governnace/blockchain/crypto... So in essence, as humanity, we are globally, a "teenager", in our relationship to our governments (symbolic parents), "God is dead" (teenagers desacralize their parents, no longer blindly admire them like when they were kids), and are slowly moving to becoming a decentralized self-governing collective through the emergence of blockchain, AI and all kinds of tools which enable mass coordination without a centralized intermediary. And yes, these transitions take time at humanity's scale, but there is a pattern here. It's not like we're inventing it all from scratch. The only choice we have, in my view, is HOW to experience it: unconsciouly, or consciously. We are just replicating unconsciously a "wisdom" that is contained within. Only our judgements are keeping us from seeing the patterns. There is an ultimate telos or end game: the universe knowing/experiencing itself as one being, by growing consciousness to the point of enfolding itself. Living cell, plant, animal, human, planet becoming self aware, then solar system, galaxy... you get the picture. All through life growing bigger and bigger conscious structures which view themselves and experience themselves as one. There is so much more to say, but it requires a deconstruction of our reality which goes beyond the exchange here...
@@BryanMoss33 I think we're already in the groove. We're just in the process of "fine tuning" ourselves. To put it bluntly, I see us in the same light as a living cell: its inner workings need to be perfectly calibrated, perfectly balanced, otherwise it might not be able to developing, from an assemblage with other cells, all the diversity of animals, plants, ecosystems, as they exist today. Life is the example of perfect non-duality, yet with the potential to manifest duality from it. Imagine if the living cell was judgmental and didn't "like" predators, and tried to twist its internal "rules" to prevent predators from emerging from itself as a structure. It would be like a tree growing sideways, eventually collapsing, not being able to grow into infinity. Humans are the same, a fractal above. We are in the process of creating a planetary organism, a conscious, self-aware planet, which is made up of ideas/concepts/thoughts. If those thoughts are not well balanced, that imbalance will reverberate into infinity. Humans and planet Earth are like the very first cell: they are a "template" from which an infinite number of subsequent "plays of light" and experiences can be built. But only if we form a harmonious whole. The living cell can't assemble with "copies" or different versions of itself if there is a war going on between the amino acids and proteins within it. Humanity as a collective represents a kind of higher level building block for life to experience itself further. And we need to be calibrated just right in order for our concepts/ideas/thoughts to be balanced, in order to pursue life's eternal quest of self-knowing via interacting with itself at higher levels of complexity.
@ I agree. We are in the groove and the groove is in us, but we are not playing to it. It has not embodied our full awareness. Right now we are too focused on perfecting our own instrument without realizing its sole purpose is to play within the song. Not to make up our own tune that alienates us from most of humanity. I agree we are part of one big self organism. How we view humanity and its role in that organism is extremely important. Because there is always a song within a bigger song right? I’m currently watching Daniel Hefner videos that Kehlan mentioned. In a follow up I will provide a link to one of his videos that inverses everything we were taught on humanity and its evolution. It makes me think of retro causation and how Steiner always said that the astral world works backwards from our material physical plane. Almost like the ending is the beginning when flowing spiritually. In the beginning was the word. The script is already complete we are just experiencing it in material real time. Maybe it’s the fusion of the spiritual with our material being is what collapses all time into both everything and nothingness. Both Being and Becoming. Transcendent and Immanent. Link will be below. Thanks for conversing. I feel dialled into the groove when engaging in these kind of conversations. Your responses hit some different notes that made me think a little differently. And adjust my play to the song:)
I've just come across the both of you fairly recently and you've both really opened up a lot for me that my mind has been clawing around in the dark at and just haven't had the philosophical means to articulate to myself. That I open my RUclips today to find y'all in conversation with each other is such a damn treat. I'm wondering if either of you have written or plan to write books? Or, alternatively, If you have reading recommendations that are in line with the broader philosophical track(s) you're on (hopefully at a lay level heh)?
@Formscapes I'm not against monetization. But your other videos have more ads than any other channels on utube. I still watch because to me Anthroposophy is truth and I will listen to anyone genuinely discussing it. Have you attempted to become clairvoyant? Or pursue that? Thanks for your work.
@@squiduardsquarepants568youtube will throw an ad every 90sec if you're watching something they disapprove of but can't restrict officially. Have you noticed that an ad break comes right at the peak of conversation? Someone will be making a point and get to the "and its-" ad break. Right before the synthesis occurs. It is meant to break you out of the concentrating you're doing on the subject. Really shady stuff. Keep it up formscapes
And what do I know now that I didn't know before I watched this dialogue? "Christianity transcends and includes Buddhism." I agree. Also, I am curious about that happens when Matt gets sentimental? And what happens right before sentimental? And what happens after? And is there a relationship between that kind of sentimental and the presence of Jesus in your symbolic landscape? These are questions I ask of myself as I peer into the collective abyss. And what does the Abyss we are gazing into want to have happen? Tenderly, sweetly Jesus is calling... I salute the gentleman from Alabama who keeps the great intellectual tradition of the Deep South alive. Many social movements were given birth in that strange land. I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee and escaped to Manhattan in my youth and became a queer punk rocker in the East Village and I continue to respect those who have embraced that troubled place and are making sense of their experiences in such a vivid way. Thanks again and keep up the good work
Your from conversation on form and emptiness in comparing Buddhism and Christianity reminded me of a line from the Heart Sutra: Form is empty. Emptiness is form. Emptiness is not other than form, and form is also not other than emptiness.
I love your questioning about "what now", and the practical implications of why you do what you do, what motivates you. I do believe that there is an evolutionary "drive" or pattern here, and indeed, we are meant to go beyond technocapitalism and representative (techno)democracy... But maybe the pattern is simpler than one thinks. Maybe it's just a fractal projection at a higher level of our own developments as human beings (as within so without): baby stage = tribal animism, infant/child stage = monarchy of divine right, teenager stage = representative democracy, and young adulthood = self-governnace/blockchain/crypto... So in essence, as humanity, we are globally, a "teenager", in our relationship to our governments (symbolic parents), "God is dead" (teenagers desacralize their parents, no longer blindly admire them like when they were kids), and are slowly moving to becoming a decentralized self-governing collective through the emergence of blockchain, AI and all kinds of tools which enable mass coordination without a centralized intermediary. And yes, these transitions take time at humanity's scale, but there is a pattern here. It's not like we're inventing it all from scratch. The only choice we have, in my view, is HOW to experience it: unconsciouly, or consciously.
Love your content but I feel the need to offer a small correction. Steiner’s cultural ages within the current post-Atlantean epoch are: Indian Persian Egypto-Chaldean Greco-Latin Anglo-Saxon (current) Russian (future) American (future) EDIT: also you NEED to read the brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky if you haven’t yet
Kehlan, I strongly encourage you to look deeper into the discernments between the states of consciousness as differentiated by Steiner. Not just for their epistemological significance but also the ontological dimensions and the psycho spiritual developmental trajectory. The latter developmental understanding is helpful both in normal development from childhood into adulthood which informs the Waldorf educational method for example. But also understanding of this threefold consciousness helps us to unfold the initiatory transformations as supersensible/perceptual consciousness. In his book on practice one can discover that these states of conscious lie relatively dormant but are inherent to what it is to be human. The Imaginal as you use the term is the first step in the extension of normal consciousness and allows for a look across the threshold out of the astral into the etheric and platonic formative world. It is the emotional life transformed into motional picture awareness. It is not yet perceiving with this formative reality but of it. Inspiration after quelling the imaginal would be the perceiving as pure information with the formative into AND out of the astral. Sustained Intuition would be the joining back of the two as the I inhabiting also the spiritualized physical body as a 7 fold life process orchestrating all three processes with the organs of perception to communicate in all three ontological dimensions. I have found a strong phenomenological testing for these threefold realities in Witzenmann's 4 fold basic structure to all organic form. The 4 fold structure is both explanatory and processural. This speaks to the first 45 minutes here. The four are the 1.Actual. That which Steiner and Barfield refer to as "the appearances" a breathing in of the world. Then there is the sentient response which in process creates inner tension or 2. Intention - an inflammation of heat internal arises. This polarity between exteriority and interiority presents as unity of process such as we find in digestion as the object the outer is broken down and made 4. Inherent to the organism. This 3. metamorphosis (the resolving of polarities) when done with agency of an I makes that which becomes inherent Immanent. For the rest of nature and its evolution this process happens at the level of species. For humans this process happens as a speciating event as individuation - as a secretion into the Inherent. This is the lever we have into what Matt has brought as the Anthropocosm. It also I believe, gives musculature to Zak Stein's skeletal Anthrontology. When Immanence is experienced in the Actual we have intuition as Intention becomes purpose. This Steiner refers to as reading the Akashic record. This is what I think Whitehead was touching upon in what Matt brought early into the conversation. Another way to sum this is up is that with the first two stages we experience beingness and beings and in the last we find ourselves as citizens among other beings of this atmanverse.
I like how Plato had that inscription "Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here" and not even 200 years later Euclid got Plato's "forms" and "solids" upside-down 🙃. We still haven't corrected that and it's been 2300 years hahaha. Descartes, Newton and Einstein thought non-zero dimensions were locally real due to that dimensional oversight. At least Leibniz got the difference between 0D and non-zero dimensions correct...
Drg Drysa Viveka gives a technique to “pull in” the exterior sensory into the subtle and then causal etc. “Process of internalization.” I think this helps the triad of known, knowing, and knower collapse into awareness of the open secret. This seems to be parallel to many Western ideas…
I love all your conversations here, as a Buddhist though, I must say I find you returning to a somewhat flattened caricature of Buddhism. While Buddhism is founded in an emphasize śūnyāta and perhaps a world-rejecting transcendence, it you follow the Buddhist philosophy and esoteric developments through Madhyamaka, Yogacara, tantra, Dzogchen, and so forth, there is a lot more thesis, antithesis, and synthesis that I think goes far beyond the perspective Gebser and Steiner had available in translation at the time. Not that that's a problem with me though, I'm still 100% onboard with the insights here, it's just that I feel there is some depth and nuance in the full span and development within Indic traditions that have yet to be integrated into the full gestalt of Western philosophical consciousness. If that integration is still incomplete in one direction, it would seem natural that it would still be incomplete the other way.
Are you familiar with henry t. laurency? He has some beef with Steiner and I'd appreciate if you address it cause I have no confidence in my ability to wrestle with these thinkers
I read some of his ranting about Steiner. From what I'm gathering, this guy has his own brand of alleged esotericism which is basically just a kind of mystical atomism which deals entirely in invisible entities and therefore appeals to secret knowledge. Laurency clearly doesn't understand what Steiner saw in Goethe, and therefore doesn't understand Steiner's epistemology, so he goes on a speculative tirade accusing Steiner of deriving ideas from Rosicrucians who weren't the real deal (elitist gatekeeping), and whether the Theosophists got their ideas from Indic mystics or not. At one point Laurency, speaking of Goethe, says "if knowledge of existence could be attained so easily, humanity would have solved all of these problems long ago." This alone is enough to tell me that this guy isn't worth taking seriously, because he doesn't understand at all just how profound Goethe's phenomenological naturalism actually is, and therefore has no clue what Steiner is actually trying to do. Steiner took issue with atomism of the physicalist sort precisely because it involved taking mental abstractions, reifying them, and then projecting them onto actual phenomena as though they were actually available to the human senses. Steiner, in keeping with Goethe, insists that we **stay with** the phenomena; that if we can understand the phenomenal as the **activity** of the supersensory, then the supersensible simply becomes visible. We are literally seeing the "spirit world" at all times. The problem is in recognition, which requires us to develop our imaginal faculties so as to fully reveal their epistemological powers. In other words, whether Steiner derived his terminology from the Rosicrucians or the Theosophists (or whatever) is irrelevant. The only thing that's relevant is whether or not his conclusions can actually be corroborated by use of this Goethean methodology, which is the core claim he held to his entire career. The reason why Steiner didn't conjecture the existence of an invisible hierarchy of super-material "atoms" is precisely because such a conjecture would be completely antithetical to his epistemology, which Laurency does not understand, as he is too enamored with his own reified abstractions (and egotistical sword rattling over claims to secret wisdom) to understand the actual secret: nothing is hidden.
@@Formscapes thanks! I went through some peer reviews of Goethe's colour theory and they have the same problem there as well, not sticking to the phenomenon. They accuse him of declaring his subjective experience as objective but that's not quite right, it's more like "transjective" as Vervaeke puts it
@@Formscapes Fourth paragraph - the concept of God? - everywhere always, by definition, just see it as fact? ..Thanks so much for your work formscapes guy it's helping me to understand Goethe where Steiner is difficult for me.. you're son of beatles stuff mate .. Must say that I'm still waiting for the moral aspect to be solidified though..I heard you say natural disasters were an example of evil, in your manifesto I think it was .. threw me a bit .. depending on what your definitions of evil and sin turn out to be.. Are you saying nature intends harm to creation, or that human suffering is evil? Too much to answer in a comment I know but I'm sure you'll be approaching it again because it has to be the central concern or lynchpin for human theories of humans. Re your cabin in the woods comment - if you don't run they can't chase you ...some want to/need to/must go over that particular hill of reflex since the great crisis..no choice now.. so we who sense or perceive the quickening think how and where? And we begin to re-locate to the mental realm, which is where 'I am' (I AM) am I not? - and which is over the hill of existential crisis, the giving up safety to the facts..I think that has got some of said paragraph in the mix
Considering ...Phenomenology, Metaphysics, and Conscience.... coming forth and going forward. Up through ...Pathos, Mythos, Logos, and Ethos.... with greater ...Sense, Science, and Salience.... and integrally greater ...Technos, Teleos, and Theos....
Would proof of an ether be a cat stepping on aluminum foil. It doesn't mind the texture or temperature, it minds getting shocked. The cat is feeling the electrical conductivity of the aluminum foil, is it not?
Considering: ...Family, Freedom, and Functional.... Objective Values ...Personal, Populational, Professional, and Psychological.... Projective Truths and ...Safety, Security, Stability, and Sustainability.... Subjective Faiths along with a Transjective ...Sense, Science, and Salience... coming forth and going forward.
Wondering whether you've considered that the transition in human consciousness you both foresee might unfold due to collapse of modern/digitized civilization from accelerating climate change and falling population (esp in the developed, i.e. materialist, world) -- rather than via the tech acceleration narrative? If the industrial supply chain breaks down sufficiently, it could be hard to rebuild today's industry & trade as oil and gas might no longer be cost effective.
Frankly I do not buy the narrative that climate change is dangerous enough to destroy modernity. That's not to say that I don't see climate change as a genuine problem, but rather it's simply that if we are being realistic about the consequences of climate change - even in the most speculative, worst case scenarios - it simply isn't going to be enough to bring modern civilization to its knees. Ahriman is far, far more resilient than that narrative gives it credit for. We have seen time and time again that even the most horrific disasters - whether natural or manmade - are no more than opportunities by which the body of Ahriman is able to further consolidate its organs of power. I see no reason whatsoever to think that disasters brought upon by climate change will be any different. We know that the machine can take tsunamis, hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes, droughts, food shortages, waves of refugees - you name it - and use those events to its advantage. Desperate, starving, angry, disillusioned or defeated peoples are simply peoples who are more easily coerced or otherwise manipulated. Every fear - realistic or delusional - is a weapon in its hands. If we are going to be realistic about bringing about a new civilization, then we have to be realistic by - ironically - imagining the impossible; the prospect that human beings can actually transmute the devouring machine from within by transforming ourselves. It is so, so, so much easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism (Frederic Jameson), but our current task is to do precisely that; to imagine the unimaginable, and then actualize it. What else could "faith" be, if not that?
@@Formscapes Thank you for the detailed reply! But I think we should consider whether population collapse + supply-chain collapse + ecological collapse could indeed end capitalism :)
i have to say, especially now that the right has found a back door into mysticism, i worry that it's being deployed to perpetuate a sense of powerlessness, apathy and nhilism. i maintain that justice is real, injustice is to be exposed and necessarily opposed. to say these are "archangelic battles" over which we have no control seems a lofty notion by which to lazily serve at the behest of selfish anti-life agendas
This was a good and fruitful dialogue. I assume you're aware of Jennifer Gidley's epic paper that compares and contrasts Gebser, Steiner, and Wilber? "The Evolution of Consciousness as a Planetary Imperative." As I listened to the two of you talk, I kept thinking that you both need to read "Rethinking the World" by Peter Pogany. Pogany carefully weaves the thread that balances Chance and Necessity, seeing cultural evolution as "deterministic chaos... - a hybrid of deterministic and indeterministic dynamics." "The human mind is torn between the logic of determinism and indeterminism because both make sense at some level, but neither could possibly motivate individual life. Being caught in the cobweb of necessities suggests fatalism, and unacceptable proposition regardless of how keen and scientifically well-founded the arguments in support of it may be. The other extreme, which claims that chance of the second kind, the humanly recognized form of indeterminate forces guides personal actions, is equally unacceptable. Would a high-school graduate draw cards from a well shuffled deck to decide what he wants to do in life?" "...The conviction of possessing free will originates from the force motrice, the life-creating pseudo-opposition to the accumulation of entropy as it appears in the human organism. This general precipitator of necessity (the autocatalytic push factor) behind cultural evolution itself was not born under the star of freedom. Life springs up anywhere in the universe where local conditions permit it." This 2006 book ("Rethinking the World") does not once mention Jean Gebser, but from 2009 to 2013, Pogany wrote a number of insightful articles and essays relating ideas from Gebser’s magnum opus, The Ever-Present Origin, to the predicament the world is now facing, and the ways in which Gebser’s ideas about structures of consciousness, especially the yet to come stage of the integral structure of consciousness (a universal “intensified awareness”), support Pogany’s own program of what he called New Historical Materialism. Many of these essays were prepared for presentation to the International Gebser Society at their annual conference. "New Historical Materialism - The theory that regards world history as the manifestation of a thermodynamic unfolding tied to changes in interdigitated, coded cerebral matter. This conceptualization allows us to characterize global transformation with the expression 'the world rethinks itself,' and consider the reinterpretations of history and social evolution a cultural evolution-dictated physical necessity. The theory suggests that the recognition of the role entropy plays in human life is a vital dividing line in global evolution; that the concept of matter (therefore, the theory itself) needs to be refreshed as scientific understanding grows; and that even if the species manages to create planetary institutions to chart its course, it will never be able to foretell and completely control its future. Entropy-accumulating, unidirectional processes inevitably produce novelties and surprises." I have a page on Pogany on my "Integral Permaculture" Wordpress blog (In Praise of Peter Paul Pogany), and a Substack post (Drifting Toward a New Form of Self-Organization).
Ahriman isn't a person. Ahriman is the "devouring labyrinth", as I've called it; techno-capitalism and its priesthood of scientism. The military industrial complex. Endless suburban sprawl and the mechanization of human bodies, etc... it's here, for certain. But it hasn't **fully** incarnated yet. Musk is just another priest of the beast, as it were.
I wanted to interpret it this way too, but Steiner clearly and explicitly states that Ahriman will incarnate into a physical human body. Check out the collection of lectures called Lucifer and Ahriman
Thanks purememory. I Kno I have poor memory even though I've heard everything on the channel "Rudolph Steiner pres audio" multiple times I had to re listen "incarnation of Lucifer and Ahriman" thanks again.
@@squiduardsquarepants568 No that's what I'm saying; techno-capitalism IS the physical body of Ahriman. In the 19th century we constructed his vital organs (Aetheric body - i.e., factories, mines, battleships, nation-states) In the 20th we constructed his sentient body (Astral body - i.e., his electrical nervous system) In the 21st we are constructing his Psychical body ("intellectual Soul" - i.e., Artificial Intelligence, the "Metaverse" and "Cloud", etc)
9:30 Are you speaking of human self-awareness being drawn into the causal body from the subtle organs of perception? Won’t animals make a jump from their gross sense organs into the more subtle organs of perception also? Exciting times!
Maybe down the line. I was already planning on doing a complete reassessment of Marxism and Liberalism eventually but I've got enough on my slate for another 3 or 4 months (at minimum) already atm so it'll be a while unless I decide to do that to take a break from one of my mega-projects (which I might tbh).
Thunderbird Phoenix Flight (TM) 🚀 TheoScientoPhilosophers and GeoSocioTechnoVisioneers are embracing and engaging ...UniPhotoElectroChemistry, BioCytoNeuroPsychiatry, and AnthropoPoliticoSocioTheophistry.... coming forth and going forward.
57-58 min - I don't get how "the fact that we have an I means we've re-incarnated" Am I mis-hearing?. Or even if that's so why it then follows that 'we' are gonna be re-incarnated again thousands of years from now as was subsequently stated. Isn't that a mad assumption, or Steiner/Theosophy cosmology simply repeated like fact, or was he hypothesising and I've missed it? Anyway it made me think.. There are all kinds of pertinent problems with re-incarnation - true or not "It has no reality in daily life" says J. Krishnamurti, and as dodgy as he may have been it's well worded. I read and listen but I don't believe things, there's an imperative not to do so. What is belief? Definitively for these sorts of purposes I mean. I'm honestly not sure. Is it comparable to an enquiring mind or the opposite? The cosmology of Steiner may be true-ish but I of course can't know or verify that so that can't be the point of it. It's imagery is awesome and compelling for sure, even so it's only as equally worthy and absurd to the mind as is six days and a rest or a big bang, or it should be - thinking impossible imagery and multiple angles should allow for both, probably sanity too.. forget the bang. Steiner's work, like many other great thinkers, is for me all about how to think, not what to think..no assumptions..and who's doing the thinking in me anyway?.. just stay sharp is all. There's a synthesis of a new religion going on in case we hadn't noticed and language and sentiment seem to matter less obviously than they should do. I'm sure most here would agree that theories and hypotheses are for us a necessary vehicle, but if we get lucifered into the scenery we can lose our way/mind - as Formscapes often points to in the astrology work - and quite possibly any chance of an 'I' at all..even Steiner's work has conditions to consciousness. So as for the future, if there is one, near matters most.. Anyway it's always a pleasure.. Thanks for your work guys.
Well here's the thing about Steiner, and this is the ONLY reason I take him seriously (while not taking people like Krishnamurti seriously). He never asked anyone to just believe anything at all. He lays out his methodology and epistemology in exhausting detail, and explicitly says - if you cannot verify what I'm saying for yourself, then don't believe me. Moreover, his methodology (namely, Goethean Phenomenological Naturalism) is, imo, as correct as it gets. Now what's unfortunate - as I mentioned briefly in this discussion - is that most Anthroposophists don't take their own glorious leader seriously enough to actually do what he asks us to do; they are perfectly content to just regurgitate what Steiner said as though it's simply true because he said it, and they may as well be spitting on his grave as far as I'm concerned. The only issue with Steiner as far as I can tell is that he was rushing to the finish line because he wanted to be able to present Anthroposophy as a complete, coherent worldview, and so I think he relied far too heavily on his imaginal perceptions and leaned too far away from the empirical sometimes. So the result is that he ends up getting a whole lot of things **partially** correct. As the formscapes project continues to truck along, you will see more of what I mean by this, but that's going to require patience. Unlike Steiner, I'm not ever going to be okay with saying "here, I figured this out. Retrace the steps to figure out how I came to these conclusions on your own". My mode of operation is to work through things step by step, which means my video essays are always about 12 steps behind where my mind actually is. So I could tell you "Steiner says that the sun and proto-earth diverged from one another at the end of the first stage of terrestrial evolution, but they actually diverged during the final stage of stellar evolution" - see, noone cares lol. Unlike Steiner I don't have a cult following so I actually need to DEMONSTRATE things if anyone is going to take me seriously (which is a good thing). As for reincarnation, this is something else that I think Steiner got partially correct. We absolutely inherit unconscious memories and karmic narrative continuities from the past, and this can be demonstrated by looking at astrological correspondences and comparing them to people's lives - the patterns are often jarringly blatant. However, I think these continuities are more like a "web" than an array of parallel currents; i.e., you were not a single specific individual in the past. You are drawing from a number of people who lived in the past simultaneously, some more-so than others. When you die, you will be inherited by a number of individuals, not just one specific person who shares an atomic "I" with you; because each "I" is only distinct from the cosmic "I" insofar as it is **embodied**. Ultimately this boils down to some very nuanced disagreements between myself and Steiner pertaining to the metaphysical implications of Christianity which would take a veeeeeeery long time to fully unpack, but in any case, the bottom line is that Steiner gives us a breadcrumb trail which we shouldn't ignore OR blindly follow into the forest.
@@Formscapes Thanks for the reply..interesting as always, particularly the thoughts on re-incarnation. It's not Krish or anyone else that matters really it's the statement I consider worth taking seriously. What is it's actual reality and how can that matter in daily life? is all it's asking. My own question is similarly always seeking the personal risk factor, otherwise might as well sit back and enjoy the end. Do not fear death is the constant warning that rings out. But we do..gotta be a good reason or two. Being completely and permanently separated, cut off from all that you love and are loved by seems to be the ultimate loss and therefore risk so must be part of bringing the daily and cosmic telos together in a complete common sense way. That's why formscapes fascinates me because I'm sure you would agree the end meaning of everything is impossible without risk and faith - ultimate decisions based on not knowing for sure. The astro-hero chart looks like it reflects that fact and a whole lot more. It's the way that's said which needs to be 'something else' and yet very much not something else considering what has already been already said. That's more important than we're used to in general, being in that kind of concordance. I don't even know much of what's been said it's just obviously necessary now/yesterday. In that regard I have sympathy that your mind is 12 steps ahead of the videos and I get the graft has to be done. Your comments on re-incarnation have a feel of redemption with a small 'r' about them - the reclaiming of what's left of certain value.. pervading time and space.. And it's true that it's possible to sense a real relationship to certain .. streams of energy and impulses over time in oneself ..needs and aspirations, moods and motifs.. probably choiceless and certainly very demanding of attention either consciously or sub-consciously, that are clearly different from or similar to those present in others. And we know they mean alot. Astral Chains I call them. The stuff of great songs in our era but what's to come I suspect formscapes will cover. The sentence beginning "When you die.." is a difficult one for me to grasp to be honest.. to do you justice. It looks like death is complete absorption either into the Christ or oblivion. The suffering or joy would be experienced collectively only, unless "embodied" - in what and where?..Sounds full of faith and risk but will have to wait for your work to proceed to wrap my head around it better. In your general comments of course I agree, too much dreaminess, but I suppose I've been there too .. just getting old now and I wont abstract myself away in some kind of cosmic communism. Thanks it's been a pleasure writing.
@@Footnotes2PlatoFr Seraphim Rose, a student of Alan Watts, was an American Eastern Orthodox hesychastic (of inner quietude and ever-moving repose) monk who renounced the way of the world (taking the vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and stability of place) by a monastic way of life and practiced the Prayer of the Heart in solitude to cleanse his heart and mind to turn aright his energies in synergy with Christ Jesus', the Theoanthropos (God-man) and his potentially organistic sanctified Church as Cosmos, as understood well by many saintly/learned Orthodox people. He wrote philosophic and prophetic books such as "Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age", "Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future", "Orthodox Survival Course", and "Russian Catacomb Saints".
shout out for being one of the only people i've ever seen to casually use the word "neptunian"
I have a very strong feeling that we are on the verge of a complete reformulation of EVERYTHING, and our current paradigm is getting increasingly questioned more and more by each month.
I really sense that in the collective consciousness people are really tired of how things are, everything is breaking, and the tendency it has been going on since the renaissance is at its end point and the impacts of late stage capitalism on society is much more apparent now with much more mainstream attention.
With the rise of AI and the end of forced work, the spiritual renaissance and the necessity to change the system otherwise everything (not just the planet itself) will collapse, I cannot see how things will continue this way until the end of this decade at least. Such changes wont amplify capitalism, it will change it into something fundamentally new.
I have faith that we will get through this giant mess we got, and I sincerely hope, not just the population but my own personal life, that I am right and we will be living in a world we never thought would be possible in 2030.
That we might be living in the most extraordinary moment of all human history.
I can really see the collective consciousness vastly changing very rapidly, and it makes me excited and hopeful that all this bullshit will end very soon, maybe sooner than we expect.
I think a spiritual renaissance is nice to think about, but I wouldn't hold your breath. I have a sense about the collective as well, and my sense is one of mass uncertainty with a sincere lack of vision all characterized by a never-before-seen level of decadence. I take decadence to mean a certain lack of agreement about the underpinning common values of the society (and the word "agreement" is doing heavy lifting, "comprehension" may be more appropriate to our times).
There is no road map beyond the critical moment, yet this future, predicated by downfalls and collapse, has somehow come to have been characterized as "just what we need," like the catalyst for our redemption, and I think a measured response is to feel dubious about that notion.There's this sort of idealistic strain of thinking that envisions a future in which all that needs to happen is that we need to reach the incontrovertible societal failure, let the system buckle under its own weight, and live through to see, what, nobody knows the specifics, but something great.
I think that what is going to happen is that we are going to figure out what's at the core of human nature, and that we will figure that out right as we skate passed the point of no return. Is mankind good? To the Earth and to itself? I feel so within my heart that we have an immense capacity for benevolence, so much so that all could be undone if we could just come together. But I don't "know so" given the weight of the counterevidence that suggests that we have about us a pernicious malignancy that is not honoring of humanity or the Earth. I notice your Alan Watts profile picture, I believe he called this the "irreducible rascality."
There's a resonance between what you are saying, and what I perceive as a trend in contemporary politics although it may not be where you expect. This belief that all that needs to happen is system dismantlement for a new epoch of spirituality to naturally promulgate. Well, this is essentially what the Republicans and the far right have been playing at for some time in America, but now more than ever. I mean, the Trump cabinet wants to abolish the department of education. If this isn't visionless cryptoanarchy, then I really don't know what is. Just a maximal faith that things will work out as long as what has been established is torn down. But, do we want the department of education to be shut down in America? I'm not so sure. If I recall correctly, he made a remark during a debate where he said he had something like "concepts of a plan" in reference to one serious issue or another, and I think this is emblematic of the lack of vision. But of course, everyone lacks vision, this isn't special to them, top English political thinkers are left inarticulate and barren whenever someone questions them about the insoluble issues, just for example.
I'll leave you with what I've been really chewing on in regards to this topic. I came into this game of thinking and considering thanks to psychedelics which left me with the notion that we were so close to the spiritual utopia that all it would take to edge us into it, all that we lacked, was one half-decent rhetorician who could manifest before us a new cultural modality for us to imbibe in together that outdoes the culture that perpetuates our sorrows, and as we'd imbibe, the gradual and natural reconstitution of our society would fall into place, and slowly we'd look around and begin seeing marked communalism, people becoming more liberated for themselves and eventually into each others arms, and this would culminate into a lasting celebration of being itself in naked parades with all people knowing well the ground of spirit that binds our new society. So, my intellectual journey has been one of seeing reason as I come to terms with why this isn't happening. I've been thinking about the takes of a few different people throughout history and their opinions about human nature. First, there is Mencius, a Chinese philosopher who supports the idea that humans are inherently good, and that it is society which is the great corrupter. If Mencius's arguments turn out to be correct, then these are indeed hopeful times, and our task should be to subdue paranoia in ourselves and others, and to hold fast through uncertainty into the golden present. Mencius, of course in line with, like, Rosseau. I also think of Freud, who I don't jump up and down about, but I do think his idea that societies require a level of repression to function is true to a pretty big extent, and the implication in a time of crisis would be that when the veil lifts, the beast comes out. And this line is pretty much Hobbesian. On one extreme is the notion that society makes a bad individual and that natural goodness rebels against societal impositions, and the other extreme is the notion that civilization... civilizes! And turns a beast into a rather repressed gentlemen. Balancing these extremes in my thought, especially since one can accumulate a wealth of evidence for either extreme throughout the course of history, helps me consider the situation with eyes slightly less clouded by my hopelessly idealistic notions than when I started my foray. Since the video we are mutually commenting on features a Whiteheadian scholar, I'd like to share this quote from Whitehead about religion. I find this quote heavily implicated in a lot of my thinking about what spirituality means to me nowadays.
Whitehead says: "Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realised; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest."
@GodLandon I am very inclined to see salvation as inevitable in history.
The argument is that our deepest moral intuitions, and intuitions about great stories, fantastical worlds and breathtaking narratives, which are all universal, are in the methaphysical estructure itself (because everything is continuous), and so they must be in history.
I honestly believe that humans are inherently good, our essence is pure infinite Love. "Evil" is the lack of good, when our feelings are repressed because "we must be strong enough to face the world", so we alienate ourselves from the world as the ego (our sense of separation) increases and this makes our essence and sensibility to other's energies clouded by darkness as we lack empathy with others and suffer due the difficulty in repressing more.
I truely believe that authenticity reveals who we really are, our own essence and our purpose, we do things not because we must by force but because we intrinsically want.
Society should adopt the great principle of focusing on looking for the causes for the problems, not on punishment, not on preventing, and not controlling, by actually helping people we solve all our problems.
People hurt each other not because they intrinsically want, but because they think they must, either to punish the other, or a manifestation of their repression or because they think it justifies a greater good.
Our principles cannot be done by force and coersion (even tolerance and "love" can be coercive), but by doing it by intrinsically will, by identifying the problem before you force the "solution" into others.
Just imagine an educational system where since children, people practice meditation, compassion and presence. We would be so much happier and evolved as a species and our own good nature would reveal itself.
Humans are spiritual beings, even our villest actions have spiritual conotations. This is why secularism is problematic, it is too empty and you can see how lacking philosophy became when it became secular.
Great talk. Matt is one of the OG youtube philosophy guys.
Caught the end and can’t WAIT to restart to get more context. You two aid me tremendously in stimulating the new, and concretizing the existing scaffolded concepts in my own thinking. Keep these going!
This was fantastic. Because of Matt I've gone deep into Steiner and am completely floored and in awe how humanity has evolved. It stirs something in one's soul where every epoch of life unfolds on repeat right in front of our eyes in real time ( in various condensed forms within our own physical lifetimes). You see the fractals appearing all over the place within creation. Kehlan got me into Gebser, Bergson and others who have their own overlapping narratives. I feel so connected to our past which makes me feel tuned in better in shaping the future. I was sharing with my Mom the other day that we need new Steiners today. As Kehlan said, not to mimic or follow but to press deeper. Humanity needs to reconnect and start building upon the great thinkers of the past once again. Even Christ said we were going to do greater things than him and that we were not ready to receive all that he wanted to share because we were just babies still within our newly formed consciousness. I believe all depression, fear and emptiness comes from feeling disconnected and separate. Nothing will connect oneself with both humanity and creation more than learning about our past and our evolution from all kinds of perspectives. We usually resort to one culture, one religion or one lineage to feel that connection. This can help give some grounding, but it robs us of the full experience of knowing and experiencing "Team Humanity". A deep reverence for all that was and is still to come is planted within you when you read deep and wide. The tree of life is not exclusive to one lineage. One must feel all its roots in order to see the whole tree blossom in above ground within your own life. Its like plugging in your entire being into the eternal becoming of all life. You will feel every part of history in you and humbly come to the acceptance that all knowing will always be a mystery. Isn't it the hubris of all knowing that leads to our dead end thinking, toxic divisiveness and quest for the throne? See how little kids always resort to imagination and inspiration to fill in the blanks of what they lack? Or is it us that lacks as our blanks become rigidly filled ,or worse yet, filled in by people we entrust to avoid the responsibility? These trees are single rooted, planted very shallow and get wiped away when the first storm comes. The irony is that learning more should foster greater imagination, inspiration and innovation that matters. Yet we are not taught to learn, but to mimic , memorize and follow. We plant our minds narrow and shallow. Which sucks out all imagination out of ones soul. Makes one's inner being completely oppressed to the questions it so direly wants to scream out. But you can hear all of humanities primal cry even if you can't face your own and see how we triumphed through it. How we transcended into something more than an unconscious dream state of existence. How every thought and every feeling we have can help shape our future. That's when the real journey of becoming begins:)
Beautifully put! I like to view every single idea that humanity has "produced" as akin to an atom or a musical note, and humans as the instrument or medium through which these notes are supposed to fit together to create harmonious or dissonant assemblages. The next step in our evolution shouldn't be necessarily "novelty", but "harmony". You see this exact dead end playing out in classical music, where they play with dissonance and noise so much that you can't tell the difference between noise and music anymore. The same goes for humanity. We're producing more and more "thoughts" every day, yet fail to harmonize them and suffer from listening/experiencing their dissonance. It's time to bring it all together into a coherent "whole", a balanced ecosystem of ideas/paradigms/philosophies. 🙂
@SpiritualBrainstorm I love the music analogy. I once heard humanity is best defined as a jazz band rather than an orchestra. Jazz still harmonizes, but it can weirdly do this while others bring in their dissonance of play and even notes. Jazz gives space to every individual in the band to fully express their individuality because everyone in the band is reverent to the whole. Each member plays within this overarching flow of order. Kehlan and Matt were talking about this idea of not going back to our archaic form of oneness (without ego or awareness), but how do we bring our individuality into the song of life that is playing? Its incredible to witness the flow state within a good jazz band. Each member brings their own idiosyncrasy and quarkiness yet it all flows beautifully.
It still follows and reveres an order even when it seems it can be pushing the boundaries of chaos.
I believe this is the challenge of humanity. How do we become fully sacrificial to the whole while becoming fully individual? If our individuality did not matter than it would have all formed in vain. When i look at my daughter grow, i never say i wish she could always stay in the state of being a baby. I take in every different stage of her becoming with awe and wonder. Try to play the song of life to her stage of development and imagination. Which ends up challenging me to find a new form of imagination to be in flow with her. Making me play notes i didnt even know existed or would have worked within the song. Stuck to my own indivuality i never woyld have found that within. Its through our sacrificial nature towards all members of the band in order to make them shine that challenges our inviduality to expand.
But it has to start with some form of honor to a rythym and beat. We as individuals need to hear and feel that rythym within our entire being. To the point it posesses our full awareness and completely locks us into the song. Where all we are here to express can come out in unison with all our fellow band members. Learning our instrument (our individuality) is only a fragment of the journey. Its all in vain if we cant feel that beat and tap into the only song in life that matters. We each must tap into that beat and just start playing into it. Let others join in and highlight what they bring to the song as it gets expanded. How do we get Team Humanity to feel that groove?
@@BryanMoss33 I think there is no escaping the groove, so long as we are developing "unconsciously". That's the key here. TRUE free will is when you are exercising it consciously. Consciously CHOOSING to do evil/good. If you're doing it "automatically", then you're in the karma wheel, and soul just balances out it's polarities through you. I compare our state as that of a baby still inside the womb. The various cells inside the body are following an unconscious "program" to harmonize and form organs in order for a being to emerge that can have a coherent experience of the world. Only once the baby is outside of the womb do the cells start to have real "freedom" (the number of experiences available to cells inside a healthy growing baby is exponentially higher than the experiences available to cells inside a still born one).
The pattern is quite simple: we are meant to become cells inside a planetary consciousness, not in the "transhumanism" way which would be like a conscious singularity type AI that takes control of all human minds via a chip in the brain and creates coherence through mind control (which would basically be symbolically, the human rational mind married to the materialist paradigm trying to "lock" itself and take control of the universe), but rather through manifesting a global decentralized collective planetary intelligence via blockchain tech, self-governance, a network of self-governed cities and towns, using AI and other tools to facilitate coordination and coherence without loosing diversity. It's all just a fractal pattern.
Baby stage = tribal animism, infant/child stage = monarchy of divine right, teenager stage = representative democracy, and young adulthood = self-governnace/blockchain/crypto... So in essence, as humanity, we are globally, a "teenager", in our relationship to our governments (symbolic parents), "God is dead" (teenagers desacralize their parents, no longer blindly admire them like when they were kids), and are slowly moving to becoming a decentralized self-governing collective through the emergence of blockchain, AI and all kinds of tools which enable mass coordination without a centralized intermediary. And yes, these transitions take time at humanity's scale, but there is a pattern here. It's not like we're inventing it all from scratch. The only choice we have, in my view, is HOW to experience it: unconsciouly, or consciously.
We are just replicating unconsciously a "wisdom" that is contained within. Only our judgements are keeping us from seeing the patterns. There is an ultimate telos or end game: the universe knowing/experiencing itself as one being, by growing consciousness to the point of enfolding itself. Living cell, plant, animal, human, planet becoming self aware, then solar system, galaxy... you get the picture. All through life growing bigger and bigger conscious structures which view themselves and experience themselves as one. There is so much more to say, but it requires a deconstruction of our reality which goes beyond the exchange here...
@@BryanMoss33 I think we're already in the groove. We're just in the process of "fine tuning" ourselves. To put it bluntly, I see us in the same light as a living cell: its inner workings need to be perfectly calibrated, perfectly balanced, otherwise it might not be able to developing, from an assemblage with other cells, all the diversity of animals, plants, ecosystems, as they exist today. Life is the example of perfect non-duality, yet with the potential to manifest duality from it. Imagine if the living cell was judgmental and didn't "like" predators, and tried to twist its internal "rules" to prevent predators from emerging from itself as a structure. It would be like a tree growing sideways, eventually collapsing, not being able to grow into infinity. Humans are the same, a fractal above. We are in the process of creating a planetary organism, a conscious, self-aware planet, which is made up of ideas/concepts/thoughts. If those thoughts are not well balanced, that imbalance will reverberate into infinity. Humans and planet Earth are like the very first cell: they are a "template" from which an infinite number of subsequent "plays of light" and experiences can be built. But only if we form a harmonious whole. The living cell can't assemble with "copies" or different versions of itself if there is a war going on between the amino acids and proteins within it. Humanity as a collective represents a kind of higher level building block for life to experience itself further. And we need to be calibrated just right in order for our concepts/ideas/thoughts to be balanced, in order to pursue life's eternal quest of self-knowing via interacting with itself at higher levels of complexity.
@ I agree. We are in the groove and the groove is in us, but we are not playing to it. It has not embodied our full awareness. Right now we are too focused on perfecting our own instrument without realizing its sole purpose is to play within the song. Not to make up our own tune that alienates us from most of humanity. I agree we are part of one big self organism. How we view humanity and its role in that organism is extremely important. Because there is always a song within a bigger song right? I’m currently watching Daniel Hefner videos that Kehlan mentioned. In a follow up I will provide a link to one of his videos that inverses everything we were taught on humanity and its evolution. It makes me think of retro causation and how Steiner always said that the astral world works backwards from our material physical plane. Almost like the ending is the beginning when flowing spiritually. In the beginning was the word. The script is already complete we are just experiencing it in material real time. Maybe it’s the fusion of the spiritual with our material being is what collapses all time into both everything and nothingness. Both Being and Becoming. Transcendent and Immanent. Link will be below. Thanks for conversing. I feel dialled into the groove when engaging in these kind of conversations. Your responses hit some different notes that made me think a little differently. And adjust my play to the song:)
Japanese kitten on Kehlan’s t-shirt perfectly matching Matt’s room divider is just a casual vibing
Grateful for these dialogues!
I've just come across the both of you fairly recently and you've both really opened up a lot for me that my mind has been clawing around in the dark at and just haven't had the philosophical means to articulate to myself. That I open my RUclips today to find y'all in conversation with each other is such a damn treat. I'm wondering if either of you have written or plan to write books? Or, alternatively, If you have reading recommendations that are in line with the broader philosophical track(s) you're on (hopefully at a lay level heh)?
Matt has two books actually.
That was so fun!
I can't afford a paid membership anymore so I'm so glad this was open to everybody!
Im impressed i didn't have a single ad this time. Usually i have to skip ads every 30 seconds. This was nice. Thanks to whoever did that.
I don't monetize livestreams because barely anyone watches them anyway
@Formscapes I'm not against monetization. But your other videos have more ads than any other channels on utube. I still watch because to me Anthroposophy is truth and I will listen to anyone genuinely discussing it. Have you attempted to become clairvoyant? Or pursue that? Thanks for your work.
@@squiduardsquarepants568youtube will throw an ad every 90sec if you're watching something they disapprove of but can't restrict officially. Have you noticed that an ad break comes right at the peak of conversation? Someone will be making a point and get to the "and its-" ad break. Right before the synthesis occurs. It is meant to break you out of the concentrating you're doing on the subject. Really shady stuff. Keep it up formscapes
And what do I know now that I didn't know before I watched this dialogue?
"Christianity transcends and includes Buddhism." I agree. Also, I am curious about that happens when Matt gets sentimental?
And what happens right before sentimental? And what happens after? And is there a relationship between that kind of sentimental and the presence of Jesus in your symbolic landscape? These are questions I ask of myself as I peer into the collective abyss. And what does the Abyss we are gazing into want to have happen? Tenderly, sweetly Jesus is calling...
I salute the gentleman from Alabama who keeps the great intellectual tradition of the Deep South alive. Many social movements were given birth in that strange land. I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee and escaped to Manhattan in my youth and became a queer punk rocker in the East Village and I continue to respect those who have embraced that troubled place and are making sense of their experiences in such a vivid way.
Thanks again and keep up the good work
Your from conversation on form and emptiness in comparing Buddhism and Christianity reminded me of a line from the Heart Sutra:
Form is empty. Emptiness is form. Emptiness is not other than form, and form is also not other than emptiness.
I love your questioning about "what now", and the practical implications of why you do what you do, what motivates you. I do believe that there is an evolutionary "drive" or pattern here, and indeed, we are meant to go beyond technocapitalism and representative (techno)democracy... But maybe the pattern is simpler than one thinks. Maybe it's just a fractal projection at a higher level of our own developments as human beings (as within so without): baby stage = tribal animism, infant/child stage = monarchy of divine right, teenager stage = representative democracy, and young adulthood = self-governnace/blockchain/crypto... So in essence, as humanity, we are globally, a "teenager", in our relationship to our governments (symbolic parents), "God is dead" (teenagers desacralize their parents, no longer blindly admire them like when they were kids), and are slowly moving to becoming a decentralized self-governing collective through the emergence of blockchain, AI and all kinds of tools which enable mass coordination without a centralized intermediary. And yes, these transitions take time at humanity's scale, but there is a pattern here. It's not like we're inventing it all from scratch. The only choice we have, in my view, is HOW to experience it: unconsciouly, or consciously.
Love your content but I feel the need to offer a small correction. Steiner’s cultural ages within the current post-Atlantean epoch are:
Indian
Persian
Egypto-Chaldean
Greco-Latin
Anglo-Saxon (current)
Russian (future)
American (future)
EDIT: also you NEED to read the brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky if you haven’t yet
Kehlan, I strongly encourage you to look deeper into the discernments between the states of consciousness as differentiated by Steiner. Not just for their epistemological significance but also the ontological dimensions and the psycho spiritual developmental trajectory. The latter developmental understanding is helpful both in normal development from childhood into adulthood which informs the Waldorf educational method for example. But also understanding of this threefold consciousness helps us to unfold the initiatory transformations as supersensible/perceptual consciousness. In his book on practice one can discover that these states of conscious lie relatively dormant but are inherent to what it is to be human. The Imaginal as you use the term is the first step in the extension of normal consciousness and allows for a look across the threshold out of the astral into the etheric and platonic formative world. It is the emotional life transformed into motional picture awareness. It is not yet perceiving with this formative reality but of it. Inspiration after quelling the imaginal would be the perceiving as pure information with the formative into AND out of the astral. Sustained Intuition would be the joining back of the two as the I inhabiting also the spiritualized physical body as a 7 fold life process orchestrating all three processes with the organs of perception to communicate in all three ontological dimensions.
I have found a strong phenomenological testing for these threefold realities in Witzenmann's 4 fold basic structure to all organic form. The 4 fold structure is both explanatory and processural. This speaks to the first 45 minutes here. The four are the 1.Actual. That which Steiner and Barfield refer to as "the appearances" a breathing in of the world. Then there is the sentient response which in process creates inner tension or 2. Intention - an inflammation of heat internal arises. This polarity between exteriority and interiority presents as unity of process such as we find in digestion as the object the outer is broken down and made 4. Inherent to the organism. This 3. metamorphosis (the resolving of polarities) when done with agency of an I makes that which becomes inherent Immanent. For the rest of nature and its evolution this process happens at the level of species. For humans this process happens as a speciating event as individuation - as a secretion into the Inherent. This is the lever we have into what Matt has brought as the Anthropocosm. It also I believe, gives musculature to Zak Stein's skeletal Anthrontology. When Immanence is experienced in the Actual we have intuition as Intention becomes purpose. This Steiner refers to as reading the Akashic record. This is what I think Whitehead was touching upon in what Matt brought early into the conversation. Another way to sum this is up is that with the first two stages we experience beingness and beings and in the last we find ourselves as citizens among other beings of this atmanverse.
Huntsville??? I was born there. Wild. 😂
I like how Plato had that inscription "Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here" and not even 200 years later Euclid got Plato's "forms" and "solids" upside-down 🙃.
We still haven't corrected that and it's been 2300 years hahaha. Descartes, Newton and Einstein thought non-zero dimensions were locally real due to that dimensional oversight.
At least Leibniz got the difference between 0D and non-zero dimensions correct...
Please keep this going
Drg Drysa Viveka gives a technique to “pull in” the exterior sensory into the subtle and then causal etc. “Process of internalization.” I think this helps the triad of known, knowing, and knower collapse into awareness of the open secret. This seems to be parallel to many Western ideas…
Steiner believed the Slavs would be very instrumental in the up and coming evolution 48:30. 57:20
I love all your conversations here, as a Buddhist though, I must say I find you returning to a somewhat flattened caricature of Buddhism. While Buddhism is founded in an emphasize śūnyāta and perhaps a world-rejecting transcendence, it you follow the Buddhist philosophy and esoteric developments through Madhyamaka, Yogacara, tantra, Dzogchen, and so forth, there is a lot more thesis, antithesis, and synthesis that I think goes far beyond the perspective Gebser and Steiner had available in translation at the time. Not that that's a problem with me though, I'm still 100% onboard with the insights here, it's just that I feel there is some depth and nuance in the full span and development within Indic traditions that have yet to be integrated into the full gestalt of Western philosophical consciousness. If that integration is still incomplete in one direction, it would seem natural that it would still be incomplete the other way.
Yes I agree that Mahayana traditions, particularly with the bodhisatva vow, replicate the incarnational move of Christ.
❤❤
Are you familiar with henry t. laurency? He has some beef with Steiner and I'd appreciate if you address it cause I have no confidence in my ability to wrestle with these thinkers
Never heard of him but I'll check em out
I read some of his ranting about Steiner. From what I'm gathering, this guy has his own brand of alleged esotericism which is basically just a kind of mystical atomism which deals entirely in invisible entities and therefore appeals to secret knowledge. Laurency clearly doesn't understand what Steiner saw in Goethe, and therefore doesn't understand Steiner's epistemology, so he goes on a speculative tirade accusing Steiner of deriving ideas from Rosicrucians who weren't the real deal (elitist gatekeeping), and whether the Theosophists got their ideas from Indic mystics or not.
At one point Laurency, speaking of Goethe, says "if knowledge of existence could be attained so easily, humanity would have solved all of these problems long ago."
This alone is enough to tell me that this guy isn't worth taking seriously, because he doesn't understand at all just how profound Goethe's phenomenological naturalism actually is, and therefore has no clue what Steiner is actually trying to do.
Steiner took issue with atomism of the physicalist sort precisely because it involved taking mental abstractions, reifying them, and then projecting them onto actual phenomena as though they were actually available to the human senses. Steiner, in keeping with Goethe, insists that we **stay with** the phenomena; that if we can understand the phenomenal as the **activity** of the supersensory, then the supersensible simply becomes visible. We are literally seeing the "spirit world" at all times. The problem is in recognition, which requires us to develop our imaginal faculties so as to fully reveal their epistemological powers.
In other words, whether Steiner derived his terminology from the Rosicrucians or the Theosophists (or whatever) is irrelevant. The only thing that's relevant is whether or not his conclusions can actually be corroborated by use of this Goethean methodology, which is the core claim he held to his entire career.
The reason why Steiner didn't conjecture the existence of an invisible hierarchy of super-material "atoms" is precisely because such a conjecture would be completely antithetical to his epistemology, which Laurency does not understand, as he is too enamored with his own reified abstractions (and egotistical sword rattling over claims to secret wisdom) to understand the actual secret: nothing is hidden.
@@Formscapes thanks! I went through some peer reviews of Goethe's colour theory and they have the same problem there as well, not sticking to the phenomenon. They accuse him of declaring his subjective experience as objective but that's not quite right, it's more like "transjective" as Vervaeke puts it
@@Formscapes Fourth paragraph - the concept of God? - everywhere always, by definition, just see it as fact? ..Thanks so much for your work formscapes guy it's helping me to understand Goethe where Steiner is difficult for me.. you're son of beatles stuff mate .. Must say that I'm still waiting for the moral aspect to be solidified though..I heard you say natural disasters were an example of evil, in your manifesto I think it was .. threw me a bit .. depending on what your definitions of evil and sin turn out to be.. Are you saying nature intends harm to creation, or that human suffering is evil? Too much to answer in a comment I know but I'm sure you'll be approaching it again because it has to be the central concern or lynchpin for human theories of humans.
Re your cabin in the woods comment - if you don't run they can't chase you ...some want to/need to/must go over that particular hill of reflex since the great crisis..no choice now.. so we who sense or perceive the quickening think how and where? And we begin to re-locate to the mental realm, which is where 'I am' (I AM) am I not? - and which is over the hill of existential crisis, the giving up safety to the facts..I think that has got some of said paragraph in the mix
Considering ...Phenomenology, Metaphysics, and Conscience.... coming forth and going forward.
Up through
...Pathos, Mythos, Logos, and Ethos....
with greater
...Sense, Science, and Salience....
and
integrally greater
...Technos, Teleos, and Theos....
Would proof of an ether be a cat stepping on aluminum foil. It doesn't mind the texture or temperature, it minds getting shocked. The cat is feeling the electrical conductivity of the aluminum foil, is it not?
Considering:
...Family, Freedom, and Functional.... Objective Values
...Personal, Populational, Professional, and Psychological.... Projective Truths
and
...Safety, Security, Stability, and Sustainability.... Subjective Faiths
along with a
Transjective ...Sense, Science, and Salience...
coming forth and going forward.
Wish these two very erudite gentlemen would have touched on Rene Girard and his Memetic Desire and The Scapegoat mechanism. Theories.
I have been thinking the same thing
Wondering whether you've considered that the transition in human consciousness you both foresee might unfold due to collapse of modern/digitized civilization from accelerating climate change and falling population (esp in the developed, i.e. materialist, world) -- rather than via the tech acceleration narrative? If the industrial supply chain breaks down sufficiently, it could be hard to rebuild today's industry & trade as oil and gas might no longer be cost effective.
Frankly I do not buy the narrative that climate change is dangerous enough to destroy modernity. That's not to say that I don't see climate change as a genuine problem, but rather it's simply that if we are being realistic about the consequences of climate change - even in the most speculative, worst case scenarios - it simply isn't going to be enough to bring modern civilization to its knees. Ahriman is far, far more resilient than that narrative gives it credit for. We have seen time and time again that even the most horrific disasters - whether natural or manmade - are no more than opportunities by which the body of Ahriman is able to further consolidate its organs of power. I see no reason whatsoever to think that disasters brought upon by climate change will be any different. We know that the machine can take tsunamis, hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes, droughts, food shortages, waves of refugees - you name it - and use those events to its advantage. Desperate, starving, angry, disillusioned or defeated peoples are simply peoples who are more easily coerced or otherwise manipulated. Every fear - realistic or delusional - is a weapon in its hands.
If we are going to be realistic about bringing about a new civilization, then we have to be realistic by - ironically - imagining the impossible; the prospect that human beings can actually transmute the devouring machine from within by transforming ourselves. It is so, so, so much easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism (Frederic Jameson), but our current task is to do precisely that; to imagine the unimaginable, and then actualize it. What else could "faith" be, if not that?
@@Formscapes Thank you for the detailed reply! But I think we should consider whether population collapse + supply-chain collapse + ecological collapse could indeed end capitalism :)
i have to say, especially now that the right has found a back door into mysticism, i worry that it's being deployed to perpetuate a sense of powerlessness, apathy and nhilism. i maintain that justice is real, injustice is to be exposed and necessarily opposed. to say these are "archangelic battles" over which we have no control seems a lofty notion by which to lazily serve at the behest of selfish anti-life agendas
53:11 we saw what happened to the Twin Towers
This was a good and fruitful dialogue. I assume you're aware of Jennifer Gidley's epic paper that compares and contrasts Gebser, Steiner, and Wilber? "The Evolution of Consciousness as a Planetary Imperative."
As I listened to the two of you talk, I kept thinking that you both need to read "Rethinking the World" by Peter Pogany. Pogany carefully weaves the thread that balances Chance and Necessity, seeing cultural evolution as "deterministic chaos... - a hybrid of deterministic and indeterministic dynamics."
"The human mind is torn between the logic of determinism and indeterminism because both make sense at some level, but neither could possibly motivate individual life. Being caught in the cobweb of necessities suggests fatalism, and unacceptable proposition regardless of how keen and scientifically well-founded the arguments in support of it may be. The other extreme, which claims that chance of the second kind, the humanly recognized form of indeterminate forces guides personal actions, is equally unacceptable. Would a high-school graduate draw cards from a well shuffled deck to decide what he wants to do in life?"
"...The conviction of possessing free will originates from the force motrice, the life-creating pseudo-opposition to the accumulation of entropy as it appears in the human organism. This general precipitator of necessity (the autocatalytic push factor) behind cultural evolution itself was not born under the star of freedom. Life springs up anywhere in the universe where local conditions permit it."
This 2006 book ("Rethinking the World") does not once mention Jean Gebser, but from 2009 to 2013, Pogany wrote a number of insightful articles and essays relating ideas from Gebser’s magnum opus, The Ever-Present Origin, to the predicament the world is now facing, and the ways in which Gebser’s ideas about structures of consciousness, especially the yet to come stage of the integral structure of consciousness (a universal “intensified awareness”), support Pogany’s own program of what he called New Historical Materialism. Many of these essays were prepared for presentation to the International Gebser Society at their annual conference.
"New Historical Materialism - The theory that regards world history as the manifestation of a thermodynamic unfolding tied to changes in interdigitated, coded cerebral matter. This conceptualization allows us to characterize global transformation with the expression 'the world rethinks itself,' and consider the reinterpretations of history and social evolution a cultural evolution-dictated physical necessity. The theory suggests that the recognition of the role entropy plays in human life is a vital dividing line in global evolution; that the concept of matter (therefore, the theory itself) needs to be refreshed as scientific understanding grows; and that even if the species manages to create planetary institutions to chart its course, it will never be able to foretell and completely control its future. Entropy-accumulating, unidirectional processes inevitably produce novelties and surprises."
I have a page on Pogany on my "Integral Permaculture" Wordpress blog (In Praise of Peter Paul Pogany), and a Substack post (Drifting Toward a New Form of Self-Organization).
I don't think Ahriman is coming. He's here. Probably musk.
Ahriman isn't a person. Ahriman is the "devouring labyrinth", as I've called it; techno-capitalism and its priesthood of scientism. The military industrial complex. Endless suburban sprawl and the mechanization of human bodies, etc... it's here, for certain. But it hasn't **fully** incarnated yet. Musk is just another priest of the beast, as it were.
@Formscapes so I misunderstood Steiner saying that Ahriman was to incarnate in a physical body?
I wanted to interpret it this way too, but Steiner clearly and explicitly states that Ahriman will incarnate into a physical human body. Check out the collection of lectures called Lucifer and Ahriman
Thanks purememory. I Kno I have poor memory even though I've heard everything on the channel "Rudolph Steiner pres audio" multiple times I had to re listen "incarnation of Lucifer and Ahriman" thanks again.
@@squiduardsquarepants568 No that's what I'm saying; techno-capitalism IS the physical body of Ahriman.
In the 19th century we constructed his vital organs (Aetheric body - i.e., factories, mines, battleships, nation-states)
In the 20th we constructed his sentient body (Astral body - i.e., his electrical nervous system)
In the 21st we are constructing his Psychical body ("intellectual Soul" - i.e., Artificial Intelligence, the "Metaverse" and "Cloud", etc)
56:00 Bird is the word. Heh.
9:30 Are you speaking of human self-awareness being drawn into the causal body from the subtle organs of perception? Won’t animals make a jump from their gross sense organs into the more subtle organs of perception also? Exciting times!
58:30 ❤
Inshallah my dudes
Do you plan on doing a video about nazism and fascism?
Maybe down the line. I was already planning on doing a complete reassessment of Marxism and Liberalism eventually but I've got enough on my slate for another 3 or 4 months (at minimum) already atm so it'll be a while unless I decide to do that to take a break from one of my mega-projects (which I might tbh).
Thunderbird Phoenix Flight (TM) 🚀
TheoScientoPhilosophers and GeoSocioTechnoVisioneers are embracing and engaging ...UniPhotoElectroChemistry, BioCytoNeuroPsychiatry, and AnthropoPoliticoSocioTheophistry.... coming forth and going forward.
57-58 min - I don't get how "the fact that we have an I means we've re-incarnated" Am I mis-hearing?. Or even if that's so why it then follows that 'we' are gonna be re-incarnated again thousands of years from now as was subsequently stated. Isn't that a mad assumption, or Steiner/Theosophy cosmology simply repeated like fact, or was he hypothesising and I've missed it? Anyway it made me think.. There are all kinds of pertinent problems with re-incarnation - true or not "It has no reality in daily life" says J. Krishnamurti, and as dodgy as he may have been it's well worded.
I read and listen but I don't believe things, there's an imperative not to do so. What is belief? Definitively for these sorts of purposes I mean. I'm honestly not sure. Is it comparable to an enquiring mind or the opposite?
The cosmology of Steiner may be true-ish but I of course can't know or verify that so that can't be the point of it. It's imagery is awesome and compelling for sure, even so it's only as equally worthy and absurd to the mind as is six days and a rest or a big bang, or it should be - thinking impossible imagery and multiple angles should allow for both, probably sanity too.. forget the bang.
Steiner's work, like many other great thinkers, is for me all about how to think, not what to think..no assumptions..and who's doing the thinking in me anyway?.. just stay sharp is all. There's a synthesis of a new religion going on in case we hadn't noticed and language and sentiment seem to matter less obviously than they should do.
I'm sure most here would agree that theories and hypotheses are for us a necessary vehicle, but if we get lucifered into the scenery we can lose our way/mind - as Formscapes often points to in the astrology work - and quite possibly any chance of an 'I' at all..even Steiner's work has conditions to consciousness. So as for the future, if there is one, near matters most.. Anyway it's always a pleasure.. Thanks for your work guys.
Well here's the thing about Steiner, and this is the ONLY reason I take him seriously (while not taking people like Krishnamurti seriously). He never asked anyone to just believe anything at all. He lays out his methodology and epistemology in exhausting detail, and explicitly says - if you cannot verify what I'm saying for yourself, then don't believe me. Moreover, his methodology (namely, Goethean Phenomenological Naturalism) is, imo, as correct as it gets.
Now what's unfortunate - as I mentioned briefly in this discussion - is that most Anthroposophists don't take their own glorious leader seriously enough to actually do what he asks us to do; they are perfectly content to just regurgitate what Steiner said as though it's simply true because he said it, and they may as well be spitting on his grave as far as I'm concerned.
The only issue with Steiner as far as I can tell is that he was rushing to the finish line because he wanted to be able to present Anthroposophy as a complete, coherent worldview, and so I think he relied far too heavily on his imaginal perceptions and leaned too far away from the empirical sometimes. So the result is that he ends up getting a whole lot of things **partially** correct.
As the formscapes project continues to truck along, you will see more of what I mean by this, but that's going to require patience. Unlike Steiner, I'm not ever going to be okay with saying "here, I figured this out. Retrace the steps to figure out how I came to these conclusions on your own". My mode of operation is to work through things step by step, which means my video essays are always about 12 steps behind where my mind actually is.
So I could tell you "Steiner says that the sun and proto-earth diverged from one another at the end of the first stage of terrestrial evolution, but they actually diverged during the final stage of stellar evolution" - see, noone cares lol. Unlike Steiner I don't have a cult following so I actually need to DEMONSTRATE things if anyone is going to take me seriously (which is a good thing).
As for reincarnation, this is something else that I think Steiner got partially correct. We absolutely inherit unconscious memories and karmic narrative continuities from the past, and this can be demonstrated by looking at astrological correspondences and comparing them to people's lives - the patterns are often jarringly blatant. However, I think these continuities are more like a "web" than an array of parallel currents; i.e., you were not a single specific individual in the past. You are drawing from a number of people who lived in the past simultaneously, some more-so than others. When you die, you will be inherited by a number of individuals, not just one specific person who shares an atomic "I" with you; because each "I" is only distinct from the cosmic "I" insofar as it is **embodied**.
Ultimately this boils down to some very nuanced disagreements between myself and Steiner pertaining to the metaphysical implications of Christianity which would take a veeeeeeery long time to fully unpack, but in any case, the bottom line is that Steiner gives us a breadcrumb trail which we shouldn't ignore OR blindly follow into the forest.
What is the destiny of the single "I" in this view of reincarnation?
@@Formscapes Thanks for the reply..interesting as always, particularly the thoughts on re-incarnation. It's not Krish or anyone else that matters really it's the statement I consider worth taking seriously. What is it's actual reality and how can that matter in daily life? is all it's asking.
My own question is similarly always seeking the personal risk factor, otherwise might as well sit back and enjoy the end. Do not fear death is the constant warning that rings out. But we do..gotta be a good reason or two.
Being completely and permanently separated, cut off from all that you love and are loved by seems to be the ultimate loss and therefore risk so must be part of bringing the daily and cosmic telos together in a complete common sense way.
That's why formscapes fascinates me because I'm sure you would agree the end meaning of everything is impossible without risk and faith - ultimate decisions based on not knowing for sure. The astro-hero chart looks like it reflects that fact and a whole lot more. It's the way that's said which needs to be 'something else' and yet very much not something else considering what has already been already said. That's more important than we're used to in general, being in that kind of concordance. I don't even know much of what's been said it's just obviously necessary now/yesterday. In that regard I have sympathy that your mind is 12 steps ahead of the videos and I get the graft has to be done.
Your comments on re-incarnation have a feel of redemption with a small 'r' about them - the reclaiming of what's left of certain value.. pervading time and space..
And it's true that it's possible to sense a real relationship to certain .. streams of energy and impulses over time in oneself ..needs and aspirations, moods and motifs.. probably choiceless and certainly very demanding of attention either consciously or sub-consciously, that are clearly different from or similar to those present in others. And we know they mean alot. Astral Chains I call them. The stuff of great songs in our era but what's to come I suspect formscapes will cover.
The sentence beginning "When you die.." is a difficult one for me to grasp to be honest.. to do you justice. It looks like death is complete absorption either into the Christ or oblivion. The suffering or joy would be experienced collectively only, unless "embodied" - in what and where?..Sounds full of faith and risk but will have to wait for your work to proceed to wrap my head around it better.
In your general comments of course I agree, too much dreaminess, but I suppose I've been there too .. just getting old now and I wont abstract myself away in some kind of cosmic communism. Thanks it's been a pleasure writing.
Is Matt a millenial?
Gen X
@@RepairRenovateRenew haha no I am born in 1986 which I believe qualifies me as Millennial
@@Footnotes2Plato Bro is qualified, certified millenial.
@@Footnotes2PlatoFr Seraphim Rose, a student of Alan Watts, was an American Eastern Orthodox hesychastic (of inner quietude and ever-moving repose) monk who renounced the way of the world (taking the vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and stability of place) by a monastic way of life and practiced the Prayer of the Heart in solitude to cleanse his heart and mind to turn aright his energies in synergy with Christ Jesus', the Theoanthropos (God-man) and his potentially organistic sanctified Church as Cosmos, as understood well by many saintly/learned Orthodox people. He wrote philosophic and prophetic books such as "Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age", "Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future", "Orthodox Survival Course", and "Russian Catacomb Saints".
@@restful5810 Yeah I was confused about who Kehlan had been talking about clearly : )