Sunday, October 30, 2011

...growing in what is.

This from The New Experience of the Supersensible by Jesaiah Ben-Aharon
St. Paul came to realize that an enemy attacked human evolution, and that this enemy is the source of error on the Earth… Only in a world in which the human being could be influenced by the Ahrimanic forces—so Paul now felt—could the error occur that led to the death on the cross. And now, when he understood this, he realized for the first time the truth of esoteric Christianity. The assimilation of death into life: this is the secret of Golgotha. Previously man knew life without death; now he learned to know death as part of life, as an experience that strengthens life… Humanity must strengthen its life, if it wants to pass through death and yet live. And death means, in this connection… the intellect… the intellect makes us inwardly cold, makes us inwardly dead. The intellect paralyses us. Man must truly feel it, that man lives not when man thinks, that man wastes his life in dead mental pictures, and that man must have strong life in himself in order to feel creative life in the dead mental pictures… This I tried to do in my Philosophy of Freedom. This Philosophy of Freedom is in reality a moral conception that should be a preparation for the vitalization of dead thinking through moral impulse, in order to bring it to resurrection.
GA 211, lecture of 2 April, 1922
(untranslated, taken from
The New Experience of the Supersensible,
Jesaiah Ben-Aharon

Now if we read once again the Appendix to the Philosophy of Freedom, added when Steiner brought out the new edition in 1918. Here he addresses the question as to how we know within the context of the human encounter. Perhaps we can see something of the dying in the extinguishing. It's a bit lengthy, and its the most precise esoteric description of what happens in the human encounter that I have found.
What is it, in the first instance, that I have before me when I confront another person? The most immediate thing is the bodily appearance of the other person as given to me in sense perception; then, perhaps, the auditory perception of what he is saying, and so on. I do not merely stare at all this, but it sets my thinking activity in motion. Through the thinking with which I confront the other person, the percept of him becomes, as it were, transparent to the mind. I am bound to admit that when I grasp the percept with my thinking, it is not at all the same thing as appeared to the outer senses. In what is a direct appearance to the senses, something else is indirectly revealed. The mere sense appearance extinguishes itself at the same time as it confronts me. But what it reveals through this extinguishing compels me as a thinking being to extinguish my own thinking as long as I am under its influence, and to put its thinking in the place of mine. I then grasp its thinking in my thinking as an experience like my own. I have really perceived another person's thinking. The immediate percept, extinguishing itself as sense appearance, is grasped by my thinking, and this is a process lying wholly within my consciousness and consisting in this, that the other person's thinking takes the place of mine. Through the self-extinction of the sense appearance, the separation between the two spheres of consciousness is actually overcome. This expresses itself in my consciousness through the fact that while experiencing the content of another person's consciousness I experience my own consciousness as little as I experience it in dreamless sleep. Just as in dreamless sleep my waking consciousness is eliminated, so in my perceiving of the content of another person's consciousness the content of my own is eliminated. The illusion that it is not so only comes about because in perceiving the other person, firstly, the extinction of the content of one's own consciousness gives place not to unconsciousness, as it does in sleep, but to the content of the other person's consciousness, and secondly, the alternations between extinguishing and lighting up again of my own self-consciousness follow too rapidly to be generally noticed.
The Philosophy of Freedom
Rudolf Steiner

It’s the best I can do this evening. Something more is calling, another draft, something more of my own thinking in relationship to these quotes, something of the future is asking to arise…A final quote:
Social processes are death processes. Part of our ego-relatedness has to die and more than that. What is social is so difficult for us because we do not want to die. In GA 73/1973/178 Steiner considers the dying processes (in contrast to the growth processes) as in organic nature, “a bridge between that part of nature that we understand and the social spheres of life that need to be understood.” Thus, our social future is brought about at the expense of our social death processes. These occur at the beginning of the Archetypal Social Phenomenon. In one perceives the process of falling asleep, then one “learns to understand the significance of dying for the human being.” As we allow another to put us to sleep, we therefore “die.” Physical death removes our sheaths one by one. Similarly the social process is one of progressive disposing. Steiner cites Max Stirner’s words in GA 30/1961/144: “Only when nothing is said about you and you are merely named are you recognized as you: as long as something is being said about you, you are merely being recognized as something.” As we awaken in the other, we have an experience which is repeated and magnified in dying. When you have passed through the portal of death, “you are forced to live in the other person, if I express it in this way.” Then one experiences what one has done to him, and this life outside of oneself “makes the future compensation occur” (GA 236/1977/102f).
p. 167-168
The Mysteries of Social Encounters
Dieter Brüll


And the Steiner verse from the national conference:

We are a bridge
Between what is past
And future existence;
The present is an instant:
Is momentary bridge.
Spirit become soul
In enfolding matter
Is from the past;
Soul becoming spirit
In germinal vessels
Is on the path to the future.
Grasp what is to come
Through what is past;
Have hope of what is growing
Through what has emerged.
And so apprehend
Existence in growing;
And so apprehend
What is growing in what is.
—Rudolf Steiner



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