I am 82. About a decade ago I began to realize the potential of “second childhood”. During the early years of this natural transformation I had the idea to pick an age from my youth, as a kind of model for my own inner life as that process unfolded. This engendered some reflection, and after a while I decided I particularly liked my soul at around the age of eleven.
One aspect of that age was to be awake to when my elders were bullshitting me. There was what they said, and clear observation that that wasn’t always truthful. In addition, it was obvious that they didn’t know what they were doing, given the fact of the differences between words and actions. An aspect of this was to realize that world they had made lacked “success”. There was little empirical evidence that by “following” them we would reach what they promised would happen.
In my 30’s I became involved with a group doing psychological self-work, that had a “model” of the stages of life. I’ll skip the early details, and go to the phase which they called: “latency”, which began around nine or ten, and had to do with an acute sense of what was “fair”. The world an eleven year old sees is clearly not “fair”, … not “right”.
This sense, or awareness, was due to the fact that during latency we were deeply into our own “feelings of the heart”. As “adults” we all still have that “gift”, but often our lives required we ignore them. We have built protective walls in the heart of the soul, given that often the biography requires we “grow up too fast”.
Yet, in my mid to late 70’s, I found ways to recover this natural wisdom. At eleven, I had had an excellent B.S. detector, and in the wisdom of aging I realized the value of again trusting this heart of rightness.
As a consequence, in my reading of the works of many “spiritual teachers”, and their acolytes, I would sense this “wrongness”, but in the beginning did not see this riddle’s details. I felt it, but had to labor with my cognitive skills to unpack the “disharmony” between the word (ideal) and the deed (manifested and acted upon conceptualizations) of others, with any exactness.
A great help has been Steiner’s works on Epistemology. Here we are led, via GA-2, to the ideas of experience and thought. In GA-4, these phenomena of the spirit mind are called percept and concept. What does it mean that I can have the concept of Vidar, but not the experience, the percept? Are our ideas (concepts) in this debate about Vidar, perceptless concepts? To Steiner to there is no knowledge without their existential unity.
Many people have clairvoyance gifts. Carl Stegmann taught me that the presence of the new thinking is best called: Clair-thinking. The mind lives in the world of Ideas and Ideals, a realm of Beings, akin to Plato’s World of Forms. In this experience there is no me here Them over-there. It is purely Intuitional in the sense that Steiner used where the Being unites Itself with us. Not my will, but Thine.
Yet the heart of an idea (the ideal), is often missing in the ways of thinking of Steiner followers. Let me give an example:
Steiner frequently used the term: “anthroposophical spiritual science”. The first word describing a characteristic of the two that follow. The implied idea is that there are spiritual sciences that one might not call: anthroposophical.
Yet, it has become a habit of thought among Steiner followers to see as equivalent the concepts living in the terms used: The idea Spiritual Science is taught is if it was identical to the idea of Anthroposophy.
In the heart of the situation, this illogical conceptualization amounts to saying “grape flavored grape flavor.”
This leads to: What are the characteristics living in the idea and ideal “Anthroposophy” – in Steiner’s mind – that modified the meaning of “Spiritual Science”.
In his first four books he lays out the heart of the matter of knowledge. Far too many of his “followers” don’t get “it”, as it were. Not just the ordinary Steiner students, but almost entirely those who ride to prominence as experts in the conceptual content of their version of Spiritual Science.
In my latency, I had became aware of the fact that people were going to worship, but never followed the teachings of their God: Christ. In my modern latency (what is the heart of the matter?), I work with people who go to the Temple of Steiner, and yet never actually follow where he went (GA-2 and GA-4).
“Vidar”, for most of us, is just a bunch of letters, code in symbols on a page. There is in a lot of Steiner’s works, that which causes us to generate concepts from the written word. All the same, there is an actual “Vidar” Being that can be experienced. Yet, we have these discussions were most folk can only work with the perceptless concept. Vidar to them is a concept, but they have not the experience.
As I watched the appearance of this “Vidar” concept, it began from a fever-dream that had been had by one of the current favorites of the Steiner world, Are Thoresen. As I experienced the various conversations, and admiration of Are, there was in me a kind of screaming going on in my heart’s mind.
Wrongness! Wrongness! Wrongness! Conceptual disharmony!
I have had a kind of relationship that seems to be an aspect of the gifts of the spirit known as Uriel. Although, truth to tell, I was given the conception that all of this Uriel business had something to do with science, and what is called St. John’s Tide. Still, I have no experience.
Here is Emerson’s poem about Uriel:
It fell in the ancient periods
Which the brooding soul surveys,
Or ever the wild Time coined itself
Into calendar months and days.
This was the lapse of Uriel,
Which in Paradise befell.
Once, among the Pleiads walking,
Seyd overheard the young gods talking;
And the treason, too long pent,
To his ears was evident.
The young deities discussed
Laws of form, and meter just,
Orb, quintessence, and sunbeams,
What subsisteth, and what seems.
One, with low tones that decide,
And doubt and reverend use defied,
With a look that solved the sphere,
And stirred the devils everywhere,
Gave his sentiment divine
Against the being of a line.
“Line in nature is not found;
Unit and universe are round;
In vain produced, all rays return;
Evil will bless, and ice will burn.”
As Uriel spoke with piercing eye,
A shudder ran around the sky;
The stern old war-gods shook their heads,
The seraphs frowned from myrtle-beds;
Seemed to the holy festival
The rash word boded ill to all;
The balance-beam of Fate was bent;
The bounds of good and ill were rent;
Strong Hades could not keep his own,
But all slid to confusion.
A sad self-knowledge, withering, fell
On the beauty of Uriel;
In heaven once eminent, the god
Withdrew, that hour, into his cloud;
Whether doomed to long gyration
In the sea of generation,
Or by knowledge grown too bright
To hit the nerve of feebler sight.
Straightway, a forgetting wind
Stole over the celestial kind,
And their lips the secret kept,
If in ashes the fire-seed slept.
But now and then, truth-speaking things
Shamed the angels’ veiling wings;
And, shrilling from the solar course,
Or from fruit of chemic force,
Procession of a soul in matter,
Or the speeding change of water,
Or out of the good of evil born,
Came Uriel’s voice of cherub scorn,
And a blush tinged the upper sky,
And the gods shook, they knew not why.
Stephen Clarke recently suggested a relationship might be possible – Vidar and Uriel. There was also this set of concepts: These were spirits of the North, and obviously “Vidar” is a name from Norse Myths.
From Stephen I have been led to the concept and experience of North as exists in native American cosmology. North is above (heaven?), so to speak, while South is below (earth?). What, in the phenomena of my experience – of my own consciousness, bears this quality?
Can I find Uriel and Vidar in my own soul? The idea of the Macrocosm and the microcosm suggests I should. If They are “above”, what are the “names” of the spirits “below”? Ask yourself whether when you think of Uriel and Vidar you give Them a “masculine” nature, in the same way that Sophia and the Holy Mother are “feminine”.
Steiner points to some interesting features of the human form. A nerve-sense pole above, and a metabolic-limb pole below. Does the geological form of the whole earth globe have any kind of analogue? In the Americas, the mountains run North and South, while elsewhere in the world, they run mostly East and West.
Steiner also spoke of the upper pole being the most awake, the lower the most asleep, and the middle more like dreaming.
In the cultural, and social forms occupying the geography of the earth globe, is there any evidence that similar polaric qualities can be found?
If we have the concept that that which lives in the Americas is fallen, what with the crass nature of US of A political influence, and the horrible ritualized mass murders in ancient Central American, … are the Ethereal and Astral aspects there somehow darker, and less “enlightened” than in the Far East.?
Are those civilizations more down (South) and less up (North)? More earthly, and less heavenly? Keep in mind that this is not South and North as in the horizontal plane, but South (below – traditionally the Mother) and North (above – traditionally the Father) in the vertical plane. Fathering generates, and Mothering nurtures that which has been generated.
It is a heart breaking qualitative disharmony to think Vidar has anything at all to do with the Americas. Although, if we follow the Emerald Tablet, as above so below has be considered. For an image, I like the ying yang symbol, where the heart of one is the same as the opposite – in the darkness, the core is the light. And in the light, the darkness is the core.
In modern theoretical physics – to perceive quantum entanglement, the manifestation of the connection requires that “we” first act upon one of the “parts”. What is the Vidar aspect of my own consciousness? Choosing?
Choosing produces Consequences, which in turn must require our care, via more choosing. What motivates our choosing? What does Art say, that Reason cannot?
In Star Wars Four, Luke tells his step-dad that the red colored D2 unit they just bought had a malfunctioning motivator. C3P0 points out that the blue one is a better choice. Hopi Lore speaks of Red and Blue Kachinas. In the profound visionary movie: “Moontrap Target Earth”, there are two robots, one blue and one red. The red one – the luciferic character, fights the ahrimanic character, and protects Scout, whose mission is to find the Temple on the Moon, wherein the Emerald Tablet is placed into the third Eye of the Feminine Goddess, allowing new Sun based Life to sprout, although both Christ and the Mother, inside the Temple, are caged (the bars of which are scientific materialism).
The Moon wisdom is Magic. Magic is based in the Will of the Human, … the dread third force? Meanwhile, is the Eighth Sphere the Now, and the passage through linear time, via the changes from Saturn, to Sun, to Moon, to Earth pass through Eternity, going where we “choose”.
Is that the real danger of the Eighth Sphere? What choices will happen remain unknown, because they are yet to be made.
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