The Capture (BBC series)

   Just finished watching series 2 two nights ago (11/11/22). Wow, it really makes you think. What is reality? We so desperately need to question everything; especially, if half of America can believe one thing (stolen election) and the other half not. I would like to add maybe here there is a conflation of levels: the election happened and the result was valid in a real world sense but in a more mythic, noetic, sense the election was stolen from Trump (after all he certainly lost the presidency).

   But back to the formulation of important questions (What is reality?), which is the theme of Parsifal, it is we ourselves that hold us back from questioning out of either fear or desire. Desiring the answer to be a certain way or fearing the answer we will get. I think most materialists know this fear very well. If the spiritual worlds exist then the whole way we approach life is not only wrong, but destructive: destructive to the individual (loneliness), destructive to the community (addiction and mental disorders (mass shooters)), and destructive to the world (greed driven profit destroying the natural world).

   This ever increasing need, felt by many, to know the truth meets an ever increasing uncertainty and inability to question towards. This difficulty with differentiating reality from illusion is portrayed in the Matrix movies (based on the philosophy of Schopenhauer) and is described as the brain in a vat experiment: which goes how do you know that you are not a brain in a vat receiving direct electrical input that then simulates what you experience as reality? You only appear to be a person in a three dimensional world but, according to the experiment, you are a brain in a vat.

   Kant never solved this and, in a sense, said it can not be solved. Kant and most philosophers after him believed that the brain creates an image of reality by interpreting sensations and this is all we can ever know! R. Steiner fundamentally repudiates this in this book The Philosophy of Freedom. One way of understanding his refutation is that by understanding the nature of knowledge and thinking we can tell whether our mental image of the world corresponds to the world reality behind it.

   When we are asking the fundamental questions, like what is real, then we are asking Pontius Pilate’s question. [John 18:38] “What is truth?” This is ever more important in our increasingly disconnected world, because without knowing the truth or keeping to the path of truth we create more and more disharmony and ill-health in the world. The old gem of wisdom explains: ‘the truth will set you free.’ It is only actions that are done out of freedom that will lead the world and humanity forward to the future. Without truth, without freedom, we will become stuck in an ever darkening backwater. The evolution of the world will become forfeit and the materialistic nightmare of science will become a reality: extinction in thermodynamic death void.

 

tyger

 The Tyger - (William Blake)
   Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
   In the forests of the night,
  What immortal hand or eye
   Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

   In what distant deaps or skies

   Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
   On what wings dare he aspire?
   What the hand dare sieze the fire?

   And what shoulder, & what art,
   Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
   And when thy heart began to beat,
   What dread hand? & what dread feet?

   What the hammer? what the chain?
   In what furnace was thy brain?
   What the anvil? what dread grasp
   Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

   When the stars threw down their spears,
   And water'd heaven with their tears,
   Did he smite his work to see?
   Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

   Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
   In the forests of the night,
  What immortal hand or eye
   Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Mottos

 

The White Magician consecrates his life to study, meditation, and service, that he may know the law and may direct force to its appointed ends. He molds himself into the plan, becoming part of the divine rhythm by sacrificing himself and his wishes to the will of the Infinite, asking only to know wherein his duty lies and how he may be of the greatest service to the greatest number.   – Manly P. Hall

 

May the events that seek me
Come unto me;
May I receive them
With a quiet mind
Through the Father’s ground of peace
On which we walk.

May the people who seek me
Come unto me;
May I receive them
With an understanding heart
Through the Christ’s stream of Love
In which we live.

May the spirits which seek me
Come unto me;
May I receive them
With a clear soul
Through the healing Spirit’s Light
By which we see.     

               ~ Adam Bittleston

 

 God can be perceived only insofar as he is loved – Bernard of Clairveaux

 

“It is this we have to learn in our times: to live with pure trust, without any existential certainty, trusting in the ever-present help of the world of spirit. Truly, there is no other way.”  - RS 

 

"Most things don't matter and what people think matters the most, doesn't matter at all" - Daskalos 

 

We are firmly grounded in our understanding of things of the spirit only when we do not rest content with abstract spiritual concepts and a capacity to express them theoretically, but instead grow into a sure belief that higher beings are present with us in a community of spirit when we engage in spiritual study. 

-Rudolf Steiner, Awakening to Community

 

Spiritual knowledge is transmuted through its own nature into love… Wisdom is the necessary condition for love; love is the fruit of wisdom, reborn in the Ego.  (Steiner)

 

Everything ephemeral is just a parable   - Goethe

   

“Learn at first concentration without effort; transform work into play; make every yoke that you have accepted easy and every burden that you carry light!”

~ Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot

 

The Mystery of the Abyss: 

The fact that what the human being creates is always ruthlessly destroyed again, raises his nature; for he must always build and create anew; and it is in this activity that our happiness lies; it lies in what we ourselves accomplish.   - RS