The Many Mansions of the 2nd Matrix
Steiner on Ahrimanic Influences and the Dangers of Clairvoyance, in Online Life
Over the next couple of weeks, I will be sharing excerpts taken from Rudolf Steiner, specifically a “Meaning of Life” lecture (one of two) given in Copenhagen, on May 24th 1912. It makes up the first two chapters of Christ and the Human Soul, a book I highly recommend to anyone who wishes to get a better idea of Steiner’s Christology. (Audio at the end)
First, a disclaimer.
Why I am Firmly On the Fence about Anthroposophy
I continue to oscillate back and forth with Steiner, from a general feeling of skepticism and doubt, to repeated experiences of being profoundly impacted and moved by specific passages. Steiner (or anthroposophy) as a whole, I find hard to take; it seems less than the sum of its parts. Yet, the parts taken independently are consistently astounding to me (and this is without yet trying out biodynamic farming).
In an email exchange with Melissa Watt (following our conversation on Steiner), I wrote this:
Regarding RS’s affiliations: Theosophy, he clearly broke from and was a thorn in the side of, ergo that speaks at least as much in his favor as against; the OTO link seems non-existent, evidentially, a correspondence, no more; Freemasonry, yes, he joined, but the idea that Freemasonry is a single thing that can be equated with evil machinations is “2nd matrix” dumbing down that, IMO, does more harm than good.
RS was affiliated, for sure, an “insider” (like CS Lewis, Jung, anyone we can name, probably); he never AFAIK spoke about organized ritual child abuse & that’s a serious omission, since he must have known about it (he did speak of orders of black magicians); he also never spoke about circumcision.
Was there an agenda he was part of (social, I mean, rather than only spiritual)? It seems so, to whatever degree; but there are only two gauges that I care about: 1) what are the observable consequences of his life and actions and words; 2) what is the usefulness and reliability of that output, for me personally? The 3rd gauge would be my sense of the man himself, but that is very subjective and probably fairly easy to fool.
I certainly have reservations about RS’s general approach, that of spiritual science, with its literalization of what I see as more amorphous, shifting, symbolic truths; and I am skeptical about how well anyone has picked up and applied his teachings since then, and made it through the unavoidable pitfalls created by flattening this stuff out into language at all (I am not sure I have ever had an entirely positive experience of an anthroposophist; most of them simply ignore me). But the same could be said of Jung, Kierkegaard, of Paul and the gospel writers, or of Alan Watt, whose audience of followers remains (mercifully?) too small to constitute a movement, or for there to be any obvious negative fall-out.
Nonetheless, it is doubtful if even 2% of people exposed to any public figure’s work is ever really able to apply it in a way that is true to its spirit.
(Needless to say, I aspire to being part of that 2%.)
An Abyss of Non-Fulfillment
(The following passages are from Christ and the Human Soul, but this is an auto-generated transcript from the audio by Dale Brunsvold, and I can’t guarantee correct punctuation, etc. I will interject commentary if and when something occurs to me. All emphasis is my own.)
Rudy says:
[O]ur souls are mysteriously affected by growth and decay. . . . [It is] something that gives us a feeling of sadness and of tragedy, if we look at it only superficially.
If with the knowledge gained from the physical world, we look at the widths of the ocean, or at any other field of existence, we know that countless eggs, countless seeds, come into being, but that very few of these grow into fully developed beings. Think how many eggs the various fish species lay in the sea every year that disappear before ever reaching their goal of becoming fully-grown fish. Think how only a very small number of these eggs reach maturity. [C]onsider the fact that everything that comes into existence has to perish again.
[I]n the infinite domain of incalculable possibilities, only a few become realities. [E]ven in the actual process of becoming, there is already something enigmatic. . . . If we sow a field with wheat, we see myriads of ears of wheat springing up. [O]ut of every single grain in those ears of wheat, a new ear can come into existence. . . . How many of all those grains of wheat that we see in the field will actually reach this potential?
[T]his life that is all around us only comes into being because, in this process of becoming, it seems to plunge myriads of its seeds into an abyss of non-fulfillment. [W]hat exists everywhere around us is built on a groundwork of infinitely rich potential which never becomes reality in the ordinary sense of the word. [I]t is from such a foundation of possibilities that realities arise.
The Heavenly Mirror (Chapel Perilous)
Now, let us turn to the other side of the picture, . . . one that presents itself to us when we follow the path to spiritual knowledge. As you know, this path to spiritual knowledge is sometimes described as dangerous. Why? For the simple reason that, when we want to follow the path to spiritual knowledge, we enter a realm that cannot, as a matter of course, be accepted in the form in which it presents itself to us.
. . . . If we follow this path with real earnestness, then we reach a stage where the whole physical world around us grows dim. In place of this physical world, there arises a world of rising and falling images, a world of surging impressions of a sound, smell, taste, and light-like nature. This world presses and whirls into our field of spirit vision. We then experience what may be called imaginative visualizations, which surround us on all sides and constitute the world in which our soul then lives and weaves. If we were to assume that the visionary world appearing to us in this way is something entirely real, then we would be gravely mistaken. This is also the point where the danger begins.
The realm of visionary life is immeasurable and will remain so unless we rise from imagination. . . . It is only inspiration that tells us which image we must concentrate on, which image we must turn to with our spirit vision, in order to experience truth. That all the countless other images surrounding this one image must vanish into a “being-less nothingness,” and that this one image will then emerge from the countless others, and will prove itself to be an expression of the truth.
. . . . For the images that endure are the ones that are compatible with the level of vision you have reached, whereas those that you extinguish are merely secondary images. And the danger now lies in the fact that many people feel extraordinarily comfortable and happy in the realm of visions. And once they are surrounded by a visionary world, are therefore reluctant to develop themselves further to continue striving, because this visionary realm pleases them so much.
But it is impossible to attain to truth in spiritual life when we simply surrender to this feeling of bliss, and as it were revel in this visionary world. This impedes our ascending to reality, to truth.
Electric Visions
These passages struck me as of particular relevance, because I have been reading and compiling (for future publication) old journal entries from the daze of Guatemalan drug-shamantics-cum-voluntary-Lucifer-possession (not as bad as it sounds). Twenty-five years later, those runaway imaginative visions are now ready to be filtered through a more grounded and sober (literally and figuratively speaking) consciousness-lens, with the aim of determining what was actually inspired, versus what was phantasmagorically confabulated (i.e., the merely psychic from the genuinely spiritual).
The model offered by Steiner seems to me, however, to have a more far-reaching, even universal, application. Between the spiritual and the mundane, there is a broad range of “intrapsychic” phenomena, and this “chapel perilous” is all-too-easy to confuse with both ends of the spectrum, i.e., to misread as actual physical events, or as transcendent spiritual truths.
While the latter is my current concern, the former seems more pertinent to most people these days, on substack at least, I imagine including many of my own readers, who are constantly being pulled by “world events” (such as I hear about daily from Mrs. Horsley); yet all the while, are haunted by the (I presume maddening) awareness (though it is often ignored or overridden) that there is really no way to know for sure what to believe anymore (if there ever was).
The information age of the internet, even without the specifics of “deep-fakes” and AI-generated content and personalities, is all-too-observably “imagistic,” bordering on the imaginary. Just as Icke and Jones (or Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes, to cite more topical slap-happy bellwethers of Matrix 2.0) merrily join together the dots they have cherry-picked to generate pictures that fit more or less neatly into the 2nd Matrix of Conspiracy Culture, so images and memes and tweets and podcast and videos that are peppered about the Net can be prematurely linked, both by content-creators providing commentary and by the end-user, into pseudo-coherent historical narratives and maps of reality.
This is the profane equivalent of the trap Steiner speaks of, and we are all currently swimming in it.
Consider the phrases he uses within this more contemporary technological context:
- “The whole physical world around us grows dim” (Check)
- “In place of this physical world, there arises a world of rising and falling images, a world of surging impressions of a sound, smell, taste, and light-like nature.” (Check)
- “We then experience what may be called imaginative visualizations, which surround us on all sides and constitute the world in which our soul then lives and weaves.” (Check)
- “If we were to assume that the visionary world appearing to us in this way is something entirely real, then we would be gravely mistaken.” (Check)
- “This is also the point where the danger begins.”
- “The danger now lies in the fact that many people feel extraordinarily comfortable and happy in the realm of visions.” (Check)
- “And once they are surrounded by a visionary world, are therefore reluctant to develop themselves further to continue striving, because this visionary realm pleases them so much.” (Check)
- “This impedes our ascending to reality, to truth.” (Check)
Ahriman’s Realm
“And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions” (Joel 2:28).
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