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Philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa — Литературное обозрение

Steiner and Aurobindo on Learned Ignorance

November 10, 2023 /

Contents

Introduction

I want to draw together some threads from Rudolf Steiner, Sri Aurobindo, Goethe and Nicholas of Cusa. These threads seem significant and consequently I feel compelled to set finger to keyboard to clarify an idea that connects the above four people in a meaningful way to the notion of spiritual growth and the transcending of materialism. In abstract it could be described as an example of cosmic Hegelian dialectic searching for a sublimation of the opposites of spirit and matter. It also affords an interesting perspective on the theodicy problem, the problem of finding meaning in the existence of evil, a question that many more people are asking themselves today with renewed fervour.

Limits of human knowledge

Over the past month or so I have been imbibing the spiritual atmosphere of Europe in the 14th and 15th Century. Those familiar with the “human number 666” mysteries will understand the connection between that period and our current period. In the English speaking world two noteworthy titles are The Cloud of Unknowing by Anonymous and The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas á Kempis. The other key ingredient was chapter 4 of Steiner’s Truth and Science, A Prelude to The Philosophy of Freedom, GA 04. More specifically when we are led to understand the consequences of Kant denying the possibility of “intellektuelle Anschauung” (intellectual seeing) for human beings.

Concepts and ideas alone are given us in a form that could be called intellectual seeing. Kant and the later philosophers who follow in his steps, completely deny this ability to man, because it is said that all thinking refers only to objects and does not itself produce anything. In intellectual seeing the content must be contained within the thought-form itself.

GA 4

This seemingly innocuous statement is profound in the context of epistemology, but in order to understand it, it helps to trace it back to its roots, namely to Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464)

Philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa — Литературное обозрение

Nicholas of Cusa develops the central concept of learned ignorance. Steiner had many interesting observations on the importance of this idea and goes into some detail in GA 7, Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age (RSArchive). In De Docta Ignorancia (1440) we are introduced to the idea of the limits of reason. I have also dealt with this topic from another perspective in another article on Steiner and Aurobindo called Destiny of the Individual and Ethical Individualism. The notion of learned ignorance was not a new idea as it was also discussed by the early church fathers and important thinkers like Scotus Erigena and Pseudo Dionysius. Essentially learned ignorance refers to the inherent incompleteness of human knowledge and the assertion that God, as an infinite and transcendent reality, cannot be fully grasped by human intellect. In the context of this essay God means knowledge of the spiritual worlds, the hierarchies all the way up to the Godhead. We can also insert here that Steiner might change this slightly to ‘cannot be fully grasped by the intellectual soul or mental representation’. Aurobindo in his language might say ‘cannot be fully grasped by Mind’ at the same time reserving this possibility for the Supermind. Nicholas of Cusa also leaves this opportunity open by asserting that both reason and supra-rational understanding are required to know the spiritual worlds. Here is a selection of some notable thinkers who have also tapped into this, at first seemingly, abstract notion since Nicholas of Cusa. The concepts of negative theology or apophatic theology are also intimately related to Cusa’s concept.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582), Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), John of the Cross (1542–1591), Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), Paul Tillich (1886–1965), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Edith Stein (1891–1942), Thomas Merton (1915–1968), Jean-Luc Marion (1946-), Richard Kearney (1954-).

Predating Cusa we also have an interesting list of mystics who challenge the notion of the unknowability of the spiritual worlds.

Laozi (c. 6th century BCE), Rabia of Basra (c. 717–801), Dionysius the Areopagite (c. 5th–6th century), Beatrice of Nazareth (c. 1200–c. 1268), Mechthild of Magdeburg (c. 1210–c. 1282), Jacopone da Todi (c. 1230–1306), Ibn Arabi (1165–1240), Johannes Tauler (c. 1300–1361), Henry Suso (1295–1366), Marguerite Porete (c. 1250–1310), , Jan van Ruusbroec (1293–1381), Angela of Foligno (1248–1309), Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1328), Julian of Norwich (1342–1416),

Nicholas of Cusa and Immanuel Kant

Let us now try to understand what learned ignorance has to do with intellectual seeing. This concept appears with Cusa in the form intuitus intellectualis. By this he meant that there is a higher form of perception or insight that transcends ordinary intellectual processes and allows for a more direct apprehension of reality, particularly in matters of spiritual and metaphysical nature. The term “intuitus” conveys the idea of a kind of intuitive vision or contemplative gaze, whilst “intellectualis” indicates that this form of seeing is related to the intellect, but it goes beyond the limitations of discursive reasoning. This too is significant in the context of Steiner and Aurobindo, because they also make clear that the spiritual worlds are knowable to human beings, but, as with Nicholas of Cusa, point out that mental representations and Mind respectively are insufficient for the task. Mind or mental representations have an important role to play in the education of the human being and gaining knowledge about the dead world of matter. However, they must be transcended if we seek knowledge of the Supermind or Spiritual-Self and its relation to the spirit worlds/planes.

It is also important here to address Kant’s position in this question. Kant was essentially motivated to investigate the limits of human knowledge. This was a response to Hume’s empiricism and skepticism about the validity of any knowledge whatsoever because it is rooted in sensory impressions. However, in his attempts to reconcile the conflict between empiricism and rationalism (matter and spirit) and thereby rescue knowledge from the clutches of Humean skepticism he also further ensnared and limited knowledge by denying human beings the possibility of a priori knowledge (knowledge independent of sense experience) in all fields other than in mathematics.

Thus, in Cusa’s notion of intellectual seeing we have an ability that transcends ordinary sense perception and discursive reason for arriving at knowledge. For Cusa the faculty of intellectual seeing is that which is required for insight into deeper spiritual truths. (Later we will address the question of how to develop this faculty according to Steiner and Aurobindo). Kant transcends Hume’s skepticism, but limits non-empirical knowledge (a priori) to the realm of mathematics and logic. The rest of existence is subsumed into the unknowable metaphysical construct of “Das Ding an Sich” (The thing in itself). In a curious way we can also see that Kant affirms certain aspects of Cusa’s assertions on knowledge, whilst denying other aspects because of his own dependence on discursive reasoning. One way to understand this curious development in the storyline of philosophy would to call it a Kantian reversion to scholasticism.

Learned Ignorance

Before moving on, let’s summarize the above so that we can better understand the contributions of Steiner and Aurobindo that will follow below. Human thinking, to the extent that it is bound to empirical evidence, feels a sense of certainty and connection to the reality of the senses. This is so because our conceptual life helps us to make sense of the impressions of the senses. However, the dominance of the senses, empirical evidence, tends to reject any experience that comes from outside that realm. An extreme expression of the this position is: “Seeing is Believing” or “”I’ll believe it when I see it.”. This rejection itself can be based in a fear of losing one’s certainty or even sense of self. Alternatively, this rejection may reflect in a healthy respect for the challenge of the immense task that faces every human being with regards to realizing one’s own learned ignorance and striving towards awakening an intellectual seeing.

Goethe

We need to introduce one further concept to the mix to facilitate the reconciliation of our cosmic Hegelian dialectic. In Goethe’s scientific writing we are confronted with the interesting concept of polarity and intensification (Polarität und Steigerung) which are important tools for reconciling what initially seem to be opposite forces.

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Polarity

At the heart of the concept of polarity is that the notion of a harmonious interplay between opposing elements. Consequently, opposites are not in conflict but rather complement and enrich each other. This is at the heart of Goethe’s experiments and exploration of the phenomena of light and darkness, which lead to a fundamentally different appreciation of what colour is compared to Newton’s, unipolar, theory of light. In the field of botany Goethe proposed that all plant organs are variations of the fundamental leaf form, a polarity, which is continuously in living transformation as a result of the Urpflanze (archetypal plant) interacting with the different physical environments. This ability to find unity in diversity, to see beyond the differences to recognize a higher unity is deeply characteristic of Goethe’s approach to science and is thoroughly investigated in Steiner’s works Goethean Science GA 01 (Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften) and The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception GA 02 (Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Schiller”. Also of note is the statement that Goethe made to Schiller with regards to being able to see this archetypal plant, as this is in tone similar to the intellectual seeing that we looked at with regards to Nicholas of Cusa.

Philosophically, Goethe benefited far more from Schiller than from Kant. Through him, namely, Goethe was really brought one stage further in the recognition of his own way of viewing things. Up to the time of that first famous conversation with Schiller, Goethe had practiced a certain way of viewing the world. He had observed plants, found that an archetypal plant underlies them, and derived the individual forms from it. This archetypal plant (and also a corresponding archetypal animal) had taken shape in his spirit, was useful to him in explaining the relevant phenomena. But he had never reflected upon what this archetypal plant was in its essential nature. Schiller opened his eyes by saying to him: It is an idea. Only from then on is Goethe aware of his idealism. Up until that conversation, he calls the archetypal plant an experience for he believed he saw it with his eyes.

GA 1, chapter 11

Nicholas of Cusa was also familiar with this concept of polarity as understood by Goethe. He considered geometry as an excellent means of training the mind for considering how geometrical figures can be deformed and transformed and thus attaining a coincidence of opposites (Coincidentia oppositorum). Readers of Steiner will also be similarly aware of the significance that geometry played in his own development and which recounts in chapter 1 of his autobiography.

Soon after my entrance into the Neudörfl school, I found a book on geometry in his room. I was on such good terms with the teacher that I was permitted at once to borrow the book for my own use. I plunged into it with enthusiasm. For weeks at a time my mind it was filled with coincidences, similarities between triangles, squares, polygons; I racked my brains over the question: Where do parallel lines actually meet? The theorem of Pythagoras fascinated me. That one can live within the mind in the shaping of forms perceived only within oneself, entirely without impression upon the external senses – this gave me the deepest satisfaction. I found in this a solace for the unhappiness which my unanswered questions had caused me. To be able to lay hold upon something in the spirit alone brought to me an inner joy. I am sure that I learned first in geometry to experience this joy.

GA 28, chapter 1

Intensificaton (Steigerung)

Intensification in the context of Goethe means a detailed study of the phenomena of transformation that reveal other deeper hidden patterns. This process of intensification or gradual enhancement in turn leads to higher states of consciousness/existence. By focusing on the way in which polarities transform in a living way then becomes a means of knowing at a deeper level more about the spiritual being or archetype underlying the observed changes. Intensification with Goethe leads to a deeper understanding of the underlying unity of nature. This phenomenological approach is deeply characteristic of Goethe’s scientific method. If we enter into the essence of Goethe’s conceptual pair we might also like to describe as an experiential version of Hegel’s abstract philosophical dialectical model.

Aurobindo

LA FUERZA DEL ESPÍRITU (107) «LA TRIPLE TRANSFORMACIÓN». POR MADO SAUVÉ ...

The above was a long introduction to enable us to understand the significance of a specific aspect of what Aurobindo describes in chapter 25, The Triple Transformation in his work The Life Divine. Earlier in the book he has already tackled the reason for and the value of the limited knowledge of Mind in the context of an evolution of consciousness. In this chapter there is a greater focus on the methods or practices that can be undertaken to transcend mere Mind consciousness, which as he states below is the goal of Nature herself.

There is a will in her to effectuate a true manifestation of the embodied life of the Spirit, to complete what she has begun by a passage from the Ignorance to the Knowledge, to throw off her mask and to reveal herself as the luminous Consciousness-Force carrying in her the eternal Existence and its universal Delight of being.

The Triple Transformation

Here he is telling us that Nature has a plan for us, she intends for us to become the crowning achievement of her own creation. However, we are still far from reaching those heights, Nature has far from accomplished her goal. In us she has placed a seed which must be cultivated by the content of our soul lives so that in that soul awareness and then direct experience of our own spiritual and eternal nature will slowly reveal itself. He points to the necessity of the involvement of the will in this process.

But even so this evolution would be slow and long if left solely to the difficult automatic action of the evolutionary Energy; it is only when man awakes to the knowledge of the soul and feels a need to bring it to the front and make it the master of his life and action that a quicker conscious method of evolution intervenes and a psychic transformation becomes possible.

The Triple Transformation

Purusha and Prakriti

At this stage of a journey with Aurobindo we are 955 pages into his complex and profound exploration of the nature of reality and spiritual truths. This also means we are likely interested in learning about methods by which we might move beyond mere Mind to Supermind. Whilst some readers of Aurobindo might be satisfied with the mental challenge of understanding Aurobindo’s philosophical framework, others will inevitably ask the question. How do we intervene in this psychic transformation process? What practices might we consider to accelerate the process? How might we develop the intuitus intellectualis talked about by Nicholas of Cusa. How might we discern Goethe’s archetypal plant, The Urpflanze. He answers us in the following way:

One effective way often used to facilitate this entry into the inner self is the separation of the Purusha, the conscious being, from the Prakriti, the formulated nature.

The Triple Transformation

What can we say about this method? Quite simply, this is the process of polarization and intensification that we discovered at the heart of Goethe’s scientific method. We will also later see that it is at the heart of the Michaelic Yoga that Steiner talks about in several of his later lectures.

Aurobindo reminds us that by standing back from the activities the mind, letting them fall silent at will or alternatively observing them as a detached and disinterested witness we intensify the experience of the insight that we are pure mental beings, Purusha. Also by standing back from life activities, refraining from outer action, we furthermore intensify the direct experience that we are pure vital beings, Purusha. Thus by standing back from these activities it becomes possible to realise one’s inner being as the silent impersonal self, the witness Purusha. In this experience we liberate our spirit from its confines, mental and physical.

The Ashtavakra Gita expresses this same idea somewhat radically in the following manner.

Janaka said: Master, how is Knowledge to be achieved, detachment acquired, liberation attained?

Ashtavakra said: To be free, shun the experiences of the senses like poison. Turn your attention to forgiveness, sincerity, kindness, simplicity, truth. You are not earth, water, fire or air. Nor are you empty space. Liberation is to know yourself as Awareness alone—the Witness of these. Abide in Awareness with no illusion of person. You will be instantly free and at peace.

Ashtavakra Gita

This liberation will, however, not lead to the transformation that Aurobindo is aiming for. Such a Purusha freed from the shackles that held it fast may leave Nature, Prakriti content to be a spiritual being that has no connection with the Earth, its inhabitants. The temptation will be strong to leave all worldly worries behind. Illness and suffering have no place in Purusha. This blissful state also has a dark side, it can lead to the most intense forms of egotism. This intensification of the ego is an inevitable consequence of spiritual development. The important question then becomes: Do I use this strengthened awareness of my god-like nature to bask in my own glory, to seek power in a Nietzschean like combat, to satisfy my own desires or do I use this new found awareness of my own divinity to consciously further the will of Brahman, Krishna or the Cosmic Purusha?

We are faced with the same question that Arjuna faced on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. Krishna had initiated Arjuna into the essence of his true spiritual (Purusha) nature, the significance of karma and reincarnation. That question is: What is the point of living as I wake up to my own eternal unbegottenness and immortality. Why live on Earth and in the confines of Prakriti if I am spirit? Arjuna fought against the blood ties that would destroy him, he aligned himself with Krishna to fight against that which wanted to destroy him. Today, those forces are the death forces of materialism and the modern Arjuna fights for a society that lives in a conscious connection with those cosmic forces that promote Truth, Beauty and Goodness. Those forces that foster a thinking that longs for and engages itself in revealing Truth. Those forces that awaken in the feeling life a joy for what lives in the world. Those forces that will to act so that Good deeds are performed. These death forces must be spiritualized to create a heaven on earth for all. Thus the freed Purusha in us must choose to lovingly invite those forces, spiritual beings, into itself to be part of creating the grand vision of Brahman, Krishna or the Cosmic Purursha.

How do we become conduits for these forces? Aurobindo is also clear in this respect and repeats and clarifies what was expressed in the Bhagavad Gita. It is a concept that is found in all true religions, namely the conscious choice to serve the highest God, Divine Being, Brahman, Ishwara that created mankind in its image and wants nothing more than for that image to realize its true divine heritage. (N.B. the name is of less importance, of greater importance is what we mean when we use the name. What is its conceptual content?)

The method of detachment from the insistence of all mental and vital and physical claims and calls and impulsions, a concentration in the heart, austerity, self-purification and rejection of the old mind movements and life movements, rejection of the ego of desire, rejection of false needs and false habits, are all useful aids to this difficult passage: but the strongest, most central way is to found all such or other methods on a self-offering and surrender of ourselves and of our parts of nature to the Divine Being, the Ishwara.

The Triple Transformation

Thus we see that Aurobindo distances himself clearly from the idea of escaping from Maya, the great illusion of the physical plane. We have seen in other articles how he rejects Eastern streams of thought, especially some interpretations of Buddhism, that deviate from this Vedic understanding. The meaning of our life is consequently to re-connect in a conscious manner with the world from which we descended. If we connect consciously with the source of life we can bring its healing forces into our relationships and societal structures. If we fail to do so and continue to deny the spirit by adhering to materialism we will unconsciously introduce more destruction into the world. In this sense Aurobindo is reinforcing a central truth of Vedic wisdom. The Isha Upanishad expresses it in the following manner.

Behold the universe in the glory of God: and all that lives and moves on earth.

Leaving the transient, find joy in the Eternal : set not your heart on another’s possession.

Working thus, a man may wish for a life of a hundred years.

Only actions done in God bind not the soul of man.

There are demon-haunted worlds, regions of utter darkness. Whoever in life denies the Spirit falls into that darkness of death.

Isha Upanishad

Steiner

Michaelic Thinking

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We have seen how Aurobindo describes a path to take us beyond Mind. This leads us to the question: How does Steiner describe the path towards overcoming the limits of knowledge that are real for a certain type of thinking, a type of thinking that is a necessary pre-requisite for that one to be developed?

In GA 194, The Mission of the Archangel Michael, but also other lectures, Steiner goes into substantial detail regarding this question and my purpose here to highlight a couple of key ideas that are developed in this series of 12 lectures in Dornach 1919, 21 November to 15 December.

For Steiner, Michael’s mission consists in the spiritualization of thinking. One way of describing what this means is that humanity has the task of redeeming thinking so that it can learn to see again the underlying spiritual nature of reality, the one that is veiled by the experience of the senses. In the lecture from 14th December 1919 he also makes clear that within the true nature of thinking there is also a will force. Students who have worked with the Philosophy of Freedom will also understand the philosophical underpinnings to this radically un-Kantian understanding of what thinking is.

Let us then look at one line of thinking Steiner uses to develop the spiritualization of thinking. Let us consider the phenomena of magnetism, electricity and light and ask ourselves whether our senses can ever perceive these forces. A brief consideration of this question soon leads us to conclude that we never directly see neither magnetism nor electricity, instead we only ever see the effects on material bodies. The compass moves according to lines of magnetic force, yet we never see that force. Electricity passed through a wire may lead to heating, yet we never perceive the electricity itself. This is also the case with light if we move beyond superficial thinking. Light itself is invisible, it only becomes visible when it interacts with matter.

If we further develop this line of thinking and then consider what the human being is from a spiritual scientific perspective we can also describe in the same fashion, namely it as an invisible being that attracts matter to it. A magnet attracts iron filing according to a certain lawfulness and similarly the human being is an invisible being that becomes evident to the senses for the same reason. The same line of thinking can also be used to show that a plant is an invisible body of forces that structures elements of the mineral kingdom according to a lawfulness that doesn’t belong to the mineral kingdom itself. An identical line of thinking is also valid for considering the animal kingdom as the manifestation of invisible forces. In the lecture GA194, 23 Nov 1919 this is expressed thus:

To say this to oneself with full consciousness at every moment of waking life constitutes the Michaelic mode of thinking; to cease conceiving of the human being as a conglomerate of mineral particles which he but arranges in a certain way, as is also assumed of animals and plants and from which only the minerals are excepted, and to become conscious of the fact that we walk among invisible human beings — this means to think Michaelically.

GA 194

The thought of “walking amongst invisible human beings” that Steiner is forcing us to confront here is that our lives are filled with meetings with beings that would be invisible to us if we lacked the sensory equipment to perceive them. However, if we persist in this thought we also realize that unless we develop new forms of perception (in anthroposophy it is more common to talk in terms of other levels of consciousness) we can only ever have indirect awareness of these invisible beings. We are conscious of the mineral realm through our senses, but consciousness of the invisible realm of plant life requires a new consciousness. This is referred to as either imaginative or pictorial consciousness or etheric vision. To perceive and know the invisible beings of the animal realm requires inspirational consciousness or astral hearing. The invisible being behind the human being is accessible to intuitive consciousness.

These different levels of consciousness give the promise of deeper levels of understanding of those currently invisible realms as the human being evolves new higher forms of consciousness. However, the above fact also obliges us to recognize the possibility that there could well be beings not made present to the senses, not clothed in the cloth of atoms, but which nevertheless have both a real existence and real effects on the inner lives of human beings. Two central forces that are continually at play in the human being and can only be known indirectly, unless the required level of consciousness is developed, are the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces.

Concentration and meditation

Steiner talks on numerous occasions about how these invisible worlds can, through schooling, become directly perceptible to anybody prepared to dedicate the time and effort required. The most comprehensive books from this perspective are “Knowledge of Higher Worlds”, “Esoteric Science” and “Theosophy”, but it is worth pointing out this question is illuminated from dozens of other perspectives in different lecture series.

Nevertheless, we can still talk about a common denominator which will be immediately recognizable to anybody familiar with oriental thinking. Earlier I quoted the Ashtavakra Gita as essentially pointing to the same path. This involves first silencing the senses. Silencing thinking that concerns the events of the outer world and developing the ability to concentrate on a single and specific thought, image, phrase and to observe how the inner life is pulled this way and that by the life inherent in thinking. The pupil must use his will to prevent himself from being pulled hither and thither and instead focus on the chosen content of for his consciousness. By acting in this manner the pupil is taking control over the inner life by for a given period of time, being the sole determiner of the content of the soul. The pupil through his own inner strength brings the inner winds, gusts and storms that normally carry his soul life to an inner calm. After months, years or decades of practise, depending on the amount of practise and personal karma, these inner winds can be stilled completely. This is the same stillness of mind that allows us to fall asleep, however, in the case of the pupil who has attained a certain inner strength consciousness is not lost. In this state this inner space that has been created becomes an inner space in which pupil can enter into dialogue with a part of himself that transcends his normal consciousness. Whether this previously hidden part of the inner life is called the Self, Purusha, Higher-Self or other is of little importance. What is important is that this hidden aspect that occasionally revealed its activity in the dream life, in ideas and inspirations, in lucid moments of creativity and in understanding something at a new level (levelling up), this aspect becomes more integrated into the pupils own understanding of what he is. Socrates descriptions of his Daimon are a good example of someone who was conscious of a deeper being of wisdom that lived in him, but was at the same time not him.

Philosophy of Freedom

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Steiner tells us that all the fruits of the results of spiritual science that he developed in his life work can be found in seed like form in his book from 1894 “The Philosophy of Freedom” (also called Philosophy of Spiritual Activity or Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path). The central argument in the books is that we can never talk about free human action unless we know the causes of our actions. However, before that investigation of the causes can even begin we have to thoroughly investigate the activity of thinking to understand what thinking is able to tell us about the world and ourselves. As we become clearer about the relationship of thinking to the inner and outer world, we are also waking up to a part of our soul that often remains unexamined. This deepening or individualization process can lead to ever deeper strata of understanding and participation in life. Indeed, it will lead to an ever deepening conscious experience of the eternal in man. This book allows us to find a region of soul that can become a well from which the human soul can always draw when it is in need of the water of life.

The fact that this deepening is the result of an increased clarity about an essential aspect of each individual’s being is extremely important. The importance lies in the fact that nothing need be believed on the basis of authority to attain this spiritual growth. A deepening of self-knowledge and the knowledge creating ability that lives within each human being, namely thinking, is the only pre-requisite for a spiritual awakening. This means no guru or master is needed in the process of self-awakening. This does not mean that gurus or masters cannot be useful in the process, it just means that they are not obligatory. The less we accept things on authority and the more they can be grounded in direct experience the greater the freedom acquired for our own being. Drawing another parallel with Socrates the assumption is made that an honest investigation in dialogue with oneself and others can lead to a spiritual awakening.

One of the fruits of reading the Philosophy of Freedom can be a crystal clear experience of how when seeing without thinking we are blind. We truly see with our thoughts! The role of concepts and ideas become far clearer in our own understanding of life and ourselves. Consequently, we also understand the importance of developing new concepts and ideas to make sense of the material, soul and spirit worlds that we inhabit. One of the chief challenges to be overcome on this path is to mistake the products of the activity of thinking for the activity itself. As we approach this activity time and time again, without being sucked into the vortex of specific thoughts, we experience a new dimension growing in ourselves. This is the seed of freedom.

Purification

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One final important element that also needs to be mentioned here is that of purification. All religious streams in the world encourage the development of a healthy moral character. One that promotes forgiveness, sincerity, kindness, simplicity and truth. Egoism, selfish desires, mendacity and duplicity are all traits that potentially live in us and they must be brought under the control of the I-being so that they cannot have their poisonous effect on the world and our relationship with others. In the context of spiritual awakening such moral development is of extreme importance. This is so because the correcting aspects of normal life that oblige us to live with the results of our mistakes is lost. As we continue consciously down the path of spiritual development we learn how our own inner realities become the world we live in. We live increasingly as if in a mirror image brought to life. If I cultivate a life of forgiveness, sincerity, kindness, simplicity and truth then we will find that in the world. If on the other hand we let egoism, selfish desires, mendacity and duplicity be the dominant forces in our inner life then we also will find that in the world.

 

Sri Aurobindo Rudolf Steiner

Finding the Trinity in Aurobindo’s “Life Divine” and Steiner’s “Truth and Science”

June 28, 2023 /

Intro

Jeff, Kate and I  are currently doing a series looking at Rudolf Steiner’s GA 3 Truth and Science on our YT channel, A prologue to the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Playlist link  I have read this book several times, but something “popped” this time, as Jeff likes to say. In chapter 4 The Starting Point of Epistemology whilst Steiner is describing the importance of the “given”, or as he later calls it in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity “the  relationless aggregate”, it became clear to me how he was conceptually describing the relationship of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit to the Godhead, ie the Trinity. Furthermore, because I had also recently read chapter 16, The Triple Status of Supermind, in Aurobindo’s The Life Divine and also ther perceived something conceptually identical to the trinity, I felt that I had to work through the texts again to see if this intuition, this gift from beyond space and time, could withstand further scrutiny. Was it a justified proposition?

If I do a good job in writing this then the reader may be led closer to an experience of an essential part of him or herself and at the same experience a re-connection to some fundamental insights into what is common to all human beings.

Aurobindo

Let us start with Aurobindo’s starting point for his further elucidations on the Divine Supermind, one of the various names he uses and which can be equated with the Godhead.

We have started with the assertion of all existence as one Being whose essential nature is Consciousness, one Consciousness whose active nature is Force or Will; and this Being is Delight, this Consciousness is Delight, this Force or Will is Delight. Eternal and inalienable Bliss of Existence, Bliss of Consciousness, Bliss of Force or Will whether concentrated in itself and at rest or active and creative, this is God and this is ourselves in our essential, our non-phenomenal being.

With Aurobindo’s description of the essential nature Divine Supermind we are simultaneously being introduced to what we are in essence. However, we do not experience ourselves as Supermind, because our own limited Minds deceive us about our own true natures. Vedic wisdom asserts that to realize our own Divine Consciousness and how it plays and delights eternally in this play, we must recognize how our true self is concealed from us by a false self, mental ego or Mind. Therefore, to aspire to awareness of our true divine nature means to unveil the veiled self in us, by transcending Mind and entering into unity with the Supermind. Knowing oneself means at the same time forfeiting through conscious mentality that which is superconscient in us, eternally present, eternally willing and playing and eternally delighting in its own existence. When the divine in us works or plays it rejoices blissfully in what has been created as it lives in our consciousness. Such existence is named Sachchidananda, however even in the Mind we can experience in a diluted form the contentedness of beholding something we have created.

Contentedness can be viewed as a dull reflection in an unpolished mirror of Sachchidananda. Swami Vivekananda, Aurobindo’s guru has described it thus:

“The moment I have realized God sitting in the temple of every human body, the moment I stand in reverence before every human being and see God in him – that moment I am free from bondage, everything that binds vanishes, and I am free.”

Sri Aurobindo himself says

“God is not found in the ego, nor in the intellect, nor in the senses. He is found only in the depths of one’s own being.”

Western readers might be more familiar with mystics like Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, Jakob Boehme, Hildegard of Bingen, Johannes Tauler, Angelus Silesius or Thomas Traherne or many of the other mystics that shook Europe in the late middle ages.

Meister Eckhart: “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”

Teresa of Ávila “Let nothing disturb you, let nothing frighten you, all things are passing away: God never changes. Patience obtains all things. Whoever has God lacks nothing; God alone suffices.”

St. John of the Cross: “In the inner stillness where meditation leads, the Spirit secretly anoints the soul and heals our deepest wounds.”

Hildegard of Bingen: “The soul is kissed by God in its innermost regions. With interior yearning, grace and blessing are bestowed. It is a yearning to take on God’s gentle yoke, It is a yearning to give one’s self to God’s Way.”

Angelus Silesius: “God is a pure no-thingness, concealed in His no-thingness. Therefore, whoever possesses Him as something, possesses not Him but what is not He.”

The question that Aurobindo tackles in this chapter is, “Why do we experience limited Mind as opposed to Supermind”, if Supermind is indeed our true nature. Here like Darwinists we must look for a missing link, something in our direct experience that can act as a seed which then needs to be nurtured to lead us towards a full experience of the Supermind or as he also calls it Truth Consciousness. This can in turn lead to the experience of Sachchidananda.

Sachchidananda is spaceless and timeless, it is not nothing, instead it is no-thingness. However, as mortals we live in space and time which was born, in Aurobindo’s presentation of Advaita Vedanta, out of this no-thingness. I will mention in passing that modern science with its description of quantum fields are in certain aspects conceptually identical to the timeless spaceless descriptions of Vedantic thinking. Hence it is fully understandable that many spiritual worldviews feel drawn to using the latest science of quantum theory as a means of illustrating how the world is spiritual in nature. The fact that this is so is also profoundly unsettling for more materialistically inclined minds and Bernado Kastrup witnesses to here:

Bernado’s samadhi experience

Where then is the missing link? It is in the trees of the forest we are looking at. If our world of space and time is, as Advaita Vedanta states, a manifestation of no-thingness, then all sense impressions, all experiences themselves whether internal or apparently external are evidence of Sachchidananda when we re-learn to interpret experience through the insight or axiom. This axiom tells us:

The true name of this Causality is Divine Law and the essence of that Law is an inevitable self-development of the truth of the thing that is, as Idea, in the very essence of what is developed; it is a previously fixed determination of relative movements out of the stuff of infinite possibility. That which thus develops all things must be a Knowledge-Will or Conscious-Force; for all manifestation of universe is a play of the Conscious-Force which is the essential nature of existence. But the developing Knowledge-Will cannot be mental; for mind does not know, possess or govern this Law, but is governed by it, is one of its results, moves in the phenomena of the self-development and not at its root, observes as divided things the results of the development and strives in vain to arrive at their source and reality.

Consistent with this axiom, it follows that Mind (mental ego) is also a manifestation, it is not a no-thing, but instead a some-thing whose being is only appearance, manifestation or immanence of that which is infinite in possibility, that which by definition is indescribable, because in describing it we limit it. Instead we must turn to apophatic statements, that is to say we can only make statement about what this non-being is not, like God is not limited by time or space, is formless without attributes, is beyond all concepts and words, is ineffable and beyond all language.

Furthermore, in accordance with this axiom we have to conclude that Mind has its origin in the Knowledge and Will that is one, infinite, all-embracing, all-possessing, all-forming, holding eternally in itself that which it casts into movement and form. The Supermind moves out of non-being into determinative self-knowledge where it perceives truths about itself and also wills into action events in the realm of time and space. The infinite, loses its infiniteness and becomes limited so that it can experience an aspect of itself.

If we consider the modern theory of the Big Bang or Big Bounce for a moment and strip it of its strictly materialistic interpretations, what do we find. We find that according to that theory the whole of existence, all matter, time and space, all life all human experience was born out of a timeless non-spatial emptiness and also that the seed was an infinitely small dimensionless point of infinite density. So also here in the modern theory of the origin of everything we find posited the same concepts that the sages living in ancient India 3,500+ years ago also used to explain to the origin of everything. For believers in scientism this is problematic, but not for lovers of truth.

In this movement from the ultimate reality of the Supermind into time and space, conventional reality, we can see a Purusha-Prakriti or Father-Son dynamic developing. Timeless Being incarnates in space-time and experiences itself as separate limited being. That separate limited being is always a reflection of an aspect of the infinite Being. What is here stated for the Supermind is also true for Cosmic Purusha and  Cosmic Prakriti. What is true for each human being is true for the cosmos.

My self is that which supports all beings and constitutes their existence. . . . I am the self which abides within all beings[1]

Within the Supermind we find that there is an inalienable unity of all things, yet at the same time this unity encompasses the manifestation of the One in the Many and the Many in the One. This microcosm / macrocosm description of reality also encompass a third aspect which has remained invisible yet always present in the preceding descriptions, the idea of an evolution in this relationship. Aurobindo describes these three “poises” in the following way

The poises

…. first and primary poise of the Supermind which founds the inalienable unity of things. It is not the pure unitarian consciousness; for that is a timeless and spaceless concentration of Sachchidananda in itself, in which Conscious Force does not cast itself out into any kind of extension and, if it contains the universe at all, contains it in eternal potentiality and not in temporal actuality. This, on the contrary, is an equal self-extension of Sachchidananda all-comprehending, all-possessing, all-constituting.

In the second poise of the Supermind the Divine Consciousness stands back in the idea from the movement which it contains, realising it by a sort of apprehending consciousness, following it, occupying and inhabiting its works, seeming to distribute itself in its forms. In each name and form it would realise itself as the stable Conscious-Self, the same in all; but also it would realise itself as a concentration of Conscious-Self following and supporting the individual play of movement and upholding its differentiation from other play of movement, — the same everywhere in soul-essence, but varying in soul form. This concentration supporting the soul-form would be the individual Divine or Jivatman as distinguished from the universal Divine or one all-constituting self.

A third poise of the Supermind would be attained if the supporting concentration were no longer to stand at the back, as it were, of the movement, inhabiting it with a certain superiority to it and so following and enjoying, but were to project itself into the movement and to be in a way involved in it. Here, the character of the play would be altered, but only in so far as the individual Divine would so predominantly make the play of relations with the universal and with its other forms the practical field of its conscious experience that the realisation of utter unity with them would be only a supreme accompaniment and constant culmination of all experience; but in the higher poise unity would be the dominant and fundamental experience and variation would be only a play of the unity. This tertiary poise would be therefore that of a sort of fundamental blissful dualism in unity — no longer unity qualified by a subordinate dualism — between the individual Divine and its universal source, with all the consequences that would accrue from the maintenance and operation of such a dualism.

In this third poise we have this beautifully mysterious phrase “blissful dualism in unity”. We will later see how this concept is reconcilable with the descriptions of aspects of the ineffable Holy Spirit, but before we do that we shall also investigate a remarkable chapter in Truth and Science which, whilst using completely different language, also points to this same trinity as the fundamental nature of reality. Furthermore it clarifies certain elements of experience that Aurobindo is, so far in my reading, less explicit about and which are of particular relevance for evolving from the Mind to the Supermind.

 

Steiner

(The knowledge process is a process of development towards freedom)

Poise 1

 

In the preparatory chapters up to chapter 4 in Truth and Science, A prologue to the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity we learn that Kant’s attempt to establish a true theory of knowledge, epistemology, is fundamentally flawed, because despite his noble attempts to create a non-dogmatic epistemology he and other after him insert dogmatic statements about knowledge into the theory. This has led to the prevalent notion that my thinking is a purely subjective activity and that thinking is an appendage to our experience meaning that we can never really know the true nature of the world, because the “thing in itself” is always unknowable.

First a few words about chapter 4, The Starting Point of Epistemology”, before we get into the important details. Steiner himself expressed on multiple occasions the “seed” like nature of the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and Truth and Science in relation to the whole of Anthroposophy and Spiritual Science. [2] This is an important point to note as Steiner does not take as a point of departure ancient texts of inestimable value, instead he starts with the fundamental question of what is knowledge? This means there is no appeal to any authority other than the reader’s own ability to observe the activity itself. Whilst a similar rigorous observation of the thinking life is present in Aurobindo’s work, this is always presented in the context of Advaita Vedantic axioms.

So what is the correct place according to Steiner to start with a theory of knowledge? It has to be in a realm in which thinking, the producer of knowledge, has not added any predicates. This means we must artificially create a realm of experience of what it would be like to live in a world completely untouched by thinking. Obviously, this realm of experience would be real yet indescribable for the pure and simple reason that we have to think about our experience before we can say anything about it. As Steiner points out:

Before our conceptual activity begins, the world-picture contains neither substance, quality nor cause and effect; distinctions between matter and spirit, body and soul, do not yet exist.  Furthermore, any other predicate must also be excluded from the world-picture at this stage. The picture can be considered neither as reality nor as appearance, neither subjective nor objective, neither as chance nor as necessity; whether it is “thing-in-itself,” or mere representation, cannot be decided at this stage. For, as we have seen, knowledge of physics and physiology which leads to a classification of the “given” under one or the other of the above headings, cannot be a basis for a theory of knowledge.

We can compare this unconditional starting point for epistemology with other thinkers from the Western sphere. For example Plotinus argues that the One is absolutely transcendent and beyond all conditions, limitations and distinctions. It is neither subject to change nor multiplicity, but is timeless and unchanging. According to Plotinus contemplation of the nature of this unconditional was a path for gaining conscious experience of the One. Due to Plotinus’ ideas regarding this path of re-ascent his ideas also became very influential in both Christian and Islamic mysticism. However, there is a key difference between Plotinus and Steiner, because the former is describing the One, giving it predicates or attributes in the same way that Advaita Vedanta through Aurobindo describes Sachchidananda. However, Steiner makes a statement that is intuitively and rationally obvious, namely that prior to knowledge we cannot say anything about anything. We can experience something as existing, yet we cannot know anything about that experience until we proceed to think about it. This pre-knowledge state is called the “given” and in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity also is named the “relationless aggregate”. The “given” is thus totally undefined, it is no-thing yet is the source of everything we can know and experience. At this point it feels justified to equate Steiner’s “given” with Aurobindo’s Sachchidananda from the point of view of what can be said about them. The One, the Given and Sachchidananda are no-thing yet also the source of everything.

Poise 2

Can we also find in Steiner’s epistemology something that coincides conceptually with Aurobindo’s second poise? The answer is yes and I will describe to what extent they coincide.

Within the field of the Given we also have an activity which also has the capacity of taking us beyond the Given and this activity is thinking itself. Thinking also initially appears to us as a given, however it is a given that is intimately bound up with the experience that was involved in the creation of those thoughts. Expressed in another way and  even more accurately; the thoughts created themselves in me because of something that I will later identify as my own activity. Naturally these are all descriptions that become possible through the activity of thinking itself. This coincidence of thinking also initially appearing as a Given is deeply significant. The significance lies in the fact that within the unknown Given we also have the activity of thinking which can begin to make the Given knowable. By arriving at this starting point we have in no way made any dogmatic statements about what can be known about the Given. Consequently the dogmatic principles that plagued Kant and other creators of a theory of knowledge talked about in chapter 3 of Truth and Science have been overcome. Starting from within this grand unity about which nothing is known we also discover the activity of thinking that will awaken us step by step to realization that not everything is given in the given. This world of experience that I partake in is initially devoid of any concepts or ideas that allow me to know the world, understand the world. To understand this world I must create concepts and ideas which form the world experience, but which remained hidden to me for as long as I was unconscious of them.

 

Let us pause here and reflect on what has been said with an example from literature. Jorge Luis Borges is arguably one of the most interesting writers in Spanish of the 20th century. In many of his short stories the book often appears to have prominent or even leading role in the story. What Borges accomplishes in for example “El libro de la arena” is a devotional story to one of humanities most curious inventions, namely the book or books in general. Give a book to any animals and it would be incapable of conceiving, let alone experiencing that a book full of white pages and black ink characters could awaken in the reader a labyrinth of infinite possibilities in the invisible labyrinth of time, “El Jardin de los senderos que se bifurcan”. In the book as a concept, not as an artefact, we have something which approaches the infinite riches as well depravations of life.

Indeed, even the North American Indians whose culture was steeped in veneration for the ‘Great Spirit” could not understand what a book was. As they gradually got to know the Europeans they were fascinated by printed paper on which there were little signs which they took to be small devils.[3]No analysis of the composition of the paper nor the ink will ever reveal what is hidden behind the appearances. Books are accumulations of symbols which we dive into and try and make sense of. Books are emanations of humanity’s ability to think. Each and every one is a manifestation of this ability, it was born out of this ability yet this ability remains eternally unchanging despite all its offspring. What is true for the book is also true for anything to which we can give a name in the whole the human experience. Anything I identify as existent I do so by the grace of thinking and as Steiner states in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, when I become aware of the full scope of the activity of thinking, I realize that I myself also only exist by the grace of thinking. Without thinking I would remain unknown in the Given. As a thinker that understands how thinking divides up the world into concepts and ideas I become conscious of how the manifestations occurring in time and space all originate from the Given. Aurobindo when describing the second poise described is as “a sort of apprehending consciousness, following it, occupying and inhabiting its works, seeming to distribute itself in its forms”. In the third part of this essay I will make more specific the “Son” aspect of this relationship between the Given and the known, although it may already be transparent to readers already well versed in immersing themselves into the Exceptional State that Steiner mentions in chapter 3 of the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.

As a final reflection here, we shall also consider another way in which Steiner distinguishes himself from Aurobindo and Advaita Vedanta. Aurobindo posits consciousness as primary and part of Sachchidananda. This is not the case with Steiner.

This directly given world-content includes everything that enters our experience in the widest sense: sensations. perceptions, opinions, feelings, deeds, pictures of dreams and imaginations, representations, concepts and ideas. Illusions and hallucinations too, at this stage are equal to the rest of the world-content. For their relation to other perceptions can be revealed only through observation based on cognition.

When epistemology starts from the assumption that all the elements just mentioned constitute the content of our consciousness, the following question immediately arises: How is it possible for us to go beyond our consciousness and recognize actual existence; where can the leap be made from our subjective experiences to what lies beyond them? When such an assumption is not made, the situation is different. Both consciousness and the representation of the “I” are, to begin with, only parts of the directly given and the relationship of the latter to the two former must be discovered by means of cognition. Cognition is not to be defined in terms of consciousness, but vice versa: both consciousness and the relation between subject and object in terms of cognition. Since the “given” is left without predicate, to begin with, the question arises as to how it is defined at all; how can any start be made with cognition?

This identification of cognition as that by which consciousness knows itself is the clearest departure by Steiner from a purely Advaita Vedanta axiomatic space. Steiner is telling us that whilst consciousness may be essential to cognition, knowing and knowledge it must also be recognized that it is the activity of thinking, the ability to name, cognize and recognize that enables the thinker to recognize thinking as being primary to knowing and not consciousness. Similarly, the relationship between the Given and the Knower cannot happen outside of consciousness, but it is thinking that establishes this relationship.

 

Poise 3

 

The third and final poise will now be examined in the light of chapter 4 of Truth and Science. It’s essential nature has already been hinted at above, but it is important present it in a clear relief so that it doesn’t escape our awareness.

 

We must find the bridge from the world-picture as given, to that other world-picture which we build up by means of cognition. Here, however, we meet with the following difficulty: As long as we merely stare passively at the given we shall never find a point of attack where we can gain a foothold, and from where we can then proceed with cognition. Somewhere in the given we must find a place where we can set to work, where something exists which is akin to cognition. If everything were really only given, we could do no more than merely stare into the external world and stare indifferently into the inner world of our individuality. We would at most be able to describe things as something external to us; we should never be able to understand them. Our concepts would have a purely external relation to that to which they referred; they would not be inwardly related to it. For real cognition depends on finding a sphere somewhere in the given where our cognizing activity does not merely presuppose something given, but finds itself active in the very essence of the given

 

Expressed in another way, by identifying this distinction between the one and the many, the microcosm and the macrocosm, the immanent and the transcendent, the father and the son we have been making using of the activity of thinking to reconcile the apparent dualism. Indeed if we have thoroughly engaged with chapter 4 we can also begin to experience more intensely the “blissful dualism in unity — no longer unity qualified by a subordinate dualism — between the individual Divine and its universal source” that Aurobindo refers to. In another essay I wrote “Mankind as Bridge” this topic is explored more thoroughly.

In our experience of the world everything is initially, prior to thinking, experienced as the Given. There is only one exception to this, namely in our thinking because in order to experience our thinking we must first produce it. When we recognize ourselves as the creator of concepts and ideas which we than recognize we are performing an action that Kant rejected as impossible.  Kant maintained that intellectual seeing, seeing the thought-form itself, was impossible because thinking only refers to objects and does not produce anything itself. However, this is the very nature of a concept, because a concept unites disconnected elements of perception into a unity. This uniting is not a subjective act in the sense that it has no truth value, this is because it is not the thinker that determines the nature of the union of the disconnected elements, instead it is the universal activity of thinking that reveals the conceptual union previously unseen in the Given. Thus, in thinking we have two fundamental actions at work. We have the naming, dividing intellect that identifies all the various manifestations in the Given. Yet thinking also, by means of intuition or reason, is able to awaken us to relationships and connections between the named and divided manifestations, recreating the unity from which the all proceeded and it is the thinking human being that is at the centre of this process of waking up to ever higher understanding concerning the nature of reality. Waking up in truth we liberate ourselves from the bondage of ideas.

 

Trinity

The idea of the Trinity of the Godhead, Father, Son and Holy Spirit is foundational to the Christian faith and is often represented with the following picture:

According to the Bible we are either images of God

Genesis 1:27: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

2 Corinthians 3:18: “And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.”

 

Or indeed Gods themselves

John 10:34 “Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?

 

Often on Christian websites we find the statements like: “The most difficult thing about the Christian concept of the Trinity is that there is no way to perfectly and completely understand it. The Trinity is a concept that is impossible for any human being to fully understand, let alone explain. God is infinitely greater than we are; therefore, we should not expect to be able to fully understand Him.”

Such answer, whilst being factually true, is uninteresting to a seeker of the truth. What a person full of Truth-Consciousness, or in anthroposophical terms the “Consciousness Soul”,  is interested in is: What can I do to better approach, understand and experience the nature of the trinity? I contest that Aurobindo and Steiner in their own ways help us to recognize the way in which God lives in all of us. Aurobindo uses the impeccable logic of Advaita Vedanta to helps us approach and contemplate this highest truth in his exegesis of the three poises. Steiner, on the other hand, invites us to more thoroughly understand the essential nature of the activity of thinking to become more conscious of how the Godhead is present in all experience. We are born of God into the flesh and the Holy Spirit illumines our relationship to our creator. First we believe and then slowly begin to understand how we are Christ-like in our essential nature, i.e. sons of God. As this understanding grows we allow the will of the Father to work through us and we do this in light filled conscious because the Holy Spirit, the helper, is there to guide us.

John 1:12-14 12
But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.

Angelus Silesius:
Christ became man that we might become God.
In order to find God, one must first lose oneself in Christ.
The Holy Spirit is the breath of God that animates the soul and leads it towards divine union.

Let us look at some other examples of descriptions of the trinity. Saint Augustine of Hippo used the analogy of the Lover, the Beloved and the Love itself to illustrate his conception of the Trinity. The Father is the unbegotten begetter of the and also the Lover of the Son. The Son is the beloved who was begotten by the Father. In Augustine the Holy Spirit is the bond of love between the two. In this description we can recognize the similarity to the concepts developed by both Steiner and Aurobindo. The Father is that out of which everything was created, the no-thing. The Son is that which is immanent and has moved out of the Godhead to take on a specific aspect of the eternal, immutable and infinite creator of all. The Holy Spirit is the knowing of the relationship between the Father and the Son. Both Aurobindo and Steiner have different ways of expressing this same truth, but it is present in both. Aurobindo talked about the “fundamental blissful dualism in unity” as a means of recognizing the awareness of the dual aspects that the unity can exist in. Steiner is equally as clear when he draws attention to the essential role that the spiritual activity of thinking fulfils to unite the Given with the conceptual realms.

Tertullian when describing the Trinity is very similar in style to Aurobindo when he talk about the unity behind the different manifestations of the same essential substance. His analogies like the sun, its light and its heat build on a preexisting understanding  unity in diversity. Another analogy he used was that of water which can exist in three distinct form of ice, water and water vapour.

Students of Anthroposophy will not be surprised to learn that Thomas Aquinas had a conception closest in essence to what we find in Rudolf Steiner. Aquinas used analogy of the mind, its knowledge of itself and the love between them to illustrate the fundamental unity of the Trinity. This is not the same as the connection described given above, but I will show how they, in my mind, appear linked.

Aquinas compares the knower to the Father in the Trinity. The Father is the source or origin within the Godhead, the knower is the source of knowledge within the human mind. The knower represents the active aspect of the mind, the subject who engages in the act of knowing. In Steiner this is the I that creates the concepts and ideas in himself which will be recognized in experience, in the Given

Aquinas compares the known to the Son in the Trinity. As the Son proceeds from the Father in the Trinity, the known represents the content or object of knowledge within the human mind. The known refers to the ideas, concepts, or objects that the mind apprehends and understands. In Steiner this is everything that exists in the Given, that which without thinking cannot be recognized as proceeding from the Father. It is beheld in the senses.

Aquinas compares the act of knowing to the Holy Spirit in the Trinity. The act of knowing represents the process by which the mind grasps or comprehends the known. It refers to the movement of knowledge from the knower to the known within the mind. In Steiner, knowledge based in a true epistemology knows that it is  the activity of thinking that allows the human being to know of the unitary existence of all phenomena.

 

[1] Gita IX, 5; X, 20

[2] That is how the whole of the anthroposophical science which has been evolved relates to the seed that was given in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. It must of course be understood that anthroposophy is something alive. It had to be a seed before it could develop further into leaves and all that follows. This fact of being alive is what distinguishes anthroposophical science from the deadness many are aware of today in a ‘wisdom’ that still wants to reject anthroposophy, partly because it cannot, and partly because it will not, understand it.
GA 78 Fruits of Anthroposophy, 3 September 1921, Stuttgart

[3] GA 354, Lecture 8, Dornach, 6th August, 1924

Sri Aurobindo Rudolf Steiner

The Destiny of the Individual & Ethical Individualism

June 19, 2023 /

 

Mankind as a Bridge

The Destiny of the Individual (The  Life Divine , Aurobindo, ch5) &

Moral Imagination (Philosophy of Freedom, Steiner, ch12)

In this article I want to explore some important convergences between ideas from Sri Aurobindo and Rudolf Steiner. These touch on the man’s place in the universe and the purpose of evolution. As we have seen before and will see in the 2 introductory quote, the language is radically different, yet the conceptual framework underlying these apparent differences is very similar.

Aurobindo

So strongly was this truth perceived in the ancient times that the Vedantic Seers, even after they had arrived at the crowning idea, the convincing experience of Sachchidananda as the highest positive expression of the Reality to our consciousness, erected in their speculations or went on in their perceptions to an Asat, a Non-Being beyond, which is not the ultimate existence, the pure consciousness, the infinite bliss of which all our experiences are the expression or the deformation. If at all an existence, a consciousness, a bliss, it is beyond the highest and purest positive form of these things that here we can possess and other therefore than what here we know by these names. Buddhism, somewhat arbitrarily declared by the theologians to be an un-Vedic doctrine because it rejected the authority of the Scriptures, yet goes back to this essentially Vedantic conception. Only, the positive and synthetic teaching of the Upanishads beheld Sat and Asat not as opposites destructive of each other, but as the last antinomy through which we look up to the Unknowable.

Steiner

This experience can only be the result of an observation, and is so, in the sense that we observe our will on a path of development towards the goal where it becomes possible for an act of will to be sustained by purely ideal intuition. This goal can be reached, because in ideal intuition nothing else is at work but its own self-sustaining essence. When such an intuition is present in human consciousness, then it has not been developed out of the processes of the organism, but rather the organic activity has withdrawn to make room for the ideal activity

 

I want to link what Aurobindo states here to a key idea that is developed in chapter 12 in PoF “Moral Imagination” Some friends and I also look specifically at Steiner in more detail here:

 

Both with Aurobindo and Steiner we are presented with a picture of the human being as a bridge connecting two worlds. I would like to use the image of a galaxy to clarify this bridge like nature of the human being as this essential nature becomes clearer when we contemplate how a galaxy comes into being and how it dissolves out of being in an eternal cycle[1]. Here I am using the process of galaxy formation as presented by Walter Russell[2]. When we imagine a toroid shape, we see at a galaxy level that all materialization happens in a horizontal plane. Exactly why this is so is still a matter of intense speculation amongst astrophysicists. Over a period of many months, I was fortunate enough to have an accomplished astrophysicist as a language tandem partner. She wanted to improve her English and I wanted to practice Spanish. One of my take-aways from these rewarding conversations was the amazing mental contortions such astrophysicists are capable of performing whilst stubbornly refusing to consider more elegant and parsimonious theories (electric universe) that would relieve them of so many mental acrobatic manoeuvres. But I digress, returning to our galaxies, as the matter moves further and further from the centre of the toroid it becomes more and more rarified so that at the edges of the galaxies all materializing forces cease and dissolution of matter, death of matter becomes the fate of all matter (Sat) (return to non-matter state). This non-matter (Asat) is then pulled back into the toroid, tracing the curves of this apple like structure and as this non-matter reaches the centre of the toroid again it becomes immanent and visible to the senses.

As human beings we are consistently converting non-matter into matter and this matter in turn feeds back into the non-matter. When we make plans to do something, they are born from an invisible realm (habit/memory or inspiration/intuition) and alight in our consciousness. When we realize a given plan or project the fruits of this are then internalized and can in the future inform us about the next stage of the project, the next plan of action. No matter where we look around, we see evidence of the obvious certainty of this truth in every single man made object. Every single one of those objects was preceded by a thought or series of thoughts. Those object were born, in the final analysis, out of non-being and will also return there in the fullness of time, at the time of the big crunch or big bounce as astrophysicists are fond of calling it, Eastern minds will feel comfortable with the word Pralaya.

What is true of material objects is also true of our own inner being. When we look at our moral actions, that is actions good or bad that have intent and are directed towards the outside world. Those moral actions too are also born out of non-being. Leaving to one side for the moment the goodness or non-goodness of these moral actions let us look more deeply into see how Sachchidananda [3] ,“Bliss-Existence-Consciousness”, is similar in essence to the relationship Steiner describes between moral intuition and moral action. With Steiner the I, when suitably strengthened and purified, becomes capable of receiving from the spiritual worlds knowledge and impulses from beings on higher planes of existence. These beings have plans in accordance with the plans of the Godhead/Brahman, yet they must work through human beings if these goals are to be achieved on the material plane. If God’s kingdom is to be created on earth, then human beings must choose to consciously receive and work with those impulses that work towards this goal. If human beings choose other impulses then these will lead earth towards different ends.

If we reflect solely on the above description of this process we soon see that despite the lofty nature of the subject matter, world evolution no less, we are at the same time talking about processes that are as common to everyday thinking as deciding what might be a better course of action with some menial task. Saving the world and planning a meal are from one perspective essentially identical processes, yet obviously radically different in scope and importance. When it comes to planning a meal I don’t tend to think in terms of needing to be inspired by the creative forces of the universe. However, the bigger the task the more I am likely to realize my own limitations and seek for inspiration from ever higher sources of power and insight.

Now, if I have done a sufficient job in explaining the bridge like nature of the human being with regards to representing that which is capable of making the transcendent immanent and understanding the relationship of anything immanent to the transcendent then it will make sense that I place also the human being at the centre of a toroid, where space becomes moral space. My moral deeds, my actions play out into the world and the world will forever bear witness to those actions. If those actions are good then the fruits of those actions will live on in the world and if they are bad then the same will also be true. I as a citizen of that world, through my actions, contribute to creating the world I live in. In religious thinking this idea can be rendered to “you reap what you sow”.

For Aurobindo man’s bridge like nature is expressed so: (ch 5)

We do not become perfect, but only shift the field of our imperfection or at most attain a limited altitude. However high we may climb, even though it be to the Non-Being itself, climb ill if we forget our base. Not to abandon the lower to itself, but to transfigure it in the light of the higher to which we have attained, is true divinity of nature. Brahman is integral and unifies many states of  consciousness at a time; we also, manifesting the nature of Brahman, should become integral and all-embracing.

In Steiner we find this relationship mirrored in the terms moral imagination, moral technique and moral intuition. (ch12)

Moral imagination and the faculty of having moral ideas can become objects of knowledge only after they have been produced by the individual. By then, however, they no longer regulate life, for they have already regulated it. They must now be regarded as effective causes, like all others (they are purposes only for the subject). We therefore deal with them as with a natural history of moral ideas.

And

This part of effective moral activity depends on knowledge of the particular world of phenomena with which one is concerned. We shall, therefore, look for it in some branch of learning in general. Moral action, then, presupposes, in addition to the faculty of having moral ideas (moral intuition) and moral imagination, the ability to transform the world of percepts without violating the natural laws by which these are connected.

 

 

Darwinism and Evolution

 

The remaining part of chapter 12 of Steiner develops what could be called a true theory of evolution for humanity, a Darwinism fully integrated with moral evolution based in the essential spiritual nature of the human being. What is striking about this is that this corresponds closely to an important topic developed by Aurobindo in chapter 7, ”The Ego and the Dualities”. To introduce this idea let us start with Darwinism as it is generally understood. Taking it purely at face value, neither believing nor denying, we are asked to imagine that at some distant point in the past a certain group of monkeys over vast periods of time became capable of doing things that were inconceivable for their ancestors.

It is not very easy for the customary mind of man, always attached to its past and present  associations, to conceive of an existence still human, yet radically changed in what are now our fixed circumstances. We are in respect to our possible higher evolution much in the position of the original Ape of the Darwinian theory. It would have been impossible for that Ape leading his instinctive  arboreal life in primeval forests to conceive that there would be one day an animal on the earth who would use a new faculty called reason upon the materials of his inner and outer existence, who would dominate by that power his instincts and habits, change the circumstances of his physical life, build for himself houses of stone, manipulate Nature

 

Both Steiner and Aurobindo are insistent that humanity is now and going into the future at a similar juncture to Darwin’s monkeys. However, there is a huge difference this time around. When considering those pre-historic times we are not invited to imagine that certain monkeys choose to develop for themselves those inconceivable new abilities. They were not capable of conscious individual choice at that stage. It was a “natural evolution” according to the theory and this was governed by the law of random mutation (ie absence of law). Steiner and Aurobindo both insist that this time round the step forward in evolution will be a conscious step. Humanity is the bridge between monkey thinking and a thinking based in a higher consciousness. Mankind is being invited to consider a relationship to life and the spiritual worlds which is inconceivable for certain parts of humanity, perhaps even currently large parts of humanity. The convincing power of materialism that has seized the world is the supreme obstacle for daring to believe this might be possible. However, some monkey minds will suspend disbelief and gradually initiate themselves into a radically different way of conceptualizing life. With Aurobindo this dynamic is developed in terms of the Mind (current intellectual thinking) becoming aware of its Supermind origins, a child of the Supermind that will, when it’s nature is not denied, attain to the consciousness of the Supermind. From chapter 14 “The Supermind as Creator” we see this expressed in the following way.

And since Mind too is created out of it, Mind must be a development by limitation out of this primal faculty and this mediatory act of the supreme Consciousness and must therefore be capable of resolving itself back into it through a reverse development by expansion. For always Mind must be identical with Supermind in essence and conceal in itself the potentiality of Supermind, however different or even contrary it may have become in its actual forms and settled modes of operation.

 

Elsewhere in Steiner’s lectures and books we see this topic of the evolution of consciousness developed in multiple directions. Here we will limit ourselves to understanding how Steiner connects Darwinism to a grander vision of an evolution of morality where the human being stands at the heart of earthly evolution as that being which is tasked with realizing its god like nature[4]. In Steiner’s terminology, a person who has achieved a certain level of clarity about the true nature of thinking, feeling and willing and how these faculties can connect him to the highest divine impulses has moved beyond thinking in mere mental pictures. Such a person practises ethical individualism by allowing moral imaginations and intuitions to live and work in his/her consciousness. He/she out of their own forces is capably of passing by lower egotistical impulses, lower moral imperatives of the family, state or religion to be inspired by ever higher benefactors of mankind.

Ethical individualism, then, is not in opposition to a rightly understood theory of evolution, but follows directly from it. Haeckel’s genealogical tree, from protozoa up to man as an organic being, ought to be capable of being continued without an interruption of natural law and without a break in the uniformity of evolution, up to the individual as a being that is moral in a definite sense. But on no account could the nature of a descendant species be deduced from the nature of an ancestral one. However true it is that the moral ideas of the individual have perceptibly developed out of those of his ancestors, it is equally true that the individual is morally barren unless he has moral ideas of his own.

This grand vision that Steiner and Aurobindo share of the true nature of the human being as a bridge between two worlds is radically different from Darwinism as interpreted by spiritless minds. Aurobindo and Steiner reconnect us to our true being and I am sure they would also recognize this same truth in the poetry of Wordsworth.

Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:

For more on Wordsworth here is a past post:
https://waywithwords.se/2023/01/23/the-exceptional-state-wordsworth-perceiving-immortality/

[1] I could have also used similar imagery the describes how sub-atomic particles come into being out of the quantum field and to which they also return after their allotted time.

[2] https://the-formula.org/walter-russell-the-man-who-tapped-the-secrets-of-the-universe/

[3] Thus possessed of itself inwardly, it imparts also to its forms and modes the conscious delight of Sachchidananda. This becoming of the infinite Bliss-Existence-Consciousness in mind and life and body, — for independent of them it exists eternally, — is the transfiguration intended and the utility of individual existence. Through the individual it manifests in relation even as of itself it exists in identity.

[4] John 10:34 “Is it not written in your Law: ‘I have said you are gods’?

Sri Aurobindo Rudolf Steiner

Rudolf Steiner, Sri Aurobindo and a Theory of Knowledge

June 6, 2023 /

Introduction

 

Several years ago I stumbled across Sri Aurobindo’s concept of the Supermind and evolution of consciousness. At the time I was impressed by how closely these ideas mapped to my understanding of Rudolf Steiner’s own thinking, but never dug any deeper. Now several years later a series of events has conspired in a beautiful way to make me want to revisit this topic.

One of the first challenges on this path was very familiar. It is the same one that anybody wishing to penetrate into the 6000 conferences, 40+ books, magazine articles, unpublished/ untranslated material written by Steiner, as well as all the secondary literature, faces. Where do I start? Aurobindo also has a complete works, like Steiner, which is abbreviated to CWSA. This runs to 36 volumes (22000+ pages) plus a further 17 volumes which go by the name of The Mother.

Goethe

I started searching for a way into this vast body of learning and lo, I did find. I was directed to part 2, chapter 25 of Aurobindo’s “The Life Divine” and there right at the beginning of the chapter I realized I was in familiar spiritual science territory. Immediately I recognized the Goethean quality of this introduction by Aurobindo to the idea of the triple transformation. In Faust part 2 within the “Walpurgnis Night’s Dream” Goethe presents us with a vision of nature whereby humanity was created by nature herself so that she may become aware of herself and participate in her own continuous self-discovery and growth. Whilst studying plants and developing his insights into the morphology and transformation of plants he recognized the organizing principle underlying the whole plant kingdom. Consequently Goethe felt fully justified in viewing humanity as a product of a higher organizing principle in nature that strived towards a conscious connection with her.

If it is the sole intention of Nature in the evolution of the spiritual man to awaken him to the supreme Reality and release him from herself, or from the Ignorance in which she as the Power of the Eternal has masked herself, by a departure into a higher status of being elsewhere, if this step in the evolution is a close and an exit, then in the essence her work has been already accomplished and there is nothing more to be done. (Triple Transformation ch 25)

 

I will have cause to return to this triple transformation, but to understand chapter 25 it became important for me to understand the foundation on which this enlivening idea was secured. Without knowing the foundations on which an idea is built we have no way of knowing if the idea is merely an idle invention of a creative mind or an invention of the mind firmly grounded in reality. This led me to part 2, chapter 7 “The Knowledge and the Ignorance”. It is this chapter that I want to investigate more thoroughly here, because as I read those 18 pages I felt that I was reading some of the essential aspects of the first half of Steiner’s “The Philosophy of Freedom”. Multiple times I was struck by how Aurobindo, whilst coming from a completely different tradition, was making similar essential points to Steiner on the relationship of thinking to knowing. Many of the same piercing insights were expressed using a completely different language, yet because they were conceptually identical the language was no longer a barrier to understanding. It was a Pentecostal experience, where language was no longer a barrier. Now I will try to recommunicate this union.

You can find The Life Divine here:
https://motherandsriaurobindo.in/Sri-Aurobindo/books/the-life-divine/

The format will be simple. I will select texts in the same order as the original text and describe how they coincide with ideas explicitly stated or implicitly understood from a deeper reading of Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom.

Supermind

In our scrutiny of the seven principles of existence it was found that they are one in their essential and fundamental reality: for if even the matter of the most material universe is nothing but a status of being of Spirit made an object of sense, envisaged by the Spirit’s own consciousness as the stuff of its forms, much more must the life-force that constitutes itself into form of Matter, and the mind-consciousness that throws itself out as Life, and the Supermind that develops Mind as one of its powers, be nothing but Spirit itself modified in apparent substance and in dynamism of action, not modified in real essence

Here I will focus specifically on the “Supermind that develops Mind as one of its powers”. I have elsewhere (waywithwords.se) looked more deeply into the exceptional state, so will here briefly summarize so that the connection may be ascertained.

In the exceptional state the focus of our attention is on that activity that makes thinking possible. The content of thinking itself is no longer of interest, instead an attempt is made to contemplate without words and images, formlessly, this activity that in normal waking consciousness connects us to the world of the senses in the outward direction and also towards the inner world of our mental images, memories, feelings. In chapter 4 of PoF we arrive at the insight that the subject does not think because it is a subject; rather it appears to itself as a subject because it can think ……[it is] neither subjective nor objective, [but]transcends both these concepts …..[thus] my individual subject lives by the grace of thinking. Steiner refers to this non-subjective activity as the “universal activity of thinking”.

What is interesting in this context is that the relationship that Aurobindo describes between the Supermind and the Mind has the same essential dynamic that Steiner describes as existing between the Universal Activity of Thinking (UAT) and how this UAT is experienced in the individual subject. When we shine a bright light into a dark room, it illuminates the contents of that room. However, we would never see that light if there weren’t objects in that room which could reflect the illuminating activity of light. As we direct our attention to the objects of the room, mental pictures, we lose sight of the activity of light making this attention possible. The world of the senses, inner and outer, would forever remain dark to knowing were the light of thinking not able to alight on the contents of consciousness. Steiner summarizes this essential relationship revealed in the exceptional state by stating:

A firm point has now been reached from which one can, with some hope of success, seek an explanation of all other phenomena of the world (chapter 3) .

Expressing this in an alternative way, we can say that no knowledge of the world and my being is possible without thinking. It can be experienced without thinking, yet as soon as I try to make any statement about the world or my being, then the light of thinking must alight in the place of the skull. Consequently, it seems justified to equate the relationship between Aurobindo’s Supermind to the Mind with how Steiner describes the relationship between the UAT and mental pictures and memories. Using Aurobindo’s word the spirit is apparently modified in substance, but not in real essence.

Ignorance

 

But here there is a world based upon an original Inconscience; here consciousness has formulated itself in the figure of an ignorance labouring towards knowledge. We have seen that there is no essential reason either in the nature of Being itself or in the original character and fundamental relations of its seven principles for this intrusion of Ignorance, of discord into the harmony, of darkness into the light, of division and limitation into the self-conscious infinity of the divine creation.

In the image of “ignorance labouring towards knowledge” a reader of the Philosophy of Freedom can instinctively feel drawn to a comparison with Steiner discussion of the “relationless aggregate” or “the given” as discussed in. In chapter 4 Steiner describes the life of a being untouched by the light of thinking.

The world would then appear to this being as nothing but a mere disconnected aggregate of objects of sensation: colours, sounds, sensations of pressure, of warmth, of taste and smell; also feelings of pleasure and pain. This aggregate is the content of pure, unthinking observation. Over against it stands thinking, ready to begin its activity as soon as a point of attack presents itself.

The concept of the given is critical for gaining a deeper understanding the true relationship between thinking and that which is given prior to thinking. In the PoF we are reminded that the given is already permeated by concepts that govern the given. This simple truth is demonstrated in recognizing that Newton didn’t invent the concept of gravity that determines an aspect of the relationship between all objects. The concept already existed and apples were falling off trees long before Newton’s time. What was new was that a new level of conceptual clarity was achieved as to the relationship between the mass of a body and its weight as determined the gravitational field it exists in. Newton increased awareness, lessening of ignorance, was granted him by the activity of thinking.

Ignorance is a human problem, not nature’s problem. The concept we call gravity acts in nature and it is of no consequence to her whether the human knows of it or not. When we meet the inner and outer world we are continually presented with a given, that is to say something which we ourselves did not bring into existence.  Initially the human being is ignorant of these concepts. However, that which appears to simply exist without conceptual insight can by degrees cause the activity of thinking to illuminate in us a new concept which allows us to understand or know the world. In the PoF the step by step overcoming of ignorance is, at it at its core, the recognition of how a concept created in my consciousness is linked to phenomena not created by my own activity. My human psycho-spiritual nature is initially blind to the full reality of concept and percept. As I develop my conceptual life I use this to overcome my ignorance of the world. Thus I continue labouring out of ignorance into increasing knowledge.

The above understanding is further confirmed when Aurobindo states:

This selfbuilding they figured as the creation by man in himself of that other world or high ordered harmony of infinite being which already exists perfect and eternal in the Divine Infinite. The lower is for us the first condition of the higher; the darkness is the dense body of the light, the Inconscient guards in itself all the concealed Superconscient, the powers of the division and falsehood hold from us but also for us and to be conquered from them the riches and substance of the unity and the truth in their cave of subconscience.

Truth hidden by a Truth

 

The Vedic seers were conscious of such a divine self-manifestation and looked on it as the greater world beyond this lesser, a freer and wider plane of consciousness and being, the truth-creation of the Creator which they described as the seat or own home of the Truth, as the vast Truth, or the Truth, the Right, the Vast, again as a Truth hidden by a Truth where the Sun of Knowledge finishes his journey and unyokes his horses, where the thousand rays of consciousness stand together so that there is That One, the supreme form of the Divine Being.

The key focus for this part of the analysis is linking another key aspect of PoF to the beautifully enigmatic “truth hidden by a truth”. A thousand rays of consciousness meeting in the supreme from of the Divine Being is not image readily understood by a mind versed in a mechanical atomistic world picture. The modern experience of thinking, at a superficial level, must reject such imagery as being fantastical and not rooted in reality. However, by yet again delving into the exceptional state and thinking about thinking itself we begin to experience how thinking is a deeply mysterious activity. In chapter 3 & 4 of PoF Steiner develops the relationship of the mental picture to that of knowing the world and the activity of thinking. We are told in PoF that:

The failure to recognize the true relationship between mental picture and object has led to the greatest misunderstandings in modern philosophy.

 

This failure is multifaceted and here I will endeavour to highlight one specific aspect in relation to Aurobindo’s observations derived from the Vidya / Avidya  framework. In the PoF we find that knowledge of the world is achieved by connecting concepts created in individual consciousness with percepts created in the world , yet also appearing in consciousness. When I see and recognize something, eg.  a triangle, in the world I am performing this simple cognitive action. However, when I see a triangle I am not seeing the concept itself, I am only seeing one of an infinite number of possible triangles which all conform to the geometrical definition, a form having 3 sides, 3 angles which add up to 180 degrees.  I can only recognize a triangle as being a triangle in the outer world if already have the concept of triangle. However, I am not restricted to merely identifying triangles in the world of the senses. As a thinking being I am also capable of recalling the percept together with the concept. This image that I create in my inner being is my own mental image (individualized concept chapter 6). It is, as it were, my own personal experience of the truth of what a triangle is, yet at the same time it is not the full truth of what a triangle is. Steiner expresses the same idea when he states at the beginning of chapter 4:

Through thinking, concepts and ideas arise. What a concept is cannot be expressed in words. Words can do no more than draw our attention to the fact that we have concepts. When someone sees a tree, his thinking reacts to his observation, an ideal element is added to the object, and he considers the object and the ideal counterpart as belonging together. When the object disappears from his field of observation, only the ideal counterpart of it remains.

In normal everyday thinking we do not observe how the conceptual world is born in us in a moment of intuition. Everyday thinking uses mental pictures to represent reality and these do a fine job of helping us to make sense of world around us. However, these useful truths at the same time are hiding a bigger, grander truth because as long as we make mental pictures the content of our consciousness, we are also masking the void out of which they are born. The activity that creates these concepts, which enable us to recognize them in the world of perception is a realm into which at a normal level of consciousness, that which Aurobindo calls Mind, we cannot penetrate. However, we will see that this apparent limit to knowing, which Kant takes to be absolute, is transcended in both Aurobindo’s and Steiner’s theory of knowledge. Consciousness can evolve and will evolve in people capable of living in a thinking relationship to this basic insight into how we know the world. It is through the re-uniting of the individualized concepts created by the intellectual faculty that we can re-create the whole from which our psycho-spiritual organization tore us. As we proceed carefully along this path there will arise a point where a thousand rays of consciousness uniting in a supreme being can become a meaningful image for us to describe the true significance of how lots of small truths can hide the one great truth. We will also be able to recognize the same idea when Aurobindo states:

The lower is for us the first condition of the higher; the darkness is the dense body of the light, the Inconscient guards in itself all the concealed Superconscient, the powers of the division and falsehood hold from us but also for us and to be conquered from them the riches and substance of the unity and the truth in their cave of subconscience.

The perils of mental pictures

 

We mentioned above that the failure to recognize the essential nature of the mental picture leads to much misunderstanding in philosophy.  Aurobindo’s describes how this leads to an essential dualism and the creation of an irreconcilable opposition.

All acceptations of our defeat or our limitation start from the implied or explicit recognition, first, of an essential dualism and, then, of an irreconcilable opposition between the dual principles, between the Conscient and the Inconscient, between Heaven and Earth, between God and the World,  between the limitless One and the limited Many, between the Knowledge and the Ignorance.

Let us now consider how Steiner treats the problems of dualism and false monisms. This is often one area of the book that causes much confusion for the casual reader. However, it is of vital importance for the whole science of freedom that the importance of this overcoming of dualism and false monisms is fully understood. When this is achieved we also see how Steiner and Aurobindo seem in complete agreement about the essential nature of reality and the relationship of the individual to the reality in which he lives.

This will be an extremely condensed summary of what is one of the central topics in the book. Steiner demonstrates how dualism divides the whole of existence into two sphere, each of which contains it own laws and at the same time standing in fundamental opposition because there is no bridge between the two realms. Specifically with relation to Kant he demonstrates how the Kantian dualism of perceptual object and thing-in-itself is rooted in an incorrect understanding of the relation of thinking to perception. Similar to Aurobindo, Steiner also demonstrates how a consistent and extreme dualism must conclude that knowledge is an illusion. He details this in his discussion of absolute illusionism and  Eduard von Hartmann’s transcendental realism. Schopenhauer is also taken to task for creating  metaphysical concepts that by definition are unknowable. He further elaborates how the 3 monisms of materialism and spiritualism or indissoluble binding of matter and spirit are equally not up to the job of reconciling in a meaningful way mankind’s spiritual nature with the natural world within which it lives. Steiner resolves the false monisms into a monism which is named Ethical Individualism. Like Aurobindo, this resolution is achieved by recognizing the correct relationship of the individual spirit life in the context of the previously mentioned Universal Activity of Thinking which appears from behind the scenes of everyday mental life.

It is worth pointing out at this point that Aurobindo is deriving all his insights based in the conceptual frameworks elaborated in the Upanishads and pre-Vedic thought, called Vidya and Avidya. Consequently these also represent the authority which Aurobindo uses to support his argument.  Steiner on the other hand in the PoF is appealing to the authority of the reader’s own experience of what thinking is and what it is not. What is remarkable is that both of them have conceptually identical ideas on the causes of the failure to understand the true nature of thinking despite start from apparently different starting points.

Ignorance

 

Aurobindo points out that certain thinkers consider the problem of the cause of ignorance as insoluble. For Aurobindo this problem is resolved in recognizing that the power of Brahman has the double force of Knowledge and Ignorance.

We must then seize hold on this strange power of Consciousness which is the root of our ills, examine the principle of its operation and detect not only its essential nature and origin, but its power and process of operation and its last end and means of removal. How is it that the Ignorance exists? How has any principle or power in the infinite self-awareness been able to put self-knowledge behind it and exclude all but its own characteristic limited action?

Steiner resolves this problem as we have already indicated by recognizing that it is our own psycho-spiritual natures that cause us to fail to understand both the inevitability of ignorance. Yet at the same time he identifies that force or being dwelling in or acting through us in the I as being the means by which ignorance can be overcome.

Both Steiner and Aurobindo resolve this in a way that confers meaning on to the process of overcoming ignorance. This is particularly significant as it also means a transcendence of what could be described as the pessimistic Buddhist mindset, of which Hartmann and Schopenhauer were devotees.

But our mind cannot remain satisfied — the mind of Buddhism itself did not remain satisfied — with this evasion at the very root of the whole matter. In the first place, these philosophies, while thus putting aside the root question, do actually make far-reaching assertions that assume, not only a certain operation and symptoms, but a certain fundamental nature of the Ignorance from which their prescription of remedies proceeds; and it is obvious that without such a radical diagnosis no prescription of remedies can be anything but an empiric dealing.

This question of the point of living is really the essence of part 2 of PoF. In part one the reader was introduced to the science of freedom, part 2 sometimes goes by the title of the practice of freedom. With Steiner as with Aurobindo the individual human being experiences himself/herself as a soul capable of receiving moral intuitions and moral imaginations from higher beings and also creating them out of the impulse of love for the world. The world is thus transformed into a space where the highest moral imaginations can be made manifest in the world of the senses. Human beings acting out of love and freedom are co-creators in the future heaven on earth. This is a radical departure from the pessimism of Buddhism and the meaninglessness of life in the Western tradition. The foundation for this worldview is found most clearly expressed in chapter 9, The Idea of Freedom and chapter 11, World Purpose and Life Purpose (The Ordering of Man’s Destiny).

 

Dialectical Intellect

 

For the dialectical intellect is not a sufficient judge of essential or spiritual truths; moreover, very often, by its propensity to deal with words and abstract ideas as if they were binding realities, it wears them as chains and does not look freely beyond them to the essential and total facts of our existence. Intellectual

Another area in which Steiner and Aurobindo are in agreement is the importance of intellectual thinking and associated mental pictures. The mental pictures are in the world of Steiner considered dead pictures of living spiritual realities or as we said earlier, they are truths which hide a truth. Another way of describing this could be say that elements of the truth can manifest in these dead mosaic like pictures. Aurobindo describes how the dialectical intellect is important for clarifying and justifying our expression of the vision and the knowledge, but it cannot be allowed to govern conceptions. Thus both thinkers recognize the Mind (Aurobindo), mental picture (Steiner) as precursors to a future evolution in mankind’s thinking.

Aurobindo concludes the chapter with a description of the individual’s relation to knowing the world expressed in a way that enhances the meaning of life and the value of the struggle. The tone of this passage is noteworthy because it speaks to the same ennobling description for an ethical individualist’s relationship to knowing the world.

But if we find that Knowledge and Ignorance are light and shadow of the same consciousness, that the beginning of Ignorance is a limitation of Knowledge, that it is the limitation that opens the door to a subordinate possibility of partial illusion and error, that this possibility takes full body after a purposeful plunge of Knowledge into a material Inconscience but that Knowledge too emerges along with an emerging Consciousness out of the Inconscience, then we can be sure that this fullness of Ignorance is by its own evolution changing back into a limited Knowledge and can feel the assurance that the limitation itself will be removed and the full truth of things become apparent, the cosmic Truth free itself from the cosmic Ignorance.

Conclusion

 

It feels important to stress here that I am only scraping the surface of the similarities in thinking between Sri Aurobindo and Rudolf Steiner here. For a Steiner reader like myself reading “The Life Divine” is like reading confirmation from a second witness about what Steiner says are spiritual facts. Lovers of Aurobindo will naturally see this from the reverse perspective and this is equally valid. Lovers of the truth will rejoice and unite in reading how two of humanity’s most accomplished initiates create a picture of reality so awe inspiring in depth and breadth that its very existence helps the reader to sense that Brahman or the Logos was close at hand when they were living and writing at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.

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