Preliminary Remarks
Our last article Sun Eater is not a pre-requisite for this one, but it should be read to understand better the philosophical undertone.
To understand this better, as we began in the beginning of Sun Eater, let us look to the work of some mystics, the influence they had, and so the reactions they drew out of others. Here is a reading done of Steiner’s philosophy, but by someone who does not necessarily understand the main point of Steiner’s writing. In the article we will being looking at, the author makes it fairly obvious he does not understand the life mission and philosophical statement Rudolf Steiner dedicated his life to; and in fact, is extremely ignorant about it, boasting his own world view as superior, anyways.
The Mystical Trial
Issues with transcendental knowledge
Every mystic encounters a trial along their path that is of this nature. The mystic must learn that his experiences have exclusive meaning to themselves, and others are not obliged to partake in them, purely based on their objective value.1 The author we will look at: he has failed it. And that is okay2; but it is a learning moment for the intelligent and wise. He may succeed and be admitted into higher knowledge at a later date, or perhaps none at all. As much as this is true—such that from failure we can always prove ourselves from the ashes of it—I will use his failure as an opportunity to base the rest of my mystical experience off of.
The trial is this: your experiences only have meaning to you. Steiner thought of this as: an occult student must say that all of his knowledge only exists in his soul.3 Wolff thought of it as: my Realizations only have a kind of meaning to me.4 And Aurobindo: anyone who knows Avatars, knows they must focus solely on their mission, (perhaps precisely because of its purity in execution) and so that sometimes leads them to being misunderstood—by not perfecting other peoples’ missions—even being martyred in the process. 5
For me: I know that all of my experiences are self created, and so, if they are to be true, must be made manifest in others. This is to say, I know them to be true by their relationship to myself, and as far as I know myself I can confirm their validity. Through my linguistic studies I know these experiences to have qualities which are true for other people, but they have not been prepared to realize them in the ways I have. Rudolf Steiner, also, in How to Know Higher Worlds imparted this knowledge upon me in more subtle variations. He had done this with his dialogue on prisoners: we must realize that if our self-perception was made manifest in the experiences, the potential and life of a delinquent—of the life of a criminal—we would be the same as them. We would make the same choices.
The nature of this author’s intent, and ultimate reality, matters less than the conception of this mystical trial. I have given the answer for how it is succeeded (realizing that these transcendental notions must penetrate the relative consciousness), so here is how it is failed:
Steiner has little understanding of real mysticism. He writes:
“This tendency—the philosophy of feeling—is often called mysticism. A mystical view based solely on feeling errs in wanting to experience what it ought to know; it wants to make something that is individual, feeling, into something universal.
Feeling is a purely individual act. It is a relationship of the outer world to our subject, insofar as that relationship finds expression in a purely subjective experience.”
Contrary to what Steiner claims, higher mysticism is not based on subjective feelings. It is trans-psychological in nature and involves objective, impersonal beholding, or apprehension, of the Mysterium Tremendium: Divine Light-energy, the Holy Spirit. When one’s consciousness (or soul) unites with this Divine Light-energy, or Power, then one spontaneously experiences the transcendental feeling of Being, and this feeling is independent of emotions, though one may experience emotions in relation to it.
https://www.electricalspirituality.com/rudolf-steiner-a-great-philosopher-and-esotericist/
Notice how he bends your views. Watch carefully. Steiner never claims “higher mysticism”—all he claims is “the philosophy of feeling [is] often called mysticism.”
I will pick apart the essence of the argument, here, in much more verbose language. Steiner is incredibly smart. That is missed upon the author, who later espouses a bit of disgust that Steiner had a PhD in epistemology. (The author is surely not a fool, but many smart people end up fools, and many mystics end up foolish, because of the tenure of their transcendental experiences. I will demonstrate shortly how uncritical and utterly debased this claim is.)
Notice the specific words used, here. Steiner says “often”, he uses the words “solely on feeling” and “errs” and “ought”. Firstly, this should call to mind the “is” versus “ought” distinction; if you are reading someone with a degree in epistemology, perhaps, this should be your first clue to look into. It is my first inclination, surely.
What really defines the is verus ought argument? The argument amounts to whether we should value experiences that are formally objective, such as descriptions, over the ethical statements about what we should do about those descriptions, such as having morals or goals related to those events—or, as they say, normative evaluations. Normative evaluations, we can suppose, are those that are often said to be what should happen in normal situations. And so, when you take look at Steiner’s writing (and even under careful scrutiny) you will see it efused with great words that deal with these concepts (such as a normative evaluation) in simple and easy tl understand angauge, e.g.: ought, err, wanting, “a mystical view” (as opposed to a descriptive statement of the total mystical experience), and experience itself.
The entire paragraph the author cites, by Steiner, is meant to guide you along to this realization of the difference between things that ought to be and things that are—and how those two can be one and the same process. What the author does here that misinterprets the text is that he assumes “the subjective experience” implies the existence of many different kinds of contradictory experiences—in reference to some type of object—and nothing deeper or nothing otherwise possible to that normative experience. For example, two people may feel very differently about icecream. One enjoys the sweet and creamy taste. The other may hate its cold and think it is too luxiorious. Those feelings may appear to be in apparent contradiction at first glance. So the assumption that we must make is that to feel something is to have the potential to be wrong about it— for another person could feel differently than you about the same experience—but the quality of feeling itself does no such thing as to imply that it can only be used as just a fleeting, personal emotion. The only thing that feeling itself implies is that that is the experience we initially may have, however feeling itself does not deny the capacity for that initial experience to become transcendental (and such universal). Remember the criminal analogy in Higher Worlds: if we were born in those circumstances, with those potentials and opprotunities, as well as biases, we would be in the same position a criminal would be in. So it follows that if I like icecream in this life, it is fair to say that another who feels differently in their own life experience (that icecream stirs within them a horrid cold feeling), that they would feel the same about ice-cream as I do if they were shoved into my life.6
Detangling the Transcendent
Here I will structure it in clear and concise language:
All Steiner does is say,
“Feeling is a purely individual act. It is a relationship of the outer world to our subject, insofar as that relationship finds expression in a purely subjective experience.”
And so when we take that in reference to the beginning statement,
“This tendency—the philosophy of feeling—is often called mysticism. […] [It] wants to make something that is individual, feeling, into something universal,”
we can infer that Steiner means,
If you want to be a mystic, as many see would see it described (1), you must aim to make your feeling as unbiased as it can be (2).
And so, for this type of experience, then, it would make sense that mysticism could be said to be a type of philosophy, or way of knowledge (a love of wisdom as the ancients knew it) about feeling.
The author claims,
Contrary to what Steiner claims, higher mysticism is not based on subjective feelings. It is trans-psychological in nature and involves objective, impersonal beholding, or apprehension, of the Mysterium Tremendium: Divine Light-energy, the Holy Spirit.
Here, the author is sidestepping the argument, and stating that there is objectivity to the mystical—or the transcendental experience—but the experience of feeling is always an individual experience itself, or “apprehension” made by humans, or we could say that it is observed by some form of consciousness. This is the essence of enlightenment, and the paradox of attaining it. The enlightenment is always there, for if it were not it could not be attained at all, but you must still in spite of that become conscious of it. Which is the paradox. That is the point that Steiner is trying to say: it is subjective in its goal of attainment but the mystic experience as described must also seek to be transcendental and universal in its aims and in its content, as it uses the individual as a medium of identification.
The author has a relatively muddled conception of the enlightenment process, and is unfamiliar with Steiner’s path. In other reviews he calls it “poetic dharma.” These should not be contradictory experiences, and one only experiences contradiction when one has not been inundated into the macrocosm of life. The macrocosm that contains within it the multitudes of the human experience, ones that seem to be pitted against each other in the miasma of ignorance, but in reality are one and a part of the same transcendental reality. One may read what I have just wrote and recall to mind the philosophy of Aurobindo in the beginning of the Divine Life—actually his first chapter called Omnipresent Reality—but in reality I am actually referencing Steiner’s tradition of occultism, here. I am writing between these two traditions, in such a way as to demonstrate the transcendental experience, the mystical experience, as it has been felt by different forms—one east and one west—while also positing it as a feeling I have felt myself. And in doing so, in this moment, I am demonstrating it to all of you, as well and offering it as something you can feel for yourself. This is the foundation of my methodology herein, for outlining my mystical experimentations and my spiritual path in this life. We can talk about experiences that we personally feel in such a way that we can relate them to others who may have experienced them, and then ask ourselves if there is something to be learned (that we would see as a mature, fitting evolution of our character and knowledge) that we should then adopt. In this way, my personal experiences will attempt to speak to eternal truths as well as express my own relative faults, and in hope will illuminate more paths for the many of you.
To finish this off, from reading the various reviews of the author and his views on Steiner, it is clear he is very adamant about his beliefs and not active engagement. I have chosen one passage, but he as well treats Steiner in the same ways in numerous other passages—without considering that there is simply a difference in philosophy, therein. If one reads Steiner’s works, they would get the impression Steiner only says what seems to need to be said, or what is necessary to say, and not necessarily that he acts in such a way that he makes blunt assertions (like the author does numerous times during this review, as if he himself is projecting the hurt he feels within his soul onto Steiner).
This is the end of part one. Part two I will begin to detail more about specific mystical experiences and how they relate to transcendentalism.
Regarding more trials of students of the occult, mystics and other anomalies experience, Steiner has this to say about an experience they may have upon the path to spiritual knowledge
Now, my dear friends, I have often referred to this quality — perhaps, to the disgust of many who are sitting here. The quality peculiar to the human astral body on earth is egotism. When the astral body, apart from the influences which come from the other principles of human nature, asserts, its own peculiar quality, this is seen to be egotism, or the effort to live exclusively in itself and for itself. This belongs to the astral body. It would be wrong, it would be an imperfection in the astral body as such, if it could not permeate itself with the force of egotism, if it could not say to itself, ‘Fundamentally I will attain everything through myself alone, I will do all that I do for myself, I will devote every care to myself alone.’ That is the correct feeling for the astral body. If we bear this in mind we shall understand that esoteric training may produce certain dangers in this direction. […] It can be observed in many theosophical and occult societies that while selflessness, universal human love, is preached as a moral principle and repeated again and again, yet through the natural separation of the astral body egotism flourishes.
—https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA145/English/RSPC1945/19130326p02.html (Emphasis my own)
It is okay because it means he has missed the point precisely because he is focusing on another concept (and not the teaching the trial is meaning to impart on him). So, when we encounter a mystic who has failed we are given two paths: one path that says we should aim to teach the ‘right’ answer, and the other path which is to ask what concept they are focusing on that leads them away from solving the puzzle of the trial. As with most human choices there is usually a reason behind this.
Here is a section from a early draft of Steiner’s How to Know Higher Worlds; it gives a lush treatment to this trial in the beginning:
—https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA010/English/HR1960/GA010a_c01.html
“Wolff maintained that these realizations contained genuine knowledge about the ultimate nature of reality, but he also recognized that these insights were authoritative only for him.”
Sri Aurobindo, who was born on August 15 and whose 150th birth anniversary falls this year, spoke at length on the great mystery of Avatarhood: how god, he or she, manifests at different times of human history whenever needed, using different names and different scriptures, but always to help humanity in crisis. He also hinted at the supreme sacrifice all avatars have to go through; it is not only Jesus Christ who was crucified, but most avatars were misunderstood in their time, if not vilified.
Sri Aurobindo himself was shunned by the Congress moderate wing during his political years, imprisoned by the British and even after his death, most Indian history and school textbooks described him as a radical nationalist and ignored his extraordinary philosophical, poetic and yogic achievements.
—https://www.news18.com/news/opinion/sri-aurobindo-and-the-great-mystery-of-the-avatar-5775223.html
Aurobindo himself represents the dual realization of this trial: one the threat of egoism upon the mystic, as well as the sacrifice the mystic must make in being mistaken by others.
As someone who has deeply read Steiner, I recommend reading up in his archive about the relationship between love and knowledge. You can learn more about how gnosis is related to feeling, and thus the twin epistemics of enlightenment—compassion and insight—as well. And as for the citation for this reference to the criminality passage, seek the 1904 “How to Know Higher Worlds: A Modern Path of Initiation (Classics in Anthroposophy)” pg 99, Kindle ed..