Well this is quite something. The ongoing wrestling match between the sexes. What is its esoteric meaning?

I think it must have something to do with the "precious seed" carried by the male, and the nature and quality of the male orgasm. The esoteric dimension of the orgasm is when it is held internally, and doesn't discharge in the usual way. The "precious energy," which is extremely pleasant and blissful, and seems to connect to the essence of Life itself, ascends up the spine and into the brain, and in mature individuals, becomes Vision.

The object of the alchemist, the magician and the Templar knight, is to convert that energy into cognitive material. It's to produce Imaginations composed of sexual energy.

To reverse the male energy flow in this way is to "master the living." This is the stage man will reach in the future, through speech and love. Up to now, man has only mastered the mineral nature. Mastery of the living is beyond his powers. The reason for this is that he hasn't ascended to moral maturity.

Moral maturity can be accomplished systematically, I say, by practicing Goethean conversation. Those who want to master the living will want to study the structure and performance of anthroposophical conversation and anthroposophical social life. In that way, the foundation will be laid for the Sixth Epoch, in which the reproductive function is taken over by the organs of speech.

For Plato, what is needed for balanced social life and conversation are men with good memory, readiness to learn, breadth of vision and grace and a commitment to truth, justice, courage and self-control, rounded off by education and maturity. They are the only ones to whom you'd want to entrust your State.

We don't want Andrew Marvells running our Society. We want birds of a different feather.

Some information on Andrew Marvell;

Andrew Marvell (1621 – 1678) either during or just before the Interregnum. The poem is often considered one of the finest and most concise carpe diem arguments ever put in verse. Marvell probably wrote the poem prior to serving in Oliver Cromwell's government as a minister, and the poem was not published in his lifetime.

Interesting comments Carl; taking love to a higher level.  I think Marvell wrote a brilliant poem here understanding the struggle between materialism and spiritualism.  We feel the materialist urge building up in the poem when he say’s -

But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song: then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.

This verse challenges the existence of life beyond death and tries to woe his want to be lover in thinking ‘time is short and you are going to die so let us couplelate now in the physical before the worms get us’.

Whereas this, to the spiritualist, is the complete opposite of esoteric thought.  The materialist may think he (or she – an argument can be expressed from the males point of view towards the materialist female) is being romantic in his expression of love, although it is lust, without realizing his advances are actually portraying the world as the marble vault. 

The spiritualist knows death is life and being freed from the marble vault true love and divine embrace is so sublime and life giving.  Both in the physical and spiritual state. So the spiritualist rejects his advances because of his lack of wisdom in not understanding the cosmic dance which happens in the spiritual realms which is freed from lust and any other selfish ultra motives which ultimately, although may give short term pleasures on earth does not realize treasures in heaven.

Also, Sophia is pure and true and uncorruptable.

:)

Hi Caryn,

Yes, love on a higher level. Seems to me what we should be focused on.

The idea here is that there are terrifically high barriers to the reversal of the orgasm. It's just not easy to do.

Similarly, there are high barriers to Goethean conversation and esoteric exercise. That's not easy to do either.

The barriers are high for the same reason. They both require moral development to accomplish.

I think we should be asking each other about moral development - what it is, how it is accomplished, what its signs are. That would mean we were serious about anthroposophy.

People here probably should assume their personal understanding of moral development is correlated with their personal ability to reverse the orgasm.

This is a bold initiative that we can try to handle sensitively.

Please speak to us about the barriers that you encounter in your moral development, Carl. Tell us how you have tackled them.

It would be a valuable resource on the site to build up a repertoire of tried and tested practices that have proved their usefulness in overcoming issues that no doubt affect others. It would take the indications of Steiner and others a real step forward if we can be practical in supporting others.

How could we best do this?

Positive thinking is a good start I think ... Eckhart said 'The eye by which I see God is the same as the eye by which God sees me.  My eye and God’s eye are one and the same'.

Life is not easy at the best of times but if we consider this statement it really is up to us how we journey through it - 'The eye by which God sees me is the eye I take with me into the spiritual realms ...' might be added and with this striving to attain knowledge of higher worlds in understanding our actions and attitudes in the physical will affect how we live and how much we can see in the spiritual realms.

Hope this is uplifting!

Also wanted to say... I think poor old Andrew Marvell has been given somewhat short shrift in this thread :-)

this is interesting food for thought, as I had been in a relationship that ended a few months ago and recently felt that walking and putting energy into other things would be fine with me in fact I visited a freind recently age 82 on his death bed, and he was known to be a bit of a shaman, with many admiresrs both male and female, many lovers, and the first thing he asked me was, hows your love life! but, I answered, no, i dont have one, and I am very happy about it as i know i must now put my energies into spiritual things. he was quiet for a while and then I asked him if he had any advice for me and he said; just be yourself, he squeezed my hand and he showed me a book on angels someone had given him. he passed away a few days later.

For those following this discussion you may be interested to also look at John and Jeff's free-ranging discussion on Ideals and Archetypes here http://www.philosophyoffreedom.com/node/2220#comment-4343.

I feel the whole of Faust Parts 1 and 2 is an extended realisation or imagination of the archetypal experiences being touched on here which are living in all of us...  Interesting also because Steiner quotes Goethe's "Two souls alas dwell within my breast.." at a critical point in PoF. 

Perhaps the whole theme of male and female as archetypes and the eternal quest for knowledge bears further investigation... what do others think?

Well now  - Steiner and other great initiates tell us,  The female etheric body is male and the male etheric body is female - this is quite sublime!  Looking at anima and animus again.  However, the ego does eventually loose the etheric and astral body in its travels in the afterlife - although not lost but put aside, we should look at this further,  the sacred wedding - the soul with the spirit  - many lives in nuturing and growing the etheric and astral bodies to eventually merge .. with one ego which has been one from the beginning?

I remember when I first read Steiner talk about the male having the female etheric body and vica versa.....It was great....Then I started to wonder...

Would that be like saying that women have always had men's breasts and men have always had women's chests???? it's too late for me to ponder this....I think i'll have strange dreams tonight....

jeff

I think his most profound statments about gender are those found in PoF.  Once you get a spiritual group believing that there is something called and etheric body and that His is different then Hers and also believing that there is an activity called etheric thinking, you are setting up for yet another opportunity for people to justify distinctions that matter between the sexes.  If I have to sense-free think with my female etheric body and Lori has to do it with her male etheric body....oh brother.....now we can talk about why even our sense-free thinking is conditioned by our genders, only now we've mutually swapped genders. 

I wish when we talked about things like how astrals bodies are related to etheric and physical bodies we had to produce little sketches of what we are imagining. I think that would make us more sensitive to what caused us to ever use the words in the first place. 

On a more serious note: I'm very proud of my etheric body.  She's the best one I've ever had.

Jeff

p.s. I say all of the above while holding the first belief that everything but thinking is 100% conditioning.  So I'm not theoretically opposed to notions about male and female this or thats...I'm simply pointing to what causes us to use those specific words/concepts.  PoF's comments on gender are a good chaser to my metaphysical escapades. 

Hi Jeff,

Point taken, I guess that is part of the danger of discussing these issues - as soon as an isolated statement like "men have female etheric bodies and women have male etheric bodies" gets washed up on the desert island of intellectual thought, so to speak, it can be misled and misused in all kinds of ways.  That is the challenge that Steiner brings to us constantly I think, to keep our concepts and our thinking alive and in practical context.

I too see the beauty and truth in Steiner's statement in PoF that it is up to each individual to realise the truly free human being within them and that this is something that transcends gender, social upbringing, culture etc. because it comes in a sense at the end of all that.

So can this picture of the astral, etheric and physical help achieve this?  I believe it can if it is kept in a correct context and connection with reality.  The picture I would like to present is that beyond a certain point in life each of us has to start to find the male and female elements within ourselves.  Then the "fact" that I was born in a physical body that is male and have an etheric body that is female is no more startling than the fact that I have two hands, a left and a right hand.  I may choose to use my right hand in a certain way and the left hand in another, but there are certain activities which require me to use both left and right.   Living thinking, which I think is the starting point for Steiner's vision of the truly free human being, is one of those two-handed activities if you like.

Women's rights in that view looks more like left-handers' rights, which is still a valid movement because there are certain devices in society that do favour right-handers.  I seem to recall that Ned Flanders in the Simpsons runs a Left Handers Emporium or something like that :-)

Steiner also says that our etheric bodies get younger as our physical bodies get older... again a puzzling statement but I find that reflection on these things helps me get a more realistic grasp on what is meant by the term etheric body.

I do try to exercise some caution when using words like etheric and astral and physical, basically I use the words in the end because they mean something to me.    The challenge is in communicating my meaning to others, certainly it's possible that people may come to the conclusion that I don't know what I'm talking about, that I'm deceiving myself, that I'm just parroting what I have heard from someone else and so on.

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,' it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.'

'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master - that's all.'

The whole delightful chapter is at http://www.sundials.org/about/humpty.htm

Is not the real question, Jeff, whether an ethical individualist could find a room full of intelligent anthroposophists and would, on being granted the privil-edge of entry, hide his own creative light under the bushel of obfuscation as a means to truth seeking? The suggestion is that the group would be able to judge the verity of his remark in the light of rampant guesswork, and that the source of the assertion is irrelevant.  It flummoxes this writer, considering the known pitfalls of the Great Deceiver's machinations in thinking, what you mean here with the word intelligent.  Taking the given assumptions in your example, would the successful entry of the obfuscator not imply that the situation is more accurately characterised as a room full of smart-ass anthroposophists?

Is this a hypothetical example that tries to demonstrate that there are no lies in anthroposophical converse, thus possibly rebutting one of Carl's propositions? Is it an example of how rape can procreate in thinking? It is the view of this writer that such an ideal may be unsafe to test out in the laboratory of fisticuffs in life.

You are a tinker, Jeff!

Just checking that you were not suggesting that there is a split between the moral handling of thought content and and the realisation of PoF, Jeff. Is it not the free thinking of the inner nature of the thoughts that is the aim, rather than the conditioning of the thinker manipulating thoughts in rooms of IAs? The proposition that the content does not need to be impeccable stirred up uneasiness. Your point is that any thought will do.

Full understanding of PoF is another lifetime away. It is far easier to just get on with it, stumble, shake off the dust, and move on... It's only natural.

There are several reasons to pause here, Jeff. The Jeff on the other thread is more in touch with the John on the other thread. The Jeff on this thread is reflecting that the line from John is crackling and buzzing too loudly. It could be connected to the local weather here: generally tired with scattered yawning. 

To be brief, it could be that the present writer's earlier posts were the result of not cleaning out the local inner ear sufficiently. The trail has veered into heavy brush and some back tracking is called for. In an earlier post the man Jeff explored the imagination that a conversation could begin with a thought falsely attributed to an accepted authority, or at least a person more listenable to than Mr Anthro Positive. The lazy usage of an acronym (IA) for Intelligent Anthroposophists set the mental compass adrift and splash went lifeboats suddenly. The questionable ethic was the misdirection of the source of the quote to an author well known for his insistence that one take account of the person who speaks apparent truths that may not be based on spiritual vision, but sourced from an altogether different mental position. In this case somewhat left of centre PoF when you hold the book the correct way around. Said author is even better known for long sentences, so more than seven sub-clauses are enough to ascertain authenticity beyond any reasonable doubt. Aforementioned sub-clauses, being absent, prove that the IAs - trying that LWA again (Lazy Writer's Acronym - much more reprehensible than tennis elbow) - were more interested in the source of the sentence than its value.  This gave rise to some question of the intentions of the bushelled tinker in the room.  This writer was suggesting that a pernicious misdirection was maybe an ethical slip of the tongue. Said tongue slip was branded not impeccable, which was missing the point of the loaded bowstring by several barn doors.

This must be by now crystal clear. The dancer of Jeff's dissertation obviously has more discernment, but shares the present typist's inclination to work on the question and its source until the answer reveals itself naturally. Proposition of Engagement 2: hold the question tightly and shake it hard until it disgorges its answer onto the floor. This is tough love.

The imaginative scenario of another writer does not always reach the same denouement in the listeners' dreamscape. If it is a moral imagination, then all alternate endings sing in chorus.  If they jar then throw it back in the waters until it is mature enough to eat. It is one of the present writer's persistent foibles to shift from one imaginative scene to another offering equal or better integrity with the line of thought in order to ensure that only the reader who has tightly held to that which lives as the truth of the image will successfully navigate the labyrinth.  Easy to tell when the mental image is a misfit because the next image will trip it on its nose. Tough love.

Imagination is the realm that is explored here. It stands with its head above the pure thought and its feet below the real heart of the matter. Imaginative writing casts structural reference in resonance with more elements than prose can string together and becomes a free variation on poetry.  It chimes rather than rhymes. To pick an innocent casualty out of the bloody maze is a surgical procedure as the words cannot bear their original context under analysis so a further embodiment reincarnates the now evolved Inhabitant.  The Inhabitant is a spirit being woven with thoughts and love in the stream of consciousness. Its earthly existence is momentary, only as long as the reader shines in its light. The sense-bound thinker will only be dazzled and dazed. Tough love.

Sorry Jeff - these carcasses are not evolved enough to hold the vision. Tomorrow is another opportunity.

Hi Jeff, John,

Firstly Jeff - room of IAs = room of Intelligent Anthroposophists :-)

Second, I would like to share a piece of synchronicity - I read Jeff's piece above including:

Let's take a Steinerian comment like:

the etheric body exapands beyond the heart when we think socially antipathetic concepts, while the astral body tightens around the heart and loosens its connection with the etheric body, creating a gap, so to speak, in which the individual becomes very susceptable to influences from the adversaries.

(and by the way I was completely taken in and thought it was a Steiner quote, very nice if it wasn't!). 

A few minutes later I opened a book of lectures on "The Book of Revelation" (18 lectures given in Dornach to Christian Community priests, September 1924) and the very first sentence my eye fell on was the following from Lecture 18:

"Although it is part of cosmic wisdom that the human being should grasp the intellectuality in the cosmos for himself, nevertheless there remainds the possibility that while he is doing this he might - in those unguarded moments that always exist - allow those ahrimanic powers known as Satan in the Christian to snatch this intellectuality from him."

The connection between this and your "Steiner" passage should be obvious.  This to me is a remarkable piece of synchronicity.  I was re-reading the lectures on Revelation because it is Michaelmas time (even though it's lovely springtime in the Southern hemisphere here, the Christian festivals and the seasons is another topic I have opinions on I won't go into here...:-)

Now a shameful confession I feel free to make now that you have perpetrated your delightful fraud: I often make up series of "Steiner" lectures in my head over a period of a week or two while walking or riding to work in the morning.  Of course I always start with "Dear Friends..." though it's only me listening as far as I know.  It started as an exercise several years ago and I found it was so successful that I kept it up.  As a result I'm treated to Steiner lectures on all kinds of topics that interest me, sometimes they don't get very far but they are always interesting and present different perspectives on things that I never would have thought of by myself... or that's how I experience it.

Perhaps that's an exercise that a group of anthroposophists should try together - " Hey Jeff it's your turn to give the Steiner lecture this week and Lori is next week"... but of course half of them would get nervous and intimidated quite rightly too because the other half would be frowning and checking constantly, did Steiner say that, I don't think Steiner would have described the etheric body the way she is describing it and so on.

Anyway my point is, that to immerse ourselves in any content of thought, whether PoF, anthroposophy, right-wing Christian Fundamentalist writing or whatever, is I think to bring that thought to birth within us (the more limited "us", the "me") anew, to re-realise it.  We may then find that it has a life of its own that is more important than the mere words and concepts that enables us to bring something of its essence to birth constantly within ourselves without necessarily having to re-read it or whatever.  We have united our being with it.

After reading the email notification of Tim’s synchronicity – we were typing at almost the same time – there was a gentle rustling of wings in the room. It could have been the air giving voice to the birch trees outside my window although there was no breeze. There was a sense of relief, heightening that which was felt after posting an account of the creative imagination writing ideal. This sort of thing only happens to other people so to say that the experience was mine is obviously inadequate.  

Hi Jeff and Lori – you are raising something that I will pick up in a new journal. What would I have to write about if it was not for all you good folk?

:) Sons of the Fire-Mist ..... it will make a great poem

Appreciation from you was never more welcome, Caryn, than on this thread. I sometimes wonder if we are charging into limbo, and then you post a grounding snippet from the good doctor about self-conscious image consciousness. (No wish to burden that thread with this comment)

So Jupiter is charging us and changing us and there is a reason to feel relatively sane. Many thanks for all your support for everyone. Poetry and imagery are very necessary organ-limbs of perception for yours truly. Have you encountered Steiner's description of the eye as the nearly perfect ball-and-socket joint?

Or coincidence, call it what you will... there was an hour-long special on Gustav Holst the other night and the first thing they played was the popular "Jupiter' from "The Planets.  Jupiter, the bringer of jollity was the way they described it... very beautiful!

Caryn thank you for all your "cosmic" contributions incluing your latest one on Jupiter - if I don't comment on them much it's because I have so much to learn in that area that I don't know where to start yet... but give me time :-)