The video above, and its ideas, are a kind of over-reaction that happens when people think superficially (and out of antipathy) about modern social existence. In such a case, social reality (perceived superficially and antipathetically) is like a kind of mirror. You see reflected back to you your assumptions. Once you start, for example, with the idea of Ahirman and the ahrimanic, then the mind perceives the ahrimanic everywhere. The experiment in the video is good, but does it really reveal what the creators of that video want us to think it reveals.
As a social experiment, if one wanted to be scientific, you would have to repeat it several times with several different people in advertising to see if the same result arose. You would also want ot vary the time element given to the advertising duo, to see if the effect would fade. For example, if they were asked a day later after being exposed to the image saturation, would things be different. But these are just technical starter problems.
Deeper in is the failure to really think (in the pure thinking sense of PoF) the question of evil through. The people behind the website that produced this video haven't done that. The nature of evil, and of Ahriman's role in the creation, is highly compex and not able of being represented in thought in such a simplistic fashion as the above video asserts. Steiner had to talk about evil from many many directions, and in my own work, particularly The Way of the Fool { http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/twotf.html }, I had to write several stanzas creating preliminary concepts before attempting to describe this Mystery of Evil in any detail.
One last thought: Steiner, in his lectures From Symptom to Reality in Modern History, after saying he is going to speak about the Mystery of Evil, describes evil as not at all like we assume it to be. He uses the following analogy:
Picture a train running on its tracks. The train is not evil, nor is the goal (the direction) evil, but a secondary effect of the train running on the tracks is the wearing down of the rails. This wearing down we often think of as evil.
After saying this hint (or indication) he goes on to other matters. In working with this I have discovered the following as a good example of the nature of the problem.
Consider the Seven Chakras. The four upper (heart, throat, eyebrow and crown) can be (and are) observed to a degree during many years of introspective activity. The lower three (solar plexus, sacral and base) are not so easy to experience, in part because the will element (which dominates the lower organism) is the least conscious of our three soul forces (thinking, feeling and willing). But we can know these indirectly in their influence on the astral (or desire) body in the form of appetites and needs. We need food, so we are hungry. We need sex in order to procreate and make more physcial bodies for the future to incarnate into.
Such impulses and desires are the train riding along the tracks. Without hunger and a sex drive (these are not all the appetites but they will do as examples), there is no life, and no stream of hereditary bodies for the individual spirits to incarnate in. These bodies are the rails. The rails (our bodies) get worn out by the drives which propell us through life.
In addition, there is a relationship between the life pole of the organism and the consciousness pole. Consciousness exists at the expense of life. Again, the train drives the organism (our conscious and instinctive life choices in our biography), which then wears out the life element (the rails) until we finally die.
Obviously, when any drive is immoderate, that will (like any addiction) be seen as evil. Theft driven by greed (an excess in the astral body driving one to seek power and possession), is seen as evil. Appetites out of control are seen as evil, because they wear out the life of those affected by the excess in the appetite. Keep in mind that while the above concept of train and rails appears simple, in the biography and human history we realize that this Mystery of Evil is a great deal more complicated.
Everyone who wants to follow this out more carefully in their own thinking, and as well relates these elements and impulses to matters existing in the social life of humanity, will discover through pure thinking all manner of more astute relationships than are contained in the above video.
Submitted by Jeffrey on Fri, 07/24/2009 - 12:18am.
My hunch is that the viewer of the video is being decieved for specific purposes in much the same way as the two advertising men were. I doubt any of us have access to the full truth of how and why this video was made, but it strikes me a very probable that the viewer was set up to think that the taxi drive stands in a causal relationship to what happened in the brainstorming room. There were many cues that fell out of line in odd ways. Joel cautions against taking the results too seriously without further tests. I actually don't think the "results" the video purports took place. Most of us have seen the delightful slight of hand trick in which the magician asks you to write anything you want on a pad of paper; then he unfolds the paper he had previously folded up and, WOW, it looks almost exactly like what you wrote.
You can find many reputable sources online or in libraries or acedemic journals that poke major holes in the original research regarding popcorn and soda sales.
I would push Joel's comments even further. It's not just that this video is an example of a certain kind of over-reaction; it is an example of THE over-reaction we have any time we decide to cherry pick our own personal favorite version of "reality"/evil/truth. We over dramatize, over-react, over emphasize and over generalize our supposed "research". Joel's research, no matter how valid or invalid, will only appeal to a very select group of people who already are primed to respond to a certain very specific way of talking/thinking about social issues. This is neither good nor bad. Just a fact. Now if he personalizes such reactions (for or against his work), he will make dramatic statements about how little people understand him or how off the recognized spiritual teachers of our time are or how imperative it is that his insights correct and help shape the future discourse. And, please, it's not like Joel is unique in this regard. Just take a trip into cyberspace. Or go to a few "esoteric" meetings in your town. Everybody is offering a highly specific correction or warning or key.
After you've looked at enough of them, a patterned image builds up. It's not like all of these people are dumb. No way. There is as high a percentage of extremely intelligent thought in these teachers as in any other relatively large population. As odd as it may sound, intelligence is not the issue. It's cherry picking. It's carving and controling the terms of the "debate" or issue at hand.
As long as you have a large enough set of logical terms and poetic expressions and as long as you are intelligent enough to have a relatively fluid command of language, you won't have too much problem explaining what is missing from the other teachings. You won't find it all that tough to demonstrate that you have certain keys. And there will be people primed to both gell deeply with you and to oppose you.
Ultimately it's a lonely activity. But it's archetypal. Joel is right, in my opinion, about the above video demonstrating the shadow of projection. It's always easy to see it happening in the other guy.
The mystery of evil will be taught over and over by people who offer each other desperately important corrections. Most of them are healthy enough to take a certain kind of consolation in such consistent "social" efforts.
Some are trying to teach us the relation of Obama to the incarnating Ahriman. Some the opposite. Some need us to understand complicated klakity-klacks before we can see why the next 14 months are critical to achieve flipity-flap. Other's must prove that klacity-klack is the wrong type of thinking, so they blog in complicated diagrams about such and such.
If we look at enough of these passionate researchers and relax and watch from the heart's "I" (as one person likes to put it) we can see the function of fear operating here no differently than it does on the playground when Billy is feeling sad about losing his ball to Tommy.
Oh boy, this sounds too negative, perhaps. My main point is that we can watch a video like the above either from within an assumption of fear-based isolation, or we can watch it while already enjoying the "company" of what PoF pointing to. This gives us humor and insight what is really at issue. Many wish to teach us about how humanity might not make the right esoteric/exoteric choices and will. therefore, slide off the map and require millions of more years to get back to where we are. It's just like the video.
Remember, there is not a jot of actual evidence that our current reality was suppose to look differently. Even if somebody actually converses with high and mighty being who share their sadness that humanity is not heeding there call, this is NOT evidence that we could/should have. That doesn't mean sit back stop loving joyfully, unless one is looking for excuses to continue one's dissociation from the one and only self-sustaining aspect of their actual and ongoing nature.
I write in this fashion and slop at it bit by bit because it communicates a meta-message to anybody ready to "teach" me what I am missing. The slop of my writing pattern can be reversed (and is) easily enough as its own message. Far from subliminal. But enjoy the popcorn anyway.
Submitted by Tom Last on Fri, 07/24/2009 - 12:33am.
We can do our own research as ask ourselves what is the origin of our thoughts. How many original or renewed thoughts do we have in a day? Can we identify the difference? If not, where did we pick up the thought? The Philosophy of Freedom is about being conscious.
the mystery of evil
The video above, and its ideas, are a kind of over-reaction that happens when people think superficially (and out of antipathy) about modern social existence. In such a case, social reality (perceived superficially and antipathetically) is like a kind of mirror. You see reflected back to you your assumptions. Once you start, for example, with the idea of Ahirman and the ahrimanic, then the mind perceives the ahrimanic everywhere. The experiment in the video is good, but does it really reveal what the creators of that video want us to think it reveals.
As a social experiment, if one wanted to be scientific, you would have to repeat it several times with several different people in advertising to see if the same result arose. You would also want ot vary the time element given to the advertising duo, to see if the effect would fade. For example, if they were asked a day later after being exposed to the image saturation, would things be different. But these are just technical starter problems.
Deeper in is the failure to really think (in the pure thinking sense of PoF) the question of evil through. The people behind the website that produced this video haven't done that. The nature of evil, and of Ahriman's role in the creation, is highly compex and not able of being represented in thought in such a simplistic fashion as the above video asserts. Steiner had to talk about evil from many many directions, and in my own work, particularly The Way of the Fool { http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/twotf.html }, I had to write several stanzas creating preliminary concepts before attempting to describe this Mystery of Evil in any detail.
One last thought: Steiner, in his lectures From Symptom to Reality in Modern History, after saying he is going to speak about the Mystery of Evil, describes evil as not at all like we assume it to be. He uses the following analogy:
Picture a train running on its tracks. The train is not evil, nor is the goal (the direction) evil, but a secondary effect of the train running on the tracks is the wearing down of the rails. This wearing down we often think of as evil.
After saying this hint (or indication) he goes on to other matters. In working with this I have discovered the following as a good example of the nature of the problem.
Consider the Seven Chakras. The four upper (heart, throat, eyebrow and crown) can be (and are) observed to a degree during many years of introspective activity. The lower three (solar plexus, sacral and base) are not so easy to experience, in part because the will element (which dominates the lower organism) is the least conscious of our three soul forces (thinking, feeling and willing). But we can know these indirectly in their influence on the astral (or desire) body in the form of appetites and needs. We need food, so we are hungry. We need sex in order to procreate and make more physcial bodies for the future to incarnate into.
Such impulses and desires are the train riding along the tracks. Without hunger and a sex drive (these are not all the appetites but they will do as examples), there is no life, and no stream of hereditary bodies for the individual spirits to incarnate in. These bodies are the rails. The rails (our bodies) get worn out by the drives which propell us through life.
In addition, there is a relationship between the life pole of the organism and the consciousness pole. Consciousness exists at the expense of life. Again, the train drives the organism (our conscious and instinctive life choices in our biography), which then wears out the life element (the rails) until we finally die.
Obviously, when any drive is immoderate, that will (like any addiction) be seen as evil. Theft driven by greed (an excess in the astral body driving one to seek power and possession), is seen as evil. Appetites out of control are seen as evil, because they wear out the life of those affected by the excess in the appetite. Keep in mind that while the above concept of train and rails appears simple, in the biography and human history we realize that this Mystery of Evil is a great deal more complicated.
Everyone who wants to follow this out more carefully in their own thinking, and as well relates these elements and impulses to matters existing in the social life of humanity, will discover through pure thinking all manner of more astute relationships than are contained in the above video.
joel
My hunch is that the viewer
My hunch is that the viewer of the video is being decieved for specific purposes in much the same way as the two advertising men were. I doubt any of us have access to the full truth of how and why this video was made, but it strikes me a very probable that the viewer was set up to think that the taxi drive stands in a causal relationship to what happened in the brainstorming room. There were many cues that fell out of line in odd ways. Joel cautions against taking the results too seriously without further tests. I actually don't think the "results" the video purports took place. Most of us have seen the delightful slight of hand trick in which the magician asks you to write anything you want on a pad of paper; then he unfolds the paper he had previously folded up and, WOW, it looks almost exactly like what you wrote.
You can find many reputable sources online or in libraries or acedemic journals that poke major holes in the original research regarding popcorn and soda sales.
I would push Joel's comments even further. It's not just that this video is an example of a certain kind of over-reaction; it is an example of THE over-reaction we have any time we decide to cherry pick our own personal favorite version of "reality"/evil/truth. We over dramatize, over-react, over emphasize and over generalize our supposed "research". Joel's research, no matter how valid or invalid, will only appeal to a very select group of people who already are primed to respond to a certain very specific way of talking/thinking about social issues. This is neither good nor bad. Just a fact. Now if he personalizes such reactions (for or against his work), he will make dramatic statements about how little people understand him or how off the recognized spiritual teachers of our time are or how imperative it is that his insights correct and help shape the future discourse. And, please, it's not like Joel is unique in this regard. Just take a trip into cyberspace. Or go to a few "esoteric" meetings in your town. Everybody is offering a highly specific correction or warning or key.
After you've looked at enough of them, a patterned image builds up. It's not like all of these people are dumb. No way. There is as high a percentage of extremely intelligent thought in these teachers as in any other relatively large population. As odd as it may sound, intelligence is not the issue. It's cherry picking. It's carving and controling the terms of the "debate" or issue at hand.
As long as you have a large enough set of logical terms and poetic expressions and as long as you are intelligent enough to have a relatively fluid command of language, you won't have too much problem explaining what is missing from the other teachings. You won't find it all that tough to demonstrate that you have certain keys. And there will be people primed to both gell deeply with you and to oppose you.
Ultimately it's a lonely activity. But it's archetypal. Joel is right, in my opinion, about the above video demonstrating the shadow of projection. It's always easy to see it happening in the other guy.
The mystery of evil will be taught over and over by people who offer each other desperately important corrections. Most of them are healthy enough to take a certain kind of consolation in such consistent "social" efforts.
Some are trying to teach us the relation of Obama to the incarnating Ahriman. Some the opposite. Some need us to understand complicated klakity-klacks before we can see why the next 14 months are critical to achieve flipity-flap. Other's must prove that klacity-klack is the wrong type of thinking, so they blog in complicated diagrams about such and such.
If we look at enough of these passionate researchers and relax and watch from the heart's "I" (as one person likes to put it) we can see the function of fear operating here no differently than it does on the playground when Billy is feeling sad about losing his ball to Tommy.
Oh boy, this sounds too negative, perhaps. My main point is that we can watch a video like the above either from within an assumption of fear-based isolation, or we can watch it while already enjoying the "company" of what PoF pointing to. This gives us humor and insight what is really at issue. Many wish to teach us about how humanity might not make the right esoteric/exoteric choices and will. therefore, slide off the map and require millions of more years to get back to where we are. It's just like the video.
Remember, there is not a jot of actual evidence that our current reality was suppose to look differently. Even if somebody actually converses with high and mighty being who share their sadness that humanity is not heeding there call, this is NOT evidence that we could/should have. That doesn't mean sit back stop loving joyfully, unless one is looking for excuses to continue one's dissociation from the one and only self-sustaining aspect of their actual and ongoing nature.
I write in this fashion and slop at it bit by bit because it communicates a meta-message to anybody ready to "teach" me what I am missing. The slop of my writing pattern can be reversed (and is) easily enough as its own message. Far from subliminal. But enjoy the popcorn anyway.
We can do our own research
We can do our own research as ask ourselves what is the origin of our thoughts. How many original or renewed thoughts do we have in a day? Can we identify the difference? If not, where did we pick up the thought? The Philosophy of Freedom is about being conscious.
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