Heart Thinking & the Consciousness Soul

[Bruce Michael]

Hi All,
We are living in an age where we need to develop the Consciousness Soul. What does living "in the Consciousness Soul" mean?

You could start by reading chapter one of "Theosophy" part four. You still might be in the dark, though.

Chapter I: 4. Body, Soul and Spirit

There is another aspect to the Consciousness (or Spiritual) soul, and that is the importance of individuals making free decisions, being "true to oneself". This is a theme in Steiner's "Philosophy of Spiritual Activity", but really a theme for the whole of Anthroposophy.

Dr. Steiner defined Anthroposophy itself as a living out of the Consciousness Soul. (See definition in Awakening to Community.)
Steiner was careful when giving advice to present facts and let people decide for themselves.

We are capable of making our own good decisions out of the Consciousness Soul, because through it we attain to the Eternal Spirit, the True and the Good - see "Theosophy". That gives us the power to make our own "moral imaginations".

This ability is a fairly new one bestowed upon Man, and still, as they say on a lot of websites, "under construction".

The other aspect is the direct spiritual intuitions a student may have, which are not just a result of intellectualising or study. Here one must talk of Manas or Spirit Self as well as Consciousness Soul (Quotes from "Theosophy".)

"The "I" lives in the soul. Although the highest manifestation of the "I" belongs to the Consciousness Soul, one must, nevertheless, say that this "I" raying out from it fills the whole soul, and through it exerts its action upon the body."

The "I" is the highest expression of Consciousness Soul- it could be called an "over-ego". (My old copy of "Theosophy" refers to the Intellectual Soul as "Kama Manas".)


Continuing:

"The spirit forming and living as "I" will be called spirit self because it manifests as the "I," or ego, or self of man. The difference between the spirit self and the consciousness soul can be made clear in the following way. The consciousness soul is in touch with the self-existent truth that is independent of all antipathy and sympathy. The spirit self bears within it the same truth, but taken up into and enclosed by the "I," individualized by it, and absorbed into the independent being of the individual. It is through the eternal truth becoming thus individualized and bound up into one being with the "I" that the "I" itself attains to the eternal."

"The spirit self is a revelation of the spiritual world within the "I," just as from the other side sensations are a revelation of the physical world within the "I". In what is red, green, light, dark, hard, soft, warm, cold one recognizes the revelations of the corporeal world. In what is true and good are to be found the revelations of the spiritual world. In the same sense in which the revelation of the corporeal world is called sensation, let the revelation of the spiritual be called intuition."

In order to understand anything of an esoteric character it is essential to be adept in both intellect and imagination. Reasoning alone, will not bring to life the spiritual realities in the soul. Not everyone is so gifted as to be able to imagine and reason well at the same time, but numbers will grow in time. I suppose you could call it "heart thinking."


-Br.Bruce

[Neemai]

Originally Posted by Bruce Michael

Continuing:In order to understand anything of an esoteric character it is essential to be adept in both intellect and imagination. Reasoning alone, will not bring to life the spiritual realities in the soul.

I like that. There is saying along similar lines by Rabindranath Tagore which Srila Prabhupada often quotes:

"Religion without philosophy is sentiment, or sometimes fanaticism, while philosophy without religion is mental speculation."


... Neemai

[Bruce Michael]

Originally Posted by Neemai

I like that. There is saying along similar lines by Rabindranath Tagore which Srila Prabhupada often quotes:

"Religion without philosophy is sentiment, or sometimes fanaticism, while philosophy without religion is mental speculation."


... Neemai

Hi Neemai,
Reasoning is the masculine aspect and imagination the feminine.

When do we ever purely think, purely feel or purely will? It is always a matter of cooperation between faculties.

Steiner uses the work "thinking" in a specific way. What is spoken of colloquially as "thinking" is not thinking but a parade of ideas.

There is a statement by Dr. Steiner that animals don't think- considered controversial by some. Steiner did admit that animals deliberate. Even a wasp deliberates or a beetle which really doesn't have much that you could call a brain, deliberates. The great wisdom that a beaver displays in constructing dams, lodges and canals to transport logs, is something that the beast "sucks in" from outside of itself- from the Cosmos according to Steiner. But still this must also require some deliberation by the animal itself.

The difference between the animal and the human being is that the human reasons in full waking consciousness. The human being is not stuck in one area of reasoned thought that goes around and around- like a beaver building dams season after season. Of course, some are stuck on this merry-go-round. It really is just a matter of semantics though, and I quite understand if most people want to believe that animals think.

The conditions of driving a manual car and "automatically" changing gears, or "automatically" touch typing as you read a text don't really come under the heading of "thinking". In fact if you become conscious of your fingers moving to each key one by one you slow right down- so thinking about the process doesn't help.

There are other ways of knowing besides thinking. In fact human beings in the ancient past had an instinctual knowing that enabled them to build civilisations that rivalled own in technological marvels.

In the realm of thinking we can become conscious, in the feeling life we live in a dream and in willing we are in a deep sleep. That is why we have the capacity for freedom in thinking. We are also vulnerable to attack as well, something we are protected from in the feeling realm. This attack comes from Satan/Ahriman and its result is intellectuallism- divorced from real life.

I do believe that viewing the human being as a lot of fragmented parts is fundamentally wrong to begin with- an unhealthy soul conception. We are (or should be) after all, a functioning whole.

Divisions of the human being are made for the purposes of scientific study. We pull apart the butterfly to see how it works. There are always flaws in this approach to study, in that each part works in with the other as an organic whole.

-Br.Bruce