Hi Berserk

Your worthy comments and imput into this subject is appreciated.

I understand what Swendenborg is saying and can offer further clarification on this stage of Man's history from the research that Steiner has done.  

The question that will take many further questions; is - Illusion of memory.  Illusion - what is Illusion and what is real in the Mind of Man?  

For now I would like to seperate Reincarnation from Illusion in my reply.  Reincarnation, according to Steiner is not an Illusion.

The Illusion aspect comes from a period in our history called 'the old moon period' as told below-

A new era in human evolution started during the 15th century - intellectual thinking developed. Before the 15th century people were thinking in a different way.

Their thinking was very vivid and concrete, immediately bound up with the objects of the world around them.  They were more bound up with the feelings and will impulses that can be experienced in the human soul.

We today are inclined to think with the intellect and we have come to believe that people have always been thinking like this.

Before the 15th century; man's soul was active in a way that was definitely dreamlike, consisting of dream images.  Today when our soul is active in thought we find ourselves isolated within the world - the world outside us has its own processes.  We see the clouds, we think about them, but we do not feel that the powers alive in the clouds are also alive in our thinking.

The human ancestor said 'I am part of the universe; the power that pulses within me as I evolve images is the same power that is alive and active in the forming of clouds. He felt himself part of the existing world; he knew that this existing world contained more than just abstract forces of nature.  He knew that power was also wielded by enitities that differed from human beings, entities that did not have a physical body such as the human body was at that stage of evolution. The human beings felt that they had citizenry of the universe in common with these entities; he felt himself to be in communion with the entities and nature spirits.

For the human ancestor it was natural for him to say what happened outside himself was of the will impulses of the spirits.
Today we say the earth attracts the bodies that are on it due to the law of gravity; this is our law of nature.  When we speak of nature we base ourselves on such abstract notions. The human ancestor knew that an essential spiritual element was present in the phenomenon we have made into an abstract gravitational force.

The human ancestor period is called the Old Moon stage of our evolution.  What was it that made human beings grow independent of the guidance of spirits which whom they had felt at one?

Now we need to have a firm grasp of this change in human development.  This development happened when the mineral kingdom became part of human nature.  In those far distant times, human beings did not yet have the mineral knigdom with them.  Their organisation would not have been perceptible to our present-day sense organs.

(It must be understood when we say the intellect develop at the 15th c. this has been millennia of evolution)

To grasp this development we need to consider what it truly means when an organism includes the mineral kingdom.  We look at a mineral, a stone, and quite rightly consider it to be the way it presents itself to our observation.  Then however, we look at a plant in exactly the same way we look at a stone.  In reality it is not the actual plant we see.  A plant is really something entirely beyond sensory perception.

Consider a system of forces that in a sense has the quality of an image.  Its relationship to the mineral kingdom is that this otherwise invisible organisation soaks up the mineral kingdom and the forces that are active between individual component elements in the kingdom.

I have a plant before me.  It is an invisible system of forces that absorbs mineral principles from the mineral kingdom.  The result is that the mineral aspect occupies the space also occupied by the invisible system of forces.  I see this mineral aspect, though it is merely something the plant, which is not preceptible to the senses, has absorbed.  When we talk about plants today we are really talking only of the mineral contained within them and not about the plants themselves.

It is important that we clearly understand this in the case of a plant, for it also applies to animals and humans, only more so.

Based on the fact that human beings have received a mineral body into them; as evolution progressed the mineral human body provided the basis for intellectual thinking.The mineral kingdom had the function to transform this pre-earthly form of thinking into our earthly way of forming ideas on the basis of thought.

Within the great scheme of things the spirits with whom human beings had to feel themselves connected, in forming those ideas that were images in the distant past, were then relieved of their function.  We will have to picture those spirits rather differently from the way we are accustomed to picture non-human entities.

Now; the spirits who influenced the thinking in images which human beings had at the time of the Old Moon lost that function in the normal progress of human evolution but are not prepared to accept this with good grace.

We might ask why they do not submit to the will of the gods who guide normal progress.  They simply do not.  We have to accept this as a fact. These spirits are refered as luciferic spirits.  They are constantly trying to influence our thoughts and make them dependent on impulses similar to those that existed in pre-earthly times (pre-mineral that is) Also on the one hand mankind is open to luciferic influences and on the other to ahrimanic spirit influences (ahrimanic spirit influences arose from further development and may be discussed at a later stage)

Therefore it is necessary for us to tear ourselves away from our subjective feelings and be objective.
We shall not be able to attain to the higher worlds and the knowledge to be gained there if we do not train ourselves in rigid adherence to the facts of the external world.  If we do not do so the luciferic element will enter into our thinking.

Okay a brief history of our development. Thanks to Rudolf Steiner.  Which corresponds more or less to what Swedenborg is saying.  Do you agree Beserk?

So .. Illusion, what is real and what is illusionary?
I know the luciferic, and the ahrimanic, spirits live in the Astral regions (see my posting of 'understanding the astral realm' under the topic Seances) and we must be careful of any information coming from this region.

But, Steiner further tells us that now our intellectual thinking has developed (to include our Ego) we now have to awaken our previous state of being in communion with the Spiritual spirits.

The Spiritual spirits are not the luciferic spirits of the past.  The Spiritual spirits have always existed, the luciferic spirits were only a part of a stage of evolution.

Reincarnation is not part of this illusionary dilemma.

So the question is ... what is an illusionary spirit and what is a Spiritual spirit?

This is the point where I am in my studies (I study by myself with no groups, organisations etc.)

eh .. it is complex to be sure!  Berserk your thoughts?  


Love.