I also loved this one, Stewart. The principle you laid out seems to suggest something about human relationships but I am having trouble making it clear to myself beyond ham-fisted generalizations. Can you offer any thoughts on this question?
We require the capacity to HOLD warmth within us and not simply release it back. An inner climate that we can control. Almost like how a fruit is able to swell up with sugars, we need to be able to hold in the photosynthesized grace. If we cannot, we are like a tomato with "blossom end rot" where any sugars entering the fruit just fuel a voracious process of putrefaction and sap the entire plant of energy (you should always pluck off any tomatoes with blossom end rot!). To me, that is Jupiter (an inner atmosphere), while Saturn is warmth that we are able to retain. When Steiner says when we eat a fruit we're eating Jupiter and Saturn -- he's not kidding!
There are ways of rupturing the soul -- trauma, drugs, running from guilt (owning one's deeds), and other vices. But if we can't maintain an inner atmosphere different from our environment, we also can't radiate warmth to it. Imagine something like a solar oven or a magnifying glass -- if we can concentrate and direct the light that enters us, we can actually increase warmth around us. But if we have no "thermal mass" we can't do this. In my greenhouse we have IBC totes full of water. They warm up during the day and radiate warmth all night so I need no other artificial source of heat for germinating plants. A desert, by contrast, has no thermal mass and quickly heats and cools. If I had empty IBC totes in my greenhouse, they wouldn't do much good! Moreover, if the greenhouse fabric were torn too much, all the heat would quickly radiate out. Because my greenhouse is able to absorb more warmth during the day, it's able to GIVE more warmth at night. I don't know what water is in this analogy for the soul -- perhaps the etheric? A devitalized vitiated soul has very little buffer or reservoir in which astral light can be accumulated.
A yogi that starves himself becomes "naked" in the presence of the astral world, but generally this is an impotent process: he cannot bring it with him into everyday life. He must remain in a state of deprivation and cannot bring sweet fruits to the world through his own actions.
If I were to build a thermophilic (hot) compost pile in my greenhouse, that's a different story: then I take "cold" plants and pile them up until they create their own *inner warmth* that is more than the sun imparted today. I consider this compost pile to be the accumulation of experiences (good and bad) and the lessons they can impart, assuming we don't keep tossing out everything unpleasant. If we can't tolerate keeping our experiences, then we can't build a compost pile or generate inner warmth either.
I appreciate your question, but I don't feel like I'm answering it. Or maybe I am, but should just write another post haha
My instinct is to take a brief detour through the gunas:
Tamas - Cold (pure taking)
Rajas - Cold mixed with Warmth (giving and taking)
Sattva - Warmth (pure giving)
The cold reptilian soul approaches sources of warmth but only to absorb them -- incapable of giving warmth, it moves from warm stone to warm stone. In the human relationships, this is moving from the warmth of a new relationship to another (and another and another...) merely following what is comfortable. Specifically, pursuing what is externally warming. Tamasic personalities (or reptilian) are quintessentially criminal types. They may be rich or they may be poor, but their defining characteristic is taking -- or absorbing warmth. This is the realm of "might makes right" -- the amoral realm of "it feels good, so do it." Tamas is about immediate pleasure. Entitlement. Little to no patience, no planning, little tact, and rarely any graciousness. These are parasitic personalities. The best they know how to be is giving of what they have stolen. A generous thief is not really generous.
Rajas is a mixed bag of striving. When the tamasic thief has accumulated enough ill-earned mammon, suddenly he finds himself concerned with maintaining and protecting his kingdom. Rajas can thus be born out of Tamas. This is the "middle class" of the spiritual world. They work to supply, but they are contradictory. The tamasic person is consistently criminal -- they always take what doesn't belong to them and always expect more. But the rajasic personality does this less consistently: the middle-class soul is kind and doting to his grandchildren, but vicious to his neighbors. This is the world of "an eye for an eye" -- tit for tat. Pay to play. This is dominated by the ideas of delayed gratification for the sake of worldly gain. I grow a tomato, no matter how unpleasant it is tending the plant along the way. Work. This space is dominated by civility -- but only to a point, and only to one's identity group (or customers!). These judge others as incompetent or lazy (and they may be right).
Sattva is someone who has lived long enough to amass treasure -- even if just the treasure of wisdom born from experience. The Sattvic personality is pure generosity and graciousness. This person gives out of what has been accumulated, and does so indiscriminately because he knows that what he received was never really his in the first place. Considered karmically, this person gives things away knowing that everything he sends forth returns multiplied. The rajasic person, having gained an empire, sees that there's no way to maintain it in future lives *except to give it all away*. All three gunas seek reward. Tamas: immediate gratification; rajas: delayed gratification (kingdoms, wealth); sattva delayed gratification (treasures in heaven).
So back to warmth and cold: if I am only warm when I'm around other warm people, I'm a chameleon. This is someone who is blown about by every external condition and by other people's moods. It is a cold-blooded soul who requires warm company to radiate warmth. This person *seems* active, but it is only a kind of reflection -- there is always a sluggishness or reluctance to being tolerant, forgiving, or taking a charitable reading of something. They prefer to read everything around them as malice -- which, of course, is really a sign of their own malice.
By contrast, a rajasic personality is perhaps not entirely reptilian (maybe it's more like a chicken with cold scaly legs but a warm body), but cold towards strangers and warm to one's own "clan."
The sattvic personality, though, comes to treat all as their "clan" even their own enemies. Such a person, one might say, has become an "etheric star."
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect."
A lukewarm personality is someone who is not particularly bothered by anything. They may seem to be sad or mad, but it's superficial. They are really just expressing what's happening around them, swept up in social hysterias because they are dead. ("Let the dead bury their own dead.") Lukewarmness is spiritual *death.* When the plant becomes too much like soil? Fungus. When the soil becomes too much like the cosmos? Beet nematodes (this dynamic discussed in part 2). Those are both (sort of) examples of lukewarmness to me.
Lukewarmness is if my soul has no resistance mechanism to the outer world -- I simply *become* those conditions without modification. Steiner says (somewhere) that if we hand back sense-impressions untransformed, we do a great disservice to the elemental world. It is not our task to sense and immediately react, but to sense, contain the stimulated feeling, then allow a thought to arise from that difficult process of emotional continence -- and only THEN make a thoughtful decision (to "think our willing and will our thinking" as Steiner puts it, or as St. Augustine describes believing as "to think with assent"). If I am cold, it means I am HUNGRY for warmth. If I am warm, it means I am giving warmth. But if I am lukewarm, I'm neither hungry nor giving and therefore not motivated to do much of anything of my own initiative. I'm trying to imagine an analogy... but a reptile is cold enough it can evolve into something else: it's hungry for warmth. But evolutionary dead ends are species that become (so to speak) "complacent" within a narrow set of conditions, not wanting anything more nor fostering new diversity around them: neither hot, nor cold. A honeybee, by contrast, fosters indiscriminately all kinds of diversity in its warmth. A pine tree, though it hosts many birds, makes inhospitable soil for anything but more pine trees. An oak tree, though it thrives healthily in monoculture, creates such a beautiful soil around itself that dozens of species of trees will flourish. Maybe the way to say it is that Desire drives evolution. If Desire dies out into complacency, there is lukewarmness and an evolutionary dead end? These are just my thoughts as I'm thinking them.
Someone who can't pause between a sense-impression and an action is spiritually dead -- incapable of freedom. The only way such a person can be quickened to life is by examples of unmerited grace. They won't even appreciate it at the time -- and God help you if you try to be kind to an egotist. Kindness to an egotist is appreciated at the time only because it provides immediate relief. But as soon as that ego regains its pride, that appreciation instantly sours into resentment. Those who need help will invariably resent the help we give. Those who would appreciate help rarely need it. There's no space for "moral desserts" AND YET we must be like the Sower and live through the "folly of preaching" -- praying that seeds fall on rich soil and not withholding because of judgment of the quality of the soul in front of us. Moreover, enough seeds growing and dying in a spot is note entirely fruitless: this is the basis of fertility over time.
A reptile at least knows to move itself *into* warmth and *out* of warmth if the sun is too intense. But a corpse just sits there, warming up like a stone with no ability to maintain "disequilibrium." It's a hard saying, but this is the state of someone living in "mortal" error. They literally cannot quicken themselves to life. They do not have freedom of thought, feeling, or willing. It is a horrifying place to be. Because once one wakens from it and reflects on one's life (as I myself can do) most of my thoughts, feelings, and actions have been a lukewarm repetition of what was done to me.
If I am only warm to someone when they are first warm to me, that's not genuine warmth but a reflected "lunar" warmth. By contrast, if I am luminous, generous, and magnanimous to people I know can never repay me, then we are bordering on becoming a radiant star -- a source of new life for a deadened world. If I can transmute any sensory experience (pleasant or unpleasant) into a motivation for warmth, that's almost sainthood. A truly sattvic personality can make a tamasic person feel incredibly warm, and if the sattvic person is genuinely detached from receiving warmth back in kind, who knows? Grace may ignite a spark within the reptilian soul and suddenly it sprouts wings. Such a transmuted soul may not fly much higher than a chicken at first, but even the foolishness of a chicken is wiser than the virtues of a lizard.
I also loved this one, Stewart. The principle you laid out seems to suggest something about human relationships but I am having trouble making it clear to myself beyond ham-fisted generalizations. Can you offer any thoughts on this question?
We require the capacity to HOLD warmth within us and not simply release it back. An inner climate that we can control. Almost like how a fruit is able to swell up with sugars, we need to be able to hold in the photosynthesized grace. If we cannot, we are like a tomato with "blossom end rot" where any sugars entering the fruit just fuel a voracious process of putrefaction and sap the entire plant of energy (you should always pluck off any tomatoes with blossom end rot!). To me, that is Jupiter (an inner atmosphere), while Saturn is warmth that we are able to retain. When Steiner says when we eat a fruit we're eating Jupiter and Saturn -- he's not kidding!
There are ways of rupturing the soul -- trauma, drugs, running from guilt (owning one's deeds), and other vices. But if we can't maintain an inner atmosphere different from our environment, we also can't radiate warmth to it. Imagine something like a solar oven or a magnifying glass -- if we can concentrate and direct the light that enters us, we can actually increase warmth around us. But if we have no "thermal mass" we can't do this. In my greenhouse we have IBC totes full of water. They warm up during the day and radiate warmth all night so I need no other artificial source of heat for germinating plants. A desert, by contrast, has no thermal mass and quickly heats and cools. If I had empty IBC totes in my greenhouse, they wouldn't do much good! Moreover, if the greenhouse fabric were torn too much, all the heat would quickly radiate out. Because my greenhouse is able to absorb more warmth during the day, it's able to GIVE more warmth at night. I don't know what water is in this analogy for the soul -- perhaps the etheric? A devitalized vitiated soul has very little buffer or reservoir in which astral light can be accumulated.
A yogi that starves himself becomes "naked" in the presence of the astral world, but generally this is an impotent process: he cannot bring it with him into everyday life. He must remain in a state of deprivation and cannot bring sweet fruits to the world through his own actions.
If I were to build a thermophilic (hot) compost pile in my greenhouse, that's a different story: then I take "cold" plants and pile them up until they create their own *inner warmth* that is more than the sun imparted today. I consider this compost pile to be the accumulation of experiences (good and bad) and the lessons they can impart, assuming we don't keep tossing out everything unpleasant. If we can't tolerate keeping our experiences, then we can't build a compost pile or generate inner warmth either.
I appreciate your question, but I don't feel like I'm answering it. Or maybe I am, but should just write another post haha
Maybe it's just that love is always of one's own free initiative. And a loveless relationship is dead?
My instinct is to take a brief detour through the gunas:
Tamas - Cold (pure taking)
Rajas - Cold mixed with Warmth (giving and taking)
Sattva - Warmth (pure giving)
The cold reptilian soul approaches sources of warmth but only to absorb them -- incapable of giving warmth, it moves from warm stone to warm stone. In the human relationships, this is moving from the warmth of a new relationship to another (and another and another...) merely following what is comfortable. Specifically, pursuing what is externally warming. Tamasic personalities (or reptilian) are quintessentially criminal types. They may be rich or they may be poor, but their defining characteristic is taking -- or absorbing warmth. This is the realm of "might makes right" -- the amoral realm of "it feels good, so do it." Tamas is about immediate pleasure. Entitlement. Little to no patience, no planning, little tact, and rarely any graciousness. These are parasitic personalities. The best they know how to be is giving of what they have stolen. A generous thief is not really generous.
Rajas is a mixed bag of striving. When the tamasic thief has accumulated enough ill-earned mammon, suddenly he finds himself concerned with maintaining and protecting his kingdom. Rajas can thus be born out of Tamas. This is the "middle class" of the spiritual world. They work to supply, but they are contradictory. The tamasic person is consistently criminal -- they always take what doesn't belong to them and always expect more. But the rajasic personality does this less consistently: the middle-class soul is kind and doting to his grandchildren, but vicious to his neighbors. This is the world of "an eye for an eye" -- tit for tat. Pay to play. This is dominated by the ideas of delayed gratification for the sake of worldly gain. I grow a tomato, no matter how unpleasant it is tending the plant along the way. Work. This space is dominated by civility -- but only to a point, and only to one's identity group (or customers!). These judge others as incompetent or lazy (and they may be right).
Sattva is someone who has lived long enough to amass treasure -- even if just the treasure of wisdom born from experience. The Sattvic personality is pure generosity and graciousness. This person gives out of what has been accumulated, and does so indiscriminately because he knows that what he received was never really his in the first place. Considered karmically, this person gives things away knowing that everything he sends forth returns multiplied. The rajasic person, having gained an empire, sees that there's no way to maintain it in future lives *except to give it all away*. All three gunas seek reward. Tamas: immediate gratification; rajas: delayed gratification (kingdoms, wealth); sattva delayed gratification (treasures in heaven).
So back to warmth and cold: if I am only warm when I'm around other warm people, I'm a chameleon. This is someone who is blown about by every external condition and by other people's moods. It is a cold-blooded soul who requires warm company to radiate warmth. This person *seems* active, but it is only a kind of reflection -- there is always a sluggishness or reluctance to being tolerant, forgiving, or taking a charitable reading of something. They prefer to read everything around them as malice -- which, of course, is really a sign of their own malice.
By contrast, a rajasic personality is perhaps not entirely reptilian (maybe it's more like a chicken with cold scaly legs but a warm body), but cold towards strangers and warm to one's own "clan."
The sattvic personality, though, comes to treat all as their "clan" even their own enemies. Such a person, one might say, has become an "etheric star."
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect."
A lukewarm personality is someone who is not particularly bothered by anything. They may seem to be sad or mad, but it's superficial. They are really just expressing what's happening around them, swept up in social hysterias because they are dead. ("Let the dead bury their own dead.") Lukewarmness is spiritual *death.* When the plant becomes too much like soil? Fungus. When the soil becomes too much like the cosmos? Beet nematodes (this dynamic discussed in part 2). Those are both (sort of) examples of lukewarmness to me.
Lukewarmness is if my soul has no resistance mechanism to the outer world -- I simply *become* those conditions without modification. Steiner says (somewhere) that if we hand back sense-impressions untransformed, we do a great disservice to the elemental world. It is not our task to sense and immediately react, but to sense, contain the stimulated feeling, then allow a thought to arise from that difficult process of emotional continence -- and only THEN make a thoughtful decision (to "think our willing and will our thinking" as Steiner puts it, or as St. Augustine describes believing as "to think with assent"). If I am cold, it means I am HUNGRY for warmth. If I am warm, it means I am giving warmth. But if I am lukewarm, I'm neither hungry nor giving and therefore not motivated to do much of anything of my own initiative. I'm trying to imagine an analogy... but a reptile is cold enough it can evolve into something else: it's hungry for warmth. But evolutionary dead ends are species that become (so to speak) "complacent" within a narrow set of conditions, not wanting anything more nor fostering new diversity around them: neither hot, nor cold. A honeybee, by contrast, fosters indiscriminately all kinds of diversity in its warmth. A pine tree, though it hosts many birds, makes inhospitable soil for anything but more pine trees. An oak tree, though it thrives healthily in monoculture, creates such a beautiful soil around itself that dozens of species of trees will flourish. Maybe the way to say it is that Desire drives evolution. If Desire dies out into complacency, there is lukewarmness and an evolutionary dead end? These are just my thoughts as I'm thinking them.
Someone who can't pause between a sense-impression and an action is spiritually dead -- incapable of freedom. The only way such a person can be quickened to life is by examples of unmerited grace. They won't even appreciate it at the time -- and God help you if you try to be kind to an egotist. Kindness to an egotist is appreciated at the time only because it provides immediate relief. But as soon as that ego regains its pride, that appreciation instantly sours into resentment. Those who need help will invariably resent the help we give. Those who would appreciate help rarely need it. There's no space for "moral desserts" AND YET we must be like the Sower and live through the "folly of preaching" -- praying that seeds fall on rich soil and not withholding because of judgment of the quality of the soul in front of us. Moreover, enough seeds growing and dying in a spot is note entirely fruitless: this is the basis of fertility over time.
A reptile at least knows to move itself *into* warmth and *out* of warmth if the sun is too intense. But a corpse just sits there, warming up like a stone with no ability to maintain "disequilibrium." It's a hard saying, but this is the state of someone living in "mortal" error. They literally cannot quicken themselves to life. They do not have freedom of thought, feeling, or willing. It is a horrifying place to be. Because once one wakens from it and reflects on one's life (as I myself can do) most of my thoughts, feelings, and actions have been a lukewarm repetition of what was done to me.
If I am only warm to someone when they are first warm to me, that's not genuine warmth but a reflected "lunar" warmth. By contrast, if I am luminous, generous, and magnanimous to people I know can never repay me, then we are bordering on becoming a radiant star -- a source of new life for a deadened world. If I can transmute any sensory experience (pleasant or unpleasant) into a motivation for warmth, that's almost sainthood. A truly sattvic personality can make a tamasic person feel incredibly warm, and if the sattvic person is genuinely detached from receiving warmth back in kind, who knows? Grace may ignite a spark within the reptilian soul and suddenly it sprouts wings. Such a transmuted soul may not fly much higher than a chicken at first, but even the foolishness of a chicken is wiser than the virtues of a lizard.
Thank you, Stewart! I am still wondering about this but you have given me lost to think about