CONTENTS

1. Spiritual Science

2. Conscious Participation

3. Spiritual Being

4. Meditation


SPIRIT


Spiritual Science

What we must come to understand is the following. If you look at the needle of a compass, you discover that one end always points more or less to the north, while the other end points to the south. If you want to explain this, you don’t look to the needle but to the whole Earth. It would be ridiculous to try to explain the behaviour of the compass needle by looking for the cause in the needle itself. The position of the needle cannot be understood unless you know the needle’s relationship to the whole Earth.

For many people, however, what is nonsense with regard to a compass needle makes perfect sense in relation to other things. For example, take a beet growing in the ground. It makes no sense to restrict our attention to the narrow confines of the physical beet, if its growth actually depends on countless conditions present not only on the Earth but also in the cosmos. People today explain all kinds of things, and also arrange their practical affairs, as if they were dealing only with self-contained entities, and not with influences coming from the entire universe.

We have to commit ourselves to a much broader way of looking at the life of plants and animals, and also at the life of the Earth itself. We must widen our outlook to include the cosmos. When we look at what makes our life on Earth physically possible– in other words, at agriculture – we need to look a bit farther than we are accustomed to nowadays .

We have seen that in order to arrive at spiritual-scientific methods applicable to agriculture, we need to look at nature, and the spirit’s activity in nature, in its entirety, in its most encompassing dimensions. Materialistic scientists, on the other hand have increasingly tended to narrow their scope and investigate ever more minute entities, the microscopic level so often being the focus. But it is impossible to assess the world of human beings and other living things solely from such narrow perspectives. The way current science deals with the realities of agriculture is equivalent to trying to reconstruct the totality of a human being from just a little finger or an earlobe. Today there is an absolutely urgent need to counteract this tendency with a genuine science that can encompass the large-scale cosmic interrelationships.

Spiritual science enters into practical life and is obliged to consider life’s larger relationships and to investigate not just the forces and substances that are crudely material, but also those that are more spiritual. This certainly applies to agriculture.

                    - Rudolf Steiner. Extract: Agriculture.




Spiritual Science



What is spiritual science? Perhaps one needs first to ask what is science?

We are free to define science any way we wish, as long as we are consistent. We may define science simply as knowledge, in which case it is possible to have a spiritual science. On the other hand we may define it as empirical-sensory knowledge, instrumentally validated, in which case spirituality becomes non-scientific. If we take the second option then one of two options is available:

1.                   view spirituality as a form of personal faith, belief and values not open to scientific scrutiny;

2.                 view spirituality as non-scientific in the purely pejorative sense, as a superstition, or a purely private fantasy or delusional or emotional affair, not deserving of the title of knowledge.

Perhaps we need to go a little further and distinguish between the method of science and the domain of science. The method of science refers to the ways or means that whatever we call science manages to gather facts, data, or information, and manages to confirm or refute propositions vis a vis the data. The domain simply refers to the types of events or phenomena that become, or can become, objects of investigation by whatever it is we mean by science. Thus method refers to the epistemology of science, while domain refers to its ontology.

So, instead of asking 'What is science? ', we first ask 'What is scientific method? 'and 'What is scientific domain?'. As for scientific method, general science texts seem to be in agreement: a method of gaining knowledge whereby hypothesis are tested ( instrumentally or experimentally) by reference to experience (data) that is potentially public, or open to repetition (confirmation or refutation) by peers.

Notice that this definition makes no reference to the domain or objects of the scientific method. If there is a way to test a knowledge-claim in whatever domain by appeal to open experience, then that knowledge can legitimately be called scientific. The definition does not specify that only sensory or physical objects are open to scientific investigation. There is nothing in that definition that prevents us from legitimately applying the term scientific to certain specifiable knowledge-claims in the realms or domains of psychology, history, sociology or spirituality.

The point is that because the definition concerns only method and makes no reference to object-domains, the dividing line between scientific  and non-scientific is not between physical and metaphysical; the dividing line is between experientially testable and non-testable (or merely dogmatic) pronouncements, the former being exposed to confirmation/ refutation based on open experience, the latter being on evidence no more substantial than the because I- told- you- so variety. If science were restricted to physical-sensory object-domains, then mathematics, logic, psychology and sociology could not be called scientific.

To return to the question, does spirituality deserve the title of knowledge, does it deserve the status of scientific knowledge? Are spiritual phenomena such that they can become a proper domain for the scientific method? Dr Steiner assures us that these domains are open to scientific investigation because these domains are open to experiential disclosure. There is spiritual experience just as surely as there is psychological experience and sensory experience. In this sense we can speak of spiritual science just as legitimately as we can speak of the science of psychology, biology or physics.

By spiritual experience, it is meant the direct apprehension, in consciousness, of the phenomena of the soul and spirit. The central features of these domains are not only experienced, they are public, because consciousness can be trained to apprehend those domains, and a trained consciousness is a public or intersubjective consciousness, or it couldn’t be trained in the first place. Simply because spiritual experience is apprehended in an interior milieu does not mean it is merely private knowledge, any more than the fact that mathematics and logic are seen inwardly, by the mind’s eye, makes them merely private fantasies without public import. Mathematical knowledge is public knowledge to all equally trained mathematicians; just so, contemplative knowledge is public knowledge to all equally trained contemplatives.

The works of Rudolf Steiner contain method and experiment, which, if followed correctly, disclose to consciousness data that may be confirmed or refuted by equally trained peers just as geometric theorems can be checked with other equally trained mathematicians.