Anthroposophy & other esoterics

[vijaya]

I'm currently reading the book The Secret History Of The World by Jonathan Black, and it is, for lack of a more descriptive comprehensive phrase; weird as hell. It's suppose to be the history of humanity and the universe according to the great esoteric traditions (which Black calls the 'Mystery school'); which is apparently a weird mystic evolution and devolution of forms of matter influenced by the shenanigans of the spirit world. It asks the reader to question the supremecy of our current materialistic world view by way of comparing it to the completely different world view of the ancients.

I've not finished reading it, and at some points it's hard to know whether he's being objective or he is suggesting that these events actually happened, and thus making it hard to take. Rudolf Steiner is somebody mentioned fairly frequently as perhaps esoteric mysticisms most notable modern proponent, making me do extra reading online about Steiner's philosophy anthroposophy.

What are people's views on esoteric traditions and mystical experiences/movements? Are they delusion and phantasy, or are there elements of truth? Are we more than we know? Is this great Existential Age simply a stage in the evolution of the human mind, as Steiner suggests, soon to be replaced by a more spiritual dimension of mind?

Just curious :)

[argeiphontes]

Well, it seems to me that the fundamental problem is that any spiritual or gnostic element to humans doesn't imply the existence of an objective spiritual realm. There's almost (http://www.sheldrake.org/homepage.html) nothing (http://www.deanradin.com/evidence/evidence.htm) that would indicate otherwise, except the (sometimes) apparent psychoid (http://www.academia.edu/217174/A_Unitary_World_the_Brain_and_its_Place_in_Jungs_P sychoid_Reality) nature (http://paulijungunusmundus.eu/synw/pauli_parapsychology_p3.htm) of reality (http://books.google.com/books?id=gO-BKdRnvgoC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false). Having had a couple of interesting experiences along these lines myself, I'm not too quick to write them off. (OK, they were more than interesting, they were uncanny correlations between thought states and objective physical phenomena that would probably put Jung's famous scarab example to shame.)

Still, it all seems farfetched. Though certainly not impossible: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" and perhaps some of the evidence is valid. YMMV. :)

It sounds like an interesting book, though, I'll have to put in on the pile of books I want to read.

edit: Was searching for Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (http://books.google.com/books?id=x-Rxhf2gUa8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=synchronicity+an+acausal+connecting&hl=en&sa=X&ei=oP5tUvTtOKrksASerIGgDg&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=synchronicity%20an%20acausal%20connecting&f=false).

[Flying Purple People Eater]

Oh god, new age shit. Blech.

Give me one piece of evidence that proves that human beings:

A) Have some kind of non-physical 'spirit'.

B) That this spirit is directly connected to human consciousness, and has no link with electromagnetic waves via neurons in the human brain (which, unsurprisingly, stop once the human body ceases to metabolise).

C) That this spirit transfers to a mysterious 'spiritual world' after the human body, a sac of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, water and other chemicals, ceases to metabolise.

Then, and only then, should the possibility of an afterlife/spiritual realm be entertained.

Oh, and argumentum ad saeculum? I thought the only people who believed in that silly fantasy were children who suffered parental abuse?

[DasFapital]

"The Secret" for leftists