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Kleine Steiners
The Electronic Doppelgänger: The Mystery of the Double in the Age of the Internet
"Large temptations will emanate from these machine-animals, produced by people themselves, and it will be the task of a spiritual science that explores the cosmos to ensure all these temptations do not exert any damaging influence on human beings." --Rudolf Steiner
In an increasingly digitized world, where both work and play are more and more taking place online and via screens, Rudolf Steiner's dramatic statements from 1917 appear prophetic. Speaking of "intelligent machines" that would appear in the future, Steiner presents a broad context that illustrates the multitude of challenges human beings will face. If humanity and the Earth are to continue to evolve together with the cosmos, and not be cut off from it entirely, we will need to work consciously and spiritually to create a counterweight to such phenomena.
In the lectures gathered here, edited with commentary and notes by Andreas Neider, Rudolf Steiner addresses a topic that he was never to speak of again--the secret of the geographical, or ahrimanic, Doppelganger. The human nervous system houses an entity that does not belong to its constitution, he states. This is an ahrimanic being that enters the body shortly before birth and leaves at death, providing the basis for all electrical currents needed to process and coordinate sensory perceptions and react to them.
Based on his spiritual research, Steiner discusses this Doppelganger, or double, in the wider context of historic occult events relating to spirits of darkness. Specific brotherhoods seek to keep such knowledge to themselves to exert power and spread materialism. But this knowledge is critical, says Steiner, if the geographical Doppelganger and its challenges are to be understood.
In an increasingly digitized world, where both work and play are more and more taking place online and via screens, Rudolf Steiner's dramatic statements from 1917 appear prophetic. Speaking of "intelligent machines" that would appear in the future, Steiner presents a broad context that illustrates the multitude of challenges human beings will face. If humanity and the Earth are to continue to evolve together with the cosmos, and not be cut off from it entirely, we will need to work consciously and spiritually to create a counterweight to such phenomena.
In the lectures gathered here, edited with commentary and notes by Andreas Neider, Rudolf Steiner addresses a topic that he was never to speak of again--the secret of the geographical, or ahrimanic, Doppelganger. The human nervous system houses an entity that does not belong to its constitution, he states. This is an ahrimanic being that enters the body shortly before birth and leaves at death, providing the basis for all electrical currents needed to process and coordinate sensory perceptions and react to them.
Based on his spiritual research, Steiner discusses this Doppelganger, or double, in the wider context of historic occult events relating to spirits of darkness. Specific brotherhoods seek to keep such knowledge to themselves to exert power and spread materialism. But this knowledge is critical, says Steiner, if the geographical Doppelganger and its challenges are to be understood.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
164 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
18 people are currently reading
66 people want to read
About the author
Rudolf Steiner
4,374 books1,113 followersAuthor also wrote under the name Rudolph Steiner.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by Christian Gnosticism or neognosticism. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory.
In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply what he saw as the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions, differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, dance and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts. In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked on various ostensibly applied projects, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and anthroposophical medicine.
Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's world view in which "thinking…is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." A consistent thread that runs through his work is the goal of demonstrating that there are no limits to human knowledge.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by Christian Gnosticism or neognosticism. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory.
In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply what he saw as the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions, differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, dance and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts. In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked on various ostensibly applied projects, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and anthroposophical medicine.
Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's world view in which "thinking…is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." A consistent thread that runs through his work is the goal of demonstrating that there are no limits to human knowledge.
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December 19, 2017
Stunningly, here a Rudolf Steiner speaking in 1917 says this about the twentieth century and beyond:
“And the connection will be made between the death forces in the human being, which are related to electromagnetic forces, and outer machine forces. In a sense, the human being will be able to let his thoughts flow into machines.”
Sounds like our reality, right? As I type this review, I’m doing exactly what Steiner described a hundred years ago.
He explains that within the electricity of our nervous systems, there is another spiritual entity, a kind of doppelganger, who lives in our autonomous reflexes and unconscioius compulsions, who belongs to the sphere of the evil being Ahriman. They are beings who, cast out of heaven before the twentieth century even started, plague the earthly level of our consciousness. They long to destroy the human capacity for connecting to the etheric level of consciousness - that part of us that thinks simultaneously and not successively, in felt mental images, not coldly or mechanically. And they’ve been doing a pretty good job, I’d say.
The editors of this book make the point that the computer and the Internet, as machines that mutliply data beyond our ability to consciously remember (*consciously* being the key word), are versions of this Ahrimanic double. The Internet — in its memes, its tl;dr’s and its Buzzfee article—is pure reflex, pure automatism, making us more and more into machines. We can’t focus: it’s too long; I didn’t read. That’s why it’s so gosh darn important to use the exercises that Rudolf Steiner described in his lectures, or something similar. For example, we can think a series of events backwards, or try to take a mental snapshot of where we left our keys so that we can call that image up to find it again. These tasks are being taken over by the Ahrimanic double, aka the smartphone/PC.
But they aren’t pure evil. Steiner even says so: that they will inevitably come, and that it’s how we relate to them that matters. For me, I’m going to try relating to my electronics with a will and a memory rivaling theirs. I will not let my computer become my brain.
“And the connection will be made between the death forces in the human being, which are related to electromagnetic forces, and outer machine forces. In a sense, the human being will be able to let his thoughts flow into machines.”
Sounds like our reality, right? As I type this review, I’m doing exactly what Steiner described a hundred years ago.
He explains that within the electricity of our nervous systems, there is another spiritual entity, a kind of doppelganger, who lives in our autonomous reflexes and unconscioius compulsions, who belongs to the sphere of the evil being Ahriman. They are beings who, cast out of heaven before the twentieth century even started, plague the earthly level of our consciousness. They long to destroy the human capacity for connecting to the etheric level of consciousness - that part of us that thinks simultaneously and not successively, in felt mental images, not coldly or mechanically. And they’ve been doing a pretty good job, I’d say.
The editors of this book make the point that the computer and the Internet, as machines that mutliply data beyond our ability to consciously remember (*consciously* being the key word), are versions of this Ahrimanic double. The Internet — in its memes, its tl;dr’s and its Buzzfee article—is pure reflex, pure automatism, making us more and more into machines. We can’t focus: it’s too long; I didn’t read. That’s why it’s so gosh darn important to use the exercises that Rudolf Steiner described in his lectures, or something similar. For example, we can think a series of events backwards, or try to take a mental snapshot of where we left our keys so that we can call that image up to find it again. These tasks are being taken over by the Ahrimanic double, aka the smartphone/PC.
But they aren’t pure evil. Steiner even says so: that they will inevitably come, and that it’s how we relate to them that matters. For me, I’m going to try relating to my electronics with a will and a memory rivaling theirs. I will not let my computer become my brain.
Displaying 1 of 1 review