Tag: Spiritual Science

Video Games and Spiritual Development, a preliminary analysis

Introduction

Video games are a huge global phenomenon, driving well over $70 billion dollars in sales in 2011—a number that is only rising year by year. For comparison, global music sales in 2011 was about $16 billion, while global theater tickets was about $33 billion. This has consequences—largely unexplored—for people that are interested in spiritual development. It is thus important to look at the phenomenon of video games from a spiritual perspective, because almost no one growing up today can avoid them. The time in which human beings could develop spiritually without the presence of modern technologies is essentially over, and video games are now deeply integrated into the fabric of modern society. Their ubiquity means that human beings who wish to undertake spiritual development will often do so in contexts that are not devoid of video games. We can thus ask the question, how might video games impact spiritual development? (more…)

June 19, 2012
Sleep, Dreams and Video Games

How you use your attention in waking life has definite effects in your dreaming life. The following is my distillation of some insights from anthroposophy in this regard, which I offer as one way of looking at this phenomenon, specifically around the issue of video games and dreaming. This post should provide an appropriate background if necessary.

If people are comfortable with the terms, we can talk about how the astral body (the subtle body that allows something outside to become something for us inwardly; i.e. the sense-body, which we share with animals) gains its content in large part by reflecting itself off of the etheric body (the less subtle body that keeps your body from becoming a corpse, which we share with the plant realm).

When you spend hours of time focusing your senses on particular stimuli (i.e. a video game) your are patterning your etheric body through physiological repetitions: the movements of your eyes, hands, breathing, etc., and more importantly in the endocrine responses and other physiological changes that go along with the particular game experience. Knowing why this is important needs a little background first.

When you go to sleep, and you are no longer imposing your astral body on your etheric (i.e. choosing where to direct your attention and what sensations you will seek and avoid) your etheric body starts to (more…)

February 1, 2012
Goethean Studies Notebook

PDF: Goethean Studies Notebook (40mb)

PDF: Higher quality, print version (180mb)

This notebook was created as a personal record of the 1999-2000 Goethean Studies program at Rudolf Steiner College. This unique course, conceived of and taught primarily by Dennis Klocek, is still being offered — it is now called Consciousness Studies. When I took the course, which was seven months long and met for about three hours every weekday, I liked to call it “Being Human 101”, because it offered some basic perspectives about being human that spanned the spiritual, psychological, and physical worlds in a very deep and coherent way.

There are certainly errors contained herein: it was often simply not possible to record more than the merest fragments of the vast pictures that awakened in the little Emerson classroom and flowed like honey across our minds. This record is like a six year old’s crayon rendition of a Michelangelo: it may contain something recognizable, but is no substitute for the real thing, which I encourage everyone to experience.

It is likely that the only people who will see this document are those already familiar with the course in one of its various incarnations. For you I hope that it re-awakens a commitment and enthusiasm for the hard and necessary work of spiritual transformation by connecting you to the feeling you had sitting in the uncomfortably cold room on uncomfortable chairs, listening to another mind-blowing morning lecture by Dennis: the feeling that you were exactly where you needed to be and wouldn’t trade it for anything.

For those who have not been able to take the course, this gives a tiny taste of some of the content that was presented in its 1999-2000 incarnation, and will hopefully inspire you to research the current, more highly refined and potent version.

For those who have found this page but have no idea what I’m talking about even though you’ve read this far, just flip through it like it was you long-lost friend’s photo album and see what tickles your fancy as you skim on by.

October 15, 2010
Levels of Dreaming and the Makeup of the Human Being: The Spiritual Ontology of Dreams

By Seth Miller

Full PDF

Everyone dreams, but few people find sufficient interest in their dreams to move beyond mere curiosity at their strange contents. Even many who work with dreams as a part of a transformative practice usually concentrate on their content, and only more rarely question their form, ontology, and origins. Exploring these aspects, however, can help provide a context that helps orient dreamers to some of the esoteric underpinnings of dream etiology (their meaningful origins), and can help enliven dream-based transformative practices. This article is an attempt to show how a spiritually-oriented understanding of the makeup of the human being gives a context for understanding different types of dreams, their origins, and some associated consequences for dreamwork.

The language of spiritual science, also called anthroposophy (human wisdom) will be of help in this endeavor, because it maintains its cogency across multiple phenomenal realms (such as those of sleeping and waking), and because it has as its aim the ability to make clear and coherent processes which work within the physical realm but have their source beyond it, in the spiritual worlds. Fundamental anthroposophical terminology will not be explained in this article for reasons of space, and neither will the basic anthroposophical view of dreaming in general. For a brief introduction, I highly recommend that readers peruse this article: Sleep and Dreams in Anthroposophy, which provides the context (more…)

September 17, 2010
The Matrix and Anthroposophy video

This lecture presentation was given at the East Bay Waldorf School in 2007 (see flyer below). It explores the Matrix trilogy of movies from the perspective of spiritual science. Close attention is paid to the actual events in the “text” of the movies, with an eye towards illuminating features concerning the major characters and plot elements in a coherent, symbolic, and mythological perspective. In particular the movies are shown to be uniquely understandable from the perspective of Steiner’s anthroposophical insights concerning human evolution.

The video is based upon this essay, but (particularly because of some very astute questions from the audience) also contains a number of details that I was unable to put into the original paper.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAobTuY08Vg

April 25, 2009