Rudolf Steiner’s mistake was to reduce knowledge of the soul to knowledge of spiritual beings

A New Science of Soul - The Essence of my Philosophy -by Peter Wilberg

Freud’s first mistake was to reduce the innate sensuality of the soul to its sexuality, understood as a set of instinctive, biologically and evolutionarily determined drives. At the same time he identified meaning with its expression in dream symbols or its representation in words – focusing on symbolic sexual meanings in particular. Identifying meaning as such with its symbols — with indirectly signified sense — it was only natural for him to regard as ‘unconscious’ the entire realm of directly sensed significance. Resonance with the wordlessly sensed and sensually experienced meaning of a patient’s words or dreams, gave way to methods of ‘intepretation’ in which the sensed significance of a word or symbol was reduced to its signified sense – the sense that could be made of it in words or through association with other symbols.

Both psychonalysis and spiritual science sought and claimed a type of scientific knowledge of the soul or psyche. Freud’s second mistake, further accentuated by Jung, was to reduce knowledge of the soul and its sensual qualities to knowledge of symbols. Yet meaning or sense is not essentially a property of symbols at all but rather intrinsic to sensual experiencing. It is something directly felt before it is given form in words or images.

Rudolf Steiner’s mistake was to reduce knowledge of the soul to knowledge of spiritual beings. Both mistakes are equally disastrous. For any true ‘knowledge’ of the soul must begin with the recognition that what we call soul is in essence itself a type of knowing. ‘Soul’ is itself a direct knowing awareness, entirely free of symbols and yet imbued, like music, with intrinsically meaningful sensual qualities. This knowing awareness is not the property of any beings, human or spiritual — for in essence it is an awareness of those unbounded potentialities of beings that are the source of all actual beings. The ancient term for inner knowing was gnosis.

My philosophy and psychology is gnostic in the deepest possible sense, for it understands soul as that knowing, sensual yet free of symbols, that is the source of all beings. No true knowledge of the spiritual world can arise as a type of science that is ‘entitative’ — that postulates as its starting point a set of actual pre-existing energies, things or beings. True knowledge begins with essential gnosis — the recognition that knowing precedes being, and is the source from which all beings and all realities arise. The soul is not what we know ‘about’ it, for it is itself a condensed knowing that constitutes the core of our own being. Our being is but the ever-changing way we express and embody that knowing.

Heidegger, Phenomenology and Indian Thought (Paperback) by Peter Wilberg (Author) THE NEW YOGA - TANTRA REBORN (THE SENSUALITY & SEXUALITY OF OUR IMMORTAL SOUL BODY) by Peter Wilberg (Paperback - Jun 1, 2007) Tantric Wisdom for Today's World - The New Yoga of Awareness by Peter Wilberg (Paperback - Sep 1, 2007) The Awareness Principle: A Radical New Philosophy of Life, Science & Religion by Peter Wilberg (Paperback - Aug 15, 2007) 7:02 AM See also www.thenewyoga.org