Bleach & Anthroposophy - Steiner, Occult Science, & Bleach Manga/Anime - pontosfathom podcast ep19

Bleach & Anthroposophy - Steiner, Occult Science, & Bleach Manga/Anime 

- pontosfathom podcast ep19

Welcome to pontos fathom podcast episode 19: Bleach and Anthroposophy - Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science, & Tite Kubo's Bleach Manga and - pontos fathom podcast episode 19. Today we will talk about Steiner's Anthrosoposophy, Occult Science and similar inquiries into the soul and spirt concepts in Tite Kubo's Bleach Manga and Anime series. Please leave a comment and if you like similar content like and subscribe and ring the bell to grow our community. Please also visit out links below to support the channel. Website: https://www.pontosfathom.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pontosfathom/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/pontosfathom Hobby Blog: https://pontosfathomhobbies.blogspot.com/

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welcome everyone to pontas fathom podcast number 19. our topic today is the anime manga bleach and anthroposophy and today what we're going to do is look at works of rudolph steiner especially his outline of occult science and some of the insights he has about higher worlds the nature of the soul nature of different planets the way he talks about planets but also how that kind of fits in with the architecture and the soul dynamics and some uh let's call it the mechanisms or the the world rules of the bleach universe and i thought some of that seemed really interesting i kind of wanted to get into that so um for people who don't know either uh bleach very popular anime from uh early 2000s and looking to have somewhat of a resurgence soon as they're going to finish off not only finish off some of the anime that the manga had completed but it looks like they're actually going to take the manga a next step forward with what what looks like it's going to be a hell arc there's recently been a light novel series that's come out that i'm in the process of reading here i've just made it into the first one can't fear your own world which is sort of wrapping up some of the loose ends and there's been recently some new insights from a additional hell arc chapter where we see that some of the characters from the soul society are now down in hell so looks like a new exciting start for bleach rudolph steiner very involved with madame blavatsky's theosophy and then branched off to form his own anthroposophy which is a offshoot of sort of a spiritual science spiritual inquiry but also steiner is very much interested in the waldorf school and um very interested in the path forward let's say for for humanity and that hence in the name anthroposophy and i would like to parallel that with some works of moldenhauer balsamo just talk about some interesting features of the bleach universe in the architecture of the bleach universe so the way the different realms work we'll kind of go into that a little bit and we'll go into a little bit on the sort of the mechanics of the bleach universe how how souls work how there's things like mod souls and gig eyes and how there's some ariamonic arimonic overlap with those things and finally we'll take a look at just the nature of how some of the different factions correspond to some lessons that we see steiner highlighting in his works so maybe we'll quickly we'll just do a quick jump into the outline of occult sciences and the one that i've

got first is and maybe we'll juxtapose this we'll start off with a little intro in in occult science but then i kind of want to start off with um kisuke urahara right so kisake urahara is an interesting character from the bleach saga and we'll kind of focus from urahara's perspective and i'll kind of share that with people who aren't familiar with the the lore and then people who are familiar with the lore will know exactly what i'm talking about when i get to it so let's start off with the cult science i just wanted to start out with this it says uh the form and shape to the physical body of man so we talk about sleep and death in this section right so i just wanted to sort of jump into this idea of the astral body so one of the things we learned early on in bleach was uh there's the world of humans right so in the world of bleach there's the world of humans and when a human dies their soul uh it leaves their body in the in the bleach universe now some souls stay behind on the earth and they become something what they call hollows so it's a soul that's been detached from its body but is not yet passed on to heaven let's say and there's this role of these soul soul reapers they're called the shinigami and the shinigami are sort of a squa are squads of soul reapers and one of their tasks is to usher the souls um uh to heaven through this console now there's there's some overlaps with christian obviously bleach is a japanese property so there's some more more resonance with some mythology there but one thing that's very interesting is when the when the hollows are stuck behind they can grow in power by eating other souls or other ghosts and as those hollows eat each other and grow upon each other they they end up becoming these monstrous creatures hollows and menos grande and then eventually into these things like arankar which are even more frightful versions and so then you have the economy of soul reapers in heaven kind of like angels in a way but different than angels but some some overlaps here so let's kind of get into it so steiner says the form and shape proper to the physical body of man can only be maintained by means of a human etheric body which in its turn must be endowed with the appropriate forces by the astral body the ether body is the form-giving agent or architect of the physical but it can only form the physical body a right if it receives from the astral body the necessary guidance and simulation stimulation in the astral body the pattern forms our archetypes according to the etheric body now gives the physical it's a pointed shape and it says uh the astral body fulfills its waking function within the physical body its sleep in works from the latter without just as the physical body and the supply of nourishment for example has the need of the outer world to which it is akin a similar thing is true of the astral body imagine a human physical body taken right away from its appropriate surroundings it would eventually perish the physical body's existence is impossible without the entire physical environment

so here we have this strange idea right we have this idea of the body as a vessel of the spirit body and this the body requires its nourishment and the spirit body requires its nourishment so when the you know so let's go to the bleach universe when the soul leaves the soul would naturally go to heaven but sometimes a fearful soul or like a ghost might stay behind and this is where the shinigami role comes in so when our story opens up very early on in the bleach saga we have uh our main hero ichigo kurosaki he can see ghosts and we have these

cases for example where ichigo sees a ghost that won't leave and continues to sort of haunt his sister but ichigo can see this hollowed-out chest hole and he sort of lost his it's sort of interesting because the hollow loses touch with its humanity and you can see that ichigo is fighting this hollow here and eventually there's a whole network of different kinds of threats like this um each of those parents in fact mother in fact was killed by a hollow early on and then he gets these soul reaper powers and and then he transforms into not just someone who can see ghosts but someone who can actually pass the ghost and fight these creatures and this leads into a very vast storyline in bleach but one of the characters of bleach is kisake urahara so urahara um is you know in a ways like steiner he's interested in soul science and he's interested like steiner was talking about the container of the soul the body's the container of the soul the soul nourishes the body nourishment nourishes body but what nourishes the soul right so urahara gets involved with looking at ways to create these things called ghee guys right a gigan is like a a container a body for an artificial soul or a mod soul so you can see that there's something very strange going on in the bleach mythology it's like the idea of a not real soul and they end up being cute little characters like stuffed animals with a magical candy inside of them that can run around and talk but but what's interesting about it is this sounds a lot like artificial intelligence right so if we take a look at um a steiner we keep going down this rabbit hole

we see um a reflection of this inner soul condition of man could be seen in the external bodily form the parts which contain the beginning of what afterwards formed the head were evolved the remaining organs would appear only as appendages and were shadow-like and indistinct but not all earth men were alike in their form and figures the appendages more or less with variation depending on dwelling on the earth others had not been ready for contact with the elements the spirit of air and the spirit of fire and the light affects the archangels there was in addition to this a third kind of human being still more deeply entangled in earthly existence these had not been able to touch by the fire element and they've received the element of water so here's just sort of steiner talking about the elements and influences of different different planets on the forms it says on earth had developed the air element within it the relics of the old moon who had remained further back in evolution with these lowest of human souls these became the souls and the forms that have deserted by man and had separated from the sun and were the forefathers of the animal kingdom they evolved especially the organs and appendages these astral bodies uh were the case with man on the old moon so this is interesting how there's these animals on the old moon in steiner's um occult science so later in the bleach saga we find that um so just like urhara had experimented with these gigas and artificial souls they also looked at artificial hollows and making order harder's experiment i think originally was something like to give the lost souls a temporary body to live in so they could be free to move about on their way toward their heavenly redemption but there was let's say forces of those hollows which were cannibalistic and they ended up creating a higher form of a hollow and those hollows of the higher form were called manos grande and eventually they became monstrous like this is a one of these

uh espada this one is ukiyora so the idea is as these souls of the hollows became more powerful their disconnection from their former humanity was so far that they've now become something totally different so these are like the fallen souls and just like cyno talks about the old moon these are on car and these um uh sort of like advanced hollows they lived in a place called hueco mundo which is very moonlike also so it does have a moon vibe to it i want to keep going into this area because i think that the cannibalistic nature of the hollow so the hollows found much of their power through a kind of cannibalism and it was basically by devouring more and more souls they ended up consolidating their power and so this is where urahara comes in but there was another villain of the series who was doing experiments with

what they called hollows hollow vacation experiments so this is where they would purposefully take a living person and hollow fine you could see some hollows here as the pictures of some hollows they would hollofy these characters and they created these visors sort of a hybrid of a human or a soul reaper hybrid with the hollow and it was sort of this strange tortured experiment where it's a a cross between an angel and a demon think of it this way a cross between an angelic and a demonic character and it has very arimonic flavor to it you can see in um there's one character called grim zhao and they kind of show this character of grimjao and how it started out as a hollow but then it became an animal-like creature right so just like steiner was talking about these souls of animals from the old moon well on hueco mundo these more powerful hollows would evolve into smaller groups of advanced monsters and they would hunt in packs for more souls and they would continue to consume the souls right and i think that this is a very arimonic kind of vision if we look at the uh

our amonic view of this there is only one of the forces of corruption poured by ariman into human souls another means of temptation connected with his incarnation he was also working in cooperation with the luciferic forces another of his endeavors is to preserve the already widespread attitude that for the public welfare is sufficient for the economic and material needs of humanity however we point not willingly face to modern life official science nowadays contributes nothing to real knowledge of the soul and the spirit at the heart there are always asking what is the good of it how can it help me acquire the world's goods but now think of the consequences of this what numbers of people are there today who no longer value the spirit for the sake of the spirit for the sake of the spirit or the soul for the sake of the soul they are out to absorb from cultural life only what is regarded as useful this is significant and mysterious factor in the light that you modern humanity must be lifted to the full light of consciousness so again this is a bit like an anthroposophical view of um bleaches architecture so let's talk a little bit about that architecture right you've got the humans and you've got the human souls that can become hollows right so the the the soul can become hollow and the hollows can feed off them they can evolve off and eventually they live in hueco mundo which is got a purgatory moonlike place to it uh the seoul society uh the cerete this is much much akin to uh it's not quite like a heaven but it's more like an elysium or an afterlife there's a there's a hierarchy there's a soul king uh there's the thirteen guards of this of this society and then they have uh areas like the rue khan district in the soul society where the normal souls that have passed on live and um from there there's also a concept perhaps of a heaven and there's also a concept perhaps of a hell so the fallen souls that need to be punished for say horrible life in their existence would go down to hell and we've seen some indications that this hell arc may have some implications on the architecture of kubo's space right so let's keep going though it says in the connection people today have succumbed to this strange fallacy they do not believe that the spirit can be eaten and yet the very ones who say this do eat the spirit or they refuse to accept anything spiritual nevertheless every morsel that passes through their mouths into their stomachs they are devouring the spirit but dispatching it along the path and the other paths which lead to the real well-being of mankind so here we have kind of um an interesting thing the idea of consuming spirit you know and we even have the christian version of this is uh you know the transubstantiation and in and in kubo's bleach universe they have this idea of reishi which is the spiritual energy so the shinigami draw their powers from reishi and the hollows also have reishi so they this is like that spiritual energy where they can direct this and fight with it and get stronger and whatnot so this imbuing of spirit into not only physical bodies a physical body it's an orange it's the sun right but a spirit body can have a spiritual substance sustenance this reishi sustenance and the accumulation of this the built up of the spiritual pressure can create these higher angelic beings so we can think of angel mark michael as a higher being perhaps like a soul reaper in a way these angelic figures uh it says if we understand how to penetrate more deeply into the supersensible evolution which lies behind our sense evolution we are actually able to perceive at some point how an archangel ascends to the nature of the arkay and an angel being to an archangel being right so this idea of the evolution the powering up right this is deep embedded into religions how one can power up and it's very much a uh

it's very much a theme throughout many shonen books where the characters power up and they become more powerful so let's take a pause here and go back to the idea of occult science right so so steiner is saying here the cult science is in fact influenced perhaps by a couple of forces there's the mysteries so for example atlantis and the hidden nature of the mystery so human life goes on in the bleach world and we we are not aware of these other forces going on in the soul society and how this inner workings go and even in the soul society they're not actually aware of the inner workings of how the soul king works or or all the mechanisms of how the aran car work or even uh for example there's a another group called the quincy that comes in the quincy another form of another race another form of spiritual beings that that are at odds with the shinigami and this is kind of like steiner's planets right so or different mystery schools like the eastern mysteries and the southern mysteries or something like this so we'll go here into that others were others there were who though they had not lost their old clairvoyance developed the new faculties in relation to the physical world with inner feelings and emotions that correspond to the experience of clairvoyance and besides all this the atlantean oracles also had their successors the centers of the mysteries were found on every hand the initiation secret chiefly developed in these centers was the kind that leads to the revelation that the spiritual world which ariman keeps hidden see ariman is keeping things hidden these mythologies also contain other secrets though in less perfect form from either the southern or the eastern mysteries the superhuman beings were known in europe too but they were seen in perpetual war with the associates of lucifer the god of light so you see the idea of the atlantean epoch the mystery schools and the different superhuman beings they all kind of seem to make their way out into um

bleach mythology right

the um so in the bleach mythology the next uh place to go is we can talk about some of the mechanisms we talked about the mechanism so but let's talk about some of the different modalities of these different groups and as we mentioned there was this there are these 13 court guards in the cerete and you have at the former head of the 12th court guard

kisake orihara transforms his division the 12th division into the research division so here we are like as i was saying earlier rudolph steiner probing into occult science kisake uruhara probing into occult science what's one of the things that urahara experiments with gay guys artificial beings containers to put souls into and we go into the idea of desiring machines impedance and admittance and desiring machines so here the concept is

again a machine acquires intelligence a container for a soul right so when the soul reapers come to earth they don't have a body but urahara could provide them with a gigai which is a artificial body that a soul can be placed into and then they can be visible in the world so the idea it's like giving the ghost a home but it's not a ghost in the machine it's ghost in a biological machine and then that kind of gets very close to the idea of this human automaton right so there's a little bit of confusion there in the research world between you know what's a real person what's a synthetic body what's a synthetic body with a real soul what's a artificial soul like artificial intelligence right a desiring machine and i think cone is the comic relief of this cone is a like i said there's a plush toy maybe there's a picture of him here on the cover of the book uh ichigo has a

uh it's a small lion it's like a it's a small lion that is animated that's something like this this is not him but this is just some cartoonish thing

it says soul society the first to conduct whole souls to soul society means of kanso which is my mission to vaporize hollows

we call hollows hollows attack the living and the dead indiscriminately and devour their souls the hollows are evil spirits so the soul reapers have two principal duties

one of them is to pass the console the other one is to kill the hollows so and this goes into a bit of that uh necromancy space too so the idea here is there's the idea of the dying and rising gods the shinigami are alive but they're dead the souls are having various grades and shapes and i think this is kind of akin to this ariamonic idea of the eighth sphere right or the idea of uh it's an attractor for the souls to move forward to so let's go to steiner again and he says uh the phase of evolution beginning of with our own time has had a very special characteristic uh just think what effect could could be of knowledge such that the future incarnation of ariman who is preparing it by means i have described both yesterday and today it is essential to inform ourselves objectively about these things in order that we may take the right stand toward what is going on around us in preparation for the arimanic incarnation if you apply deep and mature reflection to what has been said in these lectures the ariemonic currents you will be able to apprehend the gravity of the present situation

so anthropo anthroposophically uh he divides the class into two subjectively this might not be altogether welcome for i may want to prove it to be a rod for our own backs but if we do not want to speak i want to show that there is a longing for progress in human beings but that they are asleep and do not perceive the forces that are keeping these longings in subjugation so i think that we have that in the early bleach stories uh we'll have ichigo's high school friends they can't see the hollows and but ichigo because he's become a soul reaper he can see it so he's been awakened by this sort of occult science and also interesting to just talk about the idea that the ariemonic challenge eventually leads us to characters again similar characters throughout bleach ukiyara is one of these um uh espada or these advanced hollows that are very very demonic let's call them but then also characters that want to overturn the cosmic order right so so if you think in steiner's turns he would talk about something like the golgotha mystery right so you have a luciferian and ariemonic forces and then you have a knight something like michael of the archangel who stands at the gates to defend that and this is where ichigo has that role of the protector of his friends but also protector of the worlds and the protector of the architecture of the worlds right and urahara ends up on this kind of side of right too he is the occult scientist in a way who's doing the research not for nefarious purposes you know there's nefarious characters whether it's eisen with his hokyoku or kurutsuchi and his experiments against the quincy for example or his treatment of his own squad and he's more of a mad scientist where urahara is a mad scientist but he's kind of like a mad scientist with a heart or with a plan and in the end the idea that is this occult sciences looking beyond the spaces that we can see with our human senses and activating those spiritual senses and so then maybe we'll end on the concept of this because in bleach there are a couple of characters that have these innate abilities and they come out very early in the series for example the brother and sister of ichigo they have some spiritual sense especially one of his sisters has a very clear sense of when the hollows are present chad his human friend he has this spiritual sensitivity he can tell when the evil spirits are present and he actually can physically punch them right so you get this concept of uh even um uh all of his friends have some spiritual sensitivity so again in the occult science of things uh you know you know in and in the kind of urahara sense urahara is running his candy shop on the earth he's an exiled shinigami he's an exiled soul reaper and you have something like steiner building his goterium starting his wardolfs waldorf school something like this the idea of how do we transmit this knowledge to people so lots of interesting things in the world building of bleach that i kind of wanted to jump into hope it was a bit interesting for everyone um leave comments below i read the comments you know as i've mentioned before another podcast i'd like to turn this into a live chat where we can talk live but need to build the channel still so if some of these topics were interesting leave me a note below i read all the topics uh there are so many things we can talk about here and in my research uh this month on anthroposophy and reading through the works of steiner we've done another podcast where we looked at similarly looked at the works of dune and we did that one last week next up we're going to deep dive we touched on it a bit today but we're going to deep dive on our iman and artificial intelligence and look at the anthroposophy of artificial intelligence but you can see from the vector we've even explored here with with this anime world the the world building that goes on in the human imagination it's very profound and it's very spiritually influenced right so there's a there's a spectrum as we always talk about here between imagination and clairvoyance or imagination and spiritual sense let's say and it's interesting to see those archetypes emerge you know we've done a lot of podcasts here talking about jungian archetypes and lacanian language right and with a character like urahara who is the exiled researcher with a heart and he's also the smart guy who has to bear the bear the burden of the challenge i think steiner was a figure like this and steiner's admonishment or warning he gives is that those type of characters will have to face this ariamonic age this kind of kali yuga age those people will be put to the test so leave a message below let me know what you think a little bit of fun here mixing anthroposophy with bleach touching on some interesting topics hope you guys found it interesting we'll read the comments if you like and subscribe if i'm so lucky to earn your subscription that can help us with the algorithm build up the page otherwise check out our links in the bookstore can support our channel that way really appreciate your guys attention listening and time talk to you soon thanks a lot for being here bye bye