Concerning the eighth sphere, you may check the thread named 'food for the eighth sphere, not the moon', that I initiated in the "Aliens and Matrix" category. There I presented what I gathered from an anthroposophical understanding of the 'eighth sphere' phenomenon.
I think it goes without saying that the 'eighth sphere' is what we refer to as 'food for the moon'. The article on montalk website on 'food for the moon' is much better than what Cs and LKJ have to say about it.
I also what to point out that by visionary I meant those visionaries who receive visions, about the future or whatever, mediumistic faculties (involving trance or not), etc. According to Steiner, these are pathological phenomena of the human psyche. He stressed that we should develop ourselves and our understanding of the spiritual world through thinking and gradually through sense free thinking (thinking about thinking) without relying on these atavistic faculties. Often people who have these inborn faculties or have awakened them, when the start to develop logical thinking, lose this 'power' they had and get frustrated againt reason and logical thinking. Yes we have to obtain Imaginations of the spiritual but not through a REGRESSION in past stages of human evolution (visionary and mediumistic faculties are atavistic and thus belong to a past stage of human evolution, that Steiner call ancient Moon. these moon forces taking us back into ancient clairvoyance were neutralized by a densification of the moon by Yahve, or so says Steiner). We must re-enliven thinking but not by falling back in regresion through hypnosis or mediumistic or spiritist seances, but really but using our minds and train it to thinking logically in order that the Self can become conscious of itself more and more. With logical thinking many fundamental erors can be avoided and they must be if we really want to gain access to a valid understanding of spiritual worlds. We must form Imaginations, spiritual concepts, no longer intellectual abstract concepts. Visions come to us from our subconscious and we all know how entities are bent to trick upon us, especially when we are as vulnerable as we are when our consiousness level is lowered (through hypnosis, suggestions are easy to imprint in the subconscious mind). Visions impose themselves upon us from out of consciousness and are symptoms of pathology. In the past, visionary clairvoyance was highly common, shared by all humans, but we were not very smart nor intellectualistic as today. We weren't individualized as we are today. Gods gave us thoughs, they we thinking in us, we only could remember it by ourselves. Today, visionary clairvoyance is an atavistic phenomenon and has been hijacked by demons and vicious elemental beings (some created by our own mind, for example by immoral thoughts, materialistic spiritual imaginations, and so on) and play with our minds as easily and effectively as Hollywood makes movies that can be very realistic but at best can only be simulacra of reality. I think there are similar forces at work in the triumph of cinema and the forces behind the eight sphere, which mimics reality in a way that it is hardly feasible to distinguish between what is real and what is not (for example, in hypnotic regressions, sometimes people think they are re-experiencing a trauma coming from one of their past lives; the experience is hugely realistic, more often than that highly traumatic, practically like 'a movie of which you are the hero'. This often brings relief to the patient who has just found 'the source of his/her suffering'. But this is grossly misleading 'cause it may be demons who influenced her in order that her mind caught memories of someone's harshly painful suffering in the past in the Akasha, through unconscious atavistic clairvoyance.
I think many memory screens of alien abduction have to do with such manipulations originating from beings from the eighth sphere. The stuff of the eighth sphere itself is like electromagnetic substance endowed with consciousness and materiality. This is spectral matter. This spectral world is put between ourselves and the spiritual world so that the first thing people see when they revert back into atavistic clairvoyance is not the spiritual world but a simulacra of it, the eighth sphere. This eight sphere is made up artifically by Lucifer (DEvil) and Ahriman (Satan) (the two main aspects of Evil, the Seducer and the Destroyer) in order to take human soul in prison, to transmute earthly and brain substance into eighth sphere substance, to trasmute the willpower of our individuality into atavistic clairvoyance. Thus the person can become a medium when his/her ego has escaped from the brain, thus enabling elementals (informed by moon Adepts, ancient teachers of humanity) to teach through the medium. More often than that, it is spiritual materialism that is divulged this way, a more cunning way to divert our spiritual quest than the crude materialism of (ahrimanic) rationalists.
In short, I would say that we have to gather wisdom and knowledge from a clear day-light knowledge. If the level of consciousness is lowered, the mind becomes vulnerable to attack because he does not enter the higher supernatural world but the lower subnatural realm. There creeps many graciously fallen angels and messengers of deception as well as omniscient all-knowing elementals who can even pose as '6D STO'... I'm not shure about this, but it is a train of thought I have been following for a while.
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