“Imagine that half the world is hidden from you. Half of the person sitting across from you has never been appreciated, half of the garden has never been seen or smelled, half of your own life has never been truly witnessed and appraised.” — Arthur Zajonc
For seven years we have met here to consider some of the realities disclosed by Rudolf Steiner about the unseen spiritual world surrounding us. The first post, Trivial Pursuit, appeared on September 1, 2018, and in it we take a look at the way we spend our time and how our ability to focus is being challenged by our devices. Now, 7 years later, most of us are addicted one way or another to these devices; the resulting disruption of our thinking is catastrophic.
Since that first post, we have talked about karma and reincarnation, sleep and death, etheric and astral bodies, angels and other hierarchies of the heavens, and so on. For many of us, these are still just words with some concepts added. The weight they carry for our lives, however, is incalculable.
Rudolf Steiner spoke many times about why he didn’t make reading his work easier. One purpose was to force us to increase the intensity of our focus and our endurance in the pursuit of higher knowledge. Not to exclude people, but to enhance our capacities to concentrate—for the sake of our ability to think… for the sake of thinking itself. The gift of thinking is bestowed from the spiritual realm, but it is our responsibility to utilize it. If we lose our thinking, we lose ourselves, we lose the possibility of knowing ourselves.
Here's the thing:
The importance of knowing ourselves cannot be overstated. Knowing our genealogy, our inherited traits, our skeletons and organs, doesn’t tell us about who we are, it tells us only what we are in our material bodies. And everything we know—everything—is learned by our capacity to think, to apply it to our perceptions and the words we use to describe them.
Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:
A profound breach now runs through the whole of civilization, a breach which brings much chaos to the world and which people who are fully aware experience with a sense of tragedy. One expression of this breach is the fact that human beings, when considering human dignity and their worth as human beings, can no longer find any connection with that world which gives the human soul devout feelings both profound and uplifting—namely the world of moral values.
People look instead to the world of nature, to which, of course, they also belong. During the course of recent centuries, the world of nature has come to appear before the human soul in such a way that it has absorbed the whole of reality, has absorbed every aspect of actual existence. The world of nature with its laws is indifferent to moral values and runs its course in accordance with external necessity. In their everyday life, human beings, too, are tied up in this necessity.
If human beings feel themselves enclosed within such bounds, it is impossible for them to discover what it is that makes them human.
We have to see the content of this moral world as something which ought to be, something which is the ideal. Yet no knowledge which is current today is capable of showing us how moral ideals can flow into the laws of nature (necessity) and how necessity can be made to serve moral values.
We have to admit that today’s world is divided into two parts which, for modern consciousness, are incompatible: the moral world and the material world. People see birth and death as the boundaries which encompass the only existence recognized by present-day knowledge. On the other hand, they have to look up to a world which lies above birth and death, a world which is eternally meaningful, unlike the endlessly changing material world. And they have to think of their soul life as being linked with the eternal meaning of that world of moral values…
But now initiation science (aka spiritual science) wants to enter once again into human civilization and show us that behind the world perceived by our senses there stands a spiritual world, a mighty world, powerful and real, a world of moral values to which we may turn. It is the task of initiation science to take away from natural existence the absolute reality it assumes for itself and to give reality back once more to the world of moral values.
It can only do so by using means of expression different from those given by today’s language, today’s world of ideas and concepts. The language of initiation science still seems strange, even illusory, to people today because they have no inkling that real forces stand behind the expressions used, that language cannot give full and adequate expression to what is seen and perceived.
What, after all, do the words ‘human being’ signify, when only the speech sounds are considered, compared with the abundant richness of spirit, soul and body of an actual human being standing before us! In just such a way in initiation science a spiritual world—behind the world of the senses—living in the world of moral values, storms and flows, working in manifold ways. This initiation science has to select all manner of ways of expressing what, despite everything, will be far richer in its manifestation than any possible means of expression.
Excerpt: Old and New Methods of Initiation, Lecture One, January 1, 1922, by Rudolf Steiner. Dornach.
Dr. Steiner wants us to discover for ourselves the world he has tried to illumine with words. He has given us exercises that help us prepare ourselves to consciously enter the spiritual world—the moral world—we inhabit unconsciously each time we sleep. Our world desperately needs to know this stuff. Clearly.
Reading a biography of Rudolf Steiner shows us the extraordinary compass of his influence and his work. Reading Steiner’s work moves us forward on our journey towards self-knowledge.
Meanwhile, we will continue to explore the question: Who Are You?