Both Sides of the Story

“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?

A New Dawn

A good night’s sleep is wonderful… a treasured event—we fall asleep easily and wake up feeling refreshed. We may want to think about why. What did we do that day that prepared us to fall asleep without a struggle? After all, many of us do struggle to get to sleep or we can wake up feeling exhausted. When that happens, we could examine the time we’ve been awake since we last slept and try to find a connection. What did we do? What did we eat or drink? What were we thinking about all day? Is the quality of our sleep life due to cause and effect? Only partially.

As we read the excerpt below, we will find a deeper meaning to our sleep life. We will realize that the review of our waking time that naturally occurs when we sleep is a moral one. That’s pretty sobering, especially since most of us are unaware of this aspect of sleeping. “Make good choices” becomes more than a joke. When we realize this, we may wish to renew our meditative practice of going backwards through our day before going to sleep to get a conscious and objective read on ourselves before moving into the unconsciousness of sleep.

Steiner also explains that our sleep life is the context of our life after death. For a period of time commensurate with our time spent asleep in our lifetime, we consciously experience our relationships from a moral perspective as we move backward from our last moment of life until we reach our moment of birth or conception.

Some terms that we may need to review: The life body or etheric body that Steiner refers to below is with us throughout our lives on earth. When we sleep this body stays with us while our astral body and “I” or ego rise to the spiritual world. When we die, the etheric body leaves with the astral body and “I”. Though we have discussed these terms previously, it is easy to take a moment to look up these terms if you are not familiar with them. An awareness of these four bodies is essential to an understanding of sleep and death and the whole human being for that matter.

Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:

If we consider human existence on Earth, the most significant element in life must appear to be our capacity to think or make mental images—the capacity to think for ourselves about the world, our own actions and so forth. Any other view would be a self-deception… Now, when we pass through the gates of death, we lay down our physical and life bodies. And so, in the first days after death (since it takes about three days to let go of the life body), we feel that our thought life is being sucked up by the universe… In these few days, the most valuable aspect of the earthly life that is past departs from the person who has died.

Everything we thought about the things of the world, about our whole earthly environment, what filled our normal consciousness—all this melts away from us in just a few days… and out of this darkening, dimming awareness there emerges what we lived through every time we slept, but which formerly remained outside awareness… This experience stays unconscious [during life], but it is not less lively than what becomes conscious. We do go through it. And once we have done so, it is something that belongs to our inner content. Each morning, we awaken changed; the night has changed us…

Now, the peculiar characteristic of our sleeping experiences is this: that in sleep the world takes place in reverse. Whether our sleep is long or short, once we fall asleep it is all the same, since other states of consciousness also have completely different time-senses. So, the characteristic I am talking about holds true whether you sleep all night or only for a few minutes. From the time we go to sleep until the time we wake up again, we live backwards through everything we just experienced between our last waking and the current moment of falling asleep. But we live through it in a different form than we did at first…

When we are awake, we live through the day from start to finish, every event and every circumstance in terms of physical, intellectual nuances. While asleep, however, we experience it all backwards and in terms of its moral nuances. Moral impulses appear; we pass through everything evaluating how it has made us more or less valuable as moral human beings. We indulge in no illusions, nor can we, but we evaluate everything we did the previous day in terms of our fundamental humanity… Every night as we sleep, we experience this moral ordering of the world. There, we evaluate things morally, that is, in connection with our own human value. We do this every time we sleep.

Excerpt from: Preparing for a New Birth by Rudolf Steiner. June 21, 1923, Stuttgart

How difficult it is these days to consider our own value to humanity. Yet, when we read this excerpt, we can expand our view to see that our own moral life matters not just to ourselves but to all of humanity – actually, to all beings of the universe. This should be how we measure success in life. Our efforts to act morally are to be made not egoistically to have an easier afterlife, but as an effort to raise all humanity by our “good choices”. We matter.

Steiner says that each morning we awaken changed. Let’s become conscious of this. Let’s become active in this process.

This is what we owe each other. This is what changes the world. The whole lecture excerpted above is worth reading; look it up. Meditating is worth doing. Changing the world happens with each human individual and no where else.