Sleeping into War

The three aspects of consciousness we know as awake, dreaming, and sleep, are discussed often in Steiner’s work; in 2019 this blog devoted 5 months to this topic. The counterintuitive aspect of these states is that what we know about the realms of the physical world while we are awake, is like sleep to the knowledge of the spiritual world. Just as we are unaware of our physical surroundings when we are asleep, when we are awake, we are unaware of our spiritual surroundings. We take it for granted that the physical world doesn’t disappear because we are asleep, but many of us are unable to grasp that the spiritual world doesn’t disappear when we are awake. Far too many of us believe that the spiritual world doesn’t exist at all.

This is the starting point of the topic today because we will begin discussing the challenging idea that some of the spiritual beings around us are actively working to bring discord and destruction into the world. There are so many ways to look at this, but the main thing to keep in mind is that these “evil” beings are nonetheless serving the grand purpose of leading the human being to freedom. Freedom is only possible when we have a choice; error, too, is only possible when we have a choice. Why do we so often choose war?

The excerpt below is from a lecture Steiner gave in December 1917, one month after the Bolsheviks took control of Russia and less than a year before the end of World War I. Take a look at the reason given for the war’s beginning. Does this make sense? Then, after the League of Nations was created, and all sorts of sovereignty was given to individual nations, WWII began less than two decades later. That’s enough history for now; we can march through all the wars since then if we are so inclined because the war to end all wars was in fact only the beginning. What are we as nations hoping to accomplish in the world? What do we want? And why do we so often choose war?

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

Merely knowing what is going on in the physical world and knowing the laws that human minds are able to perceive as operative in this world, is no more than being asleep in a higher sense. Humanity is only fully awake when people are able to develop notions and ideas of the world of the spirit. This is all around us, just as air and water, the stars, the sun and the moon are all around us. When we are physically asleep, we are wholly given up to the internal processes that go on in the body during the night and have no idea of anything in the physical world around us. We are asleep in exactly the same way when we are wholly given up to the physical environment and to the world and the laws of the intellect and have no idea of the world of the spirit that is all around us.

Humanity has made great play of its intellectual progress and scientific achievements in the last few centuries and has been particularly insistent on this at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Yet, strangely enough, the unconscious and instinctive life was never more to the fore than it is at this time. Up to the present time this instinctive and unconscious element has increasingly taken hold of the human race. Failure to see the spiritual reality and take account of the element of the spirit is ultimately the cause of this terrible world war. Nor can it be said that through these years—years which have turned into centuries for anyone who is awake in them—humanity has learned an adequate lesson from the terrible events around us. Sadly, it has to be said that the opposite is the case.

What is the characteristic element to be found day by day, hour by hour, when we take note of what people think, or rather pretend to think and pretend to want? It is that, fundamentally speaking, no one in the world knows what they want, and no one realizes that people’s perfectly justifiable aims, whichever form they may take in the minds of individual nations, would be achieved so much better if they did away with these terrible wars in which so much blood is shed. People do not realize that these terrible events with their bloodshed are really not necessary as a means of helping them to achieve their aims…

People are ill-equipped to understand what wants to come to the surface. Why are they so ill-equipped? Strange as it may seem to people today, the present age is more than any other age demanding the one thing people least want to have: understanding based on the science of the spirit. Strange as it may sound to the ordinary, average people of today—order will not be created from the chaos of the present time until a sufficiently large number of people are prepared to recognize the truths of spiritual science. Such will be the karma of world history.

If people insist that this war {WWI} is just like the wars of the past and that we’ll be making peace just as peace has been made before—let them talk. They are the people who love maya and do not distinguish between truth and deception. Let them make what may seem like ‘peace’—order will only arise from the chaos that fills the world today when insight based on the science of the spirit dawns in human minds. You may feel in your hearts that it will be a long time before such order comes; you may think it will be a long time before people are prepared to let the dawn of such a science arise, and you will be right. You have to accept that it will be a long time before order arises from the chaos. For it will not come until human hearts understand the realm of the spirit. Order can only come when it is understood how this chaos has arisen.

Excerpt from: The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness, Lecture I: The Driving Forces Behind Europe’s War by Rudolf Steiner. Dornach, Switzerland, December 29, 1917.

As much as we may not want to dwell on this topic, we will return to it again next month as we learn why acceptance of spiritual science plays such an important role in bringing peace out of the chaos of our time. Meanwhile, much more than you think, directing our thoughts to those suffering from war’s ravages—saying prayers on their behalf—provides them with some solace. Where your thoughts go, your presence goes with them. Thought isn’t contained by your skin, as you know. Direct your love forth into the world; it is a source of comfort that is real… and vital.

So Much More to Know

Let’s take a quick review of the various bodies that make up the human being before we advance to today’s topic. The physical body is obvious; it’s the one studied by modern science, made up of earthly materials that we experience with our senses. The etheric body carries our life forces of growth and healing and reproduction—our health and vitality. The astral body houses our feelings, passions and desires, our pleasure and pain. Our I, or Ego, is our eternal spiritual core. It’s the body of our self-consciousness that stays with us throughout all our many incarnations. The I is our true self that directs and transforms the rest of our bodies. (These descriptions are the barest hints of the many functions of each body.)

As we think of these bodies, we can imagine how the health of each one would affect the other. For example, if we are filled with despair, an emotion expressed through our astral body, our etheric body correspondingly loses vitality, which causes our physical body to become unhealthy. Science already recognizes that unloved or lonely people have a harder time healing that those surrounded by love. We can probably imagine lots of other ways that soul-sickness affects our bodies.

When we begin a path of spiritual development, the I begins in earnest to work on the other bodies, usually beginning with the astral body. We’ve begun this work when we try to be kind, we try to contain our anger, we try to reign in our baser instincts. As our I slowly gains mastery of our astral body, we free ourselves to evolve and develop additional capacities, spiritual capacities. These capacities are explained to us by initiates such as Rudolf Steiner. Some capacities we gain include staying conscious during sleep, conversing with friends and family who have already crossed the threshold into the spiritual world, coming to know other beings of the hierarchies such as our guardian angel.

Owning these capacities can arouse disbelief and even scorn from those who haven’t worked long and hard enough through meditation or contemplation and other exercises to acquire them.

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

Every time we wake in the morning, we find the same physical and etheric bodies, and we know that fundamentally speaking we can do very little by means of our own forces to transform these two bodies or to develop them to a higher stage… Nevertheless, inner forces must be active through the whole of life between birth and death, and these forces must be continually rekindled if life is to continue. We see at the moment of death what becomes of the physical body when the etheric body is no longer working in it. The physical and chemical forces inherent in the physical body as such assert themselves from the moment of death onwards and dissolve, disintegrate it. That this cannot happen during life is due to the etheric body, which is a faithful fighter against the disintegration of the physical body. At every moment our physical body would be ready to disintegrate if fresh forces from the etheric body were not continually supplied to it.

The etheric or life-body in turn receives what it needs in this respect from still deeper inner forces, from the astral body, which is the vehicle of happiness and grief, of joy and sorrow. Thus, the corresponding inner body is perpetually working at the outer body. The outwardly visible part of us is sustained all the time by the inner forces. How the astral body works on the etheric body and the etheric body on the physical—that is what we would see if we were able to descend consciously into the physical and etheric bodies on waking; but we are diverted from this perception by external objects and happenings.

However, by developing our souls to the stage enabling us to experience consciously the moment of entry into the etheric and physical bodies on waking, we can acquire a certain knowledge of what actually works creatively on our inner being during sleep.

We become conscious of the driving forces of our human nature when we are able to descend into our inner being. What must we do if this is to be achieved with conscious awareness? We must prepare ourselves in such a way that at the moment of waking, external impressions transmitted by the eyes, ears, and so forth, do not disturb us, do not immediately force themselves upon us. We must train ourselves to be able to pass out of the state of consciousness prevailing in sleep in such a way that we are able to ward off all external impressions. When we can do that, we pass the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold.

 What is it that we see if we pass through the portal leading into our own inner being? As genuine mystics we learn to know something of which hitherto we had no notion… Genuine knowledge of these bodies into which we descend on waking is only possible as the result of a patient and prolonged approach from every angle to the great truths of existence.

Excerpt from: Macrocosm and Microcosm, Lecture Four: Faculties of the Human Soul and Their Development by Rudolf Steiner. Vienna. March 24, 1910.

 As Dr. Steiner states in many places in his work, the transitions from sleeping to waking and from waking to sleeping are sensitive times when we can direct our attention inward instead of outward. Staying as open as possible without thinking about all that the day holds in store for us as we wake and recalling backwards from the last moment to the first of our day before going to sleep are ways that can lead us toward remembering our experiences in the spiritual world while we are asleep.

We have a hard time being patient these days, especially as we try to learn new things. Sometimes we end up with more questions than answers. Instead of being irritated, we could choose to live with a question—to ponder it. We may start by asking ourselves why we curious about all this spiritual stuff in the first place.

We will continue this discussion next year. Happy New Year to you all!

Phenomenal

Let’s suppose the following is true:

Long ago, people had an innate capacity to experience the spiritual worlds and the beings, the gods, that inhabit them. These ancient peoples didn’t make up the worlds we read about in their stories and mythologies, they portrayed those worlds. They consciously communicated and interacted with the various spiritual beings until humanity lost its innate capacity to see in these realms. In other words, the gods didn’t go away, humanity had to lose the capacity to see them in order to develop other capacities important for our evolution as human beings. These spiritual realms which became inaccessible for humanity, could still be experienced by those few who were initiated.

Seen in this way, the ancient stories come alive for us. All over the world, the origin stories, the stories of the various nature spirits and the spirits of the elements, the stories of the gods and the planetary powers, and so on tell us what the ancient peoples observed. To us, they are stories of fantasy; to humanity of thousands of years ago, they are stories of the real world, the world they experienced, populated by gods and goddesses. To us, we have the four elements, to Empedocles back in the fifth century B.C.E. we had four divinities: earth/Hera, water/Persephone, air/Zeus, and fire/Hades.

Intellectually, many of us know that we are spiritual beings inside physical bodies. Extending that idea to the other earthly phenomena is more difficult. We must imagine a spiritual being hidden behind each and every thing we experience in the physical world, just as we imagine our own spirit hiding behind our corporeal bodies.

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

A justifiable opinion might be expressed by the following illustrations: I had supposed up till now that I knew what fire is but that was only an illusion. For what I have called fire up till now would be like calling the tracks of a carriage on a road the only reality and denying that a carriage in which a person was sitting must have been passing that way. I declare these tracks on the road to be the signs, the outer expression of the carriage which has passed there and in which a person was sitting. I have not seen the person who passed there, but he is the cause of these tracks, he is the reality. And a person who believed the marks left by the wheels to be something complete in themselves, something real and basic, would be taking the outer expression for the thing itself.

That which our senses see as flashing fire bears the same proportion to its reality, to the spiritual being which stands behind it, as do the tracks on the road to the person who was sitting in the carriage which passed there. In fire we have only an outer expression. Behind what our eyes see as fire and what we feel as heat is the real spiritual entity, which has only its outer expression in the outer fire. Behind what we inhale as air, behind what enters our eyes as light, and behind what our ears perceive as sound are active beings spiritual and divine, whose outer garments only we behold in fire, in water and in what surrounds us in the different realms of nature.

In the so-called secret teaching, in the teaching of the mysteries, the experience which is then gone through is called the ‘passage through the elementary worlds.’ Whereas previously one had lived in the belief that what we know as fire is a reality, one then becomes aware that living beings are hidden behind the fire. We become, so to say, acquainted with fire, more or less intimately as something quite different from what it appears to be in the world of the senses. We become acquainted with the fire-beings, with what is the soul of the fire. Just as our souls are hidden behind our bodies, so the soul and spirit of the fire are hidden by the fire which we perceive with our outer senses.

We penetrate into a spiritual domain when we experience the soul and spirit of fire in this way, and the experience by which we realize that the outer fire is no reality, that it is a mere illusion, a mere garment, and that we now move among the fire-gods just as we did formerly among people of the physical world, is called ‘living in the element of fire’, to use the terms of occult science… when one has acquired true self-knowledge, one can ascend to experiencing the beings in the so-called elements, in the elements of fire, of water, of air and of earth. These four classes of gods or spirits live a real existence in the elements, and a person who has reached the stage which has just been described is in touch with the divine spiritual beings of the elements.

Excerpt from: The East in the Light of the West, Lecture II: Comparison of the Wisdom of East and West, August 24, 1909.

Steiner encouraged us to read his work with an open mind until such time as we could discover the spiritual worlds ourselves… and then he gave us the methods by which to do so. In the beginning of the above lecture he says, “The method for the attainment of clairvoyant powers employed by the teachers of this research is drawn from the knowledge which has been tested for thousands of years in the way of exercises, meditation and concentration…” We won’t be able to prove that fire spirits are real to anyone other than ourselves, and we won’t see them for ourselves until we’ve done the work to become initiates. For the majority of us who cannot find even five minutes a day to meditate, we most likely will first encounter the spiritual world when we enter it after death.

Meanwhile, we might enjoy the ancient myths and stories of the many cultures around the world from a new perspective. Or go see a movie with Odin, Thor and Loki in it…