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…