Not everyone walks into an art museum with the same enthusiasm, but almost all of us will find at least one painting we think is beautiful. We may even recognize it from somewhere. We will spend a minute or so in front of it, enjoying its colors and forms whether we understand what the artist is trying to express or not. And then we move on.
Let’s say a docent walks up while we are standing in front of our favorite painting and starts to explain it. We may learn about the artist, the painting’s composition, its historical context, etc. Now we see the painting differently; it is more beautiful than it was before. The painting didn’t change, we did. And from now on whenever we see a piece of art, though we may immediately recognize its beauty, we know that it is also filled with mysterious meaning we can’t see until we understand what we’re seeing.
For all of time, humanity has searched for meaning to the mysteries of life.
Why not be satisfied with a feeling? Why bother to understand?
Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:
… All an investigator of the spiritual world is doing is simply recalling to people’s memories something they have forgotten.
Now imagine that during life on earth you come across another person with whom you remember experiencing something 20 years before, but which he has completely forgotten. By talking with him, however, about the incident which you yourself remember clearly, you can bring the other person to recall it also. It is just the same process, though on a higher level, when I speak to you about the spiritual worlds, the only difference being that pre-earthly experiences are more completely forgotten than those of earthly life.
Now people might say: ‘Why should we be asked during our life on earth to take on this extra task of concerning ourselves with matters which, in accordance with cosmic ordering or, one might say, with divine decree, we experience during life beyond the earth?’ There are those, too, who ask: ‘Why should I go to this trouble before death to gain knowledge about the supersensible worlds? I can very well wait until I am dead. Then, if all these things really exist, I shall come face to face with them.’
All this, however, arises from a total misunderstanding of earthly life. The facts of which the spiritual investigator speaks are experienced by human beings in pre-earthly existence, but they are not then the subject of thought, and only during life on earth can thoughts about them be experienced. And only those thoughts about the supersensible world that have been worked upon during earthly life can be carried with us through the gate of death, and only then can we understand the facts we experience between death and rebirth.
… At this present stage of human evolution people’s lives are extraordinarily hard if, during life on earth, they give no thought to the spiritual world. For having passed through the gate of death they can no longer acquire any real knowledge of their surroundings. They are in the midst of what is incomprehensible to them. An understanding of what is experienced after death has to be striven for during life on earth… it was different for people of earlier ages. But, at the present moment of humanity’s evolution people will have to rely more and more on acquiring here on earth an understanding of what they are going to experience in the supersensible world between death and rebirth.
Excerpt from: The Evolution of Consciousness, Lecture 3: New and Old Initiation Science, August 21, 1923, in Berlin.
Consciousness evolves. Spiritual knowledge, once our birthright, once innate, must now be attained through our thinking. Spiritual awareness disappeared so that our thinking could develop freely, and now we need to lift the power of our thinking into the spiritual realms to understand what we will experience between death and rebirth. Until we can acquire this knowledge firsthand, we need a docent. We have the many works of an initiate, Rudolf Steiner, to provide us with this knowledge. We have much to learn before we cross the threshold.