Three Powers: Wonder, Compassion, Conscience

The purpose of Earth evolution is that there may be implanted into the evolutionary process as a whole, powers which could otherwise never have come into existence: Wonder, Compassion and Conscience.

What are we to make of the brutishness of our time? Mostly, nothing new is showing up. The stories of cruelty and intolerance are as old as our histories, no matter where we came from or where we are now. Those people who refuse to just let evil run riot and who respond actively without resorting to violence themselves represent the good in humanity. If we wonder what that looks like, the citizens of Minneapolis, Minnesota are showing us every day. Or the Buddhist monks whose Walk for Peace, 2300 miles from Fort Worth, Texas to American University in Washington DC was completed this week. Or the thousands of people all over the world who are actively and peacefully resisting attacks on rights both human and ecological.

The three qualities, Wonder, Compassion or love, and Conscience or moral obligation, are spiritual qualities that can exist only here on earth. They exist because we have a connection to our spiritual home, and the world we understand with reason and intellect alone, the world of our senses, doesn’t always tally with our soul’s experience. Thus, we feel wonder when we witness courage that overrides fear and compliance. We feel compassion for people suffering from injustice, and we may even attempt to feel some compassion for the perpetrators who are at a stage of development that allows them to behave as they do. We feel our conscience nudging us to action to prevent further injustice and guide the offenders to a healthy soul development.

We can come to understand that these three forces actually lift us out of ourselves and open us to each other and the world around us.

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

The wonder felt by philosophers is associated with the fact that certain things are not to be comprehended through what presents itself to the eyes of sense… Wonder arises in us when the form in which the things in the material world can be explained only by knowledge we once possessed in a supersensible world prior to our birth. Wonder points to the connection we have with the supersensible world, to something belonging to a sphere we can enter only when we transcend the world in which our physical bodies enclose us. This is one indication of the fact that here, in this physical world, there is a continual urge within us to reach out beyond ourselves…

Those of us who can only remain shut up in ourselves, who are not driven by wonder beyond the field of the “I”, who remain unable to reach beyond ourselves, who see the sun rise and set without a thought and with complete unconcern are uncivilized.

A second power which releases us from the ordinary world, leading us at once away from material perception into supersensible insight, is compassion. When we look at a being only from outside, impressions come from that person to our senses and intellect; with the awakening of compassion, we pass beyond the sphere of these impressions. We share in what is taking place in that person’s innermost nature and, transcending the sphere of our own “I”, we pass over into that person’s world. In other words: we are set free from ourselves; we break through the barriers of ordinary existence in the physical body and reach over into the other being. Here, already, is the supersensible—for neither the operations of the senses nor of the reasoning mind can carry us into the sphere of another’s soul.

If we are incapable of compassion, there is a moral defect, a moral lack in us. If at the moment when we should get free from ourselves and pass over into the other person, feeling not our own pain or joy but the pain or joy of that other—if at that moment our feelings fade and die away, then something is lacking in our moral life.

Conscience is a third power whereby we transcend what we are in the physical body. In ordinary life we will desire this or that; according to our impulses or needs we will pursue what is pleasing and thrust aside what is displeasing to us. But in many such actions we will be our own critic; the voice of our conscience sounds a note of correction. Final satisfaction or dissatisfaction with what we have done also depends upon how the voice of conscience has spoken. This in itself is a proof that “conscience” is a power whereby we are led out beyond the sphere of our impulses, our likes and dislikes.

Wonder and Amazement, Compassion or Fellowship, Conscience [or moral obligation]—these are the three powers by means of which we, even while in the physical body, transcend our own limitations. For through these powers, influences which cannot find entrance into the human soul by way of the intellect and the senses, ray into physical life. If a body of flesh did not separate us from the spiritual world and present the outer world to us as a sense-world, we would be incapable of wonder. Compassion could not unfold if we were not separated from each other. And conscience could not be experienced as a spiritual force sending its voice into our world of natural urges, passions and desires, if the material body did not wish to satisfy them.

And so, the human being must be incarnated in a physical body in order that he may be able to experience wonder, compassion and conscience. In our time, people concern themselves little with such secrets, although they are profoundly enlightening.

Excerpt from: Earthly and Cosmic Man, Lecture 6: The Mission of the Earth. Wonder, Compassion and Conscience. Rudolf Steiner. May 14, 1912. Berlin (Note: some edits were made by this writer.)

Steiner says elsewhere in this excerpted lecture that “We human beings on Earth, if we are to reach the stature of full and complete personhood, must be able to move out beyond our own earthly life, we must be able to live in another, not only in ourselves.”

Becoming a full human being is a goal towards which each of us must strive. It’s not the fact that we belong to a country, a government, a party, a tribe, or a family that makes us full human beings. Becoming a full human being requires that we think for ourselves and seek out others who are filled with wonder, compassion and conscience like the neighbors in Minneapolis, the Buddhist walkers, the people the world over who are trying to love instead of hate.

We each have a deep responsibility toward the earth and all that lives on it. If we strengthen our powers of wonder, compassion and conscience, we become fit as human beings—we evolve as we are meant to evolve. We owe this to ourselves and the world.

What Happened

“What has happened was necessary, but at the same time, it is a basis for learning, learning through observation, not useless criticism.”
– Rudolf Steiner

We live many lifetimes over thousands of years. Our time in the spiritual world between incarnations includes observing these lives, especially our most recent one, and preparing for our upcoming incarnation. We use the knowledge we have thus gained to form the next life we will enter through our heredity and our karma. Understanding that the causes for what happens in our current lifetime may have occurred hundreds of years ago helps us to accept that our past is unchangeable; it is a done deal; it is inevitable—a necessity. But from this moment right now and forward into our future we have opportunities for freedom.

Steiner says, “Where the deepest riddles of human existence are concerned the best way to avoid abstraction and to get close to reality is to give examples.” Below is one of three examples he gave in the excerpted lecture.

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

The two concepts of freedom and necessity are extremely difficult to grasp and even more difficult to reconcile. It is not for nothing that philosophy for the most part fails when it comes to the problem of freedom and necessity…

When we look at human activities, the first thing we see everywhere is the thread of necessity. For it would be biased to say that every human action is a product of freedom. Let me give you a hypothetical example.

Imagine someone growing up. Through the way he is growing up, it can be shown that all the circumstances have gone in the direction of making him a country postman who has to go out into the country every morning with the mail and deliver letters. He does the same round every day. I expect you will all agree that a certain necessity can be found in this whole process.

If we look at all that happened to this lad in his childhood and take into account everything that had its effect on his life, we will certainly see that all these things combined to make him a mailman. So that as soon as there was a vacant position, he was pushed into it of necessity, at which point freedom certainly ceased to exist, for of course he cannot alter the addresses of the letters he gets. There is now an external necessity that dictates the doors at which he has to call. So, we certainly see a great deal of necessity in what he has to do.

But now let us imagine a younger person who, not out of idleness but just because he is still so young, makes up his mind to go with the mailman every morning and accompany him on his round. He gets up in good time every morning, joins the postman and takes part in all the details of the round for a considerable while.

Now it is obvious that we cannot talk of necessity in the case of the second fellow in the same sense as we can of the first. For everything the first fellow does must happen, whereas nothing the second fellow does has to be done. He could have stayed at home any day, and exactly the same things would have happened from an objective standpoint. This is obvious, isn’t it? So, we could say that the first man does everything out of necessity and the second everything out of freedom. We can very well say this, and yet in one sense they are both doing the same thing.

We might even imagine a morning comes when the second fellow does not want to get up. He could quite well have stayed in bed, but he gets up all the same because he is now used to doing so. He does with a certain necessity what he is doing out of freedom. We see freedom and necessity virtually overlapping…

If we study the way our actual soul nature—which will pass through the gate of death—lives in us, it could be compared with someone accompanying the outer human being in the physical world… What we are in life really consists of two parts that come together from two different directions for our external physical nature comes through the line of heredity, bringing not only physical characteristics with it … but also social status…

Our individual being originating in the spiritual world comes from a different direction bringing with it the causes that may have been laid down in us centuries before and unites them on a spiritual level with the causes residing in the stream of heredity. Two beings come together, and we can regard this second being coming from the spiritual world and uniting with the physical being as a kind of companion to the first. Our soul being in a certain sense joins us in the external events in a similar way.

The other person accompanying the postman did it all voluntarily. This cannot be denied. We could certainly look for causes but compared with the necessity that binds the first postman, the causes for the second man’s actions lie in the realm of freedom; he did it all voluntarily. You will not deny that if the second person accompanied the first person long enough, he would doubtlessly have become a good mailman. He would have easily been able to do what the man he accompanied did. He would even have been able to do it better because he would avoid certain mistakes.

But if the first fellow had not made these mistakes, the second man would not have become aware of them. We cannot possibly imagine that it would be of any use if the second fellow were to think about the first one’s mistakes. If we think in a living way, we will consider this to be an utterly futile endeavor. By specifically not thinking about the mistakes but joining in the work in a living way and just observing the proceedings as a whole, he will acquire them through life and will as a matter of course not make these mistakes.

This is just how it is with our soul nature that accompanies us within. If this being can rise to the perception that what we have done is necessary, that we have accompanied it and will furthermore take our soul nature into the future in so far as it has learned something, then we are looking at things the right way. But it must have learned those things in a really living way.

Excerpt from: Necessity and Freedom, Lecture 3, Berlin. January 30, 1916.

We need to “strengthen the companion part of ourselves”, strengthen our souls so that we aren’t just obsessing over or rationalizing the mistakes we’ve made. Self-reflection, even remorse, are of course, still important. But once we can see all our successes and failures objectively, can see that we cannot change what we have already done, felt or thought, we are free to shape our will to move on, to move from who were just a moment ago to who we will become.