Still Stoking the Fire

The world seems to be conspiring to make us angry. The very earth itself seems angry now. Vicious storms, earthquakes, volcanoes, heatwaves, tidal waves all seem to echo the blistering storms and heat of our political, economic and social lives. The third decade of the third millennium could be seen as a conflagration of the worst of us. Rudolf Steiner has much to say about this particular time of earth and human evolution, but today we are going to once again look at the inner work we might do to manage it all.

We cannot ignore the injustices and tragedies going on around us, but we don’t have to become victims of them either. Bad things can befall us without our believing we are victims. When we fully understand that we have asked for these hardships of life—that we have placed ourselves in the midst of them to gain mastery of ourselves---we come to an inner realization that is a rich source of empowerment allowing us to extract ourselves from the outer feelings of blame or victimhood.

Many of us feel we have every right to be angry by the injustices we perceive. But anger isn’t a solution; it always makes things worse. We may not be active perpetrators to the injustices, fear and hatred we witness, but with deeper insight, we inevitably find our own culpability. We come to see how our own behaviors and beliefs now and in our past lives have contributed to the problems of our time.

What now?

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

Whenever I am angry or irritated, I build a wall around myself in the soul world and the forces that should develop the eyes of my soul cannot approach me. If, for example, someone annoys me, he or she sends a soul current into the soul world. But I cannot see this current as long as I am still capable of anger. My anger hides it from me. This is not to say that if I master my anger, I will immediately perceive such soul (or astral) phenomena. For that, I must first develop an inner eye for my soul.

Each of us possesses such an eye in rudimentary form, but it remains ineffective so long as we are still capable of anger. Not that it appears as soon as we have begun to combat the anger in ourselves. Rather, we must continue on, struggling patiently with our anger, until one day we notice that this inner eye in the soul has opened…

In addition to anger and irritation, we must also struggle against other traits, such as fearfulness, superstition, prejudice, vanity, ambition, the urge to gossip, and the tendency to discriminate on the basis of such outer characteristics such as social status, gender, race, and so on.

We may have difficulty in understanding that the struggle against such traits has anything to do with increasing our cognitive abilities. Yet every occultist knows that much more depends on these things than on our ability to expand our intelligence and practice artificial exercises.

Misunderstandings can easily arise if, for example, we believe that the injunction to overcome fear means becoming foolhardy; or that to fight against discrimination based on social status or race means becoming blind to the differences among people. The fact is that we learn to recognize these differences for what they are only when we are no longer caught up in prejudice.

Even in ordinary life, fear of a thing prevents us from seeing it properly. In this sense, racial prejudice prevents us from seeing into a human soul. The esoteric student must take such ordinary common sense and perfect it inwardly with great sensitivity and precision.

Excerpt from: How To Know Higher Worlds: A Modern Path of Initiation, Chapter 4: Practical Considerations, by Rudolf Steiner.

Anger, fear and division are the tools being used in our time to dominate us all. When fear and division are our go-to tools, we do not act in anyone’s best interest, especially our own. If each of us would refuse to pick up these tools, all the useless rhetoric from all sides of an argument would disappear. We cannot make anyone drop a tool they want to use, but we are the only ones who can decide to drop it from our own hand. When we do, we gradually gain a clearer perspective, one that allows us to become a healthful force in the universe instead of a source for more anger and hatred and intolerance.

Later in this book, Steiner expands on this idea. In fact, in more than 6000 books, lectures, and articles, Steiner has made it clear over and over that the goal of all humanity is to achieve mastery over ourselves so that we can consciously cross the threshold into the spiritual world and see what the world is really like.

The world looks as it does today because we have not, as a whole, achieved anything close to that. Yet, every single one of us that begins to work in this way changes the world for the better. We need to decide who we shall be—that is the freedom of our time.

• • •

This post first appeared in the April 2025 edition of Who Are You?

Being Light

These are dark times. No matter where we live in today’s world, we are unable to rest within our own minds. This perfect confluence of disasters, of mental distraction amidst forces too numerous to list, leads us to feel helpless and fearful. The current state of the world is not an accident; the source lies in the spiritual world. Not enough of us understand this, which exacerbates all the contributing factors.

Most of us are at war now in one way or another. If not actually warring with another country or countries, we are experiencing cultural wars within our own borders; it’s not just nationalism that is dividing us. Extreme views determine the news we receive, the education we get, the rights we have, the beliefs we practice. The ability to reach a middle ground is fast disappearing.

Too few of us recognize that our sense of self while in our body, seeing ourselves as belonging to a particular country, race, gender, etc., is temporary, a material illusion. Once we leave our bodies at death, none of these aspects are important; we don’t take them with us as we enter our lives on the other side of the threshold. Acknowledging this, however, is a serious challenge.

The lecture featured below was given by Rudolf Steiner in Berlin just three months after the beginning of World War I. Steiner chose this subject knowing that emotions were running high because people from many of the countries opposing each other in the war were working together to build a center for Anthroposophy with sounds of gunfire nearby.

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

There is one particular great truth that we should have in mind these days as we look for love and understanding, for a loving comprehension of what is happening all around us – an insight that, fundamentally speaking, is at the center of everything we aim for in spiritual science. In our day this has to present itself to our souls with the full gravity and moral weight inherent in it. It is the realization – and this has by now become the simplest and most elementary fact in our spiritual life – that life on earth recurs. The fact is that in the course of time our souls progress from body to body. The part of man that is eternal hastens from body to body through man’s successive incarnations on earth. On the other hand, there is the part that has to do with human existence in a physical body, the part present on the physical plane that provides the configuration, the formation, the particular stamp to human existence in an outer physical body.

One particular thing that provides the outer stamp, determining the character of a person as it were, in so far as he is living in a physical body on the physical plane is what may collectively be referred to as nationality. This is something we should never forget, especially today. If we turn the mind’s eye to what we call man’s higher self, the concept of nationality loses significance. For when we pass through the gate of death everything encompassed by the term ‘nationality’ is among the things we cast off. And if we do in all seriousness want to be what we think people with spiritual aims should be, it is proper to remember that in passing through successive incarnations the human being belongs not to one but to a number of different nationalities. The part of him that links him to a particular nationality is among the things that are cast off, have to be cast off, the moment we pass through the gate of death…

The only life impulses we are able to take there are those that animate the efforts of our hearts and minds and in the final instance aim to join all peoples on the earth in brotherhood …

Truths that belong to the realm of the eternal do not have to be easily understood. Indeed, they may well be truths which at times go against our feelings – truths we achieve with difficulty particularly in difficult times, and also find difficult to achieve and retain in their full strength and clarity in difficult times such as these …

Today we see the members of different nations facing one another in dislike, in hatred. I am not at this point speaking about what is going on in the combat situation. I am speaking of what is going on in the feelings, the passions, of human souls. Here we have a soul. It needs to prepare for its reception into a spiritual world through which it will now have to pass between death and its next birth, a world that will guide it towards an incarnation that will belong to quite a different nationality from the one it is now leaving.

This is a fact which shows very clearly, in the best and most powerful way, how man resists the higher self that is within him. Consider some real ‘nationalist’ today, someone with national feelings who directs his antipathy very particularly against the members of another nation and, indeed, may be ranting and raving against this other nation in his own country… This is man raging against his own higher self. Wherever the ranting and raving is worst, wherever the hatred felt against other nationalities is greatest and where the most lies are told about them, someone seeing things not as Maya but in truth can perceive the true reason, which is that a great many members of the nation that rages most, is most cruel in its attitudes and lies the most, will have to assume that other nationality at their next incarnation.

Excerpt from: The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations, Lecture 2: Nationalities and Nationalism in the Light of Spiritual Science by Rudolf Steiner, Berlin, October 31, 1914

If each of us, every citizen of every country, recognized the spiritual reality that our patriotism – our affinity to our own nationality or culture – will be discarded at the entrance to the afterlife, we might be able to find a more expansive view of ourselves and others. When we incarnate once again, we will most likely be citizens of a different nation or a different gender or a different race than we are now. With this in mind, can we contemplate ourselves and others without the passions that stir so many of us to dark thoughts and even physical violence toward those who aren’t like us in thought or appearance? Can we accept two distinct ideas at the same time – that we must honor each other’s gender, race, and culture, while at the same time acknowledge that these factors are temporary circumstances of this lifetime? Can we seek unity?

In Joshua Tree National Park, massive boulders are piled high leaving crevices and caves beneath them. By crawling inside such a mountain of rocks, it doesn’t take long to lose all light. It is possible to hold your hand up and see nothing there at all. An eerie feeling envelops you—you feel the weight of the rocks above and all around you. You feel alone and helpless. Then someone strikes a match. The entire space lights up. That tiniest of lights extinguishes all the darkness!

These are dark times. We each need to become a radiating light. Imagine the comfort we can bring to others who have fallen into despair. If we begin our work to reach a spiritual understanding of humanity and its purpose on earth, we will no longer be blind. We ourselves will be a light.

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.