Time
Karen Grant
Taking The Time
Taking The Time
Karma
Karen Grant
Karma Is an Active Law
Karma Is an Active Law
Love
Karen Grant
Love as a Force for Good
Love as a Force for Good
Spiritual Science
Karen Grant
Un-easy
Un-easy
Birth
Karen Grant
A World Full of Stars
A World Full of Stars

nature

Fighting the Dragon

Dragons are certainly popular these days. Books, cartoons, television shows, movies, they’re featured everywhere. Why dragons? For that matter, why were the villagers in stories dating back hundreds of years required to sacrifice a daughter to the dragon terrorizing them?

We know actual dragons don’t exist on earth; we have no evidence that they ever did. Yet, we all seem to know that great courage and strength is required to conquer them, and that, if captured, they are very hard to train. Let’s take a look at a specific dragon from a specific story.

The Archangel Michael (pronounced in three syllables), who is celebrated each year on September 29, has everything to do with the dragon we will talk about today. But first, let’s look at Raphael’s painting depicting Michael conquering the dragon.

Why was this battle a subject for so many artists? We can learn from studying spiritual science that long ago, when humankind still possessed an innate spiritual vision, cosmic images of spiritual realities explained the heavens and the earth to humankind. The knowledge imparted by these cosmic images is the basis of our religions, and though mankind had lost access to direct knowledge of the spiritual world, the artists of the Renaissance like Raphael and Michelangelo kept painting these images.

The paintings by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, for example, depict the cosmic images revealed to the writer of Genesis. Is God an elderly white man with a flowing white beard? No, of course not. And dragons as a species aren’t a thing. So, when we look at these paintings, we must keep that in mind. To refresh this kind of thinking, please refer to the blog from October last year. (https://www.whoareyou.blog/invisibility).

Why are we talking about any of this? Because a cosmic truth is revealed when we understand that a being depicted by the dragon was cast out of his milieu by Michael and found its new residence within us. We don’t see the dragon, but we see the results within us in the form of many evils to which we succumb in our lives. When we contemplate the image of Michael conquering the dragon, we need to understand that the Dragon, cast out of the heavens, is now an earthly problem; a problem each of us must attend to. Why? Because as human beings we need to cultivate courage and strength to fulfill our destiny.

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

When we turn our gaze back into earlier times of human evolution, we are inevitably struck with the change that has come about in our conceptual pictures of nature and of spirit. Nor do we need to go back very far to observe this change occurring. As late as the eighteenth century the forces and substances of nature were thought of in a much more spiritual manner than they are today, while spiritual things were conceived more in pictures taken from nature. It is only in quite recent times that ideas about the spirit have become so utterly abstract and ideas about nature have become based on matter that is devoid of spirit and so impenetrable for human thought and vision. For present-day human understanding, nature and spirit are sundered from each other; there appears to be no bridge leading from one to the other.

It is for this reason that images of a sublime worldview, which in past times had great significance for the human being as he sought to comprehend his place in the universe, have passed completely into the realm of things deemed to be no more than airy fancy—to which man could only give himself up so long as an exact science was not there to forbid him. One such cosmic image is that of Michael fighting with the Dragon.

The picture of the fight of Michael with the Dragon expresses a strong awareness that man himself must give to his inner life of soul the direction and guidance that nature cannot give. Our present-day thinking is inclined to mistrust such an idea. We are afraid of becoming estranged from nature. We fear to lose ourselves in all kinds of fantasy should we allow the spirit that transcends the perception of external nature to play a part in our striving for knowledge about the true nature of the world…

Excerpt from: The Festivals and Their Meaning. Article: Michael and the Dragon, Das Goetheanum, Sept. 30. 1923.

That last sentence bears repeating: “We fear to lose ourselves in all kinds of fantasy should we allow the spirit that transcends the perception of external nature to play a part in our striving for knowledge about the true nature of the world.” We are afraid of accepting spiritual truths. Yet, once we do, we recognize the inadequacy of the purely materialistic understanding of life, the universe, and everything.

Maybe we could try to embrace this image of Michael conquering the Dragon. Maybe we could set it before our mind’s eye, and through it accept that a real battle with a real dragon is occurring inside us. We need to emulate Michael. We need to find the courage to recognize the dragon’s influence within us and the strength to conquer the evils to which we’ve fallen prey.



,

Know It All

,

The vault of the blue sky arching over snowcapped mountain peaks in the distance invites the soul to expand out to meet the beauty we behold. The sound of a rushing stream that accompanies the visual complexity of water flowing over boulders and cascades fills the soul with feelings of abundance. We are alive and present in the moment. We may begin to notice the tiny flowers sparking the green banks with a multitude of colors. What are they called? How did they get there? We move naturally from our observations to our thinking.

The first of the six steps of the scientific method states: “Make an observation or observations.” This presumes that we possess the faculties and abilities necessary to observe the world around us. Every further step presumes that we possess a rational mind—that we can think. It is thinking itself that is implicit and fundamental to the scientific method. The scientific method, formalized by Francis Bacon back in 1621, is still the way we do science. Rudolf Steiner uses this method as his means for investigating and reporting on the spiritual world.

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

In sequence of time, observation does in fact come before thinking. For even thinking we must get to know first through observation... Everything that enters the circle of our experience, we first become aware of through observation. The content of sensation, perception and contemplation, all feelings, acts of will, dreams and fancies, mental pictures, concepts and ideas, all illusions and hallucinations, are given to us through observation.

Excerpt from: Philosophy of Freedom, Chapter III: Knowledge of Freedom revised edition: 1918.

Critical thinking is essential to the five remaining steps of the scientific method. A definition for critical thinking formulated by Michael Scriven and Richard Paul reads: “Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning or communication, as a guide to belief and action.”

 Back to Dr. Steiner:

When we consider the significance of natural science in human life, we shall find that this significance cannot be exhausted by acquiring a knowledge of nature, since this knowledge can never lead to anything but an experiencing of what the human soul itself is not. The soul-element does not live in what man knows about nature, but in the process of acquiring Knowledge. The soul experiences itself in its occupation with nature. What it vitally achieves in this activity is something besides the knowledge of nature itself: it is self-development experienced in acquiring knowledge of nature. Occult science desires to employ the results of this self-development in realms that lie beyond mere nature. The occult scientist has no desire to undervalue natural science; on the contrary, he desires to acknowledge it even more than the natural scientist himself. He knows that, without the exactness of the mode of thinking of natural science, he cannot establish a science. Yet he knows also that after this exactness has been acquired through genuine penetration into the spirit of natural-scientific thinking, it can be retained through the force of the soul for other fields.

Excerpt from: Esoteric Science: An Outline, Preface to the 1925 edition 10/01/25 by Rudolf Steiner.

Natural science can tell us what type of flower is growing by the stream and how it probably got there. We can investigate its physiology, structure, genetics, ecology, distribution, classification, and economic importance. Natural science struggles to explain, however, why the flower gives us joy; why the sky, the mountains and the stream invoke the feelings they do.  We need to further science into those realms as well—the realms beyond what we can perceive through our senses. We believe that understanding botany is a worthwhile endeavor; shouldn’t we pursue the science of the spirit with equal vigor?  This is what Anthroposophy does. Reading books like The Philosophy of Freedom (also translated as Philosophy of Spiritual Activity) can be a good first step.