Un-easy

It’s hard to think amidst all the distractions we have in our lives. The levels of media disturbance we accept in our own homes are exacerbated when we live within the unceasing hum of a city. No wonder so many of us abandon efforts to meditate after a few attempts; we neglect to pursue our own thoughts, let alone thoughts of higher knowledge. Yet connecting with our spiritual nature has never been more important.

Why? Because it’s our time to do it; we are at that point in our evolution. Just as once people lived among the spirits of nature in a dreamy consciousness and then lost that capacity four to five hundred years ago in order to acquire scientific reason, we are now able to find our connection to the spirit again with this hard-won intellect and reason. If we continue to live without a foundation in the spirit, rooted in materialism, we will sink ever deeper into egotism and despair. We will lose our moral grounding. Sound familiar?

The trouble is, we have to exert ourselves to acquire this connection to the spirit. Steiner says, “It belongs to the essence of spiritual science that it makes demands on soul activity, that you do not accept spiritual-scientific truths lightly, as it were, for it is not just a matter of taking in what spiritual science says about one thing or another, but of how you take it in… To make spiritual science your own you must work at it in the sweat of your soul…”

Of course, we can choose to disregard the call to spirit. We are, after all, free in this regard.

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

Human beings will only attain the kind of connection they need to be truly human if they seek it in their inner life, if they delve so far down into the depths of their soul that they reach the forces that connect them with the spirit of the cosmos, out of which they were born and in which they are embedded, but from which they can be separated…

Only by penetrating into the depths of their own being will they find the connection with divine spiritual beings that they need for their salvation, the spiritual hierarchies that are progressing along a straight path. This connection with the spiritual hierarchies from which we were actually born, in the spirit, this living connection with them, is made difficult to the highest degree by the saturation of the world by modern technology. Human beings are dragged away from the spiritual-cosmic connections, and the forces which they should be developing to maintain their link with the spiritual-soul being of the cosmos are being weakened.

A person who has already taken the first steps in initiation will therefore notice how the mechanical things of modern life penetrate into man’s spiritual-soul nature to such an extent that a great deal of it is smothered and destroyed. Such a person also notices that the destruction of these forces makes it particularly difficult for him really to develop those inner forces which unite the human being with the ‘rightful’ spiritual beings of the hierarchies.

When someone who has taken the first steps in initiation tries to meditate in a modern railway carriage or on a modern steamer, he makes a great effort to activate the necessary forces of vision to lift him into the spiritual world, yet he notices the ahrimanic (spiritual beings desiring materialism) world filling him with the kind of thing that opposes this devotion to the spiritual world, and the struggle is enormous. You could call it an inner struggle experienced in the ether body, a struggle that wears you out and crushes you.

Other people who have not taken the first steps in initiation also go through this struggle, of course, and the only difference is that the student of initiation experiences it consciously. Everyone has to go through it; the effects of this are experienced by everyone.

It would be the worst possible mistake to conclude from this that we should resist what technology has brought into modern life, that we should protect ourselves from Ahriman (See: Here Know Evil) by cutting ourselves off from modern life. This would be a kind of spiritual cowardice. The real remedy is not to let the forces of the modern soul weaken and cut themselves off from modern life, but to make the forces of the soul strong so that they can stand up to modern life. A courageous approach to modern life is necessitated by world karma, and that is why true spiritual science possesses the characteristic of requiring an effort of the soul, a really hard effort.

Excerpt from: Art as Seen in the Light of Mystery Wisdom, Lecture 1, Technology and Art, by Rudolf Steiner. Dornach, December 28, 1914.

No one seems to be very happy with the current state of the world. Wars on all continents, political strife between families and friends, poverty, injustice, famine, you name it. Will we be able to address any of it with our established lines of thinking? Will we be able to penetrate to any truth with the shifting stories told through the lenses of deceit, arrogance, greed and malevolence we can witness every day in front of us or in the news? What if these maladies are recognized as evidence of a humanity that needs a perspective, a new voice? What if we could understand it all with spiritual insight?

We just won’t know unless we make the effort over and over again. Effort, by definition, isn’t easy, but then, neither is witnessing the world as it is today. Finding our own spiritual self could be the most important work we do in this lifetime.

What the Dead Want to Know

As we began to develop scientific thinking in the early 1400s, we lost our awareness of the spiritual world. This loss was essential to our evolution as human beings because we needed to develop this type of thinking exclusively; however, the time has come to renew our connection to our spiritual home. The topic of death is a tough one because most of us fear it; we have lost our ability to understand it. Yet now in our time, the veil between life and death is thinning for a variety of reasons. Humanity is evolving. We are at an important transition from using purely scientific reasoning to using the intellectual power gained by it to understand the spirit.

Many of us are reluctant to make that transition, and that has widespread ramifications for us and for those in our lives who have died. Rudolf Steiner tells us that souls who enter the spiritual world are capable of “seeing” amazing and profound things, but unless they have acquired spiritual knowledge while alive, they are unable to fully understand everything they are seeing.

Just as we can enjoy music without knowing how to read notes or play an instrument, those who are able to do those things have an enhanced appreciation for music. Similarly, people who die do so with the knowledge of the spiritual world that they acquired while they were alive. If they don’t know anything about the spiritual world before they die, their experience will be limited. In other words, their ability to understand what is in their new environment is predicated on what they learned during their lifetimes. This is an immediate issue for them because they want to know about the beings and environment of the spiritual world they now live in, but they lack the concepts to do so. We can help them.

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

If human beings on earth allow spiritual thoughts to permeate their souls, those thoughts can be perceived by souls in the beyond, and those earthly souls remain real for them. What we are touching upon here is the fact that the spiritual thoughts nurtured by souls here on earth can not only be perceived but be understood by the souls beyond. And, even more significantly this fact can have a practical consequence. Building on this insight, we can do something that could become very significant for the relationship between souls here and souls beyond. I refer to what we may call “reading to the dead.” Reading to the dead is often extraordinarily important.

A seer can have the experience that human beings who have entirely disregarded spiritual wisdom have a strong longing for it and wish to hear about it after they have passed through the gate of death. If souls who have remained behind make a clear mental image of the dead person, and at the same time bring to mind a spiritual train of thought or read from a spiritual book (in thought, not aloud) then the dead person whose spiritual image stands before them will become aware of it… One can often see how the dead long to hear what gets through to them from here… It is a grave error to think that a human being merely needs to die in order to contact the whole spiritual world… it is a deep misconception to believe that souls become wise as soon as they pass through the gate of death. A soul cannot be easily instructed by souls in the beyond immediately on passing through the gate of death if there is no basis for a connection with them.

… While materialism permits us to bring to life only relationships between souls confined to their earthly existence, spiritual science opens the way for free communication and exchange between souls on the earth and souls that dwell beyond the earth in the other world. The dead will live with us. And, when that happens, what we may call the passage through the gate of death will often after a time be experienced as merely a change in the form of existence. The whole transformation in the life of spirit and of soul that will take place when such things become common knowledge will be of enormous significance.

Excerpt from: Occult Research into Life Between Death and a New Birth, Lecture II: The Establishment of Mutual Relations between the Living and the So-called Dead by Rudolf Steiner, Stuttgart February 20, 1913.

Steiner is saying that the souls of those who have died are hungry for knowledge of the spirit—even if they were opposed to it during their lifetimes. Last month, we discussed how these departed souls miss us just as we miss them. This month, we see that they may need our help to understand what they are experiencing in the spiritual world. Reading to them is an ideal gift because we are learning too while we read. Reading scientific works doesn’t reach them—those concepts are unnecessary in the spiritual world—but reading spiritual scientific works does reach them because spiritual science explains the images they are seeing.

Communication does go both ways. The dead have reasons to communicate with us and attempt to do so in a variety of ways. We will learn to attune ourselves to the efforts and means of these communications in future blogs.

Meanwhile, we could pick up a book by Rudolf Steiner, such as Theosophy: An Introduction to the Spiritual Processes in Human Life and in the Cosmos and read it to one of the people we know on the other side. Steiner, the initiate of the 20th century who has over 6000 published works, continues to be the source of knowledge for this blog.

Hydration

Angels exist whether we believe in them or not, according to Steiner. Certainly, people of old experienced them as we can surmise from the many artifacts of antiquity that would otherwise make no sense. The realms of the angels of the Third Hierarchy, which we’ve discussed over the last year, can be referred to by the names we know from long ago: Angels, Archangels, and Archai. Steiner refers to them using many names.

He sometimes refers to Angels as Sons of Life or Sons of Twilight, to Archangels as Spirits of Fire, and Archai as Spirits of Personality or Time Spirits. As we learn more about these higher Beings, we see how these other names are fitting.

We no longer have direct experience of the angels and many of us no longer believe in them—or the spiritual world—at all. We are thus unable to fully understand ourselves or the world. Steiner says one way we can see ourselves is that our physical body is just 1/3 of us and our soul and spirit comprise the larger percentage, the other two-thirds. Yet, we toil away serving the physical world day in and day out for approximately 2/3 of every 24-hour period. Then we spend the remaining 1/3 of that time unconscious. Huh. What would our world look like if we spent some of our conscious time contemplating and working on our soul and spirit?

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

Look at the modern, materialistic world with all its commotion of people hurrying to and fro from morning till night, judging and measuring everything in terms of material worth: they do not suspect that, behind all this, the spirit lives and weaves. People go to sleep of an evening, never imagining that they are anything but unconscious and that they will wake to another day on the physical plane. People go to sleep, oblivious, after another rushed working day without considering life’s meaning. The spiritual seeker who has heard the word of spirit will know something that is not theory or doctrine: they know that they are given soul warmth and soul light. They also know that, during the day only to take in images of physical life, their lives would become desiccated and barren and any gains would perish. When you lie down to sleep at night you enter a world of spirit, diving down with all your soul powers into a realm of higher spiritual beings, towards whose stature your very being is intended to grow. On waking, you return, newly strengthened from a spiritual world and—consciously or unconsciously—divine spiritual vitality spills out over everything you receive from the physical plane. Out of eternity do you every morning rejuvenate what is temporal in your existence.

We transform the word of the spirit into the feeling we can have at evening: I am not only departing into unconsciousness, but I am immersing myself in a world where the beings of eternity dwell and among whose ranks my own being is intended to belong. I go to sleep with the feeling: Onwards into spiritual worlds! And I awake with the feeling: Forth from the spirit! We will then be filled with the feeling into which spirit word is transformed when tended here from day to day, from week to week, in a life dedicated to spiritual knowledge. Then will the spirit become life in us, then will we go to sleep and wake up differently.

Excerpt from: Lecture by Rudolf Steiner, Dec. 21, 1909, Berlin.

The words Steiner uses above—desiccated and barren—are ominous. These words call forth images of the cracked and lifeless earth of former lakes and rivers; they are the very words that refer to drought. We know we cannot survive without water, so these images rouse a fear for the future. Fortunately, some people are creatively working on this problem by collecting rainwater, using drip irrigation, and harvesting water from the air using solar power that could produce water even in desert climates. We didn’t always need to do this, but we must meet the reality of a changing world.

Spiritual science reveals that the human being is also changing, and what once met our spiritual needs in prior times is no longer sufficient. Steiner wants us to see that the drought in our spiritual lives needs to be addressed, not ignored; he says that it is urgent that we do so. We may not feel the urgency of this spiritual drought yet, especially with all our compelling distractions. Once we set aside these diversions though, we are faced with the state of our own spirit; our subconscious thirst for spiritual renewal suddenly becomes manifest.

As we learn about the many beings and laws of the spiritual world in earnest, we will be surprised how even our initial efforts are transformational, like water to a parched throat or an arid land. We need to hydrate.