Unbounded

“This spiritual science is not trying to found either a new religion or a new religious sect of any kind. It hopes to be able to fulfill the tasks required spiritually of our contemporary culture.”

– Rudolf Steiner, July 13, 1914.

Even though religious tradition is the impulse behind our holiday celebrations, it is no longer the focus for many of us. There’s a reason for this: as human consciousness evolved, we lost the shadowy clairvoyance of earlier times, clairvoyance that allowed us some experience of the spiritual worlds as Dr. Steiner reminds us below. That kind of consciousness was gradually replaced with scientific thinking, which is strictly dependent on physical perceptions.

Religions no longer satisfy some of us because much of what they profess doesn’t make sense to our cognitive reasoning, even though we may get comfort from some of the remaining religious rituals.

Scientific thinking is an essential development for humankind in the cosmic scheme of things. It gave us our independence: we are, each of us, our own person. What we are not, however, is finished. We are constantly evolving. Our current earthly consciousness isn’t our final state. That may not be obvious now, but even the most earthbound materialists will understand it once they cross the threshold and find themselves still “alive.” How much we see and understand once we’ve crossed over into that realm, however, depends very much on what we think, feel, and do during our lifetimes.

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

The ideas we have gained through sensory perceptions and the brain-bound intellect will be of no use to us when it comes to giving effective power to the part of our feeling and will which does not come to birth during life. The impulse and impetus we shall need after death can only come from ideas that do not relate to outward reality but make us turn to higher things and look up to a world of the spirit.

… When we take in ideas of the supersensible, these are not merely ideas based on knowledge but something which will be active after death—which means that now, when we are in a physical body, people who refuse to give any thought to active principles of this kind will laugh about them and, being materialists, reject them. But if they do not let ideas of the supersensible enter into them, their power to bring the unborn elements in the feeling and will to development will be crippled.

… In earlier times, the Imaginations, Inspirations, and Intuitions which are veiled by the world perceptible to the senses, were given to human beings as religious faith and belief, in order that they might not lose all impetus for the time after death and might have something in the inner core of the soul that would keep them alive once they had laid aside their physical bodies…

 It is sheer prejudice of the intellect and the senses which makes people consider the ideas relating to the supersensible world which are presented by spiritual investigators to be nonsense and figments of the imagination. If we accept these ideas, they will give impetus to the inner core of our beings, so that in all future ages it will find its way in the cosmos.

Investigation of the contents of the spiritual world is only possible if one has achieved esoteric development; but to have knowledge of these contents, to work through them inwardly in consciousness and have ideas and concepts of them, to make them our own and know for certain that the soul exists in the world of the spirit—this is something human beings will need more and more as essential nourishment for soul and spirit.

Excerpt from: The Inner Nature of Man and Our Life Between Death and Rebirth, Lecture 5 by Rudolf Steiner. April 11, 1914, Vienna.

In the quote at the top of the blog, Steiner refers to tasks required spiritually of our contemporary culture. What are the spiritual needs of our contemporary culture? We need to have spiritual concepts, spiritual ideas formed before we die so we’ll have the energy to find our way in the cosmos after we die. This energy is no longer given to us as a gift from the gods, we have become independent as we have evolved. It’s up to us now to find out for ourselves about the spiritual world outside us and inside us.

Steiner encourages us not simply to believe him, but to do the meditative and contemplative work to elevate ourselves to the levels where we can experience spiritual realities. It won’t hurt, in the meantime, to learn as much as we can from the scientists of the spirit, of which Steiner is one of the most prevalent.

We are often reminded of humankind’s ideals during the holidays. Love, goodwill to all, peace and harmony, selflessness, devotion, compassion—these all have their roots in our spiritual selves. Let us rededicate ourselves to exploring the vast consciousness of which we are a part.

Insecure

The National Institute of Mental Illness says on its website that 1 in 5 US citizens suffer from mental health issues every year. So, those of us who experience these maladies are definitely not alone. Out of the 332 million people in the US, that’s 66 million. Wow. One of the most prevalent mental illnesses is diagnosed as General Anxiety Disorder or GAD. GAD and depression top the list.

Some of the symptoms that can occur for GAD are listed on the Mayo Clinic website: persistent worrying or anxiety about a number of areas that are out of proportion to the impact of the events; overthinking plans and solutions to all possible worst-case outcomes; perceiving situations and events as threatening, even when they aren’t; difficulty handling uncertainty; indecisiveness and fear of making the wrong decision; inability to set aside or let go of a worry; inability to relax, feeling restless, and feeling keyed up or on edge; and difficulty concentrating, or the feeling that your mind “goes blank.” Of course, there are physical signs like fatigue or trouble sleeping, among others. The two main treatments for GAD are psychotherapy (especially cognitive behavioral therapy) and medications. Many people self-medicate with alcohol or drugs.

What is going on? Rudolf Steiner points to a root of these issues: we have forgotten that we are spiritual beings. In fact, many of us actively reject this core truth of being human. The symptoms listed above are not from bacteria or viruses, they are soul issues that are actively disrupting our lives. The traumatic world humanity has created for us to try to live in may be the catalyst for GAD, but underneath that is the eradication of what we know about the whole human being and its place in the universe. We’ve lost our birthright. If we look at the symptoms once again, we may realize that each one would disappear if we had a sense of security in life, if we knew how we got here and why. We can know this.

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

Souls without a rudder, souls without a firm grip on life who feel they do not belong, are numerous in our time. They are for the most part souls who, out of an instinctive need, long for something different from what traditional values can offer, souls who have been searching without finding anything which could give them a feeling of security, of belonging. So, what is lacking, what is it that man needs? What does man need to find a secure path through life?

What he needs above all is a consciousness of belonging within the world. Weakness and inner discontent come from the soul’s feeling of isolation. Life’s greatest question is in fact: Where and how do I fit into the world?

When we turn to natural science to reach a satisfying answer to the question: Where, as a human being, is my place in the world? then, at best, the natural-scientific world view will tell him where his physical body belongs within world evolution as a whole. But the natural-scientific world view has absolutely nothing to say about how man’s soul, let alone spirit, fits into world evolution… (Spiritual science shows) how we are related to the primordial warmth pervaded through and through by the individual beings of the Hierarchies who are still about us. We are placed within a cosmos filled with soul and spirit.

Spiritual science shows our soul and spirit to be part and parcel of a universal all. It is a science that can describe the universal all in detail. Thus, spiritual science alone can give the human soul a context without which it feels annihilated. The dissatisfaction and insecurity felt by modern man reflect modern thinking. This thinking disregards the soul and declares that only the human body exists within the cosmic all. Another aspect is that the soul feels it has nothing to relate to, and that prevents it from finding inner strength. To reach inner strength of soul one must have attained concepts and ideas which depict the cosmic all as containing man as a being of soul and spirit; just as natural science depicts physical man as part of the physical evolution of the universe.

Excerpt from: Karma of Materialism, Lecture II by Rudolf Steiner, Berlin Aug. 7, 1917

We should not abandon natural scientific thinking but rather permeate it with spiritual thinking. Without going into details about society’s ills, which seem impossibly complicated and hopeless, we can imagine that a kind of thinking imbued with spiritual science would prove a crucial alliance to natural science in all our endeavors. Try to imagine the world-changing impact of scientists, doctors, teachers, economists, farmers, etc., whose thinking embraces our place in the spiritual world.

Try to imagine the life-changing impact this thinking would have for each of us. We owe it to ourselves to recognize that being human is so much more than being a physical body. We are soul/spiritual beings residing in human bodies. We can know little about ourselves if we refuse to recognize that fact. The soul ailments we suffer can be cured by the spirit, but to know the spirit, in addition to studying spiritual science, we must quiet our minds daily… not an easy task, but it is a way to open the door to the spiritual world.

Not that long ago, meditation wasn’t taken seriously in Western cultures, but it is now. Just last week (Nov. 9, 2022) a study found that a daily mindfulness meditation practice is as effective as escitalopram, the “gold-standard” drug used in treating anxiety... and meditation is free.

Mental Health Statistics >

Mayo Clinic: Generalized Anxiety Disorder >

All Hallows Eve

Clairvoyant consciousness does not charm anything new into being; it merely brings up into consciousness what is present all the time in the spiritual world. All of you are in constant communication with the dead.

Skeletons, witches, devils and demons, ghosts, spider webs, black cats and bats, costumes, pumpkin patches and apple-bobbing, and so on. These are our symbols of Halloween in America. Over 2000 years ago, the Celtic people celebrated Samhaim, their New Year on November 1. They believed that on its eve, the line between the dead and the living was blurred and the ghosts of those who were dead returned to create mischief. And here we are, 2000 years later, celebrating Halloween each year with general spookiness all about us.

Halloween as it is now celebrated, besides being great fun, may also be our way to trivialize that thing that scares us most, death. In some cultures and religions, All Hallows Eve precedes the day in which we honor our dead; a day in which we attempt to communicate our love by bestowing gifts and prayers for those we love who have died. A day to follow the havoc of Halloween when these dead are back where they belong and no longer “wandering the earth”. A day we return with relief to our normal lives where the firm boundary between the living and the dead exists, or so we imagine.

When we pray for the dead or honor the dead, do we imagine that they can hear us? What if they could? And what if we could hear them?

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

Today, people think: When a human being has passed through the Gate of Death, his activity ceases so far as the physical world is concerned. But it is not so, in reality. There is a living and perpetual communication between the so-called dead and the so-called living. Those who have passed through the Gate of Death have not ceased to be present, it is just that our eyes have ceased to see them. They are there, nevertheless. Our thoughts, our feelings, our impulses of will are connected with the dead.

People today still find difficulty in acquiring knowledge of the spiritual world…

One way of becoming acquainted with the spiritual world is relatively easy to attain by those who have enough perseverance, along the path described in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment and in other writings… The other is what may be called concrete direct communication with beings of the spiritual world that is possible between those who are still on Earth and the so-called dead.

Think of your own biography. You consider the course of your life always with interruptions; you describe only what has happened in your waking life. Life is thus broken: waking-sleeping; waking-sleeping. But you are also there while you sleep; and in studying the whole human being, waking life and sleeping life must be taken into consideration.

Besides waking life and sleeping life, there is a third state, even more important for communication with the spiritual world than waking and sleeping life as such. I mean the actual act of waking and the actual act of going to sleep, which last only a moment, for we immediately pass on into other conditions. If we develop delicate, sensitive feelings for these moments of waking and going to sleep, we shall find they shed great light on the spiritual world.

… In our whole life there are no single moments of falling asleep or of waking when we do not come into relation with the dead.

Excerpt from: Lecture: The Dead Are With Us by Rudolf Steiner. Nüremberg, February 10,1918.

Since the dead, those we have known and loved, are communicating with us anyway, why try to make this communication conscious? Steiner says that the so-called dead have important information to share with us about ourselves, and they have important questions for us that only we can answer. Remarkably, we are already communicating with the dead, but we don’t know it. For example, maybe we’ve found ourselves pondering something at night before falling asleep and when we wake up, we have the answer. It may seem like we figured out something for ourselves while we were asleep, but Steiner indicates that is only the way it appears; we’ve actually received guidance in those transitional moments between waking and sleeping.

As a side note, it is said that Thomas Edison used to nap in a chair with his arms at his side holding a steel ball in each hand. When he fell asleep, the balls would drop, and he would wake up with answers to huge problems. Though scientists have come up with names to explain this, if we look closely, we see these names explain nothing. One may well wonder why Edison kept this a secret for most of his life. See: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thomas-edisons-naps-inspire-a-way-to-spark-your-own-creativity/.

We can start by simply taking notice of the moments when we are falling asleep and waking up. We can practice calming our minds before falling asleep and opening ourselves to the quiet thoughts that come. Some of us pray. We can even pose direct questions at that time. When we wake up, we can refrain from checking the news or our texts and see what thoughts are coming to us in the quiet of those first waking moments. As time goes on, we will become more sensitive, more aware.

Meanwhile, Happy Halloween!

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.

Our Karma, Ourselves

We all make mistakes, and we more than likely learn something from them. Even if no one else is aware of what we did, we suffer a bit; we hope to put it behind us; we hope no one ever finds out; we hope to avoid punishment. We cannot imagine that we would ever need to answer for every single little thing we do wrong.

Justice, both personal and cultural, often fails to manifest during our lifetimes. Sometimes, people who have done horrible things avoid punishment and people who hurt no one suffer the most. Life, examined even superficially, makes no sense in this regard; the seemingly haphazard dispensation of justice is one of the appalling aspects of being human. But an understanding of karma and reincarnation shows that no one “gets away with” anything.

Rudolf Steiner, a modern initiate, tells us that in the life after death, we face the good and bad, the wise and foolish of everything we’ve done in our lives. Ultimately, as we begin to prepare for the next life to come, we help to create the circumstances which can lead us toward our purest self. It turns out that we will embrace any suffering gladly because it helps us reach that goal. Knowing this now allows us to accept our fates with deeper understanding and equanimity.

Steiner spoke often about karma and reincarnation. We can study the things he has said while we work on ourselves to gain access to the spiritual world for ourselves. Today we will discuss one of the basic principles of karma referenced above: that we answer for absolutely everything in our lives.

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

In earthly life… we do not like to suffer from our own foolish mistakes. We wish we had not made the foolish decision. But this really only applies to the one earthly life, because in effect, between the foolishness of the decision and the punishment we suffer in experiencing its consequences, only the self-same earthly life is intervening. It all remains continuous.

But between one earthly life and another it is not so. For the lives between death and a new birth are always intervening, and they change many things which would not change if earthly life continued uniformly. Suppose that you look back into a former life on earth. You did something good or ill to another person. Between that earthly life and this one, there was the life between death and a new birth. In that life, you cannot help realizing that you have become imperfect by doing wrong to another human being. It takes away from your own human value. It cripples you in soul. You must make good again this maiming of your soul and you resolve to achieve in a new earthly life what will make good the fault. Thus, between death and new birth you take up, by your own will, that which will balance and make good the fault.

Or if you did good to another person… you see it clearly in the life between death and new birth. If you have helped another person, you realize that he has thereby attained certain things which, without you, he could not have attained…

… It will never happen, under any circumstances, that a real insight into your karma will lead you to be dissatisfied with it… for, in the last resort, we ourselves are our karma. What is it that comes over, karmically, from our former lives on earth? It is actually we ourselves.

Excerpt from: Karmic Relationships: Esoteric Studies. Volume I, Lecture 3 by Rudolf Steiner. Dornach 1924.

We are eternal beings that keep evolving throughout our many incarnations as well as the time we spend in the spiritual world between our incarnations. Learning about karma gives us an impetus to keep working on ourselves in earnest long before death takes us across the threshold. With humility and gratitude, it is possible for us to learn to accept responsibility for ourselves while we are still living in this lifetime. We cannot erase the past, but we can create a better future for ourselves and everyone we know.

All the World's a Stage

“They’re going through a stage,” we hear parents or teachers saying about younger people, though we say it about each other, too. Social scientists and psychologists often describe our lives as occurring in stages. Piaget refers to four stages from birth to adolescence. Rudolf Steiner describes our lives in 7-year cycles beginning at birth. Learning these frameworks gives us ways to make sense of our lives, ways that help us understand ourselves and others at every age.

In spiritual science we begin to look beyond the single life into previous lives. We begin to grasp that the history we learn is about us and our contemporaries in previous lives. We’ve evolved from our caveman days, and we will continue to evolve in our future lives. We aren’t the only beings evolving. The spiritual beings of the Third Hierarchy that we’ve been talking about this past year—the angels, archangels, and archai—are evolving, too. So are the beings in the Second and First Hierarchies. What causes evolution? Steiner says that evolution comprises different stages of consciousness.

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

… It makes little difference whether a person takes his stand on Darwinian materialism or whether he speaks about the Gods in a more or less religious sense. It is much more to the point to become livingly aware that we ourselves have ascended from lower stages of existence and have yet to ascend to higher stages. We must realize that we have a relationship both with what is below and what is above.

Instruction about the Gods was first systematized by Dionysius the Areopagite, the pupil of the apostle Paul. It was however not written down until the sixth century… The Akashic Chronicle teaches that Dionysius actually lived in Athens, that he was initiated by Paul and was commissioned by him to lay the foundation of the teaching about the higher spiritual beings and to impart this knowledge to special initiates. At that time certain lofty teachings were never written down but only communicated as tradition by word of mouth. The teaching about the Gods was also given in this way by Dionysius to his pupils, who then passed it on further. These pupils in direct succession were intentionally called Dionysius, so that the last of these, who wrote down this teaching was one of those who was given this name.

This teaching about the Gods, as given by Dionysius, encompasses three times three ranks of divine beings. The three highest are: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. The next degree: *Dominions (Kyriotetes), Mights (Dynamis), Powers (Exusisai). The third degree: Primal Beginnings (Archai), Archangels, and Angels… After the Third Rank follows the Fourth Hierarchy: Man, as the tenth in the entire sequence.

The names of the Hierarchies do not refer to individuals but to certain stages of consciousness of the great universe, and the Beings move from one stage to another. Eliphas Levi perceived this clearly and laid stress on the fact that with these names one has to do with stages of development, with Hierarchies.

*Names in parenthesis have been inserted for this blog.

Excerpt from: Foundations of Esotericism: Notes of Thirty-one Lectures by Rudolf Steiner. Lecture 13, October 8, 1905. Berlin.

Recognizing that there are individual angels, for example our own guardian angel, we now see that the term angel refers to a level of consciousness. In the same way, we recognize that there are individual archangels, some of whom we’ve named in previous posts, but the term archangel refers to a level of consciousness different from angels, and so on. Thus, we come to see that we are all different human beings, but the term human refers to a level of consciousness.

As we advance in our consciousness, we become a more ideal human being. When we don’t evolve according to “our time” we become less and less content with ourselves and the world we live in because we aren’t developing and using the spiritual tools we’ve been given that are appropriate for our time. By studying spiritual science and by taking just a few minutes a day to meditate, we are choosing to put in front of us the ideal human being we are meant to become.

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.

Time Spirits

Most of us can easily recall with gratitude a person who positively influenced our life. We honestly don’t know where we’d be without them; they led us in the right direction. We might also feel gratitude for someone who influenced our whole nation of people to become better. The study of the angelic hierarchies explores the influences of those beings we cannot see. When we learn about these beings, when we actually acknowledge their work, we feel gratitude towards them, too.

Every time we fall asleep, we commune with our Guardian Angel—we enter that realm of angels which is closest to the human being. (See March and April 2021.) Every time we are born, we enter the culture of our birthplace, we are influenced by the Archangel of that people. (See March 2022.) The realm of the Archangels is higher than that of the Angels; whereas Angels guide individuals, Archangels guide groups of people, even nations. We are also born into a specific time, an Age, and this period that lasts over 2000 years, is guided by the realm above the Archangels, the realm of the Spirits of Time, historically called the Archai.

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

In addition to the evolution of the peoples and all that is associated with their evolution, a progressive evolution of mankind takes place. Whether we consider one particular civilization to be superior to another is of no consequence.

In every age there is something that transcends the Folk Soul (Archangel), which can bring the various Folk Souls together, something that is more or less universally understood. This is the Zeitgeist or Time Spirit, the Spirit of the Age, to use an unfortunate term which is in common usage. Each epoch has its particular Zeitgeist; the Zeitgeist of the Greek epoch is different from that of our own age. Those who understand the Spirit today are drawn towards Spiritual Science. It is this Spirit which, reflecting the Spirit of the Age, transcends the individual Folk Souls…

Thus, for every epoch we can discover the Spirit of the Age (Archai), which is something that permeates the activity of the Archangels. To the materialist of today, the Spirit of the Age is an abstraction, devoid of reality; still less would he be prepared to accept the Spirit of the Age as an authentic entity. Nevertheless, the term ‘Spirit of the Age’ conceals the existence of a real Being who is three stages above man. It conceals the identity of the Beings, the Archai…

We are here dealing with exalted Beings, and the contemplation of their attributes might well overwhelm us. They are the Beings who might be described as the inspirers—or if we choose to use the technical expression of occultism—the “intuitors” of the Spirit or Spirits of the Age. They work in such a way that they take over from one another and mutually support each other. From epoch to epoch, they pass on their mission to their successor. The Spirit of the Age who was active in the Greek epoch handed on his mission to his successor, and so on…

These Spirits of Personality, these inspirers of the Spirit of the Age, are of a higher order than the Archangels. In every epoch one of these Spirits is predominant and sets his seal upon the whole epoch, assigns to the Archangels their specific tasks so that the whole spirit of the epoch is determined by the special or individual characteristics of the Archangel. Then, in the following epoch, another Archai takes over.

Excerpt from: The Mission of the Individual Folk Souls, Lecture: Angels, Folk Spirits, Time Spirits: their part in the Evolution of Mankind, Oslo, Norway, June 7, 1910.

Understanding of the idea of a Spirit of the Age is easier when we recognize that we have an overarching idea about Ancient Greece or Ancient Egypt or Ancient India. In a lecture that follows the one excerpted above, Steiner tells us, for example, that “Kepler, Copernicus and Pericles could not possibly have lived in any other age or under other circumstances” than the epoch into which they were born. Our current Age began in the early 1400s and will end in the late 3500s, so we have a way to go before we reach the goals for humanity of this epoch.

What is the stamp of our Age? One hint is that meditation in our time is becoming ubiquitous. In education, in healthcare, in science, in business, in sports, meditation is being touted as a benefit to everyone. We human beings are recognizing that we have to make an effort to connect our earthly consciousness to our spiritual consciousness—a goal of our epoch—in order to live healthy lives. We are being inspired by the Spirit of our Age to do so.

Knowing ourselves is impossible without acknowledging that we are spiritual beings evolving in a world of other evolving spiritual beings. Learning about these spiritual entities is essential to learning about ourselves.

Looking Back

Seven months ago (Why Bother, Sept. 2021) we noted a time when humankind experienced spiritual beings as a matter of course, as part of their everyday life. In other posts, we’ve talked about angels and archangels as those beings in the spiritual hierarchies that are closest to us. Somehow, though, accepting the idea of karma and reincarnation has been easier for many of us than the idea of beings who exist outside our physical senses. What changed?

All cultures have origin stories. No culture was godless at its roots. Why? Though we may be tempted to call the people of our ancient past childlike or gullible, if we focused only on their achievements in astronomy, we would have to admit someone was thinking albeit quite differently. We were those people back then, and we changed. Over the course of centuries, our pursuit of knowledge stopped aiming toward the spiritual world and focused almost entirely upon the natural world we can observe through our senses. Since the spiritual world cannot be experienced with our senses, we lost our connection with it.

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

… We must turn our gaze again and again to the particular mental condition of civilized mankind which began with the blossoming forth of the Natural Sciences and reached its climax in the nineteenth century.

One should place the character of this age vividly before the soul’s eye, comparing it with that of preceding ages. In all ages of the conscious evolution of mankind, Knowledge was regarded as that which brings man to the world of Spirit. To Knowledge, man ascribed whatever relationship to Spirit he possessed. Art and Religion were none other than the living life of Knowledge.

All this became different when the age of the Spiritual Soul* began to dawn (1400s). With a very great part of the life of the human soul, Knowledge now concerned itself no more. Henceforth, it sought to investigate that relation to existence which man unfolds when he directs his senses and his intellectual judgment to the world of ‘Nature.’ It no longer wanted to concern itself with that which man unfolds as a relation to the world of Spirit, when he uses—not his outer senses—but his inner power of perception.

Thus there arose the necessity to connect the spiritual life of man, not with any living present Knowledge, but with Knowledge gained in the past—with Tradition.

The life of the human soul was rent in twain. On the one hand there stood before man the new science of Nature, striving ever onward and unfolding in the living present. On the other side there was the experience of a relation to the spiritual world, for which the corresponding Knowledge had arisen in the ages past. All understanding of how the Knowledge, corresponding to this side of human experience, had been gained in ages past, was gradually lost. Men possessed the Tradition, but they had lost the way by which the truths of Tradition had been known—discovered. All they could do now was to believe in the Tradition.

A man who had consciously reflected on the spiritual situation, say about the middle of the nineteenth century, would have been bound to admit: mankind has come to a point where it no longer feels itself capable of evolving any Knowledge beyond that science which does not concern itself with the Spirit. Whatever can be known about the Spirit, a humanity of earlier ages was able to investigate and discover, but the human soul has lost the faculty for such discovery.

But men did not place before themselves the full bearing of what was taking place. They were content to say: Knowledge simply does not reach out into the spiritual world. The spiritual world can only be an object of Faith.

Letter from: Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts: The Apparent Extinction of Spirit-Knowledge in Modern Times, by Rudolf Steiner, March 25, 2025. Dornach, Switzerland.

For years now, those who accept a spiritual world, a world they can accept on faith alone, are seen as misguided if not pathetic by many of their peers. Yet faith and tradition play a big role in science, too. For example, cosmology assumes that the speed of light and the laws of gravity are constants throughout the universe, so we make all sorts of theories based on these assumptions. But what if they aren’t universal? Maybe all our ideas about the natural world are theoretical.

At our current stage of evolution, we need to pursue knowledge of the spiritual world once again purposefully—out of freedom—to understand ourselves as whole human beings. “What in earlier times was known instinctively must now be acquired by conscious effort.” (Steiner) This knowledge, once acquired, will augment what we have learned in all fields of the natural world.

In future posts, we will continue to investigate the other beings inhabiting the spiritual world including those beings who are determined to lead us into error. We need to realize we are not alone, and now more than ever it is necessary to understand who we’ve been, who we are, and who we may become.

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*Spiritual Soul is a stage of human development preceded by that of the Sentient Soul (our lower soul nature) and then the Intellectual Soul (higher soul nature). We will talk more of this in subsequent posts. Or, if you can’t wait, please read the book: Theosophy, Chapter entitled: The Essential Nature of the Human Being.

Our People

Each man on earth has his own fate,
Each one his highway wide:
This one builds up, that one lays waste,
And that casts greedy eyes
O’er all the globe, to find somewhere
A land not yet enslaved,
Which he could conquer and then bear
With him into the grave.
From “A Dream” by Taras Shevchenko

Many Ukrainians interviewed since Russia’s attack say that the people of the country are united as never before. Many of us can recall similar responses when national tragedies or disasters struck our own countries. Even those of us who criticize our country’s policies and actions and feel various levels of discomfort at its aggressions and failures, will feel outraged when it is attacked by an outside force. Suddenly, we feel united with all our fellow citizens.

What is the source of this feeling? Why does the country in which we were born matter to us so much?

A few months ago, we discussed the work of the angels, especially that of our own guardian angels. Rudolf Steiner reminds us that humans are spiritual beings in physical bodies and that we are not alone in the spiritual world. Our physical body is our lowest aspect (as discussed last month) and our second aspect, the etheric body, is the lowest body for angels. Our third aspect, the astral body, is the lowest body of the archangels. So, only when we gain sight on the astral plane will we see archangels. Just as angels devote themselves to individual human beings, archangels devote themselves to groups of people – some of them to nations.

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

“[Angels] are directly connected with the individual human being. They lead or guide him in so far as he needs guidance, from one earthly life to another and are his Guardians, his Protectors, whenever and wherever he needs their protection. Therefore, supersensible though they be and imperceptible to earthly sight, the Angeloi are directly connected with mankind's evolution.

In the next immediately adjacent spiritual realm, the Beings whom we call the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi, the Archangels, unfold their activity. The Archangeloi have to do with much that also plays a part in the evolution of humanity. They have to do, not with the individual human being, but with groups of human beings. Thus, as I have said in many anthroposophical lectures, the evolution of the peoples is under the rulership of Archangelic Beings.”

Excerpt from: The Mission of the Individual Folk Souls. Lecture I: Angels, Folk Spirits, Time Spirits: their part in the Evolution of Mankind. June 7, 1910, Oslo, Norway.

Let’s try to understand a little of what our relationship as a people is to the archangels from the work of Adam Bittleston (1911-1989).

“As the Angel gazes upon the development of an individual soul, the Archangel indwells the development of a nation. But just as a man may look at an event as one of his successes while the Angel may see it as a misfortune distracting him from his real task—so what seems a victory to the people of a nation may be a spiritual defeat for its Archangel. What the Archangel wants for his nation is not power, but ways of life which serve the great purposes of humanity. He works above all among the artists, the thinkers, and the reformers among his people… Just as a man’s pride in his own genius is a great hindrance to his Angel, national pride blocks the work of the Archangel, produces indeed an appalling caricature of it. Human beings do not support the spirit of their country by trying to be French, or Italian, or English, but by working for justice, or the freedom of the oppressed, or beauty in the arts and in the environment. The Archangel wishes to see what is achieved or hoped for by individuals pass over into general habits and customs which enrich life.” (Bittleston, Our Spiritual Companions.)

The truly frightening world confronting us today with war, poverty, disease, inequality, and on and on, can make us feel helpless, even hopeless. What can we do about any of these things? We need to prepare ourselves for our contemporary world by embracing a larger perspective of knowledge. We need to accept that the material world is just one part of the world not the whole world. We need to think more deeply than the words shouted to us from all sides (or one side). We need to think for ourselves. What would it mean to replace nationalism with a sense of what one can do within a nation for the good of all humankind? How does the culture of my people contribute to the good of the world? How do I contribute to the good of my people? If we look closely, we will see the people around us who are already responding to this question. After all, nations are built of individuals.

In our highest quest to “know thyself” we need to contemplate what belonging to a nation means to us and why. Certainly, the Ukrainians are doing that. And the war? And the wars yet to come? They will be fought until we wake up.

Seven Members

Back in the 1980s, Herbert Benson, a Harvard cardiologist, investigated the abilities of Tibetan monks to change their metabolism (see link below). The monks he saw were apparently working on their seventh member.* In the lecture excerpted below, Rudolf Steiner discusses this aspect as the most difficult to achieve for human beings, a capacity he attributes to the Adept, one who has developed his seventh member. As a result of our evolution in consciousness, we have already begun to develop our fifth member. (It should be noted that altering our breath is no longer a viable method to reach spiritual knowledge; we must do so through our intellect.)

We’ve talked before about the physical, etheric, astral bodies and ‘I’ of each human being, especially in connection with sleep and death, but today we will review them from a new angle: Steiner’s description of what the spiritual researcher sees when looking at a person. Many of you will recognize these descriptions from other sources. We will also look briefly at the three members that are “above” the ‘I’.

The description below is just a brief review. We must acknowledge that whole libraries could be written about each member that makes up every human being. Think about all that has been written about our physical bodies or just specific body parts; here the physical body gets one sentence.

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

Man has a physical body in common with the mineral kingdom and an etheric body in common with the plant and animal kingdoms. Ordinary observation can confirm that. But there is another way in which we can prove to ourselves the existence of an etheric body, although only those who have developed their higher senses have this faculty. A very definite form of higher perception is needed to understand this principle of life, growth, nutrition, and propagation.

Anyone who wants to know the nature of the etheric body by direct vision must be able to maintain his ordinary consciousness intact and ‘suggest away’ the physical body by the strength of his own will. He will not, however, be left with an empty space, but will see before him the etheric body glowing with a reddish-blue light like a phantom, whose radiance is a little darker than peach blossom…

Animals can feel pleasure and pain, and thus have a further principle in common with man: the astral body. The astral body is the seat of everything we know as desire, passion, and so forth. This is clear to straightforward observation as an inner experience, but for the initiate the astral body can become an outer reality… The initiate sees this third member of man as an egg-shaped cloud which not only surrounds the body but permeates it. Within this cloud or aura the initiate sees every desire, every impulse as color and form in the astral body. For example, he sees intense passion flashing like rays of lightning out of the astral body. In animals the basic color of the astral body varies with the species… but in human beings the color alters from person to person…

But man is distinguished from the animal in another, further way. This brings us to the fourth member of our being, which comes to expression in a name different from all other names. I can say ‘I’ only of myself… Hebrew initiates spoke of the ‘inexpressible name of God’, of the God who dwells in man, for the name can be uttered only by the soul for this same soul… This attribute makes man superior to the animals… This again presents itself to the seer in a peculiar form. When he studies the astral body, everything appears in perpetual movement except for one small space, shaped like a somewhat elongated bluish oval, situated at the base of the nose, behind the brow. Just as the empty center of a flame appears blue when seen through the light around it, so this empty space appears blue because of the auric light streaming around it. This is the outer form of expression of the ‘I’.

Every human being has these four members… A refinement of the moral nature produces finer colors in the aura; an increase in the power of discrimination between good and evil also shows itself in a refinement of the aura. In the process of becoming civilized the ‘I’ has worked upon the astral body and ennobled the desires. The higher a person’s moral and intellectual development, the more will his ‘I’ have worked upon the astral body. The seer can distinguish between a developed and an undeveloped human being.

Whatever part of the astral body has been thus transformed by the ‘I’ is called Manas. Manas is the fifth member of man’s nature. We have just so much of Manas as we have created by our own efforts; part of our astral body is therefore always Manas… In the same way that we can raise ourselves to a higher moral level we can also learn to work upon the etheric body and what we have transformed in this body by our own efforts is called Buddhi. This is the sixth member of man’s nature…

The highest achievement open to man on this earth is to work right down into the physical body. That is the most difficult task of all… [we] must learn to control the breath and the circulation, to follow consciously the activity of the nerves, and to regulate the processes of thought… A man who has reached this stage is called an Adept; he will then have developed in himself what we call Atma. Atma is the seventh member of man’s being.

Excerpt from: Founding a Science of the Spirit, Lecture 1: The Being of Man, Stuttgart, Germany, August 22, 1906, by Rudolf Steiner.

Usually, these monthly posts point to some action we may contemplate taking to become more responsible human beings. This time, we focused on descriptions of the seven members of the human being. From these descriptions, however, we may consider becoming the artist of our own astral body, consciously choosing the beautiful colors and forms that will manifest when we begin creating Manas for ourselves.

https://mindmatters.ai/2019/09/tibetan-monks-can-change-their-metabolism/

*Note: It is hard to avoid thinking of a “body” as anything other than physical substance; the word “member” avoids this assumption. Both words are used in this post.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/43408247_Buddhist_Brains_A_Case_Study_in_the_Reenchantment_of_the_Brain_Sciences

Temper, Temper

Let’s imagine a building with people inside; the doors are locked and the windows are shuttered. Four separate people at different times want to get in.

The first marches up and knocks loudly. No one answers. She pounds on the door and still gets no answer. As her fury rises, she decides to break one of the windows to get in. The second is lightly jogging by and notices the door. Always curious, she knocks. Getting no response, she looks away, notices a butterfly, and immediately pursues it. The third trudges up to the door and waits to see if someone opens it. Eventually, she sits down nearby and waits to see what will happen. The fourth, lost in her thoughts, looks up and sees the door; after weighing the possibilities, she knocks and backs off. When no one answers, she is convinced the people inside don’t want her inside; head lowered, she sadly walks away.

This story, which has many variations, serves as a way for us to understand the four temperaments and thus understand ourselves and others better. Galen of Pergamon (129 AD – c. 216) named these four temperaments choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic. We can compare them to the four elements, choleric = fire, sanguine = air, phlegmatic = water, melancholic = earth.

Steiner found in his spiritual research that these four temperaments synthesize our incarnating spirit with its line of heredity. He says, “Temperament strikes a balance between the eternal and the ephemeral.” We each have all four temperaments, but one usually predominates over the other three and one is often barely evident. Mastering or balancing our temperaments is one of the many tasks that gives purpose to our lives.

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

How does the spiritual-psychic stream, of which a human being forms a part through reincarnation, unite itself with the physical stream of heredity? The answer is that a synthesis must be achieved. When the two streams combine, each imparts something of its own quality to the other. In much the same way that blue and yellow combine to give green, the two streams in the human being combine to yield what is commonly known as temperament…

Cholerics come across as people who must always have their own way…

Sanguines surrender themselves in a certain sense to the constant and varied flow of images, sensations, and ideas…

Phlegmatic(s) are preoccupied with their own internal processes. They let external events run their course while their attention is directed inward…

Melancholics (experience pain that) continually wells up within them…

When we consider that the temperaments, each of which represents a mild imbalance, can degenerate into unhealthy extremes, we realize just how important this is… for in every temperament there lie two dangers of aberration, one great, one small.

One danger for young cholerics is that they will never learn to control their temper as they develop into maturity. That is the small danger. The greater is that they will become foolishly single-minded.

For the sanguine the lesser danger is flightiness; the greater is mania, induced by a constant stream of sensations.

The small danger for the phlegmatic is apathy; the greater is stupidity, dullness.

For the melancholic, insensitivity to anything other than personal pain is the small danger; the greater is insanity.

In light of all this it is clear that to guide the temperaments is one of life’s significant tasks… By filling ourselves with practical wisdom such as this, we learn to solve that basic riddle of life, the other person… Spiritual science makes it possible that when two souls meet and one demands love, the other offers it. If something else is demanded, that other thing is given. Through such true, living wisdom do we create the basis for society.

Excerpt from: The Four Temperaments, Lecture by Rudolf Steiner, Berlin, March 4, 1909.

View fullsize

I found this temperament chart on Pinterest. Click to enlarge. Sources are listed above.

Steiner gives specific guidance to teachers in the first Waldorf School with ways to recognize the temperament of a child and the methods that will be most effective in working with each one. For example, these teachers know that the choleric child needs to respect the teacher’s expertise while the sanguine child needs to love the teacher’s personality; that the melancholic child needs to know the teacher has experienced suffering and the phlegmatic child needs the help of friends to find things interesting. Waldorf teachers incorporate these principles in every aspect of their teaching.

If we go back to our story at the beginning, we will probably recognize the predominate temperament in ourselves and in the people we know. Understanding each other’s behaviors based on this significant underlying reality allows us to better communicate with each other and to better meet each other’s needs. We can also understand why natural leaders are often cholerics, why every social gathering needs at least one sanguine, why the calm heads in a crisis are often phlegmatics, and the people who will have thought with precision through every course of action are often melancholics.

We can gain a deeper understanding of the four temperaments in a simple Google search as the far-ranging strengths and weaknesses of each temperament cannot be included here. You can also listen to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pG8AihZyOlg where you will find the excerpted lecture above in full.