Fearlessness

Fear is sewn into the fabric of our everyday lives with ever more intention by the web of voices in media governing all aspects of our lives. Most of us struggle to have any knowledge of ourselves at all because we haven’t figured out how to throw off the heavy blanket of fear and distraction bearing down on us every second we are awake. Maybe this is what will finally motivate us to seek higher knowledge—a way to conquer the fear; a way to make sense of the world.

We are afraid to ask questions of the medical “experts” who, when we think about it, rarely have considered the spiritual natures within and without us that play the most important roles in our health. We are afraid of being out in nature, of believing something different than our peers, of stepping off the competitive ladder of acquiring more and more things, of having children, of war, of climate change, of the government, of other people, of anything new. We are afraid.

In his book, How to Know Higher Worlds: A Modern Path of Initiation, Rudolf Steiner laid out guidelines to safely acquire higher knowledge. The excerpt below speaks about conquering fear, and he lists it as one of the requirements to pursue this path.

Candidates for initiation must bring with them courage and fearlessness. These have a certain relationship with each other and must be developed together. As esoteric students we must be able to look danger calmly in the eye and overcome difficulties without hesitation. When facing a danger, we should immediately be stirred to the conviction: “All fear is useless. I must not let it take hold of me. I must think only of what is to be done.” In fact, we must reach a point, in situations that earlier would have caused us to be afraid, in which the very idea of fear and lack of courage become things impossible for us to conceive in the core of our soul.

Such self-education in courage and fearlessness develops quite specific forces that we need for initiation into higher knowledge. Just as we need healthy nerves as physical beings to make use of our physical senses, so—as beings of soul—we need the strength that develops only in courageous and fearless natures. For as we penetrate the higher mysteries, we see things that were previously hidden from us by the illusions of the senses. In fact, it is a blessing that our physical senses do not allow us to perceive the higher truths. In this way they protect us from things that, if we saw them unprepared, would cause us great dismay, things we could not bear to see. As students of spiritual science, we must train ourselves to bear these sights.

In the process, we shall inevitably lose some of the supports that the external world provided for us as long as we were caught up in its illusions. What happens is literally the same as when people are made aware of a danger that was present for a long time, but which they knew nothing of. Unaware of the danger, they were of course also unafraid. But once they know about it, they are overcome with fear—even though the danger has not increased by their knowing about it.

The world’s powers are both destructive and constructive; the fate of sense-perceptible beings is to arise and pass away. The initiate must see and understand how these forces and this fate work themselves out. For this, the veil that lies before our spiritual eyes in ordinary life must be removed. Of course, we ourselves are closely interwoven with these forces and with fate. Our individual natures, like the world, contain destructive and constructive forces. As initiates, our own souls will be revealed before our seeing eyes as nakedly as all other things.

Students must not lose strength in the face of such self-knowledge. They must come to meet it with a surplus of forces. In order to have this surplus, we must learn to maintain our inward calm and certainty in difficult life situations and cultivate an unshakable trust in the good powers of existence.

We may often have acted out of conceit, but we now come to realize how unspeakable useless all vanity is to the initiate. We have been motivated by greed; now we realize how destructive greed is. We have to develop completely new grounds for acting and thinking. This is what involves courage and fearlessness.

Above all, we need to cultivate courage and fearlessness in the inmost depths of our thought life itself. We must learn not to be discouraged by failure. We should be able to think: “I will forget that I have failed again and will try once more as if it never happened.” In this way we struggle to the conviction that the sources of strength in the world that we can draw from are inexhaustible. Again and again, we aspire to the spirit, which will lift us up and carry us, regardless of how often our earthly being proves to be weak and powerless.

We must become capable of living into the future and not let any past experiences disturb our striving.

Excerpt from: How to Know Higher Worlds: A Modern Path of Initiation by Rudolf Steiner.

What does Steiner mean by living into the future? We can spend time thinking about this question within ourselves. This is one way to start down the path. We have lots of paths to choose from. Self-knowledge is required by all of them. If we begin to name the things we are afraid of and think about rising above them, we may get glimpses of living into the future.

These are scary times. Maybe we’re living in them for a reason. After all, we did choose to be here at this time. What are we supposed to be learning? We may want to read—or re-read—the book referenced above, which was the edition translated from the original German by Christopher Bamford. Getting started is a fear we may wish to overcome in this new and fraught year 2025.

Our Essential Being

In times like these, we may look around us and think what a long way we have to go. We may become despondent about the massive challenges the world faces and the forces working aggressively against each other to address them. It’s hard not to feel overwhelmed. Yet here we are, and we have our work to do and our lives to live. In quiet moments, we may wonder why.

A significant why is that evolution is happening; it’s not just something that already happened. We are evolving, as is the earth and everything else. At one time, long ago, we lived under the direct guidance of the world of spiritual beings. Because we needed to become free beings, direct contact with the spiritual world became increasingly difficult until we reached a point about five or six hundred years ago when we could question whether it even exists. Today we have evolved enough that our intelligence is sufficient to reunite with that world by using it toward that aim.

We still have a period of grace from birth until around the age of 3, when we are in direct contact with the higher worlds. Most of us do not have memories that stretch back to our birth but begin at a point before we learn to say “I”, so we are never aware of that direct contact. That state of grace, the ability to have direct contact with the spiritual beings, is the goal toward which we must consciously strive.

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

What we bring with us at birth contains something that is better than anything we can make of it in later life. In early childhood, the luciferic and ahrimanic forces have only a limited influence on our being. Essentially, they are active only in what we make of ourselves through our conscious life...

Our passing through successive incarnations is significant for the overall evolution of our essential being, which has undergone successive past lives and will continue to go through future lives. The evolution of the earth runs parallel to our own. At some point in the future, the earth will have reached the end of its course; then the planet earth, as a physical entity, will have to separate from the totality of human souls—just as when we die the body separates from the spirit, and the soul, in order to live on, enters the spiritual realm between death and rebirth. From this point of view, our highest ideal must be the striving to make all the fruits to be gained in earthly life truly our own before we die.

By the time the earth separates from humanity, we must have advanced to the point of giving over our whole being to the forces that presently work on us only in childhood. Only when we have reached this level can we claim to have attained our goal. Thus, through successive earthly lives, we must gradually make our entire being, including our consciousness, an expression of the forces that work on us under the guidance of the spiritual world in early childhood. This is the purpose of evolution.

After such considerations, the realization that we are not alone takes hold of our soul. This realization imbues us with humility, but also with a proper consciousness of our human dignity. We realize at the same time that something lives in us that can prove at all times that we can rise above ourselves to a self that is already surpassing us and will continue to do so from one life to the next. As this realization assumes a more and more definite form, it can have a very soothing, heartwarming effect and, at the same time, imbue the soul with the appropriate humility and modesty. What lives within us is truly a higher, divine human being, and we can feel ourselves pervaded by this being as by a living presence of whom we can say, ‘This is my inner guide in me.’

Given this, the thought easily arises that we should strive in every way possible to achieve harmony with that part in us that is wiser than our conscious intelligence. Thereafter, our attention will no longer be directed to the conscious self but will be focused instead on an expanded self, and from this perspective we can then combat and eradicate all our false pride and arrogance.

Excerpt from: The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity, Lecture 1 by Rudolf Steiner given June 5, 1911, in Copenhagen.

Steiner tells us that “what we bear within us is not a higher self that has to be developed gradually, but one that already exists and that often leads us to rise above ourselves.” We already know which are the healthy and unhealthy choices; our true self doesn’t make the unhealthy choices. When we listen to that self, our own wise self, we rise.

We do have a long way to go. We do have a lofty goal. Each one of us. If we accept our own strenuous path forward, our own struggle to first find and then listen to our higher self, perhaps we will have compassion for others as they struggle with their own journey. ‘Tis the season for love and compassion toward our fellow humans. Happy holidays!

Deeds of the Day

Every night while we are sleeping, we work with our Angel to preview the coming day. Most of us don’t remember this.

Just like we plan our coming life with the hierarchies while we are between death and our new birth, we plan our coming day with our Guardian Angel—plans, for example, to be somewhere at a certain time to meet someone we need to meet or to be where we need to be to experience something important. These intentions exist in addition to the practical plans appearing on our calendars.

This probably sounds incredible, but if we spend some time thinking about this idea, we may come to realize how our plans for the day include goals we wish to accomplish on a higher level. We can become more mindful, more aligned with what is actually best for us just by thinking this way. We may begin to recognize the experiences that are a fulfillment of the work we’ve done with our Angel the night before.

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

There is a secret intimately connected with the present stage of human evolution, which is not known today. In earlier times, before the middle of the fifteenth century, it was not necessary to take much notice of it, but today it must be reckoned with. This mystery of life is that the human being, constituted as we are today in body, soul, and spirit, every night looks, to a certain extent, at the events of the coming day, but without always carrying that vision over into full day-consciousness. It is our “Angel” who has that clear consciousness.

But what is experienced at night in community with that being whom we call the Angel is a pre-vision of the coming day. This is not a subject for human curiosity, but a matter for practical life. Only when the feeling of this fact fills our inner being can we make right decisions and bring right thoughts into the course of daily life. Let us assume that a person has something definite to do, say at noon. This thing the person has to do has already been arranged by that person and the Angel and during the preceding night, though the fact is not necessarily kept in consciousness and human curiosity has no part in it.

People should be filled with the conviction that during the day they should realize in a fruitful way what they have arranged at night in cooperation with this Angel being.

Much that has happened of late might draw our attention with almost shattering force to what I have just said. The last four or five years of agony (World War I) should have taught us that the consciousness of our association with higher beings through the experiences of the night did not, alas, exist. If the feeling had permeated us that our doings in the day were in harmony with the decisions made with our Angel in the preceding night, how different events would have been!

These things must be spoken of now, to point out how we must learn to regard this life between birth and death as a continuation of the life of spirit and soul which was before birth. It must be made known that we in the future should be able to experience throughout our whole life the revelation of the Divine in our own being, and what through all our life in the day this vivid consciousness should persist as: “What I do from morning till evening I have discussed with my Angel while I slept.”

We must turn to feelings which are more concrete with regard to the spiritual world… Our attitude to the spiritual world must move in this appointed direction.

Excerpt from: The Problems of Our Time, Lecture II by Rudolf Steiner. Berlin, September 13, 1919.

Here we are reminded once again that the life between birth and death is a continuation of our spiritual life before birth. Just as we have intentions for this life prior to being born into it, intentions we formed in alliance with the hierarchies, so we have intentions we make each night as we sleep. The time we are asleep is also part of our life, and it happens every day. We make other kinds of plans arising from our higher self and in agreement with our Angel whether we are aware of them or not.

We’ve already explored how knowledge of karma shows us the consequences of unhealthy trends of thinking, of feeling, and of doing to ourselves and the world around us. The more clearly we see this, the more we naturally strive to become better people. This additional element, the work with our Angel during the night, does the same thing on a daily basis.

Perhaps the miscommunications, the hostilities, the materialistic thinking that are leading our world into chaos would be mitigated if we woke up each morning knowing of the intentions made the night before. Perhaps we would choose to pursue lives that align with the harmonious working of the spiritual world.

Unbornness

Babies radiate a purity that speaks of something divine, even for those of us who do not believe in God or Heaven. This stirring in our souls, brought to life in the presence of a new life, points to the human being’s divine origin that is hard to ignore or negate. How do we explain this?

When we look at a baby, any baby, we are experiencing not a brand, new being, but a being with a long, long history. While we may see a complex inheritance of the parents’ traits, we must also recognize that this is a person who is here in a new body to further its own evolution. If we feel something magical in the presence of a newborn, we are actually sensing that they come to us from somewhere else--from the spiritual world. This baby existed, as did we, before it was born– before it was even conceived.

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

Among the concepts of spiritual science that must work toward the future development of the human being’s soul in the most fruitful, the most intensive, indeed the most necessary way, will be the concept of our prenatal existence…

In that we have this word “immortality” of the human soul, we actually negate only dying. What word could we use to indicate preexistence in the same way that the word “immortality” points to postexistence? A word like “unbornness”, in the fact of true spiritual knowledge, has as much justification as the word “immortality.” This can be your best evidence of what has been lost in the West directly through the activities of the various religious denominations: the truth about the being of the human being. This truth has been lost even in regard to language. And even insofar as language is concerned, we must bring about the awareness that the human soul is eternal, that it exists before birth as much as it exists after death.

Of course, if you speak only of immortality, of postexistence, you can believe: Here is one earth life, then follows an eternity of a totally different kind! Logically, you will no longer be able to do that when you speak of preexistence. In short, you absolutely arrive at repeated earth lives when you speak of preexistence. It is a fundamental fact that never in earthly civilization has one come to the view of preexistence without also speaking of repeated earth lives.

But consider what it will mean for the whole approach to this earthly existence if this teaching of repeated earth lives is not a mere theory, if this view finds its way into all the feeling life and also the will life of people, if we experience ourselves as beings that have descended from spiritual worlds and have embodied ourselves in a physical body. Then, you know that here on this earth you are a messenger of the divine spiritual world; you know that this life here is a continuation of a spiritual life. Everything that we bear in ourselves as a sense of duty, as abilities, is illuminated and energized by such an awareness, for we know that the gods have sent us down into this physical existence…

These concepts penetrate the whole of our human nature; they penetrate not merely our thoughts; they penetrate our feeling, our emotions; they penetrate our will and give us an awareness of the nature of our whole human condition.

The manner in which one places oneself in the world in awareness of this preexistence of the human soul will be especially important for the civilization of the future. This manner will penetrate human beings with the light and with the power that is needed to struggle free from the powers of decline that otherwise will, without fail, drive civilization into barbarism at the beginning of the third millennium.

Excerpt from: Spiritual Science as a Foundation for Social Forms, Lecture XVII, by Rudolf Steiner. September 18, 1920, in Dornach, Switzerland.

Over the last six years of this blog, we have looked at karma and reincarnation many times. We have spoken about choosing our parents, our birthplace, our strengths and weaknesses and all of the challenges we face from previous earth lives.

Immortality does not mean that when we die we’ll go to a heavenly place for all eternity. Though we are immortal, we continually leave one physical body through death’s doorway, and after a while in the spiritual world, we come back again into a new body. Most people do not yet know they are here time and time again to further their own evolution as well as world evolution. In fact, today’s religions largely work against this knowledge by telling us that we will receive eternal life after death either in heaven or hell depending on how we lived. We are told that if we believe a certain way and behave a certain way, we will live in heaven forevermore.

Yet, it is egotistical to say, “When I die, I want to live eternally in heaven with all those I love.” The whole focus is on oneself. It is not egotistical to say, “I have lived and died before. The people I care about have lived and died before. Here I am again, just like every other human being on the planet.” The good news is that every one of us wants to come back.

Accepting preexistence—unbornness—is altruistic not egotistic. Our present body is most likely a different sex or race or nationality or all of the above than our previous body or the one we will have in our next life. Compassion and tolerance are logical outcomes of this worldview because this worldview encompasses all human beings, all those with whom we exist in the world of the living and the “dead”. We imbody a capacity to love beyond our family and friends, we feel our relationship with all of humanity because we are part of all humanity from the distant past and into the distant future, we come back with those we know according to the grand laws of karma.

Dr. Steiner’s last sentence from this excerpt tells us how important this realization is to us. We all have a sense of the times that show us what will happen without it.

Harmony

We have arrived at the sixth and final basic (aka essential) exercise. We have explored ways to gain mastery of our three soul qualities: thinking, feeling, and willing. In the first three exercises, our goal with thinking is to obtain objectivity; with willing, to obtain control of our actions; with feeling, to obtain equanimity. In the fourth exercise between thinking and feeling to seek positivity, and in the fifth, between thinking and willing to become open-minded. All of this has led us to have more control of ourselves.

The sixth exercise is an effort to harmonize all these capacities. For example, we may have noticed that we have a hard time thinking positively, that we don’t naturally look for the good aspect of things. We may want to practice that particular exercise (#4) more often. Maybe we tend to act before we think, or we tend to get carried away by our feelings; we now have a practice to address the areas that require more effort. The sixth exercise asks us to practice all the exercises in various combinations to strengthen our self-control – our sense of self.

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

In the sixth month, endeavors should be made to repeat all the five exercises again, systematically and in regular alternation. In this way a beautiful equilibrium of soul will gradually develop. It will be noticed, especially, that previous dissatisfactions with certain phenomena and beings in the world completely disappear. A mood reconciling all experiences takes possession of the soul, a mood that is by no means one of indifference but, on the contrary, enables one for the first time to work in the world for its genuine progress and improvement. One comes to a tranquil understanding of things which were formerly quite closed to the soul. The very movements and gestures of a person change under the influence of such exercises, and if, one day, he can actually observe that the character of his handwriting has altered, then he may say to himself that he is just about to reach a first rung on the upward path. Once again, two things must be stressed:

First, the six exercises described paralyze the harmful influence other occult exercises can have, so that only what is beneficial remains. Secondly, these exercises alone ensure that efforts in meditation and concentration will have a positive result. The esotericist must not rest content with fulfilling, however conscientiously, the demands of conventional morality, for that kind of morality can be extremely egotistical, if a person says: I will be good in order that I may be thought good. Esotericists do not do what is good because they want to be thought good, but because little by little they recognize that the good alone brings evolution forward, and that evil, stupidity and ugliness place hindrances along the path.

These exercises do not have to take exactly one month each. Some indication of time had to be indicated. What is important though, is that one practices them in the particular order given here. If anyone should practice the second exercise before the first, he would derive absolutely no benefit from it. The order is very important. Some people even believe that they ought to begin with the sixth exercise, the harmonizing one. But nothing can be harmonized which is not already there. Whoever does not practice the exercises in the given order will gain nothing at all from them. To begin with the sixth exercise is as senseless as if one needed to take six steps to cross a bridge and tried to take the sixth step first.

Excerpt from: Guidance in Esoteric Training by Rudolf Steiner.

One of the reasons this work is courageous is because we come face to face with the shortcomings in our own soul. Without striving for self-control, we tend to either excuse ourselves or berate ourselves for the outcomes of our daily lives. Many of us don’t even go this far; instead, we blame everyone or everything else for the outcomes of our daily lives. Taking responsibility for ourselves is hard to do, but that is only the first step.

If we refer back to April and the first exercise, thinking, right away we get a glimpse of the consequences of this exercise toward objectivity. Because we learn to focus on an irrelevant object, we gradually develop the skill to focus on our thoughts and deeds with objectivity; we become truthful to our own self. We begin to see objectively our own excuses, our own guilt, our own blame of others, and how they’ve dominated our thinking life. Plenty of our head space is hard to face until we obtain the required objectivity.

The reason we don’t see many people who have control of themselves is because it is a hard goal to reach. Yet, when we do meet such a person, it’s no longer difficult to imagine how just one person can make the world a better place. The mysterious answer to world problems begins with becoming a better person – one who has self-mastery.  Since we’re alive anyway, we may as well begin the actual hard work of being a human being.

Embracing the New

As living human beings, the most important thing we can do for ourselves – and everyone else – is to continue to learn and grow. Sometimes, all it takes is to apply an unaccustomed depth of attention to the world happening every second around us to open our minds to the new.

Scrolling through the various media is not sufficient. Yes, we encounter a cat doing something we’ve never seen before or a person falling in a stupendous way, or even a great vocalist performing, but this curated entertainment is two-dimensional, and you are not. We belong in the three-dimensional world, and that world is our best teacher. For example, did we see a squirrel dashing up the tree where we’d never seen one before? What color, red or grey? Why is it suddenly running; is danger chasing it? Is the day warm, is the sun shining, are there mountains in the distance, are birds singing in the trees, are there more small animals scuttling among the leaves? It belongs here—it is indigenous. Its needs are met here, yet danger still exists… As we pay close attention to the squirrel, our thoughts expand; we begin to see how we connect with everything in the world around us. As we observe the squirrel and its environs, we observe ourselves too.

This same attention can be applied to new ideas. Sure, we already know a lot, but we can build on what we know rather than argue against what we don’t already know. The only way to do this is to try to accept a new idea without judging it for a moment; to stop and give the idea some attention and room to breathe. How does the idea feel as I think about it? How does the person who believes it feel? How does this idea fit into the world? Is there any aspect of this idea that works for me? What would change about us if I believed this?

In this fifth essential exercise, Steiner leads us toward advancing soul capacities through accepting new thoughts and new experiences. We can perhaps imagine why this exercise follows the previous four.

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

In the fifth month, efforts should be made to develop the feeling of confronting every new experience with complete open-mindedness. The esoteric pupil must break entirely with the attitude which, in the face of something just heard or seen, exclaims: “I never heard that, or I never saw that, before; I don’t believe it – it’s an illusion.” At every moment the student must be ready to encounter and accept absolutely new experiences. What he has hitherto recognized as being in accordance with natural law, or what he has regarded as possible, should present no obstacle to the acceptance of a new truth. Although radically expressed, it is absolutely correct that if anyone were to come to the esoteric pupil and say, “Since last night the steeple of such and such a church has been tilted right over”, the esotericist should leave a loophole open for the contingency of his becoming convinced that previous knowledge of natural law could somehow be augmented by such an apparently unprecedented fact.

If he turns his attention, in the fifth month, to developing this attitude of mind, he will notice creeping into his soul a feeling as if something were becoming alive, astir, in the space referred to in connection with the exercise for the fourth month. This feeling is exceedingly delicate and subtle. Efforts must be made to be attentive to this delicate vibration in the environment and to let it stream, as it were, through all the five senses, especially through the eyes, the ears, and through the skin, in so far as the latter contains the sense of warmth. At this stage of esoteric development, less attention is paid to the impressions made by these stimuli on the other senses of taste, smell and touch. At this stage it is still not possible to distinguish the numerous bad influences which intermingle with the good influences in this sphere; the pupil therefore leaves this for a later stage.

Lack of prejudice. We should remain flexible, always capable of taking in new information. If someone relates something to us which we think sounds improbable, we must nevertheless always keep a tiny corner of our heart open, in which we say: “He could be right after all.” This does not need to make us completely uncritical, for we can always examine and test such statements. When we practice this, a feeling comes over us as if something was streaming into us from outside. We draw this in through the eyes, ears and the whole skin.

Excerpt from: Guidance in Esoteric Training by Rudolf Steiner.

Next month we come to the last of these six exercises. Meanwhile, we can reflect on the reality that we are always becoming something anew—even when we do nothing. Put another way, doing nothing is impossible because we are always becoming. Who are we becoming? These exercises are teaching us to guide ourselves purposefully. The world around us is also eternally becoming. We can be either blindsided by the events of the day every morning when we wake up or we can become masters of the way we encounter every day. It’s our choice—which is pretty remarkable when we think about it.

The Bright Side of Life

“If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Hm. We’ve sure come a long way toward the opposite pole of that sentiment. A certain meanness, if not malice, is readily observable across the various media we consume and in the areas of our shared presence.

This destructive criticism originates inside of each of us, and no matter how refined or deserved the rebuke may be, what lies behind it is the desire to tear someone or something down. This is a common but dangerous poison causing untold harm to both the giver and the receiver. These cruel observations are never to our credit but diminish us every time we allow ourselves to be amused or caught up in the mudslinging.

This month, Steiner suggests that we take an alternate route – that we actively try to notice the beauty in someone or something. That at the very least we withhold criticism. Think how much better we would feel about ourselves and the world around us. Think how differently we would affect the people around us. Of course, this effect expands out into time and space beyond our current comprehension, and we should consider this in our assessment of its benefits. But even without that cosmic view, we would observe the positive impact we make in real time.

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

In the fourth month, as a new exercise, what is sometimes called a ‘positive attitude’ to life should be cultivated. It consists in seeking always for the good, the praiseworthy, the beautiful and the like, in all beings, all experiences, all things… The esoteric pupil must strive to seek for the positive in every phenomenon and in every being. They will soon notice that under the veil of something repugnant there is a hidden beauty, that even under the outer guise of a criminal there is a hidden good, that under the mask of a psychopath, the divine soul is somehow concealed.

In a certain respect this exercise is connected with what is called ‘abstention from criticism’. This is not to be understood in the sense of calling black white and white black. There is, however, a difference between a judgment which, proceeding merely from one’s own personality, is colored with the element of personal sympathy or antipathy, and an attitude which enters lovingly into the alien phenomenon or being, always asking: How has it come to be like this or to act like this? Such an attitude will by its very nature be more set upon helping what is imperfect than upon simply finding fault and criticizing…

A person who consciously turns his mind, for one month, to the positive aspect of all his experiences will gradually notice a feeling creeping into him as if his skin were becoming porous on all sides, and as if his soul were opening wide to all kinds of secret and delicate processes in his environment which hitherto entirely escaped his notice. The important point is to combat a very prevalent lack of attentiveness to these subtle things.

If it has once been noticed that the feeling described expresses itself in the soul as a kind of bliss, endeavors should be made in thought to guide this feeling to the heart and from there to let it stream into the eyes, and thence out into the space in front and around oneself. It will be noticed that an intimate relationship to this surrounding space is thereby acquired. A person grows out of and beyond himself, as it were. He learns to regard a part of his environment as something that belongs to him. A great deal of concentration is necessary for this exercise, and, above all, recognition of the fact that all tumultuous feelings, all passions, all over-exuberant emotions have an absolutely destructive effect upon the mood indicated. The exercises of the first months are repeated, as with the earlier months.

Excerpt from: Guidance in Esoteric Training by Rudolf Steiner.

We are bombarded by the criticisms surrounding us in our daily lives.

Deciding to take up the six basic exercises must be done in freedom; we make the choice. The hard choice. Steiner indicates that this particular exercise, the fourth of six, can be the point where many decide they cannot go forward as their livelihood depends on delivering this type of criticism. Looking on the bright side is not compatible with the work they’ve chosen to do in this lifetime. And that’s ok. The spiritual path is arduous and not everyone is prepared or willing to begin right now. Nevertheless, many of us want to do something to make the world a better place and aren’t sure what we can do, so here it is: the chance to actively work to make the world a better place is totally within our own power as a result of work we are free to choose.

Pretty cool.

Emotional Intelligence

“The riddle of man becomes important for us when we begin to realize that in all we do, even down to our moods, we influence the whole cosmos, that our little world is of infinitely far-reaching importance for all that comes into being in the macrocosmos. A heightened feeling of responsibility is the finest and most important fruit that can be gained from spiritual science. It teaches us to grasp the true sense of life, to take it earnestly so that what we cast upon the stream of evolution may be meaningful.” – Rudolf Steiner

If a child has a meltdown when it doesn’t get its way, the adult is advised to stay calm and quietly talk to the child until they can successfully divert the child’s attention. This advice implies that adults have some control over their own emotions. Generally, this is regarded as a healthy development, and people who can’t control their emotions are deemed immature.

The control we seek over negative emotions makes total sense; however, in this exercise we are also asked to have control over our pleasurable emotions. Why? As we’ve explored in previous posts, we exist in the center of two opposing forces. When we looked at virtues from this point of view, we saw that courage exists in the balance between foolhardiness and cowardice. Thus, in this month’s exercise, we should seek to feel the peaceful calmness somewhere between depression and euphoria.

Steiner elsewhere says that every day we should laugh and cry. Emotions are real; we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. We shouldn’t suppress them, but we can learn to be the master of them. We may need to meditate on this a moment to recognize the difference between suppression and mastery.

In this third of six exercises (see previous posts for exercises one and two), we are being asked to consciously choose a moment to understand an emotion we are having rather than succumb to it – and to do that for about 15 minutes every day this month.

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

In the third month, life should be centered on a new exercise – the development of a certain equanimity towards the fluctuation of joy and sorrow; pleasure and pain; ‘heights of jubilation and “depths of despair” should quite consciously be replaced by an equable mood. Care is taken that no pleasure should carry us away, no sorrow plunge us into the depths, no experience lead to immoderate anger or vexation, no expectation give rise to anxiety or fear, no situation disconcert us, and so on. There need be no fear that such an exercise will make life arid and unproductive; far rather will it quickly be noticed that the experiences to which this exercise is applied are replaced by purer qualities of soul. Above all, if subtle attentiveness is maintained, an inner tranquility in the body will one day become noticeable; as in the two exercises before, we pour this feeling into the body, letting it stream from the heart towards the hands, the feet, and finally the head. This naturally cannot be done after each exercise, for here it is not a matter of one single exercise but of sustained attentiveness to the inner life of the soul. Once every day, at least, this inner tranquility should be called up before the soul and then the exercise of pouring it out from the heart should proceed. A connection with the exercises of the first and second months is maintained, as in the second month with the exercise of the first month.

Mastering joy and sorrow: We may feel sometimes an urge to cry. Then it is time to practice this exercise. We force ourselves with all our strength not to cry for once. The same with laughing. We try, on some occasion when we feel laughter rising up, not to laugh but to remain peaceful. That does not mean that we should not laugh any more: but we should be able to take hold of ourselves, be master over laughing and crying. When we have overcome ourselves in this way a few times, we will have a feeling of peace and equanimity. We allow this feeling to flow through the whole body, pouring it out from the heart first of all into the arms and hands, so that it can radiate out from the hands into our actions. Then we let it stream down to the feet and last of all up to the head. This exercise requires earnest self-observation and should take at least a quarter of an hour each day.

Excerpt from: Guidance in Esoteric Training by Rudolf Steiner.

This exercise, mastery of our feeling, is so important right now. We are exposed everywhere to countless efforts to enflame us one way or another, and many of us are often reacting with great vehemence to something we read or hear. Of course, much of what we are hearing is horrific—if it’s true—, but working with this exercise may teach us how to see through all the manipulation and calm ourselves.

When we have allowed something to pull us off center, we are not masters of ourselves. It’s just a fact. If we believe that having mastery over our own selves will not allow us to be fully ourselves, we may want to examine that conviction. If we can simply come to ourselves in the moment and giving ourselves permission to laugh or cry, we lose nothing.

As in the previous month, don’t forget to occasionally practice the first exercise, mastery of thinking and the second exercise, mastery of doing. Meanwhile, this month we will see how we fare with mastering our feelings.

A Small Task

The challenge this month is the same as last month: to dedicate ourselves to a daily regimen of doing something relatively simple. Last month’s exercise was to gain mastery of thought. This month’s exercise is to gain mastery of will, to take charge of our own actions.

In last month’s exercise we were to set aside 5 minutes each day for an entire month to think about an unexciting object. We could imagine a pencil or a pin or a button. We could think about what it’s made of, how it was manufactured, how we use it, etc. That exercise works best with our eyes closed. For more details, including the results we can hope to experience, see last month’s post.

The second exercise of six is to focus on something we do every day for a month. Once again, we should pick something unexciting to do that is out of the ordinary. Steiner’s example is to water a flower at or near the same time each day. Clearly, a flower, whether it’s in a vase or in a garden, doesn’t need to be watered each day, so we want to choose an activity to do every day that doesn’t need to be done. Some people turn a ring around their finger or a watch around their wrist once a day. That’s it. If we can see that accomplishing this one unimportant thing each day is easy, we can add another thing to do at another time of day.

More examples will not help us because we really have to come up with our own ideas; we shouldn’t use the examples given here in this post.

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

When this exercise has been practiced for, say, one month (see last month’s blog for first exercise), a second requirement should be added.

We try to think of some action which in the ordinary course of life we should certainly not have performed. Then we make it a duty to perform this action every day.

It will therefore be good to choose an action which can be performed every day and will occupy as long a period of time as possible. Again, it is better to begin with some insignificant action which we have to force ourselves to perform; for example, to water at a fixed time every day a flower we have bought. After a certain time, a second, similar act should be added to the first; later, a third, and so on… as many as are compatible with the carrying out of all other duties. This exercise, also, should last for one month. The action must spring from our own initiative, one must have thought of it oneself.

But as far as possible during this second month, too, the first exercise should continue, although it is a less paramount duty than in the first month. Nevertheless, it must not be left unheeded, for otherwise it will quickly be noticed that the fruits of the first month are lost and the slovenliness of uncontrolled thinking begins again.

Care must be taken that once these fruits have been won, they are never again lost. If, through the second exercise, this initiative of action has been achieved, then, with subtle attentiveness, we become conscious of the feeling of an inner impulse of activity in the soul; we pour this feeling into the body, letting it stream down from the head to a point just above the heart.

Excerpt from: Guidance in Esoteric Training by Rudolf Steiner.

This series of exercises will move us toward becoming masters of ourselves. By directing our thoughts in a focused way, we will eventually be able to control our thinking instead of having random thoughts intrude in haphazard ways throughout the day. We also begin to have more faith that we are doing things we consciously intend to do; we aren’t wondering why we did something uncharacteristic because we are conscious and directed when we act.

None of us is a finished product; we are always on a path of becoming. We should expect and guide ourselves to pursue mastery of our thinking and our doing. That is the point of these simple exercises; they get us started on that path.

If we continue last month’s effort for 5 minutes a day and add this second one this month, we may well begin to experience subtle changes in our capacities. We should try. After all, we are the ones responsible for ourselves.

Taking The Time

Meditation and contemplation are no longer practices existing on the sidelines of modern life. Many professional athletes consider their morning meditation as essential. The medical world acknowledges that meditation helps patients deal with chronic pain, stress, anxiety and depression (Mayo Clinic 2/10/24). A Wharton School of Business study in 2019 found that meditation can “reduce stress, improve focus, help regulate emotions, increase cooperation and team building, and lead to better decisions.” Most of us have already heard about this.

So why isn’t everyone doing it?

Because it takes time. It takes consistency. It takes discipline.

Meditation or mindfulness practice promises a mastery of ourselves that changes who we are. And no trumpets are blaring, no lights are flashing, no accolades are forthcoming, so we must see a point to ourselves that is our own reward.

Though many forms of meditation exist, today we will look at the first step in what Rudolf Steiner calls the six basic exercises. Many reasons exist for beginning a meditative practice. One reason is so that we can become masters of ourselves.

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

In what follows, the conditions which must be the basis of any occult development are set forth. Let no one imagine that he can make progress by any measures applied to the outer or the inner life unless he fulfils these conditions. All exercises in meditation, concentration, or exercises of other kinds, are valueless, indeed in a certain respect actually harmful, if life is not regulated in accordance with these conditions. No forces can actually be imparted to a human being; all that can be done is to bring to development the forces already within him. They do not develop of their own accord because outer and inner hindrances obstruct them. The outer hindrances are lessened by means of the following rules of life; the inner hindrances by the special instructions concerning meditation, concentration, and the like.

The first condition is the cultivation of absolutely clear thinking. For this purpose, a person must rid himself of the will-o’-the-wisps of thought, even if only for a short time during the day – about five minutes (the longer, the better). He must become the ruler in his world of thought. He is not the ruler if external circumstances, occupation, some tradition or other, social relationships, even membership of a particular race, the daily round of life, certain activities and so forth, determine a thought and how he works it out. Therefore, during this brief time, acting entirely out of his own free will, he must empty the soul of the ordinary, everyday course of thoughts and by his own initiative place one single thought at the center of his soul.

The thought need not be a particularly striking or interesting one. Indeed, it will be all the better for what has to be attained in an occult respect if a thoroughly uninteresting and insignificant thought is chosen. Thinking is then impelled to act out of its own energy, which is the essential thing here, whereas an interesting thought carries the thinking along with it. It is better if this exercise in thought-control is undertaken with a pin rather than with Napoleon. The pupil says to himself: Now I start from this thought, and through my own inner initiative I associate with it everything that is pertinent to it. At the end of the period the thought should be just as colorful and living as it was at the beginning.

This exercise is repeated day by day for at least a month; a new thought may be taken every day, or the same thought may be adhered to for several days. At the end of the exercise an endeavor is made to become fully conscious of that inner feeling of firmness and security which will soon be noticed by paying subtler attention to one’s own soul; the exercise is then brought to a conclusion by focusing the thinking upon the head and the middle of the spine (brain and spinal cord), as if the feeling of security were being poured into this part of the body.

Excerpt from: Guidance in Esoteric Training, Chapter I: General Requirements: General demands which every spiritual aspirant for occult development must put to himself, by Rudolf Steiner.

Perhaps if this were easier to do, people would be less inclined to take medications to fall asleep, to calm down, to get work done. Many people don’t even try meditation or mindfulness before seeking external help. Why? Perhaps we don’t have faith that it will work. What we don’t have to take on faith is that there will be no damaging side effects.

If we give this exercise a try for just 5 minutes a day until the 15th of May, we will have spent 2 ½ hours in meditation over the course of a month. Of course, we can go meditate longer than 5 minutes if we want. Our minds will wander, extraneous thoughts will pull us off course, but we just keep coming back to the pin or the pencil or the paperclip or the button or whatever we decide to focus on. We do get better and better at this if we keep at it.

We are free to mediate or not, obviously; however, if we want to experience the spiritual world and our place within it, we cannot just wait for it to happen, we must begin the work.

Karma Is an Active Law

In Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, he outlines his idea that the human being’s will to find meaning is the driving force of our lives. In Frankl’s logotherapy, he has three tenets: 1) Life has meaning under all circumstances, even the most miserable ones; 2) Our main motivation for living is our will to find meaning in life; 3) We have freedom to find meaning in what we do, and what we experience. Central to his theory is that we must find ways to endure hardship.

Rudolf Steiner tells us that understanding the principles of karma is the key to understanding the meaning of life. We can see that underlying Frankl’s theory is the law of karma. Why is this happening to me or to them is understandable on a deeper level when we begin to grasp the idea of karma and reincarnation. The suffering we see in the world and in our own lives, the disparity of one human life compared to another, seems random, senseless, and cruel without this key.

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

The law of Karma does not throw light upon abstract riddles of the universe, but upon problems which we actually encounter in life at every step. Is it not a real life-riddle when we see that one human being is born in misery and poverty, apparently without any fault of his own, and that the finest gifts which lie concealed within him must atrophy owing to the social condition into which life has placed him? We must often ask ourselves in life: How can we explain the fact that an apparently innocent man is born in the midst of misery and pain, whereas another man is born without his merit in overabundance and wealth, surrounded at the cradle by those who tenderly love him? These are problems which modern superficiality alone can ignore.

The deeper we look into the law of karma; the more we find that the hard injustice apparently presenting itself to a superficial observation of this law disappears. We then realize more and more why one person must live in one condition of life and another person in another. Injustice and hardness in one or other life-situation can only be seen if we limit ourselves to the observation of one life; but if we know that this one life is the absolute result of former deeds, the injustice completely vanishes, for we perceive that the human being prepares his own life.

Someone might now object: It is terrible to think that all the blows of destiny which a human being encounters in this life are brought about through his own fault! We must realize, however, that the law of karma is not something for sentimental people to brood over, but that it is an active law, rendering us strong and giving us courage and hope. For even though we ourselves have molded our present life with all its hardships, we know at the same time that karma is a law the chief significance of which must be looked for, not in the past, but in the future. No matter how deeply oppressed we may be in the present owing to the result of past deeds, our insight into the law of karma will bear fruit in our subsequent lives. Our attitude determines what fruit our deeds will bear, for no action is without consequence. It is far more anthroposophical to look upon karma as an active law! For no matter what we do, we cannot escape the consequences of our deeds. The more we suffer in this life and the better we bear our sufferings, the more shall we profit by this in future lives. Karma is a law which solves the riddles of life which we encounter at every step.

Excerpt from: Theosophy and Rosicrucianism, Lecture 7: The Law of Karma by Rudolf Steiner. June 22, 1907 Kassel, Germany

Applying the law of karma to our own lives means that we are better able to accept and move on through life’s tribulations; we are meant to grow and become stronger because of them.

Applying the law of karma to the woes of the world includes the knowledge that we cannot idly watch evil run riot. We must help wherever we can; we can choose to have a positive effect on another person’s karma. To see an example of this, watch the short documentary, The Barber of Little Rock, on YouTube. Arlo Washington’s work in Little Rock, Arkansas is an inspiring example of what Steiner calls making a new entry in the book of someone else’s karma.

Truly understanding the law of karma is not to focus on the past, but to embrace the future knowing that nothing we do is in vain.

#TheBarberofLittleRock #ArloWashington #ViktorFrankl #karma #meaning of life #Man’sSearchforMeaning

Love as a Force for Good

Love for someone else is possible only if we become genuinely interested in them. We can be attracted to them by an array of qualities but love itself happens because of our desire to know more about them: what gives them joy, what interests them, what are their hopes and dreams. As we get to know them better, we begin to understand them and gain insight into them. Interest is the ground on which we step that allows love and understanding to bloom. As great as our love for another person becomes, it is but a baby step.

The spiritual hierarchies are interested in us; they love us. We will find that our experience of love here on earth is a mere reflection of the love we experience among the hierarchies in the spiritual world between earth lives. Each cycle of life as we go back and forth between earth and “heaven” is held with interest by the hierarchies, most specifically by our guardian angels. We are never alone and never unloved, but most of us don’t know it. Many of us aren’t interested in knowing it, but nevertheless, between each earth life, we are part of this communion with the hierarchies.

We may recall from previous posts that how we live our lives on earth affects our ability to fully encounter the beings of the hierarchies after we die. It is our own responsibility to work toward our inner development, and if we choose not to do that, not only do we find it difficult to feel love toward each other and all of humanity, to work together toward common goals, we also will have difficulty communing with the hierarchies after death which then hinders our ability to love in our next life. And so on.

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

(Some) people here on Earth are incapable of unfolding love in which there is real strength, incapable of unfolding that all-embracing love which comes to expression in the power to understand other people. We may say with truth: it is among the Gods, in pre-earthly existence, that we acquire the gift for observing other people, to perceive how they think and how they feel, to understand them with inner sympathy. If we were deprived of this association with the Gods, we would never be capable of unfolding here on Earth that insight into other human beings which alone makes earthly life a reality.

When in this connection I speak of love, and especially of all-embracing human love, you must think of love as having this real and concrete meaning: you must think of it as signifying a genuine, intimate understanding of other people. If to the all-embracing love of humanity, this understanding of others is added, we have everything that constitutes human morality. For human morality on Earth—if it is not merely expressed in empty phrases or fine talk or in resolutions not afterwards carried out—depends upon the interest one person takes in another, upon the capability to see into the other person. Those who have the gift of understanding other human beings will receive from this understanding the impulses for a social life imbued with true morality.

So we may also say: everything that constitutes moral life in earthly existence has been acquired by human beings in pre-earthly existence; from our communion with the Gods there has remained in us the urge to unfold, in the soul at any rate, community on Earth as well. And it is the development of a life where the one person together with the other fulfils the tasks and the mission of the Earth—it is this alone that in reality leads to the moral life on Earth. Thus we see that love, and the outcome of love—morality—are in very truth a consequence of what man has experienced spiritually in a pre-earthly existence.

Excerpt from: Man and the World of Stars. Lecture IV: Rhythms of Earthly and Spiritual Life, Love, Memory, the Moral Life, by Rudolf Steiner. Dec. 15, 1922, Dornach, Switzerland.

We can be grateful to those who love us and allow us to love them because we need to know what love means. And we can feel grateful for meaningful work with others—work that accomplishes something in the world—work we could not do if we didn’t have others working alongside us. We can also be grateful for the flame that ignites our interest in others and our will to work in the world. The impetus to be our best selves, to create community in the world, to truly love, comes from the hierarchies in the world we live in before birth and again after death, whether we believe in them or not. But we must purposefully direct our wills to overcome the distractions of our world in order to utilize this gift of the gods, in order to genuinely encounter each other.

All around us in 2024 we can find the results of a lack of capacity to see and understand the other: we have lost our moral compass. We define people by our sympathies and antipathies instead of seeing them as having souls like us. The results of this are horrific. To become complete human beings, we must fight our own lethargy, our own prejudices, to seek insight into each other. Becoming a whole human being, a moral human being, is the hardest thing we can do because no one can do it for us. Yet this is our real work, the work that matters.

A meditative practice, of contemplation in the quiet of our own minds, even for just five minutes every single day, is a start. This is so much harder to do than it sounds. Try it.

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.

A World Full of Stars

The way we look at babies changes drastically when we learn to accept reincarnation and karma. The baby that is born to us is not a blank slate, nor is it simply ours – a product of our genetic heritage. Every baby is a person who has a history stretching back to the beginning of humanity at the dawn of time. It’s one thing to touch on this idea and another thing altogether to truly grasp what it means. Who is this person looking out at us from their newborn eyes? Where has this person been since they were last on earth?

Rudolf Steiner says that our souls, our spirits, continue to live amongst the Beings of the Hierarchies (angels, archangels, etc.) between earth lives; we do not die when our physical bodies die. Our bodies are not the whole of us and neither are the stars and planets revealed by our telescopes the whole of them. The cosmos is inhabited by spiritual beings with influences far more important than sunspots or tides or minerals that exist in the “great mechanical processes in the Universe” we’ve discovered. Astronomy does not explain the spiritual forces with which we are connected after we die. When we look at pictures of the earth taken from far away in space, we do not see the hopes and dreams of human beings.

All consciousness extends beyond the physical world.

We need to consider that when we come back through a new birth, we have been shaped and influenced by the Beings of the Cosmos around us. Humanity used to be aware of this; we took for granted that we descended from the heavenly worlds and that we return there after death because we could still experience it. This direct knowledge was lost to us so that we could develop intelligence through our physical senses. Now we must regain our knowledge of the spirit using this earthly intelligence. Neglecting to do this is one of the factors causing the continued decline of earthly culture. We simply cannot know ourselves without knowing the whole of ourselves. We cannot fix things we don’t understand.

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

There is a tendency to look back with a certain condescension to “primitive” periods of culture, for instance to the culture of ancient Egypt, when people did not speak of the great mechanical processes in the Universe but of divine Beings outside, in space and beyond space – Beings to whom a person was known to be related just as that person is related to the beings of the three kingdoms of Nature on Earth.

The ancient Egyptians traced the origin of the spirit and soul of the human being to the higher Hierarchies, to supersensible worlds, just as they traced the origin of their material, bodily nature to the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. In our age, people speak of what is beyond the Earth out of a kind of weak and ever-weakening faith that much prefers to avoid scientific scrutiny. Science speaks only of a great system of world-machinery which can be expressed in terms of mathematics… Earthly existence has finally come to be regarded as confined with the walls of a little molehill in the universe.

Yet there is a profound truth, namely this: When we lose the heavens, we lose ourselves. By far the most important elements of our humanity belong to the universe beyond the Earth and if we lose sight of this universe, we lose sight of our own true being. We wander over the Earth without knowing what kind of being we really are. We know, but even then only from tradition, that the word “human” applies to us, that this name was once given to us as a being who stands upright in contrast to the quadruped animals. But our scientific view of the world and technical culture no longer help us to discover the true content of our name, for that must be sought in the universe beyond the Earth, and this universe is considered to be nothing but a great system of machinery. Humanity has lost itself; it has no longer any insight into its true nature.

A feeling of sadness cannot but overtake us when we realize that the heights of culture to which we have risen since the middle of the fifteenth century have led us to wrench ourselves from our true nature and to live on the Earth divested of soul and spirit…

In the lecture to educationists yesterday, I said that we are prone to speak of only one aspect – and even that merely from tradition – of the eternal being of the human being. We speak of eternity beyond death but not of the eternity stretching beyond birth, nor of how the human being has descended from spiritual worlds into material, physical existence on the Earth… We must find ourselves again and be true to the laws of our innermost being. Interest must be awakened in the whole nature of the human being instead of being confined to its outer, physical sheaths. But this end cannot be achieved until humanity is regarded as belonging not only to the Earth – which is conceived as a little molehill – but to the whole Cosmos, until it is realized that between death and a new birth, we pass through the world of stars to which here on Earth we can only gaze upwards from below. And the living essence, the soul and the spirit of the world of stars must be known once again.

Excerpt from: Cosmic Forces in Man, Lecture 1 by Rudolf Steiner, Nov. 24, 1921. Oslo, Norway.

When we are consciously able to enlarge the human experience to include the cosmos, we see that each of us is much more important than a materialistic point of view permits us to see. Not only do we each carry within us our multitude of our past and future lives, we carry also the time in between our earthly lives where we live in a place much larger than the molehill in which we imagine ourselves, we live among the stars.

That’s where our children have been before they come to us. This is why the newborn child feels holy to us… like a gift from heaven.

Thanks For Everything

The Guest House by Rumi

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Naturally, we are grateful to the people and experiences of our lives that have been beneficial to us—that have helped us to become who we are. The teacher who gave us confidence in ourselves. The friend who always has our back. The career that supports us and our families. It is a challenge, however, to feel equal gratitude to the people who have been unkind or unsupportive, the teachers who were unsatisfied with our efforts, the school we didn’t get into or the job we didn’t get. Nevertheless, it is important that we adopt a feeling of thankfulness for our disappointments, too.

Most of us don’t know anything about our spiritual life before our birth, let alone our previous earth lives, yet as we study karma and reincarnation, we understand that we have consequences in this life for what we did before. In our current lives, we meet people with whom we have karma, and we are set in circumstances with them to have the experiences we need. We eagerly approached this life to work out our karma; it is a fact of life. Gratitude for all things is a practice that can help to free us from past resentment and disappointment and lead us to look more openly at the things that aren’t “going our way” as well as acknowledge all positive gifts we have received.

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

If we often look back over our life, we can say to ourselves something highly significant for the present moment. We can say: we owe the facility with which we adapt our soul, perhaps even our physical constitution with more or less dexterity to life, to the circumstances that in youth we were able to live happily, not suffering from depression, that we were led to much that gave us joy.

These impressions of joy in the soul endow us in later life with a certain happiness, although it is drawn down into deeper regions of our being. Let us now ask how much of what life brings us in the way of inner deepening, how much of this is to be attributed to our sorrows, our sufferings? And let us also ask: what can arise in the soul if we look at our life with these questions in mind? We must give the answer to these questions not with the intellect, but with feeling. And feeling answers: I must be thankful to all that has come into my life because only thereby have I become the being I am and with whom I more or less identify myself. I cannot know whether otherwise I might have been of even less account. I can only be thankful to life, because I have become what I am through its joys and sorrows.

These questions must be answered with a feeling of thankfulness to life. And it means a great deal if this thankfulness for earthly existence finds its way into the human soul. If certain deepenings of the soul are achieved and life is judged not out of emotion but out of the soul in its purity, then this thankfulness always arises. Though much of what life has brought us may be deplored, yet in many respects the regret is the expression of a complete error. For if what is regretted had not taken place, we should not be what we actually are. The feeling that we can have about life amounts ultimately to this thankfulness.

Thankfulness may also be felt even when we are not entirely in agreement with life, when we would like to have had more from our existence… It can truly be said that whatever, in our opinion, life has denied us—and this opinion may after all be erroneous—it has at all events brought us something. For what it has brought us we must develop the feeling of thankfulness. But when in all earnestness we develop the feeling of thankfulness—we need only reflect on this, and it will be readily understood—there must be thankfulness for something else. Anyone who has developed thankfulness to life will be led, through this thankfulness itself, to recognition of the invisible spiritual Bestowers of life and to the transformation of memory in loving devotion to them.

The most beautiful way for one’s personality to be led to the supersensible is when the path leads through thankfulness to life. Thankfulness is also a way into the supersensible and finally it becomes veneration and love for the life-bestowing spirit of humankind. Thankfulness gives birth to love and when love is born from thankfulness to life it opens the heart to the spiritual Powers permeating all existence.

Excerpt from: Karmic Relationships: Esoteric Studies. Volume VII, Lecture Seven by Rudolf Steiner. June 13, 1924, Breslau, Germany.

This spirit of thankfulness is a blessing to ourselves and to others. The more we practice it, the more we are able to recognize setbacks as opportunities and appreciate them for the gifts they are.

This spirit of thankfulness leads us to love and acceptance of ourselves and of others. It leads us to recognize the guidance coming to us from the spiritual worlds. It leads us to acknowledge who we have become thus far and directs us to feel hope towards all that will come to us from the future.

A little later in the above lecture Dr. Steiner says, “Whatever life has been, when we take it in its reality and not sentimentally, we can certainly develop this thankfulness and acknowledge that we have been forged by the destiny that goes with us or against us…”

For Belonging by John O’Donohue

May you listen to your longing to be free.
May the frames of your belonging be generous enough for our dreams.
May you arise each day with a voice of blessing whispering in your heart.
May you find a harmony between your soul and your life.
May the sanctuary of your soul never become haunted.
May you know the eternal longing that lives at the heart of time.
May there be kindness in your gaze when you look within.
May you never place walls between the light and yourself.
May you allow the wild beauty of the invisible world to gather you, mind you, and Embrace you in belonging.

How They Reach Us

Every October we approach with anticipation a holiday that has been celebrated for a long, long time: in the United States, for example, it’s Halloween; in South America, it’s Día de los Muertos; in Italy, it’s Ognissante; in Ireland—where the tradition began—it’s Samhain. The gravity of the death of our loved ones and of our own eventual passing is relieved by celebrating with others. What we’ve been talking about for the last few months is something altogether different and much more personal than national celebrations, though these can serve as reminders. While we’ve explored methods like reading to the dead as ways of contacting our own departed loved ones, this month we will look at how we might hear from them.

It is unlikely that we will see them as an apparition in the physical world; however, if we focus our attention on a picture of them, we will put them in the front of our mind. If we create an inner picture by recalling a time we spent with them in as much detail as possible: the time of day, the room, the weather, the occasion, etc., we will create a sense of companionship.

We may also, however, get a nudge from them below our level of consciousness, even while we are awake. Steiner indicates that we can become aware of their presence only if our underlying state of mind is one that is filled with gratitude for all that life gives us—even the stuff we don’t like. Obviously, in our present state of almost continual distraction, it is very difficult to achieve a quiet state of mind that will allow us to have the sensitivity to communicate across the barrier between life and death. Yet, the path is open to each of us if we are willing to put in the work.

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

We perceive unconsciously a far wider range of our environment than is possible consciously. It is quite true that if we are walking along a street and meet someone just coming around the corner, we may feel that we had seen the person just before they appeared. Quite often we may have a feeling of having seen something happen before it actually occurs. It is indeed a fact that first we have a psychic, spiritual connection with what we later perceive; only we are deafened, as it were, by the later sense perceptions and do not observe what goes on in the intimacies of soul life.

This is something that takes place of itself subconsciously, like the formation of a memory or the feeling of thankfulness toward all surrounding phenomena. The dead can speak to us only through the element that pervades the dreams that are interwoven with our life. The dead speak into these intimate, subconscious perceptions that occur on their own. And it is possible for us, given the right conditions, to share with the dead the same spiritual-psychic air.

If they wish to speak to us, it is necessary that we take into our consciousness something of the feeling of gratitude for all that reveals itself to us. If there is none of this feeling within us, if we are not able to thank the world for enabling us to live, for enriching our life continually with new impressions, if we cannot deepen our soul by often realizing that our entire life is a gift, then the dead will not find a common air with us, for they can speak with us only through this feeling of gratitude.

Otherwise, there is a wall between us and them.

… We cannot arouse in ourselves this feeling of gratitude if, having lost them, we wish them back in life; we should be thankful that we had them with us quite irrespective of the fact that we have them no longer. Thus, if we do not have this feeling of gratitude for the beings we wish to approach, they do not find us; or at least they cannot speak to us. The very feelings we so often have toward our nearest dead are a hindrance to their speaking to us… The better we can feel what they were to us during their life, the sooner it will be possible for them to speak to us—to speak to us through the common air of gratitude.

Excerpt from: Earthly Death and Cosmic Life, Lecture 6: Feeling of Unity and Sentiments of Gratitude: A Bridge to the Dead, by Rudolf Steiner, Berlin. March 19, 1918.

Steiner indicates that, at least initially, any communication from the dead is subtle, below our consciousness, so if we aren’t paying attention, we miss it. The most challenging aspect of communicating with the dead is the formidable task of preparing ourselves to do so. Nevertheless, it’s good to know that all our efforts toward reaching the spirit are beneficial to we ourselves and to the world. Living consciously in gratitude requires effort, but living this way is a worthy goal in itself whether we succeed in communicating with the dead or not.

We are always moving toward our future karma. Our connections with each other are how that karma plays out. Realizing that we ourselves survive death, just as those who’ve gone before us have survived it, helps us be less fearful of death. And that, too, affects every aspect of our lives.

The dead want to help guide us toward our healthy selves, to our healthy goals. They care about what happens to us. We can open ourselves to their guidance if we choose to do so.

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.

Staying Close After Death

People we know who have “died” are still around us. They didn’t go to a far-away heaven somewhere off in space. They didn’t cease to exist just because they died. In fact, they are busy in their lives between death and rebirth. We’ve already discussed in previous posts the phases people go through once they’ve left their physical bodies at death, so now we can expand our understanding to recognize that once people are on the other side, they have many things that occupy them while going through each phase. One of the things that occupy our loved ones after they die is their desire to have contact with us.

How do we go about deepening our relationship with someone who has died? Love for them will draw us closer, prayers and thoughts will draw us closer, and remembering our moments together will draw us closer as long as we harbor spiritual thoughts at least occasionally. If we are completely mired in the materialistic world, they will not find us. This may seem unnecessarily harsh, yet if we think about it, it makes sense. Once we believe our loved ones still exist after they die, we are acknowledging there is a spiritual world.

Acquiring a deeper more conscious relationship requires efforts the results of which we may not achieve in this lifetime. We should start on the path anyway; we have nothing to lose. Because here’s the thing: the person who died misses us just as we miss them.

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

… Here on earth, by means of our souls and bodies, we have the most varied kinds of relationships with the physical world, as well as with the spiritual world that underlies it. Likewise, between death and a new birth we exist in relationship with the facts, happenings, and beings of a supersensory world. Human beings have an occupation or activity in the physical world between birth and death; likewise, they have activities—occupations as it were—between death and a new birth. What we can learn about human life and human activity between death and a new birth will lead humanity more and more toward what we may call the overcoming of “the abyss” that, especially in our materialistic times, separates those who live on earth from those whom we call “the dead.” In this process, communication and a mutual entering-into-relationship will increasingly come to be established between the living and the “dead.”

Naturally, those who die before others with whom they had relationships on earth often gaze back from the spiritual world at those they loved who remain here. This being the case, we may ask whether such souls living between death and a new birth can perceive human beings who live here on earth between birth and death… Seers can often have a kind of heart-wrenching experience with souls who feel fettered when they think of those they left behind. Such souls feel that they cannot get through, cannot look down on those earthly souls.

They are fettered not by their own essential being, but by the other souls left behind…

Investigation into why a soul in the spiritual world cannot perceive souls who remain on earth reveals that, because of the circumstances of our time, those souls who have remained on earth have been unable to take in or allow any thoughts to live in them that might otherwise become visible and perceptible to a soul who has passed through the gate of death.

There is a great difference among souls here on earth, depending on their makeup. Imagine a soul living here in the physical body who, between awaking and going to sleep, is concerned only with thoughts taken from the material world. Such a soul—filled entirely with thoughts, concepts, ideas, and sensations taken solely from the material world—cannot be perceived at all from the world between death and rebirth. No trace of it can be seen. But a soul filled with spiritual ideas such as those provided by spiritual science—a soul glowing and illuminated by spiritual ideas—is perceptible from the other world. Consequently, no matter how good they may be as human beings, the souls left behind who are immersed in materialism are not real to the world beyond and cannot be perceived. This makes a shocking, terrible impression upon the seer.

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 clear that we ourselves must direct our own efforts to contact those who have died before us; we cannot rely on mediums or seances or drugs like ayahuasca. Our first step is to direct our thoughts to spiritual content at some point every day. Though it is unlikely that we will experience direct, conscious contact early on, we may experience the comfort and good will that arises with our efforts to become closer to those we love who have died. All these efforts are felt by those to whom we direct them.

In the September post we will discuss some of the things it is possible to learn from those who have died and they from us. We will also look at specific practices we can undertake that work to open lines of communication.

Phenomenal

Let’s suppose the following is true:

Long ago, people had an innate capacity to experience the spiritual worlds and the beings, the gods, that inhabit them. These ancient peoples didn’t make up the worlds we read about in their stories and mythologies, they portrayed those worlds. They consciously communicated and interacted with the various spiritual beings until humanity lost its innate capacity to see in these realms. In other words, the gods didn’t go away, humanity had to lose the capacity to see them in order to develop other capacities important for our evolution as human beings. These spiritual realms which became inaccessible for humanity, could still be experienced by those few who were initiated.

Seen in this way, the ancient stories come alive for us. All over the world, the origin stories, the stories of the various nature spirits and the spirits of the elements, the stories of the gods and the planetary powers, and so on tell us what the ancient peoples observed. To us, they are stories of fantasy; to humanity of thousands of years ago, they are stories of the real world, the world they experienced, populated by gods and goddesses. To us, we have the four elements, to Empedocles back in the fifth century B.C.E. we had four divinities: earth/Hera, water/Persephone, air/Zeus, and fire/Hades.

Intellectually, many of us know that we are spiritual beings inside physical bodies. Extending that idea to the other earthly phenomena is more difficult. We must imagine a spiritual being hidden behind each and every thing we experience in the physical world, just as we imagine our own spirit hiding behind our corporeal bodies.

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

A justifiable opinion might be expressed by the following illustrations: I had supposed up till now that I knew what fire is but that was only an illusion. For what I have called fire up till now would be like calling the tracks of a carriage on a road the only reality and denying that a carriage in which a person was sitting must have been passing that way. I declare these tracks on the road to be the signs, the outer expression of the carriage which has passed there and in which a person was sitting. I have not seen the person who passed there, but he is the cause of these tracks, he is the reality. And a person who believed the marks left by the wheels to be something complete in themselves, something real and basic, would be taking the outer expression for the thing itself.

That which our senses see as flashing fire bears the same proportion to its reality, to the spiritual being which stands behind it, as do the tracks on the road to the person who was sitting in the carriage which passed there. In fire we have only an outer expression. Behind what our eyes see as fire and what we feel as heat is the real spiritual entity, which has only its outer expression in the outer fire. Behind what we inhale as air, behind what enters our eyes as light, and behind what our ears perceive as sound are active beings spiritual and divine, whose outer garments only we behold in fire, in water and in what surrounds us in the different realms of nature.

In the so-called secret teaching, in the teaching of the mysteries, the experience which is then gone through is called the ‘passage through the elementary worlds.’ Whereas previously one had lived in the belief that what we know as fire is a reality, one then becomes aware that living beings are hidden behind the fire. We become, so to say, acquainted with fire, more or less intimately as something quite different from what it appears to be in the world of the senses. We become acquainted with the fire-beings, with what is the soul of the fire. Just as our souls are hidden behind our bodies, so the soul and spirit of the fire are hidden by the fire which we perceive with our outer senses.

We penetrate into a spiritual domain when we experience the soul and spirit of fire in this way, and the experience by which we realize that the outer fire is no reality, that it is a mere illusion, a mere garment, and that we now move among the fire-gods just as we did formerly among people of the physical world, is called ‘living in the element of fire’, to use the terms of occult science… when one has acquired true self-knowledge, one can ascend to experiencing the beings in the so-called elements, in the elements of fire, of water, of air and of earth. These four classes of gods or spirits live a real existence in the elements, and a person who has reached the stage which has just been described is in touch with the divine spiritual beings of the elements.

Excerpt from: The East in the Light of the West, Lecture II: Comparison of the Wisdom of East and West, August 24, 1909.

Steiner encouraged us to read his work with an open mind until such time as we could discover the spiritual worlds ourselves… and then he gave us the methods by which to do so. In the beginning of the above lecture he says, “The method for the attainment of clairvoyant powers employed by the teachers of this research is drawn from the knowledge which has been tested for thousands of years in the way of exercises, meditation and concentration…” We won’t be able to prove that fire spirits are real to anyone other than ourselves, and we won’t see them for ourselves until we’ve done the work to become initiates. For the majority of us who cannot find even five minutes a day to meditate, we most likely will first encounter the spiritual world when we enter it after death.

Meanwhile, we might enjoy the ancient myths and stories of the many cultures around the world from a new perspective. Or go see a movie with Odin, Thor and Loki in it…

Speak Know Evil

“Virtue is the human capacity or skill guided by reason and insight, which in relation to the human being holds the mean between the too-much and the too-little.”
— Aristotle

Talking about evil is not a popular topic. Personifying evil with the names of Lucifer and Ahriman, as we did in last month’s blog, is even less popular. I get it. Some words we are more comfortable using are shadow, immoral, atrocity, depraved, corrupt, and so on. Evil is just four letters and when we use it, people generally know what we’re talking about. People do not, however, generally know why evil exists or why we succumb to it. Let’s explore that a bit from a psychological perspective.

Way back in 1971, psychologist and Stanford professor, Philip Zimbardo, conducted an infamous experiment, The Stanford Prison Experiment. Normal people, students, were divided into two groups; one group was designated as jailors and the other as prisoners. The circumstances after just a few days became so dire that the experiment had to be stopped before its completion. In his 2007 book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, Zimbardo talks about the atrocities committed by normal people, U. S. soldiers, at Abu Ghraib, a U.S. military prison in Iraq. In a TED talk on the psychology of evil, Zimbardo says, “So, the Lucifer Effect, although it focuses on the negatives – the negatives that people can become, not the negatives that people are – leads me to a psychological definition. Evil is the exercise of power. And that’s the key: it’s about power. To intentionally harm people psychologically, to hurt people physically, to destroy people mortally, or ideas, and to commit crimes against humanity. If you Google “evil”, a word that should surely have withered by now, you come up with 163 million hits in a third of a second” (2007).

Zimbardo wants us to understand evil and what he believes to be its causes so that we can work to prevent it from happening. A question: do unseen causes lie below those Zimbardo has discovered? In his quote above he says evil is the exercise of power. Every power has a source…

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

How in the course of evolution has evil become possible?

A satisfactory answer to this question can be obtained only by studying the elementary moral instruction that was given already in ancient times… The pupils of the Mysteries were shown that human nature can bring about destruction and harm in two directions and that human beings are in a position to develop free will only because of this possibility of erring in two directions. Furthermore, they were shown that life can take a favorable course only when these two lines of deviation are considered to be like the two sides of a balance: as one side goes up the other side goes down, and true balance is achieved only when the crossbeam is horizontal. In this way the pupils were shown that right conduct of a human being cannot at all be described by saying this is correct and that is incorrect. Right conduct is achieved only through the fact that human beings are placed at every moment in the position of being pulled either to the one side or to the other—and must then themselves establish the balance.

Consider the virtue of fortitude or courage. On the one hand, human nature may swing toward recklessness, that is, toward unrestrained activity in the world with full exertion of all one’s forces. That is on the one side; on the other side there is cowardice… and the pupils in the Mysteries were shown that if one swings toward recklessness, one loses oneself and becomes crushed by the wheels of life. If one errs in this direction, one is torn apart; on the other hand, if one errs toward the side of cowardice, one becomes hardened in oneself and thus torn away from other things and beings (and) becomes a self-enclosed being whose actions cannot be brought into harmony with the whole. This was demonstrated for the pupils with regard to all human actions.

These are the two possibilities: Either we become lost to the world—the world seizes and overpowers us—as is the case with recklessness; or the world becomes lost to us because we harden ourselves in our egoism, as is the case with cowardice. Accordingly, the pupils in the Mysteries were told that there is no unique and fixed goodness for which one can strive; on the contrary, goodness arises solely because the human being, like a pendulum, can always swing to one side or the other, and must find the possibility of balance, the central mean, through individual inner force.

You have here everything you need in order to comprehend free will and the significance of reason and wisdom in human conduct…

Excerpt from: The Spiritual Foundation of Morality. By: Rudolf Steiner. Lecture III, May 10, 1912

In a subsequent book, The Time Paradox, Zimbardo indicates that he is “interested especially in temporal biases in which learned cognitive categories are not ‘balanced’ according to situations, contexts and demands, but one or another are utilized excessively or underutilized.’”

Angels and Devils, Maurits C. Escher 1960

Much remains to be said about evil. We hinted above that evil’s purpose in the world is to make human beings free. We have to have a choice between good and evil in order to choose, and the struggle to choose the good over the evil has to be real in order to be realized. Surely the horrific events we can read about every day in the news deserve our deepest effort to understand. Electing to think about this at all is relevant to the future of humanity.

So, yeah, evil is not fun to speak about, but we need to speak about it to know it. Pretending evil doesn’t exist isn’t helpful to anyone, including ourselves. At the very least, we can learn to see ourselves and each other as searching for balance in all that we think, feel, and do, right?

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Phillip Zimbardo Biography:

https://www.verywellmind.com/philip-zimbardo-biography-2795529