Three Powers: Wonder, Compassion, Conscience

The purpose of Earth evolution is that there may be implanted into the evolutionary process as a whole, powers which could otherwise never have come into existence: Wonder, Compassion and Conscience.

What are we to make of the brutishness of our time? Mostly, nothing new is showing up. The stories of cruelty and intolerance are as old as our histories, no matter where we came from or where we are now. Those people who refuse to just let evil run riot and who respond actively without resorting to violence themselves represent the good in humanity. If we wonder what that looks like, the citizens of Minneapolis, Minnesota are showing us every day. Or the Buddhist monks whose Walk for Peace, 2300 miles from Fort Worth, Texas to American University in Washington DC was completed this week. Or the thousands of people all over the world who are actively and peacefully resisting attacks on rights both human and ecological.

The three qualities, Wonder, Compassion or love, and Conscience or moral obligation, are spiritual qualities that can exist only here on earth. They exist because we have a connection to our spiritual home, and the world we understand with reason and intellect alone, the world of our senses, doesn’t always tally with our soul’s experience. Thus, we feel wonder when we witness courage that overrides fear and compliance. We feel compassion for people suffering from injustice, and we may even attempt to feel some compassion for the perpetrators who are at a stage of development that allows them to behave as they do. We feel our conscience nudging us to action to prevent further injustice and guide the offenders to a healthy soul development.

We can come to understand that these three forces actually lift us out of ourselves and open us to each other and the world around us.

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

The wonder felt by philosophers is associated with the fact that certain things are not to be comprehended through what presents itself to the eyes of sense… Wonder arises in us when the form in which the things in the material world can be explained only by knowledge we once possessed in a supersensible world prior to our birth. Wonder points to the connection we have with the supersensible world, to something belonging to a sphere we can enter only when we transcend the world in which our physical bodies enclose us. This is one indication of the fact that here, in this physical world, there is a continual urge within us to reach out beyond ourselves…

Those of us who can only remain shut up in ourselves, who are not driven by wonder beyond the field of the “I”, who remain unable to reach beyond ourselves, who see the sun rise and set without a thought and with complete unconcern are uncivilized.

A second power which releases us from the ordinary world, leading us at once away from material perception into supersensible insight, is compassion. When we look at a being only from outside, impressions come from that person to our senses and intellect; with the awakening of compassion, we pass beyond the sphere of these impressions. We share in what is taking place in that person’s innermost nature and, transcending the sphere of our own “I”, we pass over into that person’s world. In other words: we are set free from ourselves; we break through the barriers of ordinary existence in the physical body and reach over into the other being. Here, already, is the supersensible—for neither the operations of the senses nor of the reasoning mind can carry us into the sphere of another’s soul.

If we are incapable of compassion, there is a moral defect, a moral lack in us. If at the moment when we should get free from ourselves and pass over into the other person, feeling not our own pain or joy but the pain or joy of that other—if at that moment our feelings fade and die away, then something is lacking in our moral life.

Conscience is a third power whereby we transcend what we are in the physical body. In ordinary life we will desire this or that; according to our impulses or needs we will pursue what is pleasing and thrust aside what is displeasing to us. But in many such actions we will be our own critic; the voice of our conscience sounds a note of correction. Final satisfaction or dissatisfaction with what we have done also depends upon how the voice of conscience has spoken. This in itself is a proof that “conscience” is a power whereby we are led out beyond the sphere of our impulses, our likes and dislikes.

Wonder and Amazement, Compassion or Fellowship, Conscience [or moral obligation]—these are the three powers by means of which we, even while in the physical body, transcend our own limitations. For through these powers, influences which cannot find entrance into the human soul by way of the intellect and the senses, ray into physical life. If a body of flesh did not separate us from the spiritual world and present the outer world to us as a sense-world, we would be incapable of wonder. Compassion could not unfold if we were not separated from each other. And conscience could not be experienced as a spiritual force sending its voice into our world of natural urges, passions and desires, if the material body did not wish to satisfy them.

And so, the human being must be incarnated in a physical body in order that he may be able to experience wonder, compassion and conscience. In our time, people concern themselves little with such secrets, although they are profoundly enlightening.

Excerpt from: Earthly and Cosmic Man, Lecture 6: The Mission of the Earth. Wonder, Compassion and Conscience. Rudolf Steiner. May 14, 1912. Berlin (Note: some edits were made by this writer.)

Steiner says elsewhere in this excerpted lecture that “We human beings on Earth, if we are to reach the stature of full and complete personhood, must be able to move out beyond our own earthly life, we must be able to live in another, not only in ourselves.”

Becoming a full human being is a goal towards which each of us must strive. It’s not the fact that we belong to a country, a government, a party, a tribe, or a family that makes us full human beings. Becoming a full human being requires that we think for ourselves and seek out others who are filled with wonder, compassion and conscience like the neighbors in Minneapolis, the Buddhist walkers, the people the world over who are trying to love instead of hate.

We each have a deep responsibility toward the earth and all that lives on it. If we strengthen our powers of wonder, compassion and conscience, we become fit as human beings—we evolve as we are meant to evolve. We owe this to ourselves and the world.

What Happened

“What has happened was necessary, but at the same time, it is a basis for learning, learning through observation, not useless criticism.”
– Rudolf Steiner

We live many lifetimes over thousands of years. Our time in the spiritual world between incarnations includes observing these lives, especially our most recent one, and preparing for our upcoming incarnation. We use the knowledge we have thus gained to form the next life we will enter through our heredity and our karma. Understanding that the causes for what happens in our current lifetime may have occurred hundreds of years ago helps us to accept that our past is unchangeable; it is a done deal; it is inevitable—a necessity. But from this moment right now and forward into our future we have opportunities for freedom.

Steiner says, “Where the deepest riddles of human existence are concerned the best way to avoid abstraction and to get close to reality is to give examples.” Below is one of three examples he gave in the excerpted lecture.

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

The two concepts of freedom and necessity are extremely difficult to grasp and even more difficult to reconcile. It is not for nothing that philosophy for the most part fails when it comes to the problem of freedom and necessity…

When we look at human activities, the first thing we see everywhere is the thread of necessity. For it would be biased to say that every human action is a product of freedom. Let me give you a hypothetical example.

Imagine someone growing up. Through the way he is growing up, it can be shown that all the circumstances have gone in the direction of making him a country postman who has to go out into the country every morning with the mail and deliver letters. He does the same round every day. I expect you will all agree that a certain necessity can be found in this whole process.

If we look at all that happened to this lad in his childhood and take into account everything that had its effect on his life, we will certainly see that all these things combined to make him a mailman. So that as soon as there was a vacant position, he was pushed into it of necessity, at which point freedom certainly ceased to exist, for of course he cannot alter the addresses of the letters he gets. There is now an external necessity that dictates the doors at which he has to call. So, we certainly see a great deal of necessity in what he has to do.

But now let us imagine a younger person who, not out of idleness but just because he is still so young, makes up his mind to go with the mailman every morning and accompany him on his round. He gets up in good time every morning, joins the postman and takes part in all the details of the round for a considerable while.

Now it is obvious that we cannot talk of necessity in the case of the second fellow in the same sense as we can of the first. For everything the first fellow does must happen, whereas nothing the second fellow does has to be done. He could have stayed at home any day, and exactly the same things would have happened from an objective standpoint. This is obvious, isn’t it? So, we could say that the first man does everything out of necessity and the second everything out of freedom. We can very well say this, and yet in one sense they are both doing the same thing.

We might even imagine a morning comes when the second fellow does not want to get up. He could quite well have stayed in bed, but he gets up all the same because he is now used to doing so. He does with a certain necessity what he is doing out of freedom. We see freedom and necessity virtually overlapping…

If we study the way our actual soul nature—which will pass through the gate of death—lives in us, it could be compared with someone accompanying the outer human being in the physical world… What we are in life really consists of two parts that come together from two different directions for our external physical nature comes through the line of heredity, bringing not only physical characteristics with it … but also social status…

Our individual being originating in the spiritual world comes from a different direction bringing with it the causes that may have been laid down in us centuries before and unites them on a spiritual level with the causes residing in the stream of heredity. Two beings come together, and we can regard this second being coming from the spiritual world and uniting with the physical being as a kind of companion to the first. Our soul being in a certain sense joins us in the external events in a similar way.

The other person accompanying the postman did it all voluntarily. This cannot be denied. We could certainly look for causes but compared with the necessity that binds the first postman, the causes for the second man’s actions lie in the realm of freedom; he did it all voluntarily. You will not deny that if the second person accompanied the first person long enough, he would doubtlessly have become a good mailman. He would have easily been able to do what the man he accompanied did. He would even have been able to do it better because he would avoid certain mistakes.

But if the first fellow had not made these mistakes, the second man would not have become aware of them. We cannot possibly imagine that it would be of any use if the second fellow were to think about the first one’s mistakes. If we think in a living way, we will consider this to be an utterly futile endeavor. By specifically not thinking about the mistakes but joining in the work in a living way and just observing the proceedings as a whole, he will acquire them through life and will as a matter of course not make these mistakes.

This is just how it is with our soul nature that accompanies us within. If this being can rise to the perception that what we have done is necessary, that we have accompanied it and will furthermore take our soul nature into the future in so far as it has learned something, then we are looking at things the right way. But it must have learned those things in a really living way.

Excerpt from: Necessity and Freedom, Lecture 3, Berlin. January 30, 1916.

We need to “strengthen the companion part of ourselves”, strengthen our souls so that we aren’t just obsessing over or rationalizing the mistakes we’ve made. Self-reflection, even remorse, are of course, still important. But once we can see all our successes and failures objectively, can see that we cannot change what we have already done, felt or thought, we are free to shape our will to move on, to move from who were just a moment ago to who we will become.

So Much More to Know

Let’s take a quick review of the various bodies that make up the human being before we advance to today’s topic. The physical body is obvious; it’s the one studied by modern science, made up of earthly materials that we experience with our senses. The etheric body carries our life forces of growth and healing and reproduction—our health and vitality. The astral body houses our feelings, passions and desires, our pleasure and pain. Our I, or Ego, is our eternal spiritual core. It’s the body of our self-consciousness that stays with us throughout all our many incarnations. The I is our true self that directs and transforms the rest of our bodies. (These descriptions are the barest hints of the many functions of each body.)

As we think of these bodies, we can imagine how the health of each one would affect the other. For example, if we are filled with despair, an emotion expressed through our astral body, our etheric body correspondingly loses vitality, which causes our physical body to become unhealthy. Science already recognizes that unloved or lonely people have a harder time healing that those surrounded by love. We can probably imagine lots of other ways that soul-sickness affects our bodies.

When we begin a path of spiritual development, the I begins in earnest to work on the other bodies, usually beginning with the astral body. We’ve begun this work when we try to be kind, we try to contain our anger, we try to reign in our baser instincts. As our I slowly gains mastery of our astral body, we free ourselves to evolve and develop additional capacities, spiritual capacities. These capacities are explained to us by initiates such as Rudolf Steiner. Some capacities we gain include staying conscious during sleep, conversing with friends and family who have already crossed the threshold into the spiritual world, coming to know other beings of the hierarchies such as our guardian angel.

Owning these capacities can arouse disbelief and even scorn from those who haven’t worked long and hard enough through meditation or contemplation and other exercises to acquire them.

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

Every time we wake in the morning, we find the same physical and etheric bodies, and we know that fundamentally speaking we can do very little by means of our own forces to transform these two bodies or to develop them to a higher stage… Nevertheless, inner forces must be active through the whole of life between birth and death, and these forces must be continually rekindled if life is to continue. We see at the moment of death what becomes of the physical body when the etheric body is no longer working in it. The physical and chemical forces inherent in the physical body as such assert themselves from the moment of death onwards and dissolve, disintegrate it. That this cannot happen during life is due to the etheric body, which is a faithful fighter against the disintegration of the physical body. At every moment our physical body would be ready to disintegrate if fresh forces from the etheric body were not continually supplied to it.

The etheric or life-body in turn receives what it needs in this respect from still deeper inner forces, from the astral body, which is the vehicle of happiness and grief, of joy and sorrow. Thus, the corresponding inner body is perpetually working at the outer body. The outwardly visible part of us is sustained all the time by the inner forces. How the astral body works on the etheric body and the etheric body on the physical—that is what we would see if we were able to descend consciously into the physical and etheric bodies on waking; but we are diverted from this perception by external objects and happenings.

However, by developing our souls to the stage enabling us to experience consciously the moment of entry into the etheric and physical bodies on waking, we can acquire a certain knowledge of what actually works creatively on our inner being during sleep.

We become conscious of the driving forces of our human nature when we are able to descend into our inner being. What must we do if this is to be achieved with conscious awareness? We must prepare ourselves in such a way that at the moment of waking, external impressions transmitted by the eyes, ears, and so forth, do not disturb us, do not immediately force themselves upon us. We must train ourselves to be able to pass out of the state of consciousness prevailing in sleep in such a way that we are able to ward off all external impressions. When we can do that, we pass the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold.

 What is it that we see if we pass through the portal leading into our own inner being? As genuine mystics we learn to know something of which hitherto we had no notion… Genuine knowledge of these bodies into which we descend on waking is only possible as the result of a patient and prolonged approach from every angle to the great truths of existence.

Excerpt from: Macrocosm and Microcosm, Lecture Four: Faculties of the Human Soul and Their Development by Rudolf Steiner. Vienna. March 24, 1910.

 As Dr. Steiner states in many places in his work, the transitions from sleeping to waking and from waking to sleeping are sensitive times when we can direct our attention inward instead of outward. Staying as open as possible without thinking about all that the day holds in store for us as we wake and recalling backwards from the last moment to the first of our day before going to sleep are ways that can lead us toward remembering our experiences in the spiritual world while we are asleep.

We have a hard time being patient these days, especially as we try to learn new things. Sometimes we end up with more questions than answers. Instead of being irritated, we could choose to live with a question—to ponder it. We may start by asking ourselves why we curious about all this spiritual stuff in the first place.

We will continue this discussion next year. Happy New Year to you all!

Sleep Well

Many of us track how well we sleep during the night. How many minutes of REM, how many minutes of deep sleep, light sleep, our heartrate, oxygen levels, etc. We then derive meaning from those numbers; we transmute a quantity into a quality. In this case, the higher our score for deep sleep or REM, the better we’ve slept. One might wonder how any of us knew we’d had a good night’s sleep before these tools were available. We could argue that having to tune into ourselves to know how well we’ve slept is a skill we probably don’t want to lose. Nevertheless, the best aspect of this tracking is the inescapable realization that sleep is essential to our overall health.

What these sleep numbers cannot tell us is an infinitely larger topic. Questions we could ponder: Why is the sleep state such an effective way to be healthy? What are we doing during this time when we are unconscious? What else, if anything, do we acquire from our time spent unconsciousness each night?

In previous posts, we have discussed what the soul and spirit (the astral body and ego) experience during sleep while our physical and etheric bodies stay behind. (See August through November 2019 posts.)

Today, Dr. Steiner points out an especially interesting outcome of sleep: its ability to transform the learning experiences of our waking lives into capacities that help us navigate our lives later on. Thus, the more we learn on a daily basis, the more abilities we will have at our disposal as we mature.

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

In the course of his life man develops from one stage to another… How does this development proceed in everyday life?

Sleeping and waking play an essential part. When we think of the daily experiences man has in his youth in connection with learning and picture how these experiences are transformed into faculties, we must turn our minds to the condition of sleep which alone makes this transformation possible.

Every night on going to sleep our souls take with them something from daily life; what we take with us—the fruit of our experiences—is transformed during sleep in such a way that it becomes our abilities and capacities. To take a concrete example: What efforts we were obliged to make day after day when we were young, in order to learn to write! But we are not in the least aware of those past experiences when we take up a pen today to give expression to our thoughts. All our earlier efforts to shape the letters have been transformed into the capacity to write. The power which has transformed all these daily experiences into the faculty of writing is actually present in the depths of the soul but can operate only when we ourselves are not consciously there.

From this we may conclude that in our souls there is something that is higher than all our conscious life. Forces higher than those available in our conscious life become active during sleep; experiences are transformed into faculties, and the soul becomes more and more mature. A deeper being is working within us at our further development; when we go to sleep, this being receives the day’s experiences and remolds them, so that in a later period of life they are at our disposal in the form of faculties.

But we bring out of sleep much more than we ourselves brought into it through our conscious experiences. During the day we use up forces by participating in what is going on around us. In the evening, we feel fatigue because these forces are exhausted, and during sleep they are replenished; many forces flow into us during the night other than those we have acquired as the result of our daily activity. Our life during sleep is therefore the source of innumerable forces we need for waking life.

Excerpt from: Macrocosm and Microcosm, Lecture Four: Faculties of the Human Soul and Their Development by Rudolf Steiner. Vienna. March 24, 1910.

To repeat a line in the above excerpt, Steiner says, “…in our souls there is something that is higher than all our conscious life.” This is something we should be infinitely curious about. We can see that the numbers alone don’t tell us much. We can see that even though sleep is something we all do, it is still a mystery to most of us. We shouldn’t be satisfied knowing only that the number denoting the hours we’ve slept is a reason to pat ourselves on the back. The better health sleep provides points to something much deeper and more profound. We should want to know more.

Each of us is the only one who can live our individual life. We alone give our life purpose and meaning. We alone are responsible for our own evolution as a human being. All the numbers by themselves will never, ever give us relevant information about the soul capacities we have obtained in sleep.

To begin with, we can cultivate a sense of gratitude that sleep is provided for us. When we try to imagine learning without developing any capacities or living without replenishing our resources, we can be humbled by the blessing of this daily gift.

And we can really infuse the words we say at day’s end. “Good night. Sleep well.”

Limitless

The tribulations we are experiencing in the world today feel overwhelming not only because of their complexity and divisiveness, but also because we feel unable to penetrate them sufficiently. Any issue we address has so many facets we cannot grasp the whole. If we attend to one aspect, another erodes. Why?

Could our reliance on reason alone as the means to address the issues of our day be insufficient?

Evidence of the slow evolution of the human being can be seen, until the last 500 years or so, almost entirely within the various religions and spiritual practices of all cultures. Dr. Steiner explains how we had to be separated from the knowledge found in the spiritual realms in order to develop our intellect independently. We have done that. Now we have to move on from that phase to the next which calls for a spiritual knowledge that is no longer handed down from above but pursued with our own intellects. This kind of thinking is appropriate for our time.

The resistance we have toward the acceptance of a spiritual world, let alone a comprehensive understanding of it, is no longer reasonable. The answers for humanity’s ills will be illuminated by a consciousness that contains both the natural laws and the spiritual realities of a world invisible to most of us.

We will not thrive if we continue to limit ourselves to what we can perceive with our senses alone. Surely, we can feel our trust in them is fast eroding. Our sense for truth is being attacked; what we see, hear, taste, touch, smell isn’t to be trusted. And the near constant noise vying for our attention prevents us from fully focusing with any depth on exactly where the truth may lie. We are swept away by opinions and slogans.

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

Eventually, people will treat information from the spiritual world as they treat the insights of, say, astronomy, biology, physics, and chemistry. That is, even if they are not astronomers, biologists, physicists, or chemists, they accept the scientists’ findings about the physical world on the basis of a natural feeling for truth, which we may call a silent language of the soul.

The harmony between intelligence and clairvoyance will become much more obvious, and then people will admit that clairvoyant research approaches the world of spiritual beings and processes with the same attitude that also motivates the natural sciences. In view of the considerable opposition to spiritual science, it will comfort us to know that our modern culture will eventually come to the point Giordano Bruno* did. Looking up to the blue vault of the sky, which people then considered to exist exactly as they perceived it, Bruno declared that they saw the blue dome of the sky only because that was as far as their vision reached. They themselves in a way imposed that limit; in reality space extends into infinity. The limits people saw so clearly, based on the illusion of their senses, were created by the limitation of their vision.

You see, now, and in the future, the spiritual researcher will have to stand up before the world and say that there is also a firmament with regard to time, the time between birth and death. We perceive this firmament of time through the illusion of the senses. In fact, we create it ourselves because our spiritual vision is limited, just as in earlier times people “created” the blue firmament of space. Space extends endlessly beyond the blue dome of the sky, and time also continues infinitely beyond the boundaries of birth and death. Our own infinite spiritual life is embedded in this infinite time together with the rest of spiritual life in the world…

The world extends beyond the realm of the senses, and behind the sensory world we find spirit. In spiritual science, the spirit reveals itself to clairvoyant perception, and it is only then that we can see the divine nature of the magnificent sensory world around us. The world is vast, and the spirit is the necessary counterbalance to the physical world.

A proper perspective on our future cultural development reveals that in trying to understand the world in its entirety, people will strive not for a one-sided exploration of the natural world, as many now adopt. Instead, people will seek to unite science, intellect, and clairvoyant research. Only in this union will people truly come to understand themselves and their own spirit. Only then will they realize solutions to the world’s future riddles, never to be solved completely, and feel satisfaction in that knowledge.

*Giordana Bruno: Born in 1548, burned at the stake in 1600. Steiner mentions him many times. He’s worth looking up – especially in reference to what Steiner has to say about him elsewhere. For example: “The whole mathematical conception of the world as it arose with Galileo and Giordano Bruno stems from the deepest stratum of consciousness. Four- and one-half centuries have elapsed since we have begun to acquire this world conception.” The Mission of the Archangel Michael: The Culture of the Mysteries and the Michael Impulse.

Excerpt: The Presence of the Dead on the Spiritual Path, Lecture Five: The Blessing of the Dead, by Rudolf Steiner. Paris, May 26, 1914.

Space extends endlessly and time extends infinitely in the spirit. Though natural science is beginning to explore endless space and infinite time, without the understanding of spiritual science the facts derived from these explorations are mere abstractions unable to enhance our knowledge of what it means to be human and what our place is among all the other spiritual beings.

Spiritual science as we study it in Rudolf Steiner’s work will tell us of ourselves and these beings, of the origins of the universe and of humankind. Contemplating these things leads us into the work we undertake to master ourselves enough to encounter the spiritual world consciously.

We do not have to be bound by our current limitations. We can break through them by devoting ourselves to mastering ourselves. We are so much more than we think we are. We are limitless.

Both Sides of the Story

“Imagine that half the world is hidden from you. Half of the person sitting across from you has never been appreciated, half of the garden has never been seen or smelled, half of your own life has never been truly witnessed and appraised.” — Arthur Zajonc

For seven years we have met here to consider some of the realities disclosed by Rudolf Steiner about the unseen spiritual world surrounding us. The first post, Trivial Pursuit, appeared on September 1, 2018, and in it we take a look at the way we spend our time and how our ability to focus is being challenged by our devices. Now, 7 years later, most of us are addicted one way or another to these devices; the resulting disruption of our thinking is catastrophic.

Since that first post, we have talked about karma and reincarnation, sleep and death, etheric and astral bodies, angels and other hierarchies of the heavens, and so on. For many of us, these are still just words with some concepts added. The weight they carry for our lives, however, is incalculable.

Rudolf Steiner spoke many times about why he didn’t make reading his work easier. One purpose was to force us to increase the intensity of our focus and our endurance in the pursuit of higher knowledge. Not to exclude people, but to enhance our capacities to concentrate—for the sake of our ability to think… for the sake of thinking itself. The gift of thinking is bestowed from the spiritual realm, but it is our responsibility to utilize it. If we lose our thinking, we lose ourselves, we lose the possibility of knowing ourselves.

Here's the thing:

The importance of knowing ourselves cannot be overstated. Knowing our genealogy, our inherited traits, our skeletons and organs, doesn’t tell us about who we are, it tells us only what we are in our material bodies. And everything we know—everything—is learned by our capacity to think, to apply it to our perceptions and the words we use to describe them.

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

A profound breach now runs through the whole of civilization, a breach which brings much chaos to the world and which people who are fully aware experience with a sense of tragedy. One expression of this breach is the fact that human beings, when considering human dignity and their worth as human beings, can no longer find any connection with that world which gives the human soul devout feelings both profound and uplifting—namely the world of moral values.

People look instead to the world of nature, to which, of course, they also belong. During the course of recent centuries, the world of nature has come to appear before the human soul in such a way that it has absorbed the whole of reality, has absorbed every aspect of actual existence. The world of nature with its laws is indifferent to moral values and runs its course in accordance with external necessity. In their everyday life, human beings, too, are tied up in this necessity.

If human beings feel themselves enclosed within such bounds, it is impossible for them to discover what it is that makes them human.

We have to see the content of this moral world as something which ought to be, something which is the ideal. Yet no knowledge which is current today is capable of showing us how moral ideals can flow into the laws of nature (necessity) and how necessity can be made to serve moral values.

We have to admit that today’s world is divided into two parts which, for modern consciousness, are incompatible: the moral world and the material world. People see birth and death as the boundaries which encompass the only existence recognized by present-day knowledge. On the other hand, they have to look up to a world which lies above birth and death, a world which is eternally meaningful, unlike the endlessly changing material world. And they have to think of their soul life as being linked with the eternal meaning of that world of moral values…

But now initiation science (aka spiritual science) wants to enter once again into human civilization and show us that behind the world perceived by our senses there stands a spiritual world, a mighty world, powerful and real, a world of moral values to which we may turn. It is the task of initiation science to take away from natural existence the absolute reality it assumes for itself and to give reality back once more to the world of moral values.

It can only do so by using means of expression different from those given by today’s language, today’s world of ideas and concepts. The language of initiation science still seems strange, even illusory, to people today because they have no inkling that real forces stand behind the expressions used, that language cannot give full and adequate expression to what is seen and perceived.

What, after all, do the words ‘human being’ signify, when only the speech sounds are considered, compared with the abundant richness of spirit, soul and body of an actual human being standing before us! In just such a way in initiation science a spiritual world—behind the world of the senses—living in the world of moral values, storms and flows, working in manifold ways. This initiation science has to select all manner of ways of expressing what, despite everything, will be far richer in its manifestation than any possible means of expression.

Excerpt: Old and New Methods of Initiation, Lecture One, January 1, 1922, by Rudolf Steiner. Dornach.

Dr. Steiner wants us to discover for ourselves the world he has tried to illumine with words. He has given us exercises that help us prepare ourselves to consciously enter the spiritual world—the moral world—we inhabit unconsciously each time we sleep. Our world desperately needs to know this stuff. Clearly.

Reading a biography of Rudolf Steiner shows us the extraordinary compass of his influence and his work. Reading Steiner’s work moves us forward on our journey towards self-knowledge.

Meanwhile, we will continue to explore the question: Who Are You?

For What We're Worth

Innumerable tragedies occurring in the world right now make us feel powerless to save anyone—even ourselves. We wonder how so many people are forced to suffer horribly at the hands of others. Every issue, filled with contradictory information, makes workable solutions seem impossible. Even those in positions of power seem unable or unwilling to think of solutions, yet we keep waiting for them to do so.

Are the people in power throughout the world the brightest and best, the most compassionate and humane people? If so, maybe they will save the world. If not, can we find a way to put different people into power? If so, maybe they will save the world.

Maybe not.

What if holding power is not the precise tool of a true revolution? What if each one of us has the right tool, but we don’t even know we have it? We need to find this tool and how to wield it before thinking itself becomes obsolete. We are facing a new world, and this world needs people who understand that they, and everyone else, is worth saving.

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

People ask: What is to be the source of a new morality?” And then they answer: “Having power is an indispensable means for achieving something good in the world; therefore, you should strive to gain the power necessary (if you do not already possess it) for doing good.” People would like to have something good to do in the world, and they beautifully advise one another to seek the power to do that good. A second justification for this new ethics is as follows: With the power that you already possess, you can do some good. Therefore, you should always use the power you have for the achievement of good.

But first you must have some good to do; first you must be able to recognize what is good! The advice that people give is the opposite of what spiritual science must spread throughout the new human civilization. For spiritual science has nothing to do with trying to found something on the basis of having power. You can only found something on the basis of power when you are working with a group of people collectively. When one human being stands before another, it is impossible to found anything on the basis of power; it is only possible to found something on the basis of the things that can develop in the human being, so that the other person has some worth.

We all have a worth to discover and to develop within ourselves that will allow us to accomplish something for the sake of humanity; and each of us must simultaneously develop within ourselves a receptivity that allows us to recognize this worth in others.

This is the only possible means of forming a foundation for the morality of the future: to develop our own individual worth, and to become able to recognize that worth in others. To put this another way: all morality will have to be built on real trust!

… Now, in the wake of recent developments in human evolution, it is indeed necessary that as many people as possible find the energy to recognize that in fact a new spiritual revelation is attempting to enter the flow of human evolution and to see how this new revelation must be understood by humankind. For as long as we allow our spiritual lives to be pawns to exterior powers in the world (be they the state or some other external power), our spiritual lives will never be afforded the opportunity to take up the impulse of this spiritual revelation.

We must come to understand that in every human being there is a seed that does not come from our education and upbringing. We must hold the belief that in every human being alive today is something that can be awakened only by spiritual forces and by maintaining the conviction that these spiritual forces exist.

Excerpt from: What is Necessary in These Urgent Times, Lecture 3: Knowledge of the Human Being through Knowledge of the World by Rudolf Steiner. Dornach, January 11, 1920.

Sitting around fretting about whatever our sources have told us is happening does nothing. The other thing that does nothing is blaming others. Neglecting to work on ourselves may seem easier, but it isn’t an option anymore because we can no longer discern what is true or good based on our senses alone. Right? In print, in videos, in photos – what we can see, hear, and feel through these mediums – all this is now easily altered or AI-produced. We can’t trust it; it isn’t reality.

What then is reality? Knowing ourselves. Being able to trust ourselves, being able to trust the person we meet, is critical to living in reality, a reality that accepts the spiritual as fully as it does the material.

We have to honor our capacity to think by actually thinking for ourselves. We have to take ourselves in hand and do the hard work of freeing ourselves from the mindset that the material world is the only reality.

We must work to develop ourselves so that we can tell the truth and do the good and trust others will do the same. If we are successful in breaking through the barrier lying between the material world and the spiritual world, we will find worthy solutions because we will recognize the truth and goodness in them. If we want to do good things, we need to know what they are. Think about it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/11/opinion/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-deepfake-ai.html

Before We Know It

Back in December, the post entitled “Our Essential Being” spoke about the holiness, the purity, we feel around babies. With wonder, we contemplate how we once were thus. Looking back at our lives since then, we can trace our memories to around the age of 3, but we usually can’t recall our lives before then. Why not? In today’s excerpt, Steiner talks about what we accomplish during this time of grace.

We begin to develop the power to think, to feel, and to will.

These vital capacities, which are forces given to human beings by the spiritual hierarchies, begin to develop while we lack full consciousness of ourselves during our waking hours. It is our higher selves, our souls, who perform these wise deeds. We thereby shape ourselves to become the expression of who we are, to meet the destiny we must meet.

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

As we know, we bring the fruits of earlier lives on earth with us into the physical world at birth. For example, at birth our physical brain is still an incomplete and unfinished instrument. The soul must then work on it, adding the finer, detailed structures that make it the medium of all the soul’s faculties. In fact, before the soul is fully conscious, it works on the brain to transform it into an instrument to express all the capacities, aptitudes, characteristics, and so on, that it has as a consequence of earlier lives. This work on our own body is guided from a perspective that is wiser than anything we can achieve later with our full consciousness. Moreover, during this time when the brain is being transformed, we must also acquire the three most important capacities for life on earth.

The first capacity we must learn is to orient our body in space… Animals are destined from the beginning to achieve their equilibrium in a certain way: one is destined to be a climber, another a swimmer, and so on… human beings are not given an innate way to achieve equilibrium in space but must develop it out of their total being… We achieve our vertical position, our position of equilibrium in space, by ourselves. In other words, we establish our own relationship to gravity.

The second capacity we learn out of ourselves from our essential being—which remains the same through successive incarnations—is language. This allows us to relate to our fellow human beings and makes us bearers of the spiritual life that permeates the physical world primarily by means of human beings. It has often been emphasized that someone stranded on a desert island who had had no contact with other human beings before learning to speak would never learn to do so… We must sow the seed for the development of the larynx in the time before our earliest memory—before we attain full I-consciousness—so that the larynx can then become an organ of speech.

There is still a third, even less well known, capacity that we learn on our own through what we bear within us through successive incarnations. I am referring here to our ability to live within the world of thoughts and ideas, the world of thought itself. Our brain is formed and worked on because it is the tool of thinking. At the beginning of life, the brain is still malleable because we must shape it ourselves to make it an instrument for the thinking appropriate to our essential being.

Why must all these things be accomplished from soul depths that lie outside our consciousness? Because in the first years of our lives, our souls, as well as our whole being, are much more closely connected with the spiritual worlds of the higher hierarchies than is the case later.

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

In our first three years we learn to walk, to talk, and to think. Miraculous!

The grown-ups wait with growing excitement for a child to take its first step, to say its first word, to think something by itself. How much richer are these moments when we understand that these milestones are the beginning of the child’s unique life: walking on its own path, speaking with its own voice, thinking of its own ideas… living its own life.

As Steiner says later in this same lecture: “In the early years of life, we learn out of the spirit, first to walk—that is, we learn under the guidance of the spirit to find our way in earthly life. Then we learn to speak—to formulate the truth—out of the spirit. In other words, we develop the essence of truth out of speech sounds. Finally, we also develop the organ for our life as earthly I-beings.”

And then our work becomes conscious and continues for the rest of our lives. We continually develop these capacities we formed in the first three years so that, to the best of our abilities, we are indeed walking our own paths, speaking our own truths, and thinking our own thoughts.

Me Me Me

Without question, our current materialistic culture reinforces our egoism. For some of us, it makes no sense to do things for others without getting something back. Even if we forgo accolades or quid pro quo, we give ourselves a little pat on the back for doing good. It is no surprise that altruism is a distant goal for most of us because egoism is the reverse of altruism. Imagine the soul development necessary to act in freedom for the common good.

Egoism is supported by the absence of two major soul qualities, reverence and humility, qualities that are often ridiculed and ignored these days. Instead, we take great pride in our personal accomplishments with no awareness of the spiritual beings helping us and with no credit given to all the people who have helped us become who we are.

Egoism should be the least of our problems, but it isn’t. In fact, nothing else even comes close.

In the excerpt below, Dr. Steiner shows that we can be egoistic even when we acquire some spiritual knowledge and try to better ourselves. How?

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

A strong altruistic impulse can only come from a spiritual worldview. Only when we know ourselves to be a part of the world of spirit do we cease to be so terribly interesting to ourselves as to make ourselves the very center of the whole universe. At that point, egoistic impulses cease and altruistic ones begin. Our era has little inclination to develop this great interest for the world of spirit, but this is what must increase if we are really to feel ourselves part of the spiritual world.

And then the impulses of reincarnation and karma have, as it were, come raining into our civilization out of the blue. Yet how have they been taken up? Even those who embraced them have done so in a very egoistic fashion. It has been said, for example, that a person earns his destiny in each life.

Even otherwise intelligent people can be heard to say that ideas of reincarnation and karma are an answer to the question of why human suffering exists, and the social question is therefore irrelevant. Otherwise intelligent people have said that poverty is the deserved outcome of a former incarnation, that if someone is poor, they must simply expiate something they brought about in their past life. So even ideas of reincarnation and karma are not capable of working into our civilization as an impulse for altruistic feeling.

What matters is how we introduce ideas of reincarnation and karma into our era. If they only become an impetus for egoism, they do not raise our culture to a higher level but push it still further downwards. Reincarnation and karma actually become unethical or anti-ethical ideas if many people think they must become good so that their next incarnation is a good one. This drive to become good in order to have as pleasant an experience as possible in our next life is a kind of double egoism, a step beyond even straightforward egoism.

And this is precisely what ideas of reincarnation and karma have come to mean for many. Our society today has so little real altruism… that it cannot even comprehend ideas such as reincarnation and karma in a way that would make them an impulse for altruistic and not egoistic actions and feelings.

Excerpt from: Understanding Society through Spiritual-Scientific Knowledge, Lecture 4. Dornach, October 10, 1919.

Yes, we are at the center of our own karma, but our work in the world is to prepare ourselves so that we have the insight and the moral qualities to lift other people from their suffering. Spiritual growth is so that we acquire the capacities necessary to build a healthy society. The ideas that are truly capable of benefiting humankind are born in the spiritual world.

If we recognize no thoughts coming from that realm, if we aren’t working very, very hard on ourselves, we will remain ill-equipped to answer life’s challenges. We won’t know enough to recognize the truth when we hear it. We won’t be in the right place to see what needs to be done, and we will continue to create band-aids rather than cures. We will still be acting out of egoism instead of working with all the spiritual powers available to us. That’s why we are on this arduous path toward enlightenment.

The way to find lasting solutions to the problems stated above are spiritual ones, altruistic ones. Sure, we have a long way to go, but we can’t wait for perfection to offer our services to the good. We can begin by examining our motives, objectively, precisely, to find the place within ourselves to make them clean.

Steiner states that the evolution of all beings is toward giving more than they receive. All beings. Altruism is the goal of humanity, not egoism. Gratitude and humility are the appropriate tools for this work. Even saying this is controversial in today’s world. So, no, it won’t be easy. But what a great goal, right?

A New Dawn

A good night’s sleep is wonderful… a treasured event—we fall asleep easily and wake up feeling refreshed. We may want to think about why. What did we do that day that prepared us to fall asleep without a struggle? After all, many of us do struggle to get to sleep or we can wake up feeling exhausted. When that happens, we could examine the time we’ve been awake since we last slept and try to find a connection. What did we do? What did we eat or drink? What were we thinking about all day? Is the quality of our sleep life due to cause and effect? Only partially.

As we read the excerpt below, we will find a deeper meaning to our sleep life. We will realize that the review of our waking time that naturally occurs when we sleep is a moral one. That’s pretty sobering, especially since most of us are unaware of this aspect of sleeping. “Make good choices” becomes more than a joke. When we realize this, we may wish to renew our meditative practice of going backwards through our day before going to sleep to get a conscious and objective read on ourselves before moving into the unconsciousness of sleep.

Steiner also explains that our sleep life is the context of our life after death. For a period of time commensurate with our time spent asleep in our lifetime, we consciously experience our relationships from a moral perspective as we move backward from our last moment of life until we reach our moment of birth or conception.

Some terms that we may need to review: The life body or etheric body that Steiner refers to below is with us throughout our lives on earth. When we sleep this body stays with us while our astral body and “I” or ego rise to the spiritual world. When we die, the etheric body leaves with the astral body and “I”. Though we have discussed these terms previously, it is easy to take a moment to look up these terms if you are not familiar with them. An awareness of these four bodies is essential to an understanding of sleep and death and the whole human being for that matter.

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

If we consider human existence on Earth, the most significant element in life must appear to be our capacity to think or make mental images—the capacity to think for ourselves about the world, our own actions and so forth. Any other view would be a self-deception… Now, when we pass through the gates of death, we lay down our physical and life bodies. And so, in the first days after death (since it takes about three days to let go of the life body), we feel that our thought life is being sucked up by the universe… In these few days, the most valuable aspect of the earthly life that is past departs from the person who has died.

Everything we thought about the things of the world, about our whole earthly environment, what filled our normal consciousness—all this melts away from us in just a few days… and out of this darkening, dimming awareness there emerges what we lived through every time we slept, but which formerly remained outside awareness… This experience stays unconscious [during life], but it is not less lively than what becomes conscious. We do go through it. And once we have done so, it is something that belongs to our inner content. Each morning, we awaken changed; the night has changed us…

Now, the peculiar characteristic of our sleeping experiences is this: that in sleep the world takes place in reverse. Whether our sleep is long or short, once we fall asleep it is all the same, since other states of consciousness also have completely different time-senses. So, the characteristic I am talking about holds true whether you sleep all night or only for a few minutes. From the time we go to sleep until the time we wake up again, we live backwards through everything we just experienced between our last waking and the current moment of falling asleep. But we live through it in a different form than we did at first…

When we are awake, we live through the day from start to finish, every event and every circumstance in terms of physical, intellectual nuances. While asleep, however, we experience it all backwards and in terms of its moral nuances. Moral impulses appear; we pass through everything evaluating how it has made us more or less valuable as moral human beings. We indulge in no illusions, nor can we, but we evaluate everything we did the previous day in terms of our fundamental humanity… Every night as we sleep, we experience this moral ordering of the world. There, we evaluate things morally, that is, in connection with our own human value. We do this every time we sleep.

Excerpt from: Preparing for a New Birth by Rudolf Steiner. June 21, 1923, Stuttgart

How difficult it is these days to consider our own value to humanity. Yet, when we read this excerpt, we can expand our view to see that our own moral life matters not just to ourselves but to all of humanity – actually, to all beings of the universe. This should be how we measure success in life. Our efforts to act morally are to be made not egoistically to have an easier afterlife, but as an effort to raise all humanity by our “good choices”. We matter.

Steiner says that each morning we awaken changed. Let’s become conscious of this. Let’s become active in this process.

This is what we owe each other. This is what changes the world. The whole lecture excerpted above is worth reading; look it up. Meditating is worth doing. Changing the world happens with each human individual and no where else.

Stoking the Fire

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

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

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

What now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unintended Consequences

Once we lived with the gods of our mythology; the gods spoke to us, guided us, rewarded and punished us. Most of us believe we’ve outgrown such nonsense; however, the stories of these times were based on real experiences, experiences we had as part of our nature, part of our lives. Those capacities allowing us to know the spiritual world have since faded away from our consciousness as our scientific reasoning developed into our new ideas and eclipsed those of yore.

Rudolf Steiner tells us that in our time, we have spiritual powers that are waiting to be called into consciousness; powers that we may sense and yearn for but that lie hidden deep in our souls. No longer freely given, we need to work on ourselves to access those spiritual powers.

We gain strength for life when we begin to understand the concepts of spiritual science. The ideas discussed in the blog over these past years have given us concepts to ponder about waking and sleeping, birth and death, karma and reincarnation, our four bodies: physical, etheric, astral and ego “I”. We can bring the unsettling chaos of life into perspective when we begin to understand these concepts. The advantages to obtaining this knowledge are obvious to all who have begun on a path leading towards it. We might wonder if any disadvantages exist for ignoring this knowledge during our lives

What if what we don’t know can hurt us?

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

The human being of the present time needs a different relationship to the world than that which the human soul could have in past times in order to find inner satisfaction, calm in the stream of existence. Spiritual science shows us that in the human souls of the present time a certain sum, a kind of fund, of spiritual powers rests hidden within us. These spiritual powers want to emerge from this human soul so that they do not remain hidden. These powers wish to step forth into human consciousness so that people not only feel them as an inner urge, as an inner compulsion, but can place them in their world of ideas, in their world of concepts.

In these deep foundations of the human soul rests a whole sum of forces, which, when brought up into human consciousness, show for the first time what moves us inwardly, what inspires us inwardly. Truly, we are richer and more full of content than we often imagine.

There is now a law, an important essential law, which will gradually be recognized as governing all of existence: that which can be beneficial in one state can have a destructive effect when it asserts itself in another state, as it were in another place.

In what remains hidden from our material consciousness, invisible supersensible forces rest. They rest in what we release into the spiritual world when we sleep, and bring insecurity to us in our behavior, in a lack of direction in life. When these forces are brought up into consciousness, when they are transformed into conscious knowledge, concepts and ideas, then they become beneficial, then they become healing, then they give the person direction and purpose, peace and security in life. It is a peculiar law, and it must be admitted, a difficult law to understand.

But it is true nevertheless: spiritual science gives the spiritual knower deep satisfaction when it enters consciousness, it is an unsettling element, an unsettling force, if it rests below only, unconsciously, in the dark regions of the soul. If it rests unconsciously in these regions, which spiritual science wants to raise to clear knowledge, then it remains without influence on the human ego (“I”); then it surges and billows in the subconscious, then it cannot have any influence on what the person experiences in terms of happiness and pain, of successes and failures. Then we can bring only that part of our nature into successes and failures, into happiness and pain, which goes along with happiness and pain in such a way that the soul loses itself in happiness or sinks in pain, becomes numbed by its successes, filled with pain by its failures. Then the soul goes everywhere with us, then it rocks and floats in the stream of life.

But when the soul’s powers of knowledge about the spiritual world which lie dormant down there in the dark regions are brought up into the ego so that this ego can take the spiritual knowledge with it when life smiles on us in happiness or challenges us in suffering and pain, then the “I” no long rocks and swims in happiness and unhappiness in the stream of life; then it carries a strengthened inner being into happiness and unhappiness, into pain and suffering, and happiness and pain are then experienced differently.

Excerpt from: From a Fateful Time, Lecture 6: Intuitive Insight in the Happy and Serious Hours of Life. By Rudolf Steiner. Berlin. January 15, 1915.

Steiner goes on to explain that we experience happiness and pain differently once we have learned some of the ideas of spiritual science. In a nutshell, we slowly gain control over these emotions. We still experience happiness in all its fullness and joy, but we don’t lose ourselves in it. The same goes for pain. We still suffer just as fully as before, but we don’t lose ourselves in it. We are no longer avidly pursuing more and more happiness, nor are we scared to explore or try to avoid the depths of pain.

Some unintended consequences of staying unaware of our spiritual souls were stated clearly in the excerpt above: insecurity in our behavior, lack of direction in life, losing ourselves in our emotions. The forces trapped in our unconsciousness create disturbances in our waking lives. When spirit flows into our consciousness, we become masters of our own lives. Our destiny shines before us, and the hindrances begin to fall to the wayside. For our own good, we should begin the work.

We Are The Ones

On the temple at Delphi, the Greek mystery student would read: “Know Thyself.” That is still the most basic requirement of spiritual science. Today, however, this requirement is especially daunting because we are so distracted by the culture of our time. Many are content with believing that they are the sum of their upbringing, their place in society, their interests and opinions. Without thinking about why. Why they were brought up in a specific society or why certain things interest them or why they hold this or that opinion. Why they belong to this race or this gender or this religion or this nation or this family.

Spiritual science provides us with a way to find ourselves as we have discussed many times in these posts, including the six basic exercises we shared together from April through September last year. One way to see ourselves now in these divisive times is poetically given to us, and though some attribute it to Hopi elders, it is anonymous. It goes like this:

“You have been telling people that this is the Eleventh Hour, now you must go back and tell the people that this is the Hour. And there are things to be considered…

Where are you living?
What are you doing?
What are your relationships?
Are you in right relation?
Where is your water?

Know your garden.
It is time to speak your truth.
Create your community.
Be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for your leader.

Then he clasped his hands together, smiled, and said, “This could be a good time! There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly. Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water.

And I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate. At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally, least of all ourselves. For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey come to a halt.

The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves! Banish the word ’struggle’ from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Yes, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. And we are the ones who went before. And we will come again to live in the future we are now preparing. This points to the depth of the demand, “Know Thyself”. This means we need to begin to understand ourselves by accepting the karma we have thus far created for ourselves and how it has extended to all humanity and all the earth. This points to each one of us, not to everyone else.

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

If people today want to feel what they really are, the first thing they think of—whatever other nice theories they might have—is what is within their body, within their skin, really within their skin. It is difficult to get a clear idea of this, in particular, because it is true, and no one believes it in our time because people like to develop all kinds of idealism to hide the fact that basically they only believe in themselves in so far as they are enclosed in their own skin…

What people will experience as their karma in the future will connect them consciously with other people. People will have to experience their karma consciously as something real.

As you can easily imagine, experiencing their karma consciously is still very difficult for people today. As I once said, let us assume that someone gives us a slap in the face. Outwardly, of course, in so far as we are enclosed in our body and are beings between birth and death, we have to defend ourselves against that. But a higher perspective has to be applied beyond that: who was it that gave you the slap in the face? Who put the person who gave you the slap in the place where he could do that? He would not be standing there if you had not put him there through the way you are connected with him through karma.

Just think how incredibly difficult it is for people today to think that. Christians believe that they are people of the present, but truly very few of them follow the one who counsels them: if someone strikes you on the left cheek, turn the other one also (Matthew 5:39)—in thought; outwardly it is not possible. People do not yet differentiate in this way between what is inward and outward. It becomes incredibly difficult for them to live in karma in some way.

And yet, as we enter life from the embryonic period through birth, through early childhood, then that which helps to form our body is our karma. Between our last death and our present birth, we have gone through, and have even taken an interest in going through, how we should experience karma and what kind of body we should have so that we can live out our karma.

In this way, we work on kneading, in a manner of speaking, our body through the soul forces. We even act in a localizing way in that we place ourselves at the location in the world where we can live out our karma. We thus act on our personal destiny with the consciousness which we have between death and a new birth.

Excerpt from: Unifying Humanity Spiritually, Lecture 10 by Rudolf Steiner. Dornach. January 7, 1916.

What does turning the other cheek mean? It means that we have helped form that which befalls us in this lifetime. And we are helping to form what will be when we return. So, yes, we cannot allow ourselves to lie down and be trampled by the outside world, but we need to acknowledge our inner responsibility for why whatever is happening is happening. Knowing ourselves is the only path to freedom. And knowing that we chose this time to live is a key to knowing ourselves. It is a good meditation to think about the truth of that and to respond purposefully to what the times are asking of us.

What does it mean to let go of the shore? To push off into the middle of the river? We have a destination as ourselves and as the human race. When the river is flowing great and swift, we have to be braver – something we’ve also been talking about. Let’s get to it!

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 unspeakably 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.