The way we look at babies changes drastically when we learn to accept reincarnation and karma. The baby that is born to us is not a blank slate, nor is it simply ours – a product of our genetic heritage. Every baby is a person who has a history stretching back to the beginning of humanity at the dawn of time. It’s one thing to touch on this idea and another thing altogether to truly grasp what it means. Who is this person looking out at us from their newborn eyes? Where has this person been since they were last on earth?
Rudolf Steiner says that our souls, our spirits, continue to live amongst the Beings of the Hierarchies (angels, archangels, etc.) between earth lives; we do not die when our physical bodies die. Our bodies are not the whole of us and neither are the stars and planets revealed by our telescopes the whole of them. The cosmos is inhabited by spiritual beings with influences far more important than sunspots or tides or minerals that exist in the “great mechanical processes in the Universe” we’ve discovered. Astronomy does not explain the spiritual forces with which we are connected after we die. When we look at pictures of the earth taken from far away in space, we do not see the hopes and dreams of human beings.
All consciousness extends beyond the physical world.
We need to consider that when we come back through a new birth, we have been shaped and influenced by the Beings of the Cosmos around us. Humanity used to be aware of this; we took for granted that we descended from the heavenly worlds and that we return there after death because we could still experience it. This direct knowledge was lost to us so that we could develop intelligence through our physical senses. Now we must regain our knowledge of the spirit using this earthly intelligence. Neglecting to do this is one of the factors causing the continued decline of earthly culture. We simply cannot know ourselves without knowing the whole of ourselves. We cannot fix things we don’t understand.
Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:
There is a tendency to look back with a certain condescension to “primitive” periods of culture, for instance to the culture of ancient Egypt, when people did not speak of the great mechanical processes in the Universe but of divine Beings outside, in space and beyond space – Beings to whom a person was known to be related just as that person is related to the beings of the three kingdoms of Nature on Earth.
The ancient Egyptians traced the origin of the spirit and soul of the human being to the higher Hierarchies, to supersensible worlds, just as they traced the origin of their material, bodily nature to the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. In our age, people speak of what is beyond the Earth out of a kind of weak and ever-weakening faith that much prefers to avoid scientific scrutiny. Science speaks only of a great system of world-machinery which can be expressed in terms of mathematics… Earthly existence has finally come to be regarded as confined with the walls of a little molehill in the universe.
Yet there is a profound truth, namely this: When we lose the heavens, we lose ourselves. By far the most important elements of our humanity belong to the universe beyond the Earth and if we lose sight of this universe, we lose sight of our own true being. We wander over the Earth without knowing what kind of being we really are. We know, but even then only from tradition, that the word “human” applies to us, that this name was once given to us as a being who stands upright in contrast to the quadruped animals. But our scientific view of the world and technical culture no longer help us to discover the true content of our name, for that must be sought in the universe beyond the Earth, and this universe is considered to be nothing but a great system of machinery. Humanity has lost itself; it has no longer any insight into its true nature.
A feeling of sadness cannot but overtake us when we realize that the heights of culture to which we have risen since the middle of the fifteenth century have led us to wrench ourselves from our true nature and to live on the Earth divested of soul and spirit…
In the lecture to educationists yesterday, I said that we are prone to speak of only one aspect – and even that merely from tradition – of the eternal being of the human being. We speak of eternity beyond death but not of the eternity stretching beyond birth, nor of how the human being has descended from spiritual worlds into material, physical existence on the Earth… We must find ourselves again and be true to the laws of our innermost being. Interest must be awakened in the whole nature of the human being instead of being confined to its outer, physical sheaths. But this end cannot be achieved until humanity is regarded as belonging not only to the Earth – which is conceived as a little molehill – but to the whole Cosmos, until it is realized that between death and a new birth, we pass through the world of stars to which here on Earth we can only gaze upwards from below. And the living essence, the soul and the spirit of the world of stars must be known once again.
Excerpt from: Cosmic Forces in Man, Lecture 1 by Rudolf Steiner, Nov. 24, 1921. Oslo, Norway.
When we are consciously able to enlarge the human experience to include the cosmos, we see that each of us is much more important than a materialistic point of view permits us to see. Not only do we each carry within us our multitude of our past and future lives, we carry also the time in between our earthly lives where we live in a place much larger than the molehill in which we imagine ourselves, we live among the stars.
That’s where our children have been before they come to us. This is why the newborn child feels holy to us… like a gift from heaven.