At the beginning of his book, How to Know Higher Worlds: A Modern Path of Initiation, Steiner says, “A person rich in feeling and deep of soul who passes through a beautiful mountain landscape will have a different experience from one whose inner life is poor in feeling. Inner experience is the only key to the beauties of the outer world. It depends upon the inner lives we have developed whether, when we travel across the ocean, only a few inner experiences pass through our souls, or we sense the eternal language of the world spirit and understand the mysterious riddles of creation.”
Most of us would like to sense the world spirit; we would like to understand the mysterious riddles of creation. Point the way, right? Steiner goes on to say, “To develop a meaningful relationship to the outer world we must learn to work with our own feelings and ideas. The world around us is filled everywhere with the glory of God, but we have to experience the divine in our own souls before we can find it in our surroundings.”
In other words, we won’t understand the world without first understanding ourselves and what it means to experience the divine in our own souls. In today’s blog, Steiner offers an argument for getting into details rather than settling for generalities. For example, we can appreciate a beautiful plant out our window for its beauty alone. If we can name it, we will appreciate it more. If we understand how earth, water, air, and light/warmth work on a seed growing into all its component parts, we will appreciate the plant even more. We can go further: what are the components of the earth where the plant is located? Of the water? Of the air? What natural laws are in effect here? Very soon we realize how much there is to know and how little we actually do know. Then, at what altitude, in what season… We can go on and on and on.
Now visualize that the plant and all the components of its life and death have spiritual aspects, too. We can imagine how our appreciation for all of it would grow.
Being human is hard work, and it’s challenging to try to understand it, but try we must. Today we will take another look at a profound spiritual reality. A year ago, we discussed the seven members (subdivisions) of the human being. Rather than explain them again, please refer to this link and read the Steiner excerpt: https://www.whoareyou.blog/seven-members. This time, Steiner explains why it is important to know about them.
These are the seven subdivisions:
Physical body
Life body
Astral body
The “I” as the soul’s central core
Spirit self as transformed astral body
Life spirit as transformed life body
Spirit body as transformed physical body
Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:
It may seem that the subdivisions of the human constitution are based on purely arbitrary distinctions between parts within a monolithic soul life. To counter this objection, it must be emphasized that the significance of (the subdivisions above) is similar to that of the appearance of the seven colors of the rainbow when light passes through a prism. What a physicist contributes to our understanding of light by studying this process and the seven colors that result is analogous to what the spiritual scientist does for our understanding of the makeup of the human soul. The soul’s seven members are not abstract intellectual distinctions any more than are the light’s seven colors.
In both cases, the distinctions rest on the inner nature of the things themselves, the only difference being that the seven constituents of light become visible by means of an external device while the seven components of the soul become perceptible to a method of spiritual observation consistent with the nature of the human soul.
The true nature of the soul cannot be grasped without knowing about this subdivision, because the soul belongs to the transitory world by virtue of three of our constitutional components—physical body, life body and astral body—and has its roots in eternity through the other four constituent parts.
When the soul is seen as a unity, its transitory and eternal aspects are indistinguishably bound up with each other, but unless we are aware of the differentiations within it, we cannot understand its relationship to the world as a whole.
Let me use another comparison. Chemists separate water into hydrogen and oxygen, two substances that cannot be distinguished when they are united in the form of water. However, each of these elements has an identity of its own and can form compounds with other elements. Similarly, at death our three lower constitutional components unite with the makeup of the perishable world, while our four higher members unite with the eternal. Refusing to consider this differentiation within the soul is like being a chemist who refuses to learn about decomposing water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Excerpt from: Theosophy by Rudolf Steiner. 9th edition: 1918.
When our “I” acts on the astral body to purify it, our “I” is building the Spirit Self, our next higher soul level. Obviously, becoming the master of our desires and passions instead of letting them rule us is a good thing; we don’t need to know more than we already do to become a better person. But ponder for a moment what it means to know how our soul works. Through the knowledge we gain by understanding the details of our soul, we begin to see the divine laws working. We begin to “experience the divine in our own souls” as a fact rather than just a feeling. We begin to grasp the components of our own light and see how they interact with the light of the world.
The source for today’s blog, Steiner’s book, Theosophy, is widely available, so is How to Know Higher Worlds: A Modern Path of Initiation.