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.

Unbounded

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

– Rudolf Steiner, July 13, 1914.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All the World's a Stage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Names in parenthesis have been inserted for this blog.

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

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

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

Why Bother?

Not everyone walks into an art museum with the same enthusiasm, but almost all of us will find at least one painting we think is beautiful. We may even recognize it from somewhere. We will spend a minute or so in front of it, enjoying its colors and forms whether we understand what the artist is trying to express or not. And then we move on.

Let’s say a docent walks up while we are standing in front of our favorite painting and starts to explain it. We may learn about the artist, the painting’s composition, its historical context, etc. Now we see the painting differently; it is more beautiful than it was before. The painting didn’t change, we did. And from now on whenever we see a piece of art, though we may immediately recognize its beauty, we know that it is also filled with mysterious meaning we can’t see until we understand what we’re seeing.

For all of time, humanity has searched for meaning to the mysteries of life.

Why not be satisfied with a feeling? Why bother to understand?

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

… All an investigator of the spiritual world is doing is simply recalling to people’s memories something they have forgotten.

Now imagine that during life on earth you come across another person with whom you remember experiencing something 20 years before, but which he has completely forgotten. By talking with him, however, about the incident which you yourself remember clearly, you can bring the other person to recall it also. It is just the same process, though on a higher level, when I speak to you about the spiritual worlds, the only difference being that pre-earthly experiences are more completely forgotten than those of earthly life.

Now people might say: ‘Why should we be asked during our life on earth to take on this extra task of concerning ourselves with matters which, in accordance with cosmic ordering or, one might say, with divine decree, we experience during life beyond the earth?’ There are those, too, who ask: ‘Why should I go to this trouble before death to gain knowledge about the supersensible worlds? I can very well wait until I am dead. Then, if all these things really exist, I shall come face to face with them.’

All this, however, arises from a total misunderstanding of earthly life. The facts of which the spiritual investigator speaks are experienced by human beings in pre-earthly existence, but they are not then the subject of thought, and only during life on earth can thoughts about them be experienced. And only those thoughts about the supersensible world that have been worked upon during earthly life can be carried with us through the gate of death, and only then can we understand the facts we experience between death and rebirth.

… At this present stage of human evolution people’s lives are extraordinarily hard if, during life on earth, they give no thought to the spiritual world. For having passed through the gate of death they can no longer acquire any real knowledge of their surroundings. They are in the midst of what is incomprehensible to them. An understanding of what is experienced after death has to be striven for during life on earth… it was different for people of earlier ages. But, at the present moment of humanity’s evolution people will have to rely more and more on acquiring here on earth an understanding of what they are going to experience in the supersensible world between death and rebirth.

Excerpt from: The Evolution of Consciousness, Lecture 3: New and Old Initiation Science, August 21, 1923, in Berlin.

Consciousness evolves. Spiritual knowledge, once our birthright, once innate, must now be attained through our thinking. Spiritual awareness disappeared so that our thinking could develop freely, and now we need to lift the power of our thinking into the spiritual realms to understand what we will experience between death and rebirth. Until we can acquire this knowledge firsthand, we need a docent. We have the many works of an initiate, Rudolf Steiner, to provide us with this knowledge. We have much to learn before we cross the threshold.