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 are 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.