Thanks For Everything

The Guest House by Rumi

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Naturally, we are grateful to the people and experiences of our lives that have been beneficial to us—that have helped us to become who we are. The teacher who gave us confidence in ourselves. The friend who always has our back. The career that supports us and our families. It is a challenge, however, to feel equal gratitude to the people who have been unkind or unsupportive, the teachers who were unsatisfied with our efforts, the school we didn’t get into or the job we didn’t get. Nevertheless, it is important that we adopt a feeling of thankfulness for our disappointments, too.

Most of us don’t know anything about our spiritual life before our birth, let alone our previous earth lives, yet as we study karma and reincarnation, we understand that we have consequences in this life for what we did before. In our current lives, we meet people with whom we have karma, and we are set in circumstances with them to have the experiences we need. We eagerly approached this life to work out our karma; it is a fact of life. Gratitude for all things is a practice that can help to free us from past resentment and disappointment and lead us to look more openly at the things that aren’t “going our way” as well as acknowledge all positive gifts we have received.

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

If we often look back over our life, we can say to ourselves something highly significant for the present moment. We can say: we owe the facility with which we adapt our soul, perhaps even our physical constitution with more or less dexterity to life, to the circumstances that in youth we were able to live happily, not suffering from depression, that we were led to much that gave us joy.

These impressions of joy in the soul endow us in later life with a certain happiness, although it is drawn down into deeper regions of our being. Let us now ask how much of what life brings us in the way of inner deepening, how much of this is to be attributed to our sorrows, our sufferings? And let us also ask: what can arise in the soul if we look at our life with these questions in mind? We must give the answer to these questions not with the intellect, but with feeling. And feeling answers: I must be thankful to all that has come into my life because only thereby have I become the being I am and with whom I more or less identify myself. I cannot know whether otherwise I might have been of even less account. I can only be thankful to life, because I have become what I am through its joys and sorrows.

These questions must be answered with a feeling of thankfulness to life. And it means a great deal if this thankfulness for earthly existence finds its way into the human soul. If certain deepenings of the soul are achieved and life is judged not out of emotion but out of the soul in its purity, then this thankfulness always arises. Though much of what life has brought us may be deplored, yet in many respects the regret is the expression of a complete error. For if what is regretted had not taken place, we should not be what we actually are. The feeling that we can have about life amounts ultimately to this thankfulness.

Thankfulness may also be felt even when we are not entirely in agreement with life, when we would like to have had more from our existence… It can truly be said that whatever, in our opinion, life has denied us—and this opinion may after all be erroneous—it has at all events brought us something. For what it has brought us we must develop the feeling of thankfulness. But when in all earnestness we develop the feeling of thankfulness—we need only reflect on this, and it will be readily understood—there must be thankfulness for something else. Anyone who has developed thankfulness to life will be led, through this thankfulness itself, to recognition of the invisible spiritual Bestowers of life and to the transformation of memory in loving devotion to them.

The most beautiful way for one’s personality to be led to the supersensible is when the path leads through thankfulness to life. Thankfulness is also a way into the supersensible and finally it becomes veneration and love for the life-bestowing spirit of humankind. Thankfulness gives birth to love and when love is born from thankfulness to life it opens the heart to the spiritual Powers permeating all existence.

Excerpt from: Karmic Relationships: Esoteric Studies. Volume VII, Lecture Seven by Rudolf Steiner. June 13, 1924, Breslau, Germany.

This spirit of thankfulness is a blessing to ourselves and to others. The more we practice it, the more we are able to recognize setbacks as opportunities and appreciate them for the gifts they are.

This spirit of thankfulness leads us to love and acceptance of ourselves and of others. It leads us to recognize the guidance coming to us from the spiritual worlds. It leads us to acknowledge who we have become thus far and directs us to feel hope towards all that will come to us from the future.

A little later in the above lecture Dr. Steiner says, “Whatever life has been, when we take it in its reality and not sentimentally, we can certainly develop this thankfulness and acknowledge that we have been forged by the destiny that goes with us or against us…”

For Belonging by John O’Donohue

May you listen to your longing to be free.
May the frames of your belonging be generous enough for our dreams.
May you arise each day with a voice of blessing whispering in your heart.
May you find a harmony between your soul and your life.
May the sanctuary of your soul never become haunted.
May you know the eternal longing that lives at the heart of time.
May there be kindness in your gaze when you look within.
May you never place walls between the light and yourself.
May you allow the wild beauty of the invisible world to gather you, mind you, and Embrace you in belonging.

Staying Close After Death

People we know who have “died” are still around us. They didn’t go to a far-away heaven somewhere off in space. They didn’t cease to exist just because they died. In fact, they are busy in their lives between death and rebirth. We’ve already discussed in previous posts the phases people go through once they’ve left their physical bodies at death, so now we can expand our understanding to recognize that once people are on the other side, they have many things that occupy them while going through each phase. One of the things that occupy our loved ones after they die is their desire to have contact with us.

How do we go about deepening our relationship with someone who has died? Love for them will draw us closer, prayers and thoughts will draw us closer, and remembering our moments together will draw us closer as long as we harbor spiritual thoughts at least occasionally. If we are completely mired in the materialistic world, they will not find us. This may seem unnecessarily harsh, yet if we think about it, it makes sense. Once we believe our loved ones still exist after they die, we are acknowledging there is a spiritual world.

Acquiring a deeper more conscious relationship requires efforts the results of which we may not achieve in this lifetime. We should start on the path anyway; we have nothing to lose. Because here’s the thing: the person who died misses us just as we miss them.

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

… Here on earth, by means of our souls and bodies, we have the most varied kinds of relationships with the physical world, as well as with the spiritual world that underlies it. Likewise, between death and a new birth we exist in relationship with the facts, happenings, and beings of a supersensory world. Human beings have an occupation or activity in the physical world between birth and death; likewise, they have activities—occupations as it were—between death and a new birth. What we can learn about human life and human activity between death and a new birth will lead humanity more and more toward what we may call the overcoming of “the abyss” that, especially in our materialistic times, separates those who live on earth from those whom we call “the dead.” In this process, communication and a mutual entering-into-relationship will increasingly come to be established between the living and the “dead.”

Naturally, those who die before others with whom they had relationships on earth often gaze back from the spiritual world at those they loved who remain here. This being the case, we may ask whether such souls living between death and a new birth can perceive human beings who live here on earth between birth and death… Seers can often have a kind of heart-wrenching experience with souls who feel fettered when they think of those they left behind. Such souls feel that they cannot get through, cannot look down on those earthly souls.

They are fettered not by their own essential being, but by the other souls left behind…

Investigation into why a soul in the spiritual world cannot perceive souls who remain on earth reveals that, because of the circumstances of our time, those souls who have remained on earth have been unable to take in or allow any thoughts to live in them that might otherwise become visible and perceptible to a soul who has passed through the gate of death.

There is a great difference among souls here on earth, depending on their makeup. Imagine a soul living here in the physical body who, between awaking and going to sleep, is concerned only with thoughts taken from the material world. Such a soul—filled entirely with thoughts, concepts, ideas, and sensations taken solely from the material world—cannot be perceived at all from the world between death and rebirth. No trace of it can be seen. But a soul filled with spiritual ideas such as those provided by spiritual science—a soul glowing and illuminated by spiritual ideas—is perceptible from the other world. Consequently, no matter how good they may be as human beings, the souls left behind who are immersed in materialism are not real to the world beyond and cannot be perceived. This makes a shocking, terrible impression upon the seer.

Excerpt from: Occult Research into Life Between Death and a New Birth, Lecture II: The Establishment of Mutual Relations between the Living and the So-called Dead by Rudolf Steiner, Stuttgart February 20, 1913.

Steiner is clear that we ourselves must direct our own efforts to contact those who have died before us; we cannot rely on mediums or seances or drugs like ayahuasca. Our first step is to direct our thoughts to spiritual content at some point every day. Though it is unlikely that we will experience direct, conscious contact early on, we may experience the comfort and good will that arises with our efforts to become closer to those we love who have died. All these efforts are felt by those to whom we direct them.

In the September post we will discuss some of the things it is possible to learn from those who have died and they from us. We will also look at specific practices we can undertake that work to open lines of communication.