A World Full of Stars

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.

Our Karma, Ourselves

We all make mistakes, and we more than likely learn something from them. Even if no one else is aware of what we did, we suffer a bit; we hope to put it behind us; we hope no one ever finds out; we hope to avoid punishment. We cannot imagine that we would ever need to answer for every single little thing we do wrong.

Justice, both personal and cultural, often fails to manifest during our lifetimes. Sometimes, people who have done horrible things avoid punishment and people who hurt no one suffer the most. Life, examined even superficially, makes no sense in this regard; the seemingly haphazard dispensation of justice is one of the appalling aspects of being human. But an understanding of karma and reincarnation shows that no one “gets away with” anything.

Rudolf Steiner, a modern initiate, tells us that in the life after death, we face the good and bad, the wise and foolish of everything we’ve done in our lives. Ultimately, as we begin to prepare for the next life to come, we help to create the circumstances which can lead us toward our purest self. It turns out that we will embrace any suffering gladly because it helps us reach that goal. Knowing this now allows us to accept our fates with deeper understanding and equanimity.

Steiner spoke often about karma and reincarnation. We can study the things he has said while we work on ourselves to gain access to the spiritual world for ourselves. Today we will discuss one of the basic principles of karma referenced above: that we answer for absolutely everything in our lives.

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

In earthly life… we do not like to suffer from our own foolish mistakes. We wish we had not made the foolish decision. But this really only applies to the one earthly life, because in effect, between the foolishness of the decision and the punishment we suffer in experiencing its consequences, only the self-same earthly life is intervening. It all remains continuous.

But between one earthly life and another it is not so. For the lives between death and a new birth are always intervening, and they change many things which would not change if earthly life continued uniformly. Suppose that you look back into a former life on earth. You did something good or ill to another person. Between that earthly life and this one, there was the life between death and a new birth. In that life, you cannot help realizing that you have become imperfect by doing wrong to another human being. It takes away from your own human value. It cripples you in soul. You must make good again this maiming of your soul and you resolve to achieve in a new earthly life what will make good the fault. Thus, between death and new birth you take up, by your own will, that which will balance and make good the fault.

Or if you did good to another person… you see it clearly in the life between death and new birth. If you have helped another person, you realize that he has thereby attained certain things which, without you, he could not have attained…

… It will never happen, under any circumstances, that a real insight into your karma will lead you to be dissatisfied with it… for, in the last resort, we ourselves are our karma. What is it that comes over, karmically, from our former lives on earth? It is actually we ourselves.

Excerpt from: Karmic Relationships: Esoteric Studies. Volume I, Lecture 3 by Rudolf Steiner. Dornach 1924.

We are eternal beings that keep evolving throughout our many incarnations as well as the time we spend in the spiritual world between our incarnations. Learning about karma gives us an impetus to keep working on ourselves in earnest long before death takes us across the threshold. With humility and gratitude, it is possible for us to learn to accept responsibility for ourselves while we are still living in this lifetime. We cannot erase the past, but we can create a better future for ourselves and everyone we know.

Hanging in the Balance

Some people find validity for their own views by deeming as good those who agree with them and evil those who disagree with them. These terms, strong as they are, become meaningless or even laughable when they are applied so indiscriminately. But these terms are not meaningless in the cosmic order. In fact, without both good and evil, humanity would never develop free will.

When we look back to civilizations from Egypt to the present, we find abundant evidence of humankind’s endeavor to understand its place between heaven and hell. Before that, humanity had an instinctive clairvoyance; we didn’t have to believe in spiritual beings, we experienced them. This state of being did not cultivate free will. With the consciousness we’ve developed since then, we don’t directly experience the spirit, nor are we are likely to believe in things simply because an authority has told us what to believe. Our thinking of today, based on logic and reason, demands an approach to the concepts of good and evil that makes sense, especially if we hope to incorporate these concepts into our understanding of karma and reincarnation.

Karma is continually playing out so that we can fix our error (evil) in order purify our souls, to evolve as souls, to become good. If we are willing to identify a virtue as being good, our natural inclination is to identify the opposite of that virtue as evil. So, for example, we could say that courage is good, so cowardice is evil. But it is more complicated than that. Aristotle said, “Virtue is a human capacity or skill guided by reason and insight, which, as regards man, hold the balance between the too-much and the too-little.” What does he mean?

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

… The pupils of the Mysteries were shown that free will can only be developed if a person is in a position to go wrong in one of two directions; further, that life can only run its course truly and favorably when these two lines of opposition are considered as being like the two sides of a balance, of which first one side and then the other goes up and down. True balance only exists when the crossbeam is horizontal. They were shown that it is impossible to express the true attitude of man by saying; this is right and that is wrong. It is only possible to gain the true idea when the human being, standing in the center of the balance, can be swayed each moment of his life, now to one side, now to the other, but he himself holds the correct mean between the two.

Let us take the virtue valor, bravery. In this respect human nature may diverge on one side to foolhardiness—that is, unbridled activity in the world and the straining of the forces at one’s disposal to the utmost limit. Foolhardiness is one side; the opposite is cowardice. A person may turn the scale in either of these directions.

In the Mysteries the pupils were shown that when a man degenerates into foolhardiness, he loses himself and lays aside his own individuality and is crushed by the wheels of life. Life tears him in pieces if he errs in this direction, but if, on the other hand, he errs on the side of cowardice, he hardens himself and tears himself away from his connection with beings and objects… the pupils were told that goodness cannot merely be striven for as goodness obtained once and for all; rather does goodness come only through man being continually able to strike out in two directions like a pendulum and by his own inner power able to find the balance, the mean between the two.

You have in this all that will enable you to understand the freedom of the will and the significance of reason and wisdom in human action. If it were fitting for man always to observe the eternal moral principles, he need only acquire these moral principles and then he could go through life on a definite line of march, as it were, but life is never like this.

Freedom in this consists rather in man’s being always able to err in one direction or another. But in this way the possibility of evil arises. For what is evil? It is that which originates when the human being is lost to the world or the world is lost to him. Goodness consists in avoiding both these extremes. In the course of evolution, evil became not only a possibility, but an actuality; for as man journeyed from incarnation to incarnation, by his turning now to one side and now to the other, he could not always find the balance at once, and it was necessary for the compensation to be karmically made at a future time.

Excerpt from: Anthroposophical Ethics, Lecture III by Rudolf Steiner. May 30, 1912. Norrkoping.

If we sit with this for just a moment, we can see how this way of looking at good and evil helps us to become less judgmental of others – instead of being evil, they are off balance. It helps us be less judgmental of ourselves, too. In a way, we can see that we already possess the virtue; however, we may have too much or too little of it. We must swing to the other side to become more centered.

As we explore this method of viewing virtue or good as the mean between two extremes, we find a practical way to work on ourselves. For example, we may admire someone we know who always keeps their temper, who exhibits the virtue of patience. By placing patience as a mean between its two extremes—its deficiency is irascibility, and its excess is apathy—we can see which side of the scale we tip to and work toward the center. Likewise with all the virtues. Here is the spiritual work/life balance.

A Clear Consciousness

Accepting the premise of reincarnation and karma might be easier for us than imagining that spiritual beings inhabit the world outside our senses. Spiritual science, however, teaches us that these beings are a profound reality. One way to open ourselves to this idea is by reviewing what we already know: we are spiritual beings who live in physical bodies for a time and enter the spiritual world when we die. We reside there between our death and subsequent rebirth. Furthermore, we know that when we go to sleep, our astral and ego bodies leave our physical and etheric bodies behind as they enter the spiritual world. What do we find when we go there?

The Buddhist and Hindu deva, Islam’s malaikah, Judaism’s malachim or mal’akh, and the Christian angel are all names for a hierarchy of beings acknowledged within the core tenets of these religions. Devas or angels, who are the beings belonging to the closest realm above us, do not incarnate into physical bodies. What little we’ve heard about them outside of our religious texts is often sensationalized or trivialized or romanticized, so that even if we are willing to open our minds to the idea of angels, our references may include movies like It’s a Wonderful Life with James Stewart or pictures of beings with harps, halos and wings. Are we curious to know more?

If we can make the leap to imagine that we are not alone in the spiritual world, what do we encounter in spiritual science when we contemplate the realm of malachim? What is our relationship to this realm of beings? And, more specifically, what is meant by the term guardian angel?

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

When we wake from sleep, we pass over into the world of animals, plants, minerals – the three kingdoms of Nature belonging to the world of sense. When we fall asleep, we pass beyond the world of sense, we are transported into the realm of the first rank of Beings above man – the Angels. And from the time of falling asleep until waking, we are connected with the Being who is allotted to us as our own Angel, just as through our eyes and ears we are connected with the three kingdoms of Nature here in the world of sense. Even if at first we have no consciousness of this connection with the world of the Angels, it is nevertheless there. This connection extends into our astral body.

If, living in our astral body during sleep, we were suddenly to wake up, we should contact the world of the Angels, in the first place the Angel who is connected with our own life just as here in the earthly world we are in contact with animals, plants, and minerals.

Now even in the earthly world, in the world of sense, if a man is attentive and deliberately trains his thinking, he sees much more than when he is unobservant and hasty. His connection with the three kingdoms of Nature can be intimate or superficial. And it is the same with regard to the world of spiritual Beings. But in the world of spiritual Beings, different conditions prevail.

A man whose thoughts are entirely engrossed in the material world, who never desires to rise above it or to acquaint himself with moral ideas extending beyond the merely utilitarian, who has no desire to experience true human love, who in his waking life has no devotion to the Divine-Spiritual world – on falling asleep, such a man has no forces which enable him to come into contact with his Angel. Whenever we fall asleep, this Angel is waiting as it were for the idealistic feelings and thoughts which come with us, and the more we bring, the more intimate becomes our relation to the Angel while we are asleep. And so throughout our life, by means of what we cultivate over and above material interests, we garner, in our waking life, forces whereby our relation to the Angel becomes more and more intimate.

But the idealistic thoughts and feelings, the pure human love, the spiritual feelings which have arisen in our waking life and have united us with our Angel, these accompany us when we pass through death. And the more idealistic thoughts and feelings, human love and piety we have brought to our Angel, the clearer does our consciousness become.

Excerpt from: Cosmic Forces in Man, Lecture II: The Soul of Man, November 27, 1921, Oslo

None of us would actively wish to have our consciousness diminished… at least not permanently. Fortunately, most of us do bring some of the right elements into our sleep at night. We may want to do more. Though we can find many paths toward the divine, following the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path is one means by which we can prepare ourselves to live in harmony with our guardian angel’s intentions. The eight endeavors are: right conceptions, right resolves, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right aspiriation, right recollection and right contemplation.*

We have enormous freedom in this regard. The choices we make now, however, have far-reaching consequences, which we will explore in future posts. We will also continue to study the vast richness of our cosmos filled with beings other than ourselves with whom we live and learn.

*For more information on Noble Eightfold Path https://www.britannica.com/topic/Eightfold-Path

Time After Time

We’ve discussed sleep, death, and even life after death in previous posts, but as we explore the law of karma further, we need to take a look at the other side of our life—our birth. We all know that who we are when we’re born is a result of genetics and enumerable other things: where we are born, our culture, education, religion, race, sexual orientation, economic status, whether or not we’re healthy or beautiful or intelligent, etc.

Already at birth—or conception—we are given some opportunities and denied others. Then, with these birthrights, we step-by-step go out into the world and build our biographies—we become who we become. The inherent advantages and disadvantages of our birth, though, appear to be arbitrary—the luck of the draw.

Believing the circumstances of our birth and our ensuing life’s advantages (or lack thereof) to be the result of random chance is not a satisfactory explanation for many of us. It doesn’t make sense because it isn’t fair—from conception and birth on we enjoy benefits or suffer deficiencies for which we seem to have no control. Karma can be the key to understanding the causes of things that seem beyond our control.

To understand karma, however, we need a larger view of life and death. Steiner’s view is larger. He shows us that not only do we continue to exist after death, but we exist before conception and birth. Our “I” is eternal. Karma works out because we were alive before this current life and we will live again after it. Yes, we are talking about reincarnation. In an effort to keep an open mind—

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

What a man did yesterday is today still present in its effects. A picture of the connection between cause and effect is given in the simile of sleep and death. Sleep has often been called the younger brother of death. I get up in the morning. My consecutive activity has been interrupted by the night. Now, under ordinary circumstances it is not possible for me to begin my activity again just as I please. I must connect it with my doings of yesterday if there is to be order and coherence in my life. My actions of yesterday are the conditions predetermining those actions that fall to me today. I have created my destiny of today by what I did yesterday. I have separated myself for a while from my activity, but this activity belongs to me and draws me again to itself after I have withdrawn myself from it for a while. My past remains bound up with me; it lives on in my present and will follow me into my future. If the effects of my deeds of yesterday were not to be my destiny of today, I should not have had to awake this morning, but to be newly created out of nothing.

The human spirit is no more created anew when it begins its earthly life than a man is newly created every morning. Let us try to make clear to ourselves what happens when entrance into this life takes place. A physical body, receiving its form through the laws of heredity, makes its appearance. This body becomes the bearer of a spirit that repeats a previous life in a new form. Between the two stands the soul that leads a self-contained life of its own. Its inclinations and disinclinations, wishes and desires, minister to it. It presses thought into its service. (It) receives the impressions of the outer world and carries them to the spirit in order that the spirit may extract from them the fruits that are permanent.

It plays, as it were, the part of intermediary.... The soul is really that part of a man through which he belongs to his earthly life. Through his body he belongs to the physical human species; through it he is a member of this species. With his spirit he lives in a higher world. The soul binds the two worlds together for a time.

Excerpt from: Theosophy by Rudolf Steiner, 1910 (1986 edition.)

Because we think logically, because we reason, we try to create order out of chaos, we want the answers to the larger questions of life and death to make logical sense. When we contemplate the unjust and apparent randomness of life and fail to find order, we can choose either to accept that answers are impossible or look for answers in new directions. If we are able to open our minds to the idea of returning again and again to work out karma, to become better and better at being a human being throughout several lifetimes, the inequities of life begin to make more sense.

Each of us has lived in other times, in other places, in other bodies. When we think of all the qualities mentioned at the beginning of the post and imagine ourselves within circumstances entirely different than those of our current life, we can perhaps imagine how the law of karma creates the ultimate fairness. We can think about how much of the life we lead now is contingent on the qualities given to us at birth and imagine that, in the spiritual realm between death and a new birth, we chose these circumstances of life in order to best work out our karma.

Karma stretches out behind us and in front of us; we are resolving old karma and making new karma every day. Owen Barfield, a friend to C. S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, wrote in an article entitled, Why Reincarnation?, “If the majority of people were to become convinced of reincarnation, as I have just outlined it as a fact (see attached article), what an enormous difference it must make to many of the discords that are at present threatening to tear our civilization to pieces!”

A short bio of Owen Barfield:
https://www.wheaton.edu/academics/academic-centers/wadecenter/authors/owen-barfield/

Why Reincarnation? by Owen Barfield.
https://owenbarfield.org/why-reincarnation/