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.