From the moment we wake up in the morning until we fall asleep at night, we do lots of things. We do other things while we sleep. As discussed in previous posts (August – November 2019), while we sleep, our astral and ego bodies enter the spiritual realms leaving our physical and etheric bodies behind. Last month we discussed our encounters with our guardian angel; what else is there to know?
Our guardian angel sees far back into our past and forward into our future. Steiner talks about “nudges” we may get that save us from catastrophes, or “feelings” we may get to call someone we know who needs to hear from us. These contacts with our angel during waking life are very subtle and almost always pass by without our noticing; angels are careful to give us total freedom to respond or not. Though we may be amazed when we narrowly escape a disaster by leaving home late or missing a flight, it wouldn’t occur to most of us that perhaps an angel had intervened.
Steiner reveals that the “limits to man’s knowledge” were lifted at the end of the 19th century, and the capacity for us to know the spiritual world directly is once again possible after a long period of darkness. We can actively pursue this knowledge and experience the spiritual world for ourselves; we might as well get started. One of the things we can learn about is the work of the angels in our astral bodies.
Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say.
Beings of the Hierarchy of the Angels – particularly through their concerted work, although in a certain sense each single Angel also has his task in connection with every individual human being – these Beings form pictures in man’s astral body… If we are able to scrutinize these pictures, it becomes evident that they are woven in accordance with quite definite impulses and principles. Forces for the future evolution of mankind are contained in them. If we watch the Angels carrying out this work of these – strange as it sounds, one has to express it in this way – it is clear that they have a very definite plan for the future configuration of social life on earth.
People may shy away from the notion that Angels want to call forth in them ideals for the future, but it is so all the same. And indeed in forming these pictures the Angels work on a definite principle, namely, that in the future no human being is to find peace in the enjoyment of happiness if others beside him are unhappy.
But there is a second impulse in the work of the Angels… Through the pictures they inculcate into the astral body their aim is that in future time every human being shall see in each and all of his fellowmen a hidden divinity… To conceive man as a picture revealed from the spiritual world, to conceive this with all the earnestness, all the strength and all the insight at our command – this is the impulse laid by the Angels into the pictures. Once this is fulfilled, … every meeting between one person and another will of itself be in the nature of a religious rite, a sacrament, and nobody will need a special church with institutions on the physical plane to sustain the religious life. If the church understands itself truly, its one aim must be to render itself unnecessary…
And there is a third objective: To make it possible for us to reach the Spirit through thinking, to cross the abyss and through thinking to experience the reality of the Spirit… Purely through the Spiritual Soul, through their conscious thinking, people must reach the point of actually perceiving what the Angels are doing to prepare the future of humanity. The teachings of Spiritual Science in this domain must become practical wisdom in the life of humanity…
Spiritual Science for the spirit, freedom of religious life for the soul, brotherhood for the bodily life – this resounds like cosmic music through the work wrought by the Angels in the astral bodies of mankind… Man must gradually come to understand this in his wideawake consciousness.
The Work of the Angels in Man’s Astral Body. Lecture by Rudolf Steiner in Zurich, October 9, 1918.
Most of us are unable to be happy near someone who is suffering, and we are disheartened by institutions that fail to recognize the divinity in each person. Thus these first two tasks of the angels are already familiar to us even if we don’t believe in angels; we already hold these objectives as ideals. The third task of the angels is the one least developed in us: crossing the abyss to the spirit through thinking. Dr. Steiner’s task was to build the bridge between our physical consciousness and our spiritual consciousness through spiritual science. It’s our task to take up this work in all seriousness.
Rudolf Steiner, a 20th century initiate, is not our only source for spiritual knowledge, but his research by direct experience in the spiritual realms, which he calls spiritual science, combined with his standing as a natural scientist makes a compelling case for reading his work. He wrote dozens of books and articles and gave thousands of lectures. One of Steiner’s basic works, Theosophy: An Introduction to the Spiritual Processes in Human Life and in the Cosmos, is a great way to begin.
This book is available to read free at: https://www.theosophy.world/sites/default/files/ebooks/theosophy.pdf.
Or have it read aloud at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOdk5FaUY3U