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.

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.

How They Reach Us

Every October we approach with anticipation a holiday that has been celebrated for a long, long time: in the United States, for example, it’s Halloween; in South America, it’s Día de los Muertos; in Italy, it’s Ognissante; in Ireland—where the tradition began—it’s Samhain. The gravity of the death of our loved ones and of our own eventual passing is relieved by celebrating with others. What we’ve been talking about for the last few months is something altogether different and much more personal than national celebrations, though these can serve as reminders. While we’ve explored methods like reading to the dead as ways of contacting our own departed loved ones, this month we will look at how we might hear from them.

It is unlikely that we will see them as an apparition in the physical world; however, if we focus our attention on a picture of them, we will put them in the front of our mind. If we create an inner picture by recalling a time we spent with them in as much detail as possible: the time of day, the room, the weather, the occasion, etc., we will create a sense of companionship.

We may also, however, get a nudge from them below our level of consciousness, even while we are awake. Steiner indicates that we can become aware of their presence only if our underlying state of mind is one that is filled with gratitude for all that life gives us—even the stuff we don’t like. Obviously, in our present state of almost continual distraction, it is very difficult to achieve a quiet state of mind that will allow us to have the sensitivity to communicate across the barrier between life and death. Yet, the path is open to each of us if we are willing to put in the work.

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

We perceive unconsciously a far wider range of our environment than is possible consciously. It is quite true that if we are walking along a street and meet someone just coming around the corner, we may feel that we had seen the person just before they appeared. Quite often we may have a feeling of having seen something happen before it actually occurs. It is indeed a fact that first we have a psychic, spiritual connection with what we later perceive; only we are deafened, as it were, by the later sense perceptions and do not observe what goes on in the intimacies of soul life.

This is something that takes place of itself subconsciously, like the formation of a memory or the feeling of thankfulness toward all surrounding phenomena. The dead can speak to us only through the element that pervades the dreams that are interwoven with our life. The dead speak into these intimate, subconscious perceptions that occur on their own. And it is possible for us, given the right conditions, to share with the dead the same spiritual-psychic air.

If they wish to speak to us, it is necessary that we take into our consciousness something of the feeling of gratitude for all that reveals itself to us. If there is none of this feeling within us, if we are not able to thank the world for enabling us to live, for enriching our life continually with new impressions, if we cannot deepen our soul by often realizing that our entire life is a gift, then the dead will not find a common air with us, for they can speak with us only through this feeling of gratitude.

Otherwise, there is a wall between us and them.

… We cannot arouse in ourselves this feeling of gratitude if, having lost them, we wish them back in life; we should be thankful that we had them with us quite irrespective of the fact that we have them no longer. Thus, if we do not have this feeling of gratitude for the beings we wish to approach, they do not find us; or at least they cannot speak to us. The very feelings we so often have toward our nearest dead are a hindrance to their speaking to us… The better we can feel what they were to us during their life, the sooner it will be possible for them to speak to us—to speak to us through the common air of gratitude.

Excerpt from: Earthly Death and Cosmic Life, Lecture 6: Feeling of Unity and Sentiments of Gratitude: A Bridge to the Dead, by Rudolf Steiner, Berlin. March 19, 1918.

Steiner indicates that, at least initially, any communication from the dead is subtle, below our consciousness, so if we aren’t paying attention, we miss it. The most challenging aspect of communicating with the dead is the formidable task of preparing ourselves to do so. Nevertheless, it’s good to know that all our efforts toward reaching the spirit are beneficial to we ourselves and to the world. Living consciously in gratitude requires effort, but living this way is a worthy goal in itself whether we succeed in communicating with the dead or not.

We are always moving toward our future karma. Our connections with each other are how that karma plays out. Realizing that we ourselves survive death, just as those who’ve gone before us have survived it, helps us be less fearful of death. And that, too, affects every aspect of our lives.

The dead want to help guide us toward our healthy selves, to our healthy goals. They care about what happens to us. We can open ourselves to their guidance if we choose to do so.

What the Dead Want to Know

As we began to develop scientific thinking in the early 1400s, we lost our awareness of the spiritual world. This loss was essential to our evolution as human beings because we needed to develop this type of thinking exclusively; however, the time has come to renew our connection to our spiritual home. The topic of death is a tough one because most of us fear it; we have lost our ability to understand it. Yet now in our time, the veil between life and death is thinning for a variety of reasons. Humanity is evolving. We are at an important transition from using purely scientific reasoning to using the intellectual power gained by it to understand the spirit.

Many of us are reluctant to make that transition, and that has widespread ramifications for us and for those in our lives who have died. Rudolf Steiner tells us that souls who enter the spiritual world are capable of “seeing” amazing and profound things, but unless they have acquired spiritual knowledge while alive, they are unable to fully understand everything they are seeing.

Just as we can enjoy music without knowing how to read notes or play an instrument, those who are able to do those things have an enhanced appreciation for music. Similarly, people who die do so with the knowledge of the spiritual world that they acquired while they were alive. If they don’t know anything about the spiritual world before they die, their experience will be limited. In other words, their ability to understand what is in their new environment is predicated on what they learned during their lifetimes. This is an immediate issue for them because they want to know about the beings and environment of the spiritual world they now live in, but they lack the concepts to do so. We can help them.

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

If human beings on earth allow spiritual thoughts to permeate their souls, those thoughts can be perceived by souls in the beyond, and those earthly souls remain real for them. What we are touching upon here is the fact that the spiritual thoughts nurtured by souls here on earth can not only be perceived but be understood by the souls beyond. And, even more significantly this fact can have a practical consequence. Building on this insight, we can do something that could become very significant for the relationship between souls here and souls beyond. I refer to what we may call “reading to the dead.” Reading to the dead is often extraordinarily important.

A seer can have the experience that human beings who have entirely disregarded spiritual wisdom have a strong longing for it and wish to hear about it after they have passed through the gate of death. If souls who have remained behind make a clear mental image of the dead person, and at the same time bring to mind a spiritual train of thought or read from a spiritual book (in thought, not aloud) then the dead person whose spiritual image stands before them will become aware of it… One can often see how the dead long to hear what gets through to them from here… It is a grave error to think that a human being merely needs to die in order to contact the whole spiritual world… it is a deep misconception to believe that souls become wise as soon as they pass through the gate of death. A soul cannot be easily instructed by souls in the beyond immediately on passing through the gate of death if there is no basis for a connection with them.

… While materialism permits us to bring to life only relationships between souls confined to their earthly existence, spiritual science opens the way for free communication and exchange between souls on the earth and souls that dwell beyond the earth in the other world. The dead will live with us. And, when that happens, what we may call the passage through the gate of death will often after a time be experienced as merely a change in the form of existence. The whole transformation in the life of spirit and of soul that will take place when such things become common knowledge will be of enormous significance.

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 saying that the souls of those who have died are hungry for knowledge of the spirit—even if they were opposed to it during their lifetimes. Last month, we discussed how these departed souls miss us just as we miss them. This month, we see that they may need our help to understand what they are experiencing in the spiritual world. Reading to them is an ideal gift because we are learning too while we read. Reading scientific works doesn’t reach them—those concepts are unnecessary in the spiritual world—but reading spiritual scientific works does reach them because spiritual science explains the images they are seeing.

Communication does go both ways. The dead have reasons to communicate with us and attempt to do so in a variety of ways. We will learn to attune ourselves to the efforts and means of these communications in future blogs.

Meanwhile, we could pick up a book by Rudolf Steiner, such as Theosophy: An Introduction to the Spiritual Processes in Human Life and in the Cosmos and read it to one of the people we know on the other side. Steiner, the initiate of the 20th century who has over 6000 published works, continues to be the source of knowledge for this blog.

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.

Phenomenal

Let’s suppose the following is true:

Long ago, people had an innate capacity to experience the spiritual worlds and the beings, the gods, that inhabit them. These ancient peoples didn’t make up the worlds we read about in their stories and mythologies, they portrayed those worlds. They consciously communicated and interacted with the various spiritual beings until humanity lost its innate capacity to see in these realms. In other words, the gods didn’t go away, humanity had to lose the capacity to see them in order to develop other capacities important for our evolution as human beings. These spiritual realms which became inaccessible for humanity, could still be experienced by those few who were initiated.

Seen in this way, the ancient stories come alive for us. All over the world, the origin stories, the stories of the various nature spirits and the spirits of the elements, the stories of the gods and the planetary powers, and so on tell us what the ancient peoples observed. To us, they are stories of fantasy; to humanity of thousands of years ago, they are stories of the real world, the world they experienced, populated by gods and goddesses. To us, we have the four elements, to Empedocles back in the fifth century B.C.E. we had four divinities: earth/Hera, water/Persephone, air/Zeus, and fire/Hades.

Intellectually, many of us know that we are spiritual beings inside physical bodies. Extending that idea to the other earthly phenomena is more difficult. We must imagine a spiritual being hidden behind each and every thing we experience in the physical world, just as we imagine our own spirit hiding behind our corporeal bodies.

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

A justifiable opinion might be expressed by the following illustrations: I had supposed up till now that I knew what fire is but that was only an illusion. For what I have called fire up till now would be like calling the tracks of a carriage on a road the only reality and denying that a carriage in which a person was sitting must have been passing that way. I declare these tracks on the road to be the signs, the outer expression of the carriage which has passed there and in which a person was sitting. I have not seen the person who passed there, but he is the cause of these tracks, he is the reality. And a person who believed the marks left by the wheels to be something complete in themselves, something real and basic, would be taking the outer expression for the thing itself.

That which our senses see as flashing fire bears the same proportion to its reality, to the spiritual being which stands behind it, as do the tracks on the road to the person who was sitting in the carriage which passed there. In fire we have only an outer expression. Behind what our eyes see as fire and what we feel as heat is the real spiritual entity, which has only its outer expression in the outer fire. Behind what we inhale as air, behind what enters our eyes as light, and behind what our ears perceive as sound are active beings spiritual and divine, whose outer garments only we behold in fire, in water and in what surrounds us in the different realms of nature.

In the so-called secret teaching, in the teaching of the mysteries, the experience which is then gone through is called the ‘passage through the elementary worlds.’ Whereas previously one had lived in the belief that what we know as fire is a reality, one then becomes aware that living beings are hidden behind the fire. We become, so to say, acquainted with fire, more or less intimately as something quite different from what it appears to be in the world of the senses. We become acquainted with the fire-beings, with what is the soul of the fire. Just as our souls are hidden behind our bodies, so the soul and spirit of the fire are hidden by the fire which we perceive with our outer senses.

We penetrate into a spiritual domain when we experience the soul and spirit of fire in this way, and the experience by which we realize that the outer fire is no reality, that it is a mere illusion, a mere garment, and that we now move among the fire-gods just as we did formerly among people of the physical world, is called ‘living in the element of fire’, to use the terms of occult science… when one has acquired true self-knowledge, one can ascend to experiencing the beings in the so-called elements, in the elements of fire, of water, of air and of earth. These four classes of gods or spirits live a real existence in the elements, and a person who has reached the stage which has just been described is in touch with the divine spiritual beings of the elements.

Excerpt from: The East in the Light of the West, Lecture II: Comparison of the Wisdom of East and West, August 24, 1909.

Steiner encouraged us to read his work with an open mind until such time as we could discover the spiritual worlds ourselves… and then he gave us the methods by which to do so. In the beginning of the above lecture he says, “The method for the attainment of clairvoyant powers employed by the teachers of this research is drawn from the knowledge which has been tested for thousands of years in the way of exercises, meditation and concentration…” We won’t be able to prove that fire spirits are real to anyone other than ourselves, and we won’t see them for ourselves until we’ve done the work to become initiates. For the majority of us who cannot find even five minutes a day to meditate, we most likely will first encounter the spiritual world when we enter it after death.

Meanwhile, we might enjoy the ancient myths and stories of the many cultures around the world from a new perspective. Or go see a movie with Odin, Thor and Loki in it…

Speak Know Evil

“Virtue is the human capacity or skill guided by reason and insight, which in relation to the human being holds the mean between the too-much and the too-little.”
— Aristotle

Talking about evil is not a popular topic. Personifying evil with the names of Lucifer and Ahriman, as we did in last month’s blog, is even less popular. I get it. Some words we are more comfortable using are shadow, immoral, atrocity, depraved, corrupt, and so on. Evil is just four letters and when we use it, people generally know what we’re talking about. People do not, however, generally know why evil exists or why we succumb to it. Let’s explore that a bit from a psychological perspective.

Way back in 1971, psychologist and Stanford professor, Philip Zimbardo, conducted an infamous experiment, The Stanford Prison Experiment. Normal people, students, were divided into two groups; one group was designated as jailors and the other as prisoners. The circumstances after just a few days became so dire that the experiment had to be stopped before its completion. In his 2007 book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, Zimbardo talks about the atrocities committed by normal people, U. S. soldiers, at Abu Ghraib, a U.S. military prison in Iraq. In a TED talk on the psychology of evil, Zimbardo says, “So, the Lucifer Effect, although it focuses on the negatives – the negatives that people can become, not the negatives that people are – leads me to a psychological definition. Evil is the exercise of power. And that’s the key: it’s about power. To intentionally harm people psychologically, to hurt people physically, to destroy people mortally, or ideas, and to commit crimes against humanity. If you Google “evil”, a word that should surely have withered by now, you come up with 163 million hits in a third of a second” (2007).

Zimbardo wants us to understand evil and what he believes to be its causes so that we can work to prevent it from happening. A question: do unseen causes lie below those Zimbardo has discovered? In his quote above he says evil is the exercise of power. Every power has a source…

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

How in the course of evolution has evil become possible?

A satisfactory answer to this question can be obtained only by studying the elementary moral instruction that was given already in ancient times… The pupils of the Mysteries were shown that human nature can bring about destruction and harm in two directions and that human beings are in a position to develop free will only because of this possibility of erring in two directions. Furthermore, they were shown that life can take a favorable course only when these two lines of deviation are considered to be like the two sides of a balance: as one side goes up the other side goes down, and true balance is achieved only when the crossbeam is horizontal. In this way the pupils were shown that right conduct of a human being cannot at all be described by saying this is correct and that is incorrect. Right conduct is achieved only through the fact that human beings are placed at every moment in the position of being pulled either to the one side or to the other—and must then themselves establish the balance.

Consider the virtue of fortitude or courage. On the one hand, human nature may swing toward recklessness, that is, toward unrestrained activity in the world with full exertion of all one’s forces. That is on the one side; on the other side there is cowardice… and the pupils in the Mysteries were shown that if one swings toward recklessness, one loses oneself and becomes crushed by the wheels of life. If one errs in this direction, one is torn apart; on the other hand, if one errs toward the side of cowardice, one becomes hardened in oneself and thus torn away from other things and beings (and) becomes a self-enclosed being whose actions cannot be brought into harmony with the whole. This was demonstrated for the pupils with regard to all human actions.

These are the two possibilities: Either we become lost to the world—the world seizes and overpowers us—as is the case with recklessness; or the world becomes lost to us because we harden ourselves in our egoism, as is the case with cowardice. Accordingly, the pupils in the Mysteries were told that there is no unique and fixed goodness for which one can strive; on the contrary, goodness arises solely because the human being, like a pendulum, can always swing to one side or the other, and must find the possibility of balance, the central mean, through individual inner force.

You have here everything you need in order to comprehend free will and the significance of reason and wisdom in human conduct…

Excerpt from: The Spiritual Foundation of Morality. By: Rudolf Steiner. Lecture III, May 10, 1912

In a subsequent book, The Time Paradox, Zimbardo indicates that he is “interested especially in temporal biases in which learned cognitive categories are not ‘balanced’ according to situations, contexts and demands, but one or another are utilized excessively or underutilized.’”

Angels and Devils, Maurits C. Escher 1960

Much remains to be said about evil. We hinted above that evil’s purpose in the world is to make human beings free. We have to have a choice between good and evil in order to choose, and the struggle to choose the good over the evil has to be real in order to be realized. Surely the horrific events we can read about every day in the news deserve our deepest effort to understand. Electing to think about this at all is relevant to the future of humanity.

So, yeah, evil is not fun to speak about, but we need to speak about it to know it. Pretending evil doesn’t exist isn’t helpful to anyone, including ourselves. At the very least, we can learn to see ourselves and each other as searching for balance in all that we think, feel, and do, right?

---

Phillip Zimbardo Biography:

https://www.verywellmind.com/philip-zimbardo-biography-2795529

Here Know Evil

“We must accustom ourselves to using the terms and concepts that have become familiar to us for the realm of the spirit, such as ahrimanic and luciferic, with the same precision and focus that a scientist will use when speaking of positive and negative electricity, magnetism and so on, though of course it is a different, higher realm that we are examining.” — Rudolf Steiner

Invisible forces like gravity and magnetism are something we believe in because we experience their effects. Forces of evil are harder for us to believe in even though we experience their effects, too. We recognize our battles within, (see last month’s blog called See No Evil ) but few of us believe these battles are entwined with forces from other beings. In fact, many of us who believe that love exists as a “force” in the world do not believe that evil, too, exists as such. Nevertheless, just as angels and archangels exist, so do spiritual beings who wish to divert us from our evolutionary path, and they’ve been called Lucifer and Ahriman for a long, long time.

It sounds like science fiction or the Marvel Universe, right? Well, like so much of spiritual science, it isn’t far-fetched at all, it shows us what we need to bring into our human consciousness now.

Ahriman and Lucifer represent two scales of a balance with human beings in the middle as the equilibrium. Contrary to our notion of the battle between good and evil, the reality is that the human being stands as a balance between two forces of evil, with the middle point – balance – as the good. The good lies between Ahriman and Lucifer.

We can think of how we work with balance in our everyday lives. For example, too little joy is misery, too much is mania; too little courage is cowardice, too much is foolhardiness; too little love is apathy, too much is obsession. Think of mundane examples like starvation/gluttony—in the middle lies enough. A healthy balance.

The forces of evil that align with too little (contraction) are ahrimanic and can be experienced in materialism, separation, control, exactitude, lying. The forces that align with too much (expansion) are luciferic and can be experienced in passion, excess, self-indulgence, egotism. Ahriman and Lucifer have thoroughly penetrated us, and we work here during our time on earth towards becoming balanced between them.

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

We must be aware that the world as it presents itself to us is in a state of equilibrium or balance. The beam of a scale does not come to rest in a straight horizontal position just because it is a beam, but only because equal weights hang down from it on both sides and balance each other out. It is the same with everything in our world. The world exists neither because of a state of rest nor because of nothingness, but because of the balance created by the possibility of deviating radically from what is right and good either toward Lucifer or toward Ahriman.

Anyone who says that we simply have to guard against everything ahrimanic and luciferic is in the same position as people who say they want a scale, but don’t want to put weights on either side. For instance, we know there would be no art if the luciferic element did not play a role in the world. On the other hand, we also know there would be no observation and understanding of nature if the ahrimanic element did not play a part, too. It is only a matter of establishing a balance in the human heart and soul. And that is why we can fall prey to the ahrimanic and luciferic elements just when we think we are rejecting everything ahrimanic and luciferic. We can sin against reality, but we cannot suppress it!

Thus, those who want to avoid everything ahrimanic will easily fall prey to the luciferic, and those who are trying to avoid the luciferic will be easy prey for Ahriman. The point is to find the balance, to fear neither the one nor the other, and to have enough courage to face both ahrimanic fear as well as luciferic hope or desire…

Now there are philosophers, or people dealing with world views, who say they are striving for unity. That sounds very fine but is purely luciferic. Others are striving for diversity and don’t want to have anything to do with unity. Though this can be fruitful today, it is ahrimanic. Only those really strive for balance who seek unity in diversity and look for diversity in such a way that it reveals unity. It is simply a matter of finding a way to really do this…

The important thing is to develop in life, so that when we meet with such things, we do not pass by reality but experience the human soul growing together with reality and maintain the balance even in our relation to what was not made by human beings, but was given by the eternal powers. We can perceive the spiritual world only when our striving is neither only one-sided mysticism, nor only one-sided observation of nature, but instead is directed toward the union of both.

Excerpt from: Toward Imagination, Lecture 5: Balance in Life by Rudolf Steiner. Berlin, July 4, 1916

We can all think of examples of ahrimanic or luciferic extremes in today’s world, and we can see which pole we tend to gravitate toward in various instances in our lives. Essentially, what Steiner is saying is that we are influenced by these forces of evil that are present in our lives. These evil forces lead us away from the center and toward opposite extremes—they lead us away from a healthy balance. As we continue working with the concept of evil, we will see that these forces also play a necessary role in our evolution as human beings and by balancing ourselves between them, by refusing to surrender ourselves to extremes, we will find goodness, truth, and beauty.

See Know Evil

We can easily discern in the world today that which most of us would call evil. Evil seems to be everywhere around us in various forms in varying degrees. In the coming months, we will explore those spiritual forms of evil behind the happenings in the outer world and in ourselves. We will try to examine them as they exist on either side of the balance we discussed in June 2021 (Hanging in the Balance). In taking up the discussion of evil, today we will focus on how it exists inside of each one of us.

Various practitioners advocating for our healthy inner lives steer us away from acknowledging our own complicity with evil. But at the end of the day, none of us buy that we are blameless for the bad things we’ve done in our lives. We are haunted by them, and we are scared to confront the worst of them. We want to believe we are good people—and we are—but we also aren’t.

Evil may be a concept we are encouraged to avoid when we consider our own selves, but acknowledging our own goodness is just one aspect and can in no way be considered a complete picture of who we are. As we’ve pointed out in the past few blogs, we humans are infinitely complex. Evil exists in the world we live in, and one of the many places it exists is inside us. We need to find the right tools to think about it.

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

…It is surely not too far-fetched to think that important questions, such as that about the origin of evil, have not been able to be answered for the very reason that people were so reluctant to go beyond the kinds of knowledge and perception which depend upon these senses and this sense-bound reason; and so were unable to attain a different sort of knowledge…

It is perhaps legitimate to ask what results we are likely to obtain if we really try to pursue this path of spiritual research—which I have frequently described, and which is presented in detail in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. Of particular interest to us today is the way in which what we normally call evil relates to this path.

When the spiritual researcher elevates himself to higher worlds… then all that he looks back on and recognizes as evil, or even only incomplete in his life, provides the greatest obstacle and hindrance to his path of development. The greatest obstacles are formed by those aspects which he looks back on and sees are unfinished or imperfect.

I certainly don’t wish to sound arrogant by suggesting that only perfect people can develop the capacity to perceive the spiritual world. All I am saying is that the path to spiritual perception involves a certain kind of martyrdom; for the moment we begin to be participators in the world of spirit, we look back on our life with all its imperfections and realize that these follow us like the tail follows a comet. We realize that we must carry them on with us into other lives, will have to try to resolve them, balance them out in the future; that all we blithely ignored previously and were as unaware of as the ground under our feet, now lies clearly before us as an inevitable task we must get to grips with.

It is this somewhat tragic realization, this perception of the nature of our ordinary, everyday selves, which hampers us when we try to ascend into the world of spirit. If it does not hamper us, if we do not feel burdened by the more ponderous, earnest aspects of life, we can be sure that we have not found a real path to the spirit. And even if we do not manage to get any further, this one realization is of great value, this infinitely clear and vivid perception of the evil and imperfection within ourselves. So, we can see that our very first steps of ascent into the world of spirit are accompanied by an experience of evil and imperfection.

Excerpt from: Evil Illumined through Science of the Spirit; Lecture by Rudolf Steiner, January 15, 1914.

All serious paths toward enlightenment require courage. Really? Why? It is because the first step of all of them is to know ourselves. In this blog, we have looked at various ways to know ourselves in these past years, but to progress on the spiritual path, this first step must be taken. It is inevitable. Few of us want to admit, let alone examine carefully, what evil lurks in the depths of our souls, a truly honest assessment of ourselves, so most of us do not start on the path to enlightenment.

How we manage this knowledge is painful, humbling and, ultimately, freeing. We can adopt a mood of genuine inquiry. We can focus on the motivation behind the deed, the motivation that lies deep within us. That is different than remembering the deed itself. Once we’ve thoroughly accepted that this or that inclination exists in us, we can focus our intention to rid ourselves of it.

Then it is natural to look honestly at those times when we’ve done good in the world, when we had nothing to gain for ourselves, but just did the right thing when it was in front of us. We must recognize the inclination which lies behind that, too.

Where do these inclinations come from? How do they get there? Why is there evil in the world? These are the larger questions we will be considering moving forward.

A Matter of Life and Death

Would we suffer in anguish when a loved one dies if we knew what awaited them in the spiritual world they are entering? Would we be inconsolable if we knew that they still exist, outside their physical bodies and that we will be reunited with them when we ourselves die?

When we study the human being using our methods of natural science, we have come so far that we can see the moment of conception when the sperm penetrates the egg, and we can see the moment of death when the last breath is exhaled. What natural science cannot see is where the human being is before its conception or after its last breath. Natural science has its limitations, and scientists and philosophers have all come up against the boundaries of our ability to penetrate these realms. With knowledge gained through spiritual science, however, we can experience the facts of our life before birth and after death, and when we open ourselves to the possibility, we can learn these things – we can know these things – so that this larger perspective grants us immeasurable solace.

We restore our reverence for life by understanding the life between death and a new birth. (See links below.)

We have discussed sleep and death, karma and reincarnation, heredity and destiny in several previous posts that provide much more detail than is being provided today. Today, we offer an overview, a framework, of a human life.

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

… Sleep is a helpful image for death because during sleep we are also withdrawn from the realm in which our destiny awaits for us. While we are sleeping, events in this realm continue without us, and for a while we have no influence on the course they take. Nevertheless, how we live the next day still depends on the effects of what we did the day before. In reality, our personalities are reembodied anew each morning in the world of our actions. It is as if what we were separated from during the night is spread out around us during the day. The same holds true for the actions we carried out in earlier incarnations. They are bound to us as our destiny … a human spirit can live only in the environment it has created for itself through its own actions. The ongoing course of events sees to it that when I wake in the morning, I find myself in a situation that I myself created the previous day. Similarly, my reincarnating spirit’s relationship to the objects in the surroundings sees to it that I enter an environment corresponding to my actions in the previous life.

From the above, we can form an idea of how the soul is incorporated into the overall organization of a human being. The physical body is subject to the laws of heredity. The human spirit, on the other hand, must reincarnate over and over again, and its law consists in having to carry the fruits of previous lifetimes over into the following ones. Our souls live in the present, although this life in the present is not independent of our previous lives since each incarnating spirit brings its destiny along with it from previous incarnations, and this destiny determines its present life.

What impressions our souls will be capable of receiving, which of our desires can be fulfilled, what joys and sorrows will be our lot, what other human beings we will meet—all this depends on what our actions were like in earlier incarnations of the spirit. People to whom our souls were connected in one lifetime will necessarily encounter us again in a later one because the actions that took place between us must have their consequences. Souls that have once been associated will venture into reincarnation at the same time. Thus, the life of the soul is a product of the spirit’s self-created destiny.

The course of a human life within the framework of life and death is determined in three different ways, and we are also therefore dependent on three factors that go beyond birth and death. The body is subject to the laws of heredity; the soul is subject to self-created destiny, or to use an ancient term, to its karma; and the spirit is subject to the laws of reincarnation or repeated earthly lives. The interrelationship of body, soul and spirit can also be expressed as follows: The spirit is immortal; birth and death govern our bodily existence in accordance with the laws of the physical world; and the life of the soul, which is subject to destiny, mediates between body and spirit during the course of an earthly life.

Excerpt from: Theosophy: An Introduction to the Spiritual Processes in Human Life and in the Cosmos by Rudolf Steiner.

Until we are able to experience the spiritual world, we are confined to the limits of our senses. However, within these limits, we are able to elevate our thinking to understand the concepts of the spiritual world revealed by the initiates who do experience it. Rudolf Steiner is such an initiate; he was especially adept at putting into words what he experienced firsthand in the spiritual realms. He was extremely prolific with more than 6000 books, lectures and essays contained in his complete works.

Below is a list of posts that focus on the questions of sleep and death, karma and reincarnation. Reading the excerpts from Dr. Steiner’s work in each post gives us a glimpse into the processes which are invisible to us but nevertheless exist as facts of life.

Sleep:

https://www.whoareyou.blog/blog/while-you-were-sleeping;

https://www.whoareyou.blog/blog/more-sleep;

https://www.whoareyou.blog/blog/the-stuff-of-dreams;

https://www.whoareyou.blog/blog/the-final-sleep;

Karma and Reincarnation:

https://www.whoareyou.blog/blog/love-fate-relationship;

https://www.whoareyou.blog/blog/causeoreffect;

https://www.whoareyou.blog/blog/time-after-time;

https://www.whoareyou.blog/blog/our-last-moment;

https://www.whoareyou.blog/blog/panorama-of-life;

https://www.whoareyou.blog/blog/not-so-very-instant-karma;

https://www.whoareyou.blog/blog/you-cant-always-get-what-you-want;

https://www.whoareyou.blog/blog/burning-desires;

https://www.whoareyou.blog/blog/our-karma-ourselves;

Know Thyself

At the beginning of his book, How to Know Higher Worlds: A Modern Path of Initiation, Steiner says, “A person rich in feeling and deep of soul who passes through a beautiful mountain landscape will have a different experience from one whose inner life is poor in feeling. Inner experience is the only key to the beauties of the outer world. It depends upon the inner lives we have developed whether, when we travel across the ocean, only a few inner experiences pass through our souls, or we sense the eternal language of the world spirit and understand the mysterious riddles of creation.”

Most of us would like to sense the world spirit; we would like to understand the mysterious riddles of creation. Point the way, right? Steiner goes on to say, “To develop a meaningful relationship to the outer world we must learn to work with our own feelings and ideas. The world around us is filled everywhere with the glory of God, but we have to experience the divine in our own souls before we can find it in our surroundings.”

In other words, we won’t understand the world without first understanding ourselves and what it means to experience the divine in our own souls. In today’s blog, Steiner offers an argument for getting into details rather than settling for generalities. For example, we can appreciate a beautiful plant out our window for its beauty alone. If we can name it, we will appreciate it more. If we understand how earth, water, air, and light/warmth work on a seed growing into all its component parts, we will appreciate the plant even more. We can go further: what are the components of the earth where the plant is located? Of the water? Of the air? What natural laws are in effect here? Very soon we realize how much there is to know and how little we actually do know. Then, at what altitude, in what season… We can go on and on and on.

Now visualize that the plant and all the components of its life and death have spiritual aspects, too. We can imagine how our appreciation for all of it would grow.

Being human is hard work, and it’s challenging to try to understand it, but try we must. Today we will take another look at a profound spiritual reality. A year ago, we discussed the seven members (subdivisions) of the human being. Rather than explain them again, please refer to this link and read the Steiner excerpt: https://www.whoareyou.blog/seven-members. This time, Steiner explains why it is important to know about them.

These are the seven subdivisions:

1. Physical body

2. Life body

3. Astral body

4. The “I” as the soul’s central core

5. Spirit self as transformed astral body

6. Life spirit as transformed life body

7. Spirit body as transformed physical body

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

It may seem that the subdivisions of the human constitution are based on purely arbitrary distinctions between parts within a monolithic soul life. To counter this objection, it must be emphasized that the significance of (the subdivisions above) is similar to that of the appearance of the seven colors of the rainbow when light passes through a prism. What a physicist contributes to our understanding of light by studying this process and the seven colors that result is analogous to what the spiritual scientist does for our understanding of the makeup of the human soul. The soul’s seven members are not abstract intellectual distinctions any more than are the light’s seven colors.

In both cases, the distinctions rest on the inner nature of the things themselves, the only difference being that the seven constituents of light become visible by means of an external device while the seven components of the soul become perceptible to a method of spiritual observation consistent with the nature of the human soul.

The true nature of the soul cannot be grasped without knowing about this subdivision, because the soul belongs to the transitory world by virtue of three of our constitutional components—physical body, life body and astral body—and has its roots in eternity through the other four constituent parts.

When the soul is seen as a unity, its transitory and eternal aspects are indistinguishably bound up with each other, but unless we are aware of the differentiations within it, we cannot understand its relationship to the world as a whole.

Let me use another comparison. Chemists separate water into hydrogen and oxygen, two substances that cannot be distinguished when they are united in the form of water. However, each of these elements has an identity of its own and can form compounds with other elements. Similarly, at death our three lower constitutional components unite with the makeup of the perishable world, while our four higher members unite with the eternal. Refusing to consider this differentiation within the soul is like being a chemist who refuses to learn about decomposing water into hydrogen and oxygen.

Excerpt from: Theosophy by Rudolf Steiner. 9th edition: 1918.

When our “I” acts on the astral body to purify it, our “I” is building the Spirit Self, our next higher soul level. Obviously, becoming the master of our desires and passions instead of letting them rule us is a good thing; we don’t need to know more than we already do to become a better person. But ponder for a moment what it means to know how our soul works. Through the knowledge we gain by understanding the details of our soul, we begin to see the divine laws working. We begin to “experience the divine in our own souls” as a fact rather than just a feeling. We begin to grasp the components of our own light and see how they interact with the light of the world.

The source for today’s blog, Steiner’s book, Theosophy, is widely available, so is How to Know Higher Worlds: A Modern Path of Initiation.

Basic Attitude

What if we read the news without immediately developing an opinion? Or if we met someone without immediately judging them? We are quick to define things by our opinions of them, but unless we do some real soul searching, we don’t know the source of our opinions or why we find it so important to have them. It may be in our best interest to think deeply about these questions. Steiner says that our opinions and judgments are effective barriers to progress in spiritual knowledge. Yet, if we don’t know how to open ourselves to new ways of thinking, we will never even venture toward spiritual science in the first place.

For example, spiritual science shows that human evolution is much longer than most of us think because most of us think of the human being as a physical manifestation rather than a spiritual being currently going through its physical phase. This basic premise of spiritual science is not common knowledge now, and many of us could find it easy to either ignore it or refute it. If we entertain that idea, though, we can imagine vast periods of time preceding our physical bodies and vast periods of time proceeding into a future wherein we will no longer need our physical bodies. In order to learn about the evolution of humanity and the earth and even our cosmos, “we must begin with a certain fundamental attitude of soul. In spiritual science this fundamental attitude is called the path of veneration, of devotion to truth and knowledge. Without this attitude no one can become a student (of spiritual science.)” Veneration and devotion are not characteristics of our modern culture, so where do we start?

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

Our civilization is more inclined to criticize, judge, and condemn than to feel devotion and selfless veneration. Our children criticize far more than they respect or revere. But just as surely as every feeling of devotion and reverence nurtures the soul’s powers for higher knowledge, so every act of criticism and judgment drives these powers away. This is not meant to imply anything against our civilization—our concern here is not to criticize it. After all, we owe the greatness of our culture precisely to our ability to make critical, self-confident human judgments and to our principle of “testing all and keeping the best.” Modern science, industry, transportation, commerce, law—all these would never have developed without the universal exercise of our critical faculty and standards of judgment. But the price of this gain in outer culture has been a corresponding loss in higher knowledge and spiritual life. Therefore, we must never forget that higher knowledge has to do with revering truth and insight…

In an age of criticism, ideals are degraded. Reverence, awe, adoration, and wonder are replaced by other feelings—they are pushed more and more into the background. As a result, everyday life offers very few opportunities for their development.

If we wish to become esoteric students, we must train ourselves vigorously in the mood of devotion. We must seek—in all things around us, in all our experiences—for what can arouse our admiration and respect. If I meet other people and criticize their weaknesses, I rob myself of higher cognitive power. But if I try to enter deeply and lovingly into another person’s good qualities, I gather in that force…

Each moment that we spend becoming aware of whatever derogatory, judgmental, and critical opinions still remain in our consciousness brings us closer to higher knowledge. We advance even more quickly if, in such moments, we fill our consciousness with admiration, respect, and reverence for the world and life. Anyone experienced in these things knows that such moments awaken forces in us that otherwise remain dormant. Filling our consciousness in this way opens our spiritual eyes.

Excerpt from: How to Know Higher Knowledge: A Modern Path of Initiation, Chapter I: How to Know Higher Worlds by Rudolf Steiner.

Though a simple concept to understand, feeling respect and reverence for the world and life is challenging. Nevertheless, this is a preliminary requirement regardless of the spiritual path we choose. The excerpt below from The Inner Development of Man, directly pertains to what we’ve been discussing here.

It is difficult to attain an uncritical attitude, but understanding must take the place of criticism. It suppresses the advancement of the soul if you confront your fellowman immediately with your own opinion. We must hear the other out first, and this listening is an extraordinarily effective means for the development of the soul eyes. Anybody who reaches a higher level in this direction owes it to having learned to abstain from criticizing and judging everybody and everything. How can we look understandingly into somebody's being? We should not condemn but understand the criminal's personality, understand the criminal and the saint equally well. Empathy for each and every one is required, and this is what is meant with higher, occult “listening.” Thus, if we bring ourselves with strict self-control to the point of not evaluating a fellow human being, or the rest of the world for that matter, according to our personal judgment, opinion and prejudice and instead let both work on us in silence, we have the chance to gain occult powers. Every moment during which we become determined to refrain from thinking an evil thought about a fellow human being is a moment gained.

Dr. Steiner often reminded his audiences and readers to keep an open mind when he introduced new findings. We will be moving forward this year with spiritual topics that will necessitate the openness of mind we’ve been discussing today.