A series of comments on Rudolf Steiner’s book “The Threshold of the Spiritual World” (1913, GA17).

IX. Concerning the Ego-Feeling and the Human Soul’s Capacity for Love; and the Relation of these to the Elemental World

For each chapter I try to find some condensed (line of) thoughts from the text as the basis for an article. For this chapter:

Love has an interesting position in Steiner's work. As a beginning reader of Anthroposophy you can easily overlook it, or even consider it lacking. As a young adult I found Steiner’s books cold and focused on thinking, while I was craving for a life full of warm intenseness and feelings. When I was 24 and still single, I read Steiner's autobiography while travelling in Morocco. I was surprised by the lack of passion, and lack of romantic love in his story. I stopped reading the book during that holiday, started mingling with the locals and met my first serious love. Later on when rereading the autobiography I understood Steiner's choice to keep those love related things private.

When love suddenly pops up in Steiner’s early work it sometimes feels unexpected, without very thorough explanation, always assigned a huge importance. For example, in the Philosophy of Freedom (1893), chapter 9, love is quite unexpectedly introduced1:

“Only when I follow my love for the object is it I myself who acts. I act on this level of morality, not because I acknowledge a master over me, nor outer authority, nor a so-called inner voice. I acknowledge no outer principle for my actions: love for the action. I do not test intellectually, whether my action is good or evil; I carry it out because I love it. It will be “good” when my intuition, imbued with love, stands in the right way within the intuitively experienceable world configuration; “evil” when that is not the case”

Also in the book Occult Science (1909) love has a remarkable place. Only in the last chapter, about the future of humanity, in the last two paragraphs, love is suddenly mentioned2:

“From the Spirits of Form the human being receives his independent ego. In the future this ego will harmonize with the beings of Earth, Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan through the power that is added to wisdom by the Earth evolution. This is the power of love. In earth humanity this power of love must take its beginning, and the “cosmos of wisdom” unfolds itself into a “cosmos of love.” Everything that the ego is able to unfold within itself is to become love. The exalted Sun Being Whom we are able to characterize in the description of the Christ evolution manifests Himself as the all-encompassing “archetype of love.” Thus the seed of love is planted into the innermost core of human nature. … Wisdom is the pre-condition of love; love is the result of wisdom reborn in the ego.”

In Steiner's comments on the Gospel of John (GA103, 1908) this last statement is better explained, for example:

“Let us ask:—What then is essential for love? What is essential in order that one person love another? It is this—that he be in possession of his full self-consciousness, that he be wholly independent. No one can love another in the full sense of the word if this love be not a free gift of one person to another. My hand does not love my organism. Only one who is independent, one who is not bound to the other person, can love him. To this end the human being had to become an I-being. The I had to be implanted in the threefold human body, so that the Earth might, through mankind, fulfil its mission of love. Therefore, you will understand Esoteric Christianity when it says:—Just as other forces, of which wisdom is the last, streamed down from divine beings during the Moon period, so now love streams into the Earth and the bearer of love can only be the independent I which develops by degrees in the course of the evolution of the Earth.3"

So when advancing more in Steiner's work, the position of love falls into place. Steiner talks about a ver pure form of love that can only be developed when a certain level of wisdom and individuality has been attained.

It is interesting that certain virtues, like wisdom and love, have a sequence of occurrence in evolution but also in an individual life. First, the development of the I and knowledge of the physical world go hand in hand. We can consider that to be the phase of surrender/devotion to the outer world, reflected in the sentence of the text from the chapter I discuss: Devotion/surrender is experiencing oneself in another being or process. Through knowledge and experiencing of the world, we get to know and develop ourselves. Only when we have developed a strong enough self, can we experience the other in one’s own soul. Here the reverse process of devotion/surrender takes place. We then also let someone else experience themselves in us. It is a becoming one with another, without losing oneself.

Posing devotion/surrender and love in this way, the following metaphor applies as well:

Devotion/surrender is experiencing oneself in another being or process.

I use the world/the other as a mirror to discover myself.

Love is experiencing the other in one’s own soul.

I am a mirror for the world/the other to discover itself.

And we can see the first step of Devotion/surrender as a necessary narcissistic step (Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection in a mirror) which should not be interchanged with the next step, true love. On the other hand, devotion and love, as defined here, are probably both present in a healthy romantic relationship, but also in life. Sometimes I want to lose myself in the other/the world through devotion and surrender, sometimes I need to stand my ground for the other/the world to be surrendered to me.

When entering the etheric world, Steiner says we need to start with surrender to the etheric surroundings. Only later can we start to be an individual spiritual entity. It is like the process we went through in the physical world, is now repeated on another level. Love and devotion for, and wisdom about the spiritual, developed in the physical world, are at the origins of this movement towards the etheric.

The duality arisen by the fall and subsequent duality, has created distance between us. This allowed individuals and human wisdom to arise. Once we acknowledge our spiritual shared nature, we can get closer again without losing ourselves.

Are you ready for true love?

I wrote the piece below a couple of months ago, based on the previous book I discussed, but did not post it. The chapter of the current book I am writing about, discusses the same topic. The process of re-reading and editing my own work seems fitting for the topic of these chapters, which is also about transforming the self by facing yourself.

A series of comments on Rudolf Steiner’s book “A Road to Self-Knowledge”.

Fourth Meditation

In which the Attempt is made to form a Conception of the Guardian of the Threshold

In this chapter it is explained how, if we want to enter and observe the supersensible world during meditation, we need to transform the I. This transformation is radical. Fundamentally, as individuals we exist because we experience a clear division between inner and outer, between self and world. However,

“As soon as the soul perceives the supersensible world around it, it must merge with it to a certain extent: it cannot consider itself as separate from these surroundings as it does from the outer world. Through this fact all that can be designated as our own inner world in relation to the supersensible surroundings assumes a certain character which is not easily reconcilable with the idea of inward privacy.”

At a higher level we obtain individuality through our likes and dislikes, opinions, truths and falsehoods. We are attached to this ego and did the hard work to obtain it, and we actually need it to function successfully in the physical world. However,

“There is in the soul the strongest inclination to guard the ego at all points in order not to lose one’s foothold absolutely. What the soul thus feels of necessity to be right in ordinary life, it must no longer feel when it enters supersensible surroundings. It has there to cross a threshold, where it must leave behind not only this or that precious possession, but that very being which it has until now believed itself to be. The soul must be able to say to itself: “That which until now has seemed to me to be my surest truth, I must now, on the other side of the threshold of the supersensible world, be able to consider as my deepest error.”

On the other hand, the old I should remain intact to live in the physical world, and we need to be able to live in two worlds, the supersensible, with the transformed self, and in the physical world, with the old self;

“He must not only learn to live in two different worlds, but also to live in each in a completely different way. He must not impair his sound judgment in the ordinary world of the senses and intellect, because he is compelled to apply a different kind of judgment in another world.”

During this transformation, it is said, we need to pass a threshold, where a Guardian is standing;

“Behind the outer world of ordinary life there is another. Before the threshold of this world a stern Guardian is standing, who prevents man from knowing what the laws of the supersensible world are. For all doubts and all uncertainty concerning that world are, after all, easier to bear than seeing what one must leave behind when one wishes to cross the threshold.”

In the book Occult Science, there is also a warning about the challenges of this process, stating that "from the old I just as much of living force is withdrawn as is bestowed upon the new I”, and thus the old I needs to be stable and well developed1. Also, “the human being must realize that, with the strengthening of soul powers, self-love and egotism will appear to a degree quite unknown to everyday soul-life"2.

So these steps towards the threshold are not without risk, should only be taken when ready and go hand in hand with the (moral) development of the “old I”. Steiner always said that the initiate can develop states of being that will be available for all humans in a later stage of evolution. In this piece I look at the (future) evolution of consciousness and where we are supposed to be now, and where the meeting with the Guardian is supposed to take place in this evolution, and how we can understand the related moral steps. Is this something of the far future or something we should all currently be able to do?

Planet level evolution

At the highest level we are told the earth is undergoing incarnations as well, and that the current incarnation is the fourth3. On the previous three incarnations our three bodies evolved: the physical (during old Saturn, only having mineral-like consciousness), etheric (old Sun, plant-like consciousness) and astral (old Moon, animal-like consciousness) bodies. On earth, the I is added, having waking self-consciousness. On future planets the Spirit Self (astral body transformed by the I) will be added on Jupiter, the life spirit (etheric body transformed by the I) on Venus, and spirit man (physical body transformed by the I) on Vulcan.

We can interpret this as a development from a formless universal unitary world (the spiritual and physical were not separated), and even beyond physicality, into individuals in the physical world (our current state) that can experience self and freedom, but have lost touch with the spiritual. In the future, in order to follow the ‘cosmic plan’4, the I has to be acknowledged as spiritual, and as such become a guiding principle in tune with the cosmos. Thereby connecting the physical with the spiritual, humans will eventually return towards a unitary world while keeping individuality. That sounds like a paradox, and in some esoteric traditions this return to unity is imagined as only possible by losing the self. We can call that a nostalgic attitude, and to face the unknown seemingly paradox future can be daunting. The solution may be to imagine that in a unitary world self and world are not distinguishable anymore, so the paradox only exists in our current dualistic worldview.

This double future element (being individual in a unitary world) is reminiscent of the two worlds the initiate should be able to live in when passing the threshold, as described above. The threshold is passed if the identification with the physical world is reduced, the spiritual I is experienced and acknowledged, after which the I can be guiding towards the unitary world again. So humanity is supposed to pass the threshold during the planetary earth stage. If we take a closer look at the evolution on earth, we can see how far we are (supposed to be) with that.

Earth epoch level evolution

In the first three earth epochs, there is a recapitulation of the first three planetary epochs, in which the physical, etheric and astral bodies reoccur, adjusted for earthly conditions. In the fourth Atlantean period, the implementation of the I, which is the goal of the current planetary stage, happens. The last three epochs, including the current Post-Atlantean, can be seen as a preparation for the next planetary (Jupiter) stage.

Whereas the first four epochs are more set in stone, in the last three there is more freedom. Compare it to childhood, where we develop according to biological and cultural rules/settings, and adulthood where we are more free to choose our own direction. During the Atlantean epoch, human consciousness had to be limited to the physical world, and disconnected from the spiritual, in order for a feeling of self and freedom to be possible. This came with the risk of humans losing themselves in, or identifying themselves with the physical world. The reality is that we are not just physical beings. So if we want to grow further, embedded in reality, this reality has to be acknowledged, by acknowledging the spiritual elements in our being. And this is exactly where we meet the Guardian of the threshold. To pass this threshold is the only way we can progress to the next planetary (Jupiter) stage. So the last three earth epochs can be seen as the possibility to move into this direction. Dramatically, Steiner depicts a future where only part of humanity can choose this direction, and the other part remains entangled in the physical world. Less dramatically, this apparently is how things always went: also during the other planetary stages only part of ‘humanity’ made it to the next planet.

We are currently in the Post-Atlantean earth epoch, the first epoch after the I emerged, and thus the second epoch in which the direction back towards acknowledging the spiritual nature of the I can be taken. Within this epoch, a separation will occur between humans that can pass the threshold, and those who remain identified with the physical world, with as a consequence extreme egoism. This epoch will very dramatically end with a "War of All Against All” due to this egoism. In my imagination this is due to the fact that the individualization process, when not enlightened by the spirit, leads to each individual finding its own egoistic truth, and in the end to fighting each other over these truths and egoism5. That is why the step into the supersensible, in which “That which until now has seemed to me to be my surest truth, I must now, on the other side of the threshold of the supersensible world, be able to consider as my deepest error” is so important to relativise the power of the intellect. It is the intellectual soul making the step towards the consciousness soul. In the end of the current Post-Atlantean epoch humanity will have passed the threshold, consciously or unconsciously6. To see how far we are towards this, let's now look at the 7 cultural epochs within the current Post-Atlantean epoch.

Cultural epoch level evolution

In Steiner’s framework, first three cultural epochs of recapitulation occurred, adjusting the corresponding subtle bodies and types of consciousness to the new physical and spiritual circumstances, now for the first time including the I that merged with the subtle bodies during the Atlantean epoch. What is important for my story is that during the current Germanic period, the first division into the two streams (those acknowledging the human spiritual nature and those who don't) of humans will emerge. I could not find this in Steiner’s written work, but many anthroposophists7 claim that, in accordance with Steiner’s (maybe only oral undocumented) words, humanity as a whole started to pass the threshold around 1930 (mostly unconsciously). They also claim that this process may have largely ended around 2020.

To summarize, we are in epoch 4-5-5. Planetary epoch 4: the development of the I. Earth and cultural epoch both 5: the fifth standing for the first epoch the I can establish itself as spiritual entity (Spirit Self). From a planetary standpoint, there will be an irreversible split at the next planet (Jupiter) between humans for which Spirit Self will be part of human constitution, and for those who wouldn’t. But who will pass this threshold is decided on earth. Both in the current earth epoch and the current cultural epoch there is an important step to be made: for each human there is a first indication of the direction the I will take. And we can conclude that passing the threshold is not something all humans can only do in the future, and it is not only for advanced initiates, but it is a step that is currently available and demanded from us. On the other hand, only in the next Slavic epoch (after 3500) it’s predicted that there is a first division into the two streams of humans, and only in the end of the final period (7800) the decisive war will take place. Only those humans passing the threshold consciously, will be able to be part of human evolution, eventually.

Passing the threshold and/or forming the Spirit Self

Steiner depicts the passing of the threshold as the step towards supersensible vision. On the other hand, he says there should also be a moral development if we want to make this step. In both the fifth earth epoch and fifth cultural epoch, the development of the Spirit Self is happening. This is the transformation of the astral body guided by the I. We can see this as the moral development that has to go hand in hand with the development of supersensible organs. Or can we say: the aim is the transformation of the astral body, as a consequence we may develop supersensible organs. We can then reformulate the passing of the threshold as: the acknowledgment/development of the I as a guiding spiritual principle in tune with the cosmic order. The transformation of the astral body is probably much more tangible and relevant for most people, compared to the development of supersensible organs. Most people are in dialogue with astralities such as good/bad desires, good/bad habits, good/bad decisions anyway. But to find the right direction for this transformation, knowledge of and connection with the supersensible can be crucial. Because it is there that we can reconnect the I to its origins and find the wisdom needed for guidance. Plus, the experience of the spiritual is crucial to acknowledge the spiritual.

The free I as a sharp two-edged sword

The direction towards freedom and individuality that humanity took, comes at a cost. And we cannot even blame God for it, who wanted us to become just passive cosmic mirrors (see footnote 2). Following a rebellious nature… will lead to adventures. Adventures can turn out right (the best stories of our lives shaping who we are) or wrong (damaging traumatic or deadly events). A consolation is that we do not need to leave behind or suppress any of the individual physical adventures that lead to the current I. These experiences made us unique. If we allow this uniqueness to ground and root in the universal cosmos, the cosmos will experience the rebirth it aimed for, and the eternal pattern of cosmic mirrors of repetition will be broken.

A series of comments on Rudolf Steiner’s book “The Threshold of the Spiritual World” (1913, GA17).

VI. Concerning the Astral Body and the Luciferic Beings; and the Nature of the Etheric Body

For each chapter I try to find some condensed (line of) thoughts from the text as the basis for an article. For this chapter:

It may not have that reputation, but Anthroposophy is radical. It may be hidden, like most knowledge was hidden in the old mystery cults. It may be taboo, and painful. Whoever has ears, let them hear. And if this is not your Anthroposophy, that is fine as well, there are many perspectives and approaches. I am talking about the role of the creatures known as the “devils” Lucifer and Ahriman. When we understand their role throughout history and in forming our consciousness, we understand that good and evil are not black-and-white, well-defined, universal concepts that we can just uncover and define by studying or experiencing them long or intensely enough. At the same time, however, we should relentlessly search for the good and strive towards being good in our individual lives. These two seemingly opposing perspectives (universal vs individual, spirit vs soul), however, are both present and needed, which is like allowing paradoxical, alternating elements to be part of yourself and worldview. Radical!

Both Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces contribute to the imbalance in our consciousness. Classically, we see the current influence of these forces as Ahriman pulling us towards matter (wanting us to believe that we can live without spirit), and Lucifer pulling us towards spirit (wanting us to believe that we can live without matter). What they have in common is that they do not want a balanced development, with both spiritual and material elements, for humanity. Throughout history these polar forces had different roles than they now have, at different points in time, with different intensities.

Lucifer is at the root

The best known of their actions is probably the seduction of Lucifer that led to the fall of mankind in paradise. In Steiner’s cosmology, this was a transition from a plant like consciousness, a dreamless sleep, without clear difference between inner world and outer world, towards the animal and later on human like consciousness. The centralised inner life that arose in humans and animals led to a transition from a unitary experience of the world towards the split between mind and matter, alternating life on earth and life in heaven, man and woman, right and wrong, and yes, good and evil (aka the eating from the tree of knowledge).

That is why we can see that this event has happened during the third earth epoch (Lemuria), where humans made the transition from only having physical and etheric bodies (like plants) towards the implementation of an astral body. It was also the time when the alternating phases of life on earth and life in the spiritual domain, and thus reincarnation, started. Lemuria was a recapitulation of the evolution during the previous planetary phase on the old moon, when the astral body was implemented. If we compare beings with astral body to those without (stuck to the earth with roots, without a brain), it becomes clear that adding the astral body is a process towards individualisation. Individual freedom to move around but also the individualised inner representation of the world and the ability to act thereupon, through the brain.

“The whole of evolution depends first upon the severance of independent being from surrounding life; the environment then imprints itself upon this severed being as though by reflection, and then this separated entity develops further independently.” (Steiner, Occult Science)

In Steiner's book Occult Science we read that during the old Moon, humans first had a consciousness reflecting the cosmos. When organs of perception developed, images were not just reflected, but entered, leading to individualised dreamy picture-consciousness, alternated with the purely reflective consciousness. This development came under the influence of Luceric forces that pulled away from the reflective consciousness and towards the internalized picture consciousness1. This extent of individuation was not according to the cosmic plan and the beginning of the 'fall’ of mankind.

At this point it is not completely clear to me whether “the fall” is the separation process as a whole, or the pull from Lucifer towards an unhealthy separation. It is also not clear whether the separation process would have happened without the pull of Lucifer, whether the separation was not according to the cosmic plan, or whether only the extreme separation was the work of Lucifer against ‘the plan’. To me intuitively it feels as if the latter is true, but Steiner at a couple of occasions seems to say that humans should have remained "passive mirrors of the cosmos” according to the cosmic plan. In that sense the whole separation and individuation process can be considered ‘the fall’.

It resulted in a consciousness alternating between a feeling of being one with the universe (the reflecting consciousness) and a feeling towards being an individual (the internalized pictures). These alternating states lead to an alternating “bodily composition” similar to what we currently know as sleep and death vs waking and life.

In the Lemurian and beginning of the Atlantean period on earth, this process was recapitulated, now adjusted to earthly conditions. Humans had a dreamlike picture-consciousness during daytime, and a cosmic awareness during the night. So we see that until this point the Luciferic forces pushed us towards becoming free individuals, the extent to which was not according to the cosmic plan. The rebellious nature of Lucifer may have been "bad” for the cosmic plan, currently we can not think of anything more valuable than the basic elements Lucifer gave us (individuality and freedom). It seems like after the fall the cosmic plan was adjusted/adapted. When we choose to not just mirror the cosmos, we basically created a microcosmos within ourselves; an individualised image of the macrocosmos. The development of this microcosmos and the relation/balance between microcosmos and macrocosmos is what became the next main line in history. We became active players in the cosmic plan.

Enter Ahriman

With consciousness alternating between microcosmos and macrocosmos during the Atlantean period, the next step was a further breaking free of this microcosmos. The alternating consciousness stopped this breaking free because the microcosmos was constantly confronted with its maker, the macrocosmos. Therefore, consciousness was limited to the microcosmos in the next phase of evolution. We can see this as the breaking away from our spiritual origin, which was done with the help of Ahrimanic forces that started during the Atlantean period2 . Daytime consciousness became clearer, and the night slowly changed towards the unconscious state we experience today. Moreover, the microcosmos, the individualised image inside humans, was imposed on the outside world:

“The pictures which man formerly perceived as colour pictures floating freely in space, wrap themselves, so to speak, round the objects. One might say they are laid over them, they form the surface and seem to be upon the objects, whereas formerly they seemed to float in freedom. In consequence, they have become the expression of the form; what man earlier had within himself has come out and fastened itself on the objects and through this he has come to his present waking day-consciousness."3

Now the microcosmos had conquered the macrocosmos. With the help of Ahriman, the outside world had become limited to our picture/image of it. The individual was born.

In the text I discuss here, we read that “we learn to know spiritual beings who bring about this independent life of the reflected image of the spiritual world”, which are the Ahrimanic beings. So there is an interesting interplay and sequence of Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces that gave rise to our feeling of an individual free I.

Luciferic forces wanted us to believe that only the inner picture representation of the world is real (Idealism). Ahrimanic forces wanted us to believe that only the objects with the pictures wrapped around them (this is the way we observe the world) are real (Materialism). The inner pictures, initially inspired by Lucifer, are abstract representations of the world. Ahrimanic forces imposed these abstractions upon the world, making us believe the material world through an abstract lens is the real and only world.

Considering the historical perspective going back all the way to the old Moon, it becomes clear that our current perspective on the world is really only one side of the coin. Initially consciousness was alternating between individualized and cosmic. Only the individualized consciousness remained, during the cosmic periods we slowly lost consciousness (we now call this sleep and death).

We can apply this knowledge to our current state of consciousness. The difficulty is that we are a product of this evolution: we emerged as "selves” in this individualized part of consciousness. Thus our perspective is originally limited, by purposeful design, to this part of consciousness. The way we observe the world during waking is the product of the individuation and abstraction that has taken place inside us. By limiting our inner life to abstractions, and by imposing the inner abstraction on the outer world, we lost connection with our original inner selves and with the original outer world.

The Ahrimanic beings “desire to give, as it were, a kind of permanent existence to a sense-bound thinking within the physical world”. That would be a path where the microcosmos loses contact with its roots and full potential. Once the individualised image of the world, and the individual, the I, is strong enough, it can start to become conscious of the macrocosmos again. The meditations that Steiner describes can be considered a starting point towards opening consciousness beyond the individual. During these meditations we can let the individualized image of the world go, without losing consciousness. In this way we can again develop an alternating consciousness and embed the microcosmos back in the macrocosmos where it belongs, where it can continue to grow.

A series of comments on Rudolf Steiner’s book “The Threshold of the Spiritual World” (1913, GA17).

V. Concerning Reincarnation and Karma; Man's Astral Body and the Spiritual World; and Ahrimanic Beings

In the living meditation group we meditate for two weeks on each chapter of this book, and I try to find some condensed (line of) thoughts as the basis for daily meditation. For this chapter:

The inner seed being containing karma, grows a new astral body in the spiritual realm, and chooses a new etheric and physical body, plus environment, for the growth of this seed to take place through its roots into the physical world. Once the body is there, the seed occurs now in our psychology as the archetype of the higher self. This is the archetype of the individual, independent, but embedded creator (in that sense the seed is a good metaphor). The lower self (ego) is a single manifestation of, and inspired by, this archetypal seed self. After death, the fruits of this particular manifestation feed into the seed, the archetype, thereby changing the karma of the following manifestation, the next life. So the spiritual seed shapes physical life, but physical life also contributes to shaping the spiritual seed.

This is reminiscent of Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields, which are formative for life, but also formed by life. And of Whitehead’s mental pole, shaping events but also integrating past experiences. The single manifestation is not just passively following a universal blueprint, but the manifestation is needed to initially create and further on fine-tune the universal. So the universal is the seed of the particular, but in the particular the universal seed grows for the next manifestation.

The birth and death cycle at the physical plane is similar. A seed grows into a plant, the experience of the plant influences the future generations: the survival and successful and specific reproduction allows the particular genetic makeup of the seed to continue to the next generations. So here also the particular manifestation of the species has influence on the species as a whole (the archetype).

Whereas in animals and plants the single manifestation influences the species, each human can be considered a species of their own (and thus having its own archetype), because the fruits of a life remain separated in an ongoing seed shaping the next life. This is opposed to animals that in Steiner’s view have no individual soul, but a group soul per species, in which the individual souls merge after death.

At the etheric and astral planes, similar cycles take place. These cycles meet in the manifestation of a being consisting of these multiple levels. When trying to condense this chapter into a couple of sentences or ideas, the need for a visual representation came up. The process can be visualized by multiple circles, each representing a single level (physical, spiritual, etheric, astral), meeting each other in the manifestation of the multilayered body. Limited by the 2d plane that would be two circles meeting each other (representing 2 levels):

The invisible part of the circle (the backside, or in 3d the other side of the sphere) represents the invisible path in the spiritual world after death. While sketching and playing with this and similar figures,

a memory popped up of an image I created during my mathematics studies. During that period I wrote scripts in statistical software to detect so-called “strange attractors”. It turned out they are a useful metaphor for the karma cycle, as I will explain below.

Mathematically, these shapes are for example derived from discrete formulas/functions mapping a point with two coordinates (x1, y1) on the plane to another point on the plane (x2, y2), and using this next point as the input for the function creating the next iteration (x3, y4) etc. If these systems behave chaotic, meaning unpredictable in the long term, due to sensitivity to initial conditions (the starting point on the plane), the trace they make on the plane (or on any dimension) is called a strange attractor. These traces tend to show remarkable creative, organic, artistic shapes. Fairly simple functions can have these properties. I searched the space of second order polynomials:

To get from the first point (x1, y1) to the next (x2, y2):

x2 = a+ b*x1 + c*y1 + d*x1*y1 + e*x1*x1 + f*y1*y1

y2 = g+ h*x1 + i*y1 + j*x1*y1 + k*x1*x1 + l*y1*y1 (* meaning multiplication).

So a search space of 12 parameters a,b,c, ... , l. I randomly searched this space and if the points had some chaotic characteristics I plotted them and checked it for "beauty". In this manner I was able to create endless amounts of remarkable images that for me had an artistic-organic flavor, see this collection for example. I printed some on A0 format and they surrounded me on my walls during this time (and one still does). The one that popped in my memory:

was created using the 12 parameters 0.30478249, 0.30064481, -0.70510761, 0.50646577, 0.86407906, 0.13304429, -0.08837714, 0.54857723, 0.57625476, 0.15865988, -0.62869253, and -0.69394997. What is depicted are 10,000 iterations of the function.

What is interesting with these processes is the chaotic behavior. Once all parameters and the starting point are known, all following points can be exactly calculated so the process is 100% deterministic. In practice however, when real-life processus are modelled that have these properties, the initial condition can never exactly be determined (or some parameters), which results in unpredictable behavior after a couple of iterations. That is why the weather (a chaotic system) is predictable only in the short term. Thus, while in theory these systems are 100% deterministic, in practice they are 100% random in the long run but still clustering around a pattern. So the end pattern will always be the same, in case of the strange attractor, but the particular path all points will go to shape the attractor cannot be determined, if the starting point cannot be determined exactly.

This partially deterministic partially random behavior is seen a lot in nature and it may explain why the shapes resulting from these systems look organic. DNA for example gives exact instructions to cells, that does not change during a lifetime. Within this DNA (and the etheric body) the archetypical shape of the plant is coded (Goethe’s Urphänomenon). The exact manifestation of the plant however is influenced by a lot of random events, giving rise to a unique manifestation of the archetype. It will always be a single occurrence of that plant species though.

This is also the way we can look at the seed that contains our karma. The outlines of our life are there (the strange attractor): it will always contain the elements needed by that karma. The particular path someone walks in his/her life is not deterministic (giving rise to a certain level of freedom). If karma is not processed and the same good and bad things happen as in the previous life, the next life will be very similar. In that case it is really just another manifestation of the same formula. This is what is referred to in Eastern traditions as the endless cycle of suffering and karma. However in practice there will always be changes in a particular life, new lessons learned, old mistakes corrected, that will influence the growth of the karma (the equation) for the new life. The more karma is resolved the less we are determined by the parameters and starting point of the equation. This is the direction towards becoming the higher self archetype, becoming the free creator, enabling the free shaping of a life form instead of the seemingly free but eventually deterministic clustering around old patterns. Starting with shaping our own life instead of endless resolving old and creating new karma.

As the almighty creator of the image above I checked if random perturbations of the corresponding parameters would lead to variations in the image as well. Changing the archetype and karma, so to speak. Interestingly, these perturbations did make the shape vary, but the basic characteristics remained, as you can see here, and in the image below. And for around half of the perturbations the points did not remain in orbit and went off to infinity of converged to a single point. The archetype, the attractor, turned out to be a single manifestation of a larger level archetype. I can only show manifestations of that archetype, not the archetype itself. By changing our karma we can change our life, but we will always remain humans. As individual humans we all have our individual archetype, as if a species, but above that there is still the universal human archetype that connects us. What does that archetype look like?

III. Concerning Man's Etheric Body and the Elemental World

In the living meditation group we meditate for two weeks on each chapter of this book, and I try to find a condensed thought as the basis for daily meditation. For this chapter the sentences were:

The following is translated from the original Dutch version.

The paintings of H.R. Giger (1940-2014, a Swiss visual artist) played an important role in my life. When I was looking for images to accompany this chapter, I came across him. I’ll try to explain both.

Fear played virtually no role in my childhood. It was “paradise-like”: we grew up in the municipality of Schermer, about 5 meters below sea level at the bottom of the drained Schermeer lake. It was a polder surrounded by the elements, plants, and animals. The people there knew little evil: my parents never argued, and I can still clearly remember the only time my mother cried, a major exception. I attended primary school in the village of Driehuizen (Threehouses), in a class with three children, one of whom was my best friend. We had an old-fashioned teacher who knew everything and taught us a lot. In village life, the evil of the outside world was virtually absent. I can clearly remember someone from the village getting a divorce, which was a rare occurrence, and that one evening my mother took me along as she went to support this woman. The emotions she expressed were completely new to me, as if from another planet. Illness, death, poverty, crime, drugs, addiction, misery—it was practically nonexistent. Only on weekends we sometimes went shopping in the city of Alkmaar and I was always fascinated by the people from this other planet.

When I was 12, we moved to a village on the other side of Alkmaar, where my father worked as a cook at an anthroposophical institute for people with intellectual disabilities. The transition from this sheltered childhood to a Waldorf school with children of alternative, liberated parents, in the artists’ village of Bergen, at the institute with these remarkable people, was enormous. But I had a deep desire to experience the world in all its craziness and drama, with a special passion for the fringes of society and humanity.

I don’t remember how, but one evening my brother and I ended up at the house of a partially mentally disabled colleague of my father’s, who lived semi-independently. He wanted to watch a movie with us. At that time, our television was still limited to three channels and maybe one children’s program a day. That evening we saw the first horror film of our lives: Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979). My father’s colleague didn’t quite realize we were probably too young for this film. We loved it. However, we couldn’t sleep well for a few days. I found out much later that all the surreal/horror elements in the film were designed by H.R. Giger. Hello underworld, hello fear!

“The spiritual world, before it is perceived and recognised by the soul, is to the latter something quite strange and unfamiliar, the qualities of which have nothing in common with what the soul is able to learn through its experiences in the physical world. Thus it comes about that the soul may be confronted with the spiritual world and may see in it an absolute void. The soul may feel as though it were looking into an infinite, blank, desolate abyss.”

“Now when the soul searches, in the sphere of thought, for reasons for disproving and for evidence against the spiritual world, it does so, not because those reasons are conclusive in themselves, but because it is seeking for a kind of narcotic to dull the feeling just described. People do not deny the existence of the spiritual world, or the possibility of attaining knowledge of it, as a result of being able to prove its non-existence, but because they desire to fill their souls with thoughts which will deceive them and rid them of their dread of the spiritual world … “Materialism as a psychic phenomenon of fear” is an important chapter in the science of the soul.”

A poster of the painting Li I (See image below) hung there for years in my room when I was still living with my parents (I was 15-18 years old). This image shows a lot of my subconscious from that time. My sheltered childhood had the downside that something was missing from my life. The reverse side was missing. Because of this lack, I was extremely attracted to this other side around this age: I wanted to live big and exciting, to feel the drama of life, and yes, that included to look evil/unknown in the eyes.

This manifested itself in my wild friends from Amsterdam, my adventures in the hippie colony Ruigoord, and the accompanying experiments with hallucinogens. Taking hallucinogens can be seen as a kind of self-initiation, with many risks involved. You enter the spiritual world without any preparation, with a self and a thinking/feeling/willing that are still very fragile at that age. Because of this fragility, you are even less able to resist and you lose yourself completely in the chaos that arises. Your conception of the world is completely turned upside down, and with it, your conception of yourself, and your experience of yourself, giving you the feeling that your old self is disappearing, even though you are conscious. The only way to survive at that moment is total surrender and trust.

Looking back, you could say that my desire for the other side of life was partly a longing for the spiritual world. However, society didn’t offer me this insight, not the institutions/community, not the helping hand to encourage and guide me in this. I think a lot of young people’s escape behavior boils down to this, and it’s good to see that nowadays there’s much more available to make this connection. Where for us only listening to a techno beat on pills in a squat was available, there are now endless options (ecstatic dance and breathwork, to name a few), completely sober, to come together and gain spiritual experiences that compensate for “material life.”

“Now in his ordinary consciousness man calls himself “ I,” signifying the being which presents itself in his physical body. The healthy life of his soul in the world of the senses depends on his thus recognising himself as a being separated from the rest of the world. That healthy psychic life would be interrupted if he characterised any other events or beings of the outer world as part of his I. When man realises himself as an etheric being in the elemental world, things are different. Then his own I blends with certain occurrences and beings around him. The etheric human being has to find himself in that which is not his inner being, in the same sense as “inner” is conceived in the physical world. In the elemental world there are forces, occurrences, and beings which, although in certain respects part of the outer world, must yet be considered as belonging to one's own I.”

Probably because I came into contact with hallucinogens at a relatively young age, I experienced something a few months after such an experience that I’ve never been able to explain. During that time, through certain conversations, I could enter a state resembling one of those hallucinogenic trips, as if doors were opening to an endlessly creative (but chaotic and partly frightening) world. This was very similar to the description a schizophrenic friend gave of his experiences. One evening, after such a conversation and in such a state, I felt as if something had left my being. It was shocking, and I literally felt like a zombie. The world did enter, but it was as if the experience wasn’t entirely individualized. As if I myself had partly disappeared. I didn’t dare tell anyone and could still function. A week later, after another such conversation, I lay in bed and had a kind of cosmic experience in which I felt what had left returning to me. This ended with a clear image of a golden skull, complete again. I was infinitely grateful and happy. Looking back now, with a knowledge of anthroposophy, I can imagine that my I (or a part of it, if we can even call it that) needed some time to be alone. I know that the astral body remains connected to the I, but if the astral body were to disappear from me along with the I, I would lose consciousness. It could also be purely physical if part of my brain wasn’t functioning properly for a while. If anyone can clarify this for me, please do!

After this experience, I didn’t use hallucinogens for a while and felt fear of that world. I knew quite a few people who lived with a similar fear of this world (due to similar experiences during or after a trip), and still do to this day, even developing anxious personality traits. I wanted to slay this dragon and not live in fear, so some time afterward I took hallucinogens one more time, and then gratefully made peace with that side of existence. Being able to function during such a trip through total trust, surrender, and acceptance, and the beauty and creativity of that world, taught me a lot. It also resembles Steiner’s description of how to endure as an individual when entering the spiritual world. I see this as an experience that can open doors for some people at a certain point in life where it might be needed. It wouldn’t be the way for me to approach this world now, because there is too little control and too much risk and adverse effects.

“As etheric human beings we are woven into the elemental essence of the world. In the physical world we have our thoughts, with which we are so bound up that we may look upon them as forming a constituent part of our I. But there are forces, occurrences, and so forth which act as intimately upon the inner nature of the etheric human being as thoughts do in the physical world; and which do not behave like thoughts, but are like beings living with and in the soul. Therefore clairvoyance needs a stronger inner force than that which the soul possesses for the purpose of maintaining its own independence in the face of its thoughts. And the essential preparation for true clairvoyance consists in so strengthening and invigorating the soul inwardly, that it can be conscious of itself as an individual being, not only in the presence of its own thoughts, but also when the forces and beings of the elemental world enter the field of its consciousness as if they were a part of its own being.”

“… he has a quite comprehensible dread of recognising his spiritual environment, and he—unconsciously—has recourse to the illusion that the spiritual world does not exist or cannot be known. This illusion delivers him from his instinctive dread of the growing together or blending of his own individual essence, or I-being, with an actual outer spiritual world.”

When I look back at Giger's paintings now, I see them as an embodiment of the other side of life I longed for growing up. Interestingly, this other side has a strong dark element. As children, we are raised with rules of what is and isn't allowed (i.e., what is good and bad), and the rules of society follow on top of that. When you become independent for the first time as a young adult, elements of resistance to these rules often arise. This is a longing for freedom! Freedom also means determining for yourself what is good and evil, and this can mean letting go of imposed norms for a period of time. A similar process takes place on the spiritual path. On the other side, we must be able to see the greatest lie as truth, and therefore also the greatest good as evil. Only from this ultimate freedom can I develop an authentic will and voluntarily begin to resonate with what is, so that I feel part of a larger body without losing myself.

“Clairvoyant consciousness finds in the elemental world real beings which up to a certain point have independence, just as physical consciousness finds thoughts in the physical world which are unreal and have no independence. Growing familiarity with the elemental world leads to seeing these partially independent beings in closer connection with each other. Just as someone may first look upon the limbs of a physical human body as partially independent, and afterwards acknowledge them to be parts of the body as a whole, so to clairvoyant consciousness are the several beings of the elemental world embraced within one great spiritual body, of which they are living members. In the further course of clairvoyant experience that body comes to be recognised as the elemental, supersensible, etheric body of the earth. Within the earth's etheric body an etheric human being feels himself to he a member of a whole.”

III. Concerning Man's Etheric Body and the Elemental World

In the living meditation group we meditate for two weeks on each chapter of this book, and I try to find a condensed thought as the basis for daily meditation. For this chapter the sentences were:

De schilderijen van HR Giger (1940-2014, een Zwitserse beeldend kunstenaar) speelden een belangrijke rol in mijn leven. Toen ik zocht naar beelden voor bij dit hoofdstuk, kwam ik bij hem uit. Ik zal beide proberen uit te leggen.

Angst speelde vrijwel geen rol in mijn kindertijd. Het was "Paradijselijk": we groeiden op in de gemeente Schermer, ca 5 meter onder de zeespiegel op de bodem van het drooggelegde scher meer. Het was polder omringd door de elementen, planten, dieren. De mensen daar kenden weinig kwaad: mijn ouders hadden nooit ruzie, en ik kan mij de enige keer dat mijn moeder huilde nog goed herinneren, als grote uitzondering. Ik zat op de basisschool in het dorp Driehuizen, in een klas met drie kinderen, waarvan een mijn beste vriend, en we hadden een ouderwetse schoolmeester die alles wist en ons veel leerde. In het dorpsleven kwam het kwaad van de buitenwereld vrijwel niet in zicht. Ik kan mij goed herinneren dat iemand uit het dorp ging scheiden, wat een hoge uitzondering was, en dat mijn moeder mij op een avond meenam toen ze deze vrouw ging bijstaan. De emoties die ze uitte waren voor mij geheel nieuw, als van een andere planeet. Ziekte, dood, armoede, criminaliteit, drugs, verslaving, ellende, het bestond vrijwel niet. Alleen in het weekend gingen we soms boodschappen doen in de stad Alkmaar en ik keek altijd mijn ogen uit naar de mensen van deze andere planeet.

Toen ik 12 was, verhuisden we naar een dorp aan de andere kant van Alkmaar, waar mijn vader op een antroposofisch instituut voor mensen met een verstandelijke beperking als kok werkte. De overgang van deze beschermde jeugd, naar een vrije school met kinderen van alternatieve, vrijgevochten ouders, in het kunstenaarsdorp Bergen, op het instituut met deze bijzondere mensen, was enorm. Maar ik had een groot verlangen de wereld te leren kennen in al haar gekheid en drama, met een bijzondere passie voor de rafelrand van de samenleving en mensheid.

Ik weet niet meer hoe, maar op een avond belandden mijn broer en ik in het huis van een verstandelijk beperkte collega van mijn vader, die half zelfstandig woonde. Hij wilde een film met ons kijken. Televisie was voor ons op dat moment nog beperkt geweest tot drie kanalen en misschien een kinderprogramma per dag. Die avond hebben we de eerste horrorfilm van ons leven gezien: Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979). De collega van mijn vader had niet helemaal door dat wij waarschijnlijk te jong voor deze film waren. Wij vonden het fantastisch. Echter we konden er een paar dagen slecht van slapen. Ik kwam er veel later achter dat alle surrealistische/horror-elementen in de film door HR Giger werden vormgegeven. Hallo onderwereld, hallo angst!

“The spiritual world, before it is perceived and recognised by the soul, is to the latter something quite strange and unfamiliar, the qualities of which have nothing in common with what the soul is able to learn through its experiences in the physical world. Thus it comes about that the soul may be confronted with the spiritual world and may see in it an absolute void. The soul may feel as though it were looking into an infinite, blank, desolate abyss.”

“Now when the soul searches, in the sphere of thought, for reasons for disproving and for evidence against the spiritual world, it does so, not because those reasons are conclusive in themselves, but because it is seeking for a kind of narcotic to dull the feeling just described. People do not deny the existence of the spiritual world, or the possibility of attaining knowledge of it, as a result of being able to prove its non-existence, but because they desire to fill their souls with thoughts which will deceive them and rid them of their dread of the spiritual world … “Materialism as a psychic phenomenon of fear” is an important chapter in the science of the soul.”

Er hing jarenlang een poster van het schilderij Li I (zie afbeelding hieronder) in mijn kamer, toen ik nog bij mijn ouders woonde (ik was 15-18 jaar). Deze afbeelding laat veel van mijn onderbewuste van die tijd zien. Mijn beschermde jeugd had als keerzijde dat er iets ontbrak aan mijn leven. De keerzijde ontbrak. Door dit gebrek werd ik extreem aangetrokken tot deze keerzijde rond deze leeftijd: ik wilde groots en meeslepend leven, het drama van het leven voelen, en ja, daarbij hoort ook het kwaad/onbekende in de ogen kijken.

Dit kwam tot uiting in mijn wilde vrienden uit Amsterdam, mijn avonturen in de hippie kolonie Ruigoord, en de bijbehorende experimenten met hallucinogenen. Het nemen van hallucinogenen kan je zien als een soort zelf-initiatie, met alle risico's van dien. Je stapt in de geestelijke wereld zonder enige voorbereiding, met een ik en een denken/voelen/willen dat op die leeftijd nog erg fragiel zijn. Door die fragiliteit kun je nog minder weerstand bieden en verlies je jezelf totaal in de chaos die ontstaat. Je conceptie van de wereld wordt totaal overhoop gehaald, en daardoor ook de conceptie van jezelf, en het beleven van jezelf, waardoor je het gevoel krijgt dat je oude zelf verdwijnt, terwijl je wel bewust bent. De enige manier om je staande te houden op dat moment is een totale overgave en vertrouwen.

Terugkijkend zou je kunnen zeggen dat mijn verlangen naar de keerzijde van het leven deels een verlangen naar de geestelijke wereld was. Echter de wereld bood mij niet dit inzicht, niet de instituten/gemeenschap, niet de helpende hand, om mij hierin te stimuleren en begeleiden. Ik denk dat veel vluchtgedrag van jongeren hierop neerkomt, en het is goed om te zien dat tegenwoordig er wel veel meer aanwezig is om deze verbinding te maken. Waar wij alleen met pillen na middernacht in een kraakpand op een techo dreun de eenheid konden vinden, zijn er nu eindeloze opties (ecstatic dance en ademwerk om maar wat te noemen), compleet nuchter, om samen te komen en spirituele ervaringen op te doen die het “materiële leven” compenseren.

“Now in his ordinary consciousness man calls himself “ I,” signifying the being which presents itself in his physical body. The healthy life of his soul in the world of the senses depends on his thus recognising himself as a being separated from the rest of the world. That healthy psychic life would be interrupted if he characterised any other events or beings of the outer world as part of his I. When man realises himself as an etheric being in the elemental world, things are different. Then his own I blends with certain occurrences and beings around him. The etheric human being has to find himself in that which is not his inner being, in the same sense as “inner” is conceived in the physical world. In the elemental world there are forces, occurrences, and beings which, although in certain respects part of the outer world, must yet be considered as belonging to one's own I.”

Waarschijnlijk omdat ik op vrij jonge leeftijd in aanraking kwam met hallucinogenen, heb ik een paar maanden na zo’n ervaring iets meegemaakt wat ik nooit heb kunnen verklaren. Ik kon in die tijd door bepaalde gesprekken te voeren in een stemming komen die leek op zo’n hallucinogene trip, alsof er deuren open gingen richting een eindeloos creatieve (maar chaotische en deels beangstigende) wereld. Dit leek erg op de beschrijving die een schizofrene vriend deed van zijn belevingswereld. Op een avond na zo’n gesprek en in zo’n stemming, had ik het gevoel alsof er iets uit mijn wezen vertrok. Het was shockerend en ik voelde mij letterlijk als een zombie. De wereld kwam wel binnen maar het was alsof de ervaring niet geheel geïndividualiseerd werd. Alsof ikzelf dus deels weg was. Ik durfde dit tegen niemand te vertellen en kon nog wel functioneren. Na een week, na weer zo’n gesprek, lag ik in bed en had ik een soort kosmische ervaring waarin ik datgene wat weg was weer in mij voelde terugkomen. Dit eindigde met een helder beeld van een gouden schedel waarvan de inhoud weer compleet was. Ik was eindeloos dankbaar en gelukkig. Nu terugkijkend met kennis van de antroposofie, kan ik mij bedenken dat mijn ik (of een deel daarvan, als we daarvan kunnen spreken) een tijdje op zichzelf nodig had. Ik weet dat het astraal lichaam verbonden blijft met het ik, maar als het astraal lichaam samen met het ik uit mij zou verdwijnen, dan zou ik het bewustzijn verliezen. Als iemand mij hier opheldering over kan geven, graag!

Na deze ervaring heb ik een tijd geen drugs gebruikt en voelde ik angst voor die wereld. Ik kende aardig wat mensen die met een soortgelijke angst voor deze wereld leefden (door soortgelijke ervaringen tijdens of na een trip), en dat tot de dag van vandaag doen, en zelfs angstige karaktertrekken hebben ontwikkeld. Ik wilde deze draak toch verslaan en niet in angst leven, en heb een tijd daarna nog één keer hallucinogeen genomen, en toen dankbaar vrede gesloten met die kant van het bestaan. Het kunnen functioneren tijdens zo’n trip door een totaal vertrouwen, overgave en acceptatie, en de schoonheid en creativiteit van die wereld, heeft me veel geleerd. Het lijkt ook op Steiner's beschrijving van hoe je stand kunt houden als individu wanneer je de geestelijke wereld betreed. Ik zie dit als een ervaring die voor sommige mensen deuren kan openen op een bepaald moment in het leven waar het wellicht nodig was. Het zou voor mij nu niet de weg zijn om deze wereld te benaderen, omdat er te weinig controle en teveel risico en nadelige effecten zijn.

“As etheric human beings we are woven into the elemental essence of the world. In the physical world we have our thoughts, with which we are so bound up that we may look upon them as forming a constituent part of our I. But there are forces, occurrences, and so forth which act as intimately upon the inner nature of the etheric human being as thoughts do in the physical world; and which do not behave like thoughts, but are like beings living with and in the soul. Therefore clairvoyance needs a stronger inner force than that which the soul possesses for the purpose of maintaining its own independence in the face of its thoughts. And the essential preparation for true clairvoyance consists in so strengthening and invigorating the soul inwardly, that it can be conscious of itself as an individual being, not only in the presence of its own thoughts, but also when the forces and beings of the elemental world enter the field of its consciousness as if they were a part of its own being.”

“… he has a quite comprehensible dread of recognising his spiritual environment, and he—unconsciously—has recourse to the illusion that the spiritual world does not exist or cannot be known. This illusion delivers him from his instinctive dread of the growing together or blending of his own individual essence, or I-being, with an actual outer spiritual world.”

Als ik de schilderijen van Giger nu weer terugzie zie ik er een belichaming in van de keerzijde van het leven waar ik zo naar verlangde toen ik opgroeide. Het is interessant dat deze keerzijde een sterk duister element heeft. Als kind worden we opgevoed met regels van wat wel en niet mag (dus wat goed en slecht is), en de (spel)regels van de samenleving komen daar nog bij. Als je als jongvolwassene voor het eerst zelfstandig bent, dan ontstaan er vaak elementen van verzet tegen deze regels. Dit is een verlangen naar vrijheid! Vrijheid is ook het zelf bepalen van wat goed en kwaad is, en dit kan betekenen dat je voor een bepaalde tijd de opgelegde normen moet loslaten. Op het spirituele pad vindt een vergelijkbaar proces plaats. Aan gene zijde moeten we de grootste leugen als waarheid, en dus ook het grootste goed als kwaad kunnen zien. Alleen vanuit deze ultieme vrijheid kan ik een authentieke wil ontwikkelen en vrijwillig beginnen te resoneren met wat is, zodat ik mij een deel van een groter lichaam voel zonder mijzelf te verliezen.

“Clairvoyant consciousness finds in the elemental world real beings which up to a certain point have independence, just as physical consciousness finds thoughts in the physical world which are unreal and have no independence. Growing familiarity with the elemental world leads to seeing these partially independent beings in closer connection with each other. Just as someone may first look upon the limbs of a physical human body as partially independent, and afterwards acknowledge them to be parts of the body as a whole, so to clairvoyant consciousness are the several beings of the elemental world embraced within one great spiritual body, of which they are living members. In the further course of clairvoyant experience that body comes to be recognised as the elemental, supersensible, etheric body of the earth. Within the earth's etheric body an etheric human being feels himself to he a member of a whole.”

A series of comments on Rudolf Steiner’s book “The Threshold of the Spiritual World” (1913, GA17).

II. Concerning Knowledge of the Spiritual World

In the living meditation group we meditate for two weeks on each chapter of this book, and I try to find a condensed thought as the basis for daily meditation. For this chapter the sentence was:

Where can we find these memories? A dream, a sigh, a stranger’s look, the wind, the rain, the ocean, the mountains, loved ones, hated ones. They can all invoke a mood or images resembling faraway places or events we never visited or experienced.

But also: much closer! You are spirit! Remember who you are

“… if the I is to observe itself, it cannot simply surrender itself; it must, through inner activity, first lift its being out of its own depths in order to have a consciousness of it. With the perception of the I, with self-contemplation, an inner activity of the I begins … In what fills the consciousness soul, the hidden enters unveiled into the innermost temple of the soul. Yet it appears there only like a drop out of the ocean of all-pervading spirituality. Here, however, man must first take hold of this spirituality. He must recognize it in himself, then he will be able to find it also in its manifestations."1

I am spirit. But also my thoughts are faint shades of actually living spiritual beings! What we experience as thoughts are dead footprints of their activity. These beings can incarnate with our help, and become alive, creating “living thinking”:

“When we think, we are seemingly quite alone within ourselves; nevertheless beings of a spiritual nature are active with us in our thoughts, beings still higher and more significant than those active in our speech. More lies in these things than in a whole world-history. Through them much can be explained. Let us consider a thought within us. Behind this thought a spiritual being is present. If we imagine ourselves enveloped on all sides by the body of a spiritual being, we can realise that a thought is only the expression of the body of the spiritual being working into us. Every time a thought flashes through our soul it is an impression, a kind of foot-print of a higher spiritual being, just as if we were walking over damp ground, leaving footprints, and were to say: ‘Here a person walked’. This spiritual being is formed of the same substance as that of which thought consists. The thought in us can only become the imprint of a higher spiritual being because this higher being has a body formed of the same substance as our thoughts. When our foot imprints itself in the damp earth, this imprint is a negative, a counter-image of our foot. So is it too with our thoughts. In the higher spiritual world there is a counter-image for every thought. Image and counter-image are as interconnected as seal and sealing wax. The substance is the higher spiritual being which corresponds in our analogy to the sealing wax. Now we call thought, in so far as it corresponds to the sealing wax, intuition, and the impression we call abstract thought. We can say when we think: ‘I feel the traces of what is happening in higher worlds.’ It is with regard to this fact that in religious writings, for instance in the Revelation of St. John, the expression ‘seal’ is used. This corresponds with reality. It is also because a higher being is working with us in our words that every word is the impression of a seal. With the mystics the counter-image is called Imagination. Thus we have three levels of the thought element: the intuitive, the imaginative and the ordinary abstract thinking.
When man develops further, when abstract thought itself develops to the stage on which the beings are incarnated who work with us when we speak, then he is a Chela, an occult pupil. To be a Master means: To work in the substance in which the beings are incarnated who work with us in our thoughts. Imagination gives the picture. This is why the great religious teachers of earlier times spoke pictorially, for Imagination gives the picture, not abstract thoughts. In all religions, teachings were expressed in pictures. At first the picture is for man something of lesser importance, but when he understands how to form again for himself a picture out of every thought, then he has reached a higher stage. This is the pre-requisite for a quite new kind of perception. Everything depends on a man developing to the point at which he no longer thinks merely abstractly, but at all times has his thoughts in pictures.”2

So we find spirit in ourselves and in our thoughts. Can we also find spirit in the world?

Spirit needs matter to become visible to itself. I first bring myself into a new existence by becoming visible to myself as a spiritual being. Only when I am strong enough as a spiritual being can I withstand meeting and making visible the inner spirit of the world, thereby giving the world a spiritual rebirth. This rebirth is the reuniting of the world outside me and the spirit inside me.

I. Concerning the Reliance which may be placed on Thinking; the Nature of the Thinking Soul; and of Meditation

In the living meditation group we meditate two weeks on each chapter of this book, and I try to find a condensed thought as the basis for daily meditation. For this chapter the sentence was:

One of the largest merits of Steiner's work is the reassessment and corresponding revaluation of what thinking means in spiritual practice but also for science in general. Unfortunately, the fruits of this merit have hardly been harvested. We still have no clear answers to what it means to think, what value we need to assign to thoughts, and what the relation between self, consciousness and thinking is. The Cartesian split into mind and matter is fully intact, and we became fully pragmatic about it: some thoughts work out fine in the physical world, which help gaining comfort, wealth and power. But we have no clear common idea about what a thought actually is and what the value of thoughts is when not applied to the physical world, for example.

Before I started to study the work of Steiner, I did not associate thinking with spiritual practice. I used thinking for work (as an academic) and for practically managing my life. During spiritual practices like meditation and yoga, thinking was something to reduce or at most observe. Already around 1900, Steiner saw the movement that would lead to giving thinking this place. Steiner’s fear became reality; the role of thinking regressed into what it had become for me (and most of us).

One of the reasons for this may be that within thinking there are two poles with seemingly opposing activities: a dividing (analytic, intellectual) thinking and a uniting (intuitive, living) thinking. Both are needed, but currently dividing thinking is what we mostly do, and uniting thinking is what we mostly need. Most importantly, we are hardly aware of these poles and the role they play. Below I will also link this to the hemisphere hypothesis of McGilchrist. So again, let’s think about thinking.

The meaning of thinking in Steiner’s earlier work

Already in his earliest epistemological work (GA2, 1886), Steiner makes clear that by understanding the world through thinking, we reunite that which initially comes to us separated into mind and matter. But also in GA1 (1884) this idea was already present:

“By taking possession of the idea, thought merges with the source of the world's existence; that which works outside enters into the spirit of man: he becomes one with objective reality at its highest potency. Becoming aware of the idea in reality is the true communion of man.”

However, to understand, and thus reunite the world, a particular way of thinking is needed. Already in GA2, Steiner made the distinction between two kinds of thinking (Verstand (intellect) and Vernunft (reason):

“For a long time one saw the only task of science to be the making of exact distinctions between things … Making distinctions like this is the task of the intellect (Verstand). It has only to separate concepts and maintain them in this separation. This is a necessary preliminary stage of any higher scientific work. Above all, in fact, we need firmly established, clearly delineated concepts before we can seek their harmony. But we must not remain in this separation. For the intellect, things are separated that humanity has an essential need to see in a harmonious unity. Remaining separate for the intellect are: cause and effect, mechanism and organism, freedom and necessity, idea and reality, spirit and nature, and so on. All these distinctions are introduced by the intellect. They must be introduced, because otherwise the world would appear to us as a blurred, obscure chaos that would form a unity only because it would be totally undefined for us. The intellect itself is in no position to go beyond this separation. It holds firmly to the separated parts. To go beyond this is the task of reason (Vernunft). It has to allow the concepts created by the intellect to pass over into one another. It has to show that what the intellect keeps strictly separated is actually an inner unity. The separation is something brought about artificially, a necessary intermediary stage for our activity of knowing, not its conclusion. A person who grasps reality in a merely intellectual way distances himself from it. He sets in reality’s place—since it is in truth a unity—an artificial multiplicity, a manifoldness that has nothing to do with the essential being of reality.”

Interestingly, Vernunft was an important concept for many German Idealists (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel), but they all gave a slightly different meaning to it1. Currently most Germans use Verstand and Vernunft almost interchangeably. Also Steiner stopped using these words in later work to make the distinction between these two ways of thinking. He would rather refer to them as “intellectual/ abstract thinking” vs "living thinking”.

When Steiner moved from philosophy towards esotery (around 1900), the fundamental role of thinking became less prominent. The emphasis was more towards the development of the I. Thinking can serve this development, but in order to do so, also thinking needs to be developed in a certain direction.

“For a knowledge of the “I” as an instrument whereby the human soul’s immersion in the fullest reality may be clearly perceived, we are required to distinguish most carefully between the real “I” and the “I” of ordinary consciousness. A confusion of these might lead us to assert, with the philosopher Descartes: “I think, therefore I am”; in this case, however, reality would refute us during every sleep, when we “are” though we do not “think.” Thought does not vouch for the reality of the “I.” On the other hand, it is equally true that an experience of the true “I” is not possible except by means of pure thought. As far as ordinary human consciousness is concerned, the true “I” extends into pure thought, and into pure thought alone. Mere thinking only leads us to a thought (conception) of the “I”; experience of all that may be experienced within pure thought provides our consciousness with a content of reality in which “form” and “matter” coincide.”2

Oneness through Thinking

Now in this first chapter of this book The Threshold of the Spiritual World (GA17, 1913) about which I will write a couple of articles, Steiner again presents thinking prominently, now as the way to connect to the world and feel at home in it, and as consolation in difficult times. As individuals we can feel separated from the world and each other. It is clear that some ways of thinking, and some thoughts, will only make this separation larger. So although not explicitly mentioned here, Steiner refers to a particular way of thinking that can help to reconnect.

Steiner's book "Theosophy” can help to make clear how we can understand these two ways of thinking. In the first chapter3, a division is made between

Body

The body connects us to the physical world. It provides us with the basis to be in this world and interact with it through our physical sense organs.

Soul

In the soul live our individual experiences of the world: our taste and distaste, likes and dislikes, opinions about truth and untruth. It separates us from the world and from each other: This is me, that is not me. It is where the feeling of individuality (the I) is located.

Spirit

In spirit the essence of the world is revealed. By connecting to the spirit inside us we find our own essence. By connecting to the spirit outside us we find the essence of the world.

The soul lives in the body

The I lives in the soul

The spirit lives in the I

The sentient soul serves the body

The intellectual soul serves the I (ego, lower self)

The consciousness soul serves the spirit (higher self)

Material thinking serves the body and the sentient soul

Intellectual thinking serves the individual and the intellectual soul

Living thinking serves the spirit and the consciousness soul

Material thinking is the kind of thinking needed to keep the body safe and alive. It helps in connecting the physical body with the physical world. These are the brain processes we share with animals.

Intellectual thinking gives rise to the individual. It is a separating thinking: I think that this is true and that is false. It helps in understanding yourself as individual and individual facts and objects.

In Living thinking we try to raise above individual views and opinions. Like the higher self raises above the lower self. We acknowledge that for functioning in the material world we need to take a position as lower self with certain views and opinions. But we also know that “That which until now has seemed to me to be my surest truth, I must now, on the other side of the threshold of the supersensible world, be able to consider as my deepest error.”4. By becoming aware of our own lower self, and of its necessity, we can also see the necessity of the lower self and corresponding opinions, of others. We understand and connect to their inner being (wesen), their spirit (expanding into the spirit world), not only to their individual thoughts, soul and body. We can lovingly forgive ourselves and others for the limited capacity of the lower self.

A physiological basis for two ways of thinking?

In recent decades, Iain McGilchrist has argued that the left and right brain hemispheres are both involved in the same tasks, but they differ in how they perform these tasks. Roughly we can say that the left hemisphere is good in separating objects from each other, and the right hemisphere is good at uniting individual concepts in a single comprehensive view. There is a striking similarity with how Steiner defined Verstand (a dividing thinking) and Vernunft (a uniting thinking) in GA2, as I quoted above. The hemisphere findings of McGilchrist give the division and tension between these two poles in thinking, but also in human development and human culture, a physiological basis, and confirms the fundamental nature of these two poles. According to McGilchrist, the right hemisphere is currently dominated by the left hemisphere, leading to a unbalanced cold, abstract, material worldview. This is in line with Steiner's call to move from a world and mind dominated by intellectual thinking towards a world where living thinking and intellectual thinking find the right balance.