Today the veils felt thinner than usual, befitting a day when the unmanifestโthe stars and planetsโliterally became visible in the diurnal sky. The eclipse was only partial where I live, but its potency was enough to keep me indoors. I started to feel strange as the moon began passing over the sun. Perhaps I was primed by the words of a Navajo elder I had listened to the day before. According to their tradition, a solar eclipse spells the death of the highest divinity; such moments ought to be solemnly waited out with the blinds drawn. Thereafter the Navajo sing songs to help strengthen and renew the sun-god, thereby renewing the Life of the world. It was with the atmosphere of soul generated by this event and these ideas that I sat down to read this weekโs selection of Rudolf Steinerโs Occult Science for the latest
book study.Throughout his many lectures and esoteric writings, Steiner often referred to postmortem existence as โthe life between death and a new birth,โ a phrase that challenges what many of us tacitly assume life to consist in. Rather than the antithesis of death, life is presented by Steiner as the unitive dynamism of spiritโas capital โL,โ Life. โTo the eye of sense,โ writes Steiner, โlife appears in its effectsโin plants and animals and human beings. To the eye of the spirit, life is a flowing essence, like seas and rivers pervading Spiritland.โ1 In the life hereafter we supposedly reenter this flowing essence in radical communion with our loved ones and other spirit beings.
Summarily speaking, what death reveals for Steiner is the very inside of the world, andโas Owen Barfield put it in his novel Unancestral Voiceโthe realization that this interior is anterior. But, according to Steiner, these revelations can only come after the purgatorial period that immediately follows upon casting off the corpse of cravings that could only be indulged during material existence.
Such cravings are said to blind our perception of spirit kin whose personal qualities might otherwise draw us near to them upon crossing the threshold. Whether violent or lustful, all such acts blight the ego (the higher โIโ) of the perpetrator and their victim. To compensate for this, a metamorphic inversion of the entire life lived unfolds backwards. As Steiner writes, โthe soul now feels drawn to every being and to every object by contact with which a craving of this kind was ever kindled in him, so that the craving may be destroyed even as it originated.โ2 Not only is the timeline reversed, but so also the spatial dimension: rather than re-live our experience of such acts, we must instead endure how it felt for the one we inflicted it upon. Steinerโs account of this process suggests that an individual life possesses a kind of wholeness that includes all those with whom one comes into contact with.
Through this process of purification we gradually return to ourselves as I-beingsโdrops of Spiritโand can see more clearly that our delusory cravings were feeding a host of demonic beings intent on our destruction. As Steiner writes, โthere are beings whose food consists of cravings and passions more evil and pernicious than those of any animal, for they live not in the true nature of the senses but seize the spiritual and drag it down onto he sensual level.โ3 Anytime we feel our appetitesโfor power or pleasureโas infinite in scope, we are surely in the presence of such demons.
Once our backwards review reaches the gate of birth, we come out the other side, or better yetโturn inside outโand find ourselves in what Steiner calls โSpiritland.โ As Steiner reports,
โWhen after death man has passed through this world, he finds himself face to face with a world of pure spiritual contentโa world, moreover, which begets in him only such longings as will find satisfaction in the purely spiritual. But he still distinguishes what appertains to his own I or ego from what constitutes his environmentโฆ Only once more his experiences of this environment come to him in the same way in which the inner perception of his own I came to him while living in the bodyโฆ Now therefore the whole environment of man is replete with beings alike in kind to his own I, for in effect, only an I has access to an I.โ4
Rather than a space, Spiritland must be conceived as a realm of pure experienceโone that consists of inversions of everything we perceive through our senses while on Earth. For example, what appears to us through the mineral kingdom as rock and crystal appears in the spirit as โthe power that builds the formโ of such minerals, โa kind of hollow or vacuum, while all around the hollow is seen the force building the form.โ5 Rather than perceive color outwardly, as with the senses, in Spiritland color presents itself โas though another being directly influenced the ego of man, impelling him to represent the influence to himself in a colour picture.โ6 When it comes to colours we perceive with our senses, they appear to the inner representation of spiritual observation in the guise of their complement: the red stone of the senses appears green to the spirit. Again, a kind of wholeness is suggested by such inversions.
In Spiritland the creative thoughts we contemplate and enact with transformative effect during our life on Earth are living beings. โThe thoughts man apprehends within the manifest world,โ writes Steiner, โare but a shadow of the real thought-being, living in the land of spirits.โ7 Interior as anterior. And just as light shines from the sun onto earthly creation, illuminating the quidditas of things, โwhatsoever the Wisdom shines upon is revealed in its true significance for the spiritual world.โ8 Like colour, the significances shown forth by these beings of Wisdom must be conceived as arising as inner representations.
But as those familiar with Steiner will know, this re-entry into Spiritland is only temporaryโat least for now. Though purified of intemperate, delusory cravings, we individuated spirits are not merely restored to a state of undescended and perfect eternity. Rather, we bring with us a distillate of our incarnated adventures and plant it like a seed in the environs of Spiritland. This land is constituted by a choir of beings responsible for generating the bodily sheathes necessary for incarnation. Upon casting off those corpses, we reunite with them as wellโa reversed theogony.
โThese beings of the spiritual world henceforth collaborate with the fruit of his former life which man himself has brought with himโthe fruit which is now about to become the seed. And by this collaboration man is built up a newโฆโ9
According to Steiner, these beings work to prepare us for a new incarnation, one that will be driven by a desire to compensate for the harm done in former livesโa desire for wholeness. โAs after death he experiences a kind of memory tableau of the past,โ writes Steiner, โhe now experiences a pre-vision of his coming lifeโฆ What he thus sees becomes the source of active forces which he must carry with him into the coming life.โ10 Steinerโs report consists of inversions ad infinitum: the unceasing creativity that is polaric intensification. Reincarnation appears to be a kind of breathing process, a rhythm wherein birth and death constitute threshold moments of an ongoing process of folding out and folding back in. Interestingly, Steiner is careful to note that, though this is the way things are now, it has not always been so and will eventually give way to some other mode of existence. Fascinating.
Though I have had experiences with my deceased father that incline me to embrace much of what Steiner says, I canโt claim to know it for certain. His presentation of the spiritual world as a dynamic inversion of the world that appears to our senses has a compelling logic to it. But could the hereafter really be so simple to explain? Then again, much of what Steiner describes has precedent in traditions around the world which recognize the ongoing presence and influence of the ancestors.
He goes on to describe a profoundly ecological reciprocity between the events on the earth plane and activities unfolded from Spiritland by the โso-called deadโ (another perception expanding phrase of Steinerโs) and the higher beings that weave the world. The dead, including ourselves prior to birth, are operative in the climatic changes of our planet; our moral deeds have consequences in the life hereafter.
In Steinerโs view, the spiritual world is not elsewhere, but is rather the inside and origin of the manifest here and now. Will we heed it?
Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science, 5th English ed., trans. George and Mary Adams, (Forest Row, England: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2011), 89.
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