individualizing anthroposophy

Experiencing the etheric world by memorizing

2011-08-17T18:11:00.008+02:00

The memory is an amazing human gift. Memories are wonderful, unique and unforgettable. I can use it whenever I want. Although I don’t want, it’s there and helps me in every situation in life without having to call it. Memory is a wonderful friend. It remains a silent-present companion in any weather. When I remember, I wander back to all dates and events that have been most recently or that are further away in time. At no time like using seven-mile boots I can take me there and resume activities, events and situations. My thinking, feelings and action emergency at the moment can use memory to sharpen themselves, compensate and take rate in a conversation with others or in solitary rides in relation to an individual project such as writing this blog.

A particular feature of memory appears, if I use it to go backwards step by step in a sequence of events. At this timing backwards in memory, I can both perceive and get in existential touch with an ethereal dimension of time, with what in anthroposophy is the origin of the living processes in time progression: the so-called etheric. I want to view this opportunity and this principle in relation to things that just happened in my life in the last hours, today, yesterday and in recent weeks, but unless I strictly stick to the rules for the smooth progress of the contemplative backward exercise originally been described by Rudolf Steiner.

The lines above, I wrote during the last half hour. Before that I had sat down in front of my laptop at my desk in my working corner by the window in the living room. Before that I came walking from the couch in the opposite corner of the more or less rectangular room. As I sat on the sofa I meditated by the method “undivided attention” that I have learned from the Dutchman Roland van Vliet. This undivided attention and devotion goes through stages of vision, listening, body sensation, dynamic connection between thinking and feeling and the experience of presence in relation to the spiritual circumference. This meditation can be done as a short and concentrated meditative stress wash, thus as a straight decision to be located in all of these courses of action at once – or I can during the example half an hour or longer slowly go from one to the other quality, such as to consolidate the experience of the spirit in myself and in the world, before I again go back to everyday activities.

Besides the typical motifs of the gradually expanded awareness in this exercise just now I let form the concept of memory and its dealing opportunities as well as a focus for my special interest. In the field of view with the white walls, wardrobe, ironing board, iron, vacuum cleaner, Peter Selg’s new book on Christian Rosenkreutz, the phone book with paintings by Claude Monet at the front, gems and other objects on the table, the yellow IKEA mat and other furniture from the same origin, I let some memories that somehow occurred by themselves, be suspended in the face to these observation objects without fixing some of them. I left my memories – a trip to IKEA in Kungens Kurva near Stockholm in the 1980s, how I stand and iron clothes by Karin Ruth-Hoffman in Järna 33 years ago, holding countless painting course at the seminary there in the last century and my series of articles renewal of Christian Rosenkreutz on my website some month ago, which got incredibly little feedback – simply slide off and disappear into the soul space behind me. In a regular meditation with undivided devotion, you are precisely meant to try especially to keep all the memories at bay, but this time I let them then run sort through and out of the sensory field.

By heeding the hearing, different sounds got out: diffuse voices from the recorder that my German son listened to in the children’s room next to the living room, raindrops against the window and the window sill, voices and noise from the neighborhood across the street, where the local fire division celebrate its annual summer party, and last but not least my own sounds of breathing, heartbeat and digestion. Then fewer memories advanced. Some associations of the radio drama about the detectives “The Three Investigators” that I have heard together with my son, the memory of the faces of some neighbors and the muesli, which I ate for supper buzzed silently by without making any echo.

The heed on the own well-being and body condition, while I sat, let me be aware of some interesting experiences: At no time I could scan down from the head through the neck, chest, back, abdomen, bring with my arms, hands and fingertips and continue through the thigh , pass the knees, go down through your legs and into my feet. My consciousness could even go further out, as if my body would go beyond the air space and bound with other elements of nature and the landscape beyond. At no time I could somehow connect my body experience with a sense of the whole earth. Is there any objectivity in this self-perception; in the perception of the environment and the world? Different memories was formed and lost again in this scan: My chronic tendency to have migraine, the now considerable improvement compared to the last two weeks of flu and sore throat, feeling of fullness and gratitude at having something to eat every day, feeling of a so-called foreign shame in relation to the millions of people, who die of hunger every day.

Here I sit and don’t want anything else! This thought left the inner field of thinking and invited me to come and look at my own thinking. I felt thinking as towering high like the Norwegian Mountains called Snøhetta and stretching far beyond the sort of Sunndal mountains, Trollheimen, Jotunheimen, Rondane and Jotunheimen in a panorama. But this thinking didn’t want anything but to let the water gush down canyons and hillsides, to give life to all the feelings that want to swim in ponds and lakes in the valleys and on the beaches of the fjord. There were feelings that wanted to go out with a sailing ship without wanting to occupy a foreign country or rape the poor, innocent people of a different faith than mine. This is possibly a little later construction, but the feeling of such a comprehensive approach and profound sense of empathy was present in this: I think, I feel, I want, I live and I am.

Before this outer and inner reflection that basically didn’t last more than fifteen minutes, I stood at the kitchen table with today’s dish. My memories of chatting with Michail Taracha from Moissejevitchi by Valdai in Russia about how to find stakeholders, who will support his wonderful cultural project financially, I got the idea to write this blog. Then I thought about my travels to Russia last year and the year before, the journey to Weimar a month ago, the conversations with many anthroposophists there and talks on the phone yesterday with a friend in Bergen, who recently lost her youngest son in a sad accident. Such memory fragments only appear to be subsections, really they are as colorful, delicate, beautiful lotus flowers that has long roots down into a deep pond of the nexus of memories. A little memory lies and is dipped in the water line’s moment, but is rooted in ancient seabed.

Before the dishes I ate supper with my son – I had muesli and he one in the oven heated roll with chocolate spread. Before that again, I had written with Mikhail in Russian. That is, I use Google translation machine back and forth and in this modern way we can make ourselves intelligible to one another, unless he can speak Norwegian and I Russian. It’s amazing what Ahriman has been a good partner in the last few years! Earlier in the afternoon with my son I had taken in the laundry that had been soaked again in the sudden rain that had come while I rested for dinner at the couch. I don’t rest after dinner every day, but today I had to stretch out my legs, since I had gotten up so early, to be prepared, when our German grandfather very short should come to visit. And, of course, I had the coffee ready prepared for him. While yesterday, until late night I had seen a good crime movie. I like crime movies – especially the series about Henning Mankell’s “Wallander”.

For dinner we had made real good Norwegian butter porridge. In the morning we had packed clothes that I had failed this morning and yesterday had washed. The car was vacuumed and cleaned inside and everything was packed and clearly found its luggage place in the vehicle. After breakfast we took leave of my wife and her father. She is driving her father’s car on his way to Mattrei in East Tyrol, where he has stayed during his summer holidays for over a generation. Last night we picked up her from the rail station in Behning in France, but before that we pleased ourselves with a serving of vanilla ice cream by Francesco’s in Blieskastel. My wife did walk for two weeks on the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela in southern France. We had also used that Saturday to washing, ironing and other travel arrangements. And we did cut the grass on the green in our garden and in addition the lawn of our nearest neighbor, Mr. Schwartz, who has gradually become too old to be able to tend his garden itself.

Last week went on with playing and cooking, reading and writing, drawing, walking, shopping and gasoline refueling, bank and pharmacy visits, watering the flowers with friends in Frauenberg, France, who are on holiday in Brittany, phone calls and writing of texts, reading of old articles by Jørgen Smit in front of the computer screen, historical investigations about the Renaissance, immersion in Giordano Bruno’s biography and in the life of Margaret of Parma, studies on Goethe’s biography, re-reading of Steiner’s karma lectures in the third and fourth volumes, and much, much more. On Friday, a week before we had gone one day to Stuttgart to pick up a load with a total of 530 copies of my first book, the karmic autobiography, which had been published in German by the anthroposophical publishers Urachhaus in 1999. It is about the remaining inventory that the publisher can no longer afford it to be left on the stock. Although the book as they say, sells poorly, it seemed that it was a pity that it should be destroyed. Then I could take over the entire stack. No matter what others think about it, so is the book for me a milestone in the history of anthroposophy in particular and in the history of mankind in general. Call it conceit? Hopefully it will be possible to have sold or gone with the copies of each to people who are serious about the karma theme and the pursuits of finding sense in life.

In this way I could go backwards and inwards in my memory collection. It’s about a kind of ethnography in individual self-realization on the basis of memory. “Auto-ethnography; to research your own methods and actions. Self-observation in your relationships. Autobiography, researching your life ways and intentions.” This great quote is by Kjell Helge Johansen from Trondheim, who described it on Facebook today for ten hours ago. Where is now the etheric world to be found in all this listing up? To note later what one can recall in a memory exercise, isn’t the same as doing the exercise, where the essential etheric can be experienced in the will based energetic tension between thinking and feeling. The writing process is always something turned into sensible, something rational, which easily leads attention away from what the reader in the reading process may experience as an etheric quality. How can I manage to convey the qualities of the etheric world that I have experienced in meditation, which among other things, for example, are related to the reverse migration in memorizing, this etheric phenomena that cannot be attached to the font, the text, but must remain somewhat diffuse between words, between sentences? How do I manage to write so that the reader experience the etheric, while he reads, because what he reads, evokes the etheric in him?

Prana (Sanskrit, प्राण, prāṇa, life’s breath, spirit) means in Hinduism, life, life force or vital energy. Prana can be compared with the Qi in ancient China, Ki in Japan and the Tibetan Lung. This life energy is believed to flow through the body in small channels called nadis, like blood is flowing through blood vessels. Prana is an important concept especially in yoga and prana healing that is founded by the Philippine esoteric teacher Choa Kok Sui. Also Rudolf Steiner used at the beginning of his time as a spiritual teacher the word prana, as a notion for the life force, which he later called the etheric. When I make memory exercises in dynamic interaction with meditative sensations – such as described above – and after having quenched my memoirs and banished the impressions, I turn my inner attention over toward life as a supernatural reality. Then I can start making my entrance on an ethereal plane, which is the etheric world. Two images from the Gospels describe this situation: the Christ, who mitigates the storm and then is walking on water (Matthew 14.22-33). I achieve a balance between thought and feeling, and my will stay below the surface of the etheric. My will let me be free to look outward and upward and to support my fellow human beings, who are in the boat of anxiety. This is the beginning of research on the spiritual field in relation to the world, to oneself, to the own or others’ karma, and in relation to other beings beyond the human field. ■

This text was originally posted on my Norwegian blog on Sunday, 11:41 p.m., 10 July 2011

Illustration: Traditional Chinese character qì, also used in Korean hanja. In Japanese kanji, this character was used until 1946, when it was changed to 気. Source: Wikipedia

My multi-cultures

2011-08-04T20:50:00.012+02:00

Reincarnation consciousness and cosmopolitan identity

“Those who were killed, does not return,” Svein Tore Marthinsen writes in a blog post in the daily newspaper Aftenposten about the massacres in Oslo and at Utøya. Of course he is right! Even in relation to the reincarnation idea he is right. The man I am today can only be like I’m now under the prevailing conditions in the current incarnation as a born and bred Norwegian who was living in Sweden and is staying in Germany with a Norwegian state passport in almost an entire adult life. The individuals I have been in past lives were different than I am now and who I’m going to be in possible future lives is going to be different than me today. Yet there is something consistent in the many lives we all have had within different cultures and populations. If we get hold of some of these threads and realize that we in our higher selves carry these cultures that now seem to be strangers in relation to our current home country’s culture, we never would think that “our” culture would be better or be higher than the others.

How does the frequent theme that has to do with my individuality be colored or influenced by the cultures and people that I’m passing through like this? Is it possible to recognize some of my current personality in the social groups that I have lived in during past lives? Since I remember many of my past lives and have an idea about a possible direction of my karma out into the future, it may be sequentially to suggest something about the cosmopolitan identity that actually forms an inevitable result of the reincarnation consciousness and karma knowledge.

At the risk of appearing as supercilious, I claim to have memories from a lot of different cultures, nations and societies, which I in earlier centuries and millennia have lived in. I have actually in meditative practice rediscovered a number of places where I was born or where I died or were killed. Some of them I have visited – such as Bucha in the German state of Thuringia, Delphi and Eleusis in Greece. I have been Swiss, German and Greek. I have also been Egyptian, Indian and Chinese. I have been born in Scotland, Ireland and Italy. I was as well born under dramatic circumstances in the Roman Empire as in the idyllic surroundings of ancient Greece. I have both had a French mother and a Scottish father as well as Chinese, Indian, Egyptian, Greek and Irish parents. I was born within marriage as well as outside, and I was once even sat out in the woods, but was rescued by foxes in a cave.

I grew up in tents, wooden and stone houses, villas, castles and palaces. I have lived in the desert, the jungle, the mountains, in villages and cities. I have been noble, royal, artisans and a cleric. I have worn clothing of leather and cloth, wool and cotton, silk and velvet. I have walked in wooden shoes and in sandals of leather. I have eaten by wood and tin plates and owned helmets of iron and gold. My picture was impressed into coins, my face is modeled in marble and my character turned into the copper. These honors, however, prevented not that I have been imprisoned, tortured and defiled. I have healed many, but also killed some. In one connection I spoke the truth, so that someone should be punished with death, but in another I lied to save my own skin. I have walked through the Rocky Mountains and the Alps, run across the mountain Parnassus in Greece and traveled by boat on the rivers Rhine, Nile and Han River in China, the longest side of the Yangtze River. I have sailed in ships on the Black Sea, across the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean. I have ridden on horseback from Ohio to Oregon, been walking with donkeys from Mainz to Modena and as a woman tamed elephants by the river Tawa in the present Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.

I died in Italy, England and Canada. I was once killed by a wild bull of Crete, passed away of old age in China and was put to death in the second Battle of Adrianople (now Edirne, Turkey) on 9th August 378, which was fought between a Roman army – led by the little-known emperor Valens – and the Germans (mainly Visigoths) – led by Fritigern, King of the Visigoths. In the Middle Ages I died surprisingly in fever, later once I died in the youth because of poliomyelitis and a third time I have been blind from birth. I spoke German, English, Flemish, French, Italian, Latin, Greek, some Indian languages and various ancient languages, which it is possible to approach in meditative awareness. I have been a Quaker, Protestant and Catholic and was in various past lives related to diverse pre-Christian religious and mystery groups. Not least, I’ve alternately lived in several male and female incarnations. I have been a female fortune teller, hieroglyph writer, marathon runner, female troubadour, bishop and queen and a railway engineer.

I’ve been a mother at Dongting Lake in China, father in Athens, grandmother in Rome, uncle in Mainz and a daughter in Edinburgh. Both as mother and father I have had sons and daughters and grandchildren. I have relived how inconsolable it is to be a woman who gives birth to a stillborn child. I know how heartbreaking it is to be deprived of one’s only son. I know how sad it is to lose one’s most loving son during an intricate poisoning in Antioch and how awful it is to be beheaded, even in a clammy castle in the village of Fotheringay in England. Such an inventory of implications and allegations may seem superficial and may have little to do with today’s often dramatic and brutal reality. However, behind each of these terms and place names there are personal feelings and realizations that sometimes in the re-experience process has been equally true with and in some cases incredibly stronger than the ones I have in relation to my present life. Let me put forward something from a past life nearly 6000 years ago (the distance of the outer time to this past life is unreal long, but the distance to its karmic memories in the spiritual space are surprisingly close):

I know how it felt for a girl of eight years named Alawira who suited her younger brother and while they were playing in some extend ahead of the campsite somewhere in North Africa. She soon after discovered that their parents and all members of the household had been ambushed and kidnapped by road robbers. Because I was this girl, I know how it was to stay alive for days on insects and herbs up to strangers in a caravan came by, who took us to an oasis, where we were handed over to a kindly old man who later divorced us apart, because he couldn’t keep us so long. I know how it felt for Alawira losing her parents, then had to be separated from her beloved little brother, because the circumstances didn’t allow anything else. I also know how it feels to meet him again today, because one day I surprisingly discovered that a man I had recently gotten to know, just turned out to be “the missing little brother”.

I know how it felt for Alawira to be connected with cultural impulses that emanated from an ancient initiation site at the foot of the Atlas Mountains, which she in her youth was brought to – that no today’s archaeologists until now are interested in, which remains could be excavated to the east of the Moroccan city of Marrakech – and which exchange extended even far away to countries around the lake Issyk Kul in Kyrgyzstan, where the current Alawira for some years served as advisor to the ruler of the province. I also know how she felt when she predicted that an earthquake would come about and the ruler didn’t believe her and the disaster came and only a small group managed to escape with her in the head. “God’s ways are inscrutable” (quoted in English), she said laconically!

This is just a little hint about how – because of my reincarnation studies and my karma research – I feel connected to different cultures and ethnic influences over the globe. Such an attitude and a mindset that is the basis for the violence in Oslo, Utøya and everywhere else in the world, where terrorism unfolds, are not feasible in the perspective that opens up to and is including the reincarnation and karma idea. It is a fatal misunderstanding to think that by killing or by violence against anyone, you can affect the development of society in the direction you wish. The karma laws are basically stronger than any human willpower.

Anders Behring Breivik will in the future – if not before, then at least after death – have to identify with and relive each one’s pain and horror of those he tormented and killed on 22 July this year. Even the relatives’ feelings of shock, loss and grief and the feelings of all of us who abhor such actions, he will have to put up with and bring together with his future destiny. The fact that I with my convictions about nonviolence and intercultural dialogue as a political method to the fore haven’t been able to contribute to Breivik and other terrorists landed in isolated despair, cruel fanaticism and hateful fundamentalism, of course, I will have to take also on my mantle. I will therefore not be deleted off. And my future will always take a new direction for each strand of hair that is bent in my next against the person’s free will. “I tell you with certainty, since you did it for one of the least important of these brothers of mine, you did it for me.” (Matthew 25:40)

There are surprisingly many cultures, people and groups I can count as belonging to my own sphere of influence down through the earth lives. I will eventually just name a few of them: the Chinese Yangshao culture, the Obed culture in Mesopotamia, Berbers, Egyptians, Hittites, Israelites, Greeks, Romans, the pre-Christian movement in Rome and in Corinth in the first century AD., the Arthur stream and Grail stream in the 9th century, the House of Hohenstaufen in the 12th century, the House of Guise in France in the 16th century, the Lakota and the Hopi people in the 19th century. If I today would sense antipathy or distasteful feelings towards persons who come from these people, countries or regions, so it could be that I would put myself up against my own or my relatives’ or friends’ descendants from the time I was associated with their ancestors. I would therefore be in a genetic conflict with myself today, if I now began to oppose them by force or violence. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28) This Christ word can be taken literally in karmic sense.

The general in us in all the cultures and people we in our past lives have lived within is corresponding to the cultural, social and political impulse that Christ brought into humanity, namely the friendly dialogue and nonviolent communication to create a long-cultural society in mutual respect, peace and harmony, where no culture must suffer at the expense of another. Culture is not a static phenomenon, but a mutable, yes, in the long term almost ephemeral structure or a social body that we may live and work in and be impressed by a little time, while we visit our wonderful, beautiful and unique earth under a short human life. Norway is no longer the country that I grew up in; something I but grieve when I walk the overgrown paths of the mother country, but it doesn’t matter: the development continues and therefore I’m very happy. New trails with a guide mark and cosmopolitan signs have popped up while I took care of my voluntary exile. ■

Author: Jostein Sæther

In my karmic autobiography, I have told in detail about how I have come up till insights about past lives.

The book’s German original “Wandeln unsichtbaren unter Menschen” has been discontinued by the publisher, but can still be ordered directly from me: info@gamamila.de

The English version “Living with invisible people” you can order through clairviewbooks.com

Illustration: Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 6 (African). Oil on canvas, 1909. 107 x 99.5 cm. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. Source: Isar-arabesken.de

Rudolf Steiner 150 years and the future of anthroposophy

2011-04-06T12:56:00.001+02:00

“Anthroposophy” we call, what Rudolf Steiner laid out in his comprehensive and supposedly epoch-making work. When I use this term, I always think that it is about this Austrian Steiner, who developed his aspects of life issues and arts as well as natural science and transcendental research that has had a social and practical significance for a number of areas of life such as education, agriculture, medicine and architecture. Since his death nearly 86 years ago, however, the word anthroposophy in public is not only used about Steiner’s own work, but also about anything related to the so-called anthroposophical movement that arose around his person and activities. Everything of later date, which is equivalent to it and that later so-called anthroposophists have achieved, is also called anthroposophy. Steiner himself once said that it would be good to find new names for Anthroposophy every week. Maybe he meant that one could use any name that eventually like this would occur, precisely to distinguish between the different qualities that different people would then represent out of their individual relation to “anthroposophy”.

So the question is, if we should continue to think so and let Anthroposophy keep on as “anthroposophy” or should I grab up Steiner’s advice and call what lived on by anthroposophists with one or more new concepts? The following terms might be relevant, if I link them up to his name, the place, Dornach, where he worked in Switzerland or to the central motifs in his workings: Steinersophy, Steinerianism, Steinerianity, Rudolfianism, Rudolfethics, Dornachianism, Goetheanumsophy, Goetheanumlogics, Karmasophy, Karmanianism, Egosophy, Christsophy, Christianism, Dynamism and Dynamosophy. Only when someone comes and declares to be able to confirm Steiner’s statements and results, we could really talk about anthroposophy in the original sense of the word, although this also couldn’t prove – otherwise than by fact that more and more acknowledge and confirm the same issue. Everything else should be considered as individual and group-related interpretations and life philosophies in the style of the proposed terms, which, however, is completely useless.

I put the initial concept of Anthroposophy in quotes, because it is hardly possible to discuss anthroposophy without getting into trouble with each other, since each has a different opinion about it, depending on what you have studied, or what experience you have in relation to realization of the content of anthroposophy. And if you’re in a conversation without first defining precisely or refine your understanding of how you look at the contents of what Steiner presented, it becomes difficult to discuss the details. So let me therefore mention two things that for me characterizes the core of Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy, as I perceive it and what for me has been crucial in relation to individualize and putting into practice Steiner’s advices and instructions.

Steiner’s project went out for two things that were related to each other as “hand in glove”, as synthesis and antithesis or as yin and yang: First, he required pursuing a European-based philosophy of reincarnation and karma. Secondly, it was about associating this with Christianity’s esoteric core or reverse to open it or to access the source of Christianity, thus bringing it into equivalence with the reincarnation idea. Everything else of what Steiner wrote, said or practiced was related to these two areas of responsibilities. Steiner himself thus characterized by the term anthroposophist just a man who exercised or developed a genuine, honest and practical plus meditative relation to these tasks.

Look at the beginning of his activities in the Theosophical Society in 1902: Immediate he announced that he would convey “practical karma exercises”! Look at his basic books and lectures ranking until World War I: They are about Christology, reincarnation and karma! View his mystery dramas: The present is set in relation to previous lives and set on the stage! Look at the first Goetheanum building and the lectures during the First World War: Almost everything is about past cultures, spiritual and karmic current backgrounds to the contemporary crises! Look at the esoteric teaching for members of the Anthroposophical Society, for the members of the School of Spiritual Science (including the former ES) and on his methodology and didactics for professionals within the subsidiary motions: much about self-awareness, training in relation to the issues of fate, karmic laws in education, medicine, etc. Even descriptions of how to develop a relationship with nature beings in agricultural shows going on one’s own karmic point of view – and he quoted to the young generation who had met up in Koberwitz that it is about looking back at least on seven previous lives.

Why did he use so much time and energy on wanting to associate Christianity with the idea of reincarnation and vice versa? Probably it wasn’t about feeding the egoism of the readers and listeners, but to give perspectives on the individual point of view in relation to the fact of working with a specific project. Steiner was in fact based on his personal experience and thus convinced that the individual through the cognition of karma can access his latent resources and skills and can start to sort out the karmic relationship to his fellows and that this is best completed, if this course is done in open and honest cooperation in the esoteric area. Therefore, he founded the internal exercise circles, groups, and colleges and finally an alternative to a social model and a new spiritual foundation for professional education at university level.

Was all this just ideals and recipes? Yes, ideals and recipes for art of living, but somebody who sits down and try out in concrete, for example, some of his meditations or karma exercises, will soon find that the spiritual world is responding. In such terms Steiner and all his works remain and subsist as a “chips” (SIM card) to direct contact with the deceased, with angels and Christ. These facts I know from own sublime, painful and happy experiences. Thus and only then, Steiner’s anthroposophy can find independent and comprehensive trade off today and tomorrow. People who so believe they have experienced the spiritual or karmic things authentic, however, will soon be facing a problem: How to translate their inner experiences that were possibly made in a meditative state, to communicate in a useful language? How and to whom can one talk about and communicate such experiences and realizations? Where are the forums that have a high enough ceiling for my ethical individualism?

I myself have struggled, worked, suffered and rejoiced during 14 years with this translation and communication projects and interestingly found very little aural among so-called “principal anthroposophists”. Similarly, it has gone for a dozen and hundreds of friends and colleagues to me in several European countries, who believe they have much to contribute in relation to a continuation of Anthroposophy. Yes, interestingly enough, it is now actually possible not only to confirm Steiner in many areas of his transcendent research, but also to expand his views, yes, even to correct him on some important points, as the earth, mankind and the spiritual world situation today has become a completely different than it was before Nazism.

When, for example, applying some of Steiner’s statements about a prehistoric Atlantis civilization, I have confirmed some of them in books and other publications. Who is interested in this? Who is at all interested that the content, aspects and results in Rudolf Steiner’s works can be confirmed? Who wants his anthroposophy just now and in the next time after 2012 to be detected as a possible source of genuine insight into the spiritual realities that can bear a lot of individual anthroposophy? Who will support such individuals and researchers, both morally and possibly financially (if they ever need it), which apparently has managed to realize some of Steiner’s recipes – which can serve other than such “anthroposophical boil” as the Archangel Michael may only see as a Swedish sorts “puddle in the pan” (Swedish: pytt i panna) – that is stew?

To celebrate the Rudolf Steiner 150th birthday doesn’t work for me so much by examining Steiner or to travel to the places where he lived and worked, nor does it ask for placing his “left cabinet” up to public spectacle. Such has been done enough and more than enough during the time after his death. I am thinking only on the incredibly aesthetically beautiful and famous peripatetic exhibitions that my teacher and colleague Arne Klingborg initiated and conducted in several countries around the theme of Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophy, architecture and landscape art from 1961 and forward to the mid 80’s. What the individuality behind the name “Rudolf Steiner” today certainly would prefer – while he in his supposedly existing incarnation in good health is ”sitting on the fence” watching the anthroposophists’ feverish selfishness and bad conscience on his behalf, as they try to hide by covering themselves with his former works – is that they show for themselves, for each other and for the outside world, how they live and work with the task of associating Christianity with karma understanding – a spiritual “Michael Mandate”, which he simply called: ethical individualism. Rudolf Steiner went miles forward on his way; who wants to follow in his footsteps, in order to refresh himself without resorting into dependence to him?

Author: Jostein Sæther

Image: Detail of a portrait of Rudolf Steiner (Weimar 1892), painted by Otto Froehlich.

Social future – perspectives of karma research

2011-04-06T12:33:00.001+02:00

In this contribution I would like to point on spiritual beings, which are connected to us since ancient times. The more we recognize their spiritual placement and acting in earthly acquaintances; they can more and more through their relation to our karma support the future impulses in the human community building.

The primordial teachers of mankind

Everything we do and experience on earth is observed from these beings of the spiritual sphere of the moon. They register and carry it into the Akasha substance. They once lived with mankind in ancient times on earth. Rudolf Steiner used for them the term “Urlehrer” – primordial teachers. If we deal with the area of karma in all its aspects and impacts, we must take care with these moon beings in our outlook. These teachers didn’t at that time obtain a solid, physical body. Their effort on the people went through their etheric bodies.

They were etheric figures who didn’t show themselves in everyday life, but only in the mystery services. They had already in an earlier phase of earth development reached the “rank” of humanity and could thus be pioneers of human development. In meditation it occurred to me for them the primordial word “Gada”, which means about “circle of the gods council”. The Greek goddess Gaea stands for this spiritual quality. The English word “gather”, what means “meeting” or “uniting”, and the old Norwegian “gander” (compare the male name Gandalf) has as well the same origin; it means to “tell the fortune”.

Already in the times of Atlantis the communities of Gada moved forever back to a spiritual level, which has to do with the moon. In the service of the hierarchies they have here engaged a special position. When we go through the stages between death and rebirth, we meet them on our travel through the lunar region twice. After death, they help us to understand the experiences during the sleeping time of the completed life by penetrating everything essentially. Thus in the world ether the compensation for our own incarnation actions is fixed. If we again approach the earth, and unite with the germ, which the parents give, we go through their “karma register”. While the primordial teachers lived on the earth, they brought us the ancient wisdom, which referred to the past of the universe. In their present cosmic existence, they hold the past of other persons, with whom we are connected. By the “descent” of the present life, the Gada wrote the balancing karma into our astral bodies.

The astral body is filled with entries of the shared experiences with other people from the past life. In meditation, we can uncover the mystery of how all the past gather us. Just because the primordial teachers still consider us almost as a “student” in a group of related karma, we don’t lose our next fellow men out of sight. Wouldn’t they any more provide to us the appropriate balance karma, luciferic and ahrimanic opponents would on the one hand by physical environmental factors, on the other hand by chronic genetic diseases constantly would drive us apart. The increasing disasters and trends in these areas in recent decades can either be an expression of the enhanced evil, or be seen as a result of the unfolding of human freedom. From a “higher” point of view, the two trends, of course, are intertwined.

Meditation as a cultural impulse

Because love is the ultimate supernatural power of all knowledge, the spiritual practitioner, since he maintains spiritual and karmic experience, will conclude, that he starts to be more attentive than before dealing with every life beeing and every human being. Rudolf Steiner stressed out this fact in the lecture series “Freedom of thought and social forces” (GA 333) by emphasizing that the love itself must be seen even as the research method in spiritual field. But for the spiritual regions, which open gradually in meditation, we have to make ourselves even more capable with love, as it has to be in ordinary social life.

A true life style will be needed to bring new ideas and inspiration to life derived out of individualized anthroposophy. Out of what we discover in spiritual research, we don’t need to draw up specific new spiritual laws, but to keep everything so alive, that it always creates a new impetus to joyful practice and serious research. The prospect of a life of art from spiritual knowledge is so comprehensive that it probably needs its own representation. The fact that meditation more and more is becoming an element of everyday life is changing old employment and life guidelines. Not only the working hours but also the architectural environment will be designed differently if meditation is taken seriously as a cultural impulse.

The idea of reincarnation and karma would abolish many habits at all, and drain some of the institutions and establishments of employers and employees total, if this idea and their prospects would be accepted as truths. The military system and all its related industries would have no sense any more if its representatives would embody the idea of karma. This would definitely not crate unemployment, but rather an innovative potential to promote new inventions and projects, which would include the reconstruction of war-torn areas and places that were abandoned by materialism and imperialism – as I experienced myself on first hand in Russia – places, however, which in the future again can be habitable through environmental consciousness.

New life abilities by insights of karma

When people understands, respects and supports each other by true karma knowledge, even if the one and the other in daily life is still estimating false, a truly sustaining social force begin to show itself. In the time when the “Mystery dramas” of Rudolf Steiner, as the karma idea for the first time in history conscious and literally was brought to the stage, in 1911, an attempt of him was situated. For and together with some support persons of the anthroposophical movement a “Foundation of Theosophical Style and Arts” was announced, which was probably intended as an esoteric “enlightening site” to cause that a new way of life could be supported by karma understanding between real people. A basic motive for this foundation was the individual sovereignty between the participants and to the esoteric teacher himself.

Steiner’s idea couldn’t be achieved for reasons that are not supported by documents. We only know which persons were raised and which represent specific areas of work they should embody. It was later claimed that Steiner brought a resumption of this idea when he initiated the “esoteric board of directors” at the Christmas Conference 1923-24. The following devastating history of the General Anthroposophical Society shows that there was too little understanding of karma, to defuse the negative hearsay that were in circulation about karmic information – e.g. to Ita Wegman. In the social problems after Steiner’s death, which during many decades – and with some late foothills still – led to bitter conflicts, legal and painful divisions between individuals and groups in many countries, I see the lack of understanding of karma as a producer of the anthroposophical iniquities.

Coming together is a conscious understanding of karma, where research is done about why we again met, and where removal is being sought of possible tensions specifically to help each other, make peace on the basis of freedom and love. Only such a karmic reconciliation could develop a promising way of social factors. Similar to earlier in the guilds of the Middle Ages and still today in marriage, the partners are committed in appreciation for each other, a foundation everywhere involving karmic peace would be depended on a commonly confirming the will direction based on karma knowledge.

Karma consciousness contributes to a social future through a broader understanding, in which the individual has his soul roots in the cultural life of a community. A comprehensive social understanding and a genuine global thinking are both pursuing empathy towards a complex karma between individuals, religious communities and nations. According to Rudolf Steiner in “Social understanding out of spiritual knowledge” (GA 191) social understanding leads in the next life on earth just to come across the karma. It also only arises when a spiritual interest not only for its own, but also for other kinds of cultural affiliation is present.

The political disasters of the most recent century and in the current time have clearly demonstrated the reverse. Individual karma research has an organizing utility in the social field. Independent of whether other people know that someone has such insight, his own life is changing significantly. When people start together to arrange their karma in principle, ‘color and number orders’ appear in meditation arising from the dialogue with the former primordial teachers, our present karma builders. Somebody will e.g. recognize himself as a ‘blue’ in a circle of kindred spirits, which may represent the virtue of mitigation. The other persons in the same karmic circle may experience themselves as representing ‘red’, ‘yellow’, ‘green’, ‘peach blossom colored’, ‘white’ or ‘black’ in an organism of a spiritual color circle. This allows the larger social context in which he lives to receive new group dynamism. Even the substance of the Akasha record is experiencing a metamorphosis that reaches far into the future, when the state of our solar system especially between earth and moon will get another astronomical relation as present.

Author: Jostein Sæther, Blieskastel (DE)

Illustration: A tempera painting on wood by Jostein Sæther (2005) called Christmas.

The wandering light – aspects of a meditation given by Rudolf Steiner

2011-04-06T12:21:00.000+02:00

Rudolf Steiner gave extensive information for meditative work and he described many ideas and practical exercises in this field. In this text I would like to reproduce such a meditation practice in his wording and then describe how I and others have practiced it. The exercise is simple in its characteristic style. I got experiences with this exercise which contributed to an indispensable foundation of my meditative practice. Steiner said (in my translation):

“For the pupil, for those who wish to develop a higher visualization, clairvoyance, it is of great importance, if he does exercises such as the following: You imagine the room dark, without an external light source affecting you – it be the night darkness or by closing your eyes – and then by own inner strength trying to evoke the idea of light. If you can make this thinking highly enough, it will gradually become lighter, and you will see a light that is not physically but which you create yourself with inner strength. And it is a light that will be trawled throughout of wisdom that emerges as the creative wisdom. This is called astral light. In the meditation human being can create light out of inner supremacy. This light is precursor to what man will one day come to see – not with physical eyes, but with finer sense organs. It will be clothes for real spiritual beings. ” (Rudolf Steiner, Mythen und Zeichen – Okkulte Zeichen und Symbole, GA 101, Dornach 1987, Page 149)

For one of his esoteric students, named Friedrich Krüger, Steiner around 1912 gave a meditation, which I in the following meditation process match together with the above light meditation. (Rudolf Steiner, Mantrische Sprüche. Seelenübungen II, GA 268, Dornach 1999, Page 150) It sounds (in my translation):

Light around me
Light fills me up
Light gives me strength
Light is freeing me
Light places me
Upon myself
I am

If it isn’t enough to mitigate the physical lighting conditions by turning off room lighting or by closing your eyes, you can tie a kerchief without pressing over the eyes. Concentrate then on the inner room and surroundings around you. Try then to seize the darkness and to experience it. How does darkness really appear to you? How would you characterize it? Try to remember nights and to pursue dark experiences in your life. How did you experience it differently? Then act on the immediate moment and the momentary darkness in your mind. Is everything all black or is there some gray too? If it isn’t similar to coal, it still implicates a little light quality being present.

Try then to create or to detect a light source outside of your reach. Try out different ideas as how dusk, dawn, stars in the sky or a distant luminous window seem. Decide for one particular character of light, which shall be located a short distance from you. Let yourself be illuminated by this light. Discover which character you then acquire.

In a manner of speaking you then change standpoint of consciousness. Move to the light spring. Distinguish yourself as the source of light. Look back on your being who was standing at the starting point. If this is successful, it means that you now in a way have “divided” yours, without losing yourself. The inner light that you created unites you, or it allows you to move freely between the two positions. You can see that the light flows back and forth. – The exercise may also be worked out different. Instead of imagining the light outside, you immediately let it flow out of yourself.

The result of this contemplative exercise can be, in my view, that we discover lighting quality of our own astral body, the “Star Body” – corresponding to Steiner’s meditation dictum to Mr. Krüger. This light being is in the continuing contemplative and meditative work going to be not a static light source, but it will be a wandering light piece by piece, layer by layer, it will light up and consciously make the darkness in the supersensible, in the spiritual world, so that we will become ripe for real encounters with spiritual beings.

I quoted that it’s possible and advisable to add both versions together, so you around yourself can create a light formation for instance similar to an egg or an oval. The continued work with this light exercise, which I recommend that you may take up on a regular basis, you will be able to recognize phenomena that have to do with the human aura. Both in relation to yourself and to others you will sometimes be able to have light and color sensations that correspond to aspects of the divine wisdom. How the emergence of wisdom appears, you may find out by regular practice. Wisdom is usually seen as a specific knowledge that can be formulated for example in a simple decree.

Wisdom as power, structure or spiritual nature may in the middle of the meditation experience be perceived as an astral light quality. If the astral light manifests itself as a guiding principle, the wisdom itself will be recognized as imaginative, inspirited and intuitive as a life-giving principle, as a divine being. To be in the midst of this life situation in the spiritual “fields” – which is known in the esoteric tradition to achieve enlightenment or to experience the so-called “kundalini flame” – one can also discover that one’s own self, the ordinary self or ego, just is a reflection of a so-called “higher I being” (compare my book, Living with invisible people. Page 223ff). However, this higher self – the individuality – is just a small “drop” of a larger I out at the cosmic oceans.

All of the exercises and suggestions for contemplative and meditative practice that I give in this blog can be understood as individual works of art created in the astral light. To the extent that we learn to respect the imaginative and spiritual laws and begin to follow them, the objective wisdom will embrace to the individual one. What we may discover as our karma is like road signs on the spiritual path. We need them to become spiritual scientists. They prevent us from “colliding” with others, or they will hold us from excessive speed, so we don’t end up “in the ditch”.

When we add pure and virtuous willing forces to our thought and feeling life – which we really are looking for something true, good and fair in relation to nature and the social field – in the inner exercises and meditations, the time may be ripe to step into the real field of spiritual research. The first area here will be to handle issues and tasks connected to reincarnation and karma.

Author: Jostein Sæther, Blieskastel (DE)

Illustration: Part of a ceiling painting by Jostein Sæther (1996) in Martingården (assisted living), Umeå (SE). Photo: © Kristian Bodell

The will path to Christ

2011-04-06T12:14:00.000+02:00

Christ is resurrected", the Russian Orthodox Christians are greeting each other on Easter morning. Yes indeed, Christ has come again. He has combined himself with the etheric world. To see or to envision Him, we must develop our human perspective in mind. How do I get a relationship to him, possibly confirming the Christian faith of longing? In this Easter posting I want to outline how the way of human willpower leads to Christ through stages of alienation and karmic affliction. By the way, increasing this central life theme would fill a whole book.

Applying alienation syndrome

Christology, the doctrine of Christ's person and behavior - understood anthroposophically and practiced meditatively - can lead to wonderful experiences. Coupled with the retrospective work on the own biography, it sometimes can lead to surprising imaginative encounters with angels. In connection with the new Christ event in our time is in a steadily etheric progress, Rudolf Steiner described, that Christ would actually come appeared to man in its memory like an angel being. He used the term - to be Christianized - for this spiritual “igniting process” (see Steiner's collected works: "Gesamtausgabe", GA 152).

I know some people who at least occasionally are unable to cope with everyday life. They visit doctors and therapists, since they assume that they are sick. But no common diseases are discovered. We hear that more and more persons are "strolling" around until they land in psychiatry or even commit suicide. The assistance they are offered there, they often don’t accept, since their condition has been manic-depressive. To concretize such a case: I am close friend to a person who works in an anthroposophical institution, but who are not affected much by anthroposophy. He feels "infected" by something unknown and doesn’t come away from the fear that he "has" an organic defect that doctors should find. It seems to me that we here are dealing with a phenomenon described by Steiner for about 100 years ago (compare GA 131).

According to Steiner certain strengths will be developed in human nature into the future. When we have reached a certain age and have become self-conscious, these new soul powers will arise a feeling in us: There is something in me that I must understand. Something apparently strange will be notified, so that you can feel that it really will be linked to your own self. At the same time you will feel strange until alienated because this "something" doesn’t fit in everything you know about yourself since the birth. The alienation syndrome applying to you only becomes understandable, if reincarnation and karma has become a life content that gives confidence: I feel strange, because I uncover the self identity that has come over from a previous life. Then our I-being is a complex organism that is associated with both the previous as with a future life (com. GA 145).

If the strange feeling wouldn’t be explained by the perceptive of karma, it creates fear, anxiety and concerns which in turn attracts a real disease. Subsequently we need to look backwards to get a perspective on our existence. Additional everything that we observe as a karmic effect must be considered from an unassailable point of view, other we fall into a new self-centeredness.

Christ as a “model”

The central idea of anthroposophical Christology is that Christ is seen as an ideal. The exemplary fate of Jesus Christ during the events in Palestine will eventually live out in all humanity (com. GA 124). Every individuality goes through a specific phase of the life of Christ during his karmic development. Also within modern Esoteric this occult fact is known, for instance the Catholic-inspired author on the theme of angels, Alexa Kriele, treat this topic in an exemplary manner.

The situation in Gethsemane, when Christ go aside to pray, where he asks the next three disciples to watch - but they fall asleep anyway - can occur as an individual life experience, I have even acknowledged. I experienced an important phase of life that my friends were "missing". I experienced the pain that for some reason more than once they couldn’t support me. By discovering the many previous incarnations that we can access through the karmic memories, such a life situation can be confirmed by an individual spiritual experience, where we learn to accept help from angels.

"Behind" the self

In the recent development of consciousness the human mind has evolved gradually and become stronger than in earlier times. Thus we have achieved more and more civilization from the industrial to the high-tech revolution. In ancient cultures people went out in the morning and greeted the ascending sun as a spiritual and divine being. They looked through their etheric body which still partially was "floated" out of the physical head and viewed a spiritual being in the physical sun. But today the etheric body and the soul in a way are added together and so strengthened in us that we can gaze at an intense way into the self being which is "widespread" in our organism; and so to speak sense behind it to find Christ. I must therefore seek "behind" myself and "behind" the self to another human being, to see what in ancient times was seen in front of the sun (com. GA 220). This wills path lead through the self being and not around it.

How do I add a closer connection with the being that we call Christ? How do I win a relationship with him? For this there are probably no instructions. Certain aspects of anthroposophy can be, however, perceived as “seven mile boots” that leads into the spiritual area where he lives. As the stigmatized author Judith von Halle has portrayed, one could only in Palestine at that time experience him as an individual in historical events. When we want to get close to him today, we must seek Him in the earth's etheric field. He doesn’t live in the rough or in so-called "fine matter" contexts, so if we seek him, so to speak, within the natural etheric layer, we will probably not find him. We have to "go ahead" to Christ within a social context, because he normally does not come to us (com. GA 176).

In what direction then should we search him? The will steps to Christ lead inwardly and have always again to be carried out. Steiner pointed to the infancy idealism that isn’t lost even in adolescence, because this generosity again and again is wrestled by means of various events - such as fighting against torture. Fighting for human rights encourages us and makes us enthusiastic, so we continue to be spiritual and physically active and develop well-built initiatives (com. GA 193). When I go out into the world Christ himself is organized in my midst. Am I in me, he locates himself around. Steiner foresaw that especially young people would come to meet him in our time.

Someone who awaken is gazing Christ, but fails to recognize the karma idea that Christ certainly is identical to, would possibly not be able to cope with such an experience. Probably he wouldn’t even acknowledge that he met Christ. Of course there are other types of encounters with Christ by grace, which cannot be described in this essay, as fruitful transform the lives of those who are pardoned with such meetings so that they may recognize the karma idea, provided they did not know it from before. The meeting with the "Lord of Karma" - an expression of Steiner - happens mostly unconsciously and will be perceived as a "negative energy" if you have no empathy for karma. A transformation of the soul can thus take place, since the study of Christ's life awakens the retrospective gaze on your own life.

Author: Jostein Sæther, Blieskastel (DE)

Translated from Norwegian, first published in my German blog on 8 April 2009; and then published on the website anthromedia.

Illustration: Sandro Botticelli, (1445-1510), Agony in the Garden (c. 1500), Tempera on panel, 53 x 35 cm, Capilla Real, Granada. Source: wga.hu

Arts and meditation

2011-04-06T12:01:00.000+02:00

Both in my own meditative work as well as in guiding others, the importance of an artistic and creative approach of life and spirituality became clear to me. It was again and again interesting to experience that for people who work with arts - such as Eurythmy - or who had an artistic approach to life and to existence at all, it was easier than for others to associate with the transcendent, often moving experiences, and that they easier than others managed their spiritual development. People with no artistic background proved more fear and uncertainty when they were faced with inner pictorial, imaginative experiences. In my task advising people spiritually and karmicly, in addition a requirement came upon, that I only was qualified to support and help someone in the way I myself in an artistic, caprice and inventive way could be circumvented by new interpersonal situations and transcendental motives. My professional background - having been a painter and art teacher for over twenty years - appeared thus as a very fruitful experience in the field to take on a task as a spiritual teacher.

In dealing with arts our creative middle is continuously prosecuted. Within artistic creation we find ourselves in an instant process that appeals to our whole being, if we indulge us on the possibilities of its means in the medium. In the artistic activity we experience to be fully present as humans. We can see this clearly by children when they play that they somehow are identical to the artistic or when we experience, how they perceive the world in their open-minded manner. The following anecdote my wife told one day at lunch actually right after I had written the statement above. She had heard it from another mother in the neighborhood. So daily life often view onto the truths of life:

In the winter a not yet two years old girl looked out of the window at the moon. She said: "Poor moon!" "Why poor moon?" asked the older sister. "Cold. Put on the sweater!" replied the little one. She took pity on the moon. A possible artistic commentary to the child by an adult would be: "When we look at the moon, our tenderness streams up to him and he will not freeze." A child experiences the world differently - namely, being convenient - and impetuous adults can find the appropriate visual words for the transcendent reality.

Everything in the world is more than just the visible that appear to our senses as related to the objects and the physical side of life. Goethe's statement - in his drama Faust: "Everything transient is only a parable" - refers to this experience. When the so-called objective physical world appears to us as a preliminary observation in our cognitive perception, we will at the ongoing maturation of cognition always win new ways to gain our understanding of basic principles. This expansion of the horizon is pursued in every single human life from conception until the mortal moment - whether you experience all the stages through childhood, youth, adulthood and old age or not - just as well as for all human evolution. Not only the exterior has this comparative nature, the ideas and notions that we are developing towards mental and spiritual facts, must submit to a preliminary status.

Only the original, the purely spiritual containing the pure universal order may in its individuality, indivisibility and eternity core introduce itself to human consciousness as something explicit. Since only the same can recognize the same, the spiritual in human beings strive to be united with the cosmic spirit. And before that happens we until further have to beat us satisfied with the parable of the spiritual, until a recognition meeting, a consciousness of unity on a spiritual level - for example in meditation or in a therapeutic situation - one time or another would reward us. The exercises, meditations and the investigations I’m doing and communicating to others is of course still in the world of parables that are available to everybody, provided they would not have its origin in the real spiritual. But since knowledge is always an individual performance, only the individual can consider whether some of what I have achieved and told about in my books, depicts a spiritual objectivity or not.

Author: Jostein Sæther, Blieskastel (DE)