Incarnating the Word of the Gods

Incisive Thinking as the Seed of the Gods; Individuation from Group-Soul/Hive-Mind Clairvoyance: Reading Rudolf Steiner’s The Deeper Secrets of Human Evolution in the Light of the Gospels

Megalomania & Clairvoyance

Nothing allows mendacity to thrive more than visionary clairvoyance that is not challenged and reined in by thinking. On the contrary, such loose visioning can nurture quite a different tendency, namely a certain high-handed arrogance that can extend to delusions of superiority and megalomania. This is all the more dangerous for going unnoticed. The danger is very great of considering oneself superior on account of seeing things which others do not see. It is not normally apparent just how deep-seated this tendency bordering on megalomania may be rooted in a soul (Steiner, p. 76, emphasis added).

I read this passage the day after a men’s meeting where the subject of clairvoyance came up, specifically the pros and cons of visionary states, awake or asleep. Within spiritual circles, just as analytic logic is downgraded, visionary “spiritual” experiences are raised up as the currency by which to measure one’s stock.

Since direct experience of spiritual realities is the goal, any sort of analytical talk or theorizing is viewed as more of an obstacle than an aid—much less a viable alternative—to such experiences. The proof is in the pudding, and visions or “energetic” experiences are the proof of Nirvana pie. Having an intellectual grasp of what goes on in the kitchen is seen as a distraction and an indulgence, a time-waster. “The map is not the territory.”

But if we don’t make (or uncover) maps of the unexplored territories we are entering into—Steiner seems to be asking—how can we even know where we are, communicate our experience, or help others to get there too?

Part of the problem is—and this is something I have discussed over the years, being an axiom of traditionalist metaphysics—in the confusion of psychic states with spiritual ones. Steiner, himself a prodigious clairvoyant, doesn’t make this distinction explicitly in this particular lecture series (though he may elsewhere), but it is implicit in his strong criticism of clairvoyance when uncoupled from clear thinking:

One might easily think that seeing visions would be a better preparation for death than merely hearing facts derived from the spiritual world. And yet, after death, it is of little use to human beings what they have seen by way of visions. But with facts, on the other hand, one is immediately able to set to work to make them one’s own, if one has grasped them in a sensibly thoughtful way. What is valuable after death is precisely what one has understood, regardless of whether it has been seen in visionary form or not. Taking even the most profoundly initiated: they can see this entire spiritual world, but the significance of this is no wit increased if they are not capable of expressing their findings in terms of clear human concepts. After death, the only things that will help them are the concepts they have formed here on earth. These are the seeds for life after death (p. 66-67, emphasis added).

This seems almost shocking to read within a Western spiritual framework in which “concepts” have received a bad rap for decades. And there is a valid argument to be made that concept-heavy spirituality, or concept-heavy anything, is like a soufflé without eggs, so much hot air and mush.

But from here there frequently proceeds a blanket rejection of concepts of any sort in the spiritual process, even when they stem from and/or develop into direct experience. Steiner made them central to it. He was arguing that perceptions that weren’t (at some level and at some point) conceptualized could be as deceptive and as futile, finally, as concepts that aren’t perceptible.

What We Take into Death

Of course, if one is a clairvoyant and simultaneously a clear thinker, one can usefully share the fruits conferred by vision. However, after death, two non-thinking people, of whom one is clairvoyant and the other only hears what his peer is seeing, find themselves in the identical situation because what we take into our life after death is precisely what we have struggled to master through our own incisive thinking. This ascends as a seed rather than as something we extract from the worlds into which we now go. We receive what we do from spiritual worlds not as a free gift simply to facilitate a more comfortable existence once we leave our earthly abode but so that we convert it into earthly currency. To the extent that we have affected this conversion into earthly currency, are we helped after death. That is the essential point here (ibid.).

“This ascends as a seed rather than as something we extract from the worlds into which we now go.”

This is a difficult concept(!), so I want to spend some time unpacking it. Steiner seems to be saying that incisive thinking is, as it were, the fertile earth in which a seed of clairvoyant vision—cast into our consciousness from the higher dimensions by the winds of the gods (a.k.a. the Holy Spirit)—can take root and flower, like the proverbial mustard seed. The inference is that, just as understanding without experience is never going to be complete, so the inverse is also true: experience cannot complete itself without our understanding.

Faith, in this conceptual framework, is a kind of receptivity that is anything but passive, a willingness to engage fully with the raw material of knowledge, to enter into the darkness of the earth (that of unknowing, having no ability to see, but only to conceive of), and to die, thereby bringing forth fruit. For Steiner, the darkness of a lack of spiritual vision was itself an essential part of the evolution of consciousness: fertile ground for the coming forth of a new kind of “individuated” (earned through effort) spiritual awareness.

Insofar as we have lost our (once-natural) clairvoyant capacities, and been condemned to relative darkness, this is precisely so we might “ascend to the spirit again . . . via logical thinking.” Our access to spiritual dimensions then is fully rooted in our human incarnation rather than a sort of bypassing of it, and it is those roots that make us all the more stable within the higher realms. Clairvoyants, on the other hand, never having done (or needed to do) this work of mental application to enter the spiritual dimensions, “can be lost at any time” (p. 71).

I would guess that this relates to something Steiner says elsewhere in the same lecture series, that knowledge cannot be used to increase our spiritual status without becoming a curse. Spiritual capacities exist only to help others, and communication is central to this goal. Any spiritual knowledge that is overly subjective, hermetic, or abstract—to say nothing of so-called vision-states that often cannot be articulated at all, save as stories—is useless outside of a niche market in which it serves as currency.

Everyone is fascinated by their own dreams; yet in most cases, nothing is less interesting to others than hearing about them.

It really is a thousand times more preferable to gain knowledge of spiritual science without seeing anything, than to see all sorts of things without the opportunity to penetrate them with incisive thought, because this is how they are compromised by uncertainty and instability (p. 69).

Based on my own experience of “psychic” types, visions unpenetrated by incisive thought, as Steiner puts it, are not only vague and amorphous and essentially without substance, they also tend towards increased instability in the psychic. How many gurus on the spiritual marketplace—to say nothing of psychics—claim some sort of enlightenment, based on an amorphous spiritual epiphany which they have failed to integrate, understand, or ground in clear and intelligent thinking, and which is therefore something that can never be effectively conveyed to others?

According to Steiner, this is a two-way dead-end street: not only does premature, unearned, or insufficiently integrated spiritual experience lead to muddy-thinking—the reverse is also the case, and “It is comparatively easy for non-thinkers to have a measure of visionary clairvoyance, which easily inclines them to arrogance when faced with thinking, whereas it is relatively hard for thinkers to become clairvoyant” (p. 69).1

Receiving communications from the spiritual world only has value if “we receive them in a manner compatible with our present earthly circumstances” (p. 73, emphasis added).

Many have this greed simply to snatch something from the spiritual world without painstakingly proceeding with the thinking that must be mastered here in the physical world. No God can conceive of the world in thought form unless they are incarnated on our physical Earth; they can do this in other forms but to comprehend our world through thinking can only be achieved here when incarnated. Bearing this in mind, every individual needs to be absolutely clear that dangers are attached to clairvoyance not rightly used (ibid., emphasis added).

Unless the Seed

Just as our “fallen” intellectual capacities keep us out of the garden—from becoming as the gods are—by the same token, it is via these same faculties that the gods “descend” into the earthly realms and so transform it. To aspire to the heavens by seizing transcendental insight, rather than working within the limited, earthbound capacities of our materiality, Steiner was arguing, is to prevent and undermine the very evolutionary process for which we “fell” in the first place.

Whoever develops clairvoyance without using it rightly remains at an astral level, fails to bring the experience down to the physical level, cuts themselves off from the prospect of convincing others and creates a dangerous abyss between their vision and physical reality. . . . Real discernment can only be acquired through working on the physical plane. That is why one remains floating without foundation, if one scorns the albeit laborious work of grappling with thinking (p. 73, 75, emphasis added).

The main points:

• misuse of clairvoyant abilities;
• confinement to the astral level;
• being cut off from others and from physical reality;
• the failure to communicate;
• the necessity of engagement with physical reality, via the methodical application of rational thought and earned understanding.

What Steiner doesn’t make explicit is the link between this material and the material I quoted last week, from a lecture he gave a few days later, i.e., his warning about a regression to a group-soul level of consciousness that can be mistaken for a new evolution. Yet it seems to me Steiner was speaking about the same thing in two different ways.

Astral = clairvoyant = primal level = group-soul = groupthink = disconnect from physical reality and from others = a lack of individuation. It is through a combination of diminished clairvoyance with the incisive thinking required to re-access our soul’s awareness (the I of the heart) that subjectivity is able to grow, like a seed sprouting in darkness.

As our consciousness becomes fully immersed in the physical realm, it thereby separates out from the astral group-mind, and, after abiding for the necessary period in darkness, pushes up through the earth and towards the sky: into the individuated realm of the gods, just as Christ did before us. This is the “Christ in I.”

The willingness to think our own original thoughts, then, is to allow the gods to think us into existence, using those thoughts as landing pads, or seeds, by which to enter into/emerge from the mortal realm (Jacob’s ladder goes two ways). Thus it is from the seeds of incisive, and isolate, thinking that the life of the individual soul grows.

And upon that foundation—the head cornerstone the builders rejected—the kingdom of heaven is established.

To bring this peaceful circle (transcript-typo/pun intended?), an I-self is individuated, has no group affiliations, is uninfluenced by groupthink. It can see the truth because it has no preference, no personal investment in seeing one perspective over another or confirming one interpretation over another, because it is under no external pressure to conform or to rebel.

The I of the heart is the eye of God that sees out of the subjectivity of Creation. God “has no respect for persons,” i.e., is absolutely impartial, without tribal allegiances, with no time for groupthink.2 Infinite being, consciousness, and bliss, the “I am” that lives in all things and from which all things come, is the Sun that shines both through and on every one.

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