Reading Rudolf Steiner’s The Deeper Secrets of Human Evolution in the Light of the Gospels

Part One: The Dark Side of Spirituality

The Shape of Thought

Let us assume you have a seed such as a grain of wheat. However long you contemplate it, it will not germinate into a wheat plant. To do so it needs to be planted in soil and left to grow, allowing growth forces to activate it. What divine beings possessed before the creation of human beings can be compared with that grain of wheat, were it to exist in the form of a thought. It would first need tending by terrestrial human beings on the physical plane. There is no other way for thoughts sent from higher worlds to be tended than for them to flourish through human incarnations.

Thus what humans think on this physical plane is unique, and must complement such potentialities as approach from spiritual realms. Human beings are in fact essential for this, otherwise the gods would not have caused them to arise. The gods made possible the genesis of humanity, so that what they had previously possessed could also appear to them in the shape of thoughts formed through human activity.

That this was even possible, that what descended from higher worlds could take the form of thoughts, would never have been possible, had not human beings clothed these spiritual gifts with the contours of their own thinking. . . . People who do not want to exercise their thinking on earth deprive the gods of something they have been relying upon, and they, thereby, fail in their intrinsically human task, their human assignment. They will only fulfill this mission in their incarnation when they undertake to work rigorously with their thinking (Steiner, p. 63-64, emphasis added).

In the last Jobcast with Brett Carollo, we talked about the limitations of knowledge (gnosis) as a path to wholeness, illumination, or salvation, and I reiterated a position that I have held for the last fifteen years or so (roughly since I began focusing on “observing the law of matter” and stripping “spirituality” of the occultic trappings of identity-boot-strapping).

As often happens with these sorts of things, the timing of this podcast (recorded about a month ago) coincided with a change in my perspective about the topic. This was caused by reading a book by Rudolf Steiner called The Deeper Secrets of Human Evolution in the Light of the Gospels. I ordered the book (despite the free availability of the audios by Dale Brunsvold) ostensibly for its content about Abraham and the mission of the original Hebrews. It turned out that the real reason I ordered it was something else, namely the sixth chapter, entitled “On the Right Relationship with Anthroposophy” (Lecture 6, Stuttgart, 13^th of November 1909, audio here).

Reading this chapter gave me an epiphany, because until that moment, I had fully internalized the new-age, spiritually ubiquitous idea that thinking is “bad,” that the intellect is “fallen” and corrupt (and corrupting), and that the way to the truth is through heart, soul, body, but certainly not through the mind.

At the same time, being a writer, talker, and thinker, I have also taken great enjoyment in exercising my intellect, reasoning, and analytic logic, even if there was always, in the back of my mind, the idea that reading, writing, thinking, talking, were all somehow lesser modes of being. My spiritual coach and cohort of many years, Dave Oshana, has, or had, the motto, “Experience first, understanding later, if at all.”

The thought that thinking was bad has created a tension in my consciousness. This tension was more evident than ever as I proceeded, over the past two years, to apply the intellectual tools I had developed (over several decades of “mapping hell”) to the problem of Biblical scripture and religious faith. My recent post about “Logos Pistis” was an attempt to raise analytical logic (back) up to its proper place as central to understanding, experiencing, engagement, and expression of/with God/the Spirit/the Divine.

And where would logic be without thinking?

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But Is It True?

Of course, I do not know how much of what Steiner says is true. A Christian occultist with his own school of thought—is this a case of the serpent peddling his own wares? Luring me back into an intellectual huis clos, just when I had finally reversed my way out?

The idea of developing one’s intellectual capacities to think one’s way into godliness is a tantalizing one. Yet what is thinking for (besides rudimentary practical tasks) if not for bridging the finite with the infinite? While one literally cannot think about the infinite, can one perhaps think one’s way into an encounter with it (or learn to think in such a way as to become receptive to it)?

In my twenties and thirties, I had many visions and dreams, not all of them the result of psychedelics, some I believed at the time to be sent by God. It became obvious to me, however, as I entered my forties, that my visionary capacities were not helping me to be happy or whole or to live a better life. Instead, I was top-heavy, perennially dissatisfied, enduring chronic fatigue and body pains, barely able to even wake up in the morning after prodigious astral travels. It was apparent to me that the solution required becoming more embodied and less “spiritual” (psychic), at least in the conceptual (or astral) way, and more in the Zen, chop wood, carry water, observe the law of matter way.

What was less apparent to me, but with hindsight seems also true, was that honing my intellectual faculties to anchor a runaway “intuition” was part and parcel of course-correcting. The bridge between sentient but inarticulate physicality (the body) and soul-spirit (which is post- rather than pre-verbal) is the heart-informed mind and the mind-regulated heart. The continuum between organic life and spiritual life (after death) is cognitive.

Spirituality without science (knowledge) is as much a dead-end as science without spirituality.

The Group Mind Has You

The subject of thinking—good and bad—overlaps directly with my recent focus (in the last essay at CoJ, and at last Saturday’s “Christ Outside of Christianity” meeting) on the essential distinction between individuality and group consciousness, or group-think.

Simply put, my ability to develop a direct personal relationship with scripture (and what is behind it) hinges on my being able to think as an individual, uncoupled from societal, institutional or doctrinal influences. From here, I reasoned that any sort of group affiliation/identification (even as broad as identifying as a Christian) entails not thinking our own (original) thoughts, and thereby prevents us from having a direct (personal) connection to God.

There is a key difference to be drawn here, however, between individuality and individualism, the latter being a runaway virus in the postmodern world, inseparable from pathologies such as atheism, transhumanism, nihilism, and narcissism. Individualism hinges on the idea of personal preference. Individuality, in contrast, depends on surrendering personal preference, as the necessary means to relate directly to reality, truth, and God.

This is what is peculiar to anthroposophical wisdom, that an observer cannot retain their own opinion or preference for this or that theory—as a result of their own particular individual idiosyncrasy—but that they must show no preference for one or another viewpoint. As long as they take a partial stance, true world mysteries will be unable to reveal themselves. A person must acknowledge on an individual basis; but their individuality needs to extend so widely that it retains no trace of anything personal, neither by way of sympathy nor antipathy. This needs to be taken seriously, wholeheartedly, and stringently.

Anyone maintaining partiality in relation to particular definitions, concepts, or opinions, whether through their education, temperament, or other leaning, one way or another, will never be in a position to recognize objective truth. . . . People will have to exercise their individuality, because what is spiritual can emerge—neither by starlight nor moonshine—but only in the human soul, within the individuality. This faculty will in turn have to have been developed to a sufficient level that it can switch itself off when facing the advent of such world wisdom (p. 130, 131, emphasis added).

Genuine individuality, then, both allows for and depends on an ability to surrender one’s individuality to that which is greater—namely, the truth. The way in which each soul arrives at the objective truth is unique; we might even say that our uniqueness as an individual develops directly out of that journey.

Yet to arrive at objective truth is to encounter the absolute and be subsumed by it. One only ever knows objective reality by becoming it, and one can only achieve this by becoming a genuine individual—albeit only for that instant by which one arrives at the absolute. For Steiner, this was the Christ-impulse and the goal of human evolution, what we might call “opening the I of the heart.”

It is a question of whether one has tended one’s I-individuality in this incarnation. Unattended, it is not present as an inward human entity. In looking back, it will be remembered as part of a group ego, as a member of a communal identity. Humans will say: Yes, I was there, but I did not liberate myself. This will be experienced as a new feeling among humanity: that of having reverted back to a conscious blending with—or subsuming into—a group soul. This will be something terrible for the sixth cultural epoch: the inability to sense oneself as an individual in retrospect but instead being stunted and confined within a group-soul beyond whose bounds one is unable to escape (p. 136, emphasis added).

Steiner’s viewpoint was that “those who fail to penetrate and shape their individuality”—to develop a direct relationship to Christ independent of any collective body—instead “will be dependent on connecting themselves with a certain group by whom they will allow themselves to be instructed as to how they should think, feel, and act. This will be experienced as a descent, a deterioration, as a Fall by a future humanity” (ibid.).

This is the dark side of spirituality: an absorption into an atavistic group-soul, akin to a previous state of human consciousness closer to the animal (psychic, astral) level of consciousness, out of which we have evolved.

Since there is no going back to a lost group-mind of paradisiacal innocence, presumably this can only happen through such technological counterfeiting as we are currently seeing, via the Ahrimanic Induction into a Borg-mind of “the internet of bodies.” Ironically, the ideological promise of this trajectory towards “transhumanity” is that of the sanctity of individuality, combined with the group-identification intersectionality of global citizenship: “Ye shall become as gods,” working for the Man.

The group-identities of the many-headed hive-mind offer up the very worst of both worlds: consciousnesses isolated from body and soul, and therefore from all other consciousnesses, living and dead; while at the same time being subsumed into a technological machine-casing that is wholly insentient, even while retaining enough residual life energy and awareness to keep the matrix running.

Audio

Continued next week