Tag Archives: karma

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Where the Dead Live

Fast forward to the moment of your death: as the body fails, with a varying degree of rapidity, your perceptual and cognitive faculties shut down. Seeing stops. Then tasting, hearing, smelling and feeling. So too, thinking. In Buddhist traditions, supposedly hearing goes last. And at some point, presumably, consciousness.

But don’t worry too much about that last one – consciousness vanishes for a good part of every night. Sometimes, during the day as well. It comes and it goes and is no more ‘you’ than anything that arises within it. Even with consciousness completely gone, we wake up in the morning and recall stuff that seemed to have happened. Weird stuff, often. We call this stuff that happens to us in the absence of consciousness, dreaming.

Heraclitus said, ‘The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own’ (Fragment 89). Because dreams are so private and unique, we are – in a sense – closest to ourselves in the absence of consciousness. But what is this intensely personal stuff that continues to unfold in us, even in the absence of consciousness and volition? One word for it is karma.

The karmic traces are like photographs that we take of each experience. Any reaction of grasping or aversion to any experience… is like snapping a photo. In the darkroom of our sleep we develop the film. Which images are developed on a particular night will be determined by the secondary conditions recently encountered. Some images or traces are burned deeply into us by powerful reactions while others, resulting from superficial experiences, leave only a faint residue… We string them together like a film, as this is the way our psyches work to make meaning, resulting in a narrative constructed from conditioned tendencies and habitual identities: the dream. (Tenzin 1998: 32-3)

So claims Tibetan Buddhist dream yogi, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. Before we write this off as exotic claptrap, consider the similar conclusions of a western dream yogi. Sigmund Freud preferred the term ‘unconscious wish’ (Freud 1976: 200-213 [Ch. III]) instead of ‘reaction of grasping or aversion’; Tenzin’s ‘secondary conditions recently encountered,’ Freud called ‘the day’s residues’ (Freud 1976: 247-76 [Ch. V (A)]); and ‘the way our psyches work to make meaning’ was precisely what Freud believed had been uncovered through his exploration of dreams, to which he dedicated the rest of his career. (He preferred to describe it as, ‘the dream-work’ [Freud 1976: 381-651 (Ch. VI)].)

The end of consciousness is not the end of karma. Indeed, in the absence of consciousness, karma thrives. But what about the end of life? ‘What dreams may come?’ Is death the end of karma too?

I’ve used my limited abilities as a lucid-dreaming yogi to interrogate angelic and demonic entities, and to scry the Enochian aethyrs. In December last year, my father unexpectedly and traumatically died. Since then, whilst grieving for him with other members of my family, cautiously and carefully I’ve tried to use dream yoga to explore his vicissitudes after death.

28th February. To see him was lovely. A vivid sense of his presence. He sat in the chair watching television. Yet as soon as interaction was attempted, things turned problematic. He stood against the wall, frozen and immobile. No response. His eyes opened and stared blankly, like they had in the intensive care unit.

6th March. I went into the kitchen and he was getting ready for work. He looked younger and healthy, but seemed stressed. ‘You’re looking well,’ I said to him. ‘You know that’s because you’re dead now, don’t you?’ He seemed bewildered and unsure. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but I feel poorly. Every time I walk into a room, I –’ Unfortunately, just then the lucid state dissolved.

‘But these are just dreams,’ is the obvious criticism. They were lucid dreams, but other than that I do not disagree – except to point out that our experience of others is always of their behaviour: the way they look, speak and move; the choices and reactions they make. In an encounter with a dead person in a lucid dream, all of these present themselves to consciousness. Phenomenologically, there is no difference from an experience of the person in waking life.

Yet in these dreams, when the dead person is called upon to react to their current situation, the interaction breaks down, because what is missing is not karma, but life. As far as I’m aware, there is no scientifically feasible definition of life that doesn’t point instead at karma. So far, life has not been defined as what it ‘is’ or ‘has’, but only in terms of actions and behaviours – as karma, in other words.

DNA, certainly, is a substance that living things have, but that having is made possible only by a doing: the self-replicating and recombining action of the DNA molecule. It appears that life itself is not the being or having of something, but a continuous unfolding, somehow beyond these, to which being and having are responses, rather than the driving force.

The karma of the dead might persist in various forms, the strongest of which is probably memories and effects upon the living. But although the karmic simulacrum left by the dead is to all extents identical with what they were, in the experience of others, that Grace by which (when alive) they were able to change, develop and respond, has withdrawn.

25th March. I couldn’t find him, but then I went into a pub and saw him. He looked normal but, on inspection, was like a hollow, metal ornament. His eyes were closed and his face dead. Inside him was black ash and soot. Still in the lucid state, I began to meditate. This way I could find him, because he had abandoned the physical representation of himself. Where he was now, he was in a kind of focused repose. No thoughts. Very peaceful. He was collecting himself quietly, focussing in on himself, with no thoughts or perceptible changes.

The karma of the dead unfolds in the living. Their vicissitudes after death are dependent on us, because they are done with developing and unfolding. Grieving is no isolated event in an individual mind, it is the dreaming-out by the dead (through us) of their karmic remnants. Our mourning is the unfolding of love or antagonisms they left behind. The dead can suffer or cling to life, depending on their dreams, woven by our grief.

3rd April. He seemed neither dead nor alive, but I sensed I could force the issue, so I walked quickly up to him and spoke loudly into his ear, ‘Dad!’ ‘Eh?’ he mumbled. ‘Love you,’ I said. ‘Uv oo,’ he replied, then lapsed back into a stillness, from which I knew he would next time be even harder to rouse.

I found it both difficult and helpful to meet him in this series of dreams. It’s not a technique I’d recommend for anyone with complicated issues concerning the deceased. There are bereavement counsellors who can guide us more safely if this is the case. It was difficult because there he was, completely back again, even though I knew full well he had gone. It was helpful because it showed me directly, painfully, how all that remained of him was karma. What had allowed that karma to unfold had now disappeared, maybe back to where it came.

Dad and me

Dad and me in a slot-machine arcade (probably Blackpool). Late 1970s Polaroid.

This last encounter alerted me I was clinging on too tightly. As time passed, he was moving ever further away, becoming more difficult to find. Reaching out was pulling him back toward a state in which he no longer belonged. It also exposed how, really, we’d said to each other all that needed to be said. It was selfish to continue.

1st May. In the garden at night, I pointed out to him the Pleiades star-cluster. Then I realised I wasn’t looking properly: the whole sky was filled with stars like the Pleiades, packed and dense. Suddenly, he was gone. Vanished from sight, like a jump-cut in a film. Mum and I were in the garden, looking up at the stars and remembering him.

References

Freud, Sigmund (1976). The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by James Strachey. Harmondsworth: Pelican.

Heraclitus (2012). Fragments. http://bit.ly/MToVOM (wikisource.org).

Tenzin, Wangyal Rinpoche (1998). The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep. Edited by Mark Dahlby. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications.

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The Truth of Reincarnation

We mustn’t judge

There are two kinds of metaphysical propositions: implicit and contingent. The contingent type enter experience when some condition is fulfilled. The implicit type are already available to experience, although our understanding may prevent us from realising them.

Only the implicit variety is valid, in the sense that what is not already available to experience, but depends on experience assuming a different form, is not true – at least, not in the sense that applies in the case of spiritual knowledge.

For example, let’s take the proposition of God’s existence. We can make various arguments for this being true or false, but these will be based upon intellectual judgements. Spiritual knowledge of the existence of God, in contrast, consists not in an intellectual judgement on the validity of the concept of God, but arrival at a realisation of how God’s existence is necessarily true.

This will sound like madness or self-delusion to some. And it would be, were it not the case that metaphysical propositions are different from ordinary ones. To ask whether God exists is different from asking whether baby pigeons exist; or from asking whether the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists. Ordinary, relative ideas may be either true or false. It makes no significant difference to reality either way, because their truth or falsity can be accommodated in either case. Metaphysical propositions, however, have repercussions not simply for the contents of reality but for reality itself. That is why knowledge of a metaphysical proposition depends upon realising its truth rather than judging it to be true. Unfortunately (for rationalists), it is not possible to realise the sense in which a metaphysical proposition is false, because a false metaphysical proposition has no basis in reality to put us in a position to realise anything. It is only possible to continue to fail to realise its truth.

The key word here is ‘realise’ rather than ‘judge’. The realisation of a metaphysical proposition arises not from a truth-judgement, but from completely understanding it and thereby having that understanding reflected in experience. In other words, it becomes a reality. An invalid metaphysical proposition, of course, cannot become a part of reality if it isn’t one already. So the same kind of understanding that arises from a valid proposition is not available from an invalid proposition, and this is why it cannot be experienced as being false.

Spiritual knowledge concerns a different level of being. In the field of ordinary knowledge we can understand propositions, judge them true or false, and then seek confirmation of our judgements. However, in the field of spiritual knowledge the propositions concern the nature of reality itself rather than its contents.

This nowhere near as difficult as it sounds. What is being described is simply the difference between thinking and meditation. The former confronts the contents of reality, whereas the latter confronts reality itself. In meditation there’s no room for a binary judgement, because what we are confronted with is all reality. Whatever arises before us in meditation, is. Reality itself is the object. The only alternative to reality is unreality, which in meditation is not a judgement on reality at all, but a failure of engagement with it. If something in our meditation arises as ‘unreal’, then unless we include and understand that sense of unreality as a part of reality, then we have ceased to meditate.

So these are my reasons for suggesting that the process of enquiry, the outcome, and the criteria for truth are all different in the case of metaphysical propositions than in the case of ordinary propositions.

There is no evidence for reincarnation

Now let’s turn our attention to the metaphysical proposition of reincarnation and consider how it stands. Firstly, reincarnation seems viable, because if I were a being that lives, dies, and re-manifests later as a completely different being, then reality would appear no differently from how it does now. My experience and the world would manifest in exactly the same form that they do already. But if, instead, I were a being that lives once, dies, is physically resurrected, judged by Christ and then consigned to either heaven or hell for all eternity, this would be contingent upon the world adopting a very different form at some point in the future from what it has currently. It’s actually the part about arriving in a state that lasts forever (presuming heaven or hell are states and not places) that strains reality the most.

But before we go soft on reincarnation, there’s the tricky point of how it manifests. If reincarnation is viable because it sits so well with the fundamental nature of experience, then all the so-called ‘evidence’ for it takes on a new light: those dramatic cases where young children have acquired apparently first-hand memories from people who have died.

Whatever this is evidence for, it cannot be reincarnation. Receiving someone else’s impressions is usually called telepathy. It’s only that the person happens to be dead which inclines us to call it reincarnation, coupled with the ‘medium’ being a child, whose personality is unformed as yet, which easily makes it seem that these impressions are the continuance of traits in the younger mind from the individuality that originally displayed them.

Reincarnation so neatly fits the fundamental nature of experience, in which impressions rise out of nothing, endure for a while, then completely pass, that we fool ourselves we can see ‘evidence’ where we ought to suppose instead that this process has gone wrong, because instances in which conscious memories have not passed away suggest something else entirely, something that is acting on the level of the contents of impressions, rather than at the metaphysical level. This may be evidence for the so-called ‘akashic records’, wherein the contents of human experience are said to be stored, but reincarnation is not about the reappearance of contents; it’s supposedly the continuation of what gives rise to those contents.

Rudolf Steiner

'Each individual is, in fact, his own species.' Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925).

Rudolf Steiner summed up his view on reincarnation in a single but profound phrase: ‘each individual is, in fact, his own species’ (Steiner 1904: Ch. 2).

In other words, as every creature is an instance of its species, yet the species itself is unmanifest, so each individual human (according to Steiner) is an instance of an unmanifest individuality, which is never born, but plays out its destiny through a sequence of human lives.

Therefore, something that is unmanifest endures (because things that are unmanifest are very good at this), but at the same time something manifest reappears, stays for a while, then disappears again – which is what manifest things, the contents of experience, do particularly well.

Rudolf Steiner was not Thomas Aquinas

We can have some fun with Steiner, because what was not widely known outside Steiner’s immediate circle until fairly recently (Meyer 2010), is that Steiner knew who he had been in his previous life. He was the scholastic philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274).

Although Steiner seemed happy with his view that ‘man is a species,’ among his writings in his previous incarnation as Aquinas, we find this: ‘the name “species” is not predicated of Socrates, so that one could say “Socrates is a species”‘ (Aquinas c.1254: Section 4).

Aquinas stated, in effect, that it’s nonsense to assert an individual has the essence of a species. His reason was that in the case of material beings, unless the species (e.g. ‘humanity’) signifies the whole of the individual in question (e.g. ‘Socrates’) and not only a part of the individual, then it cannot be said to be the essence of the individual (e.g. ‘Socrates is a humanity’ ?!). This does not make sense because a material being is not its own essence.

Spiritual beings, however (according to Aquinas) exist in a hierarchy, in which the higher the being, the closer it draws to its own essence, until we arrive at God who is pure existence and therefore His own essence (so of Whom, incidentally, it makes perfect sense to say: ‘God is a divinity’).

The Triumph of St Thomas Aquinas

St. Thomas Aquinas depicted by Gozzoli (detail). He is seated between Aristotle (on his right, of course) and Plato.

As a side-swipe, Aquinas points out that only the Platonists were silly enough to suppose the individual was a species, because they believed the species subsisted separately from its individual members in an alternative, unmanifest realm. Aquinas’ intellectual hero was, of course, the more materialistically inclined Aristotle.

So how could Steiner suppose he was the reincarnation of a 13th century philosopher whom he went around actively contradicting in the 20th? Quite easily. Steiner’s view of reincarnation asserts that what continues from life to life is unmanifest; it is the ‘species’ not the individual. If Steiner was not that unmanifest being, then Aquinas was not it either. Reincarnation concerns the relationship of an individual biography (or ‘karma’) to what is unmanifest. The lives of Aquinas and Steiner stand equally in relation to this unmanifest, rather than directly in relation to one another. It is missing the point to say ‘Steiner was Aquinas.’ Steiner’s view was that both of them were instances of the same unnameable, unmanifest. They were ‘members of the same species’.

Indeed, both were teachers of a rational path for the attainment of spiritual knowledge. Aquinas applied Aristotle to Christianity; Steiner applied contemporary philosophy and science to the mystical tradition of his time. But evidently, the manifestations of this unmanifest species-being can change. For the Aristotelian Aquinas, it was anathema to suppose the individual was a species; this was something predicated only of a being liberated from matter. The work of Steiner’s lifetime, in contrast, was to swing the pendulum back in a more Platonic direction.

For Aquinas, our manifestation in matter removes us from the divine, whereas for Steiner, the nature of the divine is at the very heart of being human (Steiner 1914: Ch.2, pp.49-50).

Famously, four months before he died, Aquinas had a powerful mystical experience that he refused to speak of in detail. He abandoned his usual routine and refused to write any more. ‘I cannot,’ he explained to his secretary, ‘because all that I have written seems like straw to me.’

It’s unnecessary for the view of reincarnation proposed here, to speculate that at the end of Aquinas’ life the pendulum had swung towards Steiner already. But I just have.

References

St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1254). ‘On Being and Essence’. Translation by Gyula Klima available on-line.

T.H. Meyer (2010). Rudolf Steiner’s Core Mission: The Birth and Development of Spiritual-Scientific Karma Research. Forest Row: Temple Lodge.

Rudolf Steiner (1904). Theosophy: An Introduction to the Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man. Translated by Henry B. Monges. Forest Row: Anthroposophic Press, 1971. Text available on-line.

Rudolf Steiner (1914). Occult Science. Translated by George and Mary Adams. Forest Row: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2005.

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Investigation Of My Past Lives: The Steiner Method

Rudolf Steiner’s method for retrieving past lives is deceptively simple. It’s this: meditate on a chosen experience over three subsequent days and on the fourth day (all being well) an impression will arise from a past life that accounts for the experience chosen from our current life [1].

Of course, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Firstly, there’s a technique: we must picture the experience in our meditation ‘with strength and energy’ (p. 9) evoking every aspect ‘as though you were trying to paint it in spirit’ (p. 8). Steiner even describes the type of headache that the correct level of exertion will cause. This effort must be kept up over each day and an appropriate connection with the original experience must be maintained throughout the series of changes that meditating upon it will initiate.

Handy pocket edition of Steiner's 'An Exercise for Karmic Insight'.

Which brings us also to the question of process. According to Steiner, the picture of the experience is transplanted across progressive levels of our being. After the first night following the first meditation, the picture is copied from its starting-point in the astral body into the etheric body. On the second night it passes from the etheric body into the physical body. On the third night the physical body works on the picture and eliminates it altogether. The picture then becomes ‘spiritualised’, so that ‘when you get up in the morning the picture is there, with you actually floating within it. It is like a kind of cloud that you yourself are within’ (p. 19).

Each of the ‘bodies’ (physical, etheric, astral) performs a different function, so that the picture, as it filters down through them, has in effect been transformed through thought (astral) to emotion (etheric) to will (physical). Passing through will, the picture then moves beyond our conscious awareness altogether. As human beings, we cannot experience the will itself, but only the impulses, desires and motives that arise in our minds or feelings in connection with our will. In earthly life we have no direct access to the causes that issue from our will, but only to the reasons we supply (retrospectively, in many cases) to our actions [2]. This is what Steiner seems to be referring to when he describes how we wake on the fourth day to find ourselves ‘inside’ the picture.

Because the picture has become will, then on the fourth day we experience a strong and peculiar sensation of being ‘shackled’, which Steiner describes in detail. We cannot experience will within ourselves, nevertheless will is what the picture has now become. Yet – Steiner assures us – if we can sit with this feeling of being ‘shackled’ and remain attentive to it without flinching, then:

the will becomes transformed: the will becomes seeing. The will cannot do anything but it leads to your being able to see something. It becomes an eye of the soul, and the picture you woke up with becomes actual, objective. What you see is the event of… some previous earth life, which had been the cause of what we sketched as a picture on the first day. (pp. 20-1)

Now, Steiner himself admitted that this material will sound highly unlikely to a lot of people. If it sounds unlikely to you, just try it! Have you ever taken the trouble to think hard about the same experience for a fixed period over a number of days? I was surprised to discover that the experience does indeed seem to pass through certain stages. Some of the terms in Steiner’s lecture sound a little odd or woolly, such as ‘being shackled’, and also the feeling ‘of metal spreading throughout your body’ (p. 30), but in the process of doing the exercise I encountered sensations that it didn’t seem unreasonable to describe in these terms. The exercise reminded me of experiences on a meditation retreat. For instance, at the end of the most intense retreat I’ve ever done, I felt as if I were wearing a tight skullcap over particular portions of my head. Sustained periods of meditative exertion can produce all kinds of quasi-physical sensations of the type Steiner describes.

Who knows?

In our first attempts to uncover our past lives, my colleague Alan and I opted for requesting information from spirits. We supposed they had better access to the answers than ourselves.

This produced some interesting results. For instance, I was informed by one spirit that my name in the last life was ‘Otto Berg’. I’d lived in Germany during the late nineteenth century and was possibly the same Otto Berg, a chemist, who had participated in the discovery of the element Rhenium in 1925.

However, information about previous lives gained in this way is only a story, unless it demonstrates a karmic connection with our current life. This is what Steiner’s method is better suited to deliver. A message from a spirit may stun us with its accuracy when a name or date actually checks out, but there’s nothing in the events of Otto Berg’s life that supplies a meaningful link between him and me other than what I infer myself from external circumstances. A random example: I used to be very good at chemistry when I was at school.

Steiner’s method may not be good for delivering specific names, dates and places, but it will deliver the experience of a lived connection between a previous incarnation and the current one. Lacking this, it seems impossible to make a case for any historical life possessing a greater connection with mine than any other. The problem, in other words, is that if a spirit tells me I was ‘Cleopatra’ or ‘Napoleon’ how do I know that I wasn’t?

The First Investigation

I had been to a lecture where a man who seemed to have serious mental health problems was seated in the front row. He couldn’t stop moving about in an aimless, anxious manner, and seemed not entirely aware of what was happening around him. Quite possibly, this may not have been the case, but even so I couldn’t stop thinking about him. Did he come to the lectures to keep warm? Was he genuinely interested in what was being spoken about? Because he had lingered in my head after the event I decided to choose this as the first experience I would investigate karmically.

During the first day’s meditation, the memory and its thoughts and feelings were vivid and easy to concentrate upon. On the second day, less so; other ideas would more easily take my attention away because they seemed relatively more arresting and interesting. I realised that something had therefore ‘faded’ from the original experience of the memory. Looking closer, yes, the memory still had feeling and resonance, but it wasn’t interesting in quite the same way and didn’t have the ‘mental hooks’ it had possessed on the previous day. I could see now what Steiner might mean by saying that the picture had been absorbed into the etheric body (emotional) from the astral (thinking).

On the third day the memory was duller still. The trick with the method is evidently not to discount the ‘dullness’ or the ‘fading’ as a failure or deficit. It’s not that. It’s a feature of the memory’s transition down through the bodies. Around the memory on the third day there was less emotional engagement and only a sense now that thinking about it was something I ought to be doing. It was only the intention to look at it that kept me coming back to the memory, and for much of the time continuing felt like a question of pure willpower. So I could see, again, what Steiner might have been getting at with the idea that the picture passes from the etheric (emotional) body to the physical (will). The emotional resonance that the memory had was now gone and it was only willpower that was left to engage with it.

I noticed that my stomach chakra seemed especially active during this final stage when there was only ‘will’ left, and I recalled that ‘willpower’ is a function traditionally ascribed to this chakra. This set me wondering whether the chakras are somehow the means by which the experience is absorbed, which would add a fourth category to the correspondences we’ve collected so far:

Chakra Position Body Function
ajna brow astral thinking
anahata heart etheric emotion
manipura stomach physical will

Whilst sitting on the second day (etheric-physical) I also had the imaginative experience of a mass of water, and that I was one among many beings that lived merged together in the water with no separation between our consciousnesses.

On the third day (physical-spiritual) there was a sudden, vivid image of an ancient landscape. There were two hills that from my perspective seemed of equal height and similar shape. At the summit of the more distant hill stood a stone tower. It was day, but the sky was oddly dark and full of turbulent cloud. I couldn’t help wondering whether this meant that I had lived during the medieval period. At the time, I decided to stick with Steiner’s instructions and resisted the temptation to pursue these visions. Instead I focused my mind back onto the original experience.

The feeling that Steiner refers to as ‘metal spreading throughout your body’ (p. 30) seems connected with the continuous effort of the exercise. I had the sensation of a hard, constant pressure within my body to ‘do something’ during the period of the exercise. I also noticed recurrent dreams of dangerous road journeys by bus, travelling too fast along very winding and hilly roads. On the first night, however, the dream took the form of a very complicated journey I had to make on foot, which I had to constantly work at mentally so as not to forget the route.

The feeling of ‘being shackled’ arose for me in the final stages when there was only a sense of obligation left with respect to the memory. I became confronted with the fact (which I’ve also experienced on retreat) that there is simply nothing happening when we confront our bare intentions. When we explore intention we may be surprised to discover that intention in itself doesn’t lead anywhere, it just intends, intends, intends… It seems that the ‘shackling’ is the realisation that intention doesn’t do or achieve anything other than intending. At this point it becomes clear that intention is not the experience of our will that we commonly mistake it for. Intention has meaning, but it belies only motives, not deeds. I think this is what Steiner is getting at when he says ‘the will becomes seeing‘ (p. 21).

This state found its sudden resolution in a strong conviction that I knew the man at the lecture. All at once, without a doubt, I knew him. There was a flicker of imagery of a boy with blonde hair – who was me. I had been cared for by the man. He had been in the role of something like a priest or abbot, and I was a young novice or maybe a ward of the church. The man had looked after me, but from a distance. To me he was an inspiring figure, wise and kind, although I never had the contact with him that I would have liked. It was suddenly clear why I was distressed to see him at the lecture, because he had so obviously gone off-track and fallen behind in realising his potential. His tendency to isolate himself in order to pursue his ideals had grown out of control and had led to his predicament in this current incarnation, where his mind was so cut off that no one could reach him.

The Second Investigation

A man forcibly snatched two children from a woman and took them away. I witnessed this incident as I was walking down the street one evening. As I drew closer, I was uncertain what I should do. I heard the man call the woman by name, and to the children he said: ‘We’re going to nanny’s,’ so I assumed he was their father or closely associated with them. But the children were distressed and the woman looked devastated, too grief-stricken perhaps to make a fuss or appeal to me or the other passers-by for help.

I was frightened to get involved, because the man looked as if he could do someone some damage, and I wasn’t sure that both parties wouldn’t turn on me. Nevertheless what I’d seen was two children forcibly abducted in the street, and even if the man was their father did that make it okay?

In retrospect, I should have walked around the corner out of sight and phoned the police. Then I would’ve done my part; the rest would be for the police to decide. No matter the details of the circumstances, what I didn’t like was the suffering inflicted on the kids, or how people think it’s acceptable to conduct their personal affairs and abuse children in a public space, confident that no one will dare to call them to account. But in the event, I carried on walking and felt disgusted at my own lack of action over the following days.

Taking this memory as the object of Steiner’s exercise, what I discovered was this: I was disgusted at myself for colluding with both the man and the woman.

It may have been the same past life uncovered in the first investigation, in which case I saw myself this time as somewhat older. I was a lowly-born person who had ascended up the social scale, assigned to a role of some kind of senior servant that made me a party to the private lives of nobles. A military commander had originally held this post, but had managed to worm his way out of it and pass it onto me.

I was advisor to a nobleman and his wife who’d fallen out of love and used their children to score points over each other. Both cut themselves off from their children, trying to make it seem that this were the other’s fault, in order to attract social allies to their camp and score political points. It was clear to me that neither loved the children. I thought this was deplorable, but couldn’t declare it out loud without putting my life in danger. I was bitterly disillusioned that people so high on the social scale had no greater morality than the lowest. The only way forward that I could see was to try to serve both their interests without favouring one above the other. Neither wanted the children, so I decided to let them score whatever political points at the other’s expense they wanted, whilst I concentrated on trying to find the best outcome for the children. But I was still deeply frustrated and disgusted that I couldn’t tell them to their faces how despicable and selfish their actions were, not without getting myself executed.

There was also the image of a frightening face, like an old witch, as if this were a memory from my own childhood in this past life. It was as if I had been taken to the witch and initiated, or treated for an illness, or somehow given a taste of her powers that had frightened and traumatised me. It seemed to me that what the parents were putting their children through was like my experience of the witch – probably even worse.

The vision closed with a sense that in this past life I may have not been seeing a situation clearly because of the trauma that I carried. I was perhaps bringing my own experience too much to bear upon my understanding of the situation of the children.

Ongoing

This work on retrieving visions from past lives is presented in the spirit of an experiment. The status of the results and of Steiner’s method are points on which I’ve yet to reach a conclusion. What the results have triggered so far, however, are some thoughts on the philosophical issues surrounding supposed past lives and karma. These I have written-up elsewhere.

Notes

[1] Steiner described this method in a lecture entitled ‘An Exercise for Karmic Insight’, which was given to members of the Anthroposophical Society at Dornach in Switzerland on May 9th, 1924, a few months before his death. This talk was part of a long lecture series on the theme of karma, and is included in volume two of Karmic Investigations (Forest Row: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2004). The lecture is also available singly as a small booklet, An Exercise for Karmic Insight (Forest Row: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2007), which is the edition I’m referring to here. At the time of writing there is no English translation available for free on-line.

[2] Compare this with Aleister Crowley’s assertion that the ultimate aim of magick is to discover the True Will. Crowley’s Thelema, like many other non-dualistic philosophies, implies that True Will lies beyond the mundane ego and personal experience.