Tag Archives: Rudolf Steiner

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What Are ‘The Men In Black’?

Mainstream culture adopts esoteric ideas only in ways that reflect its assumptions. From the gnostic idea that reality is a prison constructed by a malevolent demiurge, for example, we get a film like The Matrix (Wachowski, 1999). The film falls short of its apparent gnosticism because, on closer inspection, reality and the matrix are pretty much identical. Neo, the hero, looks and acts pretty much like himself in both, illustrating how popular culture simply can’t do without the notion of a stable ego. Indeed, having discovered that he himself is happily a fixed feature of two realities, the matrix ultimately becomes a playground for Neo’s ego, the reason why the film degenerates into the usual chase and fight scenes.

The consensus view of reality inflicts similar damage upon paranormal themes. In the paranormal field, there is a threshold. Stepping over it, we leave behind the realm of the socially acceptable. Things get serious over there. This moment is dramatised in another Hollywood film, The Mothman Prophecies (Pellington, 2002). The hero John Klein receives a message that his dead wife will call. When the phone rings (even after he has disconnected the handset from the wall) he must decide whether to walk away and resume a rational, everyday life; or pick up the receiver, and allow himself to be drawn in by bizarre phenomena. Hollywood represents the first option as wiser.

Nick Redfern, The Real Men in Black

Nick Redfern, 'The Real Men in Black'. Click for the official website.

In Nick Redfern’s recent book, The Real Men in Black (2011), I was intrigued by how there is a species of paranormal phenomena that specifically enacts this moment in the lives of its witnesses. According to the folklore that surrounds them, the Men in Black (MIB) visit, warn and sometimes threaten people who are digging around in paranormal topics. Most frequently, MIB arrive after sightings of UFOs, but Redfern’s book shows this isn’t always so: spotting the Loch Ness monster, searching for King Arthur’s burial site, or just general dabbling with ouija boards and the occult have proved sufficient cause for a MIB encounter in certain cases.

Redfern considers a range of possible explanations for the MIB: hallucinations and hoaxes; tulpas; the Trickster archetype; actual government agents and civilian imposters; time travellers; and demons. His conclusion is that MIB are a heterogeneous phenomenon, produced by possibly any combination of these.

At the end of the book, I felt that although Redfern’s conclusion holds good for the MIB’s means of manifestation, nevertheless there does seem to be a unifying reason for the phenomenon: the position of the witnesses on that threshold I mentioned, between consensus reality and – something else.

As I read through Redfern’s stories, I found myself in each case tending towards a probable cause: one sounded like a lucid dream; another sounded like paranoia; one seemed a hallucination or screen memory; yet another seemed most likely just some guy mucking around. Nevertheless, the significance of the incident in the witnesses’ lives was pretty uniform. It brought them to a turning-point, from which most fearfully turned away, whereas a few chose to forge ahead.

The MIB reminded me of an entity that appeared one day as I sat meditating. ‘Hello,’ it said. ‘I’m the root of your being. I’m here to tell you that you’ve reached as far as it’s possible to go, so there’s no need to continue. You can stop meditating now.’ Although I was suffering at the time, and the invitation to cease was attractive, nevertheless I pressed on.

My colleague Alan had a similar experience (whilst on a bus). He named what we’d experienced as ‘The Vision of the Double’ (Chapman & Barford 2009: 22-24), a last-ditch attempt of the ego to prevent its being seen through, by producing a replica of itself and then trying to persuade us that this replica is something ‘real’ or ‘other’.

This tactic accounts for some of the weirder aspects of the MIB, for instance: the way they often appear to struggle to maintain a human appearance. Some commentators have pointed out how MIB seem particularly prone to fail in this if the witness reacts to the encounter with strong emotions (other than fear) or humour, in response to which MIB will often seem to lose their authority, or will even sometimes flee the scene. Indeed, Gray Barker has suggested that a joke is the best defence of all against them (Redfern 2011: 178). We all know from experience how nothing overwhelms our ego more than strong feelings, or silences its demands more effectively than a sharp dose of humour. Under these conditions it’s difficult for our ego to maintain its semblance of integrity.

However, I don’t mean by this that MIB are a purely interior, psychological event, or even necessarily a hallucination. MIB are not purely psychological but also partly magickal, an aspect of the magickal process that guides us toward truth. If magick is the art of experiencing truth, then we can arrive at this on the back of anything: dreams, waking hallucinations, chance events, or even some random guy hoaxing us rotten with a cheap black suit and make-up. Any of these can lead us magickally to the experience of truth; not the truth of how the MIB happen to manifest, but the truth of what the encounter with them means.

‘The Vision of the Double’ is a perspective on an important turning-point, but with a negative slant. A more positive view is provided within the literature of western occultism, however, in the guise of ‘The Guardian of the Threshold’. According to Rudolf Steiner, this is an astral being who appears when our faculties of thinking, feeling and willing become detached from the personality – in other words, when we have reached the understanding that our thoughts, feelings and intentions are not the isolated private property of a metaphysical ego, but also themselves a part of reality, and as such fully amenable to our further exploration and development.

According to Steiner, the Guardian, in effect, is saying to us:

Hitherto … [karmic powers] were interwoven with thine own being; they were in thee and thou couldst not see them, even as thou canst not behold thine own brain with physical eyes. But now they become released from thee; they detach themselves from thy personality. They assume an independent form which thou canst see even as thou beholdest the stones and plants of the outer world. (Steiner 1947: chapter X)

Consider how a UFO encounter – or some other paranormal experience – might disrupt a person’s sense of reality sufficiently to cause them to investigate seriously, perhaps for the first time, the nature of their perception and of what, until then, they had considered ‘real’. The boundary between self and other can become tenuously thin at such times, resulting in all kinds of synchronicites or chains of paranormal happenings, of such intensity that the witness may question their sanity. It is often against such a background that MIB pay their visit and issue their warnings or threats.

Whereas ‘The Vision of the Double’ emphasises the ego’s attempt to deceive, ‘The Guardian of the Threshold’ stresses the possibility of re-owning the deception and moving past it. In Steiner’s paraphrase, again:

I am thine own creation. Formerly I drew my life from thine; but now thou hast awakened me to a separate existence so that I stand before thee as the visible gauge of thy future deeds – perhaps, too, as thy constant reproach. Thou hast formed me, but by so doing thou hast undertaken, as thy duty, to transform me. (Steiner 1947: chapter X)

In some of Redfern’s cases, ignoring MIB warnings appears to have led to mysterious ‘accidents’ and premature death. But where this occurs, of course, we do not have the witness’s own full account, but instead a narrative told by others, which is perhaps more prone to the effects of telling a good story. The occult scene is littered with psychological casualties. Probably no one is immune. But the individual must decide whether harm arises from venturing into the unknown, or from the tension caused when we try to keep one foot in what we refuse to regard as anything other than rock-solid reality.

There may be disparate causes of the manifestation of MIB, but the reason for their appearance has to be a unifying factor, present in each instance. It seems no accident that, although not exclusively, MIB appear mostly in connection with UFOs, because in ufology more than any other paranormal field (ghosts or psi, for example) its dominant theories lie within consensus views.

The idea of life on other planets is easier to swallow for most people than the notion of survival after death, and whereas no one suspects their government of capturing and dissecting poltergeists, people have far less problem supposing their government has done so with respect to UFOs. Of course, there are ufological researchers who take a far more sophisticated approach, but their theories are often too subtle for consensus tastes. Ufology, more than any paranormal field, has fallen to the stranglehold of a single theory (the extraterrestrial hypothesis) whose physical basis has marked it with a materialistic taint.

Steiner's drawing of 'The Double'

A curious drawing by Steiner (for stained glass) of 'The Double' as an inhuman serpent, with chakras.

The idea that MIB are agents from the government intent on silencing UFO witnesses is widely accepted – with good reason, because as Redfern shows, in some cases it is demonstrably true! Yet the fallout from the materialism of ufology is that even in cases where governmental agents are not involved, suchlike will nonetheless appear, whether in the form of dreams, hallucinations, misperceptions, or maybe even supernatural entities. They are the product of an imagination tainted by a materialist, consensus mindset; yet also, at the same time, they are an opportunity offered by that same imagination to transcend itself.

References

Alan Chapman & Duncan Barford (2009). The Blood of the Saints. Brighton: Heptarchia.

Mark Pellington (Director). (2002). The Mothman Prophecies [Motion picture]. United States: Lakeshore Entertainment.

Nick Redfern (2011). The Real Men in Black. Pompton Plains, NJ: The Career Press.

Rudolf Steiner (1947). Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. Translated by George Metaxa. http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA010/English/AP1947/GA010_index.html

Andy & Lana Wachowski (Directors). (1999). The Matrix [Motion picture]. United States: Warner Bros.

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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.

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Demon-Hunting on the Astral Plane

Alan mentioned that he’d been doing some work on lucid dreaming. ‘Why is it,’ he said, ‘that spirits and demons in this realm are always trying to get inside your body?’

‘I’ve experienced those,’ I said, ‘but not inside a lucid dream; only during the out-of-body state.’

‘We could go hunting and find out more about them.’

‘I’ll give that a try,’ I said.

It being Good Friday, I didn’t have to get up early, so at 6.30am I made the resolution to have a lucid dream and find some demons. I instantly forgot and fell asleep, and this happened a few times, but on each occasion I reminded myself of the resolve and tried to concentrate on an image of myself falling backwards into space.

There was a non-lucid dream about a nasty old man who lived in a shack and was probably a paedophile. Then there was a dream about walking down a lane with an ornate wrought-iron fence. Words were fashioned into the metal. I was on the wrong side, so the words were backwards, but I could still read them: ‘Furdur… Malpas…’

‘These are the names of demons!’ I realised, and at that point – remembering my resolve – I became lucid.

I noticed a gate in the fence and walked through. Nearby was a building, but the space inside was full of decayed debris. ‘Not here,’ I thought. ‘Not enough room…’ So I passed through a polythene curtain into a dark, furnished lounge. I reasoned that I ought to protect myself, so I traced the outline of a triangle onto the carpet with my finger, which remained in fiery, bright orange. Next I announced my intent: ‘to evoke into the triangle one of those spirits or demons that tries to get inside the body, in order to ask it some questions.’

This is Furfur, not 'Furdur' - and it's Marbas or Malphas, not 'Malpas'.

The results were surprising. Something was coming into the triangle, but the facts about it were these: (1) it didn’t want to come and (2) it wasn’t external.

It didn’t want to come because it knew I had control over it, yet it couldn’t resist the evocation. However, it was capable of delaying, so what it tried to do was to put off materialising until the lucid state had begun to degrade. But this didn’t prevent me from realising what I hadn’t suspected about its nature: that it seemed to be coming from inside me.

Whatever I was evoking was coming from inside in order to appear as if it was outside. I could feel the evocation working, and this was precisely what was happening: something from inside was being projected out. Although the lucid state ended before the full materialisation had occurred, it was clear that if the demon had wanted to get inside me then this was in fact a return to where it had started from.

Thinking afterwards, I was reminded of some remarks by Rudolf Steiner concerning our experience after death. In the life before death we experience ourselves on the inside and our environment outside, but in the life after death, Steiner avers, our sense of self comes at us from outside and the environment is something we discover within. This leads me to wonder whether we have to contend not only with different types of spirits in these explorations – some of which come from ‘outside’, some from ‘within’ – but also different states, which can cause us to experience ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ differently from how they ordinarily appear.

As I mentioned to Alan during our conversation, I’ve only experienced invasive spirits so far in the out-of-body state. I need to conduct more experiments to discover whether invasive spirits can be found in the lucid state, or whether these can only exist in the out-of-body state, and – if so – is it the nature of the spirit or of the state that accounts for their invasiveness?

Reference

Rudolf Steiner, ‘Investigations into Life Between Death and Rebirth’, a lecture given on 27th October, 1912, in: Life Between Death and Rebirth (Anthroposophic Press, 1968), p. 30.

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Rudolf Steiner and the Minotaur: Some Short Observations on Dreams

I was at my parents’ house with K— and she, like me, was wondering how we should spend the day. We were sitting in my old bedroom. It was summer, warm, and all the windows in the house were open.

minotaur

A staring match with a Minotaur.

In the sky a man was floating; a man in the form of an elongated Friesian cow. He split into two, and the half with the head drifted down and through the window. Once the cow-man was inside he changed in a black demonic creature with the head and horns of a bull. The black Minotaur stood on the carpet and stared at me with orange eyes.

This is fine. It’s okay, I reassured myself, aware that I was having a nightmare, that the figure represented a shadow aspect, and that I could control my fear. But such strong waves of weirdness radiated from the thing that I lost my cool. The silence of its penetrating stare spooked me and I woke up, frightened.

Later, Rudolf Steiner came to address a spiritual community I was visiting. Steiner was very busy, but I pulled him aside and roused myself into the lucid state so we could have a proper chat.

We walked together briskly, both aware there wasn’t much time before he had to give his talk or I lost lucidity. We spoke quickly, but I noticed the words made little sense. He asked: ‘How’s Bill?’ (Even at the time it seemed very unlikely Steiner would actually say this.)

rudolf steiner

Rudolf Steiner. I caught up with him for a quick chat...

I asked him for a way I could make contact whenever I wanted to. He showed me a black onyx wand and said, ‘This will easily do the job.’ He was surprised that I should need a physical object, so I told him, ‘In the world I come from you’re not available to people any more.’ This surprised him. ‘Oh, I see,’ he said, as if it were something that hadn’t occurred to him.

Then the dream unravelled.

I didn’t deal with the nightmare as successfully as on previous occasions, but I’ve noticed a pattern where facing down a nightmare can lead to a subsequent dream, which seems to reward with an insight or numinous message.

To assume that because Steiner’s words were senseless then the message makes no sense is probably to misunderstand the level on which the dream communicates. ‘Bill’ was the name of the person who first introduced me to Steiner’s work. The words ‘How’s Bill?’ make little sense taken literally, but taken as ‘How’s your connection with my work developing?’ it starts to mean something more.

I realised there was no need to feel frustrated if I couldn’t remember the details of the conversation, because the feeling of walking with Steiner and enjoying his presence remained. We depend on words for conveying meaning when we are awake. We need to learn to look elsewhere when we’re dreaming to discover the meaning of the experience.