"Their thoughts rose up like living dreams." The people of the time preceding the events of the Gita lived in a primitive state of consciousness that few would understand today. They were not conscious of their thinking as we are, but instead lived an instinctive life of tamas, rajas, and sattwa. When Krishna brought his great "I" to bear on Arjuna, he forced Arjuna into consciousness of his thoughts and actions, thereby creating the beginnings of ego in him and all mankind. Krishna taught Arjuna of these three life concepts of tamas, rajas, and sattwa, what Carl Jung would thousands of years later call psychological types. Using the characters of Star Trek, the tamas type is the mundane worker who is primarily concerned with the physical world, like the Enterprise's engineer, Scotty. The rajas type is the feeling, emotional type like Dr. McCoy. Men of thinking, intelligence, and sympathy comprise the sattwa type, typified by Capt. Kirk and Mr. Spock.
Krishna also taught Arjuna about reincarnation when he came to Arjuna as he was distraught over the fratricidal battle unfolding in the plain below him. His words founded the doctrine of reincarnation when he told Arjuna, "The spirit is eternal . . . Rise, Arjuna, rise to the spiritual standpoint, then you can go and give yourself up to duty . . . in killing your enemies you are not killing their essential being." This may sound mundane today, but in Arjuna's time it was a great revelation to be told that the spirit is eternal and the physical body is but a vehicle for the spirit. Steiner lays bare the Gita as a cornerstone of the evolution of cosmic consciousness during this book in a way that a simple reading of the Gita would never achieve.
Steiner shows us how our original clairvoyance ("thoughts rose up like living dreams") has evolved into our modern form of thinking in which we have yet to "recognize the supersensible nature of our concepts and ideas." We live on the brink of a new clairvoyance, one which we will consciously control and come to understand as the very basis of our concepts and ideas. Though the 18th Century Man may have said, "Oh, Man, make bold to use thy power of reason!", Rudolf Steiner says, "Oh, Man, make bold to claim thy concepts and ideas as the beginning of thy clairvoyance." Like Krishna with Arjuna, Steiner appears to the side of the Modern Human and says, "From now one, you shall be connected with spiritual worlds. They, not the world of sense, will bestow on you your world of ideas."
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