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A READER'S JOURNAL
Awake! For the Sake of the Future, GA#220
12 Lectures in Dornach, Jan. 5 - Feb. 28, 1923
by
Rudolf Steiner
Introduction and Translation by Jann W. Gates
ARJ2 Chapter: Spiritual Science
Published by SteinerBooks in 2015
A Book Review by Bobby Matherne ©2015
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No one tells someone, Awake!, unless they perceive them to be asleep. Aren't we all awake in our ultra-modern 21st Century? I am awake as I type these words, and you are awake as you read them, are we not? Are we not more awake than the ancient Greeks whose ideal of beauty ignored the realities of the world we know more clearly today? Yes, we can say all that with much justification, but is there an aspect of reality that escapes us that the ancient Greek could inform us about? Gates in his Introduction neatly summarizes the great Imagination that Steiner invites us into:
[page xiii] If we imagine an ancient Greek who could look into the future and perceive the fundamental differences between classical Greece and our modern focus on sense perception, we would have a different point of view. The ancient Greek would argue that the ancient Greeks were awake, and materialistic modern human beings are the ones who are asleep, because moderns are narrow-minded and have lost sight of the search for the essential, the true nature of the human being.
When the ancient Greek used their native clairvoyance, which we would call dreamlike, they felt lively awake, they felt an intensification of their consciousness, they felt themselves connected to the processes in the cosmos by the mirrored processes in themselves, and, as all felt it equally no one argued or discussed it whether it was true. They felt deeply which left no room for doubt that the human being was a spiritual being living in a physical body. The ancient Greek would speak to us this way:
[page 72] You modern human beings are the ones who are asleep. We were the human beings who were awake. We were awake within our physical bodies. Yes, we were awake as spiritual human beings living in physical bodies. We knew that we were human beings, because we could distinguish our humanity existing within the physical from the physical body itself. What you call being awake, was for us being asleep. When you are awake and order your senses within the outer world, and explain something from the point of view of the world of senses, you are asleep in relation to what is the essence of your humanity. You have fallen asleep; we are the ones who were awake.
Should the ancient Greek speak to us today, the message would be Awake! That would be a paradoxical message, as we feel ourselves to be the ones who are awake in our detailed focus on the processes of the sensory world around us. The part that we are missing fills Steiner's lectures in this book, but if I may shape a short poem to you, as an ancient Greek might carve a naked human body in stone, to demonstrate the point.
Awake!
Should the ancient Greek speak
to us today,
They would say Awake!Awake!
Awake to your full humanity of fluids and air
pulsing through your physical body,
coursing through your flesh and bones,
which you see as the be-all and end-all
of your existence, up until now!Awake!
Awake from your sleep of materialism
which hold fast your eyelids
shut to the reality
of the full human being, up until now!Awake!
Awake, you frogs in a vacuum jar!
Jump out and breathe in soul-permeated air!Awake, humans!
Throw off your sleep blanket of materialism,
woven of abstract logical premises —
covering your naked humanity, up until now!Awake!
Awake from your millennial sleep, Beauty,
Speak the Ancient Greek,
Live in your full essence from now on!What the ancient Greek sculptor carved and Michelangelo recapitulated in his statue of David was a naked human body, portrayed in stone, but which revealed the fluids coursing through the flesh and bones, the air filling the lungs, the living spirit filling physical body which shines out at us from its Carrara marble substance. The Renaissance was an attempted rebirth of this ancient understanding of the full human being, to remind us of what the ancient Greek were telling us. The ancient Greek spoke to us in their sculptures about the full reality of bones, flesh, and spirit which filled every human being, a reality which we moderns have mostly forgotten, up until now. Rudolf Steiner is telling us, "The sky is falling!" but his real message is that the spiritual world which many perceive as "heaven" or "up in the sky" or "some place far away" is coming back to us, falling back into our lives, and everywhere we find the primordial Fox offering to protect us from the spiritual world by luring us into His den where we will surely die as physical beings, never having allowed the Light of the Spirit to shine into us. "Modern civilization needs an awakening. But humanity wants to go right on sleeping!" Steiner says. (Page 73)
It is not enough for us to be awake only between arising and going to sleep, but also when we are outside in the cosmos while our physical and etheric body lies in repose in our bed, for it is then we are truly awake and aware of our essential nature as a full human being, feeling as the ancient Greek felt so fully. It is a feeling that we feel so meekly today, sensing that reality weakly when we view their ancient sculptures. How did we get to this sleepy clueless state?
We have listened for 400 years to the Fox who lured us into his lair to protect us from the spiritual world, namely, Francis Bacon, who "had the impulse to justify the sleepiness of modernity".
[page 73] That is, he grasped more deeply than we have been able to do in these past two days what is characteristic of our era. The modern human being cannot reach as deeply into the physical as humanity could in ancient times.
Knowing this, Bacon taught us humans how to cope directly with the physical world outside of us using only our sensory apparatus and ignore the spiritual world completely in our new forms of calculation and thinking.
Steiner came along some 400 years later to tell us that we need to do something different.
[page 72, 73] We need to learn how to be awake when aspects of our being are out in the cosmos. With the same intensity with which the human beings in ancient time were awake within their bodies, the modern human being has to learn how to be awake within their bodies, the modern human being has to learn how be awake when the astral and the I are outside the physical body; when we are actually within the outer cosmos. . . . For modern human beings during sleep do not enter more deeply into their physical body; instead, we go out of our physical body during sleep. But modern human beings must also learn to come out of their body during the waking state, for only thereby can we be in a position to know ourselves once again as human beings.
What is a thought? People have them all the time while talking and watching movies, don't they? Especially today, people want thoughts that are easily grasped, fully explained to them in simple terms, and then they feel justified in claiming they have understood something. If anyone else comments on that understood something, they can say out loud or say to themselves, "I know that." Any mystery, any unknown, any gap, any vacant space in their knowledge of that understood something, can thus be glossed over completely. Such people are asleep to any holes in their knowledge because they appear unable to hold an unanswered question in their mind, immediately wiping away any candidate for one with a pat "I know that" response.
Steiner knew the power of an unanswered question (1) and how people dreamily sidestepped them.
[page 74] Most people prefer to dream about cosmic mysteries rather than to engage them with their inwardly active thinking. The path to waking up, however, begins with thinking, for a thought wishes to become more developed through its own activity (2).
"For a thought wishes to become more developed through its own activity." What a magnificent thought! Thinking is a creative activity. Surely that comes as a surprise to many college students who paste others thoughts into an essay and wonder why the English professor is not impressed. The professor wishes the student to doing some real thinking and show the results in the essay.
Even creative activity itself is debased in modern society (3). Creativity is a spontaneous activity, and to tell someone, "Be Creative", puts them into a Be Spontaneous Paradox (BSP) from which there is no exit. One can only respond by not being spontaneous. "Smile!" is a classic example of a BSP. You can generate a feigned smile, but not a genuine smile. Good photographers know this intuitively and never say, "Smile", but say or do something unexpected which will generate a genuine smile. The English professor well knows the BSP generated when assigning a paper, and expects the student to grow through overcoming the challenge of the BSP by holding a thought until it "becomes more developed through its own activity". No English professor would commit such a folly as saying "Write Creatively, and here's how".
The chemist Kekule held a thought of the benzene molecule until the molecule grabbed hold of its end and became a circular molecule, the first ring molecular structure ever discovered, a discovery which laid the basis of what is called organic chemistry today. Kekule said his idea came from a daydream in which a snake bites its own tail. Here was "a thought which became more developed through it own activity."
Steiner talks about the dream of Mendeleev which resulted in our ability to predict the existence of elements never before encountered in the world of physical substance. For decades after Mendeleev's death, scientists were still filling holes in Mendeleev's Periodic Table with new elements.
[page 76] . . . recall how Mendeleev calculated the existence of a new element in the periodic table of elements. That kind of dream is actually not so difficult to propose, because when there is an empty place in the periodic table, it is quite easy to fill in the space with a new element and attribute a few characteristics to this invention. Nevertheless it is a dream! If the new element does not exist, then the method of its discovery is no different than the example of the dreamer who dreams of something that happens to the dreamer a few days later in a waking state; the event in waking life is claimed to be a verification of the dream.
Steiner offers words from Fichte who says "the world is a dream and everything we think about the world is a dream of a dream" and from Edward von Hartmann who calls the chair we see is only a dream of the chair-in-itself. Steiner scoffs at Hartmann, saying it is difficult to sit on a chair that is only a dream. Why all this talk about dreams?
[page 77] The point we are making is not to persuade you that the world is a dream; the discussion of the idea becomes the spur to awaken within ourselves. And awakening begins with an energetic grasp of our thinking, an active seizing hold of our thinking. An awakened thinking is precisely what leads you into something else.
In Lecture 7 Steiner treats us to an exposition on the deeper meaning of the words, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. First there is Truth which is like a fabric which connects us to our pre-earthly existence, which we must take care not to sever.
[page 81] This connection is a delicate spiritual fabric, if I may say it in that way; a fabric that we have woven during our pre-earthly existence, a fabric that shapes the form and contours of our physical body. I would like to put it this way: it is as if our physical body was connected by many threads to its pre-earthly existence, and when we surrender to untruthfulness, it severs these threads. The purely intellectual consciousness that has become prevalent since the beginning of the era of the Consciousness Soul is so appealing to human beings that we are not even aware of being torn away from our pre-earthly existence. This is one of the reasons why human beings today have so much difficulty understanding how the human being stands in relation to cosmic existence.[page 83] When we strive for a real experience of truth and truthfulness, we discover this within the physical body. When we wish to develop our feeling for beauty, our experience of beauty in the right way, we discover this in our body of formative forces; that is, the etheric body. Beauty is connected with the etheric body just as truth is connected with the physical body.
Just as truthfulness can be felt in our physical body, beauty can be felt in our etheric body. We each gather forces from the entire forces of the cosmos when we enter this incarnation from our pre-earthly existence. An artist is someone who presents us with a beautiful gift from their pre-earthly experience using their etheric body forces.
There is a saying that "beauty is skin deep, but ugliness goes all the way to the core". The ancient Greek experienced ugliness as coldness, even causing goose bumps in the extreme. Transient shivers are a puzzle, and some people say you have them when "someone walks on your mother's grave" or a "ghost passes through you". These are unconscious responses of our bodies today that in earlier times, people felt deeply as living experiences in full consciousness. We are left with fairy tale explanations which can be called superstitious by people who are afraid of the unknown, which rightly understood means afraid of their unconscious responses. Being able to say, "Someone walked on my mother's grave" provides a quick answer with which to vaporize the otherwise unanswered question, "What just happened in actuality?"
We will feel sadness in the increasing absence of truthfulness of our current age, and the one anodyne which will help us is the presence of beauty.
[page 85] As you develop an enthusiasm for the truth and then experience a certain sadness living in the present age, your soul will be comforted and illuminated by the warmth of experiencing beauty. Through beauty we once again receive joy to balance the sadness that sweeps through us as we try to develop our enthusiasm for truth and truthfulness.
We live as humans immersed in the spiritual world, but as thinkers we cannot form abstract logical constructs of the spiritual world and therefore can miss the very presence of real information arriving from the spiritual world. One sure way to recognize the spiritual world is when we say we "feel something in our bones", something which generates enthusiasm and warms us with its presence.
[page 86] Even though this spiritual world is always there, the human being has a connection to it only in the deepest levels of unconsciousness, when one glows with enthusiasm for truth and truthfulness. And a connection is also made between earthly existence and the spiritual world whenever a human being is warmed by something beautiful, and by beauty itself.
What is goodness? It is similar to beauty in that it provides us a way of re-connecting ourselves with the spiritual pre-earthly life we left when we incarnated into this life. While beauty is something we mostly experience as a result of what someone else has done, goodness can only be experienced as a result of something we ourselves have done to help others.
[page 86] A good human being is one who is able to give something of their own soul to the soul of another human being. The capacity to take something of your own soul and give it to the soul of another is foundation of all true morality. Moreover, no social configuration on earth can be sustained without the element of true morality (4).
We are now in a position to discover, just as truth is related to our physical body and beauty to our etheric body, that goodness is related to our astral body.
[page 87] Just as the feeling for the true is manifest in your physical body, just as the glowing experience of the beautiful is impressed upon your etheric body, so the good enlivens your astral body. Your astral body cannot be healthy, cannot stand upright in the world, when you are not able to be permeated by goodness.
Truth is related to the physical body;
Beauty, to the etheric body; and
Goodness, to the astral body.Equally important to know is that Truth is connected to the Past, Beauty to the Present, and Goodness to the Future.
[page 88] To be united with the true means that we must remain connected to our spiritual past. For beauty to have meaning, we must not deny that the spiritual and the physical worlds are interwoven [RJM: In the Present]. To be guided by the good means that we shall plant a seed on behalf of the spiritual world for the future.
To summarize: we can now see and come to understand, after some thought, the following relationships:
Physical Etheric Astral
Truth Beauty Goodness
Past Present Future
Now Steiner asks us, some of us new to his work, to make a gigantic leap and accept fairy tales as depicting reality. That would be like asking us to accept the gods of the ancient Greek as reality, would it not? It would seemingly require us all to throw Bacon's way of dealing with the world out of the window, right? Well, not so fast. Bacon would ask us to deny the existence of gods and fairy tales, but we don't have to deny the usefulness of Bacon's way of doing science based exclusively on the sensory world. Steiner certainly never did that, nor did he ever complain that Bacon was in error, only that we moderns following Bacon's advice have thrown out the spiritual world after the cleansing Bacon recommended. Such an act certainly would equal the proverbial act of throwing out the baby with the bath water. Luckily, during this cleansing, some poignant reminders of the existence of the spiritual have come down to us in myths and fairy tales, which remain a puzzle to us. Using Bacon's advice, we have treated these as superstitions, up until now. Following Steiner's advice we can reconcile the existence of the spiritual world and the physical world as equal realities, both being important to our human existence.
[page 91] What used to be understood as the life of nature is now referred to as myths and fairy tales. These myths and fairy tales contain pictures that point to a spirituality that permeates nature. This is an elemental spirituality within uncertain boundaries, but spirituality nonetheless; and one that reveals a still higher spirituality. Humanity in earlier times was not dealing just with plants, stones, and animals; human beings formerly were also in contact with elemental spirits, which lived within the earth, water, air, and fire. As we have lost our awareness of the inner human being, so, too we have lost a living experience of nature spirits.