Piercing Through the Veil of Karma - Rudolf Steiner’s Path to the Microcosm, Part 2

by Luigi Morelli

In the first part of this article we explored some central ideas derived from Steiner’s archetypal social phenomenon, namely that human beings of the present are only truly social in their sleep, when in their astral bodies they are united with other human beings—but are not conscious of it.

And Steiner indicates that “only that which continues to work out of sleeping into waking conditions is active as a social impulse in ordinary waking consciousness...” (1) To this end, in order to overcome our natural antisocial tendencies in the encounter with others, we must move away from our spontaneous inclination to form concepts about the being of the other and attempt to develop imaginations. With this aim in mind Steiner designed some basic exercises that allow us to awaken in our souls imaginations of ourselves and of other human beings, effectively rendering us more aware of the workings of karma in our lives.

Among the exercises I loosely grouped under the name of “karma exercises,” listed first was the simplest of all, the Rückschau, or the daily backward review.

This was followed by the habit of looking back at parts of our lives (phases with clear beginnings and ends) and pass them in review as if we were looking at another person.

In order to stop identifying ourselves with our persona, and with the events of our lives, Steiner devised an exercise in which we are asked to look at relatives, friends, and colleagues and detect what we owe to each one of these.

Moving one step further we can look at other human beings and create “spiritual paintings” of their being, thereby awakening the habit to portray individuals beyond how we customarily perceive them through sympathy and antipathy alone.

We are the architects of our biographies

The Lesser Karma Exercise and the Greater Karma Exercise form two important thresholds in the apprehension of the forces at work in our biography. In our pre-birth life we have consciously and earnestly decided to encounter the challenges that we meet in this present life, for the growth they provide our soul and the souls which are connected to us. This mood inevitably fades, or turns into its opposite, during our lives on earth. It is the purpose of the Lesser Karma Exercise to encourage us to take responsibility for everything that happens in our lives, reminding us that by and large we are the architects of our biographies. This realization can push us a step further, to strive to break through the veil of karma and apprehend the origin of present life challenges in previous lives. We mentioned the Greater Karma Exercise as one way to get in touch with this reality; another exercise with a similar purpose is the socalled Moon-Sun-Saturn Exercise that Steiner gave us in his Karmic Relationships lectures.

The exercises above belong to the practice of looking back in time, which in the Foundation Stone Meditation is called “Spirit Recollection.” It is this path of Spirit Recollection (or Spirit Remembering) that we will now contrast with its counterpart of Spirit Beholding (or Spirit Vision). An exploration of this kind can only be summarized in article form. I have treated the matter much more extensively in the book Karl Julius Schröer and Rudolf Steiner: Anthroposophy and the Teachings of Karma and Reincarnation. (2)

Paths of the Foundation Stone Meditation

The Foundation Stone Meditation brings to full expression three paths or impulses: Spirit Recollection, Spirit Mindfulness (or Spirit Awareness), and Spirit Beholding. We will look at the expression of the two terms that form a polarity in Spirit Recollection and Spirit Beholding. The central term lies midway between the two, or rather forms a higher synthesis. It becomes more understandable in light of the other two paths. It will not be contemplated in what follows.

In the year leading to the Christmas Conference, Steiner introduced the contrast between the “path of Saturn” and the “path of the Moon.” In relation to the Saturn path, Steiner took his start from the Philosophy of Freedom. Abstract thinking, which gives free reign to association of ideas is resurrected from a passive activity, into a path of perception of the spiritual in matter, when the thinker tries to apprehend the relationship between thinking and himself, when he looks at the activity of thinking itself. This is what leads to pure thinking, or spiritualized thinking. Steiner described “how the will strikes into the otherwise passive realm of thought, stirring it awake and making the thinker inwardly active.” This is the path through which the human soul eventually reaches beyond Saturn into the universe (the path to the macrocosm). Steiner continues, “in [Philosophy of Freedom] I limited the discussion entirely to the world of the senses, keeping more advanced aspects for later works, because matters like these have to be gradually developed.”

The Saturn path is then contrasted with the Moon path, the one in which “one can advance on the opposite side [microcosm] by entering deeply into the will, to the extent of becoming wholly quiescent, by becoming a pole of stillness in the motion one otherwise engenders in the will.” Instead of becoming an unconscious part of world movement, one can consciously come to a stand- still. Through this “one succeeds in keeping the soul still while the body moves through space; succeeds in being active in the world while the soul remains quiet; carries activity, and at the same time quietly observes it; then thinking suffuses the will, just as the will previously suffused thinking.” The Moon path allows one to separate the will from the physical body, just as the Saturn path offers body-free thinking. On the Moon path, “One learns to say ‘You harbor in your will sphere a great variety of drives, instincts and passions. But ... they belong to a different world that merely extends into this one, a world that keeps its activity quite separate from everything that has to do with the sense world.’”

Sense-free thinking on one hand; sense-free willing on the other. This is as much as was said before the Christmas Meeting. We can now take this further with the Foundation Stone Meditation, the Leading Thoughts, and the Letters to the Members.

The third panel of the Foundation Stone Meditation contains the mention of Spirit Beholding, in which we are told:

Soul of Man

Thou livest in the resting head

Which from the ground of the eternal

Opens to thee the thoughts of worlds.

Practice Spirit-vision

In quietness of thought,

Where the eternal aims of Gods

World-Being’s Light

On thine own I

Bestow

For thy free willing.

Then from the ground of the Spirit of Man

Thou wilt truly think.

For the Spirit’s universal thoughts hold sway

In the being of all worlds, beseeching light.

Archai, Archangeloi, Angeloi!

(Spirits of Soul!)

Let there be prayed in the depths

What from the heights is answered,

Speaking:

Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.

(In the spirit’s universal thoughts the Soul awakens.)

The elemental spirits hear it

In East and West and North and South:

May human beings hear it!

Here, it appears quite clearly that it is through thinking that we can apprehend the working of the spirit, in the quiet of the head. Key words are “world thoughts” and “light of the being of worlds.” Through the “quietness of thought” the “eternal aims of Gods” grant us “Worlds-Being’s light.” This is the activity penetrated through and through by the will, which allows us to truly think “in grounds of the spirit in Man.” It is the activity that leads us to “truly think” which connects us to the world of the Holy Spirit, or the Spirit’s universal thoughts, through which the soul resurrects into eternity (“Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus” or “In the Spirit’s universal thoughts, the Soul awakens.”)

In Steiner’s subsequent "Leading Thoughts", #66 states: “The Beings of the Third Hierarchy reveal themselves in the light which is unfolded as a spiritual background in human thinking. In the human activity of thought this life is concealed. If it worked on, in its own essence, in human thought, man could not attain freedom. Where cosmic thought-activity ceases, human thought-activity begins.”

The path of “Spirit Recollection” or “Spirit Remembering” resounds in the words of the first panel of the Foundation Stone Meditation.

Soul of Man!

Thou livest in the limbs

Which bear thee through the world of space Into the ocean-being of the Spirit.

Practice Spirit-recollection

In depths of soul,

Where in the wielding

World-Creator-Being

Comes to being

Within the “I” of God.

Then in the all-world-being of Man

Thou will truly live.

For the Father-Spirit of the heights holds sway

In depths of worlds, begetting Being

Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones!

(Spirits of Strength!)

Let there ring out from the heights

What in the depths is echoed,

Speaking:

Ex Deo nascimur.

(From God, Mankind has being.)

The elemental spirits hear it

In East and West and North and South:

May human beings hear it!

Here we can gather that Spirit Recollection addresses the realm of the Father and the activity of the will through the limbs. The activity of Spirit Recollection leads us back in time (through the stream of memory) to the time in which our “I comes to being within the I of God,” which is later addressed in the same stanza in the voices of the Rosicrucian motto of “Ex Deo Nascimur,” or “From God, Mankind has Being.” This refers to, among other things, the time in Lemuria in which the fall and the stream of earthly incarnations took place. The end of the activity of Spirit Recollection is not to truly will, but to “truly live in the All-World-Being of Man.” The limbs that are here mentioned should be seen as limbs in motion, as the activity of the limbs that moves us through the world of space in search of our destiny. These active limbs stand in contrast to the lungs and heart, whose activity is a rhythm (second panel), and even further to the head, which has to be brought to a complete standstill in Spirit Beholding (third panel).

"Leading Thoughts" #95 (September 21, 1924) reads: “In the manifestation of the Will, Karma works itself out. But its working remains in the unconscious. By lifting to conscious imagination what works unconsciously in the Will, Karma is apprehended. Man feels his destiny within him”. Central to this sentence are the words “lifting to conscious imagination,” to which we have abundantly referred above. It is this lifting to conscious imagination which is the object of the karma exercises. These thoughts find a continuation in the formulation of "Leading Thoughts" #68: “The beings of the First Hierarchy manifest themselves in spiritual creation beyond humanity—a cosmic world of spiritual Being which indwells the human Willing. This world of cosmic Spirit experiences itself in creative action when man wills. It first creates the connection of man’s being with the Universe beyond humanity; only then does man himself become, through his organism of Will, a freely willing human being.”

Let us further explore the contrast between Spirit Recollection and Spirit Beholding. It is clear that we are looking at a contrast between thinking and will in panels one and three of the Foundation Stone Meditation. However, the terms thinking and will evoke simplistic characterizations, and such are not applicable in this instance. Rather, one has to see thinking and will as interpenetrated activities; there is thought in the will, and will in the thinking.

At one end, our thinking is penetrated through and through by the will in the act of directing the thinking towards an object without any external distraction, and without swaying into associative thinking. This is the path of thinking through the will; the Saturn path, and the path of Spirit Beholding.

At another end, the activity of will is penetrated through and through by the thinking evoked through the act of recollection. This is what allows us to be spectators of our own lives; to act and at the same time perceive our actions as spectators. This is the path in which the activity of the will is penetrated through and through by thinking; this is the Moon Path, and the path of Spirit Recollection. Because we are used to call the first the “path of thinking,” the second should be called the “path of the will.” A more complete characterization of either impulse would be the path of thinking through the will—Spirit Beholding—and the path of the will through thinking, or Spirit Recollection.

On the path of thinking through the will (Spirit Beholding), the exercises in Knowledge of Higher Worlds, meditation, and the whole of anthroposophy form the essential foundation, which accompanies the pupil in his higher understanding of how the spirit permeates everything that we behold through the senses. To this, the six basic exercises are added as an important prerequisite and foundation.

In Spirit Recollection, the exercises we have just described and other similar ones form the essential core of the path. The whole of anthroposophy, and even knowledge of karma and reincarnation, form the complement. In fact, to walk at least the first stages on the path of the will through thinking, as Prokofieff’s study [The Foundation Stone Meditation: A Key to the Christian Mysteries] confirms, it is not necessary to know anthroposophy. And the attitude of soul necessary on this second path also differs greatly from what is needed on the path of Spirit Beholding. This difference is clearly stated in Philosophy of Freedom’s chapter 12, “Moral Imagination.” In contrasting natural-scientific knowledge (and all external knowledge) with knowledge that leads to moral action, Steiner said:

The confusion arises because, as natural scientists, we already have the facts before us and afterwards investigate them cognitively; while for ethical action, we must ourselves first create the facts that we cognize afterward. In the evolutionary process of the world order, we accomplish something that, on a lower level, is accomplished by nature: we alter something perceptible. Thus, initially, the ethical norm cannot be cognized like a natural law; rather, it must be created. Only once it is present can it become the object of cognition.

Only when I have acted in the world can I perceive what I have done and how it has affected the world. And only when I have acted can I go back in thought—recollect—in order to review and evaluate. This appeals to a strengthening of observation and especially of memory.

The contrast between the two paths appears emblematically when we look at the polarities between “pencil exercise” (control of thoughts) and the so-called “Rückschau” (3) as expressions of Spirit Beholding and Spirit Recollection respectively.

In the pencil exercise we focus all our attention on an object such as a pencil, by discerning our sense impressions of the object, thinking about its component parts and their relationships, imagining the steps of the process that create it, etc. During the few minutes of the observation all thoughts foreign to the object are carefully kept at bay, and that requires a tremendous effort of the will. It is truly an education of thinking through the will.

The polarity, though not immediately apparent, is realized in the Rückschau exercise. The intent is to focus inwardly upon the whole of the day or parts of it, picturing the events in the reverse order of their occurrence, and even in reverse motion. Instead of looking outwardly we turn our focus inwardly with an effort of our memory. What our will has brought about throughout the day, all of which would remain unconscious or semi-conscious, is raised to awareness. This is also a conscious effort of the will, but here thinking places order in the unfolding of the will which was previously brought about in the day, reminding us of what Steiner tells us is the precondition for ethical action in which “we must ourselves first create the facts.” Looking outwardly in the pencil exercise becomes looking inwardly in the Rückschau; the first addresses the thinking through the will, the second the will through thinking. We can summarize our findings:

SPIRIT BEHOLDING

Saturn path (macrocosm)

Path of thinking through the will

Pencil observation exercise: looking at the outer world

Preparation through study of anthroposophy

Furthering through meditation, and deepening of the study

Facts are given

SPIRIT RECOLLECTION

Moon Path (microcosm)

Path of the will through thinking

Rückschau: looking at the inner world

Preparation through the karma exercises: review exercises going first to lesser karma and then to greater karma exercises.

Furthering through study of karma and reincarnation teachings: eventually, karmic research

Conscious experience of Destiny

Facts (deeds) need to be created in order to be known and understood

Luigi Morelli has a passion for social change from a cultural perspective, and has extensive experience working with the social therapeutic impulse in Camphill, in L’Arche communities, and presently within Ecovillage Ithaca where he lives, with an emphasis on Nonviolent Communication and participatory facilitation. Luigi has written a number of books (see previous page) which are available for donation or for free at www.millenniumculmination.net

1. Social and Anti-Social Forces in the Human Being (12/12/1918, GA 186).

2. See http://millenniumculmination.net/ for a PDF format of the book.

3. Literally, “backward look.” —Editor