A Lucid State of Mind.

According to Rudolph Steiner the only way to say anything about the immortal soul is to observe it in the super sensible realm.  So how does one go about that?

In his lecture http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/ES5278_index.html Steiner sets out to explain the state of consciousness that would surpass the waking state. He says: “Can we not allow ourselves to think that, if we can wake up out of the dream into everyday reality, we can also awaken out of everyday reality into a higher consciousness? Just as a higher consciousness is given with which we can judge the reality of the everyday world — where we are from morning until evening — can we not also judge the reality value of the dream from the standpoint of wakefulness?”. He adds a few important notions: First, we know our dream state only from the point of view of the Guardian, our waking consciousness. Second, wakefulness (our waking consciousness, or guardian) causes a shift from sleep to the dream state. Third, the waking consciousness itself can be further evolved to a more lucid state.  Physiologically speaking we would in the case of a shift to wakefulness be referring to something like the Reticular Activation Centre of the brain (Magoun,H.W.1952). We can in this time and age say that returning to wakefulness or going into a dream state is clockwork. It happens in phases. So whatever the acting agent Steiner refers to (the “waking consciousness” causing the shift from sleep to dream), it may not be needed there. We may think it to be an autonomous neurological clock, a 25 hour circadian rhythm, working on solar impuls.  So obviously Steiner has a spiritual actor in mind that is handling the consciousness part of the phase shifting.

The transition to the lucid state would be much like that from the dream state to the waking state. When we dream we perceive pieces of reality which, sometimes even while we dream, we know to be not real. Steiner suggests that in waking life we also see pieces of reality that are not real, in fact we are dreamers.

To reason analogue to the previous, we would have the following situation: we look at the information given to us in the lower state of consciousness and then we discover that there is a whole new and more complete way to look at reality. We suddenly realize our previous understanding was false or incomplete. In the lucid state we would discover parts of waking that were not really “awoken” at all. Hypothesizing a little further, in some cases we may name these “sleeping” reality chunks “Maya” or untruths, or lies. In that case Maya obviously is the result of our not completely awoken consciousness. We will only know it to be Maya when we are fully awoken. At another time we would perceive information that seemed not to have been there to begin with, we would become omniscient. This however is not how Steiner tackles the new lucidity. He puts a hold on the thinking process altogether and lets imagination step in.

Willing, Thinking and Feeling.

diagram 1; Willing (erroneously called wanting here), Feeling and Thinking

In the transition from dreaming to waking our WILL switches on. Suddenly we are in a new state of mind and there it is, the human Will-power. As we have seen before we have rather special modes of operation; there is the Will, but also Feeling and Thinking. They are a dream according to Steiner, even looking inside yourself is dreaming. The diagram shows willing, feeling and thinking in a spatial position, where one can imagine “the I”  at the crossing. What is it, upon entering our newly acquired lucid state, that switches on at this point? What happens when we observe that not all we consider waking is actually awoken? There is your mystery right before your eyes. Steiner again brilliantly adds something else to his reasoning: “when it is possible that perceptions from the past occur in our consciousness now, will it also be possible for perceptions that come from another life, or from unearthly circumstance?” This would be a memory, more advanced (imagination) than ours is right now. This can be achieved by developing our “thought-life” we use for ordinary consciousness. For this second awakening one must surrender this power of thought. Where did we find this line of reasoning before? Once in the dark corners of our history we sacrificed something else to become “man the thinker”. We’ll get back at that some other time. Anyway it appears that ” imagination” switches on.

Space-body and Time-body

In this second awakening, I follow the various descriptions in the article, we are experiencing the power of thought like you sense your own heartbeat. You look, like from a distance, at your thought-life and you see that the power of memory also lives in thought. One begins to feel a second higher person. Here comes the main shift from a flesh or space-body towards an etheric, formative, or time-body. We go from experiencing a spacial tableau of our life towards a time table. In that time table we will be able to look back at our previous life. There we find “the real self-knowledge”, since what we see is a reverse imprint of who we were then. Which leaves us with the task to unscramble what we actually see. What does ” reverse” mean? What we used to experience as memory now becomes an enhanced form of recollection, an imagination. In my article about astrology I referred to the I, that becomes “aware”. Through the space-body it (the I) senses its presence on earth. Through the time-body it senses its relationship to the cosmos. After experiencing the power of thought and the cosmic awareness one must again sink into an unaware state of mind he calls “the deepest silence of the human soul”.  In stage one we lose the space person, the I, and then, in stage two, the time-person goes. You then find yourself in the time before birth, the time you spent with other souls and even before that. In a third stage the power of love takes the place of the power of knowledge, of memory and of cognition. After letting go of the ego and the physical, after letting go of the time body and the ethereal, you’ll feel a pain in the soul, for higher knowledge is born out of pain. In these moments of higher knowledge or “intuition” one knows this pain and must endure it. In this pain one feels a victim and surrenders himself to other beings or natural processes. This “love” is then sacrificed to others around us, it has become selfless. It then becomes the power of knowledge. So with this love we encounter our former ego, the ego in our previous life.

Unbornness and Immortality

Knowledge of the eternity of the soul can only be acquired if one achieves knowledge of unbornness and of immortality. This then is the result of the Lucid State Steiner refers to. After first getting rid of the space-person and then of the time-person one enters the deep silence of the soul. There we are unborn, in a state before entering the physical body, There we look at ourselves joining with other soul beings. . Steiner however makes not clear what he means with immortality other than the soul being there previous to being born. In Hylozoics the studying of ones own past lives is in rare cases done by a self activated “causal self”. More on that subject in an other article.