Occult Science: An Outline - Session 7
In this section, Ashton explained that Steiner emphasizes the names he has attributed to the planetary epochs do correspond to what we know as the celestial bodies in our solar system, but cautions us to set aside our usual associations with these names, assuring that the relevant connections will become clear later.
Ashton found it noteworthy that Steiner acknowledges the simplicity of his explanations, mentioning that this is merely a sketch. Steiner: "the beings and destinies are no less manifold throughout these prior planetary epochs as the manifold of beings and destinies on Earth."
Steiner also discusses methodological points right from the start, stating that the Saturn and Sun epochs are much less like what we experience during what he calls the Earth epoch than the Moon epoch. Steiner will use analogies related to light and warmth, which he says are more about the phenomenal inner realities that have a genetic relationship with the phenomena we experience on Earth.
As Ashton read through this, he was continuously reminded of Barfield's aphorism in his novel Unancestral Voice. The aphorism "interior is anterior" seemed very apt in encapsulating what Steiner was conveying.
Ashton was also reminded of Max's comments from their last meeting about cosmic history being spread out around us and within us, which we are largely amnesiac to. Steiner, Ashton believes, provides the conceptual tools needed to recognize this history.
Steiner then discusses the concept of the imminent elements within us connected to these prior epochs, such as the corpse, the sleeping human, and the dreaming human.
Steiner describes the rhythmic process of evolution where, during the Saturn phase, there is an achievement of the physical body to a certain point which then prepares it for the entry of a higher member in the next incarnation. This is followed by a cosmic sleep or death and an awakening, and a recapitulation of the former development up to that point of achievement, and so forth. The earlier members become increasingly perfected and are transformed by the addition of the higher members.
For example, Steiner talks about the ego, which is central to the Earth epoch, having the role of transforming the other members until these become a reflection, a revelation of itself.
Steiner also mentions that usually, it is the astral body, a later addition at least for humans, that causes illness by transmitting some kind of disturbance to the etheric and then the physical body. This illustrates Steiner's description of the wisdom of the physical body being disrupted by the younger, more volatile astral body.
Ashton then moved on to a more detailed play-by-play of Saturn's evolution, starting with Steiner's assertion that the only aspect of what we experience today in this Earth epoch that was present at that time was the physical human body and the supersensible beings in the periphery responsible for evolving it.
Steiner begins his description in the middle of Saturn's evolution, which Ashton finds curious. Partly, this is because, according to Steiner, there is a development at this stage that is easier for us to grasp from the outset, being analogous to what we experience as warmth. Steiner posits that if there were a hypothetical observer, what they would experience when approaching the Saturn being is a differentiated mass of inner warmth, similar to our personal sensation of feeling warm. This warmth differentiates into irregular flows arising from temperature differences.
Steiner elaborates on his view of warmth as a finer substance, stating, for example, that gas is condensed warmth. The warmth Steiner is discussing is a soul perception—an inner reality. The temperature oscillations we measure in physics, according to Steiner, are effects of these inner realities in the physical world.
He makes a distinction between the physical and mineral bodies, noting that during the Earth epoch, our physical bodies are filled with mineral content. What the physical body actually is, he says, is a body animated by physical laws that express themselves solely in warmth effects, describing it as a delicate, tenuous, ethereal body of warmth.
Saturn is envisioned as a center with a periphery of spiritual beings in continual interaction with the warmth bodies that constitute Saturn. Steiner talks about the spirits of wisdom, who, along with the spirits of will, have shaped coherent bodies that reflect back to them the spirits of wisdom's own activity, serving as a kind of organ of their self-perception.
The beginning of Saturn, according to Steiner, is marked by an outpouring of spirits of will who have just attained a higher point of evolution. They give forth of themselves, and the spirits of movement then come in, initiating a more concerted activity that resembles a whole organism.
The spirits of form then enter, individuating the whole and turning it more into what he describes as something that would appear like a blackberry or a mulberry, appearing just like a conglomerate of soul beings.
The spirits of personality then intervene. Steiner says that all these beings, their lowest body is an astral body, and they're at different levels. Through them, the spirits of personality have this equivalent of an I through their astral development. Through them, the I looks down from its nature to the singular beings. Hence, something is sent forth from Saturn into the heavenly spaces that resembles the impression made by human personality in our present life. This whole environment of beings on the periphery with Saturn at the center constitutes a resemblance of what we experience as human personality in our lifetime.
Steiner says that the spirits of personality, or the Archai, were in their human epoch at this time. At least from what Ashton gathers from this description, to be human is to have an ego and to have some kind of device for reflecting it back to you so that you become conscious of it, but it doesn't necessarily mean you look like humans do today.
A new phase then begins where something like an inner life begins to flicker from all this activity and eventually begins to emit light. The Fire Spirits then come in, and for them, the light activity emerging from the warmth bodies on Saturn is a kind of organ of picture consciousness, which is equivalent to today's dreaming. He also says that this flickering light activities are the seeds of our present physical sense organs.
The Spirits of Love then enter, utilizing the seeds of sense organs for witnessing the cosmic processes. They sacrificing themselves to provide the vessel for the Fire Spirits' perception.
Then Steiner discusses the inner equivalent of taste emerging, which reminded Ashton of Jakob Böhme and the way he talks about the unfolding of reality in connection with different tastes like bitter, sweet, and sour.
The Angels then come in, and their activity brings about something like metabolism, nutrition, and excretion, indirectly, Steiner says. Then he brings in the Spirits of Harmony or the Cherubim. He says they transmit dreamless sleep consciousness to the Angels, which is like plant-life on today’s Earth, and regulate life processes into a harmony with the outer world.
Steiner then begins referring to the development of phantoms of man or of the human. But he reiterates that they're just semblances, not actually there; they're vessels for this sort of activity from the periphery, and that these begin in a state of flux. They gradually take on a more coherent form, and through the Spirits of Will, they have the darkest form of consciousness that minerals today possess. Ashton assumes that's like the corpse that Steiner mentions from the outset.
These phantoms are like a semblance of the human, and their consciousness more like a machine rather than like the kind of voluntary activity of an I that we possess today. But Steiner says this is the first seed given of what is still only in the seedling stage even in the human being of today, namely, Spirit Man or Atma. So that's the highest potential member of the human, or at least of us, even if we're not always human. So this evolutionary endpoint connected with what Steiner calls Vulcan, is seated at the very beginning with the emergence of physicality on Saturn.
Our evolution first emerges from an inner life of pure spirituality to an existence manifesting outwardly. With this development of Saturn, this is the advent of time, whereas everything prior, or anterior, we should say, was of the nature of duration, where there's not this linear temporal sequence.
Sorry, I had to miss the discussion today. Just watched the recording. I had some thoughts I wanted to share. In regard to what Lorenzo said about being able to deduce a worldview such as the one that Rudolf Steiner presents, for me points to the mission of the Age of rReason. The freedom that we are meant to attain cannot be achieved unless we are able to logically think the things that Steiner tells us about (rather than through spiritual intervention in the form of passive revelation). This, in combination with what Bruce was talking about, an inner awareness, selflessness, moral readiness of sorts is also necessary in combination with logical thinking in order to evolve things further. At the end of the discussion, I believe it was Karsten who reminded us that the way that Rudolf Steiner shares this information with us is at the same time providing us with forces that enable us to develop the organs to perceive the very things he is describing. I think of him as a man who introduced a new capacity to evolving humanity, like in other stories of great advancements in humankind, that capacity has to enter through “one” person first in order for other humans to be able to develop it. Part of that development is to love others and to want to do that, to be willing to sacrifice. Even if it takes a long time still for all humans to develop supersensible perception, we have already developed thinking to the point where, in general, anyone can logically corroborate the worldview presented in esoteric science by Rudolf Steiner, if only we have loving hearts and open minds to do so. The path to knowledge of higher worlds involves both developed thinking and a developed moral sense. Hope to be with you all again next week.
Angus asked how we process the knowledge and imagination that Steiner is putting forth in this chapter on the early evolution of the Earth and the human being. He showed us a graphic that he used to depict the different layers and steps that are described in this part of the chapter as one way to make Steiner’s words more clear and visual. Lorenzo took up the idea that we could arrive at the same imaginations without supersensible knowledge and instead, as Laura also puts above, logically infer and corroborate these facts.
I would like to comment on this theme by sharing my own impressions of how I approach and process this. And I will do this by broadening the scope a little bit from the topic that we discussed in this part of the chapter.
My first, and maybe still strongest, interest in anthroposophy was the study of nature through Goethean phenomenology, combining scientific and artistic methods to understand nature more deeply. I had the chance to practice this methodology while studying biodynamics many years ago. Through practice and study I gradually came to understand some of the basic concepts that Rudolf Steiner uses to describe our present world and actually experience them as percepts in the world outside of me.
I also became acquainted with many ideas regarding the constitution of Soul and Spirit in the human being. Through biographical work, meditation and introspection, group study, work in social therapy, and other contexts I could verify many of these ideas in my own inner experience of being a human endowed with an I.
I also took up the study of Steiner’s philosophical work—something that has intensified with our group—and began to try and understand not only the epistemological grounds of anthroposophy but also his descriptions of the evolution of consciousness and the Universe at large, both materially and spiritually. Some of these ideas I have found correspondence in my own experience while others, such as the states of consciousness in classical antiquity or the descriptions of the early stages of the Earth that we are now studying, feel foreign to me. They are foreign to me in the sense that I cannot personally experience them and they do not fit within the worldview I have acquired up until now. Nonetheless I do invite myself to approach and relate to them.
Steiner comments in this chapter (pp. 121–122) that the earlier conditions of the human being and the Earth persist in the present time. ”… beside the alive and waking man of Earth [are present] the corpse, the man asleep, and the dreaming man. … clear and objective contemplation will behold in them the corresponding stages.”
I interpret this as by looking carefully and deeply—with Goethean eyes and minds—into the reality we find ourselves in now, we are able to discern those principles and phenomena that have governed the evolution of the human being and the Earth before us, since the stage of Saturn. By looking into the present, space and time broadens itself.
This would be a different approach than acquiring clairvoyant knowledge of those stages but would still require some form of supersensible knowledge. I would not be able to ’see’ into the distant past through what is known as the Akashic record, which I interpret as a capability of clairvoyance. Instead I would need to look for the traces and clues of that distant path in the phenomena I can observe and experience inside and outside of me in the world I live in now.
For example, I could try and study plant life and discern at which stage a warmth-body forms and gives rise to the formation of a seedling. I could then follow that formation and, in my imagination, trace parallels to the stages of evolution that Steiner describes for the human being or the Earth. Through careful examination I would thus be able to substantiate those facts with phenomena that are readily available for me.
This may not provide a ’scientific’ proof of the evolution of the world according to Steiner, but at the very least, it allows me to connect with it experientially. Steiner is very clear that his descriptions are only a tentative semblance of what supersensible knowledge can actually ’see’, so a proof is probably not what we are reaching for anyway. But it may allow me to align my present self with the past as well as with the future in a meaningful way.
We do not necessarily need to follow the same steps as I have aligned them above to approach these themes of World and Human Evolution. However, I would argue that using the Goethean method to contemplate nature, soul, spirit and world draws us closer to these seemingly distant worlds.