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Song: “Song of the Lost” by the Grief Birds
Outtakes from last week’s essay, “Split Images of God”:
From Rudolf Steiner’s The Fifth Gospel, lecture 11, 10th February, 1914 (audio here):
As man looks back upon the discarded ether-body, the processes in which it is involved are not of the same character as those operating in the discarded physical body. After death, we can by no means look at what the ether-body is and what is becoming of it, as if it were a “phenomenon of Nature.” The ether-body reveals its own individual character, coloured by the feelings and sentiments we have harboured during life. The whole gamut of our feelings—good or bad—is revealed to us by the ether-body. The temper and tenor of our soul is stamped into the ether-body and becomes visible to us after death. Then by a complicated process it dissolves into the universe of ether, is absorbed into the other world. . . .
Looking back in this way upon what becomes of our ether-body, we have before us an image of what we ourselves were in earthly life. . . .
In the spiritual world, it is part of the destiny of our soul, that is to say of our astral body and Ego, to behold ourselves in the fate of the ether-body—which cannot be changed once the separation from the physical body has taken place. It is a moment of paramount significance after death when we realize that, just as in the world of sense we saw clouds and mountains, so now, after death, we see, as a kind of background, all that we ourselves laid into our ether-body through our feelings and tenor of soul. The picture expands as the ether-body dissolves, becomes as it were a “firmament” against which everything else stands out in relief. After death, therefore, man sees what is happening to his ether-body.
Steiner’s view here is refreshingly pragmatic and free of moral overlay. There is no “judgment”—divine or otherwise—only the inescapable consequences of every action and thought that we commit to, while we are alive to do so. The medium is the message—because it is created by the message, just as the message is formed by the medium. Our souls are shaped—engraved or scarred—by what our bodies, minds, and hearts choose (in each moment) while we are alive.
This is the whole meaning of “being an individual.” Just as the Infinite acts through us, and is confined and defined (and potentially condemned) to the parameters of our actions, so, when we die, we are defined, in turn, by Eternity’s response to those choices.
God lets us know what God thinks of our embodying God.
Insofar as our identity-minds have imprisoned, impaired, restricted, and oppressed our Souls (even with the best of intentions), so our Souls return the favor to our mind-identity-selves upon our deaths.
This is not punishment. It is merely the symmetrical completion of a process. Steiner again (same source):
Certain forces in our ether-body have to do with the process by which the Earth is led onwards to its end. But the ether-body contains other forces too, quite different forces. . . .
This ‘fertile’ part of the ether-body can only be perceived—and here we come to another significant secret disclosed by Spiritual Science—when the human being has established a certain relationship with the Christ, the Christ Impulse. For this part of the ether-body is permeated with the Christ Forces which, since the Mystery of Golgotha, have poured into the sphere of the Earth. . . .
Our connection with the Christ Impulse, therefore, enables us to perceive the fertile seed, the seed of the future within our ether-body. . . . When a human being who has attained Ego-consciousness in the real sense—as is the case in the West today [though not, at that time, in the Orient]—gazes upon his ether-body after death, he must not find this ether-body devoid of the forces flowing from the Christ Impulse. For it means a life of unblessedness after death if the vista of the ether-body reveals that ether-body is not permeated by the Christ Impulse.
It is not that we need to be “good” in order to serve (save) our Souls. Rather, that serving the Soul is the only measure of what is good. Any added definitions of good or evil are only the imposition of a mental value judgment, as likely to impair the expression of our true natures as they are to allow for it.
Hence, yes, “hubris” can be good for “the Soul”!
Elsewhere, in his talks on agriculture, Steiner describes how the birds and the insects work together, in “a regular division of labor,” for the “proper distribution of astrality” on the Earth. I also heard somewhere (let me know if you know where I might have heard this) that the angels are the higher, invisible upstream intelligence of the birds, just as demons have insects as their material extensions.
If so, this suggests there will be a day when angels and demons may live and work together in peace, and return to the complementary ends of a single ELF spectrum. Such a “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” may well take Man, once again, to step up and into the fray, as the Divine Ratio between the two, to provide the balance.
With a Christ impulse, no less! A consciousness that can hold . . . just about all of you.
(C.f. Marc Bolan’s “Spaceball Ricochet.”)
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