𝔸𝕟 𝔸𝕟𝕥𝕙𝕣𝕠𝕡𝕠𝕤𝕠𝕡𝕙𝕚𝕔𝕒𝕝 ℝ𝕖𝕗𝕝𝕖𝕔𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟 𝕠𝕟 𝟙 ℂ𝕠𝕣𝕚𝕟𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕒𝕟𝕤 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕄𝕪𝕤𝕥𝕖𝕣𝕪 𝕠𝕗 𝕋𝕚𝕞𝕖’𝕤 𝕌𝕟𝕗𝕠𝕝𝕕𝕚𝕟𝕘

“What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know.”

— Augustine, Confessions, Book XI, chapter 14

“Time becomes space; the past becomes present; a picture stands before their souls.”

— Rudolf Steiner

“The secrets of Time in flow, the secrets of evolution, of development.”

— Rudolf Steiner, describing what Zarathustra taught one of his pupils

 

In our first gathering — I suggested how the study of Spiritual Science could give us richer perspectives from which to approach the sacred ideas we have inherited from Christianity. I want to return to the idea of working through Theosophical / Anthroposophical content because through such study we gradually are given more with which to approach the holy Scriptures. The thoughts we may first harbour in relation to this spiritual science do not remain where we first encountered them; they continue to work within us and begin to form relationships with things we could not previously have brought together. In this way, higher spiritual ideas become something we can take up more consciously, rather than merely think about superficially. With this approach, I want to return to Paul and allow several passages from 1 Corinthians to illuminate one another. I hope they may give us a more satisfying view of human development and enrich our understanding of our own place within the evolving and transforming landscape we see unfolding around us and feel within ourselves.

 

I think we can all feel, as we get older, how quickly time moves. This September passed as quickly as any I can remember. We need not venture into quantum theory to notice this. Poincaré questioned how observers in different places could determine whether events happened at the same time, and Einstein later showed that measurements of time depend upon the observer’s frame of reference. Neither was describing this inward feeling of a month slipping away, but their work prompts a different question for me: how do we stand in relation to the time we live through? When we cannot feel ourselves truly part of the life and processes unfolding around us, time seems to carry us along without our participation. Time becomes more destructive in our experience when we feel ourselves growing older without finding greater meaning or participating more consciously in life. We may pursue goals that give us the appearance of accomplishment but offer little real transformation or satisfaction. The thoughts we build around such goals can become a prison of their own. Perhaps the account of Paul and Silas in prison offers an image here: the doors open and their chains fall away, yet the deeper change is not simply that they can leave. Our own spiritual awakening may likewise involve the breaking of walls we did not know our perceptions had built, allowing us to participate more consciously in the life unfolding around us.

 

Anthroposophy seeks to give greater substance to our understanding of what brings about spiritual awakening, enlightenment, and initiation, and even what shapes our experience of time, by elucidating in a very specific manner the spiritual constitution of the human being. The traditional Christian understanding of the human being as body, soul, and spirit gives us a skeleton of sorts, an outline of our true nature. Yet it can be difficult to live into these distinctions today. Even a religious person may speak of the soul and spirit as though they were one indistinguishable thing. Someone who looks only to the senses may trace what we call the soul to unseen chemical processes in the body, or draw upon physical concepts such as time crystals to explain spiritual phenomena. Neither way of speaking necessarily helps us recognize these aspects of ourselves in experience. With the many explanations offered by psychology, it takes practice to pause over a particular movement of thought, memory, or feeling and ask what has actually occurred within us.

Anthroposophy offers a more detailed way to consider the human being through four interwoven members: the physical body, which belongs to the world of the senses; the etheric body, whose formative forces sustain life and bear memory; the astral body, through which we experience sensation, desire, and feeling; and the I, through which we become aware of ourselves and can work upon our own nature. In ordinary life, these members work together so closely that we seldom distinguish them. At first, such distinctions may seem like things we can only think about. But as they begin to live within us, we may become more sensitive to the different ways we think, feel, and act in the world.

 

***For a fuller account of these members and their relationships, see Rudolf Steiner’s Theosophy (GA 9), particularly “The Nature of Man,” and An Outline of Esoteric Science (GA 13), particularly “The Nature of Humanity.” ***

 

We sought, then, through this more elaborated view of the human being and our inherited consciousness, to give the falling of the scales a deeper significance. What had been veiled within the apostle Paul’s usual relation to his body and memory became perceptible through the eyes of the spirit. From an anthroposophical perspective, his soul and spirit had been loosened from their ordinary dependence upon the physical senses for orientation, yet his consciousness did not sink into oblivion. Anthroposophy seeks to bring a concrete understanding to such experiences we may find in sacred texts. What may otherwise seem vague or untrustworthy becomes something we can begin to examine through definite concepts, much richer than any biblical hermeneutics can give to one’s grounding of faith, or the authority in which a scientific hypothesis provides a framework through which an unfamiliar phenomenon can be investigated. Paul himself speaks elsewhere of being caught up to the third heaven, though he could not tell whether he was “in the body” or “out of the body.” here he heard “unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter” (2 Corinthians 12:2–4). Perhaps he was bound to silence concerning what he had heard; perhaps the language formed through physical experience could not contain it. I think both may be true. What matters here is that Paul describes an experience in which he could not even say whether his body participated. His seeming uncertainty about the finer details of his experience did not make him unconscious of the world he encountered. Steiner offers a further perspective on Paul’s way of speaking about himself:

 

“What is Paul saying in these sentences? He is saying nothing less than that, as early as fourteen years ago—based on the chronological context, one would have to assume that this experience took place about six years after the events at Golgotha—he was able to rise clairvoyantly into the spiritual realms. That is to say, he assures us himself: Within him lives a human being—and he wishes to boast only of that one, not of the physical human being—who is indeed able to look up into the spiritual worlds. — And when he had that experience, it became clear to him: What did you see in the spiritual worlds before, when you looked up? You saw the Christ as he was still up there in the heavenly realms! — Through the Damascus experience, it became clear to him that the Christ had entered the Earth’s aura and was living within it.”

— Rudolf Steiner, The Fifth Gospel (GA 148), January 13, 1914.

 

We are drawing attention here to the reality of this spiritual world, to the spirit working within one’s conscious awareness in ways that may initially remain enigmatic and bring something new for the soul to experience. Its place of activity is no less real than the one in which our physical senses are embedded.

A higher sight into ourselves and the world we meet may indeed wound the lower memory through which we had made ourselves bearable to ourselves- This self image we have grown so comfortable with. In the preceding discussion—, When the Scales Fall, we approached this wound through Paul’s description of himself as “one born out of due time.” The Greek word, ἔκτρωμα (ektrōma), denotes an untimely birth or miscarriage and carries an etymological association with wounding. Here, we can begin to understand the wound as a rupture in the familiar consciousness through which we had understood ourselves: what we remember remains, but we can no longer make it bearable through the same explanations. We will elucidate this relationship between wounding and spiritual birth more fully in the closing. For now, this tells us only something about the disturbance of our familiar, sense-bound experience, not yet what may be entering it from the other side. When we discover that we have been living within a fantasy in such varied forms, Christ’s words about “kicking against the goads” draw near: Paul had been struggling against a spiritual reality whose presence he could not yet perceive. Pain can become a touchstone of spiritual growth when what has been hidden enters consciousness and asks us to live differently.

 

With this in mind, I want to turn to Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians and to three passages near its beginning, middle, and end. Paul first speaks of a wisdom the rulers of his age did not know, then of love as that without which knowledge and spiritual gifts come to nothing, and finally of his own encounter with the risen Christ as one “born out of due time.” Taken together, these passages offer 3 windows onto the unfolding of time through humanity’s transforming congnition.

 

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐅𝐢𝐫𝐬𝐭 𝐖𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐨𝐰: 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐚𝐧 𝐀𝐠𝐞 𝐂𝐚𝐧 𝐒𝐞𝐞

Near the beginning of 1 Corinthians, Paul speaks of a wisdom that appears foolish to the world. God chooses what is weak to confound the strong. Then Paul speaks of a hidden wisdom that the rulers of the age did not know: had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory (1 Corinthians 1:18–31; 2:6–8).

These passages can be read as a reversal of ordinary judgments about power and importance. But I do not think their meaning is exhausted by an instruction to be humble or to distrust thought, or even to choose religious feeling over worldly knowledge. Paul is asking us to consider the limits of a form of consciousness. The rulers could exercise power and judgment within the world they knew. They could act upon Christ. Yet they could not recognize what was entering human history through His life and death.

 

Krishna’s instruction to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita helps me feel how differently human beings have approached knowledge of themselves and the cosmos in different ages. Long before Brahmanism took on its historical form, the ancient Indian cultural epoch belonged to a time when humanity’s relationship with the spiritual worlds was sustained by faculties very different from those we exercise today. We cannot recover that relationship simply by inheriting its teachings. We have to work our way through Maya from within the consciousness we now possess, bringing with us the self-awareness and knowledge won through the long passage since that ancient epoch. Arjuna is taught to see beyond the battlefield and the deaths before him toward a spiritual reality that his immediate experience cannot disclose. Yet with Christ, we are being asked to recognize something further: the spiritual has entered earthly history itself.. Arjuna is taught to see beyond the battlefield and the deaths before him toward a spiritual reality that his immediate experience cannot disclose. Yet with Christ, we are being asked to recognize something further: the spiritual has entered earthly history itself. We cannot approach the world before our senses simply as an illusion to be overcome, even while recognizing how much in our ordinary perception remains illusory. The rulers’ failure was not only that they committed an evil from which God would later bring good. They took part in an event whose spiritual reality was moving through their own actions without their knowing it. Paul’s words ask us to develop a consciousness capable of recognizing more of what is at work within earthly life.

 

The Incarnation and the Mystery of Golgotha exceeded what human beings were then able to comprehend. They passed many by, and their meaning continues to pass us by in ways we have scarcely begun to notice. Paul himself had lived in opposition to the very event that would later reorient his life. His change of sight was not the triumph of a better argument. Something broke into the course of his life and exposed the incompleteness of what he thought he knew. We may already recognize this doctrinally or understand it as a change of paradigm, but we need to bring to mind the reality of the spirit as an actual agent of transformation, working through the whole human being—in the I, the astral body, the etheric body, and even the physical body. To understand the possibilities opening within us now, we must consider how humanity’s earlier ways of perceiving the spirit receded, and what developed in their place.

 

The ancient Indian name Kali Yuga gives one account of a dark age within that history. The term and the traditional beginning around 3101 BCE preceded Steiner and Anthroposophy and were also taken up in Theosophical circles. Steiner gave this idea a particular meaning for the development of consciousness: the older, instinctive perception of the spiritual world receded as humanity became more firmly oriented toward physical perception and intellectual judgment. In his account, this lesser dark age ended in 1899, opening the possibility of newly developing etheric sight.

 

The traditional Hindu account gives Kali Yuga a much longer duration of 432,000 years. Terry Boardman discusses a proposed way of relating the two time spans: he describes a 10,000-year period within the longer Kali Yuga, whose first 5,000 years are dark and end in 1899. This offers a way to understand Steiner’s shorter period without treating it as the end of the entire traditional cycle.

Boardman, Terry. “The Incarnation of Ahriman—When and Where? (Part Two).” The Present Age 5, no. 9/10 (May/June 2020): 18–21, note 2 on p. 21.

 

Kali Yuga describes a long passage in which humanity gradually left behind an older, atavistic clairvoyance—a way of intermingling with the spiritual worlds through inwardly perceived, inspired pictures. As this faculty receded, intellectual acumen and the power of reason as we know it today developed more fully. Humanity’s means of understanding were themselves changing, and the effort to comprehend the Christ impulse—the very agent of its further transformation—was met with enigmas. The older Gnosis arose when spiritual pictures could still appear inwardly with something of the force of perception. By Paul’s time, the intellectual or mind soul was developing, and those pictures no longer arose of their own accord for humanity at large. The Gnostics could still bring ancient spiritual knowledge to the Christ event and recognize its cosmic dimensions. Yet some accounts followed the heavenly Christ so far that his actual life in a physical body became difficult to hold. The Church Fathers defended the reality of the Incarnation, while Christianity’s passage into the Roman world increasingly preserved its mysteries in doctrines that people could profess even as the older power to penetrate them spiritually receded. These were different responses to an event whose meaning could not be received in its fullness through any one form of consciousness. From this perspective, the etheric return of Christ which Paul experienced prematurely belongs to a further development of the soul: the possibility of consciously perceiving Christ through new spiritual faculties arising alongside the freedom and discernment developed through reason.

 

The later division between Eastern and Western Christianity offers another example. At the council held in Constantinople in 869, a teaching that the human being has two souls was condemned. Steiner saw in the Western reception of its decision a narrowing of how the human being could be understood: spirit was no longer spoken of as a distinct member alongside body and soul. This blurring of mans inner member has continued and now the soul is at the same point in some understandings just as the spirit could no longer be expierned in its presence of bringing transformation the soul today is no longer understood in its truest manner of its truer able tess to be a revelator of reality The Eastern Church retained a more instinctive relation to spiritual life, while the West increasingly sought to give that life definite doctrinal form. Here, too, each direction carried something forward, but neither could contain the whole.

 

This is why I cannot think of the Christ impulse as something humanity received once and has since held complete. Its working continues as our capacities change. I can feel something of its power to bring a refreshing newness to life, sometimes sensed only when enthusiasm and purpose light up within my breast. But that feeling is only a beginning. It asks to be taken further into understanding and into the way I live. Since time immemorial, ways of perceiving the world have receded as new capacities have come forward. Earlier peoples could experience something of the spiritual world directly, though they did not yet possess the sense of an individual “I” familiar to us today. As that older sight faded, its wisdom was carried in teachings, images, and traditions. People could inherit those traditions without experiencing the world in the way their ancestors had. What changed was the consciousness through which a culture lived.

 

Anthroposophy places these changes within successive cultural epochs, each lasting roughly 2,100 years. With each epoch, new capacities gradually emerge, changing how human beings experience themselves and perceive the outer world. The Greco-Roman period belongs to the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, during which the intellectual or mind soul develops and individual self-awareness becomes more pronounced. Around 1413, the fifth post-Atlantean epoch begins, the one in which you and I are currently in – bringing the development of the consciousness soul: an increasing task of arriving at truth through one’s own conscious activity. Copernicus’s heliocentric account in 1543 offers one example: the heavens remained the same, but humanity’s understanding of its place within them changed. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, ending in 1815, offer another, as individual personality and the demand for freedom pressed against inherited social authority. More individuals sensed this further descent into the soul by the ego and the true distortion it can bring to one’s understanding of reality These transitions unfold gradually. People may still live within familiar institutions and teachings while the consciousness through which they understand themselves and the world is changing.

***For a fuller study of these cultural epochs and the development of the soul, see Rudolf Steiner’s An Outline of Esoteric Science (GA 13), particularly its account of post-Atlantean evolution***

 

These changes do not ask us to recover an earlier consciousness unchanged. They ask what might become possible through the self-consciousness we have since acquired. Owen Barfield brings this distinction into focus in “Thinking and Thought”:

“How are we able to get back this experience, this which will alone enable us to impart fresh life to our decaying civilisation?

There is no question of going backwards and trying to be little Greeks. The Greeks are not to be our models; they are merely interesting examples, historically close to us, of a people who possessed something which we need desperately ourselves, though in a different form. Indeed, our problem is essentially different from theirs. The task which their philosophers instinctively set themselves was, as we saw, to get outside a plane of consciousness in which they normally lived, so as to be able to conceive of it: to turn thinking into thought. Our problem is the converse of this. We are outside it already. Our task is twofold: first to realise that it is still there, and then to learn how to get back into it, how to rise once more from thought into thinking, taking with us, however, that fuller self-consciousness which the Greeks never knew, and which could never have been ours if they had not laboured to turn thinking into thought. Thus, being normally outside it, it follows that we shall also be conscious of it as a different world, a world into which we can plunge at will. In this case, the Greeks did not have a word for it. We shall… .The first part of the problem has already been solved. Rudolf Steiner’s comprehensive work is enough and more than enough many times over to enable any really unprejudiced, unobsessed mind to realise that this great world of formative thinking is still there, awaiting us, if we have but the will to reach it. His book, The Philosophy of Freedom, for example, is a bridge, itself compacted of ordinary, logical thoughts, which leads beyond and away from such thoughts right up to this other world of creative thinking. And the name which, in other books, Steiner has given to this world is ‘etheric’.”

— Owen Barfield, “Thinking and Thought,” The Rediscovery of Meaning

 

The consciousness through which we meet the world has changed before. Ow. Barfield asks us to consider whether our present way of perceiving it must therefore be the final one:

“Experience in perceptions, mindsets, world structures, and cosmologies, have altered in the past. Should we rule out the possibility of their altering no less radically in the future?”

— Owen Barfield, “The Rediscovery of Allegory II,” The Rediscovery of Meaning

 

Spiritual science understands Paul’s experience at Damascus in just this forward-looking way. Paul’s sight of Christ in the spiritual sphere of the Earth came, before humanity generally possessed the faculties for such an experience. He called it a light cast ahead of a future development. With the end of the lesser Kali Yuga in 1899, Steiner expected more people gradually to become capable of a renewed experience of Damascus: a perception of Christ’s presence in the etheric. Here, the word etheric gives a more definite character to what might otherwise remain a vague reference to the spiritual world. Older accounts often speak more broadly of an astral or star-related realm and of the higher members of the human being formed through cosmic influences. Steiner distinguishes the etheric from the astral, identifying it more specifically with the formative forces of life, growth, and memory. This distinction gives us something firmer with which to approach the kind of perception he describes. What lies ahead as the Parousia becomes clearer? If the curtain continues to thin, we may have to learn to recognize realities that our present habits of thought cannot yet hold. Paul’s warning about the rulers then reaches beyond their moment in history. It asks us to remain awake to what the spirit may be bringing into view in ours.

 

I have found that my dearest religious ideals have been reshaped from time to time. More is needed, at least for me, with which to approach the world I meet. The mental images I have discerningly absorbed through theological examination have at times needed to be reshaped so that I could enter more fully and richly into the meaning of salvation. An image of the afterlife as eternal worship among angels could no longer satisfy me on its own. I needed content that could give substance – something that could prompt an actual meeting with angels, help me experience something of eternity in the present – deepen my understanding of the nature of music – of what lives within it beyond religious sentiment.

 

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗱 𝗪𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗼𝘄: 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗴𝘁𝗵 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗪𝗶𝘀𝗱𝗼𝗺 𝗠𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗕𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲

Near the middle of the letter, Paul turns from spiritual gifts to love. Even a person who speaks with spiritual insight or processes a powerful gift may still lack what gives those gifts their meaning.

 

“Though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:2).

 

We have already considered the cultural epochs through which human consciousness changes. Steiner places these within a much larger evolution, extending beyond Earth’s present existence. He describes successive planetary incarnations called Old Saturn, Old Sun, Old Moon, and Earth. These names designate earlier conditions of the world from which our Earth developed, rather than the heavenly bodies we see today. Within this larger picture, he associates Old Sun with a cosmos of strength, Old Moon with a cosmos of wisdom, and Earth with the task of developing love. Strength and wisdom are inheritances; love is something humanity must increasingly bring into being.

 

***For a fuller account of these planetary stages, see Rudolf Steiner’s An Outline of Esoteric Science (GA 13), particularly “The Evolution of the Cosmos and Man.” ***

 

Anthroposophy gives more concrete substance to what is involved in cosmic evolution and what unfolds within time, as the following passage illustrates:

“Do not believe that this or that—the thigh or the heart—arises out of nothing and thus becomes the bearer of passions and morality. To progress from blind drives and instincts to the purity of moral wisdom, this wisdom of the foundational structure first had to develop through long experience. This heart had to take shape from the experiences of the earlier planetary spirit. Thus, the wisdom that underlies the fundamental structure of our Earth is the experience of an earlier planetary incarnation of the Earth spirit. On Earth, we have a different purpose. Here, wisdom is not acquired through experience; rather, what has been wisely constructed—the refinement of drives, desires, and passions—is instilled and imparted. Beings refine themselves by living in an external relationship with one another. This external relationship of the earthly world is egoism, as it exists in all beings. It is love. This tendency toward the development of love is just as much the purpose of earthly evolution as the development toward wisdom was the purpose of the stage preceding it. When earthly evolution has reached its goal, then everything that is still egoism today in human beings and other beings will have been transformed into love. “- R. Steiner.

 

Through the inner work we undertake over time, and through the gradual assimilation of theosophical and anthroposophical content, concepts such as strength, wisdom, and love begin to reveal themselves from different sides. Ideas we first encountered separately begin to form relationships within our conscious awareness. Strength becomes visible in the forces through which a living body sustains itself, grows, and acts; wisdom in the structure of a leaf or bone, before anyone has consciously understood it. As these relationships become clearer, truth can bring an ever-increasing sense of reality and significance to what we experience. This also gives more substance to Paul’s insistence that knowledge, spiritual perception, and sacrifice amount to nothing without love. We use the word so readily that we can forget how much remains to be understood and lived within it. Love has many layers, and a human life gives something of its eternal nature a finite expression. A person may truly encounter the spirit and still use that experience to place themselves above others. They may become absorbed in what has been revealed to them and fail to notice the person beside them. What they have come to perceive must gradually reshape how they live and relate to others. The knowledge must enter their dealings with people, including those who do not share their understanding and those whom they find difficult to love.

 

Through this, -I have understood how, in my younger years, a certain strength was needed for growth. I experienced that strength as love taking the form of power needed to accomplish something for the greater good. It gave me the ability to live in thought and feeling as someone possessing the strength to make my mark in the world. This strength had been imbued with wisdom, though I had to wait for that wisdom to reach me in ever richer ways before I could begin to see the morality within it—to see morality as more than just a call to correct my wrongs, and to recognize a path to follow, a script of morality written into each expression of form, color, and sound. Reflecting on the strength of my younger years and the wisdom I have attempted to assimilate, I feel that what remains is to bring them more fully into love. Peter’s words to Christ become my own:

“Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life” (John 6:68, KJV).

 

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐫𝐝 𝐖𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐨𝐰: 𝐎𝐧𝐞 𝐁𝐨𝐫𝐧 𝐎𝐮𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐃𝐮𝐞 𝐓𝐢𝐦𝐞

Near the end of the letter, Paul recalls those to whom the risen Christ appeared. He places himself last: “as of one born out of due time” (1 Corinthians 15:8, KJV). We have already touched upon the severity of ἔκτρωμα (ektrōma), an untimely or miscarried birth, and its association with wounding. Here, Paul gives that severity a personal ground: he is unworthy to be called an apostle because he persecuted the church. His former life remains within the way he names his birth into the new one. The word also meets an older image in Job 3:16, where Job imagines himself as a miscarried child who never saw the light. The Hebrew נֵפֶל (nefel) is related to נָפַל (naphal), “to fall”; the Greek translation uses ektrōma. The words have different roots, but their meeting brings the darkness and vulnerability of this birth more clearly before us.

 

This returns us to the wound with which I began. Paul’s past had not changed, but he could no longer regard it through the consciousness that had once justified it. Through reflection upon higher ideas over time, I have begun to sense how the judging inherent in our consciousness can itself become a ground for new perception. I carry this activity with me, bringing richer content to it from multiple sides, until relationships begin to disclose themselves that I could not previously perceive. Perhaps this is something of what Steiner speaks of as intellectual clairvoyance. This is a much subtler knowing that weaves itself into the content upon which I exercise judgment. Through sustained reflection on higher ideas, organs of soul and spirit gradually develop, bringing spiritual content into clear, waking thinking. The content becomes inwardly richer: within what I am considering, I begin to perceive relationships and significance that had previously remained hidden from me. I had once imagined spiritual perception as something resembling physical sight, an unseen world appearing before me in visionary or mediumistic experiences. Now I am beginning to sense how spiritual perception can arise within conscious thinking itself.

 

Something of this may become painfully familiar in our own lives. What once made us happy, what we counted as a blessing, and what gave us a reassuring sense of ourselves may lose its former worth. We begin to see how much of our inner familiarity was held together by sympathies and antipathies we had scarcely examined. The suffering reaches into the very ground of self-awareness: we remember who we were, yet can no longer find our home there. The loosening of lower memory can be approached here as a loss of its familiar hold upon us. The events remain, while the feelings and explanations through which we lived with them give way. Ektrōma does not itself explain this process, but its image of a wounded, untimely birth gives us a way to contemplate an awakening that arrives before we know how to live from it.

 

I think this asks more of our reading of Scripture as well. The interpretations we inherit may still speak deeply, while leaving mysteries we have scarcely learned to approach. Our own age presses new questions upon us. Consumerism can fill a life with possessions while we lose all touch with life itself. leaving its purpose untouched. Political institutions lose the trust that once sustained them. Religious explanations may remain familiar even when they no longer reach what a person is experiencing inwardly. To discern the signs of our time requires a willingness to have our own understanding changed. This is where these passages return me to my own life: to what I have made bearable through explanation, and to what I have yet to recognize. The scales fall at a moment; learning to see may take the remainder of a life.

 

This November marks eight years since the death of John Allen Chau, the twenty-six-year-old missionary who attempted to bring Christianity to the Sentinelese people of North Sentinel Island. I had almost forgotten the event, yet it has returned to me as its anniversary approaches on November 17. My earlier response to it also returns, now reshaped by the years through which I have lived.

 

Alex Perry’s account in Outside describes a calling that had taken hold of Chau long before his final journey. By age 17 , he was already speaking of reaching North Sentinel as his mission. His father heard something alarming in the conviction that inspired his son. The idea endured, gathering preparation and purpose around itself until Chau acted upon it. I can relate to that sense of calling, to the urgency of evangelism and the conviction that it must be pursued at all costs.

 

Eight years ago, I was much more ready to admire someone who would risk everything to save another person from hell. Within that understanding of Christianity, the soul’s condition after death could seem to settle every other question. If eternal salvation was at stake, what could be more important than risking one’s life? My own evangelism would probably never have taken Chau’s form, but the urgency that followed my conversion lets me recognize something of what could sustain such a conviction. I wonder what might have become of that urgency in me had I not encountered ideas that opened my thinking beyond its familiar habits.

 

Steiner’s reflections on the years around twenty-seven and twenty-eight give another way to consider this. He describes a limit to the development that comes of its own accord through bodily maturation. In this sense, the ego reaches a certain completion in the powers supplied through that earlier development; further growth must increasingly be undertaken from within. He also describes how what has developed quietly through the twenties should enter more fully into self-awareness and outward activity around twenty-eight. Chau died as he approached this threshold. His age helps me consider how the strength of a purpose may reach outward before the person has had time to bring all that strength into conscious understanding.

 

Here I begin to see why the ego needs richer spiritual content with which to work. For me, remaining grounded means bringing my convictions into relationship with what I actually encounter: the person before me, the consequences of my actions, and perspectives that my own enthusiasm may overlook. Higher ideas can give this work substance when I approach them from multiple sides and allow them to change my judgments. The ego need not be suppressed, but it must become capable of receiving something beyond the thoughts through which it already understands itself.

 

Perhaps an impulse toward love can press into action before we have learned how to give it a form adequate to the people we hope to serve. I still admire Chau’s courage and discipline. Now I also wonder whether wider perspectives could have given those same powers another direction—one more able to take in the lives and wishes of the people before him. Something I love can become so closely bound to my own purpose that I cease to perceive what it asks of another person. Strength and wisdom may be working beneath the surface, yet they still need to be brought into balance through the love of Christ.

 

Who am I, though, to judge the whole path of this young man? I do not know what he had lived through inwardly or, within the perspective of repeated earthly lives, how long his soul had been approaching this calling. Perhaps thousands of years stand behind what appears to us as one brief life. His story returns me to my own purpose: I may know that I love something without yet knowing whether I am serving it in the right way. Paul’s words that he does not even judge himself, and that it is the Lord who judges him, bring me back to that limit (1 Corinthians 4:3–4). Even though I must act, I must also remain willing for what I call my purpose to be reshaped.