𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑰𝒏𝒄𝒆𝒑𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝒐𝒇 𝒂𝒏 𝑨𝒘𝒂𝒌𝒆𝒏𝒊𝒏𝒈

As the curtain that hides the higher worlds continues to thin for many, will this mean a new way of schooling oneself in the assimilation and application of spiritual wisdom – an altogether different experience of what it means to be educated in spirit? To have more inner sensitivity to witness its unfolding, not only within oneself but within the lives of other human beings – a way for some to reach beyond their typical ideas of community.

How would a school that had no physical building to assist in its cohesion, no administration to manage its day-to-day responsibilities, and no physical peers upon whom one could look or whose gestures one could embrace, nothing tangible by which to easily assess the source and activity of its fellowship, nothing to fetter its members to a common geography upon the earth, but only the lands of soul and spirit, and what one has creatively woven from them into reality, come into being? When the traditional ways of learning alongside others are not available, could a gathering begin to occur more consciously among those who work mutually together in a way that is neither dependent upon physical proximity nor confined solely to the digital world?

Does it occur for some individuals that they slowly begin to sense the awakening of a community of this kind in spirit and soul?  In a way that one does not become incapacitated in carrying out the objectives in the common, everyday world, but in the middle of the mundanity of tending to the physical happenings of life, one begins to feel the presence of others appearing and disappearing, moving through them—ghosts who bring creative impulses that foster deeper teaching and encouragement. Can an objective fellowship in spirit become inhabitable in the here and now, as bonds of spirit come alive within human beings with enough concreteness to satisfy the soul and convince one that this fellowship is not merely an inward construction?

Can something begin to emerge in one’s awareness — something that catches wandering souls and gives them an oasis, a place in spirit for fulfilling such a significant need that most still cannot quite see that they, too, require this satisfaction?   Where one gradually comes into union with other souls that he or she  has never met upon this earth in a physical sense, but perhaps only through taking in another’s artistic creations, a piece of writing, a sketch, a painting, a riddle and so on. One takes offerings of this kind and works with them within one’s own being, drawing forth further meaning and application. Yet something else may descend—or appear, or rather be awakened within us: an actual piece of the other’s inherent personality, something of their uniqueness that gives us a more personal token of them than mere sentiment or sympathy could ever provide.

Something of how this might occur can perhaps be seen in two different directions of spiritual teaching. Through his manner of questioning, Socrates attempted to initiate his listeners by drawing upward something already sleeping within them. Through the parables of the Christ, the movement is reversed: a spiritual picture descends into the soul. The listener interprets the parable, yet in the very act of interpreting it, the parable also interprets the listener, revealing them to themselves and awakening something within. Perhaps these two movements have now become more individualized within the creative offerings we give one another. An image, a parable, a piece of writing, or another creation may descend into another person while simultaneously drawing forth something that could not have awakened within that person alone. Something of the cultus—{a shared spiritual vision}— there fore becomes individualized: we each carry images and parables of our own working into the spirit, where they may be taken up by another and become part of a mutual awakening. Cultus may not be the best word for this today, since it can suggest something cult-like or coercive, though its older meaning refers simply to the cultivation or worship through which a spiritual life is nurtured.

How would one come to know that such an education was actually beginning to unfold within one’s own life? It seems so fantastical that any synchronicity appearing to reveal some connection between people could easily be thought to have occurred only within oneself. These synchronicities could also turn into something else: “I do not want to be taken in by suggestive pattern-seeking. All I am doing is giving myself over to illusion. This isn’t real.” Such doubt may be necessary, but another kind of egotism can arise from the opposite direction. I may give myself over too strongly to demanding a feeling,  or revelation from the spiritual world because of the satisfaction it gives me….kind of like in the satisfaction that soul can receive when judging people or events upon the physical plane. The experience then becomes less about receiving what is freely given and more about requiring the spiritual world to confirm itself to me. I could therefore become caught between two monsters: doubting every connection because it cannot be proven, and demanding connections because of how they make me feel.

Each individual would no doubt be living under widely different circumstances. One may pick up on something while the other picks up on something else, but would this take away from two or more people being objectively present for one another, carrying the communication toward an appropriate projection into the physical world? A sign, sound, color, event or text might appear between the two, but the true connection would not lie merely in its physical form. It would lie in the spiritual substance carried behind or through it, something perhaps held between them the night before, or at some other time throughout the day, which then finds its outward expression through whatever  sign, sound, color, or word.

This type of school would be one in which our creations could assimilate the gestures of others in spirit, even before we consciously recognized what was occurring. A person might create without any keen awareness, in the moment itself, of what is passing through or happening to them, only to look back later and realize that they had been spinning true words of spirit. It is often like this when I look back upon creations of my own: I recognize that other intelligences may have been involved and that, in many regards, the process of creative unfolding cannot be brought entirely under conscious control.

I know this may seem far too vague, with far too many things to consider in determining whether it can be—or already is—present for someone. It is easy to become caught up in attempting to control the wind that blows wherever it pleases, for the spirit cannot be manipulated into appearing simply because I want it to. But how do the tangible things we must still see in one another work in a pure way with all the many connecting threads that have been woven into reality? One would have to consider karma, the ongoing inner development of those involved, —the degree to which we have learned to quiet the soul.

Could anyone reach the point of actually knowing that this is not merely some seed sprouting and unfolding within oneself, but an objective meeting in spirit in which another soul is also present? We know that when we sleep upon an idea, it may continue to grow within us, but this would still describe something occurring primarily within one’s own soul. What I mean is an actual intercourse with others throughout life, taking place through spirit and continuing as long as one remains open to receiving and giving such teaching. This is also not the same as admiring a work of art and allowing the recollection of it to continue working upon us, or reading an author who touches our hearts. Yes, we meet them in a certain sense and carry something of them with us, but what I mean is an actual, objective meeting in spirit, something to which we return consistentl y—- have a real entanglement with others in spirit.

Perhaps the question is not whether such contact occurs, but whether it can become conscious. Anyone possessing some inner sensitivity to how human beings grow spiritually can witness that something of this is occurring between people all the time, though in most circumstances it passes unnoticed. What I am reaching toward is a more definite recognition of it: that one might learn to open oneself to the subtler impulses living within another’s creative endeavors, follow their activity across the night, or awaken to their continued presence upon returning to waking consciousness. Each may then fill the other in a manner that seems paradoxical, like one glass of water pouring itself into another while both remain full.

It was only after writing much of what appears above that I discovered that these questions had already been elaborated long before with far greater thoroughness, sensitivity, and maturity. Much more was then brought to light for me through Steiner’s Awakening to Community.. I can  see that one of my questions is taken up within it: the danger of developing a certain kind of egotism—an infatuation with proving that the spiritual world is making itself known to me.

Selected Passages from Rudolf Steiner’s Awakening to Community

The following passages are drawn from two consecutive lectures in Rudolf Steiner’s Awakening to Community (GA 257). 

From Lecture X — March 4, 1923

“Just as one becomes an egotist when one projects dream conceptions into physical situations, so does a person who projects into the conceptions he needs to have of higher realms views such as apply only to things of ordinary life, becomes the more isolated, withdrawn, insistent that he alone is right. But that is what people actually do. Indeed, most individuals are looking for some special aspect of anthroposophy. Something in their view of life draws them in sympathetic feeling to this or that element found in it, and they would be happy to have it true. So they accept it, and since it cannot be proved on the physical plane they look to anthroposophy to prove it.”

From Lecture IX — March 3, 1923

“Community building by human beings working in anthroposophy has recently played an important role in the Society. Young people in particular—but other, older ones as well—entered the Society with a keen longing to meet others in it with whom they could have a type of experience that life does not afford the single individual in today’s social order. To say this is to call attention to a thoroughly understandable longing felt by many people of our time.

“When one is discussing something, one naturally has to clothe it in idea form. But what I am about to present in that form really lives at the feeling level in people of our time. Ideas are a device for making things clear. But what I want to talk about now is something that modern man experiences purely as feeling.

“The first kind of community building that we encounter the moment we set out on earthly life is one that we take quite for granted and seldom think about or weigh in feeling. That is the community built by language. We learn to speak our mother tongue as little children, and this mother tongue provides us with an especially strong community-building element because it comes into the child’s experience and is absorbed by him at a time when his etheric body is still wholly integrated with the rest of his organism and as yet quite undifferentiated. This means that the mother tongue grows completely at one with his entire being. But it is also an element that groups of human beings share in common. People feel united by a common language, and if you remember something I have often mentioned, the fact that a spiritual being is embodied in a language, that the genius of language is not the abstraction learned men consider it but a real spiritual being, you will sense how a community based on a shared language rests on the fact that its members feel the presence of a real genius of speech. They feel sheltered beneath the wings of a real spiritual being. That is the case wherever community is built.”

[Later in same lecture]

“In other words, a more individual form of sermon is being sought, but the key to it has not been found. Thus sermons eventuate in mere opinion, personal opinion, with atomizing effect.”

“Let us take two states of consciousness familiar to everybody, and imagine a dreaming person and someone in a state of ordinary waking consciousness.

“What is the situation of the dreamer? It is the same as that of a sleeping person. For though we may speak of dreamless sleep, the fact is that sleepers are always dreaming, though their dreams may be so faint as to go unnoticed.

“What, I repeat, is the dreamer’s situation? He is living in his own dream-picture world. As he lives in it he frequently finds it a good deal more vivid and gripping—this much can certainly be said—than his everyday waking experience. But he is experiencing it in complete isolation. It is his purely personal experience. Two people may be sleeping in one and the same room, yet be experiencing two wholly different worlds in their dream consciousness. They cannot share each other’s experience. Each has his own, and the most they can do is tell one another about it afterwards.

“Even if ten people are sleeping in a single room, each has only his own world before him. The reality—and there is indeed reality in dreams—hides behind the pictures, which express it only superficially.

“When a person wakes and exchanges his dream consciousness for that of everyday, he has the same sense perception of his surroundings that those about him have. They begin to share a communal scene. A person wakes to a shared world when he leaves dreams behind and enters a day-waking state of consciousness. What wakes him out of the one consciousness into the other? It is light and sound and the natural environment that rouse him to the ordinary day-waking state, and other people are in the same category for him. One wakes up from dreams by the natural aspects of one’s fellowmen, by what they are saying, by the way they clothe their thoughts and feelings in the language they use. One is awakened by the way other people naturally behave. Everything in one’s natural environment wakes one to normal day consciousness. In all previous ages people woke up from the dream state to day-waking consciousness. And these same surroundings provided a person with the gate through which, if he was so minded, he entered spiritual realms.

“Then a new element made its appearance in human life with the awakening and development of the consciousness soul. This calls for a second kind of awakening, one for which the human race will feel a growing need: an awakening at the hand of the souls and spirits of other human beings. In ordinary waking life one awakens only in meeting another’s natural aspects. But a person who has become an independent, distinct individual in the age of consciousness wants to wake up in the encounter with the soul and spirit of his fellowman. He wants to awaken to his soul and spirit, to approach him in a way that startles his own soul awake in the same sense that light and sound and other such environmental elements startle one out of dreaming.

“This has been felt as an absolutely basic need since the beginning of the twentieth century, and it will grow increasingly urgent. It is a need that will be apparent throughout the twentieth century, despite the time’s chaotic, tumultuous nature, which will affect every phase of life and civilization. Human beings will feel this need—the need to be brought to wake up more fully in the encounter with the other person than one can wake up in regard to the merely natural surroundings. Dream life wakes up into wakeful day consciousness in the encounter with the natural environment. Wakeful day consciousness wakes up to a higher consciousness in the encounter with the soul and spirit of our fellowman. Man must become more to his fellowman than he used to be: he must become his awakener. People must come closer to one another than they used to do, each becoming an awakener of everyone he meets. Modern human beings entering life today have stored up far too much karma not to feel a destined connection with every individual they encounter. In earlier ages, souls were younger and had not formed so many karmic ties. Now it has become necessary to be awakened not just by nature but by the human beings with whom we are karmically connected and whom we want to seek.

“When the ideal ceases to be a mere abstraction and becomes livingly reunited with man’s soul and spirit, it can be expressed in the words, ‘I want to wake up in the encounter with my fellowman.’”

[Later]…

“Through experiencing the supersensible together, one human soul is awakened most intensively in the encounter with another human soul. It wakes the soul to higher insight, and this frame of mind creates a situation that causes a real communal being to descend in a group of people gathered for the purpose of mutually communicating and experiencing anthroposophical ideas. Just as the genius of a language lives in that language and spreads its wings over those who speak it, so do those who experience anthroposophical ideas together in the right, idealistic frame of mind live in the shelter of the wings of a higher being.

“The cultus brings the supersensible down into the physical world with its words and actions. The anthroposophical group raises the thoughts and feelings of the assembled individuals into the supersensible, and when an anthroposophical content is experienced in the right frame of mind by a group of human beings whose souls wake up in the encounter with each other, the soul is lifted in reality into a spirit community. It is only a question of this awareness really being present. Where it exists and groups of this kind make their appearance in the Anthroposophical Society, there we have in this reversed cultus, as I shall call it, in this polar opposite of the cultus, a most potent community-building element. If I were to speak pictorially, I would put it thus: the community of the cultus seeks to draw the angels of heaven down to the place where the cultus is being celebrated, so that they may be present in the congregation, whereas the anthroposophical community seeks to lift human souls into supersensible realms so that they may enter the company of angels. In both cases that is what creates community.

“But if anthroposophy is to serve man as a real means of entering the spiritual world, it may not be mere theory and abstraction. We must do more than just talk about spiritual beings; we must look for the opportunities nearest at hand to enter their company. The work of an anthroposophical group does not consist in a number of people merely discussing anthroposophical ideas. Its members should feel so linked with one another that human soul wakes up in the encounter with human soul and all are lifted into the spiritual world, into the company of spiritual beings, though it need not be a question of beholding them.”

WE DO NOT HAVE TO SEE THESE BEINGS IN ORDER TO HAVE THIS EXPERIENCE.

“This is the strength-giving element that can emerge from groups that have come into being within the Society through the right practice of community building.”