A Shiggaion of Coming to Greater Self-Knowledge
The blessing & Curse of Introspection.
Psalm Seven reads as follows:
O Lord my God, in thee do I take refuge;
save me from all my pursuers, and deliver me,
lest like a lion they rend me,
dragging me away, with none to rescue.
O Lord my God, if I have done this,
if there is wrong in my hands,
if I have requited my friend with evil
or plundered my enemy without cause,
let the enemy pursue me and overtake me,
and let him trample my life to the ground,
and lay my soul in the dust. Selah
Arise, O Lord, in thy anger,
lift thyself up against the fury of my enemies;
awake, O my God; thou hast appointed a judgment.
Let the assembly of the peoples be gathered about thee;
and over it take thy seat on high.
The Lord judges the peoples;
judge me, O Lord, according to my righteousness
and according to the integrity that is in me.
O let the evil of the wicked come to an end,
but establish thou the righteous,
thou who triest the minds and hearts,
thou righteous God.
My shield is with God,
who saves the upright in heart.
God is a righteous judge,
and a God who has indignation every day.
If a man does not repent, God will whet his sword;
he has bent and strung his bow;
he has prepared his deadly weapons,
making his arrows fiery shafts.
Behold, the wicked man conceives evil,
and is pregnant with mischief,
and brings forth lies.
He makes a pit, digging it out,
and falls into the hole which he has made.
His mischief returns upon his own head,
and on his own pate his violence descends.
I will give to the Lord the thanks due to his righteousness,
and I will sing praise to the name of the Lord, the Most High.
Within most of the circles to which I have belonged, the kind of thinking that is employed in a contemplative way is regarded more as a curse than as a gift that helps one navigate life. I have been told, one should be more like a cat and simply rest within what one finds around oneself. “Shane, you find too much with which to distract yourself.” Or other admonishes to refrain from thinking too deeply..
There is of course, truth in this. One can become distracted by ideas, live too heavily in thought, and an increased inner activity might then be mistaken for genuine spiritual development. A person who remains comparatively asleep within their observations – where philosophical thinking does not appear , may not have to reckon with some of the inner difficulties faced by someone who tries to understand life from wider perspectives.
Yet this inner wrestling is also a gift. One may gradually learn to take nearly any encounter, even encouragement tinged with a disingenuous tone, as a prompting to look more closely at oneself. As the world of thought expands, self-awareness does too, and one can become more capable of discerning, through deeper examination, the changes taking place in the greater world. In this manner, one grows productively in accordance with the aims of higher development—those working to transform wisdom into love. This coming to greater self-knowledge is essentially what the Bible has contained within much of its content: the soul’s journey through various states of being and its winning for itself a greater participatory role in the unfolding of cosmic evolution.
I believe something of this can be sensed in the 7th Psalm, which is called a Shiggaion of David – a song marked by intense and wandering emotion. It carries something of the individual ego, or self, coming to terms with itself in greater measure. Throughout the Psalms, we find this kind of poetic inner awareness coming alive. Something new emerges through these texts and the wisdom literature surrounding them. Beneath the surface of human consciousness, a new form of self-awareness is coming to the fore—one that would gradually move the individual beyond the generational ego, or the collective consciousness of one’s ancestral lineage.
This collective inheritance allows us to understand sin as something more than an individual moral transgression. Sin also possesses a formative power within the soul. It does not merely produce guilt after an action has occurred; through repeated thoughts, desires, and deeds, the soul itself gradually takes on a different form. These effects may become established as tendencies and ways of responding to life that continue through families and communities. Scripture speaks of the iniquity of the parents being visited upon the children “to the third and fourth generation” (Exodus 20:5). This need not mean that personal guilt is transferred from one person to another. Rather, the forms impressed upon the soul by sin – the inner dispositions it creates and the conditions of life shaped by them – may continue working through successive generations. The developing ego therefore awakens not in isolation, but within an ancestral and collective inheritance that it must first make conscious and then gradually transform.
This is significant if we wish to understand ourselves within human and cosmic evolution. An intellectual history – or a history of ideas that reaches into the inner evolution of men and women—is not an easy subject to grasp when one first encounters teachings that seek to render diaphanous the hidden or spiritual elements within the course of this journey. Yet if one commits oneself to grasping the higher domains of life, one may come to understand more of one’s own maturing and the subtle advancements of soul that all undoubtedly undergo, but that some may never experience consciously or possess within their own repertoire of words with which to give shape to the experience. We may share something of David’s anguish and fear, but the reality of his condition was felt during an earlier period, when humanity possessed a very different inner constitution. This caused people to relate to their inner lives and the outer world differently than modern humanity does. David’s experience of self-awareness, with all its sensitivities, would not have taken precisely the same form as our own coming to self-knowledge today.
The mission of the ancient Hebrew people was to prepare the way for the individual human “I” – the part of us that supplies self-consciousness—to enter earthly development more intensely. At the time of David, this “I” was not yet fully incarnated and individualized as it would become through the Christ impulse. It was still experienced more through the shared life of the people and their relationship to Yahweh. The authority of the divine “I AM” was experienced primarily through Yahweh’s covenant with the people, the king, and the sanctuary—still standing, as it were, above the individual through the collective life of Israel. This prepared the divine lordship, once experienced outwardly through the stars and natural creation, to become increasingly interiorized. The individual human ego, or selfhood, could thereby become the conscious lord and master of the personality , of what exists within one’s drives, desires, passions, ideas, and temperament.
***Addendum: YHWH, Adonai, and Kyrios*** – This development is reflected conceptually in the divine title “Lord,” though not through a literal shared etymology. YHWH, the proper name of the God of Israel, is generally connected with the Hebrew verb “to be.” Exodus 3:14 relates it to the self-revelation ’ehyeh ’ăšer ’ehyeh—“I AM WHO I AM.” By the Second Temple period, the sacred name was no longer ordinarily pronounced aloud; Adonai, meaning “Lord” or “my Lord,” was spoken in its place. The Greek Septuagint rendered both YHWH and Adonai primarily as Kyrios, meaning “lord” or “master.”
The Psalmist begins by pleading for deliverance from enemies who pursue him like lions. Yet almost immediately, he turns the judgment upon himself:
O Lord my God, if I have done this,
if there is wrong in my hands…
The enemy is no longer only outside him – David is beginning to recognize within himself something of the same forces he condemns in others. Before asking for judgment against them, he submits himself to judgment. The Psalm therefore strikes to the marrow, piercing both soul and spirit. If we no longer remain childlike in our reading of these images, and if honest inner growth has become a priority, we may begin to recognize ourselves within them. The Psalm itself gives this law a terrible clarity:
He makes a pit, digging it out,
and falls into the hole which he has made.
His mischief returns upon his own head.
What has gone out from us returns. We may call this karma, but it is not merely a system of external reward and punishment. It is the gradual revelation of our own participation in what has happened to us and through us. As an individual becomes capable of recognizing and taking responsibility for these inner deeds, something of humanity’s larger development is also revealed: the growth of self-awareness and the gradual maturing of egohood.
I have come to see the blessing and the curse from more sides than I even knew existed within this coming to self-awareness. It carries within it something of that larger drama- the fallout of that paradise lost. Yet self-awareness is not itself paradise. It is the bridge by which we may consciously enter an entirely new form of existence. The other light-bearer has given me certain qualities necessary for meeting my own battles with assimilating knowledge. I have come to recognize that Luciferic impulses are interwoven into reality itself and into my own soul. This exodus from Edenic origins—this coming to know more of good and evil and what must be done with them—has unfolded for me through three primary spiritual circles: Alcoholics Anonymous, Christianity, and Anthroposophy.
Before I was introduced to Alcoholics Anonymous—my first encounter with a spiritual way of life – I had only begun to question existential matters. Around the age of twenty-one, after the astral body has reached a certain degree of formation, the “I” begins to assert itself more independently and to undertake the gradual conquest and transformation of the forces of the soul. Working within the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions gave me a direct way to begin understanding myself amid the upheavals of early adulthood. At the same time, I sometimes encountered within AA a distrust of thinking. Thinking too much could be treated as a form of self-will, while questioning could appear to threaten the simplicity upon which sobriety depended. This warning was not without value. The familiar notion that one should bring the body and allow the mind to follow expresses the typical philosophy within these circles. It has genuine value because deliberate action can begin reshaping the life of habit through the will before the mind fully understands what is occurring. Yet this is only one way of raising consciousness. There is a fine line between beginning with the will, allowing repeated action to transform one’s habits, and the act of first bringing the mind into a quiet and ordered place so that the body may follow. Each movement has its place.
Christianity then appeared in new garments after a period of seven years had run its course. It offered an opportunity to satisfy the increasingly paramount questions concerning the meaning of life and what might exist beyond it. It gave me a language for God and for the spiritual side of life that was becoming more and more important for me to uncover. It also opened many new avenues through which I could engage my sprouting intellectual and emotional needs by examining how those who came before me had understood earthly and human development. How had they approached such questions as eternity, morality, sin, redemption, and heaven and hell?
However, much of the knowledge presented to me remained enclosed within theology, and simple sermonizing or moral instruction. There were also limits placed around what could be known. Certain mysteries had to remain mysteries, and faith was often asked to begin where knowledge ended. My response to these limitations was also shaped by my natural soul disposition—an inherited temperament carrying something of the unresolved psychic consequences of earlier generations. I had long felt that something was wrong and had to change, almost as though my soul had been cast into a particular form before birth that would orient me toward dissatisfaction with the given world. Such an orientation can become a genuine longing for transformation, but without a deeper understanding of what must be transformed within oneself, it can harden into mere dissatisfaction with the world.
Religious teachings, at least as I encountered them within Christian orthodoxy, had not been able to give me a higher image of what is contained within certain facts of life — sin being one of the realities to which we have repeatedly pointed. To see sin only as an external obstacle, something delivered by a nebulous outer evil, leaves one in great need if this reality is never allowed to enter more deeply into one’s understanding of the inner life. For sin is not merely something that approaches us from without, but something already present within us, waiting to be worked upon by the one who has become capable of seeing it and recognizing what may be done. Although I had not yet arrived at Anthroposophy within the course of this journey, Rudolf Steiner’s treatment of sin gives form to the deeper understanding toward which I was already being drawn. He brings it closer to an older and more inward understanding than the largely moral and superficial treatment I had encountered within evangelical circles:
“In this context, ‘sin’ means something entirely different from what we today call a moral transgression. And anyone who understands sin in the same way as modern church doctrine does not understand this word. We arrive at an understanding when we imagine what Paul called a ‘theory of development.’ I would like to explain this to you not in a scholarly manner, but merely by way of suggestion. It is a superstition of modern science to believe that the word ‘development’ was only discovered in the last few centuries. People have always spoken and thought about development—the emergence of the perfect from the imperfect. However, the esoteric scholars of the era from which Paul emerged said: Living beings represent a sequence of stages, from the most imperfect being all the way up to the most perfect being. The human organism was thus formally conceived as a goal toward which all other living beings strive. They perfect themselves more and more in order to become like the human organism.”
After another cycle of seven to ten years, the concepts offered by modern Christendom, conveyed almost entirely through theology, had begun to dry up for me. It was at this point that I discovered Anthroposophy and began to see the world in yet another way. It brought that elusive expanse called eternity into more imaginable forms through epochs of time, conditions of consciousness, the inner members of the human being, the life between death and rebirth, and the evolution of humanity – – especially the evolution of human consciousness. Spiritual realities were no longer left suspended in abstraction but were given forms through which knowledge could become living. I began to understand how my own soul might be situated within a larger world process.
This has brought healing, but it has also carried something of a curse. Anthroposophical ideas are not easily grasped; they require an additional measure of inner activity. Yet this very effort can cause one to become conscious of the activity of thinking itself and, through it, of the person doing the thinking. What comes into view is not always pleasant. As one becomes more attentive to what occurs within, one also begins to confront what previously remained hidden. It is not easy to look back upon one’s life and perceive the intimate details of why certain things happened, where one participated in them, or how one’s own inner disposition may have helped prepare the way for later events.
Anthroposophy is not the only place in which I have encountered this living quality of thought. Once it had become conscious within me, I began to recognize it elsewhere as a growing awareness of what each of us is living in and passing through, an awareness capable of awakening the desire to participate in the changes taking place around us. This quality is sown throughout the creative world whenever a book, an image, a piece of music, or another human creation gives birth to enthusiasm and awakens the desire to seek the spirit.
Yet the danger remains. Spiritual ideas can intensify the habit of introspection until one becomes enclosed within one’s own world. The life one encounters may then begin to appear cold and mechanical, when in reality it is we who have become one-sided—dogmatic in another sense. Through my mistakes and wayward journey, I have often lived out the warnings contained within Scripture before becoming conscious of their meaning. I have also come to know firsthand the danger of developing a kind of thinking and feeling that separates itself from what is comfortable and familiar. Spiritual thinking may lead beyond sense perception and ordinary intellect, but it can still become another prison if it does not return us to life.
This reminds me of a passage in which Rudolf Steiner speaks of the need to move beyond an inward development that remains enclosed within itself:
“But one shouldn’t always just work inward; that would be like crawling into one’s inner self. That wouldn’t be the only right way. Now a person must step back out of themselves. What we feel inwardly becomes wisdom that can be applied to the outer world, so that concepts and ideas arise within a person – that is insight.”
My creative disposition has reshaped itself with each seven-year period for as long as I can remember. Through Anthroposophy, I have found something capable of removing a certain pessimism from my outlook. It has also helped me recognize how unfree it would be to withhold from the world what has been freely given to me. The purpose of receiving spiritual substance cannot be merely to possess it inwardly. It must eventually become something that can be freely given, transformed through one’s own life and offered to others without demanding that they receive it in the same form.
My writing and other creative endeavors over the past several years have been attempts to bring this esoteric awareness into my daily life – to find some way of living into all that spiritual science has opened before me. The ideas I encountered through Anthroposophy have given my world immeasurably more color. Yet as I approach the end of another septenary period, I find that I still have almost no social outlet for these ideas, no shared place in which to practice them and allow life with others to become a mirror for my own inner development.
Have I thought myself back into another kind of prison?
I want to say more about what Anthroposophy has brought into my life, but I sometimes find myself at a loss for words. I question whether I have truly progressed in inner strength and insight, or whether I am honestly and openly continuing to take practical steps in my moral development. I have not always known how to unite these two movements — inner knowledge and outward action — and a thick film of pessimism remains. How can I avoid becoming so absorbed in continued personal development through this path that the inner world they have helped to form no longer finds a path outward?
Finding refuge in an actual place of human contact and physical presence has also proved difficult for many reasons. There is no need to place the blame entirely upon one person or another; we can all feel the increasing fragmentation that makes genuine fellowship more difficult. One may then be forced to seek some form of community through digital spaces, but these can be equally frustrating and, at times, downright strange.
This difficulty in bringing inner development into genuine human fellowship is connected with the deeper problem of individuality itself. The awakening of the “I” makes freedom possible, but it can also separate us from one another. Steiner says elsewhere that “the ‘I’ will become the apple of discord.” It is within this sort of tension that the image of the sharp two-edged sword coming from the mouth of the Christ in Revelation begins to take on meaning. Revelation is not concerned only with future events; it also portrays the forces at work within humanity’s evolution. The “I” gives us the capacity to stand apart, yet it also gives us the freedom to overcome that separation consciously. The sword therefore cuts in both directions. It can sever us from inherited forms of collective life, but it can also penetrate the self-deceptions that keep us from becoming conscious individuals capable of forming new relationships in freedom.
I make no claim to extensive knowledge of consciousness and its evolution, comparative religion, psychology, philology, esoteric Christianity, or esoteric development. I am still uncertain what one is meant to do when drawn toward these areas without having found an effective way to work within them. Is this merely a pity party? I do not believe so. It is part of growing up and recognizing what a calling may require. These ideas have sometimes kept me apart from others, and a certain coldness still makes itself known. Knowledge brings warmth when it becomes life, but grows cold when it remains enclosed within the head. Contemplative introspection must therefore become disciplined enough to find its way back into life.
Perhaps the earlier suggestion that I should become more like a cat must now be considered again. I once understood it as an admonition to stop thinking so deeply, but perhaps it contained a gentler wisdom. It may not have been asking me to become unconscious, but to acquire a quieter strength – the ability to rest within what is present without continually taking the world’s inventory. The task is not to abandon thought, but to prevent it from consuming the life it was meant to illuminate. Christ, help me continue in contemplative introspection while still returning to the world with enough warmth to rest within it.