I cannot state strongly enough how intense, and at times utterly humiliating, it is to catch myself in reflection and recognize how deeply naive realism has plagued me. It served its purpose in my younger years. I can see how ineffective I might have been if I had questioned everything to the degree that I sometimes do now. We must first be able to accept the world before we can begin examining how we know it. I spent much of my life assuming that things were simply as they appeared to me and that my first understanding of them was more complete than it really was. One way I have begun overcoming this naivety is by questioning what it means to know myself and the world outside me through the mediation of my soul. What, in a more concrete sense, is happening within my soul when I come to know something? I have gradually come to understand that knowledge is not possible in the simple sense in which I once imagined it. I thought I could understand something fully through one univocal view and only a few moments of consideration.
I am grateful that I was led to the study of consciousness and that it did not remain limited to the hard or soft problems of consciousness as they are commonly discussed today. It opened into the much larger sphere of evolution as it reveals itself throughout all domains of life. There are seemingly infinite ways to approach this transformation, and it must be considered from many different sides. One soon discovers that there are entire areas of life, many of which I had scarcely encountered, that are necessary if one wishes to develop a well-rounded view of this subject. One must know something of art, linguistics, literature, macrohistory, paleontology, philosophy, psychology, science, and spirituality. Even these specialized fields have developed from what may once have appeared to be the relatively simple ground of the liberal arts. No single field is capable of explaining the whole human being.
There have been countless times, especially recently, when I have wondered how much this pursuit of knowledge is actually changing me. How does one bring the study of human development into everyday life? How does knowing something about the ways men and women experienced themselves during past ages help us meet what is happening now? When confiding in another person, I often find myself asking: How do I give this to others? How do I live out this philosophy?
I can say with confidence that these studies have created new perspectives within me. I feel that I have begun to find my way into a living image of this evolution of consciousness that spans our known recorded history and beyond. But this raises a more personal question: Can I reflect upon the modes of consciousness that have appeared during my own years on Earth and discover within them some husks of humanity’s much longer inner development, thereby acquiring a more intimate and living relationship with it so that it does not remain merely head knowledge?
Rudolf Steiner and Jean Gebser are two spiritual researchers who have illuminated so much for me in these domains. I decided to think upon my own development in seven-year periods and consider how they might relate to these larger schemes of evolution. I am using their work imaginatively as a foundation through which to examine my own biography. Steiner describes the development of humanity through the post-Atlantean cultural epochs, while Gebser describes the archaic, magical, mythical, mental, and integral structures of consciousness. Both suggest, in different ways, that humanity’s past has not simply disappeared. Earlier forms of consciousness remain within us, but our task is not to regress into them. They must be taken up, and integrated into a freer and more conscious form.
I am now forty two years old — six periods of seven years. Can I find within those forty-two years some reflection of the movements described by Steiner and Gebser? Can I recognize humanity’s past within my own inner life, – can doing so help me prepare for what might still become possible?
Before turning toward my own biography, it is necessary to say something about the larger historical development I am attempting to recognize within it. According to contemporary science, the last glacial period extended from approximately 115,000 to 11,700 years ago. The span from roughly 70,000 to 10,000 BC therefore belongs broadly to its later course and conclusion, when enormous environmental changes transformed human life. Steiner approaches this transition through what he calls the Atlantean catastrophe and the beginning of post-Atlantean humanity. His spiritual-historical account – this form of macrohistory – should not be treated as identical to the scientific account of the Ice Age, since they arise from different methods of observation. Steiner associated the Atlantean transition with the geological Ice Age and placed the first post-Atlantean culture around the eighth millennium before Christ.
Each cultural epoch expressed a different constitution of the human being and a different relationship among body, soul, spirit.
Steiner divides post-Atlantean history into seven cultural epochs:
- Ancient Indian: approximately 7227–5067 BC
- Ancient Persian: approximately 5067–2907 BC
- Egyptian-Chaldean: approximately 2907–747 BC
- Greco-Latin: 747 BC–AD 1413
- Present fifth epoch: AD 1413–3573
- Sixth epoch: approximately AD 3573–5733
- Seventh epoch: approximately AD 5733–7893
Together, the epochs describe humanity’s gradual descent into the physical world and its growing experience of individuality. An older, more immediate spiritual awareness receded as human beings learned to transform physical existence. What was lost in direct spiritual perception made possible the development of independent thought and freedom.
Another author who has helped shape how I have grasped this evolution and involution is Owen Barfield. He presents these transitions in a similar vein, describing this descent from the spirit and humanity’s changing relationship to it as a movement from “original participation,” in which early human beings experienced themselves as inwardly united with a spiritually living nature, through a gradual “withdrawal of participation,” in which consciousness separated itself from the world and began experiencing nature as an external collection of objects. This separation made individual self-consciousness and freedom possible, but it also produced the modern feeling of isolation from nature and spirit. For Barfield, like the others the task is not to return to the earlier unconscious unity but to move toward “final participation” – a free and conscious participation in the spiritual life of the world.
The Ancient Indian Epoch
The people of the ancient Indian epoch retained a powerful memory of spiritual existence. The sensory world appeared as maya—“the great illusion”—because spiritual reality was experienced as humanity’s true abode.
The Ancient Persian Epoch
During the ancient Persian epoch, humanity turned more instinctively toward the Earth. The physical world was no longer something to be feared but embraced. Human beings experienced themselves as participants in a struggle to transform what was dark and unfinished.
The Egyptian-Chaldean Epoch
In the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch, humanity experienced a meaningful relationship between the Earth and the cosmos. Astronomy, astrology, measurement, and architecture arose from a consciousness that still experienced earthly and cosmic events as belonging to one spiritual order. They could still know, in a sense, that what lived within a man or woman would continue after the body decayed; hence the elaborate burial preparations for the deceased.
The Greco-Latin Epoch
During the Greco-Latin epoch, humanity entered more deeply into physical existence and individual personality. The intellectual or mind soul developed, and conceptual thought became increasingly independent as the older spiritual perception faded. It was within this epoch that the Mystery of Golgotha occurred. Scripture says that “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” At an esoteric level, this points toward a divinely appointed time. The Mystery of Golgotha arose at the culmination of this period of earthly evolution, when the macrocosm met the microcosm and the morality and goodness implanted within us during an earlier stage of development could begin to be taken up consciously.
The Fifth Post-Atlantean Epoch
Our present epoch began around AD 1413 and develops the consciousness soul. Its central features are individual self-consciousness and concentrated knowledge of the external world.These gains won through the power and science have also intensified the separation between self and world, knowledge and morality, and physical and spiritual reality. Steiner describes one of the great tasks of this epoch as confronting “the problem of Evil.” The individual must learn to recognize the forces working within the soul rather than locating good, evil, truth, and falsehood entirely outside oneself.
We carry something of all these epochs within us, including the ancient longing for spiritual unity without the loss of ego-hood. If humanity’s earlier forms of consciousness remain present within us, can their movement also be recognized, in an abbreviated and more personal form, within the course of an individual life? In no way am I suggesting that I have recreated within myself the actual conditions of experience belonging to these historical movements. These are imaginations that point toward more concrete modes of existence and help me recognize something of their continuing presence within my own life. The following scenes are brief in every regard, but to some degree they show how these earlier forms of consciousness have continued to surface within my biography.
Ages 1–7: Archaic Consciousness
I am seated in an upper room of the Catholic church, being told about the crucifixion of the Lord and the love of Christ. Something in that teaching met me with an understanding that did not require self-discovery or mental reflection. Meaning, I did not stand apart from it and decide whether I agreed. There was something archaic, in the sense Gebser means, in the oneness through which it reached me from that stern-faced nun. It was not yet theology in any developed sense. It was an immediate impression received by a curious child who only wanted to imitate. Christ, love, suffering, the teacher, that dusty, cold room, and my own response were not yet separated into the different categories through which I would later attempt to understand them – it was simply given.
Ages 8–14: Magical Consciousness
I then think of playing in the woods, where almost any object in the vicinity could become a plaything. Everything was heightened with an imaginative aspect. The things surrounding me were not merely objects with fixed purposes. They could become whatever the activity required of them. A stick, tree, stone, or path possessed possibilities that did not need to be justified intellectually. The boundary between the inner life and the surrounding world remained permeable.
Ages 14–21: Mythical Consciousness
Between fourteen and twenty-one, I began constructing inner additions to my life through which myth became a kind of personal reality. This occurred while my egohood was becoming more pronounced. For me, it took the form of daydreaming. I wanted to be famous, to be at the center of what was happening, or simply to be somewhere other than where I presently was. I lived heavily within imagination to escape the reality of life, but I did not yet understand how to use it in an enriching way. My inner pictures gave meaning and movement to my life, but they could also carry me away from the life I was actually living. A personal mythology began taking shape around who I imagined I might become and how I wanted to be seen. I could find purpose only by imagining myself occupying some recognized place within the collective.
Ages 21–28: Mental Consciousness
Between twenty-one and twenty-eight, my desire to understand the Christian impulse made its mark. Thinking took on a more intellectual coloring. I attempted to discover my calling and imagined that it might take the form of evangelism or some way of bringing different things together. What I had first received immediately as a child now became something I wanted to define, explain, and communicate. This development was necessary, but it also carried the danger of believing that the intellect could stand outside life and explain it completely. The living religious experience risked becoming a system of thought and making the world into a dry and ruthless environment.
Ages 28–35: The Consciousness Soul
Between twenty-eight and thirty-five, I began to recognize that the answers I had inherited were no longer sufficient. Christianity had given me an essential experience of Christ, but the theological forms in which I had received it could not answer my questions about what occurs after death or provide a comprehensive explanation of what confronts the human being today. These questions could not be answered by theology alone. They required a wider field of inquiry and a degree of elucidation and synthesis that modern Christianity in its ecclesiastical forms—Protestantism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Catholicism — could not provide. I was no longer searching only for an answer that I could believe. I was searching for a way of knowing capable of meeting the fullness of human existence. The consciousness soul appears to demand this difficult independence. A faith received from others must either become one’s own or gradually lose its power.
Ages 35–42: The Calling Beyond Myself and the Aperspectival
Between thirty-five and forty-two came my first real calling to reach outside myself and seek fulfillment and purpose there. At the same time, something resembling what Gebser calls the aperspectival began to emerge. I began to recognize that my way of seeing was only one participation in a much larger reality. This may have begun when I first picked up Barfield’s Poetic Diction. His study of metaphor—of how words deliver meaning and how meaning changes with consciousness—was powerful enough to shift my thinking and feeling out of the heaviness of physical reality.
A social calling began to appear – the feeling that whatever I was discovering could not remain solely for me. This was terrifying because it required more than collecting ideas. It asked me to confront the lies I had told myself, as well as those I had been fed by the world around me. It meant attempting to make my own way making my faith my own.
Something of a future consciousness may already be protruding into the present through experiences like these. It is a more lived expression of Paul’s image of the Body of Christ: although it possesses many different members, it remains one body, and if one member suffers, all suffer together. What Christianity has long presented as a spiritual teaching may gradually be becoming a genuine human experience. Brotherhood would then no longer arise only because we have been commanded to love one another. It would arise because the separation between another person’s suffering and our own could no longer be experienced as absolute. I feel this becoming more genuine within my life—not as an accomplishment, but as something that has begun to make demands upon me by experiencing firsthand what it is to suffer simply because another person is suffering, or to feel the gnawing conviction that I cannot separate myself entirely from conditions for which I might otherwise blame someone else. I can no longer place every fault outside myself. I must ask what part of the condition also lives within me and how I participate in the life of the whole.
The earlier structures have not disappeared. The archaic need for unity, the magical life of nature, the mythical activity of imagination, and the mental demand for clarity all remain within me. The aperspectival task is not to fall backward into any one of them or force them into one final viewpoint. It is to recognize both allowing them to become transparent to one another and bringing them into a more conscious relationship. At forty-two, these ideas give me new hope, but they also confront me with a questio—: Is it too late? Have too many years already been lost to unconsciousness, falsehood, and ways of seeing that I mistook for reality itself? Can I begin preparing the ground for a new consciousness during the remaining half of my life?
Steiner approaches the future from another direction. He describes the sixth post-Atlantean cultural epoch as a time when Spirit Self will begin to irradiate the consciousness soul. Individuality will not disappear, but it will no longer be experienced through the same degree of isolation. Another person’s suffering will be felt as one’s own. The well-being of the individual will become inseparable from the well-being of the whole. Religious conviction will also have to arise through freedom of thought rather than institutional authority. Spiritual truth will need to receive the free assent of the individual. Knowledge will no longer be regarded as complete if it excludes spiritual reality, and spiritual perception will not be a return to the dim, involuntary clairvoyance of ancient humanity. It will have to be joined with an intellectual clairvoyance and one’s individuality.
Can I begin loosening the rigid perspectives through which I have interpreted myself and the world? Can I perceive how humanity’s past remains active within me without allowing it to control me? Can I make my faith my own without cutting myself off from others?