Hi Untop,

My best friend and I went to a wonderful leader in the anthroposophical movement ten years ago to ask him just this question. My freind had been the victom of major and repetitive sexual abuse as a child. He also was born with a natural clairvoyance that made it it always obvious to him that we live multiple lives and have responsibility for the situations in which we find oursleves.

At the time it was eating up my friend that he was suppose to take some responsibility for the countless times he was raped by a family friend, so he asked this wonderful anthroposophist what he thought of the issue of choice/karma:

the anthroposophists (who is an astrosopher) said that nobody incarnates with the intention of being abused.

This sounds much like what you are saying.

For me the question is what do we mean by the notion that individual selves makes "choices". I understand the conventional use of "choice": there is a self that has autonomy and can engage in actions that are determined soley through that self and are not the result of various other conditionings. This seems to be a universal belief; even by those who identify themselves as pure materialists.

I think your question points to a deep existential pain that does not actually require an answer about "choice" and "karma". I think that pain is only asking us to understand the roots of all violence. I think it has no need for specific opinions about angles or reincarnation or the future of New Vulcan. Those are all interesting topics, but I think the pain and confusion from which you question springs is asking us to specifically locate the core structure of any and all violence. That can be examined in each moment of our lives. It requires, in my opinion, the fundamental gesture of PoF.

Every great wisdom traditon (including anthroposophy) will have a way of addressing your question; so, in that sense, you can just seek out leaders of your particular traditions as my friend and I did. If the leader is worth her salt, she will be able to say things that will bring you comfort, or that will at least be meaningful. Pof won't give that sort of response. But it will ultimately show you directly what the nature of that very pain that generated the question is....PoF shows us what must be there in order for any act of human violence to take place. In chapter 2 Steiner describes the very cause of our identification with fragments. This identification is the first gesture of action that seeks to increase separation and fragmentation. It's late, but I wanted to respond to what I consider a very profound post on your part.

My questions:

Can you boil your question down to a short sentence?

Can you imagine a senario in which an individual would "choose" to be abused?

If I told you that I was refusing to leave an abusive job because I believed that I ultimately could bring a deep healing to the work community, would you consider my "choice" different from an individual who is about to incarnate and is willing to be abused because of what he or she wants to bring to that family?

Is it the image of an innocent baby that makes it difficult to think of the individual who got to stand back and look realistically at what he or she was about to incarnate into?

Thanks for sharing this very difficult question.

Jeff

Hi Untop,

The thing that came to my mind was the opportunity the child represents to the abusive parent to transform.  Beyond the parent, the child represents an opportunity for the destruction and cruelty to stop with their generation.  In the first instance the child is playing a karmic role in the life of the parent.

Being born in to an abusive family is a really huge deed.  Being born most places in the world is pretty difficult, whatever the family.

The problem with viewing things through this frame is when "fault" slips in to the frame.  "What's happened is your fault so I don't have to support you..."  When an abuser is abusing their victim it is the abuser's fault.  The behaviour is not excused because the victim has put themselves in the way of the behaviour.  Not at all.

The benefit for the victim of the abuse in seeing their situation as something they decided to put themselves in to - incredibly difficult though it is - is that through this frame they can be released from the trap of victim mentality.

As long as you believe that you are the victim of someone else it is hard to mobilse forces that will overcome the situation.  If you take responsibility for what is happening then this is actually hugely empowering and often frees you up to take positive action.

I think it is almost impossible to discuss this without risking being misunderstood and possibly triggering out of control emotional reactions.  It is, quite rightyly such a senstive subject.  I think that it is very difficult to discuss specific situations or hypothetical situations because it is only the reality of real lived experience that provides enough detail, enough texture, enough substance to stand a chance of untangling the karma that results in these desparately unhappy situations.

I hope this makes some sense.

S-)

Hello untop. I agree with Sebastian here.

One of the difficulties in approaching ideas of choices made before birth is that we generally expect such choices to be reasonable and understandable. In my experience, this is seldom the case. Any choice made out of love for another human being steps beyond reason's borders. It may be possible to understand and reason retrospectively, but it is love that informs such choices in principle. Love bears its own reasoning, and often defies logic.

This may be quite a strong view to swallow, but I find that our need to find justification for what comes our way in Earthly life, may often obscure other genuine insights into the greatest human mysteries.

Dear Friends,

There basic error we make in considering the above question is to assume that our activities as we get ready for our next incarnation are made from a state of consciousness at all like our earthly consciousness.  Our state of being in higher devachan, and the nature of our perceptions, is nothing like how we view matters from the point of view of earthly consciousness.

No child (star-spirit) incarnates to be abused because there is nothing in their experience at the Midnight Hour which makes such questions as to which parents and the like that has anything at all to do with such set of conceptions ("being abused").

A couple of basics.  In higher devachan we are outside space and time.  So, for example, in the lectures to Priests and Doctors called Pastoral Medicine, Steiner describes the earthly sense of time, which we see as a line of say 3000 years, as not being a line at all, but something more like a very complicated and intricate knot.  What we experience as linear is actually something all warped up in and around itself.

In a wonderful discussion some years ago on the Ark (a very fine spiritual discussion list that only lasted for a few years) the question was put as to how does Christ pay attention to all our different needs at the same time.  The fact is that from His point of view he has all of Eternity, such that in His work with us he steps into Time from Eternity, and can therefore touch and pay attention to all 6 Billion plus human beings at what is essentially His leisure.  He can be completely and fully devoted to us, as individuals, at any given moment, because time and space are irrelevant to His consciousness and His will.

An incarnating spirit does not experience the earth existence they are about to enter in any kind of way which we would normally put in words.  You would have to imagine the whole soul and spirit in a state of ecstacy.  Every aspect of the being of the incarnating spirit is filled with the most passionate possible feeling need and hunger to be in earthly life, for many "reasons", of which one of the main ones today is that Christ is there.  Christ is no longer the "spirit" of the Sun Sphere of Cosmic existence, but the "Spirit" of the Earth, and to incarnate means to actually unite with Him in a way not fully possible during excarnation anymore.

Now the details are also not so much in the consciousness of the incarnating spirit either.  Communities of Spiritual Beings have, for example, during the excarnation process relieved the excarnating spirit of much of its burdens.  Unredeemed astrality is left behind and held by these Beings so that at the Midnight Hour we are entirley free of any dross at all.  Only on the descent into incarnation are various difficult tendencies added to the astral body that will later be reflected in karma.

We also need to remember that as excarnate beings we can't change.  We are what we are, and many spirits today never even get far from the earth at all (their excarnation process is greatly inhibited by materialism and its effects).   When we do turn around and seek the earth experience again, we hunger for it, whatever its difficulties, for only this experience lets us develop - become.  Of course there are all kinds of spiritual beings that try to interfer with a progressive evolution, and these form alliances with incarnate human beings in occult brotherhoods, such that together these try to cause all sorts of difficulties.  The battle between Michael and the Dragon in the spiritual worlds has finished in heaven (it ended in 1879), and now goes on in and around the earth (see Steiner's lectures "The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness").

So what does an incarnting star-spirit "see" as it approaches life in the body on the earth?  It sees its death in the spiritual world, followed by a birth in the material world, during which it will undergo the trial of the Phoenix, which during its biography burns the soul to ash, only to be once more reborn at the death in the material world and able then to return to its natural spiritual existence.  In heaven we hunger for the earth.  On the earth we hunger for heaven.  The details are unimportant.

Does this mean we who suffer or observe suffering need to accept the horror and tribulations?  Of course not!  But that struggle with evil is the very purpose of the stage of the evolution of consciousness connected to the Consciousness Soul Age.  We face today the Mystery of Evil, and in the biography we are fully engaged in such precisely in order to have certain experiences and to make certain choices ON THE EARTH, that can't be made in heaven.  Further, we are never alone, never.  We will feel alone, for that is part of the experience the I must face - to stand up alone.  But factually we are never alone, for whole communities of spiritual beings surround us, and care for us.

Some will know this story, but others may not so I will repeat it (it comes from the work in 12 Step Circles).  A man is with Christ, and looks back over his life as if it was steps in the sand on a beach.  He sees two sets of steps, and then for a long time when there is only one set of steps (covering the periods of his worst life experiences).  The man turns to Christ and says, why did you abandon me at my createst moment of need?  And then Christ says, no, the reason there is only one set of steps during that period of your life is because that's when I carried you, because you could no longer carry yourself.

joel

Hi,

Joel, nice to hear from you. It's also a relief that you are one of the few anthroposophists who won't mind me asking specific questions.  My questions are in the nature of those that you quickly ask when people share descriptions of the spiritual world.  I know that whenver you share social Imaginations these are the result of your contempletive introspective research, but I'm less clear about your personal research in to pre-incarnation and Midnight Hour of the Soul stuff.    When I was a baby anthrophosophist 10 years ago, I naively assumed that because this was a science there would never be a problem asking methodology questions.  I learned quickly that it almost never was ok for me to ask an anthro elder if his or her descriptions were logico-creative explorations of pictures Steiner gave or if they were independent investigations that happen to correspond to a high degree.  I was mostly lectured about how it is an anthroposophist's responsibility to work with the more esoteric material and see how it fits perfectly into Steiner's whole cosmology.  Oh brother......It was less than a year ago when you, rightfully, took that guy to task on your yahoolist who kept mentioning "facts" about spiritual beings and quoting Steiner....

I don't think I've ever read such authoritative descriptions from you on matters such as pre-incarnation, The Midnight Hour Experience, Communities of Spiritual Beings and so much more!  Perhaps you are creatively exploring Steiner's Imaginations about such events, or perhaps Steiner's work is acting more as solid reference material for your research.  Either way I like how you put your above post, but you can imagine why the distinction between the two is significant.  I'd like to hear you say more about the role that direct experience plays with what you've learned from Steiner when you mention some of the more esoteric facts in the above post.  Now even though I know I'm talking to Joel here, I'm still worried I've stepped on your toes just by asking the question!  Why is that?  I'll go ask my shrink. Oh wait, I can't afford my shrink....Thanks,

gulp

(it feels awkward to ask people I know to address me as gulp, but i i'm sure i'll get used to it)

What a wonderful question!

I have had experiences of the kind Steiner calls Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, but I am not an initiate, or clairvoyant.  Seems a mystery doesn't it?  Could be confusing as well.  I wish there was a simple answer, but you'll have to bear with me while I spiral around the subject matter.

What Steiner was concerned with was a vague mysticism, and also people not being awake enough during a spiritual experience to properly understand it.  He wanted Anthroposophy to be scientific, but we get confused if we think its scientific basis lies in "repeating" Steiner's researches.  What makes the matter "scientific" is the act of cognition that goes along with the experience.  We train ourselves in this act of cognition through the work with The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, but this is not as easy as some believe who come to this website.  Mostly people who come here focus on understanding the book.  Wrong place to look.  Need to look within (introspect), and the within is very messy and human.  Barely looks at all the like map that is the book.  I've been doing introspection for 35 years, the last 28 of which under the inspiration of the "maps" of Steiner.

So I have, as a consequence, became able to do "living thinking", and I wrote about this in my essay In Joyous Celebration of the Soul Art and Music of Discipleship [http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/samod.html].  As an experience it is quite unlike what most people here write about.  Steiner talks about what happens when one succeeds at PoF - at this more exact and more precise result than that which is found through Knowledge of Higher Worlds - at the end of Chapter 5 in Occult Science: an outline.  He there states that those who succeed at PoF are actually in the spiritual world, although they experience this world as a world of thought.  Again, it would be dangerous to assume that when I speak of the "world of thought" I am talking at all about normal discursive thinking.  The experience of living thinking I describe in the above essay and a few other places, but it is not at all like normal discursive thinking.

So then, where comes the experiences of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, without clairvoyance in the way Steiner seems to suggest? By Grace!

For reasons having to do with the will of Spiritual Beings, they decide to reveal something to you - they reach out and touch you.  This is true even of Rudolf Steiner by the way.  He doesn't wander in the akashic record or in the "spiritual worlds" like we might travel to Tibet or the Library of Congress.  These experiences of Steiner are hardly expressed at all in his communications.  Instead we get from him the cognitional result of his experiences (how he thought it as it fades away).  He has taken into his soul something as an experience which is so profound and deep that it can leave you shaken to the deepest parts of your soul, and turned it into a mediating language in between conventional intellectual German and spiritual cognition.  At the same time, his personal efforts (which are more about disicipline and purification) are met by the activity of Spiritual Beings (or other initiates) that meet with him.  My second Christ experience (an Intuition by Grace) left me lying in bed, so deeply at peace that I was unmoving and unthinking  for almost half an hour.

So there have been several of those, as well as some atavistic experiences in my early thirties.  One of the things Steiner points out, and which is not often discussed (remember he seldom said anything about his "personal" spiritual experiences), is that when we are truly touched by higher beings, we are also changed.  They reach down and touch us (out of Love, and not so much for our needs, but for that which we may later be able to do), and this transforms the soul (yet in a paradoxical fashion, that never - never - touches our freedom).  We are always more free after such an experience.

Living Thinking has a similar quality.  It is not for us, but for the thou with whom we have a relationship.  So when I read the post to which I replied above, I am not pontificating, but am filled within from the living and become stream of thought, which takes my soul and causes it to be borne upward by the "wind" (the Holy Spirit).  Now this isn't as "moving", as are some of the experiences of being "touched", but is more subtle.  I my essay above, I call it the delicate and subtle experience of the presence of Fullness and the fullness of Presence.

So what I write above becomes a mixture of actual profound spiritual experience, the moving of thought in me (It thinks in me), and (what any scientist will do) the conforming of the language to the forms of speech and writing created by Steiner (who makes the whole thing possible).  Its also important to recongize that I do little "original" research - I add little to what we can already know and understand with the help of Steiner.  Most of my "original" work is in the social, as you noted.

So if I talk of what it feels like to incarnate, I have an actual experience by Grace of what it feels like (I actually felt - through Grace -  what it felt like - feel in this sense is so inadequate - to be incarnating), and I have what "It thinks in me" in the present (the spiritual world experienced as a world of thought), and Steiner's disciplined language, which helps me confine, what might be otherwise egotistic and luciferic, in a cogitional form that meets the question which has come to me from the outside (this is different from a journal entry I create out of some other kind of impulse).  When a question is given to me, my I gets out of the way, and It thinks in me.  If you consider it carefully, you'll find that nothing I said is contrary to what Steiner has written (the gold standard to a degree).

At the same time, I remain responsible for what I write.  I can't just say: "well a little bird told me".  When "It thinks in me", I am not only not passive, I am very awake and constantly checking whether or not what is going on in anyway disturbs my participated conscience (participated conscience being a kind of technical term for an inner act of moral imagination applied to ourselves as to whether we are being truthful - again see the essay).

Of course, this won't satisfy some of those who have their theories about all this (but no experience).  Not my problem.  In the end I only have to satisfy myself, and I can count on the reader to possess a certain degree of discrimination.  You thought the post was okay, but  felt it necessary to ask a question.  I've answered truthfully, but maybe not satisfactorily.

You get to decide  for yourself, how much attention to pay to what I said, and hopefully you will not make me any kind of authority that Steiner also wanted not to be made.  You'll take what I wrote in, keep it at a distance and then make your own conclusions as you live on.  Seems to me that's the way it is supposed to be.

My main hope was to suggest that we simply couldn't think about the incarnation process as if it bore any similaritiy to how we think about our biographies while in earthly life.  If I get people to think outside that box, than that is the essential thing.

joel

Joel,

If your main goal was to suggest that this question of how incarnating relates to the incarnated experience of evil should not be thought of conventionally, you succeeded. I think you pointed to a different kind of criteria indeed. I have more questions but I notice I pull back.....I think I pull back because it feels a bit inappropriate to ask questions about your process in untop's journal, which has its own specific quesitons. I would like to ask you a few quesitons about what you just wrote; I will respond to this in my own journal. Thanks.

gulp

Let me preface with this: the following thoughts are presupposing that Steiner's mental pictures have accuracy in a way that is useful to adopt.  It would be like letting a friends description of his house stand even though I've never been to his house or seen many of the objects which he is describing. I could still talk about the relationship between the objects as he has put forth....

Steiner sometimes talked about how a soul that is about to incarnate will "know" very specific events that it will encounter. He has given concrete examples of this:  sometimes he describes this as the soul getting a detailed flash-like experience of an experience it will go through (I take this to mean it is highly probable of going through because...come on....free will and all that!)...And sometimes Steiner talks about the pre-birth soul arranging very specific encounters and experiences with higher beings. This includes things like setting up highly complicated timings of when people will meet and under what exact circumstances. 

If we simply take it that this is what Steiner believed based on his research, we can ask quesitons from there (remembering, or course, that "there" is our holding of Steiner's mental pictures, not our sharing of them)....

Based on an overall view of the variety of knowings and experiencings that Steiner allotted to pre-birth souls, I think we can safely make some guesses:

pre-birth people can expect very specific encounters. 

pre-birth people can preview very specific encounters from both outside and inside (this is based on descriptions in which Steiner might say a pre-birth person wanted to encoutner X to go through such and such a type of experience)

pre-birth people will sometimes plan for specific type experiences; these planned experiences do not seem to be limited to only positive encounters.

a pre-birth person can know details about the behaviors and tendencies of the people who will raise it.  We have no reason to think that physical abuse is on a list of things kept from a pre-bith persons sight.

Based on Steiner's interpretation of his research experiences, we have reason to think that a pre-birh person can know very specific details of encounters with evil it will go through.

Of the billions and billions of souls who have chosen physically abusive households in which to incarnate, it is reasonable to speculate that some of these pre-births "knew" exactly the nature of the early poundings they would take....

let me comment on what I've written above: I used to work with anthroposophy in something like the manner I've just written up. I would take mental pictures given to me from Steiner. I'd then work them and shape them in my own mind, relating them to other Steiner mental pictures and relating them to other gulp mental pictures)...I would have a bunches of mental pictures about things like "pre-birth" experiences, "etheric body stuff", "early history of mankind stuff"...and on and on....

This kind of thinking can lead me to the conclusion that it might be very true that some pre-birth souls have a detailed knowing that they will be physically abused at a young age and that some pre-birth souls will not have such a knowing.

The question I ask is why am I choosing to "know" about this?  What is underneath my interest to know this?  And what does it mean that I "know" that a pre-birth person might know that it will be abused by a caretaker at a young age.  Does this type of "knowledge" utimately answer my question.  I found that for me this type of answer was like a bandaid.  It could be highly interesting for my mind. I could be highly helpful to my heart; it helped me find meaning about things that seemed unknowable.  But I grew to question the nature of that "meaning".  What does it really mean when anthroposophists know things about pre-birth experiences?  Every spiritual community has their own set of mental pictures associated with what happens before and after birth and they find these mental pictures to be meaningful.  I have no beef to pick with whatever helps a person.  In that sense, I applaud any mental activity that helps a person relieve the existential stress of holding questions about the violence and terror of living in a body. 

I agree with Joel when he says:

There basic error we make in considering the above question is to assume that our activities as we get ready for our next incarnation are made from a state of consciousness at all like our earthly consciousness. 

I think it is important for anthroposophists to consider if Steiner, in any way, encouraged such an error.  We might say strongly, "No, Steiner did everything he could to make sure that people did not form mental pictures that implied that the pre-birth experience was anything like the post-birth experience".  But a healthy consideration of this question might also say, "The way Steiner somtimes taught and spoke about pre-birth experiences implies a state of consciousness very much like our own."  Personally, I do notice that Steiner often described the "planning" and "knowing" of a pre-birth person to be the way that I plan and know. 

The confusion around this type of anthroposophical topic seems to me to be inherent in the fact that you have people "taking on" mental pictures from somebody else and assigning truth value to them.  Imagine what would happen if we found a lost lecture in which Steiner had said something like, "Under certain circumstances a soul preparing to incarnate will know exact details of its encounters with evil and will, in fact, freely choose to undergo such experiences."

All of a sudden anthroposophists would "know" something about pre-birth differently than if the newly discovered lecture said:  "Under no circumstances does a pre-birth soul ever choose to freely undergo encounters with evil."

When we don't find a specific question explicated by Steiner, we try to fill in the gaps by thinking about the statements he did make.  The "smart" anthroposophists are the ones who can remember and manipulate a wide variety of Steiner statements in creative matters. But even the "smartest" of these anthroposophists will immediately modify whatever they are "thinking" if a lost lecture gives a new factual statement.

This is not an answer to your question, untop, and might not even relate to it in a way that you find all that meaningful.  This response is where I had to go to even begin addressing your very important question about reincarnation and choice: you asked:

if we reincarnate, if we come back and back and back to this place, does it follow that we choose our life circumstances before we come?

any answer coming from somebody who does not explicity study reincarnation from his or her own direct experience, can be useful but only in terms of creative rearrangments of Steiner's mental pictures.  Even IF you are talking to somebody who says that they can directly experience and study a wide range of reincarnationg souls, you will be needing to keep in mind the model through which they interpret their experience.  I am grateful that Steiner would often emphasis that interpretation still affects spiritual perception as well (he was post-modern in the sense that he never claimed a type of "knowing" that was unaffected by filtering)....

Some systems would answer your question "no, there is no choice; it is done for you"....For those people who work under that system,they will creatively answer questions about evil from those mental pictures.  Steiner seems to say a LOUD "Yes" to your question.

You end your thoughtful post with;

but shouldn't we do what we can?

In a way the pain (for me) that helps inspire this question is the starting point.  It so often seems that in the face of so much violence and pain we are doing much less than we can.

If we really are love, then why aren't we showing ourselves more often?

I find that if I start with a question about reincarnation and really look at the mental pictures I am using to ask it, I can find the question within the question...and so on and so on.....until I have located THE questions in which my own mental pictures will guide me to direct experience.  I don't speak against reading spiritual teachings about "etheric" and "astral" and "midnight hours"...but I encourage (in myself first) digging into the fresh soil of our concern.  The last paragraphs of your post put me in touch with that soil in myself. 

gulp