Since my last post, Frank Thomas Smith has continued to publish two more of the esoteric lessons in his own translation. For anyone new to this: the esoteric lessons for the first class are very serious stuff, indeed, it is advanced anthroposophy! But don’t be shy. In the second lecture, Steiner speaks about lies, thoughts that are dead corpses (thinking is dead, materialism, et c), spirit-scoffers, Ahriman, and the role of the guardian. Among other things. He says, for example, that ‘Humor may be called for with respect to some aspects of life. But the humor must then be serious. When we compare earnestness with mere game-playing, it is not sentimentality, false piety or the rolling of eyes as opposed to games.’
Later he talks about truth:
In esoteric life there is no possibility of introducing what is so prevalent in life: interpreting lies as truth. If one tries to do this in esoteric life it is not the interpretation which matters, but the truth. In esoteric life only the truth works, nothing else. You may color something because of vanity, but what has been colored makes no impression on the spiritual world. The unvarnished truth is what is effective in the spiritual world.
Then there’s one part of the lecture I guess might be interesting to bark at:
Take one of the saddest – to the spirit saddest – occurrences of our times, my dear friends. When people think clearly they are citizens of the world, for they well know that thinking makes you human, even when it is dead in the present age.
But people are separated by their feeling into nations, and especially today they let this unconscious feeling dominate in the worst possible way. Because people feel themselves as only belonging to a certain group, all kinds of conflicts arise.
For example, one might in this context (and being a real critic, not a phony one, like I am these days) ask how thinking, feeling, willing relate to the human races. In which race do those individuals incarnate who are capable of doing the thinking… and of leading humanity in spiritual progress? So — what Steiner says sounds nice, but is it?
(Hell, you’re going to suspect I bring these things up only to wind people up. After all, I know what gets people going. And here he is, saying something that seems so nice, why am I trying to wreck it, just to agitate someone. Try figuring out which of the three beasts — which Steiner talks about in this lecture — is most connected to my spiritually deficient state of mind, and give me a diagnosis. Please.)
So let’s talk about the latest edition of Southern Cross Review. In addition the third esoteric lesson, there is among things a short story about a magician cat, which, given the canineosophical circumstances, I cannot possibly recommend to you. So don’t read it. Do not read it. (Mr Dog will hate you.) Then there is, as said, the third lesson. It’s about the spiritual world again, of course, and about the physical world, too; about reality and illusion, truth and error, and separating one thing from another. He talks about thinking, feeling, willing in the spiritual world and about memory.
And when one enters the spiritual world, he immediately senses that his feeling does not stay with him. Thinking at least goes out into the presently existing universe. It disperses, as it were, in cosmic space. Feeling goes out of the universe and if one wants to follow feeling one must ask: Where are you now? When you have become 50 years old, then you have gone back in time farther than 50 years; you have gone back 70 years, 100 years, 150 years. Feeling leads you completely out of the time in which you have lived since childhood.
And willing, if you take it seriously, leads you ever farther back in time, back to your previous earth lives. That is something which happens immediately, dear fiends, when you really come to the threshold of the spiritual world. The physical body ceases holding you together. One no longer feels within the confines of the skin; one feels split into parts.
He talks about the necessity of cultivating reverence for the spiritual in life. (I know — do you draw any educational conclusions?) He talks about honesty in meditation, but before this explains:
When a person begins to meditate, when he or she is really dedicated to the meditation, he would like to continue in tranquility. He does not want it to deprive him of life’s comforts. Well, this desire not to be deprived of life’s comforts is a strong producer of illusions and semblances. Because when you dedicate yourself completely to meditation, necessarily from the depths of your soul the question arises about your capacity for evil. One cannot do otherwise than to feel through meditation, through that penetration into the depths, everything you are capable of perpetrating. But the urge to deny this is so strong that one submits to the illusion that one is essentially a very good person.
The mantras and stuff you’ll just have to read for yourself. They are, in a very special way, quite enjoyable. (It is in the reading of the mantras that I find the biggest difference, I feel, between the German original and Smith’s English translation. Not in a bad way. Somehow, the English language suits the mantras better. Oddly, very oddly. But so it is.)