Do We Know What We Think We Know About ... - TheUFOStore.com

which Steiner had been intuitively
aware ever since he was a child.
Rudolph Steiner books on multidimensional
realities often read like
“How-to” manuals on how to get
from here to there in the spirit
world. To the twenty-first century
reader, these works can seem all too
dry and, even, despite the occult
content, all too rational. Perhaps we
sense in them the emotional
stunting Steiner could never quite
overcome. It’s well to bear in mind,
though, that the author insisted
that his books were not really comprehensible
to the rational mind;
that they worked on us directly from the astral
level; and that, as we read them, our soul would
“know,” and would evolve, to the extent that
our higher faculties spontaneously began to recognize
their shared identity with the astral
realms.
In painting his portraits of the etheric regions,
the knowledge of which he claimed to
derive clairvoyantly from the akashic records,
Steiner embraced the “root race” theories of
Madame Blavatsky. We began in spirit; then,
through a sort of gradual congealing of the
etheric substance over the millennia, we attained
to the state of homo sapiens. Steiner
argued, for his part, that we started off in mineral
form on some “primeval nebula”; then,
gradually, with the help of unnamed “sublime
spiritual beings,” we made our way down
through the planets of the Solar System until
we arrived on Earth in the form of a cloud-like
vapor. Then, over the ensuing eons, we acquired
material aspects. Finally, we became enslaved
by matter.
Eventually we reached the third root-race
state of the Lemurians; then the fourth rootrace
state of the Atlanteans. This was followed
by the fifth root-race state—the human race. In
Cosmic Memory, Steiner assures us that his
powers as a clairvoyant (powers we can awaken
in ourselves by reading his books) are such that
we can take his descriptions of Lemuria and Atlantis
with absolute seriousness; this is how it
really was. Writing with such vividness that he
does seem to be actually there, Steiner explains
that the Lemurians, being much closer to the
primal astral state than we are, didn’t really
have a faculty of memory. They had plenty of
ideas, but these did not endure and so had to
be seized and applied in the moment. These
third-root race folk didn’t have language either:
“What they could utter were natural sounds
which expressed their sensations, pleasure, joy,
pain and so forth, but which did not designate
external objects.”
The minds of the Lemurians were in immediate
telepathic contact with the environment—
animals, stones, plants, other Lemurians—and
could automatically use the energy and information
derived from the surroundings to trans-
See Our Great 8-page Catalog Beginning on Page 74
The First Goetheanum, at Dornach (near Basel), Switzerland, a timber
and concrete structure designed by Rudolf Steiner, one of 17 buildings
Steiner designed and supervised between 1908 and 1925.
form reality with the mind alone. When a Lemurian
“built something, he did not first have
to calculate the load-limit of a tree trunk, the
weight of a stone; he could see how much the
tree trunk could bear, where the stone in view
of its weight would fit, where it would not.
Thus the Lemurian built without engineering
knowledge, on the basis of his faculty of imagination,
with the sureness of a kind of instinct.”
The power of molding reality with the mind
had to be trained. Will was the key ingredient;
the stronger the will, the greater the personal
power. “If later the Atlantean was helped by his
control of the life force, the Lemurian was
helped by his mastery of the will. He was (the
expression should not be misinterpreted) a
born magician in all fields of lower human activity.”
The third root race displayed much gallantry
towards its female half. While the male
Lemurian had to develop will, the female Lemurian
was obliged to develop imagination. If the
male did poorly in his lessons, he was punished
by painful blasts of raw thought; if the female
did poorly she was given only the barest
feather-tap of a reprimand.
Some years ago, maverick American cultural
philosopher/historian William Irwin Thompson
took a new look at Steiner's writings. He writes,
in Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth
and Science (St. Martin's, 1989):
“When I first read Rudolph Steiner’s
Cosmic Memory, I could only take it as a form
of mysticism that had absolutely nothing to do
with science. It was its own world, very much
like science fiction, and, like science fiction, it
could have various poetic truths, but one could
not take its narratives as descriptions of our
conventional world. Actuality, however, was
just what Steiner was claiming for himself in his
project of ‘reading’ the ‘akashic record.’ What,
then, was one to make of descriptions of stages
in human evolution in which the human body
floated in the sea, or was not yet male and female
but produced offspring singly from within
itself, or was cold-blooded . . . . One had to
put Steiner in a separate file along with Cayce,
Tolkien, and Castaneda, or with all the other alternate
cosmologies that my generation of the
1960s liked to collect.”
Thompson came to see Steiner’s
narratives in the context of our contemporary
notion of “Gaia.” The
American philosopher accepts the
idea of a Gaian planetary consciousness;
that our entire planet has been
“consciously alive” since the beginning.
The consciousnesses of all of
us have then somehow been alive
since the beginning, since all of us
make up the consciousness of Gaia,
or Mother Earth. It follows that we
all contain within ourselves, however
obscurely, the remembrance of
past stages of evolution, including
even those of the mesozoic age and even farther
back, to the dawn of consciousness.
Thompson wonders if Steiner’s clairvoyance
did not lie in this sort of remembering. He
speculates that the anthroposophist's Cosmic
Memory narratives are his rememberings of the
evolution, in the oceans, over a period of millions
of years, of prokaryotes (single-celled organisms
without nuclei) into eukaryotes (singlecelled
organisms with nuclei), the latter destined
to one day launch the vitally important process
of photosynthesis. Thompson speculates:
“If [Steiner] talks about the human body
floating in the sea, and after the integration of
the ‘I’ still having a number of parts that were
still on the plant level, he is talking about the
human body as the evolution of the eukaryotic
cell and the vestigial plant parts as the organelles,
such as the mitochondria. If Steiner says,
‘Thus the first likenesses of man were eaters of
animals and of men,’ he is far back in time with
the amoebas and protists, just as when he is
talking about how ‘every human bring could
produce another human being out of himself,’
he is talking about life at the state of the prokaryotic
cell.”
Thompson isn’t dismissing Rudolph
Steiner’s images as “just cells.” He is suggesting
that the prokaryotic cell is aflame with life and
awareness; that that cell and its memories are a
part of all of us and that we are all a part of
that cell; and that Steiner’s particular gift as a
clairvoyant was his ability to translate these vital
primordial impulses of life into contemporary
human images, however strange and garish the
resulting translations might be. (Thompson in
his writings doesn’t focus on the stages of Lemurian
life, but rather invites us to do our own
research.)
Steiner’s writings, then, are far from being
weird, science-fictional fantasies; they may be, if
Thompson is right, some of the deepest probings
into the nature of the human race that we
have. That’s a good reason why an eavesdropping
alien should not be surprised to hear all
the Waldorf and all the Eurthymic schools in
the world sing out in one joyful voice:
“Hallelujah!”
Number 95 • ATLANTIS RISING 67