by Colin Wilson
But there was another problem, which Steiner could not possibly have foreseen. In the nineteenth century, it was possible to be a celebrity and still have a reasonable degree of privacy. And this was not simply because, in the days before newspaper photographs, celebrities were not so easily recognized. Charles Dickens was involved in a train crash. He went to the guard and said: ‘Do you know who I am?’ ‘Yes, sir’, said the man, ‘Mr Dickens.’ ‘Good,’ said Dickens, ‘then do as I tell you,’ and proceeded to take charge of the rescue operation. But if the same guard had seen Dickens in the street or eating in a restaurant, he would certainly not have rushed up to him for his autograph. The change that came about in the twentieth century was largely due to new means of communication: radio, cinema, mass circulation newspapers. These have had the effect of widening the psychological gap between the ‘famous man’ and the man in the street. If everybody in the civilized world knows the name of Charlie Chaplin or Greta Garbo, then it is natural for most people to exaggerate their importance, to imagine them surrounded by some kind of magical aura. So the knowledge that one of these god-like figures is staying in a certain hotel is enough to cause crowds of people to stand around, hoping to catch a glimpse of the prodigy. Steiner grew to manhood in the age of Dickens, but he became a celebrity in the age of Charlie Chaplin. His biographer, Guenther Wachsmuth, mentions that, in the early days, Steiner tried to give personal help and advice to as many of his followers as possible, but that this became impossible as his following swelled. Another biographer, Albert Steffen, speaks of the queues of people waiting outside Steiner's door from morning till night, waiting to pour out their problems and ask his advice.
Steiner also suffered from another consequence of the ‘celebrity mechanism’: malice. When a man is regarded with admiration (or, worse still, reverence) by a large number of people, he is bound to arouse a hostility in those who feel, quite unconsciously, that they too deserve to be admired and revered. Steffen comments on the complete lack of malicious gossip among Steiner's own disciples in those early years; they felt so exalted by Steiner's teaching that malice would have been unthinkable. But this in itself would be enough to make outsiders feel that this was a rather disgusting clique, a mutual admiration society that badly needed the corrective of a little plain speaking. When Steiner decided to deliver his message to the world in the form of lectures and articles, he felt that it was his task to explain what he had learned from twenty years of study and meditation. He probably expected bafflement or lack of interest; he can hardly have anticipated the tempest of hostility that led to the burning down of the Goetheanum and attempts to beat him up in a hotel. Although Steffen says that Steiner was sustained by enormous spiritual strength, there is still a strong case to be made for the argument that he died of discouragement.
Since Steiner's death, his ideas have lived on in schools devoted to his educational theories, in farms based on his agricultural ideas, even in hospitals and clinics founded on his beliefs about the relation of the body and spirit. Yet the work that Steiner himself would have regarded as most important—what might be called his ‘philosophy of spiritual activity’—has never succeeded in percolating through to the educated public. You would expect a man of fairly wide culture to know something about Jung, something about the Maharishi, something about Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan, perhaps even something about Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. But even among intellectuals, very few would have the vaguest idea about Rudolf Steiner's philosophy.
So before embarking on a systematic exposition of his life and works, let me attempt to sketch his fundamental idea. Once this has been grasped, everything else follows. Without this key, his work is bound to appear a disconnected chaos of theories and speculations.
Steiner's starting point is the belief that ‘behind’ this material world, revealed by our senses, there is a supersensible or spiritual world. This sounds, of course, like the central belief of most of the great world religions, but in Steiner's case there is an important corollary. He was also convinced that, by a simple training, anybody can develop the faculty of seeing this other realm of being. He himself claimed to have achieved this ability, and he did his best to show his followers how to achieve it.
It is important not to confuse Steiner's ‘supersensory perception’ with clairvoyance or mediumship. Unlike Madame Blavatsky, who started her career as a spirit medium, Steiner was deeply suspicious of spiritualism. It was not that he disputed the basic facts: that there is life after death and that man can communicate with ‘spirits’. But he felt that the spiritualists were wasting their time by concentrating on these phenomena. Suppose you could pick up some kind of psychic telephone and dial Albert Einstein in heaven (or wherever he is). Would it teach you about the theory of relativity, or help you to grasp his conception of space-time? Obviously not. If you want to know about these things, then you have to put a great deal of mental energy into learning about them. And when you have done that, you will, in a sense, ‘know’ Einstein a great deal better than if you had been allowed to speak to him. And communicating with spirits, either through a ouija board or in the seance room, will not give you the slightest conception about the realms of meaning that are hidden behind the face of material reality. This demands the development of a peculiar kind of vision, an ‘inward vision’. And, according to Steiner, this inward vision is achieved in three distinct stages. The first he labels ‘thought’ (or imagination), the second ‘inspiration’, and the third ‘intuition’.
This sounds harmless—and insipid—enough. But there is nothing insipid or vague about Steiner's exposition of the three stages. It is precise, detailed, and pragmatic. He never speaks with the accents of a would-be prophet trying to pull the wool over your eyes. He is more like a teacher of mathematics, doing his best to make his students follow his reasoning.
The first and most important stage of insight is thought. It is the most important because it is the bridge between our ordinary, muddled state of everyday consciousness and the states of ‘higher knowledge’. I shall devote the remainder of this chapter to attempting to show exactly what Steiner means by this first stage. Once this has been grasped, the reader has passed through the doorway into the world of Steiner's own vision of human evolution.
We may start from the simple observation that human consciousness spends most of its time trapped in the physical world. According to Sartre, this is the basic truth of human existence; man is stuck in physical existence like a fly on fly paper. It is worth mentioning Sartre at this point, for his thought is in every way diametrically opposed to Steiner, and can be used as a kind of philosophical ‘ground bass’ against which Steiner's ideas can be measured. According to Sartre, human life is meaningless and therefore tragic. When a man feels tired—or utterly bored with some repetitive routine—he may suddenly become fully aware of this meaninglessness. He experiences the feeling ‘What am I doing here?’ The world suddenly looks frightening and alien. Sartre calls this sudden recognition of meaninglessness ‘nausea’ or ‘the absurd’. (Camus borrowed the term from him.) According to Sartre, ‘nausea’ reveals the basic truth about human existence: that ‘it is meaningless that we live and meaningless that we die’. ‘Man’, says Sartre, is a ‘useless passion.’ We try hard to disguise this from ourselves by living in the present moment, or allowing ourselves to be carried away by emotions, or simply by telling ourselves lies about the meaning of the universe. Sartre would undoubtedly dismiss Steiner's whole philosophy as a tissue of falsehood and self-deception, ‘mauvais-foi’.
But Sartre never seemed to have noticed one interesting fact about human consciousness. In order to perceive something, I have to retreat inside myself. An obvious example would be listening to music: many people close their eyes and retreat into some ‘mind space’ behind the eyes in order to enjoy it. In the same way, if I am deeply enjoying a book, I am no longer sitting in an armchair in front of the fire: I have floated off somewhere else.
Now it may seem that t
his only applies to ‘artistic’ experience. Surely it is no longer true when I am catching a bus, or eating a sandwich, or waiting for the traffic light to turn green? But a moment's thought reveals this is not so. I enjoy my sandwich most when I am relaxed—'inside myself’. That is why a typist chooses to eat her lunch on a quiet park bench and not in the middle of Piccadilly Circus. When you are tense and irritable, your consciousness has come up to the surface, so to speak, and you see the world as a bewildering mess. If you try to read a newspaper article in this state, you do not ‘take it in’; you may have to re-read the same paragraph several times. If you go to an art gallery in this state, you do not really see the pictures. You stare at them, but somehow you fail to ‘take them in’. And that phrase ‘take them in’ reveals what we do when we really ‘see’ something. We take it inside ourselves, like a tiger seizing its prey and dragging it deep into its lair.
The explanation for this is quite simple. Our brains contain a giant library of memories—everything that has happened to us during the course of our lives, and even (if Jung is correct) remote racial memories bequeathed to us by our ancestors. If all these memories were set out on shelves, as in a real library, the building would have to be as big as the earth.
Scientists did not become aware of the vast extent of this brain-library until after 1933, when a neurosurgeon named Wilder Penfield made an interesting discovery. He was performing a brain operation on a patient who was wide awake (since the brain has no nerves, it does not feel pain). He happened to touch the temporal cortex—the seat of memory—with a probe that carried a weak electric current. As long as the probe was in contact, the patient experienced a memory of childhood—a memory so precise and detailed that it was like re-living it. Penfield had accidentally caused some of the ‘memory tapes’ to play back. Each contact of the probe brought back one single memory in minute detail.
Now consider a man's experience of his wife. When she comes into the room, he feels he ‘knows’ her fairly well. Yet if some friend were to ask him to recount in detail the story of their courtship, he would begin to remember all kinds of things he had half-forgotten. And if his wife walked into the room again, he would see her with ‘different eyes’. For by reviving these memories he has, in effect, added a dimension of reality to her. We are all familiar with this experience of talking about someone who is not present, and feeling that we have somehow come to know them better.
What Sartre calls ‘nausea’ is merely surface perception. And it tells very little about the world around us. In order to really perceive the world, I must retreat ‘inside myself’. In fact, if I can sink into one of those states of inner peace and relaxed meditation that sometimes happen when ‘the pressure is off’, I may feel that I am really seeing things for the first time. Everything seems to become more rich and complex and interesting. The difference between this perception and my everyday perception is like the difference between a Dutch interior by Van Eyck and a Walt Disney cartoon of Donald Duck. I can only achieve this richer, deeper perception by sinking inside myself.
Now clearly, all animals have this capacity to retreat ‘inside themselves’ to some extent. But it seems a reasonable assumption that in the case, say, of cows or dogs there is not much to retreat into. And there are many human beings who are not much better off—Sartre says of the café proprietor in Nausea, ‘When his café empties his head empties too’; and of his own father: ‘When he looked inside himself he found a desert.’ We know that this is not strictly true; no one contains a desert, for we all have an immense library in our heads. But the books are usually inaccessible to us.
The fact remains that human beings differ from all other animals because the world inside them is so much better furnished that that of dogs and cats. Gazing out of the window of a train, I may reflect about my childhood, or about my recent holidays, or a thousand other things, including Sartre and Rudolf Steiner. Of course, much of this thought is mere free association, like drifting in a boat along a slow stream, staring up at the leaves. But the boat also has an engine, and when necessary, I can think to some purpose. I can use my mind to solve problems that would be quite insoluble to an animal.
This is a fairly recent development in man's evolution. Our ancestors who built the first cities around 6000 BC were deeply religious—for some odd reason, man has always been a religious animal—but they did very little thinking as such. They solved problems by common sense and rule of thumb. The first evidence that man was using his mind to try to understand the universe is the Great Pyramid, built around 2600 BC, for there is strong reason to believe that it was a gigantic astronomical observatory whose purpose was to help the priests catalogue the stars. Stonehenge, built at about the same time, whatever other functions it performed, also seems to have been designed as an astronomical computer or calculator.
But it is not until about two thousand years later, in the golden age of Greece, that we begin to encounter real thinking in the modern sense of the word. And, like all great revolutions, it occurred virtually overnight. We only have to read the platonic dialogues to see that Socrates and Plato enjoyed thinking as much as a football fan enjoys the cup final. They did it for pleasure. In the Symposium one of the guests at a banquet describes how Socrates once stood in the same place for twenty-four hours thinking about a problem. No doubt this is untrue, but it expresses something essential about the Socratic spirit. It implies that Socrates could forget the external world and take a twenty-four hour voyage inside himself. A century later, Euclid spent a lifetime committing all the basic theories of geometry to paper, an activity that would have struck one of the early city builders as unbelievably boring. Yet for Euclid, geometry was plainly as important as meat and drink.
This faculty of thought is so new—for in the evolutionary sense, two or three thousand years is a mere blink of an eyelid—that we have not started to grasp its significance. We all spend years at school learning to read and write; but just under the surface, the primitive cave man wonders what on earth is going on. The cave man is naturally passive. He feels himself to be a mere product of nature. When he is hungry, he looks for food; when it rains, he looks for shelter. He merely reacts to problems. But the development of thought has started to turn him into a different kind of creature. Thought is not afraid to try and control nature. And whenever he solves an important problem, man experiences a curious flash of exultation, a momentary feeling that he is far more powerful than he realized. Ancient man believed in gods; after the coming of thought, man began to realize that he himself contains fragments of godhood.
These glimpses are usually brief, for the complexity of modern life keeps most of us trapped in ‘surface perception’. We tend to feel that we are ‘creatures of circumstance’, victims of fate. Sartre calls this ‘contingency’, the feeling that we are somehow unnecessary and superfluous. And this is due, to a large extent, to our feeling that we possess very little control over ourselves. When we get hungry, we feel miserable; when we are tired, we get bad-tempered; when we get tense, we bite our nails. And in moods of deep pessimism, we may feel that life is a long-drawn-out battle with inevitable defeat at the end of it.
Yet even in this state, the power of thought can catapult us back into optimism. We can study the process, for example, in Wordsworth's ‘Intimations of Immortality’ ode. He begins in a thoroughly pessimistic mood, describing how, as a child, the world seemed to be ‘apparelled in celestial light’, and how this has all changed: ‘The things which I have seen I now can see no more.’ ‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy’, but the ‘Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing boy…’. Yet he goes on to admit that while, on this beautiful sunny day, ‘to me alone there came a thought of grief’, a ‘timely utterance’ has given that thought relief, ‘And I again am strong.’ By thinking deeply about his reasons for gloom, he has thought himself back into a feeling of strength and inner certainty. Steiner would say that he has entered the world of thought and achieved a deeper sense
of reality. Wordsworth himself expresses the same insight when (addressing his friend Coleridge) he writes:
Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy soul's immensity…
All this begins to explain why Steiner says that entry into the ‘world of thought’ is the first major step on the ‘inward journey’ that can lead to ‘knowledge of higher worlds’. He argues that although modern man feels he knows all about thinking, he has not even begun to grasp the true nature of that revolution that occurred in the time of Plato. He still feels ‘contingent’. His view of himself is still basically negative. This is because he fails to recognize that his inner world is a realm in itself, an interior universe in the most literal sense. He spends too much time in ‘surface perception’, and feels that the mind is merely a kind of mechanism for helping him to stay alive, as a vacuum cleaner helps a housewife to keep the place tidy. He fails to grasp what Sir Edward Dyer meant when he said ‘My mind to me a kingdom is.’ This power to take voyages inside himself is new and strange. Where inward journeys are concerned, modern man has only just passed his driving test, and is still too nervous to venture much beyond the end of the street. He actually possesses a completely new power, a new dimension of mobility. Steiner saw it as one of his main tasks to bring this recognition into the clear daylight of consciousness. It explains why his followers were so cheerful and optimistic. They felt that he had given them a piece of extraordinary ‘good news’; yet it was a piece of intellectual good news, not something that demanded faith or religious assent.
There is yet another reason for evolutionary optimism. In the past ten thousand years or so, man's survival has been mainly due to his capacity for concentrating on particulars. He has developed a sort of mental microscope to enable him to deal with the endless problems and complexities of existence. It has now become second nature, and he peers through it all the time. But the problem is that it limits his field of vision; it traps him in narrow horizons of the present. The chief disadvantage of this microscope is that it causes him to exaggerate all his problems—to make mountains out of molehills. This means that his general view of human existence is far gloomier than it need be. He is always getting himself into ‘states’ of anxiety about problems that he can overcome perfectly easily.
