Our soul is the receptacle of all our inner life. It reaches the content of all sensory perceptions through the physical body, and in it all mental and mood processes, attitudes and purposes that are externalized through our will are elaborated.
When someone dies, in the first place his material body dies, where the processes of disintegration and decomposition begin depending on the law of entropy that governs all matter, cutting off the relationship that existed between the superior of the human being with his vital part and emotional In a period of days that vital part, which gave life to matter, also disappears. Without that vital force, or etheric body, in Steiner's terminology, the birth, growth and necrotic processes of our physical-material body, or that of any other living being, would not be possible. When our material body disappears with death, and shortly after the etheric, we only have our mental-mental (spiritual) structure.
In the course of our life, from the time we are born until we die, we are acquiring suprasensitive abilities that we introduce into our physical-material body. We soon learn that matter hurts, that it is something consubstantial with it, that it is impenetrable, that our body is incompartible and that it limits us with the outside world.
We know from Steiner that from the fifteenth century begins what he calls " Stage of the Conscious Soul " in the human being, who overlaps with the previous stages of the sensitive soul and the rational soul . In addition to the beginning of what we know as "science", this implies the birth of individuality, which requires an increase in the forces of selfishness so that each man can have an "isolated" consciousness of others, not group as before, and a structuring of his physical body that partly isolates him from reality and constrains him to a world of appearances (or " maya " in Hindu terminology). Thanks to this, the possibility of developing their freedom was opened to the human being, through individual knowledge. We have to consider that, in a global reality, in which all aspects of it could be perceived with equal intensity, sensitive and suprasensitive, freedom would not be possible, since there is no possibility of individual choice. Only such freedom is possible in a material world, in isolation from absolute reality.
Religious faith and faith in materialistic science
The content of the thoughts and moods and emotional states of our life depends, in large part, on the stimuli we constantly receive through our sensory perceptions; What we think and feel has, therefore, a lot to do with the physical body, and therefore based on the material. When the physical body disappears, after death, all sensory entrance doors disappear with it. Although nothing can be perceived with the physical senses, the soul has become accustomed throughout its life to experience sensory, as an unquestionable reality all its thoughts and feelings, and that has to disappear with death, which can Represent an authentic tragedy for all of us. Man today generally boasts, not without a certain dose of reason, of having got rid of the bonds of the churches, their doctrines and dogmas, something unthinkable in the conception of life makes 500 or 600 years, closely linked to religious life. The intellectual level of a normal person at that time was practically nil, knowledge was based on the life of
Since then the consciousness of the human being has evolved from the point of view of intellectual thought, as Steiner points out. From the point of view of sensitivity, what the churches can offer has been neglected, since intelligence is considered an imposition. Religious faith has been replaced by faith in the materialist science prevailing today, fully living all its contents, socially and culturally integrated, without any questioning or possibility of elaboration by the vast majority of men.
Steiner tells us that when a person dies they will extinguish all the rational-intellectual that they may have, all the scholarship acquired throughout their life, keeping in their soul only what is coincident with reality not material, transcendent or spiritual of his new post-mortem life. Unfortunately, more and more people die with a rationalist mood content full of materialism, incompatible with the new world they encounter, and therefore has to be gradually dissolved.
Throughout our lives we all believe in something, accept or deny certain things, and when we die the content of our soul accompanies us in that transit; We take what we have. If the only experiential content of the soul is exclusively linked to the material world we are going to be exposed to very painful deficiency situations, being something that we have to detach ourselves for being incompatible with the spiritual world . That is why the content of the representations that each one has in life, the values in which he believes, the thoughts, feelings and acts he performs are so important, in the sense of whether they can constitute an aid or suppose a burden after death., when we go through a stage of prolonged experience in which the soul and the mind have to separate themselves from what in this life functions as faith in the material .
“I am a spirit that has a body and a soul”
We should ask ourselves: How do I consider the reality of this world constituted? What do I consider is the most important thing in the world for my soul, as an isolated individual, in my inner being? In a sincere work of reflection we can realize the amount of things that we instinctively and structurally have in relation to the world of matter; they are necessary to live in the physical world in which we are embodied, which, as Steiner teaches us, is the only possible one in which the human being can evolve, but we must not forget his unreal and transitory character. The matter that composes our physical body is not essential, although in this evolutionary stage of earthly life it is essential for us to support our spirit; we can say: I have a body, I have a soul, but never "I have a spirit", but " I am a spirit that has a body and a soul ".
From Steiner's teachings, we know that by dying and detaching ourselves from the physical body, the soul becomes very disoriented based on the contents we all have of what reality is, which does not correspond to what reality itself is. When we die we go to the world of authentic reality, which corrects our mistakes of what we considered was the real thing and in what we had an unwavering faith, a long period of time known in the East as "kamaloka", or place of desire . All the desires we have in life are always desires of the soul, they are produced in our mood structure, although their enjoyment is realized through the physical body as an instrument. When the soul is left alone, without a physical body, it has no instrument to satisfy and continue generating those mood desires, since it lacks sensory organs, which therefore must dissolve . We are used to a world of material substances, of forms of high and fascinating sensuality that catches us, and we are going to a world of qualities that we are not accustomed to and that we normally despise.
When the physical body ceases to exist, the psychic-spiritual part is released, suprasensible, which, depending on how it has developed in life, what kind of thoughts and sensitivity the person has had, the degree to which it has been flooded of goods, appetites and materialistic attitudes, so it will continue to develop after his death. Reality will show us that matter, in itself, is an instrument, never the essence of any process.
After going through this phase of purification and retrospective review of our past incarnation, in which we free ourselves from all desires, passions and ties that bind our soul to material contents, whose duration is approximately the same as the time we spent sleeping (1/3 of life), Steiner tells us that the spirit-spiritual part of the developed soul that is useful for its penetration into the spiritual world remains, which is the world of reality, of truth, of archetypes of Essences of the origins . To that world we can only take that which is transcendent, which in itself is of an eternal character, not the temporal apparent; our embodied body and soul are temporary, our essence is not. Normally, the experience in practical life demands our full attention, it squeezes us with the strength of our senses and desires, but we must not forget the knowledge that there is something transcendent. That is why everyone needs, like the body's nutrition to stay alive, a certain and essential spirit-spiritual nutrition, which we can all develop and strengthen.
In the spiritual world, Steiner tells us, we are going to see what is the real essence of all things, what was behind the appearance of what we really had in the last incarnation. The eternal part, the essential part of all of us, has often assumed temporary masculine / feminine forms in the different incarnations we have gone through, in an evolutionary process of errors and successes that has led us to the personal situation that each one has .
The individual spiritual project in the incarnation
As human beings we have a trajectory or objective to fulfill in the still distant future; After each process of incarnation we go through the spiritual world, where there is a judgment in which we ourselves are the only ones who can draw the consequences derived from our previous immediate life, adding them to that of previous lives, essentially valuing what the latter has produced in the general set of all the previous ones, in relation to the spiritual project that each one has and with that of humanity as a whole, that is, valuing how our life has influenced humanity in general. Then we can be absolutely objective by not being constrained to our individuality, but by feeling as part of a universal human whole ; It is something that can only be done in the spiritual world, when we free ourselves from any possibility of self-deception. We see there how our life has influenced, for better or worse, our own evolution and that of all others who have had a relationship with us. Steiner also tells us that then the spiritual self of each one has the yearning purpose of elaborating as perfectly as possible a new incarnation, in order to qualitatively develop in the world of matter all the actions that allow him to rectify and correct the obstacles that had been put in the previous life and the future of other beings, regardless of the difficulties that may arise, which must be overcome as painful and problematic as they may be in the new incarnation.
We see then that, in the spiritual world, everything that has been related to the archetypes of Good will be valued in our lives ,
Truth and Beauty (in the sense of harmony of the whole set). What does not agree with this will strongly encourage us to be corrected; Those are the purposes to elaborate the instruments that will help to fulfill them: an anemic structure, a vital one and a material genetic line to insert into.In the prenatal phase immediately at birth, Steiner states that mood reactions of fear of the development of new life may arise, which may lead to deficiencies and pathologies in the incarnation. We have already seen that the human being cannot evolve spiritually in any place other than in the physical physical world; He can only do so by developing his freedom in a situation of isolated individual conscience.
The mood-bodily structure, matter and the universal human self
As humans, we are beings with a very complex structure in which each part must be the best coordinated with the physical-material, in which the protagonist is the brain and central nervous system, which, as a mirror, collects no yes. Only the sensory stimuli, but also the suprasensitive or spiritual ones. We know that thoughts are universal, thanks to which we can understand each other using concepts that we can all share. Feelings, on the other hand, are absolutely individual and personal. There must be a high degree of coordination between our constituent bodies: physical-material, ethereal or vital and astral or emotional body . The lack of coordination between them can produce deficient incarnations, manifested in dysfunctions due to the poor insertion of human structures.
The higher self is the essential part of each one of us, it is the moral entity related to the archetypes of Good,
Truth and Beauty, is the youngest entity we have, the least evolved. It is a force that has to manage to direct all our spirit-spiritual life . Today we are still developing creatures with very little moral conscience, in a world that fosters and develops personality (the ego), which is something that relates to the physical body and disappears with death. Our spiritual being is not temporary, its essence is eternal .
If our evolution were correct, if our structures were all tuned and harmonized with the suprasensible world we would not need to go through the death process. If this is not the case, disintegration and decomposition occur. The qualities we have developed in life will become skills that we will have in the next; defects and disharmonies will become forces that will be part of our vital and emotional bodies, conditioning the structuring of all of them.
Never before, in the entire existence of the human being, has there been a time like the current one, characterized by the predominance of materialism and ignorance of spiritual values, especially since the second decade of the twentieth century. The materialist tendency is something extended culturally and globally, the only academically accepted ideology, and which expands by human souls. This culture is transmitted through thinking, the part of the highest reality of consciousness, in a process of knowledge with devastating effects on the human soul, by not receiving adequate nutrition. Immorality has never ruled the destiny of this planet as it has been since the early twentieth century and there has never been so much information available and of such little use for its vastness, in the most arid time of spiritual wisdom. Our spiritual structure is correct, but as Steiner says, in our evolutionary process we must necessarily go through the different levels of descent in the material, and that is disturbing.
However, we have already acquired the ability to develop knowledge to be able to ascend, each being their own guide; we have the qualities and the will necessary to achieve it, instead of allowing ourselves to be guided by faith in teachers, dogmas or doctrines, appropriate in times past. This requires a degree of freedom, and therefore an increase in responsibility, something that continues to produce and generate fear. We can do an extraordinary spiritual work, which we had never had before. We can be an instrument of transformation of the material by contributing to the spiritual world something that it lacks (the correct relationship between matter and spirit) if we are able to be an instrument of transformation of the material to contribute it to the spiritual world.
In an honest personal elaboration work (let's not forget that the capacity for self-deception is very great) we can see how our spiritual evolution is and how we receive what the world is offering us, mainly through the media, in relation to the archetypes of good,
The spiritual evolution that the human being can carry out in his current stage is within the world of matter, living and working with others, starting with the improvement of his mood of feelings and desires, which is practically the one that directs all Life on earth. The development of the spiritual I will be beneficial if it helps other "I", because it is essential to realize that the universal human I is nothing but the "I" of the Christ.
Our destiny is increasingly in our hand, and that of all humanity in solidarity; We begin to be creative creatures in our thoughts, feelings and actions, which can be for the good or for the evil of evolution, something we can freely choose if in addition to material knowledge we have a spiritual understanding. In the plans of the creative divinity is, as Steiner teaches, that we transform ourselves from creatures into gods, which implies taking responsibility as co-creators.
Santos Guerra
-> seen in revistabiosofia.com
