Love, contradictions and questions
A Maori myth narrates that in the beginning, heaven and earth, the couple Rangi and Papa, were so closely entwined in love that their children stayed in the dark. One of them wondered what it would be like to live in the light. After numerous attempts, the son Tane managed to push the parents apart.[1] This is how time and space for our lives came into being.
The next part of the story plays out exactly as it did for Jakob Boehme:
“The forms of nature are innumerable and each one creates a will according to its property. In this way contrast and conflict arise in the existence of all living beings. They wage war against each other, hold each other in captivity and kill each other. ” [2]
Indeed, in my life, heaven and earth are distant from each other. The clear and bright blue ideals of my heaven are not reflected on my desk or in my garden. In one place a certain computer company rules and in the other the snails. In order to get closer to my sky, I climb mountains of challenges. With each step I let go of gravity, inertia and attachments. My dexterity, endurance and self-control increase and so it happens that I reach a mountain top where I feel the powers of heaven and earth equally flowing through me. And whom do I meet up there ? It is D. (I don’t want to demonize him, although or because I know him from the past) approaching me at a brisk pace and beaming with joy. “Isn’t it wonderful?” he enthuses. When I was wandering in the grey desert of my life, D. had often appeared promising me heaven and earth. Look here and look there, how wonderful. Many times I have listened to him and then lost myself like Little Red Riding Hood in a meadow of flowers. What will he say to me today? “Enjoy your success, rest. Heaven is yours, the earth is yours. You are free. Nothing can happen to you.” Yes, I am convinced that nothing will happen to me since the universe works perfectly, already for a long time. Given the greatness of heaven and the world, my question seems so insignificant: “What am I doing with this moment of my life?”
Origins and Prospects
From Rudolf Steiner[3] we can read that in pre-Atlantean times the sun, the moon and the earth were one. (Rudolf Steiner calls that constellation “earth”). He relates that in that time many powerful, radiant beings inhabited the earth: Angels, Archangels, Primordial Forces, and Higher Hierarchies.[4] That Earth radiated with love, consciousness, energy, and creative power, though our human vocabulary describes it only in stammering words. Human beings existed as dormant gems. We were then, regarding our consciousness, something like stones or plant seeds. When the sun and later the moon left the earth, humans began to wake up. They perceived the spiritual creative forces from outside and experienced a duality of I and you, inside and outside, heaven and earth. In the course of long cycles of development, man evolved, became plant-like, animal-like, and that was it. We will be human beings when we have discovered the solar potential within ourselves and will inhabit this earth creatively, lovingly and radiantly.
In Max Heindel [5] we can read that during the next three and a half earth cycles we will be especially supported and instructed by Mercury forces. These help us to free our higher consciousnesses “from the prison of the body, so that the body will be a free dwelling house instead of a prison”. At the moment, our mind mostly moves only within the framework of unconscious promptings, instincts, blood drives and emotions. Our thinking activities hardly rise above this “astral” sphere. So it may still take time until we, or some among us, master the ability of thinking in reality, which means outside projections, outside the reflection-sphere.[6] From this point of view, there is no point in getting upset about the current social, economic, and political conditions. Is it not comforting to know that the universe reckons with our inadequacies?
Temptation
At this point, I tend to sit back and relax, and then soon, in a back and forth of calm and adventure, I think of Ardjuna, who is encouraged by the divine Krishna to face the contradictions of his life (Bhagavad Gita). I move to my garden. There I work out my athletic and strategic skills: against the weeds, against the snails, with appreciation, of course, because everything has its purpose.
So I had dealt with my consumerism in the desert of my life, on the mountain with my imperiousness and now in the garden I train mindfulness, creativity, patience and of course the art of fighting, not only against the snails, because I know that deep under the earth, where the greatest treasures lie, also a dragon resides. The snails might just prevent me from going into the depths of my earth clod. But I will come back to that. While I’m busy with innocuous gardening, I’m thinking about D. again. He has three specialties, and he always sells his “products” in different ways. Did I understand the third one? “Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, on top of the Temple, and said, “If you are the Son of God, jump off!” (Luke 4;9.) Hollywood comes to mind, Los Angeles, City of Angels, the top of a temple, holy wood. It is all just appearances, all cinema. What we are and perceive is as unreal as a cinema film, our matter is not absolute reality. And then the temptation: Why should I concern myself with such appearances? Which then leads to the conclusion, that my own inner world is enough for me. My own spiritual, peaceful, ideal world is enough for me, because in this world of mine everything is possible for me. I am content with an illusory spirituality, while the dragon sits on the true treasures of the holy earth. Why should I bother him, as we do not have the same interests, because I am not interested in “matter”?
Adventure
But Little Red Riding Hood should not stay at home. “One day his mother said to him: “Come, Little Red Riding Hood, here you have a piece of cake and a bottle of wine, take this out to the grandmother; she is sick…” [7] Mother Earth offers bread and wine to the human child. Spirit-soul power, head and heart, bright red with love is to free the grandmother, the divine mother, wisdom in me, through illusion and danger (flowers, forest and wolf), by devotion and focused action (of the hunter). Bilbo [8] the hero also sets out on a journey and only when he voluntarily arrives in the dragon’s cave does the dragon wake up and threaten him. It is only in the combat that Bilbo discovers his potential.
How do we manage not to drown our spiritual potential in a bourgeois coziness or habitually lovely spirituality, which is basically nothing more than Little Red Riding Hood’s search for more flowers? Can we, like Bilbo, listen to the Merlin, the spiritual impulse in our hearts, and accept the mission?
Three gifts
Faith, hope, love are our abilities to do so. Equilateral triangle, fiery triangle of a practiced spirituality, in which heaven and earth can embrace again. Faith is our energy and substance, which perceives the spiritual solar forces, even if unconsciously, and connects us with them. Faith is the unimaginable spark, the first blink of an eye at the awakening of heaven within us. Hope then draws the spiritual primordial forces into time and space, into our earthly lives, and allows them to fall deep into our hearts. Hope is a yearning and a transforming of our imprints by allowing truth and reality to develop. Love is the dragon power with six wings that no longer destroys but inhabits heaven and earth. Faith, hope and love appear in perfect surrender and creative activity, each as yin and yang, and thus as the six wings of the liberated human being.
Three Steps
As we draw the three gifts more deeply into our everyday life of time and space, they appear as three steps in a process of integration in which we continually reconnect, integrating our heaven and earth. At the first step, we experience inspiration. Something awakens us, heaven touches us, raising our soul out of its earthly clod. Such an experience can nourish the soul for a lifetime, although there is the danger of being satisfied with being touched for a long time, even for a lifetime. Our soul then rises, as it were, in inspirations on Sunday and lives an ordinary everyday life during the week. Heaven and earth remain separated. Then the power of inspiration is drained in theories, in talking and reading about, in memories, in Youtube videos, (“listen, he says that too”) or in sporadic spiritual group experiences, sciences, so-called spiritual sciences, concepts, our inner cinema. We stand in such blockages quite particularly today, individually, collectively, scientifically, politically, socially, spiritually. But at the same time, these blockages reveal the inadequacy of the theoretical dimension.
And the universe understands us: we are only beginning to develop the Mercury Uranus forces – consciousness and love – within us. For this purpose we enter the second step: actualization. The human child, Little Red Riding Hood, takes up the spiritual impulse of inspiration in order to actualize her life. She enters the dark forest of her own entanglements of good and evil. She willingly does all the good and still ends up in the wolf’s belly. This second step means realizing inspiration and growing beyond good and evil, karma, concepts and conditioning through action and failure, all the way to Grandmother Wisdom. For this we need time, maybe months, decades, lifetimes. We till and sow and the snails eat all the lettuce. Until we recognize the wolf, the dragon within us and integrate the dragon power.
The third stage brings redemption and realization through love. The spiritual impulse of inspiration manifests through us. The creative spirit-soul forces, our heaven, bless our everyday life, our earth, and make our life fertile. This shows itself concretely in an attitude towards life and in gifts of insight, empathy, patience, energy, creativity, wisdom, love and new inspiration. The first Adam (human being) became a living soul, and the last Adam became the spirit that gives life.[9]
The call
This is the earth’s call to us: we human children are to become, together with her, through further cycles of development, a sun [10] that shines nourishingly and lovingly.
The signs of the times and Little Red Riding Hood invite us to pay special attention to the feminine in and around us.
Mother Earth nourishes us, even when we hurt her. As “child humans” we cannot avoid mistakes. Let us walk through the dark forest, listen to the wolf, pick the flowers, give them to the wolf. It will turn out that everything was not so serious. It was just a confusion of feelings in our heart, an enemy image in our subconscious. If the hunter acts with mindfulness and initiative in time and space, if we dare to use our willpower and creative power like Ardjuna, we will transform our lives. The “grandmother”, our wisdom, our spirit will be free for the forces of Mercury and Uranus, the love of heaven.
The feminine will triumph, for victory ultimately comes not through struggle but through grace. In relation to the Divine, we can only be yin, feminine, receiving. Today, when concepts, religions, theories and our own cognition are unmasked as inadequate, our heart can become pure like the heart of a child. Our intelligence can become feminine, that is, receptive to The Reality, The True Life, The Wisdom. Our actions can become feminine, a surrender to the forces of heaven and earth. Then life becomes a celebration in the garden of the Great Mother.
[1] Rangi and Papa, Wikipedia
[2] Jakob Böhme; De signatura rerum, chap. II
[3] Rudolf Steiner, Ägyptische Mythen und Mysterien (Egyptian Myths and Mysteries), 12 lectures, Leipzig, September 1908
[4] https://anthrowiki.at/Hierarchien
[5] Max Heindel, Die Weltanschauung der Rosenkreuzer (The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception), II. Teil Kap. XII, Die Evolution der Erde, Abschn. Der Einfluss des Merkur
[6] The other side of the world, not perceptible to our ordinary senses. The beyond, heaven, hell, purgatory. The divine, the kingdom of Christ not of this world, lies above the polar spheres of this visible world and the beyond.
[7] https://www.grimmstories.com/de/grimm_maerchen/rotkaeppchen
[8] J.R.R. Tolkien, The little Hobbit
[9] Cor. 15;45
[10] Rudolf Steiner, op.cit.
