research & reviews IN THIS SECTION: Luigi Morelli completes his summary of Steiner’s karma exercises. Stephen Usher greets a last volume from Sergei Prokofieff. Joaquin Muñoz shares the wealth of a training with Indigenous Waldorf teachers. Laurie Clark finds the spiritual depth in place. Sunbridge teaches world language teachers. Wolfgang Schad has carried his classic Goethean work on animals even higher. Seth Jordan revisits the training to tell Europe 1919 about new social laws. Dante and Sophia, the living cosmic wisdom, are reviewed by Terry Hipolito. Michael Ridenour shares, in a poem, an experience of being slowed down for wisdom’s sake.
Piercing Through the Veil of Karma Rudolf Steiner’s Path to the Microcosm, Part 2 by Luigi Morelli In the first part of this article we explored some central ideas derived from Steiner’s archetypal social phenomenon, namely that human beings of the present are only truly social in their sleep, when in their astral bodies they are united with other human beings—but are not conscious of it. And Steiner indicates that “only that which continues to work out of sleeping into waking conditions is active as a social impulse in ordinary waking consciousness...”1 To this end, in order to overcome our natural antisocial tendencies in the encounter with others, we must move away from our spontaneous inclination to form concepts about the being of the other and attempt to develop imaginations. With this aim in mind Steiner designed some basic exercises that allow us to awaken in our souls imaginations of ourselves and of other human beings, effectively rendering us more aware of the workings of karma in our lives. Among the exercises I loosely grouped under the name of “karma exercises,” listed first was the simplest of all, the Rückschau, or the daily backward review. This was followed by the habit of looking back at parts of our lives (phases with clear beginnings and ends) and pass them in review as if we were looking at another person. In order to stop identifying ourselves with our persona, and with the events of our lives, Steiner devised an exercise in which we are asked to look at relatives, friends, and colleagues and detect what we owe to each one of these. Moving one step further we can look at other human beings and create “spiritual paintings” of their being, thereby awakening the habit to portray individuals beyond how we customarily perceive them through sympathy and antipathy alone.
We are the architects of our biographies The Lesser Karma Exercise and the Greater Karma Exercise form two important thresholds in the apprehension of the forces at work in our biography. In our pre-birth life we have consciously and earnestly decided to encounter the challenges that we meet in this present life, for the growth they provide our soul and the souls which are connected to us. This mood inevitably fades, or turns into its opposite, during our lives on earth. It is the purpose of the Lesser Karma Exercise to encourage us to take responsibility for everything that happens in our lives, reminding us that by and large we are the architects of our biographies. This realization can push us a step further, to strive to break through the veil of karma and apprehend the origin of present life challenges in previous lives. We mentioned the Greater Karma Exercise as one way to get in touch with this reality; another exercise with a similar purpose is the socalled Moon-Sun-Saturn Exercise that Steiner gave us in his Karmic Relationships lectures. The exercises above belong to the practice of looking back in time, which in the Foundation Stone 1 Social and Anti-Social Forces in the Human Being (12/12/1918, GA 186).
40 • being human