A Science Within Consciousness

Karmic Relationships and Reincarnation

Next Sunday, I am giving a presentation followed by a discussion on the ideas of Rudolf Steiner, one of my favorite thinkers. Full-priced tickets are $25 but $15 if you buy them by the end of today. Please use the code “EarlyBird” at checkout. Buy tickets here. The event is free for paying subscribers.

What follows is an excerpt from my book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl where I consider Rudolf Steiner within a tradition of maverick scientists seeking to define a post-materialist paradigm:

In The Self-Aware Universe, the physicist Amit Goswami shifted from a materialist orientation to one based upon the essentiality of “mind-stuff.” “I had vainly been seeking a description of consciousness within science; instead, what I and others have to look for is a description of science within consciousness,” he realized. “We must develop a science compatible with consciousness, our primary experience.” In a later work, The Physics of the Soul (2001), he puts forth a scientific hypothesis, based on his understanding of the quantum nature of consciousness, for the mechanisms of reincarnation, and the existence of the “subtle bodies” and chakra system described by many esoteric traditions. 

Goswami’s call for a “science of consciousness” meshes with the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, who also saw mind as the basis of reality, describing the workings of our distinct “subtle bodies” and the chakra system, as well as “super-sensible” entities evolving on other planes. Steiner said that the specific mission of his life on Earth was to bring the knowledge of reincarnation back to the West. In his cosmology, not only do individualities return again and again, but the Earth itself reincarnates. He called this the fourth incarnation of the Earth. I doubt that Steiner knew of the Hopi cosmology when he formulated this, but it correlates with their idea of the Fourth World, on the verge of phase-shifting into the Fifth—similar, also, to the waning Fifth Sun of the Aztecs. 

The 14th Dalai Lama.

In their remote mountain kingdom, Tibetan Buddhists developed, over centuries, a highly evolved spiritual science of reincarnation. They recognize the return of certain individualities, tulkus, who are reinstated in their previous role as lamas, or lineage-holders. The current Dalai Lama, for instance, was identified, as a young child, as the reincarnation of the previous one, through oracles and foretellings. He passed a series of tests in which he was asked to choose from a variety of objects the ones that belonged to his predecessor. Modern Westerners generally consider this a symbolic process, a culture-specific practice rooted in tradition, rather than an empirically verifiable method. Steiner believed that reincarnation has continued over the course of human development, not only in Eastern cultures that believe in the transmigration of souls, but, unbeknownst to us, in the West as well. He wrote a series of books, titled Karmic Relationships, in which he used his supersensible faculties to follow certain individualities— Goethe, Garibaldi, Voltaire, Eliphas Levi—as they evolved over successive incarnations. The supramental intellect, or theme body in Goswami’s model, chooses the hereditary factors and cultural circumstances that will allow it to unfold particular talents and character traits. 

“We return to Earth again and again, whenever the fruit of one physical life has ripened in the land of spirits,” Steiner wrote in An Outline of Esoteric Science. “Yet this repetition does not go on without beginning or end. At one point we left different forms of existence for ones that run their course as described here, and in future we will leave these and move on to others.”

His esoteric philosophy was thoroughly evolutionary. He proposed that everything in the cosmos perpetually transforms—not only human beings and the planets and the higher “spiritual beings” who, he believed, advanced themselves further through sacrifice, but even basic laws of the cosmos are in flux. Of his difficulties in translating scenes from the Akashic Record into language, he wrote: “One must be completely clear about the fact that the evolutionary forms of the distant past as well as of the future are so entirely different from those of today that our present appellations can only serve as makeshifts, and really lose all meaning in relation to these remote epochs.” Time and space, matter and mind, body and soul take on different characteristics in each new phase of our development. 

A number of contemporary scientists are currently exploring the hypothesis that everything, even the seemingly immutable laws governing mineral processes or the cosmological constants underlying space and time, change and evolve. According to the biologist Rupert Sheldrake, “the assumption that the laws of nature are eternal” is a vestige of the Christian belief system that informed the early postulates of modern science in the seventeenth century. “Perhaps the laws of nature have actually evolved along with nature itself, and perhaps they are still evolving? Or perhaps they are not laws at all, or more like habits?” Sheldrake writes in The Presence of the Past (1988), proposing the existence of “morphogenetic fields,” functioning like quantum memory, shaping patterns of formation and development on every level, from atom to crystal to cell to organism to social organization and beyond. 

In The Life of the Cosmos (1997), physicist Lee Smolin suggests “the idea that the laws of nature are immutable and absolute . . . might be as much the result of contingent and historical circumstances as they are reflections of some eternal, transcendent logic.” He offers a hypothesis of “cosmological natural selection” in which black holes open onto new regions of the universe, where the cosmological constants are slightly altered. “In each birth of a new universe the parameters change by a small random step,” Smolin theorizes, analogous to the “small random change” between the genes of a child and its parents. 

Such postulates resemble the macrocosmic mindscape elaborated by Steiner, who saw the universe as a staging ground for infinite transformations and permutations of consciousness, taking multidimensional forms. In his vision of the solar system, “the planets are not hunks of stuff out there but nodes of vibration that resonate in multiple dimensions that enfold themselves into one another in patterns of complex recursiveness in which Sun, Moon, and Saturn are also modalities of Earth,” wrote William Irwin Thompson, who suggested that such a view was not a violation of rationality, but an expansion of our cosmological framing. Like Goswami, Steiner offers a nondualistic vision, perceiving the human being as integrated, embedded, within a universe that is psychophysical in its essence, where there is no “out there” opposed to “in here,” where our thoughts and imaginings are extensions of the natural processes of the world.