Does the Earth Reincarnate?
Rudolf Steiner believed this is the fourth incarnation of the Earth. What happens when we enter the Fifth incarnation?
Have you ever asked yourself the strange question: Where is the past?
Does the past continue to exist in one defined way? Or is the past, in some sense, an ongoing creative and interpretative act? Do we continuously reinvent the past?
We now know that the universe is not locally real. Instead, it is a bit like (an imperfect metaphor) a computer game that only renders that part of it we – the participant/observer – are immediately engaged with, while the rest of it is quantum fluctuation and shimmering wave-forms. How does this new scientific “revelation” influence how we conceive of past and future – or of the nature of reality itself?
Physicists have proposed that everything we call “time” already exists, from a higher-dimensional perspective. It exists as a “block.” The four-dimensional space-time continuum is like a fish tank which we could look into or walk around, if we were outside of this space-time. From that “higher” dimension, we could change different elements as we might put pebbles or a fake shipwreck in our fish tank. The fish would then swim around these obstacles or through them. As much as we changed the elements within the fish tank, or even changed the fish themselves, the tank would still remain unchanged.
But obviously any form of higher dimensional consciousness existing outside of time would be so different from the kind of sentient beings (us) we encounter within the four dimensional space-time continuum. What would be the limits on their knowledge? They wouldn’t possess a physical brain as we do. What would define its boundaries then? Without a physical brain, how do they think, cogitate, reflect?
Our fourth dimensional space-time continuum could be like an artistic medium for higher-dimensional creative minds who work out their destiny through us, just as a human artist works out his or her destiny through their chosen medium. That is how it feels to me, intuitively.
Much of Rudolf Steiner’s writing is incomprehensible from a literal-minded, rational / dualist perspective. You have to reach a different perspective from which you can understand and appreciate it while holding a scientific framework at the same time, as a kind of parallel track. It requires an intentional “suspension of disbelief” while not giving up your critical faculties.
In An Outline of Esoteric Science, Steiner writes:
In response to the opinion that there are limits to human cognition1 which we cannot overstep and which force us to come to a halt in front of any invisible world that may be there, it must be said that there can be no doubt in anyone’s mind that it is not possible to push one’s way into an invisible world with that particular kind of cognition. For anyone who believes that form of cognition to be the one and only form, it is impossible to arrive at any other view of the matter than that human beings are denied access to any higher world that may exist. But it can also be said that if it is possible to develop another form of cognition, this could lead into the supersensible world. If we consider this form of cognition impossible, we reach a viewpoint that makes any talk of a supersensible world seem like pure nonsense. To an impartial judge, however, the only possible reason for this viewpoint is that its champions are unfamiliar with any other form of cognition. Yet how can people pass judgment on something while insisting that they know nothing about it?
As I mentioned previously, Steiner stated that the principle purpose for his life on Earth was to bring the knowledge of reincarnation back to the West – not only do human beings incarnate again and again, but the Earth itself reincarnates. According to Steiner, this is currently the fourth incarnation of the Earth. There will be three more to follow.
For Steiner, past and future incarnational cycles of the Earth are inextricably linked with humanity’s evolution. We are not an accidental, transitory, or contingent species. We have a destiny and a purpose: We “transform the Earth,” lifetime after lifetime. For Steiner, we also work on the Earth between lifetimes, preparing it for our next incarnation.
For Steiner, humans as currently constituted possess four “bodies:” The physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the “I” or Ego. These bodies developed in previous Earthly incarnations. The physical body developed on what he confusingly calls the Saturn stage. Then the etheric body developed during the next, the Sun incarnation. Then the astral body developed during the Moon stage. Now, in this fourth, Earth, stage, we have been developing the “I” or Ego, which is still quite weak and fragile.
In An Outline of Esoteric Science, based on his own reading of the “Akashic Record,” he chronicles our existence in these previous and future incarnations or states of being. This long section is quite abstract and difficult to understand. He seems to be describing something like an imaginal, alchemical process taking place in another dimension of consciousness. The development of humanity and the Earth in previous incarnations was like a slow process of condensation from a psycho-spiritual immateriality, a state of inchoate potential, into this temporarily physicalized form we now experience before we become less substantive, take more subtle form again, in future incarnations.
The spiritual world, for Steiner, is a world of thought: “The actual world of thoughts is what pervades everything in the land of spirits, like the warmth that pervades all earthly things and beings. Here, however, we must imagine these thoughts as living, independent beings. What we grasp as a thought in the manifest world is like a shadow of a thought being that is active in the land of spirits.” For Steiner, the thought of this realm of embodied consciousness, this human world, manifested, first, as an imprint in the “spiritual world.” Then the vast celestial machinery went into action to realize it.
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