What am I?
You’re a human soul in a physical incarnation.
The meaning of life?
The meaning of life is to enable the soul to progress. We progress only here in the physical world, not in the spiritual world.
Rudolf Steiner says it better: “Once I came into this world … to acquire qualities unattainable in any other world. And I must remain bound to this world until I have developed within myself everything that can here be gained. I shall someday become a useful collaborator in another world only by acquiring all the requisite faculties in this physical world.” [Rudolf Steiner Archive (rsarchive.org)].
Everyone has delinquencies
I inherited this fault from my parents. They were like this. I can’t help it.
Well, maybe the way you are determined to which parents you were born. Work on your delinquencies in this lifetime, otherwise you might take them with you into your next lifetime.
Me, I worked on my maths delinquency in this lifetime. I’m never going to be a maths dummy again.
We PREVIEW our entire lives
When I came to Vienna to live, I could remember having seen this very event before I was born, while still in the spirit world. I figured that since I had seen this one event, I had seen every event. So I saw my entire life before I was born. Some years later I read exactly this in one of Rudolf Steiner’s texts. He says we preview our lives before we’re born.
Although we see everything, it doesn’t change our decisions. We still make our decisions, right or wrong, uninfluenced by the preview.
We REVIEW our entire lives
And similarly, when our lives are over and we’re back in the spirit world, we review everything, according to Steiner, and we see things more fully, for example, the full effect of our actions on other people. We get the full picture. If you made someone happy, you will feel their happiness as they felt it. If you made someone sad, you will feel their sadness as they felt it.
This next one is a terrible thought, isn’t it? — After they die, what happens to people who have done great harm? All the suffering they caused, to their victims and their victims’ families — every moment of this suffering they will experience themselves.
We too — when we were young souls we must have done terrible things, because what would have stopped us? Our conscience wouldn’t have stopped us — we hadn’t developed a conscience.
Angie Fenimore, who had a near-death experience, also spoke of viewing the disastrous effect that her failed suicide would have had on her son, had it been successful. [Beyond the Darkness, Bantam Press, 1995.]
You CAN take it with you
Every physical thing has a spiritual form. If you die clutching a briefcase full of dollar bills, you’ll still have the briefcase and the dollar bills in the spirit world. They just won’t be worth anything.
How do I know this? On those two occasions when I “took on” my spiritual body from two past lifetimes, I was aware of the clothes I was wearing. My spiritual body was wearing the same clothes that I had worn in those lifetimes. Since my physical clothes have a spiritual form, I figure that every physical thing has a spiritual form.
Predestined for a famous life?
You don’t get asked if you want to be famous. You get asked to do a job of work, and you say “Yes”. But then you have to accept the whole package. You can’t pick out the bits you like and leave the rest.
But why did you get asked and not your neighbour? Are you a better person than your neighbour? This brings me to one of my favourite theories, the divine lottery.
The divine lottery
A lot was cast. It was a divinely random act … the lot could have fallen on anyone. It fell on someone. Being divinely fair, of divinely equal chance, no-one can complain that their neighbour got the lot and they didn’t.
And when this lot falls on someone … they get asked if they agree to take on the task, or the destiny, and they say “yes”. The task, or the destiny, is not foisted on them. Rudolf Steiner said exactly this — that we get asked and are at liberty to say yes or no. We always say “yes”, but we know very well that we could say “no”. We get asked in the spirit world, not here in the physical world. When we commence our physical life, we don’t remember any of this. But we don’t change our mind or the path.
When was the lot cast? It might have been a hundred years ago, a thousand, five thousand — or it might have been when the solar system was a swirling cloud of gas and dust.
You might argue that people receive privileges because they’ve earned them in past lifetimes. I would argue the exact opposite: We can’t possibly earn the privileges bestowed on us, not in one lifetime, not in all our lifetimes.
I find a reference to my divine lottery in the New American Bible [Benziger, 1970]. It’s in a footnote to Luke 2/14 that says, “Those on whom His favor rests: [this is] an allusion to the mystery of divine election that bestows the gift of faith upon people of divine choice …”. This comes very close to my divine lottery, only I would avoid the word choice and use instead chance.
Matter and antimatter
“All matter turns into antimatter, and all antimatter turns into matter. In this way the universe, and all universes, recreate themselves in a never-ending cycle.” When I was a child, an adult told me this. I like the theory and can’t think of a better one. It answers every question.
Science and God
We have the physical world and the spiritual world, and perhaps many of those. There’s no conflict as far as I can see, but where is the person who can explain it? Where is that expert who can explain God’s position to us? Even to use the word “position” shows the limit of the human mind.
