Concern for the Patience of the Stars by Colin Treiber

“The Stars spoke once to humankind,

It is world destiny that they are silent now.

To be aware of the silence 

can become pain for earthly Human.

 

But in the deepening silence,

There grows and ripens 

what the Human Being speaks to the Stars.

To be aware of the speaking 

can become strength for Spirit Human.”

 

-Rudolf Steiner

 

For any aspiring steward of the Earth, the time when the Sun transits the Fishes (from March 12 - April 19) and the spring awakens in the northern hemisphere can be quite arduous for the patience it requires. For one cannot rush into the garden or field with seeds in hand until certain environmental qualities have been attained. No human capacity can force those qualities to arrive. In fact, it is the restraint of our human capacities, our powers of will, and the development of patience, that is most essential for those optimal qualities of environment to fully arrive. In that patience, much preparation happens. In that preparation, we are learning to speak to the Stars. This “speaking to the Stars” is a central task of our time.

While individual achievements are being made, collectively we have not uncovered an understanding of our human task to speak to the Stars. Inappropriately, we still culturally invoke the ancient inclination, which has the Stars speaking to humankind. Because this invocation is an inappropriate orientation of our being at this evolutionary moment, we invoke the “Stars” in an ever more forceful manner. A manner which is deprived of freedom. Freedom, a foundation of truth for our time. 

Threefold Human Being

You see, the "Stars" correspond to our thinking capacity. Thinking, broadly speaking, is a process of seeing, or bringing to light. But the “Stars” now abundantly speaking are being born through false light (i.e., screens), and actually work against the development of our thinking. For the true Stars correspond to our thinking capacity through wonder. Wonder works its way towards the will slowly. False light corresponds to our thinking capacity through obligation and manipulation, which works upon the will deceptively and forcefully. Understanding the relationship between thinking and willing is essential to our speaking to the Stars. So, let me take a step back to clarify this idea. 

The human being is threefold: a thinking being, a feeling being, and a willing being. The thinking capacity corresponds to our head and nerve-sense system. The feeling being corresponds to our heart and circulatory system. The willing being corresponds to our limbs and metabolic system. Similarly we could say that the thinking being is guided by spirit, the feeling being by soul, and the willing being by matter. Feeling lives between the other two as a bridge between them and through it our thinking and willing come to build a relationship with each other. But truly it is all three which are needed, and needed to be in the right proportion and proximity in order to evolve with the times.

Pre-Christian Times

In pre-Christian times it was the spirit, or thinking capacity, which was responsible for guiding (or even mandating) the human will into activity. The caste system of ancient India or the cultural hierarchy of ancient Egypt are examples. The Brahmans in India and the Pharaohs in Egypt maintained a spiritual relationship with the Gods. They received, from spiritual beings, the thoughts needed to guide their people. They thus spiritually divined the proper structures for their peoples' wills to be expressed. They demonstrated how the necessary societal structures for the evolution of humankind came from the spirit (higher thinking) and only from there began directing the human will. 

(I understand I am speaking generally about vast stretches of time. But I am only doing so to grasp the general guiding concepts of human evolution, which are more simple than we often realize. You will have to forgive me for skipping by the immense beauty and wonder of these ancient civilizations, but I am currently inclined to capture the essence from the periphery rather than set it free from the center.)

The Mind Directing Will

So, what can be said about pre-Christian times? Primarily, the purest mind (or the being which remained with its feeling life yet most entwined with the spiritual world) was responsible for directing the will power of humankind. Moses at Mount Sinai and the revelation of the Lord’s commandments is another example of this. Here again it is one human being receiving from a high spiritual being the dictates for the peoples’ life of will. This was the evolutionary imperative of the ancient civilizations. Mainly, that the diversity of willing natures would come into expression through the directive given forth by a mind yet in communion with the Gods. Thinking was guiding willing. And of course, this was happening through a feeling life. A feeling life altogether unknown to us today. 

For humankind to evolve into the Christian age this particular relationship between thinking, feeling and willing would have to change. An inversion would eventually have to take place. The freedom of the mind to direct the will would have to become the freedom of the will to direct, or develop, the mind. Thus, the Christ Being moved ever closer to the earth, towards incarnation, as humankind made steps towards freeing the will. 

The Will Directing Mind

The transition from mind directing will, to will directing mind, is underway. Yet we should be beginning to emerge on the other side of this transition with a developing capacity to sacrifice our will the way the Gods sacrificed their thinking. Yet, there is an obvious reason why we are struggling to emerge on the other side with free will in hand. Here is one example from my life:

I recently attended an organic grain conference. The keynote speaker was a highly respected, accomplished, intelligent, and diligent professor and farmer. His speech was about taking our farming method to the next level. It was a very helpful and inspiring presentation. However, the central theme of it was focused on how to use new, highly technical methods of crop rotations to achieve more profit on the farm. The methods involved intricate timings and very specific and expensive technologies (implements and tools). Most of them would have been impractical to any farmer. Ultimately they were methods which were not predictable or reliable and highly dependent on variables beyond the control of the farmer. This observation must have lingered in the speaker's mind too; he concluded the presentation by saying something like, “I don’t know, perhaps the simple technique of just tilling in the crop residue and planting into it would yield the best results.” What an admission!

Processes Possessed by Props

In that closing declaration he revealed something that I had been experiencing for years but had not quite found the best words for. Mainly, it is this: That our processes are becoming possessions of their props. In other words, we are inventing processes of production that are justified by the technologies we engage, but not by life itself. We are making tasks extremely complex and sophisticated for no other reason than to prove the worth of the technology which can alone fulfill the tasks. This is extremely important to understand so let me give a more encompassing example.

Let us consider the smartphone. This is primarily a device which enables communications of all kinds. They facilitate these communications quickly, very quickly. This has been the primary goal of technology for some time - to speed up communication. But what for? What sort of news needs to be communicated so quickly? Well that is obvious actually. It is a crisis, warning, or emergency that needs immediate communication. Think about it…. One does not ever need to communicate good news immediately, or even quickly. In fact, it is the opposite. It is generally preferable, even wise, to live quietly with good news for a time. Thus, through our relationship with the smartphone, we are facilitating a world (life) process which is set on crisis, warning, or emergency. But let us now return to the question of free will.

The Task of Our Age

Remember, the task of our age, the Christian age, is not to direct the will with greater extensions of the mind. If it were, the smartphone could potentially play this role, for the content it disseminates is spiritual, although in a false sense. However, the task of the Christian age is to direct, or develop, the mind from the human will. That is, to express our will in a manner which facilitates higher thinking. Higher thinking which is wonder, rather than conviction. It should be easy to see - for we have all experienced it countless times – that crisis overwhelmingly does not facilitate this type of willing activity. Crisis demands the formation of quick convictions and decisive actions. A perceived crisis confiscates freedom from the will. Unfortunately, crisis is the process we are committed to as long as we use its prop – the smartphone.

The Human Foot and True Light

One can approach this dilemma from yet another angle. Let us consider the more benign use of the smartphone as a vehicle of learning through knowledge dissemination. Many people are quick to claim its benefits in this regard. But, we cannot overlook the starting point. Knowledge, or knowing, begins with light and the perception it enables. Knowledge is fundamentally related to light. Light, on the other hand, has a very distinct relationship to the human foot. This is not a stretch of the imagination at all. Let us speak to the Stars here! Let us walk in the light!

The human foot is a gift given to the human being through the Stars of Pisces, the Fishes. This knowledge has been handed down to us from the ancients who lived closely with the beings residing in those realms. In fact, each zodiacal constellation corresponds to a part of the human body. Of importance here, it is when the Sun is transiting the Fishes that the spring equinox arrives (in the Northern hemisphere). Thus we herald the arrival of the Sun! The victory of day over night! But what then does this growing light enkindle in the human being. It is a will to become vertical, to walk into the world, to see that which gives itself to the light, and there to stand and perceive these gifts of new life opening up into that very light of day. It is this light, the true light, which we come to know through our feet, and their capacity for walking. Yes, it is through our lower limb members, thus our willing sphere, that we gain perceptions of the phenomenon that guide the thinking of our time.

The Screen as False Light

Let us be clear, the screen does not engage the feet of the human being. The screen merely employs some outsourced will to do the work secretly. With the screen, there is no need for approach. The screen is a source of false light which bestows perpetual arrival. This false light and perpetual arrival abhors the foot. It would like to amputate it.

It is undeniable that one’s relationship to the screen promotes thinking of a kind. But what kind? Certainly not the kind of thinking which develops when one uses one's own two feet, one’s own sovereign will power, to walk into a prairie of wild flowers in the mid-morning springtime light and stand quietly there. We should become more sensitive to our feeling life which lives within these different thinking modalities.

Understand, it is freedom which guides evolution. Just as the Gods sacrificed their capacity to think gloriously and unceasingly, so must we learn to sacrifice our capacity to will endlessly and indiscriminately. Now, at a time when our inventions are capable of extending our will forces into nearly any corner of the Earth and Sky, we are being called to cease participation. We are being called to restrain ourselves. This is a moral test, and it is our speaking to the Gods through the Stars. The Stars, which are now right beneath our feet within the Earth, hear our every reply. It is their patience for our lack of restraint that we should be seriously concerned about. 

 

Colin Treiber lives effectively without a smartphone in southeast Wisconsin. He works at the Mandaamin Institute where he is learning to work in partnership with plants for a beneficial co-evolution of plants, animals and humans.