by Colin Wilson
That other great teacher of the twentieth century, Gurdjieff, seems to have made no comment on Steiner and his ‘spiritual science’. But a story told by his follower J. G. Bennett makes it clear that Gurdjieff's views on communication with the dead were almost identical with Steiner's. In his autobiography, Witness, Bennett tells how deeply he was affected by the death of his mother. One day, Gurdjieff said to Bennett: ‘She is in need of help, because she cannot find her way by herself. My own mother is already free, and I can help her. Through her your mother can be helped, but you have to bring them into contact.’ He gave Bennett a photograph of his own mother, and said: ‘For half an hour every day you practise what I say. First look well at this picture until you can see my mother with your eyes shut. Then place two chairs side by side, and on the right chair picture my mother and on the left your own mother. Stand in front of them and keep your attention fixed upon the wish that they may meet and that your mother may receive help.’
Bennett found the task unexpectedly painful.
After a few weeks the effort of standing for half an hour before two empty chairs became almost intolerable. To my surprise I found myself bathed in sweat…as if I had been doing heavy manual labour. One day I burst into tears and sobbed for the entire half hour. Yet nothing at all seemed to be happening. I was invaded with doubts, and a feeling that the whole affair was a cruel joke…Then a change began. After I had done the exercises for a month, I began to be aware that there were presences in the room. These presences, which at first were fleeting and nebulous, took the shape of my mother and Madame Gurdjieff. I felt distinctly that my mother was resisting…Then, one day, the contact was unmistakable. A wave of relief and gratitude flowed through me. It seemed at that moment that Gurdjieff was with me…*
Steiner's comment that the living are often influenced—at the unconscious level—by the dead can also be found in an early classic of spiritualism, The Spirits’ Book, by Allan Kardec. Kardec, whose real name was Leon Rivail, was a French polymath of the mid-nineteenth century. In the very early days of ‘spiritualism’, Kardec heard of a friend whose two daughters could produce automatic writing at will. The daughters were instructed to ask the ‘spirits’ a number of questions that were written down by Rivail. Many subsequent investigators have found this method highly unsatisfactory, and have ended with large quantities of repetitive drivel. Rivail was lucky. The spirits answered his questions with detailed precision, and the result was a remarkable philosophy of the meaning of human life and the relation of the dead and the living. Rivail's informants told him that the universe is pervaded by incorporeal intelligences. Human beings are simply ‘incarnate’ spirits. They advance towards perfection through the trials and problems of their lives, and, after death, they are reincarnated in another body, and continue their slow evolution. All this corresponds with great precision to Steiner's teaching. Rivail's informants added that the influence of spirits is far greater than most people suppose; they can enter freely into our minds and influence our thoughts and actions. In extreme cases, this influence amounts to ‘possession’. But such cases are rare, and the domination always involves a certain degree of co-operation with the ‘possessed’ person.
But perhaps the most important and revealing parallel is with an American contemporary of Rudolf Steiner, Thomson Jay Hudson, whose book The Law of Psychic Phenomena (1893) is one of the great forgotten masterpieces of the late nineteenth century. Hudson, a newspaper editor and official of the Patent Office, was fascinated by hypnosis, and the extraordinary powers it seems to be able to unleash in otherwise unremarkable individuals. He was also fascinated by such anomalies as ‘calculating prodigies’—children who can calculate enormous sums in their heads in a matter of seconds—and men with ‘photographic memories’. These convinced Hudson that the powers of the human mind are far greater than most of us realize.
Hudson came to the conclusion that man possesses two minds: he called these the objective and the subjective mind. The objective mind is the part of us that deals with everyday life; it looks outward, towards the external world. The subjective mind is the part of us that deals with our inner world; it operates largely through feeling and intuition.
Hudson was convinced that hypnosis puts the objective mind—the ‘everyday you’—to sleep, and allows the powers of the subjective mind to operate freely. Normally, they are shy and repressed. When they try to operate under the critical gaze of the objective mind, they suffer from a kind of stage fright. But when the objective mind is put to sleep, the subjective mind becomes capable of the most remarkable feats. Hudson watched with amazement as a young man under hypnosis produced the most dazzling philosophical ideas, in the conviction that he was holding a conversation with Socrates.
Hudson believed that all so-called psychic powers—telepathy, clairvoyance, healing, precognition—are the perfectly normal powers of the subjective mind. He decided to experiment with his own healing powers, directing them towards a relative who suffered from such severe arthritis that he was confined to a wheelchair. Hudson decided that the best moment for the use of these powers was on the point of falling asleep at night, or waking up in the morning. The relative experienced an extraordinary recovery, which began from the time Hudson began this healing ‘treatment’.
Steiner possessed the same conviction about man's ‘hidden powers’, and in the Autobiography, quotes with approval a comment by his friend Ludwig Laistner: ‘People do not have as much as an inkling of the real significance of the creative power within the human soul. They do not realize that the creativeness of man is an expression of the same cosmic power that creates in nature.’
Hudson is so significant because in the second half of the twentieth century, his theory of the ‘two minds’ has been placed upon a scientific basis by experiments in ‘split brain’ physiology. It had been known for a long time that if the corpus callosum—the bridge of nerves connecting the two halves of the brain—is severed, it can cure epilepsy. What puzzled the surgeons who performed this operation was that it appeared to make no difference to the patient, who went on behaving much as usual. An experimenter named Roger Sperry was among the first to notice that if a split brain patient banged into a table with the left side of his body, he did not notice the impact. For some unknown reason, the left side of the body is controlled by the right side of the brain, and vice versa. Further anomalies began to come to light. One split brain patient tried to hit his wife with his left hand, while the right hand tried to hold it back; another tried to unzip his flies with one hand while the other tried to do them up. It slowly became clear that the ego—the person you call ‘you’—lives in the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain, while the person who lives in the other half is, relatively speaking, a stranger. A split-brain patient who was shown a ‘naughty’ photograph with her right brain (i.e. left visual field) blushed; when asked why she was blushing, she replied truthfully: ‘I don't know.’ It was that other person—in the right brain—who was blushing.
Why do split-brain patients not realize they have had the operation? Clearly, because in a certain sense, they were split-brain patients before the operation. So are we all. The right brain—the ‘other you’—deals with intuitions, with ‘overall meanings’, with patterns; it is the part of us that appreciates music and poetry. The left brain studies the world through a microscope; it is obsessed with the ‘here and now’. It deals with language, with logic, with calculation.
There are certain moods when the two halves of my brain work so close together that they can actually feel one another's presence. When I am deeply relaxed, when I am in a mood of ‘appreciation’, I seem to relax into the right brain. In these states, I become far more intuitive. My memory works better.
There is some evidence then, for assuming that the right brain is Hudson's ‘subjective mind’, and that the left brain is the ‘objective mind’.
The most important observation to arise from all this is that most civilized human beings spend their li
ves trapped in the left brain, obsessed by the need for efficiency, for ‘coping’ with the outside world. They can never relax very deeply; they are rather like a man waiting for the telephone to ring, subconsciously remaining in a state of inner-tension.
Artists, poets, mystics, are natural ‘right brainers’. So are all children up to the age of seven. (It has been established that in children below that age, the left and right halves of the brain can act interchangeably.) Wordsworth pointed out that as we grow up, ‘shades of the prison house’ begin to close. We lose that ability to retreat into the Garden of Eden of the right brain; the need to cope with the hard world of adulthood keeps us in a state of tension, listening for the telephone.
All this enables us to understand Steiner's ideas about the ‘spiritual world’ with far greater precision. These ideas are certainly the greatest stumbling block for the average person. We can understand what Steiner means when he says that there is an inner ‘soul space’ in all men, and even what he means when he says that this ‘soul space’ is the setting for spiritual beings and events. What we find quite incomprehensible is how that same soul space is the setting for the ideas of geometry and philosophy and science. What on earth have these to do with ‘spiritual beings and events’?
But if we think of ‘soul space’ as being Hudson's ‘inner world’, the world of the right brain, we can begin to see what Steiner means. When human beings relax deeply, they can journey into that inner world. A child deeply absorbed in a book is ‘in’ the soul space. But most of us find it very difficult to venture very far into the inner world; it is as if we were attached to the objective world—and the objective mind—with a long piece of rope. We can relax to some extent; then we reach the end of the rope and have to stop. When we experience some enormous relief, or when someone fascinates us deeply and we become ‘absorbed’, we cut the rope and walk deeper into that unknown world inside us.
So what Steiner is saying is quite simple. When I become fascinated by a book or by an idea, I retreat into my inner soul space, and this is a valid experience of that soul space. But if I can cut the rope, and wander far into that inner land—like Blake's ‘mental traveller’—I shall encounter some very strange landscapes indeed.
Moreover, and this is the central point, the more deeply I wander into that mental land, the more deeply relaxed I become, and the more deeply intuitive. That land of the subjective mind is quite unlike the harsh daylight of the objective mind; its contours are gentler, softer; its colours are more subtle, its daylight is closer to our twilight. It is at twilight that our intuitions often operate most powerfully. And in this land of intuition, we may suddenly realize that we ‘know’ all kinds of things that were simply overlooked or ignored in the harsh glare of daylight consciousness.
Now as soon as we have succeeded in cutting the rope and relaxing deeply into that mental realm, it becomes perfectly obvious that Steiner was right about one thing at least. This is a new kind of experience, not just an intensified version of what we experience when we withdraw behind a newspaper or relax in the bath. This deeper relaxation gives us a new feeling of freedom, and we experience new kinds of perceptions. We realize that the ‘rope’ had given us a completely false idea about this inner world, just as we would have a false idea about some land over the border if we had never ventured more than a few hundred yards inside it.
Even highly intelligent and perceptive individuals can make this mistake. It is instructive, for example, to study H. G. Wells's attitude to the problem. In the opening chapter of his Experiment in Autobiography, Wells remarks that he is not getting enough freedom and peace of mind to get on with his work. He goes on: ‘Entanglement is our common lot. I believe this craving for a release from bothers, from daily demands and urgencies, from responsibilities and tempting distractions, is shared by an increasing number of people.’
He then points out that since life began, most individual creatures have been ‘up against it’, absorbed with the mere struggle to stay alive. Now, for the first time in history, there is a new type of creature: a human being who wants to live a mental life. ‘People can ask now what would have been an extraordinary question five hundred years ago. They can say: “Yes, you earn a living, you support a family, you love and hate, but—what do you do?”’
Wells compares these ‘new men’ to the earliest amphibians, struggling out of prehistoric seas to live on the land, seeking to breathe in a new fashion. ‘At last it has become for us a case of air or nothing. But the new land has not yet definitely emerged from the waters and we swim distressfully in an element we wish to abandon.’ Or, to put it another way, we might say that these amphibians still have flippers instead of legs, so half an hour on land tires them out, and they need to get back to that sustaining element of the sea.
Steiner would reply: You are mistaken. We already have legs. The problem is simply that you have forgotten to cut the rope.
In order to understand Steiner, we must try to focus on the very heart of this problem. We must try to grasp what is wrong with us. Man has evolved by becoming more efficient. Being efficient involves a certain balance of right and left brain. For example, after many years of practice, I am a fairly efficient writer. I can, for example, read a book from beginning to end in a couple of days, then write a review of it. In order to write the review, I have to allow my right brain to grasp the book as a whole—from a ‘bird's eye view’, so to speak—and then select certain intuitions, certain insights, and translate them into words with my left brain. The two must work in concert. And a certain degree of tension is necessary. If I spend two weeks reading the book in a leisurely way, and write the review in the same expansive frame of mind, I shall probably write ten times as much as necessary, and have to prune it. On the other hand, if I am in too much of a hurry, my tension will become self-defeating and I may miss the whole point of the book. I must establish a balance between these two extremes. If I am a busy man, I may carry this same balance into most of my daily activities, from driving my car to eating my dinner. It may, in fact, become my ‘normal’ state of consciousness. Sitting in my armchair after a meal, I may be quite convinced that I am relaxed, while the old tensions continue, a mere inch or so below the surface of consciousness.
If I face some appalling crisis, which suddenly disappears, then I breathe a deep sigh of relief, and I really relax. I ‘cut the rope’. And, if I am lucky, I shall recognize that this new relaxation is a vitally important experience. It renews my vitality, strengthens my inner powers. And I shall make it a priority to try to establish these states of deep relaxation by an act of will.
It is, however, far more probable that I shall get a good night's sleep, and simply forget about the experience. The next day, I shall be back in the old state of consciousness, accepting a vaguely uncomfortable state of tension—like a man listening for the telephone—as an acceptable substitute for relaxation.
Steiner was one of those lucky people—Wordsworth was another, and Blake yet another—who are born with the ability to ‘relax into the right brain’. He did not achieve this ability, as so many of the Romantic poets did, at the expense of his normal efficiency. In later life, he was capable of a formidable amount of work and concentration. But when it was over, he did not, like the rest of us, settle into an unsatisfactory state of semi-relaxation. He had explored that mental world; he knew it existed. He cut the rope, and crossed deep into that mental land inside himself. And he never ceased to try to explain to his fellow men: You are mistaken to treat the ‘world of the mind’ as if it were merely a metaphor, or a dim reflection of the physical world. It is another country, and we all have passports to cross into it.
There remains one more question to be cleared up. What does Steiner mean when he says that intercourse with the dead involves asking the questions they put into our heads, and receiving their answers from within ourselves? Here again, our knowledge of the process of deep relaxation provides the answer. When I know someone very well, a kind of telepa
thic contact is established—so, for example, we may both start to say the same thing at the same time. Who puts it into the other's mind? That is impossible to say. And when I am in a deeply relaxed, deeply intuitive state, I see the answers to questions, just as a calculating prodigy sees the answer to a mathematical problem. I answer the question myself.
Steiner has also remarked on the importance of the sleeping state. In sleep, he says, we enter the ‘spirit world’—although, since we are unconscious, we know nothing about it. If we could carry consciousness into the world of sleep, we would be able to explore the spirit world. Unfortunately, consciousness tends to blank out shortly after we have entered that ‘other world’. Perhaps, at some future stage of man's evolution, we shall be able to maintain ego-consciousness while we sleep. Meanwhile, our closest acquaintance with that world occurs on the point of sleeping and waking. Again, what we know of deep relaxation indicates that this makes sense.
When Steiner moved into the home of Anna Eunicke, he was (in Dante's phrase) at precisely ‘the middle of the road of life’. He was thirty-two years old, and he had thirty-two more years to live. His entry into the Eunicke household has a symbolic importance, for he later emphasized the importance of his contact with the deceased Herr Eunicke for the writing of The Philosophy of Freedom. We could regard The Philosophy of Freedom, published in the following year, 1894, as the beginning of a completely new phase in Steiner's life. It is a conscious attempt to lay the cornerstone for all his future work. Steiner's biographer Hemleben says that it ‘embodies, purely in the form of thought, essentially everything that was to be the content of the anthroposophy that Steiner developed later.’
Today this book appears less revolutionary than it seemed at the turn of the century because other philosophers—Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Karl Popper, Michael Polanyi—have carried out Steiner's intention far more thoroughly. That intention, quite simply, is to undermine ‘reductionism’, that temptingly simple theory that tries to explain the mind in terms of physical mechanisms.