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Another blog of mine under production for some months - photos and stories about a flâneur in Hongkong. Please proceed to visit and comments are always welcomed.
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Master of Analogue #1

We can understand the meaning of this stay in spirit country only if we are able to interpret properly the purpose of our life’s pilgrimage in an incarnation. While we are incarnated in physical bodies, we human beings work and create in the physical world, but we work and create as spiritual beings. What we imprint on physical forms, materials and forces our spirits think out and develop. Our task as messengers of the spiritual world is to incorporate the spirit into the material world. Only through incarnating in physical bodies can we work in the material world. We must take on physical bodies as our tools so that we have something material through which to work on the material world and through which the material world can work on us. However, what works through our human bodily nature is the spirit. The intentions and directions for our work in the material world come from the spirit.

It is true that one of the tasks of the human spirit, as long as this spirit is proceeding from incarnation to incarnation, is to work in the physical world, but this task could not be completed appropriately if the spirit lived only an embodied existence. The intentions and goals of an earthly task are no more worked out and determined within an earthly incarnation than the blueprint for a building comes about on the site where the builders are already at work. The plan for the building is worked out in the architect’s office, and the goals and intentions of earthly endeavor are developed in the country of spirits, where each human spirit must dwell again and again between incarnations in order to equip itself for work in a physical lifetime. The architect draws up the plan for a house in the office, according to architectural and other standards, and does this without touching actual bricks and mortar. Similarly, the architect of human creativity— the spirit or higher self—develops the necessary goals and capabilities according to the laws of the country of spirit beings, in order to then send them into the earthly world. Only by returning again and again to its own realm will a human spirit be able to bring the spirit into the earthly world by means of its physical-material instrument. In the physical arena, we learn to know the characteristics and forces of the physical world; while working, we gather experience about what the physical world requires of those who want to work in it. We also learn to know the characteristics of the matter we intend to use to embody our thoughts and ideas, although these ideas and thoughts themselves cannot be derived from matter. Thus the physical world is the setting for both work and learning. Afterwards, in spirit country, what has been learned is transformed into the active abilities and capacities of the human spirit.

To make things clearer, the comparison we used above can be taken further. An architect works out a design for a house, and this plan is carried out. In the process, the architect gains experience in a number of ways so that his or her capabilities are enhanced. When the next design has to be drawn up, all these experiences flow into it. The second design is enriched by everything learned in the process of carrying out the first. It is the same with successive human lifetimes. In the intervals between incarnations, the spirit is at home in its own realm and is able to devote itself totally to the requirements of spiritual life. Released from physical existence, it develops in all directions and incorporates the fruits of its experience in previous lifetimes into this process. Its attention is thus always directed to the earthly context of its tasks. To the extent that the earth is the spirit’s field of action, the spirit is constantly working to keep pace with the earth’s evolution, and is working on itself so that in each incarnation the service it performs corresponds to the earth’s situation at that time.

Extract from «Theosophy», by Rudolf Steiner

Metade Fumaça continues

Looking first at memory, we can ask how it comes about. Obviously the process is quite different from how sensation or perception comes about. Without eyes, I could not have the sensation of blue. However, my eyes do not give me any memory of the blue; for them to provide the sensation, something blue must be in view at this moment. My bodily nature would allow all impressions to sink back down into oblivion if something were not also taking place in the relationship between the outer world and my soul—namely the formation of a current mental image through the act of perception, with the result that, through inner processes, I may later again have a mental image of something that originally brought about a mental image from outside. People who have become practiced at observing the soul will realize that it is all wrong to say that if I have a mental image today, the same mental image shows up again tomorrow in my memory, having stayed somewhere inside me in the meantime. On the contrary, the mental image that I have right now is a phenomenon that passes away with the present moment. But if memory intervenes, a process takes place in me that is the result of something additional that has gone on in the relationship between me and the outer world, something other than the evoking of the current mental image. The old mental image has not been “stored” anywhere; the one my memory calls up is a new one. Remembering means being able to visualize something anew; it does not mean that a mental image can come to life again. What appears today is something different from the original mental image.

Remembering means experiencing something that is no longer there, linking a past experience to my present life. This happens in every instance of remembering. Suppose I meet someone I recognize because I met him or her yesterday. This person would be a total stranger to me if I could not link the image formed through yesterday’s perception to my impression of today. Today’s image is given to me by perception, that is, by my sensory system. But who conjures up yesterday’s image into my soul? It is the same being in me who was present at both yesterday’s encounter and today’s. Throughout the preceding discussion, this being has been called “the soul.” Without this trusty keeper of the past, every external impression would be a new one for us. The soul imprints on the body the process by which something becomes a memory. However, the soul must first do the imprinting, and then perceive its imprint just as it perceives something outside itself. In this way, the soul is the keeper of memory.

Something happens to us, “bumps into us,” enters our life as if by chance—or so we tend to think at first. We can become aware, however, that each one of us is the result of many such “chance” occurrences. If at the age of forty I take a good look at myself and refuse to be content with an empty, abstract concept of the “I” as I ponder my soul’s essential nature, I may well conclude that I am nothing more and nothing less than what I have become through what has happened to me until now as a matter of destiny. I would probably have been a different person if, at age twenty, I had had a different series of experiences than what actually did happen to me. I will then look for my “I” not only in its developmental influences that come from within, but also in what exerts a formative influence on my life from outside. I will recognize my own “I” in what “happens to” me. If we give ourselves impartially to such a realization, we need to take only one more step in intimately observing life before we can see, in what comes to us through certain experiences of destiny, something that takes hold of the “I” from outside, just as memory works from inside to allow past experiences to light up again. In this way, we can become able to recognize an experience of destiny as a past action of the soul finding its way to the “I,” just as a memory is a past experience that is reinvoked by outer circumstances and finds its way into our minds as a mental image.

Extract from «Theosophy», by Rudolf Steiner