This piece is based on an address I gave at the Grail Chapel, Green Gully on St John’s Tide, 25th June 2023.
In the last two weeks, I have had the pleasure of house sitting for two good friends as they go on a long-awaited road trip to northern Australia. Their home is rather like a small homestead, with chickens, a cat, a vegetable garden, fruit trees and indoor plants to look after. I’ve noticed how nurturing for me it has been to enter into the daily rhythm of life here: on the surface, I have more restrictions on what I can and can’t do, and more work to look after myself. However this has, paradoxically, been nourishing to my soul, and has led me to contemplate the question of what can help each of us to thrive in the times in which we live.
In the title for this piece, I chose to use the word ‘thriving’ rather than ‘surviving’ because I think survival is not the most helpful goal at this moment in time. Of course it is good that we can live full lives and take care of our physical needs, but a focus on survival as the primary goal can distract us from the importance of a life worth living. One of the lessons of the past three years, for me, has been that physical survival should not become our all-consuming goal, because all of the great spiritual teachings tell us that when it does, we tend to retreat from a fully embodied life, and a life of relation to others. I also chose to use the neutral framing of ‘a time of change’ rather than ‘upheaval’, ‘crisis’ or ‘civilisational collapse’, even though one can certainly see each of these, to one degree or another, in the trajectory of our world today. Yet the same spiritual teachings again remind us that we need to accept change as an inevitable dimension of embodied existence, rather than fighting it, as accepting what is necessary allows us to receive the gifts in that. This is not the same as fatalistically being carried along on the currents of the world though, as I will hopefully show later – in fact it is the opposite, as only through acceptance can we step into creative, responsive action, rather than emotionally based reaction.
I want to share with you here some of the thoughts and actions that I believe can be most helpful at this time. They can help to strengthen us, to give us physical, emotional and spiritual resources for meeting the challenges that may come, and importantly, they can also enhance our quality of life. They don’t require a university education, special skills, advanced psychic powers or any other prerequisite – any person of goodwill can acquire them. The one thing that they require, above all else, is initiative, constructive action. Here it is important to differentiate between action in service of wisdom and growth and undirected or misdirected action. Westerners sometimes think that being active or ‘busy’ is a sign of moral superiority, whereas in the East this is not the case. Eastern spiritual teachings refer to two forms of laziness: active and passive. Passive laziness we know well, being a blob or couch potato. But active laziness is where we keep busy doing the same things we have always done, the daily round, without seeking to learn, to grow, to flourish.
So when I speak of constructive action, this is action that is consciously chosen to help us to grow. It is what Christ had in mind when he advised his disciples to lay up their treasures in heaven rather than on earth. At that time, materialistic thinking dominated human consciousness, and physical wealth was seen as the best way of insuring a good life (sound familiar?) In this context, Christ’s message was revolutionary. He was not saying we should neglect our physical needs, or live in poverty: rather, he was teaching that inner empowerment and transformation, becoming wise, would allow us to act more skilfully and consciously in life, so that we could effectively meet our needs and also flourish as a community of loving souls growing together.
I want to emphasise that these actions do not preclude the importance of creating resilience on a material level. Many others have written about the importance of becoming more self-reliant and resilient in these times, reacquiring the skills of homesteading that our grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ generations had, and I encourage you, if you haven’t already, to give thought to how you could create more self-reliance and resilience in your life and in your community. Yet in Matthew 4:4, Christ reminds us that ‘people do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’. Indeed it is through the voice of God working through us that we can find the wisdom to cultivate the bread that will sustain both our bodies and our souls.
What then is this wisdom from the mouth of God, this treasure that we should be laying up in heaven? What are the inner resources that we need to thrive? Some of the qualities whose cultivation I believe will help us the most at this time (and there are no doubt many others) are:
Intuition
Trust
Self-care
Creating beauty
Opening the heart through service
Moral courage
Let us look at each of these qualities in turn, and how we may bring them into our lives, if we have not done so already.
Intuition and Trust
Austrian philosopher and initiate Rudolf Steiner taught that, in ancient times, humans had access to advanced spiritual perception beyond the material realm, but that we gradually lost these faculties over thousands of years. This was necessary so that we could develop a sense of individual self-awareness and the capacity for independent thought, as well as acquire understanding of the laws of the material world. However since the end of the 19th Century, he taught that the veil that separated us from the spiritual world is beginning to lift, and that people would once again be able to develop faculties for spiritual perception, but this time in full consciousness rather than the trancelike, undifferentiated consciousness of the past. To me, it is clearly evident that this awareness is beginning to awaken in humanity, albeit still in isolated groups and individuals.
There are now many teachers who give suggestions for cultivating intuition, which at its simplest, is an awareness of right action in each moment guided by the spiritual worlds. It is the ‘still, small voice’ that tells us what we need to do in a crisis, the gut feeling that leads us toward or away from a choice or person, the flash of inspiration that reveals our path to us, like lightning revealing the night-time landscape for a moment. In my experience, it helps to recognise that it is a new faculty, and to proceed slowly and carefully with it, like a baby learning to walk. But to develop it I also believe that we need to use it, for no faculty develops without use. The time has passed when we could depend on a guru to lead us, like a shepherd leading his or her sheep: rather we each need to become our own guides, with the help of the spiritual worlds and our wise teachers to guide our learning.
Some of the signposts for being on the ‘right track’ can be a feeling of vitality, of purpose, of expansiveness, whilst being off-track can be indicated by feeling flat, listless or somehow false to ourselves. This does not mean that feelings of fear, discomfort or other emotions are indicators of being off track! This is where doing the work of clearing our unhealthy patterns and attachments is so important, as these will otherwise tend to hijack our sense of inner knowing to lead us towards the ego’s goals of self-preservation and self-aggrandizement.
Equally important is for us to cultivate a sense of trust in the wisdom of the spiritual worlds that is guiding us, and that wherever we find ourselves is where we need to be to learn the lessons that our soul came into incarnation to learn. Steiner’s Michael Prayer is a beautiful text that can help us to hold that feeling of trust within through the challenges of life:
The Michael Prayer
We must eradicate from the soul
all fear and terror of what
comes towards us
from out of the future.
We must acquire serenity
in all feelings and sensations
about the future.
We must look forward
with absolute equanimity
to everything that may come.
And we must think only that
whatever comes is given to us
by a world-directive
full of wisdom.
It is part of what we
must learn in this age,
namely, to live out of pure
trust, without any security
in existence.
Trust in the ever present
help of the spiritual world.
Truly, nothing else will do
if our courage is not to fail us.
Let us discipline our will
and let us seek the awakening
from within ourselves,
every morning
and every evening.
There are many other inspirational texts with the same message from different traditions. All of these teachings could perhaps be summarised with the statement ‘everything happens for a reason,’ and if we can hold to this, and not take the adversities of life personally, it will be an invaluable aid to us in our journey.
Self-care
Much of my work as a counsellor is concerned with supporting my clients to activate self-care in their lives. It is striking how many people do not have any awareness of what self-care entails; to me, self-care means an attitude of care for my body, soul and spirit, and the practices that nurture each of these. Care for my body, at it’s most basic includes making sure that I get enough sleep, eat good, wholesome food and have enough exercise, as well as balancing work, rest and play in my life. Care for my soul means that I make time in my life for those activities that bring me joy and fulfilment. We might call these recreational, in that they recreate us. For me, being in nature, listening to or playing music, sharing company with good friends and gardening all fulfil my soul. Care for my spirit is a little different, in that the spirit is, in a sense, invulnerable and doesn’t need to be looked after; yet our connection with it needs to be nurtured. In this sense meditation, ritual and reading spiritual texts all support the care of the spirit, but so can dancing, bushwalking, rock climbing and painting – whatever helps to open us to the numinous in our lives.
Creating beauty
Creating beauty, for me, is very much linked with care of the soul. The soul thrives on beauty the way that the body thrives on fresh air, water and food. Beauty in our environment can be an important aspect of supporting our wellbeing, yet many people are unconscious of their environment, and allow it to remain ugly and a drag on their souls. A good starting point for creating beauty in one’s environment is William Morris’s maxim: have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful’, to which I would add: ‘and preferably the useful things would also be beautiful’.
Perhaps the most common sources of ugliness in our personal environments arise from clinging to things that have outlived their usefulness, and are worn out and broken, having too many things, leading to clutter and chaos, and choosing to purchase functional but ugly things because they are cheap. Of course each of us is constrained by what we can afford, but wherever possible, let us approach choices about what we bring into our homes and workplaces by asking this question of our souls: will adding this to my life enrich you like the warm sun or make you droop with sadness? Wherever possible, let us attend to the needs of our souls as well as our bodies in what we bring into our lives, and especially let us make room for that supreme nurturer of the soul, the creative arts. Let us find a space for beautiful music, paintings, theatre, novels and dance.
Opening the heart through service:
In the yogic tradition, one of the paths to God is called bhakti yoga, the path of selfless devotion, and all the great spiritual traditions emphasise the importance of service to others in helping us to grow as people. I believe it is especially important in the period in which we live, what Rudolf Steiner calls the age of the Consciousness Soul. In this time, we have acquired a level of self-insight greater than at any time before, and this has helped us to achieve a peak in our sense of ourselves as individual beings. This is an important and necessary stage in our evolution; yet, as Steiner warns us, it carries the very real danger that our souls may withdraw from loving relationship with others and become hardened into egotism and self-obsession.
The spiritual path presents a particular danger in this regard, as we can be inclined to separate from those who we consider ‘unspiritual’ and become overly focused on our own inner experiences, whether they be blissful or painful ones. The goal should not be to disregard our inner life, but to find a sense of balance in care for self and care for others. For some, attention to the self comes easily, and they must work to give more of themselves to others and the world. For others, giving to others and the world is easy and natural, and they may need to take more time for nurturing the self. As always, each of us must consult our hearts unflinchingly to find where our bias is, to find where we need to become aware of what an Ayurvedic doctor wryly described to me as the difference between “want to” and “good for”.
Moral courage:
This is a beautiful concept that I came across some years ago, I think in the writings of M. Scott Peck, an author whom I especially admire and recommend. We often think of courage in physical, or perhaps emotional terms: the courage to embark on a dangerous task or one that takes us out of our comfort zone, and both of these kinds of courage are important to cultivate on our journey of becoming fully embodied humans. Yet moral courage represents the willingness to risk making mistakes in our journey, even for doing the ‘wrong thing’. Sometimes we find ourselves in situations where we are confronted with choices where we are afraid of making a mistake, looking like a fool, or of doing wrong, of being irresponsible, selfish or careless of others.
In these situations, it will often seem safest to do what we have always done, to choose the path we know. Yet the challenge of this time, the call to what Jung termed individuation, is to develop the parts of our experience that we do not know. Indeed these parts are more likely to cause us problems if we leave them disowned and undeveloped, because they will still influence us, but in an unconscious and compulsive way. Jung termed this compulsive force in our unconscious the Shadow, but singer-songwriter Billy Joel equally aptly calls it the Stranger:
‘We may not understand how the Stranger is inspired,
But he is not always evil, and he is not always wrong
Though you drown in good intentions, you will never quench the fire
You’ll give in to your desire when the Stranger comes along.’
Moral courage calls on us to follow the call of our hearts to enter the unknown realms where we don’t have all the answers, and to be willing to make mistakes in service of our growth. Aside from being essential for individuation, it also reflects another important aspect of the Consciousness Soul age: the need to shift our centre of control from the intellectual mind to the intuition, which lives in the heart, but the heart infused with loving awareness. Of course doing this is not an invitation to be knowingly selfish and irresponsible and abandon those we are responsible for; rather it is an acknowledgement that we need to surrender our attachment to knowing, to being right and responsible: as always the path of Christ, like the Way of the Tao is the middle path of balance between extremes.
These are some of the qualities and practices that I believe are especially important for us to cultivate in this time, the treasures of heaven that we need to gather to us or ‘lay up’. In the Parable of the Sower, Christ tells us that the seeds that fell on barren ground did not grow into plants, whereas those that fell on good soil grew to become healthy and strong. In this parable, we can understand the seeds as the impulses and gifts we are given by the spiritual world to manifest in this life, impulses that are for the enrichment of humanity and all creation, not just ourselves. The Earth on which the seeds are cast by the Sower represents our souls, and good soil refers to the health and wellbeing of our souls, and also how awakened they are.
The qualities and practices I have outlined today will help us to nourish and awaken our souls, so that the seeds that land upon them can grow into healthy plants to feed and shelter us and our communities. At the moment, we are still under the protection of old systems, yet these are faltering and failing as their contradictions and toxic, oppressive structures become apparent. Through this work, we can create the new world, one heart, one hearth and one community at a time, so that when the old finally fails, the new is ready to give shelter and sustenance to the people.