Practise Spirit Beholding (Part 2)

The kind of thinking required by the Foundation Stone Meditation is not unconscious: we are asked to learn to think ‘truly’, in the way presented as the goal of our development in the third stanza. Thinking truly – Spirit Beholding – means enabling the divine spirit to evolve as it passes through us.

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In the resting head, the soul finds a place from which the world can be observed and penetrated. It is the head that unlocks “world thoughts” for us “from the grounds of eternity”. In the Philosophy of Freedom, we read that “In thinking we are given the element that unites our particular individuality with the whole of the cosmos. When we sense, feel (and also perceive) we are separate; when we think, we are the all-one being that penetrates all. This is the deeper basis of our dual nature. Within us, we see an absolute force come into existence, a force that is universal. Yet we do not come to know it as it streams forth from the center of the world, but only at a point on the periphery.” (GA 4, Chapter Knowing the World, p. 84). In the head, the soul has something like an inner temple in which the world-thoughts can express themselves out of eternity, or from the grounds of eternity, if we open up to them.

Will that has become free

In order to be able to follow the call to “practise Spirit Beholding” we need to achieve stillness of thought. Once we have achieved this, we will receive something that has been prepared in the Foundation Stone Meditation’s first two stanzas. As we experience the father-ground of the world that lights up in the “Spirit Recalling” of the first stanza and reappears in “the gods’ eternal aims” in the third, we are approached in the second, from out of the chorus of the “spirits of light”, by the light of cosmic being, the Christ. Both together enable us to experience our “own I”. To Christ we owe our I-being, which, through beholding the world thoughts, can make its will, which has become free, available to creation.

The second, macrocosmic, part of the third stanza begins with the words, “For the spirit’s world-thoughts hold sway / In cosmic being, yearning for light”. This is looking at the evolving human soul from the cosmos. The development of “true thinking” is our answer with which we can learn to understand and appreciate both the macrocosm’s expectation and its premise. This may be an entirely new, shocking perspective.

Can we embrace the notion that there are hierarchical beings that have created us and that now look at their creation full of expectation? As created beings we have been released into freedom for our will is free. No divine-spiritual being guides us now or shows us the way. It is up to us whether we employ our thinking solely in pursuit of our own selfish purposes or whether we use it to wake up to the wider context of the world of which we form a part.

Through us human beings

The world-thoughts, which are at home in the spirit realm, do not exist for themselves alone. They do not experience their light-giving effect until we rise to the sphere of the world-thoughts through thinking. In Spirit Beholding, which is the true human thinking, the “light of cosmic being” is bestowed on our ‘I’ “for free and active willing”, as it says in the first part of this stanza. The world-thoughts are yearning for this light. The light’s being reveals itself by meeting world thought within human thought. In order to become effective, in other words, the divine light must pass through the human being. “The divine spirit, as it passes through humanity, will experience a being that it did not reveal before.” (GA 26, leading thoughts 112–114)

The third stanza of the Foundation Stone Meditation, in which we learn to sense our ‘own I’ for the first time, gives expression to both the relationship and the dependency of the higher hierarchies from us human beings.

Part of the cosmos

It is remarkable how the human soul, as it appeals to itself (GA 260), calls upon the spirits of soul, the spirits of the third hierarchy, Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai, “Let from the depth be entreated / What in the heights will be heard”. For we do not live for ourselves alone; we are of vital importance to world evolution and to the hierarchies. “[…] we are on earth because the Gods need us, so that what lives in the cosmos can be thought, felt, and willed in us. Once we think, feel and will in the right way what lives in the cosmos, the gods will take this up and integrate it into further world evolution. We are, in other words, contributing to the building of the entire cosmos […].” (GA 276, lecture of 8 June 1923).

When we awaken in “the spirit’s world-thoughts”, we do not only achieve something for ourselves, but the entire cosmos including the elemental spirits participates in this process and hears the call of the third hierarchy. World evolution depends existentially on this awakening.

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