Pagans, Autists, and Down's

I think it’s safe to say we are all “Widow’s Sons” here.

This means that while we may have strong psychic experiences and may ‘know for a fact’ we are not simply material beings - we experience the physical world, sense impressions, and knowledge of the earth as ‘reality’ in contradistinction to having a consciousness derived from communion with higher beings. Among our ranks are both those who fear poverty more than ‘God,’ prefer wealth and power to Truth, and those who have the opposite values.

Our souls, our mother-receiver of all we are conscious and unconscious of, are ‘widowed’ - alone in a foreign land and separated from any ‘like-companion.’ The designation ‘Son’ in the term “Widow’s Son” refers to our present sense of ‘identity’ including our relationship to our physical body. Opposite to the “Widow’s Son” as pertains to human consciousness is the “Son of God” as referred to many times in the Bible. A modern person with such a consciousness describes having a ‘personal relationship with God,’ or a ‘law, or faith-based’ covenant with God. This describes the Abrahamic ‘faith-based’ system which largely recognizes the ‘Widowsons’ approach as heretical, or pagan. In the approach to Truth, spirit, the divine, or God, the Widowson/pagan type finds it in ‘nature’ - on the battlefield, construction site, in natural settings from mountains to sea, cultivated gardens or in the art studio. The Sons of God find the revelation of the the divine in books, Church, Temple, Mosque, and in the teachings of religious authorities.

In past posts, we contrasted these types for their good and not so good attributes but what about their tendencies towards illness? The destiny of the world is to be created anew by the humble work of consciously striving individuals and small communities. An important component of creation is the healing or ‘accommodation’ of illness. The primary ‘mental’ illness of the masculine, “Widowson’s” spirit is autism, for the Sons of God, the feminine spirits, it primarily manifests as Down’s syndrome. Rudolf Steiner predicted that autism would become quite common in the world towards and after the millennium as a natural response to the hostile spiritual conditions that would then prevail.

The phrase ‘fish don’t know they are wet’ has a power to it for the Widowson - it reminds us that the soul in its natural environment lacks self-consciousness. In this ‘Age of the Fish (Pisces)” we only gain consciousness through the rather brutal pain of being tossed out on the ‘dry land’ of physical existence.

Why would such an unpleasant fact be true?

I recently watched a video of a conversation between a great thinker and a musician about these ideas and both of them expressed the same sense of ‘I didn’t sign up for this horror show…. how can there be such a thing as a benevolent loving God when THIS is the situation we find ourselves in?’ ‘why would God condone such evil as we see it at work in the world today, let alone create it?’ and ‘if there is such a thing as reincarnation, I don’t want to come back.’ This is precisely the kind of soul disposition that leads a spirit to choose autism as a means of mitigating these experiences.

We are collectively and individually experiencing ‘the apocalypse’ - divine ‘revelations’ - we are experiencing the birth pangs of our immortal selves - we are in the process of overcoming death and physical suffering, winning our own individual Freedom and building the foundations for human Love.

It is the same story, however it is told - through myth, illness, science, religion, art, ‘hate speeching rants,’ down to its simplest form - math or geometry. At birth, the human body is divided halfway in length by the point it which it receives all its sustenance through the umbilical cord. The body, as it grows, changes in proportion, and at the time of puberty, when it gains the power to produce life, the human form is divided in length at the organs of reproduction.

Humanity, as a whole, is only now just slightly beyond of the halfway point of the totality of our cosmic evolution - we are halfway between ‘birth’ (as speck of dust originally) ‘reunification’ with God (over the course of seven ‘Big Bangs’ in all). We are just finishing with receiving the last of the sustenance and direct guidance we’re to receive from our grand cosmic leaders and just entering into the time of becoming co-creators of the cosmos (at the moment we’re halfway through the 4th Big Bang).

All of this horror, terror, fear, illness - existence between death and evil, has the great and magnificent purpose to sustain the sense of individuality we are acquiring - all the way up to, and including, the reunification with our ultimate source (when nothing but cosmic bliss is to be experienced).

With the pulling back of the benevolent, human-centered, life-purpose-and-direction-giving spiritual guides, we now are left virtually alone with the three classes of demons who inhabit the earth with us. These are former human spirits who failed to ‘become human’ when faced with the situation we now have before us. Some beings have failed throughout all of the previous 3 big bangs to ‘become human’ - they are the torturer/annihilator ‘black goo’ creatures whose only pleasure comes from human suffering. These are the Asuras. The ones who failed twice are the beings of “Ahriman” they wish to replace our individualized consciousness with one singular materialistic mind - to turn humanity into one grand insect or machine-like colony (Ahriman is known as the “Lord of the Flies” in the Old Testament and “The Two-Horned Beast” in the Book of Revelations). Lucifer, Prometheus, Loki, is the closest to us, just having failed once - he is destined to be redeemed in our time through our help (as described in the myth of Hercules). Lucifer, is among other things, the Pedophile (and also rules over the powers of sex/drugs/ and various technological indulgences. Torture/Annihilation, Materialism (possession, illness), Molestation (ego-power imbalances) are the name of the horns these devils possess.

According to Rudolf Steiner, we indeed, did not ‘sign up’ for this situation nor was this part of the original divine plan for human evolution. Human beings were destined to exist like sleeping children, without suffering, illness, or death for most of the duration of this “Big Bang,” culminating in a gentle awakening to receive ‘Cosmic Love.’ Lucifer and his class of ‘failed humans’ were tasked with winning ‘Cosmic Freedom’ in the previous Big Bang. Lucifer transferred his burden of failure, guilt, uselessness, along with his egotism and attendant gifts, to humanity through his original act of molestation of the human soul (stealing the fire of the gods and giving it to humanity or seducing us with the fruit of the ‘tree of knowledge.’) Human beings were thereby woken up and 'kicked out of the Garden of Eden’ to live on the Earth, which was, and is, a foreign home. Earth is literally Hell - literally the ‘devil’s playground,’ laboratory, etc… If you take yourself ‘for granted’ and consider this ‘your natural home’ it is quite correct to think of these outside intelligences and influences as ‘alien.’ They certainly are. If you think of 'heaven’ as our home, if you consider the words of Christ as true - ‘My Kingdom is not of this World’ - then we ourselves are the strangers, alien to this place.

Where is the relief? Where is the comfort? Where is the sustenance to endure all this? From now on, we only have each other (including the ‘lesser beings’ as well - animals, fairies, gnomes, sylphs, undines etc..) and our various mental strategies, illnesses, vices, religions, or arts to sustain us. It is in our current destiny and necessity to create - from the ground up - outside in, and inside out, all of our own environments, tools and systems to facilitate our evolution. Our alien masters know us much better than we know ourselves - especially when it comes to group dynamics, thought systems, environments of feeling, and the mechanisms of will. Our first essential step is therefore to acquire the ‘philosopher’s stone’ - to find a center point in our own self which is indeed free from the substances and influences of ‘the world’ and consciously make this ‘stone’ the ‘cornerstone’ of our own personal selfhood.

But such a simple task becomes seemingly impossible amidst this landscape of fiercely competing interests. To begin with, we have at least a few natural and unnatural inversions to deal with. The first ‘planned inversion’ is we’ve gone from the Age of Aries (c. 750 BC to c. 1400 AD) (idealistic thought - individuation achieved through taming the passions with the mind through the axiom ‘know thyself’) and we are now living in the age of Pisces (c. 1400 - 3500 AD). Aries rules over the head - home of the ‘crown chakra’ in which streams our individual human spirit and access to the world of ‘the forms.’ Pisces rules over the feet - a complete flip in orientation! What enters through the feet? Evil. Aries is the Idealist… Pisces is the ‘dissolver’ the Psychic. This watery age is dissolving all the forms and structures of the past to clear the way for the future. It is a time of chaos where the only surety is the ‘prison/container’ of our bodies and physical surroundings. The positive side of this is we are learning how to develop good habits of intuition and instinct and to place a greater value on consciousness than intellect. We were philosophers in the past - we are becoming artists now.

The unnatural flip has to do with materialism and turning the power of the western “New World Order” into shackles rather than a platform of liberation. More than anything else today the ‘warrior/builder/artist’ suffers from this. Of course there is material abundance enough for ‘everyone’ to live a life of security and freedom and pursue happiness according to one’s own conscience. This is natural - this was designed for and by ‘us.’ It is not fair - human beings won the freedom and possessed the material gifts to sustain it only to have them taken away by demonic systems. It is further unfair that the power to ‘win back the freedom and material’ is simply not to be found in the system as it exists today.

Demonic programs manifest and operate according to a few simple rules that automatically exclude the human spirit. They are always of a larger scale than is manageable by human-led community, they operate according to a rules-based ‘take-it-or-leave it’ contract that thrives on the appropriation of personal will and the injection, manipulation, and harvesting of emotion.

This ‘platform’ is a great example of this - what an incredible collection of geniuses all gathered together in a forum-like environment! But if one compares the imagination, expectations and creative possibilities to what actually occurs - is there any denial that this is yet another infinitely manipulative and anti-human machine?

Not to complain (don’t ban me, bro) - it is just that what seems natural, human, and hopeful - competing ideas towards universal acceptance, community building and consensus in action, is a complete illusion - forever a promise never delivered. It is worse than a waste of time - almost all efforts are counter-productive and how many of us spend more time mitigating exposure and opposition than co-creating with peers?

Yet what to do? There has to be some way to dismantle the various torture chambers that await us, to protect children from sexual, violent, emotional, monetary, and spiritual predators, to protect the working class or good people that will not naturally place selfish interests above the ‘common good,’ - or, heck, what about all those who are still slowly dying away in cubicle farms?

Solutions based on power merely transfer the problem to one demon or another and meanwhile they constantly come up with ‘world solutions’ to problems that are anything but. Case in point - it seems there was just announced a universal cure for Down’s Syndrome. This comes a day or so after I watched a great video from a post of QA’s about the ‘spiritual healing benefits of cats.’ People with Down’s syndrome possess a similar power - they are mighty beings of love who absorb and deflect the evils of Ahrimanic materialism. Their’s is an opposite but equal reaction that autism affords the “Widowsons.”

In the case of each illness the human spirit pulls back just enough to benefit from the present incarnation but ‘reserves ego forces’ for a stronger incarnation in the next earthly life. Steiner said many of the greatest spirits choose to have a life of this type in order to prepare for the next (his brother being such a one). When Steiner was a very young man he took on tutoring a 10 year old autistic boy (Otto Specht), who was mostly non-verbal. Within a couple of years the boy had no symptoms of autism and later became an renown medical doctor who founded probably the most ‘successful’ modern program to treat a variety of ‘mental disorders.’ More than a hundred years later, I had the privilege of seeing one such program in operation when I was a child living in a “Steiner community.”

It was no kind of power that ‘cured’ Otto Specht, no more than it will be power that stops child molesters, torturers, or pestilence producers. According to Steiner, it was a practice of an art that cured Otto Specht (essentially… it’s an interesting story, he asked that the practice not be observed or documented). He said that it is well within the means of anyone with autism to be ‘brought in to full incarnation.’ But he also said that the individual or community that helps facilitate the healing must also bear responsibility for the results. To invite a human to live in the world and then deliver them raw to evil is in itself a karmic tragedy. We not only must become healers through the practice of art, but also priests and shepherds that bear responsibility for our work once completed.

This is the kind of paganism the world so desperately needs - inspired by the deeds and stories of the past but completely updated to address our modern problems.