This was the question the old man put to the velvet skies clotted with stars one cool autumn evening when again he could not fall asleep.
He remembered the words of Rudolf Steiner.
'The stars once spoke to human beings..
It is world destiny that they are silent now
To become aware of this silence can be pain for earth humanity
But in the deepening silence
There grows and ripens what human beings speak to the stars
To become aware of this speaking
Can become strength for Spirit Man.'
In silence he allowed his eyes to linger, not upon the stars themselves, but upon what lived between them. Here his open eyes gazed at the glowing weaving movement between the stars, the flames of warmth that glowed from this star to that and from that star to this. This warm flame he felt even in his own old heart.
'There speaks the spirit!' he said to himself. 'It speaks forth from star to star and I feel it, it speaks to me but not in words and so I do not understand it! I feel this speech in my heart, ringing its tones and notes that are silent, moving my blood and I allow it to live there resounding! This speech is love and I feel it comes from the Seraphim, the gods of love, who bestow upon my blood the quickening power of love, the fire of the spirit that enables me to say 'I'! When I step out into the world full of love for all there is and I unite my 'I' selflessly with the world, this is true feeling. It is a listening of the words of the Gods! '
He looked again and observed how this glow, like the glow of a flame, must have a source, a light, and he searched for it and he found this light in each individual star. Each star had a light that created the glow of love he could see moving and weaving from star to star. He could see how the light impulse came from the centre of each star and moved outwards in loving conversation and he smiled.
'Ah! There think the souls of the stars!' He marvelled, 'The stars think and then they speak to each other their intelligences! I can read the wisdom of the stars as one can read words! Each star gives and takes the loving thoughts of the other into itself in complete harmony creating spiritual letters that must combine harmoniously to make words!
The old man reasoned, 'Thinking in the spiritual worlds is pure harmony, and this harmony is formed from the forces of the Cherubim. In my own soul there lives a pale shadow of this thinking in language which has helped me to know I am different from the world outside me, but for this reason it is not in harmony with the truth, because I only think about what I see of the physical world. The truth only comes from cultivating the light that can add the spirit counterpart to the physical world. This is 'reality'. True thinking is a light that shines from inside out just like the light of the stars and it finds harmony when it connects with the thoughts of the Gods which have built the world! Only then, when I add seeing the words to listening to the sounds can I understand what the stars are trying to say to me.'
'But how can I speak to you when I live in a physical body? What is the answer that I must give to you, dear stars?' He looked at the great galaxies full of fixed and wandering stars, and he knew that they were sustained in the heavens by some unseen power.
'You, dear stars, do not only have a spirit and a soul, but you must also have a body! The body is what gives you the strength to exist in the heavens and yet it is the most hidden of all! Unlike the human being whose body is more visible than the soul and spirit, the body of the stars is elusive. And yet!' he thought. 'My body may be visible to others but its workings are elusive to me! I am not conscious of the workings of my body. What works in the body of the stars and in my body is life. What is life in spiritual terms if not consciousness! I see now! There lives your sustaining power in the dark, hidden aspect of each star! The aspect that is not seen but only remembered in what I see! It is what lives behind the seen world, on the other side of the veil live the spiritual beings that sustain the loving thoughts and speech I can observe and understand. The consciousness that lives behind the stars is aeons old, full of wisdom and this wisdom lives in me because of the thrones who have brought life into the will in my limbs! In my limbs I embody the wisdom, the memory of the stars and that is why my physical body is the most perfect part of me! I can say I, because of this perfection!'
The old man was warmed through and through and enlivened and quickened by these contemplations despite the night growing colder and colder about him.
'I understand you, dear stars!' He said to jewels above. 'You are always speaking to me...but I did not see or hear or understand you! Now I have become conscious of what you need from me! You need me to do loving deeds out of conscious freedom. Conscious love freely given is something new, it is a new kind speech!
'I realise now that it is through me that you can know the true nature of speech! Since Christ left the spiritual world to make it possible for me to say 'I', this has been your question to humanity!' The old man marvelled. 'For what do you stars see when you look down from the heavens?' He laughed with joy and gratitude. 'You see stars! You feel the warmth of our speech as a glow of spirit, you see the light of our spiritual thoughts and you are sustained by observing our conscious loving deeds, the movements we make as we mark a path across your night sky because something lives within us - a higher consciousness that you wish to know again!'
'My question to you was therefore really my answer. 'The true nature of the word lives in me! It is I - the Christ which lives in me that I body forth into the world! The strength of the Spirit in Man!'
Full of love he took himself to bed.
That night he slept well.
The man is an Egyptian priest. He is a priest because he is one of the few still capable of communing with the upper Gods collectively called - Osiris. When he stands before the stars and observes the patterns of light they make, he looks into his soul to find understanding, into that part of him that still remembers the language of God, this he knows is the Isis in his soul, which the Greeks call Theososophia - the wisdom of God.
Though he cannot see Isis, like the priests of older times, he has always been able to hear her interpretations, and because he is unclouded by personal feelings he has been made the chief of all priests. Isis helps him and his priests to know many things of great importance for the guidance of his people and while ever he can read the words in the stars and understand them through Isis selflessly, he is able to lead the priestly circle to direct the people in a way that is wise and just and fruitful.
One day something creeps into his nightly ritual, when with the other twelve he looks up to what the stars would say. A longing rises in him for something other than the words of the gods, he desires to speak out his own words, what lives in his own thoughts and instead of intoning the 'We' he intones the forbidden word - 'I'! Immediately there rings out a stern and awful warning which shakes him and the other priests to their very foundations. He has mingled his own self into the prayers and this has polluted the ritual. He has to leave the circle and never return and he is shunned from the temple forever. He is too egoistic to be a priest.
In his next life the Egyptian priest returns again with a certain attitude of soul which longs for nature. He wants to be a farmer but his life has led him into that army which follows the God of the Sun, the young Alexander, into Egypt.
He is an honourable man and a good soldier, and his common sense leads Alexander himself to take note of him on more than one occasion, and so he is given many responsibilities. He is outwardly honoured but inwardly sad for he does not like this foreign land they call Egypt and he does not trust the decadence of its priests.
To all he seems an ordinary man but he has a special gift. At certain moments, unbidden by him, he is able to dream into nature and to observe there the workings of the lower gods collectively called Dionysus. In those moments he sees Demeter and although she never speaks he discerns her intentions in relation to those gods, in that part of his soul that is one with nature, that part that Aristotle is said to have called, Philosophy.
At a certain point upon the army's march in the south lands they begin to traverse a narrow beach close by a hard cliff wall. Here he sees the Goddess and she points to the tide and he understands that the army will not reach higher ground before it turns again. He hesitates, for surely this is only a dream! It is plain to see that higher ground is near and they will have time to reach it. He will not bother the generals with a dream and entice their ridicule!
But the cart carrying provisions loses a wheel in the sand and by the time it is repaired the tide has turned. Many men and horses perish and the soldier realises with bitterness and sorrow his mistake and decides that he has failed the Goddess and her consort Alexander - the God of the Sun - the image of Apollo on earth! He tells himself he is too cowardly for Revelation and so he closes his eyes to his dreams and the world of nature loses its colour. When he returns home he does not buy a farm but turns his eyes to books and becomes very learned about the natural world though no one could guess it, for on the surface he seems just a simple man.
In his next life he returns again, this time as a teacher. One day this teacher, now a woman, learns about biodynamic farming and she takes herself to a conference being given locally about it. She finds that she is drawn to the speaker because he is a great philosopher, a clear thinker like Aristotle, who speaks about the spirit in nature and the language of the stars without a trace of dreaminess or priestly dogma. She feels he is enchanting memories from the depths of her soul of things she has always known in a different way. These fill her heart with warmth and enthusiasm, but most of all a desire to learn more about this Anthroposophy he teaches, and so she embarks on a deep study.
She finds that the more she studies, the more she senses in her soul an impression, in that place where she is used to sensing what is right and what is wrong during quiet moments of reflection. This part of her is that part that helps her to understand herself and now she realises that something lives there and that it is a being called Anthroposophia - the wisdom in the human being. She realises that she has always felt the guidance of this being in her heart. And she knows that although Anthroposophia lives in all human beings only those who are truly conscious of her can call themselves Anthroposophists, just as those who were once conscious of her could call themselves priests and philosophers. She also realises that because this being is a part of her, its life is dependent upon her own consciousness. This fills the teacher with a great urgency. She must teach young children in such a way that they will become conscious of this being. So she goes to the great lecturer and he gives her the task of teaching in the first Waldorf School.
Here she meets those priests from whose circle she was once banished, these are her peers; she meets those soldiers who died on that beach in Phoenicia because she was afraid of being ridiculed, these are her pupils. More and more when she walks in nature she begins to see the spirit behind everything in the world, and when she gazes out at the stars she begins to understand the pattern-language of the gods. She can say 'I' and she is not in a dream! She knows she can do this because many lives have prepared her to find within her the Wisdom, the Isis/Sophia of Christ.
The boy is walking on a beach. He looks ahead as he walks on the sand and does not see the foot prints made by his feet because his focus is on the view ahead and what might be around the corner, his destination. At one point he turns around but as he sees no footprints, because the sea has wiped them away, he is sad. He had a faint but dim impression that he had come from somewhere but now he can see that he only exists while ever he is moving forward and looking ahead and so he vows never to look behind again. To look behind is to face the nothingness of his being.
When he reaches his destination for the night, therefore, he can't remember how he got there, but he doesn't care. What is important is what will happen around the next corner during his walk the next day. This preoccupies him and fills him also with a certain fear.
Later, however, a voice in his heart tells him.
"If you are making footprints when you walk, surely you must have left footprints behind you? This means you are always in a different place from where you have been.'
He tells this voice he has no evidence and as he won't look backwards he vows to find evidence for what is behind him by observing what is ahead.
On his next walk he begins to gather shells and sand and other things, trying to explore their properties for any clue. He studies the sea that comes and goes and the sky that hangs over him in its vast and endless blueness. The sand, sky and surf are always there, ahead and in front, surely this will help him to understand where he has come from? He calls this gathering up of evidence of what he can see, Science. But this helps him to know only about what he isn't, and nothing about what he truly is and where he has come from.
So he decides he must understand how his legs move the way they do, the muscles, sinews, veins and arteries. He investigates his heart and lungs and finally his head because his eyes are what help him to see where he is going, and though they never see what is around a corner which inspires fear, he thinks they must surely be capable of explaining where he has been. And yet he doesn't use his eyes to look behind him again, because he will be too sad when he finds nothing.
One day he realises that there is a bird always following him, and this gives him comfort though this bird flies too high for him to see it clearly. Even so, that voice in his heart tells him to walk tall and to keep watching the bird because it might lead him to where he should be going.
In the evening as he sits by his fire, however, he is still no closer to understanding how he got here again he assuages his concerns by trying to think of what his journey might be like tomorrow. Yet again when he thinks about what could be around the corner it frightens him, because he is frightened of what he can't see. He is only comforted by the thought that if he keeps doing the same things he has been doing always, and if he follows the right path, that is, always looking ahead, he will eventually find not only a better place but also someone who can tell him about where he has been - he calls faith in what he can't yet see, religion.
One day he hears a voice in his heart say, 'get up and look for the bird'.
Because the sea is rough he decides not to walk so close to the shore and when he sees the great bird flying overhead he is so taken with joy in following its flight that without realising he turns around and notices something quite extraordinary! He notices his footprints and they lead around the corner! They are soon washed away by the pounding surf but he follows them and finds where he has slept the night before! At first he wonders if it isn't an illusion, and realises that by mistake he has left something of himself there. This is what helps him to recognise his sleeping place. So he begins to walk backwards to every place he has slept, and he sees signs of where he has been and with each walk he grows more and more certain that he will find his origins.
One day he comes to a hut.
In this hut he finds his mother and father. They have been waiting for him to find his way home.
The boy says to them - why did you not come and find me? I have been lost! Why did you leave me alone to walk so far from you? Science and Religion didn't help me to find you. It was the bird! I turned around, saw the bird and retraced my steps!
The mother says, 'Yes! You had to leave us, so you could find us again in this new way, a way that is not science or religion but something born out of the two! You were never alone, I was the voice in your heart and your father was the bird that followed you on your walk. Now you can go forward with joy for what is behind you and with confidence for what is in front of you, because you can see and hear that we are always with you.
