Freeing ourself from our past : Tulsa King

  

Harry closed his eyes. He never wanted to open them again. His heart sent this message to his molecules: "For reasons obvious to all of us, this galaxy is dissolved."
— Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

In 1965 I was a high-school senior in Tulsa. Will Rogers High School, a 3-year public school with 3,000 students. The Will Rogers Ropers. Well, as everyone knows, sometimes you're the roper, and sometimes you're the roped. One beautiful late-May day as we were filing into the auditorium for our last general assembly I was told that the principal would be calling me up to the stage to congratulate me on being a National Merit Scholar. Well can I just say that I could no more walk up onto that stage than I could fly to the moon: as the son of an outrageously alcoholic father, I had always tried to be invisible. So when the principal called out my name I didn't — I couldn't — move a muscle during the entire soul-crucifixion. Finally, blessed relief: "Lawrence seems not to be here today." Sometimes you seize the moment, and Sometimes the moment seizes you. This too shall pass — yes, but you'll never be the same.

 

When I told my parents what had happened, my father told me that the answer to the question "Why me, Lord?" is "Because you piss me off."

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The Wall

"In the beholding of God we do not fall;

in the beholding of ourselves we may not stand."

                          — Julian of Norwich

Rudolf Steiner:

This is one side of the picture. The other is something that can be linked up with this review of our relations to others. It is when we try to become more and more objective about ourselves. Here we must also go back to our earlier years. Then we can directly, so to speak, go to the facts themselves. Suppose you are 30 or 40 years of age. You think “How was it with me when I was ten years old? I will imagine myself entirely into the situation of that time. I will picture myself as another boy or girl of ten years old. I will try to forget that I was that; I will really take pains to objectify myself.” This objectifying of oneself, this freeing of oneself in the present from one's own past, this shelling-out of the Ego from its experiences, must be specially striven for in our present time. For the present has the tendency towards linking up the Ego more and more with its experiences.

Nowadays man wants to be instinctively that which his experiences make him. For this reason it is so very difficult to acquire the activity which Spiritual Science gives. The spirit must make a fresh effort each time. According to true occult science, nothing can be done by comfortably remaining in one's position. One forgets things and must always be cultivating them afresh. This is just as it should be because fresh efforts need to continually be made. He who has already made some progress in the realm of Spiritual Science attempts the most elementary things every day; others are ashamed to pay attention to the basics. For Spiritual Science, nothing should depend on remembering, but on man's immediate experience in the present. It is therefore a question of training ourselves in this faculty — through making ourselves objective — that we picture this boy or girl as if he or she were a stranger at an earlier time in our lives; of bestirring ourselves more and more, of getting free of events, and of being less haunted at 30 by the impulses of a 10-year-old.

Detachment from the past does not mean denial of the past. We gain it in another way again, and that is what is so important. On the one hand, we cultivate the social instinct and impulses in us by looking back upon those who have been connected with us in the past and regarding our souls as the products of these persons. In this way we acquire the imagination for meeting people in the present. On the other hand, through objectifying ourselves we gain possibilities of developing imagination directly. This objectifying of our earlier years is fruitful insofar as it does not work in us unconsciously. Think for a moment: If the 10-year-old child works on unconsciously in you, then you are the 30- or 40-year-old augmented by the 10-year-old. It is just the same with the 11-, the 12-year-old child, and so on. Egoism has tremendous power, but its power is lessened when you separate the earlier years from yourself and when you make them objective. This is the important point on which we must fix our attention.

The following precondition for social activity must be made clear to those people who raise social claims in unreasonable and illusory fashion: Understanding about how man can develop himself as a socially creative being must first be present in this period, when anti-social forces are growing ever stronger as part of human evolution.

Source: The Rudolf Steiner Archive

December 12, 1918