 |
| Veil Mysteries on our ranch. |
Thinning of the Veil: Remembering the Dead
When you look back, you often see what brought you to where you are. There are the mentors and teachers, the happy accidents, the inspirations and intuitions you followed, or not. Anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner would say that the dead are also assisting you, those you have known either in this life and/or in past incarnations. He says the dead are intensely interested in our life here on earth, that there are things that we can do only in this plane, and that humanity is of one piece, the dead and the living, separated by that veil of unconsciousness.
As the veil continues to thin this week, it is a good time to remember our dead and ruminate upon the insights and intuitions that we have received from them. The Day of the Dead is such a time of remembrance. Many cultures recognize the importance of the ongoing relationships with the ancestors, i.e., the dead, although our western European culture has not over the last couple of hundred years, losing contact with this resource and shrinking our spiritual capacities. Remembering and sending our gratitude is a way to speak with them.
I had already engaged the old man [Philemon/Elijah] in an interesting conversation; and, quite against all expectations, the old man had assumed a rather critical attitude toward my kind of thinking. He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but, according to his views, thoughts were like animals in a forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air. He said, “If you should see people in a room, you would not say that you made those people, or that you were responsible for them.” Only then I learned psychological objectivity. . . . For the understanding of the unconscious we must see our thoughts as events, as phenomena. We must have perfect objectivity. (1925/1989, 95)
In learning psychological objectivity we must learn to receive, to approach our thinking, each other, the natural world, the unconscious, and yes, the dead! in a state of receptive openness and humility. Only then can we learn the energetic language of the Other.