Still Alice, Still Steiner

Rudolf Steiner had a great appreciation of “the Easter mysteries” and always comes to my mind around Easter. I read him a lot at one time in my life and still find him very helpful in the spiritual quest, despite there being certain things he writes about which are difficult for me to understand, such as the bits about re-incarnation, the etheric body, and Atlantis. Still, I think that a study his life, works, and writings is well worth the time and effort, and I have kept coming back to him over the years.

I recently read Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival and some Steiner commentary on it in The Mysteries of the Holy Grail, from Arthur and Parzival to Modern Initiation, Compiled and edited by Matthew Barton, 2010.

Here is a nice sample of Steiner:

“When someone becomes cleverer and cleverer, in the sense in which it is fashionable to call people clever today, he develops certain forces in his soul which, in this incarnation, may render him very acute when discussing materialistic ideas; yet certain vital forces necessary for the human organism are worn away. And when such a person has only absorbed these, typical, dregs of modern education, in his next incarnation he will lack the forces required to build up the human organism. The 'cleverer' a person is by the standards of our day, and the closer his intellectual attunement to them, the more of an imbecile he will be in a later incarnation. Those categories and concepts which relate only to the sense-perceptible outer world and the ideas which constitute it, set up a configuration in the soul which may be ever so fine intellectually but lack the force to work intensively on the brain and to make use of it; and to be unable to make use of the brain while in the physical body is to be an imbecile.”

I think it is possible to get a lot out of his statements like that, even if we use the word “incarnation” to mean just a particular phase of our present life on Earth. In fact, we often do use the word in that sense, such as when I myself refer to my previous life as a bookseller or as a sociologist.

But there is another reason that Steiner was in my mind today: I saw the contemporarily highly popular film entitled “Still Alice.” Alice is stricken with Alzheimer's Disease in the story, and we witness her decline from being highly capable and intellectual to basic incompetence, not to say imbecility.

But her daughter relates a spiritual vision to her in the last scene, the essence of which is that this isn't all there is, that we are spirits, and that we still exist beyond this. “Nothing is ever lost,” the daughter tells Alice.

I walked home from the theater in bright sunshine, with harbingers of spring all around, the first buds on trees, with Easter on its way, thinking of my dear old friend, Betty Stocks, whom I lost to Alzheimer's not long ago. Those last words just felt right, rang right, in every way!