Illness and the path of self development

    “In all the areas where modern individuality is developing we will gradually discover that the heart has to be involved again. Rudolf Steiner mentioned the fact that what will be discovered in the twentieth century is that the process of life is the same as the process as that of illness. Illness is usually experienced as something negative, as something bad. Even if we take homeopathic medicine, deep within us we have the feeling that illness is not good. Steiner says that this will change, and that the more we understand karma the more we will feel that illness allows development. That is why illness exists, that is why problems are there. Suffering and crises foster the development of forces that lie dormant within the human being. To understand this fully, however, one has to love the developing individual.” [Jaap van der Haar, in The Knights Templar ed. Gil McHattie, pg. 117]

   To be healthy in an ill world is more harmful than simple denial. Illness would lead any respectable thinker towards the ideas of reincarnation and karma. Otherwise we need to abandon ourselves to senseless suffering and a life divorced from meaning. Illness is not the recompense for a misdeed but an opportunity to connect with spirit.

   The obvious goal of health when one is ill may be misleading. Health is fine as long as it comes with an acceptance of illness and not its rejection. The goal is to walk in the light shed by illness, a light that wants to lead to understanding and not directly or necessarily to health. The goal is the development of wisdom through understanding illness, living with illness.

   The search for wisdom is the search for self knowledge, self development. Illness opens up a vista that can be accessed in no other way. The hardest thing to understand and accept is that health is lived malady.

   John 11:1 “Now a certain man was sick, named Lazarus…” The name Lazarus means the invalid. Yet here is the hoped for meaning of illness: that it leads to resurrection, initiation. Lazarus becomes the evangelist John. In the 1200’s Lazarus-John is initiated by the circle of 12 as a young boy. After this initiation the boy wastes away, his body “… became quite transparent, and for a few days he lay as though dead.” [R. Steiner, Esoteric Christianity and the Mission of Christian Rosenkreutz, pg 42] He awakens transformed and gives back to the 12 their individual streams of wisdom in a new form. He dies relatively young but reincarnates soon after in the 1300’s as Christian Rosenkreutz.