Primal Trust

I’ve just discovered, and am hugely enjoying, Gary Lachman’s work on esotericism. I’m feeling myself becoming ever more interested in Steiner’s spiritual education and its hopes of resisting the rising tide of materialism. I particularly liked this comment about cultivating a positive disposition towards life:

So it would not be an exaggeration, I think, to say that I have devoted my life to trying to get a decent grip on those fundamental existential questions: who am I, why am I here, and what am supposed to do now that I am? I do not consider myself a particularly “spiritual” person. I don’t like the term particularly, because it has acquired connotations that I find unhelpful. The historian Jacques Barzun—another mainstream thinker whose work has influenced me—once made a handy distinction between “spiritual” and “things of the spirit”. Barzun feels himself to be ”obedient to ‘spirit’, knowing that from it alone come the things that justify life —things, in Nietzsche’s words, ‘transfiguring, exquisite, mad, and divine’”. I know how Nietzsche and Barzun feel. Part of this “obedience” involves developing a trust in life, a bottom-line knowledge that, although it is a grim and difficult business, life ultimately means well by us. Gebser called this trust Urvertrauen, “primal trust”, as opposed to the angst we feel most of the time. You can say that I try to make this primal trust the default setting for my attitude toward life. This doesn’t let us off the hook. We still have to do the work. I’m not a believer in “letting go and letting God”. God has enough on his plate and passing the buck on to him only makes us lazy. Anything of value is achieved through our own efforts, including our own evolution. Having a primal trust in life helps us to make those efforts.

(from an interview with Aaoron Cheak here)