this is also a comment in the thread: "choice and life situations", which concerned itself with the question of whether a child incarnates knowing it will be abused...
Dear Friends,
There basic error we make in considering the above question is to assume that our activities as we get ready for our next incarnation are made from a state of consciousness at all like our earthly consciousness. Our state of being in higher devachan, and the nature of our perceptions, is nothing like how we view matters from the point of view of earthly consciousness.
No child (star-spirit) incarnates to be abused because there is nothing in their experience at the Midnight Hour which makes such questions as to which parents and the like that has anything at all to do with such set of conceptions ("being abused").
A couple of basics. In higher devachan we are outside space and time. So, for example, in the lectures to Priests and Doctors called Pastoral Medicine, Steiner describes the earthly sense of time, which we see as a line of say 3000 years, as not being a line at all, but something more like a very complicated and intricate knot. What we experience as linear is actually something all warped up in and around itself.
In a wonderful discussion some years ago on the Ark (a very fine spiritual discussion list that only lasted for a few years) the question was put as to how does Christ pay attention to all our different needs at the same time. The fact is that from His point of view he has all of Eternity, such that in His work with us he steps into Time from Eternity, and can therefore touch and pay attention to all 6 Billion plus human beings at what is essentially His leisure. He can be completely and fully devoted to us, as individuals, at any given moment, because time and space are irrelevant to His consciousness and His will.
An incarnating spirit does not experience the earth existence they are about to enter in any kind of way which we would normally put in words. You would have to imagine the whole soul and spirit in a state of ecstacy. Every aspect of the being of the incarnating spirit is filled with the most passionate possible feeling need and hunger to be in earthly life, for many "reasons", of which one of the main ones today is that Christ is there. Christ is no longer the "spirit" of the Sun Sphere of Cosmic existence, but the "Spirit" of the Earth, and to incarnate means to actually unite with Him in a way not fully possible during excarnation anymore.
Now the details are also not so much in the consciousness of the incarnating spirit either. Communities of Spiritual Beings have, for example, during the excarnation process relieved the excarnating spirit of much of its burdens. Unredeemed astrality is left behind and held by these Beings so that at the Midnight Hour we are entirley free of any dross at all. Only on the descent into incarnation are various difficult tendencies added to the astral body that will later be reflected in karma.
We also need to remember that as excarnate beings we can't change. We are what we are, and many spirits today never even get far from the earth at all (their excarnation process is greatly inhibited by materialism and its effects). When we do turn around and seek the earth experience again, we hunger for it, whatever its difficulties, for only this experience lets us develop - become. Of course there are all kinds of spiritual beings that try to interfer with a progressive evolution, and these form alliances with incarnate human beings in occult brotherhoods, such that together these try to cause all sorts of difficulties. The battle between Michael and the Dragon in the spiritual worlds has finished in heaven (it ended in 1879), and now goes on in and around the earth (see Steiner's lectures "The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness").
So what does an incarnting star-spirit "see" as it approaches life in the body on the earth? It sees its death in the spiritual world, followed by a birth in the material world, during which it will undergo the trial of the Phoenix, which during its biography burns the soul to ash, only to be once more reborn at the death in the material world and able then to return to its natural spiritual existence. In heaven we hunger for the earth. On the earth we hunger for heaven. The details are unimportant.
Does this mean we who suffer or observe suffering need to accept the horror and tribulations? Of course not! But that struggle with evil is the very purpose of the stage of the evolution of consciousness connected to the Consciousness Soul Age. We face today the Mystery of Evil, and in the biography we are fully engaged in such precisely in order to have certain experiences and to make certain choices ON THE EARTH, that can't be made in heaven. Further, we are never alone, never. We will feel alone, for that is part of the experience the I must face - to stand up alone. But factually we are never alone, for whole communities of spiritual beings surround us, and care for us.
Some will know this story, but others may not so I will repeat it (it comes from the work in 12 Step Circles). A man is with Christ, and looks back over his life as if it was steps in the sand on a beach. He sees two sets of steps, and then for a long time when there is only one set of steps (covering the periods of his worst life experiences). The man turns to Christ and says, why did you abandon me at my createst moment of need? And then Christ says, no, the reason there is only one set of steps during that period of your life is because that's when I carried you, because you could no longer carry yourself.
joel