The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Meditation

The meditator tries to gain a true idea of his physical body

[ 1 ] If the soul is devoted to the phenomena of the external world through the senses and through its imagination, then it cannot, in true introspection, say that it perceives these phenomena or that it experiences the things of the external world. For in truth it knows nothing of itself at the time of its devotion to the external world. The sunlight, which spreads out from the things in a multitude of colorful appearances in space, is actually experienced in the soul. If the soul rejoices over any process, it is itself joy at the moment of rejoicing, insofar as it knows about the thing. The joy is experienced in it. The soul is one with its experience of the world; it does not experience itself as something that rejoices, that admires, that delights or fears. It is joy, admiration, delight, fear. If the soul always wanted to admit this to itself, then the times in which it steps back from its experience of the outside world and contemplates itself would only appear to it in the right light. They would appear as a life of a very special kind, which at first is quite incomparable with the ordinary life of the soul. With this special kind of life, the riddles of the soul's existence begin to emerge in consciousness. And these riddles are basically the source of all other world riddles. - The outer world and the inner world present themselves to the human spirit when the soul ceases to be one with the outer world for a shorter or longer period of time and withdraws into the solitude of its own being.

[ 2 ] This withdrawal is not a simple process that takes place once and could then be repeated in the same way. Rather, it is the beginning of a journey into previously unknown worlds. Once you have begun the journey, every step you have taken becomes the occasion for others. And it is also the preparation for these further steps. It prepares the soul for the following ones. And with every step you take, you learn more about the answer to the question: What is man in the true sense of the word? Worlds open up that are hidden from the ordinary view of life. And yet in them alone lies that which can also reveal the truth about this contemplation of life. - Even if no answer is a comprehensive, definitive one, the answers that are gained through inner soul-walking are nevertheless those that go beyond everything that the outer senses and the intellect bound to them can give. And man needs this other thing. He realizes that this is so when he truly reflects on himself.

[ 3 ] First of all, sober, dry considerations are necessary for this journey. They provide the safe starting point for further penetration into the supersensible realms that the soul is ultimately concerned with. Some souls would like to spare themselves this starting point and immediately penetrate into the supersensible. A healthy soul, even if it has initially avoided such a consideration through aversion to it, will nevertheless give itself over to it later. For no matter how much one has learned about the supersensible from another starting point, one only gains secure ground beneath oneself through considerations of the kind that initially follow here.

[ 4 ] There may come moments in the life of the soul when it speaks to itself thus: You must be able to withdraw from everything that an outside world can give you if you do not want to be forced into a confession with which you cannot live, namely that you are only the absurdity experiencing itself. - What you perceive out there is there without you; it was without you and will be without you. Why do the colors feel themselves in you, since your feeling could be meaningless to them? Why do the substances and forces of the outside world form your body? It animates itself into your outer appearance. The outside world shapes itself into you. You realize that you need this body. Because without your senses, which only He can imagine for you, you could not experience anything in yourself to begin with. For the time being, you would be empty without your body. It gives you inner fullness and content. - And then all those considerations can arise without which a human existence cannot remain if it does not want to come into an unbearable contradiction with itself in certain times that come for every human being. This body - it lives in such a way that it is now an expression of the experience of the soul. Its processes are such that the soul lives through it and experiences itself in it. This will not be the case one day. What lives in the body will one day be subject to completely different laws than it is now, as it runs for me, for my soul's experience. It will be subject to the laws according to which substances and forces outside in nature behave, laws that no longer have anything to do with me and my life. The body, to which I owe my mental experience, will be absorbed into the general course of the world and will behave within it in such a way that it will no longer have anything in common with anything I experience within me.

[ 5 ] Such a consideration can bring all the shudders of the thought of death before the inner experience, without mixing into this impression the merely personal sensations which are usually connected with this thought in the soul. Such sensations have the effect that the calm, serene mood necessary for cognitive contemplation does not easily arise. - It is only too understandable that man wants to gain knowledge about death and about the life of the soul independently of the dissolution of the body. The way in which he approaches the questions under consideration here is, more than almost anything else in the world, apt to cloud the objective view and to accept answers as valid which are inspired by desire. But you cannot gain true knowledge in the spiritual realm unless you accept the "no" just as willingly as the "yes", like a completely uninvolved person. And one need only look conscientiously into oneself to be completely clear about the fact that one would not accept with the same equanimity the realization that with the death of the body the spiritual life also expires, like the other that speaks of the continued existence of the soul after death. Certainly, there are people who believe quite honestly in the annihilation of the soul with the dissolution of bodily life, and who arrange their lives with such a thought. But even for them it is true that their feelings are by no means unbiased in the face of this thought. However, they do not allow themselves to be carried away by the horrors of annihilation into feeling that the reasons of knowledge, which clearly speak for them, are drowned out by the desire to live on. In this respect, the ideas of such people are often more objective than those of others who, without realizing it, pretend or allow themselves to be deceived by reasons for survival because the desire for such survival burns in the secret recesses of their souls. But with the immortality deniers the bias is no less great. It is only of a different kind. There are those among them who have a certain idea of what life and existence mean. This idea leads them to think of certain conditions under which this life alone is possible. As they now look at existence, they realize that the conditions of spiritual life can no longer exist if the body ceases to exist. Such people do not realize that they have first formed a certain idea of how life can only be, and that for this reason alone they cannot believe that it continues after death, because their idea does not allow them to imagine a body-free existence. Although they are not biased by their wishes, they are biased by the ideas from which they cannot escape. There are still many biases in this area. One can only ever cite individual examples of what is present in this way.

[ 6 ] The thought that the body, in whose processes the soul lives itself out, will one day fall prey to the outer world and follow laws that bear no relation to the inner experience, allows the experience of death to come before the soul in such a way that no desire, no personal interest need interfere in the contemplation; that this experience can lead to a pure, impersonal question of knowledge. However, the feeling will soon arise that the thought of death is not significant for its own sake, but because it can shed light on life. One will have to come to the view that the riddle of life can be recognized through the essence of death.

[ 7 ] The fact that the soul desires its continuity should, under all circumstances, make it suspicious of all opinions it forms about this continuity. For why should the facts of the world care about what the soul feels? It might, according to its needs, feel itself senseless if it had to think that it could, like a flame that arises from the fuel, flare up from the material of its body and then go out again. It could behave in this way, even if it were perceived as pointless. - When the soul turns its gaze to the body, it should only reckon with what it can show it. It seems as if the laws are at work in nature, which bring the substances and forces into an interplay, and as if these laws govern the body, and after some time include it again in the general interplay.

[ 8 ] You may now turn this idea around as you like: it is certainly useful from a scientific point of view, but it proves to be quite impossible in the face of true reality. One can find that it alone is scientifically clear, sober, and that everything else is only subjective belief; one can well imagine this. But one cannot hold on to it with real impartiality. And that is what matters. It is not what the soul perceives as necessary through its nature that comes into consideration, but that which is revealed by the external world from which the body is taken. This external world absorbs its substances and forces after death. In it they then follow laws which are quite indifferent to what takes place in the human body during life. These laws (which are of a physical and chemical nature) relate to the body no differently than to any other inanimate thing in the external world. It is impossible to think otherwise than that this indifferent relationship of the external world to the human body does not only occur at death, but that it already exists during life. It is not from life that one can gain an idea of the share of the sensory outer world in the human body, but only by thinking: everything that is there in you as the carrier of your senses, as the mediator of processes through which your soul lives, is treated by the world that you perceive in the same way as your imagination, which wanders beyond your life. It reckons that a time will come in which you will no longer have all this about you in which you now experience yourself. Every other idea about the relationship of the sensory outer world to the body lets you feel by itself that it is not tenable in the face of reality. But the idea that the real part of the outer world in the body only comes to light after death does not come into conflict with anything that is truly experienced in the outer world and the inner world. The soul feels nothing unbearable at the thought that its substances and powers are subject to processes in the outer world that have nothing to do with its own life. In its depths, with completely unbiased devotion to life, it cannot discover any desire rising from the body that would make it uncomfortable at the thought of dissolution after death. The unbearable only occurs when the idea is formed that the substances and forces returning to the outer world take the experiencing soul with them. Such an idea would be unbearable for the same reason as any other that does not naturally result from the surrender to the revelation of the outside world.

[ 9 ] Giving the outside world a completely different share in the body's existence during life than after death is a thought that would have to be drawn from nothing. As a senseless thought it must always recoil from reality, whereas the idea is quite sound that the outer world has quite the same share in the body during life as after death. The soul, when it harbors the latter thought, feels itself to be entirely in harmony with the revelation of facts. It can feel that through this idea it does not come into discord with the facts, which speak for themselves and to which no artificial thought may be added.

[ 10 ] One does not always pay attention to how beautifully the natural, healthy feeling of the soul is in harmony with natural revelation. This could seem so self-evident that it would not be worthy of attention; and yet this seemingly insignificant thing is illuminating. There is nothing intolerable in the thought that the body will be dissolved into the elements; but there is something senseless in the thought that this will also happen to the soul. There are many humanly personal reasons which make this appear senseless; these must be disregarded by objective consideration. However, the completely impersonal devotion to what the outside world teaches shows that even during life no other share can be attributed to this outside world in the soul than after death. The decisive factor is that this thought arises as a necessary one and that it withstands all objections that can be raised against it. He who thinks it quite consciously feels it as an immediate certainty. In truth, however, both believers in immortality and deniers of immortality think this way. The latter will certainly say that the laws that are effective in the body after death also contain the conditions of its processes during life; but they are mistaken if they believe that they can really imagine that these laws stand in a different relationship to the body as a soul carrier during life than after death.

[ 11 ] It is only possible to imagine that the particular connection of forces that comes into manifestation with the body is just as proportionless to the body as soul carrier as the one that causes the processes in the dead body. This lack of participation does not exist for the soul, but it does for the substances and forces of the body. The soul experiences itself in the body; the body, however, lives with the external world, in it, through it, and does not allow the soul to be decisive for itself other than the processes of the external world. One must come to the conclusion that the warmth and coldness of the outside world are as decisive for the movement of blood in the body as the fear or the feeling of shame that take place in the soul.

[ 12 ] So one first feels the laws of the outside world at work in that very special context which manifests itself as the formation of the human body. One feels this body as a member of the outside world. But we are alienated from its inner context. External science is at present partly clarifying how the laws of the external world are combined in the very special being that presents itself as the human body. It is to be hoped that this knowledge will continue to advance in the future. How the soul must think about its relationship to the body cannot be changed in the slightest by this progressive realization. On the contrary, it will have to show ever more clearly that the laws of the outer world before and after death stand in the same relationship to the soul. It is an illusion to expect that, as our knowledge of nature progresses, the laws of the external world will reveal the extent to which bodily processes are the mediators of the life of the soul. One will recognize more and more clearly what takes place in the body during life; but the corresponding processes will always show themselves as such, which the soul perceives as external to it, like the processes in the body after death.

[ 13 ] Within the external world, therefore, the body must appear as a connection of forces and substances that exists for itself and is explainable in itself as a member of this external world. - Nature gives rise to the plant; it dissolves it again. It dominates the human body and allows it to decay within its being. If man faces nature with such a contemplation, he can forget himself and all that is in him, and feel his body as a member of the outside world in itself. If he thinks in this way about his relationship to himself and to nature, he experiences in himself what can be called his physical body.