The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Freedom of Man and the Michael Age

[ 1 ] In man's ability to remember lives the personal image of a cosmic force that has worked on the human being in the way that the last observations have shown. However, this cosmic force is still active today. It works as a growth force, as an invigorating impulse in the background of human life. There it works with its greater part. It separates only a small part of itself, which enters the consciousness soul as activity. There it acts as a power of memory.

[ 2 ] This power of memory must be seen in the right light. - When man perceives with the senses in the present epoch of cosmic becoming, this perception is an instantaneous lighting up of worldimages in consciousness. The illumination comes when the sense is directed towards the external world; it illuminates the consciousness; it disappears when the sense is no longer directed towards the external world. - What lights up in the human soul: it must not last. For if man did not bring it out of his consciousness in time, he would lose himself to the content of consciousness. He would no longer be himself. Only for a short time, in the so-called afterimages that interested Goethe so much, is the "glow" allowed to live in consciousness through perception. This content of consciousness must not solidify into being; it must remain image. It must not become real any more than the image in the mirror can become real.

[ 3 ] Man would lose himself to something that lived itself out as reality in consciousness just as he would lose himself to something that had duration through itself. There, too, he could no longer be himself.

[ 4 ] So the sensory perception of the outside world is an inner painting of the human soul. A painting without painting substance. A painting in becoming and passing away of the spirit. Just as the rainbow arises in nature and passes away without leaving a trace, so perception arises and passes away without leaving remembrance through its own being.

[ 5 ] But at the same time as every perception, another process takes place between the human soul and the external world. One that lies in the more distant part of the soul's life. There, where the forces of growth, where the life impulses are at work. In this part of the soul's life, not only a temporary image, but a permanent, real image is imprinted on perception. The human being can bear this, because it is connected with the being of the human being as the content of the world. As this takes place, he can no more lose himself than he can lose himself, since he grows and nourishes himself without his full consciousness.

[ 6 ] When a person now retrieves his memories from within himself, this is an inner perception of what has remained in the second process that takes place in outer perception.

[ 7 ] The soul paints again, but now the past that lives within the human being. Again, in consciousness, this painting must not form a permanent real, but only an emerging and passing image.

[ 8 ] So in the human soul, perceptive imagination and memory are connected.

[ 9 ] But the powers of memory constantly strive to be more than they can be if man, as a self-conscious being, is not to lose himself.

[ 10 ] For the powers of memory are remnants of the past in becoming human and as such come into Lucifer's sphere of power. He endeavors to condense the impressions of the outside world in the human being in such a way that they continually shine as representations in the consciousness.

[ 11 ] This Luciferian endeavor would be crowned with success if the power of Michael did not work against it. It does not allow what is painted in the inner light to congeal into being, but preserves it in the emerging and passing image.

[ 12 ] The surplus power, however, which pushes up through Lucifer from the human inner being, will be transformed into imagining power in the Michael age. For gradually the power of imagination will enter the general intellectual consciousness of mankind. - In this way, however, man will not burden his present consciousness with permanent realities; these will remain effective in images that arise and pass away. With his imaginations, however, man reaches up into a higher spiritual world, just as he reaches into his own human nature with his memories. Man does not keep the imaginations within himself; they are drawn into the cosmic being; and from this he can paint them again and again in the pictorial-imaginative life.

[ 13 ] So what Michael preserves from congealing within the human being is absorbed by the spiritual world. What the human being experiences from the power of conscious imagination becomes world content at the same time. That this can be so is a result of the Mystery of Golgotha. The power of Christ imprints the human imagination on the cosmos. The Christ power that is connected with the earth. As long as it was not connected to the earth, but acted on the earth from the outside as solar power, all impulses for growth and life went into the human inner being. Man was formed and sustained by it from the cosmos. Since the Christ impulse lives with the earth, man in his self-conscious being is given back to the cosmos.

[ 14 ] Man has become an earth being from a world being; he is predisposed to become a world being again after he has become himself as an earth being.

[ 15 ] In this fact that man in his momentary imagination does not live in being, but only in a reflection of being, in an image-being, lies the possibility of the unfolding of freedom. All being in consciousness is a compelling one. Only the Bi/d cannot compel. If something is to happen through its impression, it must happen completely independently of it. - Man becomes free through the fact that he rises with his soul of consciousness from existence and emerges in the non-existent image being.

[ 16 ] There arises the significant question: Does man not lose being by leaving it with a part of his being and plunging into non-being?

[ 17 ] Here again is one of the points where one is faced with one of the great riddles when contemplating the world.

[ 18 ] What is experienced in consciousness as imagination has arisen out of the cosmos. Faced with the cosmos, man plunges into non-being. He liberates himself in imagination from all the forces of the cosmos. He paints the cosmos, outside of which he is.

[ 19 ] If it were only so, freedom would light up in the human being for a cosmic moment; but at the same moment the human being would also dissolve. But while in imagination man becomes free from the cosmos, he is still attached in his non-conscious soul-life to his previous earth-lives and lives between death and new birth. As a conscious human being he is in image-being, and he keeps himself with his unconscious in spiritual reality. While he experiences freedom in the present self, his past self holds him in being.

[ 20 ] In relation to being, in imagination man is completely devoted to what he has become through the cosmic and earthly past.

[ 21 ] In the development of man, the abyss of nothingness is indicated here, over which man leaps by becoming a free being. Michael's work and the Christ impulse make the leap possible.

Goetheanum, January 1925.
Guiding Principles No. 162 to 164
(February 22, 1925)

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Further guiding principles issued by the Anthroposophical Society at the Goetheanum (with reference to the preceding consideration of human freedom and the Michael era)

[ 22 ] 162. In imagination, man lives with his consciousness soul not in being, but in image-being, in non-being. Thus he is liberated from co-experience with the cosmos. Only being compels. If the human being is guided by images, then this is completely independent of the images, i.e. in freedom from the world.

[ 23 ] 163. In the moment of such imagination, man is related to the being of the world only through that which he has become from the past of his previous lives on earth and his lives between death and birth.

[ 24 ] 164. Man can only make this leap beyond non-being in relation to the cosmos through the activity of Michael and the Christ-impulse.