The Rudolf Steiner Archive

14. The Higher Development of Man

[ 1 ] In the wisdom schools of Plato and Pythagoras, students were only allowed to penetrate to the higher sources of knowledge after studying mathematics. Eternal wisdom was only revealed through pure selflessness, and mathematics was the only science that could educate people to this, because it serves no purpose, no selfish satisfaction, and only teaches the pure relationships, the pure laws of the basic forms.

[ 2 ] Man's development is a descent from the All-Unity to the particular and a gradual ascent in conscious freedom to the realization of his connection with the All and return to the General. Therefore, from the mental point of view, the dead stone is a model of the higher for man. In it the great connection is still preserved; in it only the law of causality is effective; what sets it in motion, it gives to the outside world. It extends from the mental into the physical, for pure thought is enclosed within it. Its life is only form. Thus the sun, which as a physical image of the Logos is at home in the mind, and the whole mineral kingdom can be regarded as a great laboratory of physical and chemical forces.

[ 3 ] With the plant, which has its origin one stage lower, in the astral, life begins and with it the process of isolation. It draws nourishment into itself from outside in order to increase in size; it wants to grow and spread. It is the beginning of egoism. However, the plant can develop one stage higher; it develops from the astral through the physical realm up to the etheric sphere. The animal that arises in the etheric sphere already feels, it not only wants food to grow, it wants to take from the outside world that which creates pleasure for itself and appropriate it. It feels life as pleasure and suffering; it rises and develops to the astral.

[ 4 ] And man as such, who has his origin in the physical and, as a creature of nature, has reached the point of perceiving the outside world and perceiving himself as an individual, is at his lowest in his egoism, yet he can elevate himself in thought to the mental sphere, although he can only perceive in the physical, because he lives with his brain and his visible body in the mineral kingdom. But he carries all the elements of the universe within him, he has passed through all the realms, and the powers of all rest in him as principles; he can consciously develop them from within himself. What we see is the physical body, it belongs to the mineral kingdom, but through prana, the life principle, it also lives in the etheric sphere of the plant world, it has its etheric body; and further, it also lives through sensation in the astral world, in its astral body, and through rational perception in the mental world, through the kama-manas principle. In the lower world, man possesses four bodies with the principles. But he is also connected to the higher world, since he has his origin there. He can develop his mental body and advance from the conception of the individual and the many to the idea of the type; he can develop the causal body and ascend to the higher world of the trinity of manas-budhi-atma. In the sphere of Budhi he will form his thoughts out of astral matter, he will be able to create the Mayavi-rupa body, he will live and work out of his causal soul, be a creator himself and become one again with the totality.

[ 5 ] This upper trinity, to which man must develop, is, however, in truth deeply hidden within him, it underlies his being; he must liberate it in succession – “As above, so below”. The multiplicity that we see is nothing other than the principle of unity, the Logos, which has dissolved into multiplicity. Disharmony can only arise in multiplicity because the many separateness, which are all parts of the spirit, can come into conflict with each other. When this multiplicity reunites to form a whole, our cosmos becomes a whole again, it becomes the Logos again, harmony. “As above, so below!” – Atma, the highest principle in our cosmos, in our mineral kingdom, to which we count the stars with their orbits and all the stars and all the forces in nature, has at the same time penetrated the deepest into matter; our physical organs are essentially animated and held together by Atma. Atma as the highest principle has its counterpart in the physical realm.

[ 6 ] The Budhi principle has only penetrated into the etheric and astral spheres, forming the essence of the plant and animal world, their etheric and astral bodies. When man, originally still in connection with the divine geniuses, forming a whole with them, separated into an individual being in the astral sphere and attained to ego-consciousness through imagination, then Manas, the third principle, descended into the astral sphere: united with Kama, enclosed in the brain of man, he formed his Kama-Manas body. Man has passed through all realms on the descending arc of his development. We carry Atma as a mineral cosmos within us; it is our physical body; Budhi as a living, sentient cosmos in our prana and kamakörper; and Manas, in its connection with Kama, forms our Kama-Manas-body. He is the fourth principle in the lower world and at the same time forms the transition to the higher mental world. It is the connecting bridge to it. When freed from all lower sheaths, manas reunites with budhi in selfless radiance into the universal.

[ 7 ] Of all the entities, the human being is most deeply immersed in egoism and a separate existence. He has absorbed everything and carries the whole trinity of Atma-Budhi-Manas within himself. In the mineral kingdom, Atma is spread out; it rests in its entirety in the rock, which is still directly connected to the cosmos. In the plant and animal world, dualism is already present; Budhi penetrates into the etheric and astral worlds, and the plant and animal world is built from life and sensation. Manas, wisdom, hovers above them and brings about the wisdom that is expressed in nature, in the wonderful conformity to law of the structure of all animals' rational actions. But man draws Manas into himself. Wisdom can no longer affect him from the outside. Bound up with Kama, enclosed in his mental body, wisdom is clouded for him. Man is a condensation into the single form of chemical-physical processes that take place in the mineral cosmos. Man is also active in the astral world through his feelings, desires and passions. He ceaselessly creates astral beings in that sphere, which have a truly living, material existence there, because the matter of the astral world consists of surging sensations such as envy, hatred, goodwill, anger and so on. There, the beings created by human feelings lead their special existence as elemental beings; there are also beings from other worlds that require the astral sphere for their development, and then there are the astral bodies of the souls awaiting their human incarnation. Furthermore, there are the devas, who also come from other worlds and often seek to influence people. There are the four Deva-Rajas, who form the physical bodies according to the astral scheme from the four elements of fire, water, air and earth, which the Lipikas, the lords of karma, have formed from the mental substance of the individuality.

[ 8 ] The higher development of man depends on conscious concentration and meditation, which must be practiced daily and carried out according to certain rules. By detaching himself daily, in the morning hours, even if only for five minutes, from all impressions of the outside world and directing all his concentration to a revealed thought of eternity, he will gradually connect with the cosmos and take part in its rhythmic movement. Through this consistent daily retreat from the transitory world of appearances, for the short time of his meditation, man gradually ascends to the Arupa sphere. By thinking through a sentence that contains an eternal universal truth, so that it takes on life, the human being draws out its entire content and absorbs it. The control of thought and meditation, strictly practiced daily, must not serve the individual's own education and expansion of the mind; it must be done with the awareness that in doing so we are helping and working with the development of our cosmos. All our uncontrolled, “real” thinking constantly disturbs this regular process. The person who wants to develop his astral senses must also learn to control his feelings and awaken in himself a sense of reverence for the wisdom of highly developed beings; and he must cultivate a devotional surrender, in proper appreciation of the distance to that higher wisdom. Every evening, the person practicing meditation should review the past day, look upon failures without regret or remorse, and learn from them in order to benefit from the experiences and improve. Meditation should not be forced; it should not separate the person from their surroundings or change their usual existence. On the contrary, the person should surrender to their nature without worry. He will learn more from the collection and overview at the end of the day than if he tried to force himself to become a better person.

[ 9 ] If man wants to ascend to higher development, where the first Logos flows into the second, he must become a chela and develop the qualities of a chela within himself. He must gradually develop four main qualities within himself:

[ 10 ] First: the power of discrimination, the distinction between the permanent and the transitory; that is, man must learn to recognize in the transitory, in that which he perceives, the formative power that is permanent. All things that our senses perceive have an inherent power that seeks crystallization, just as salt, which is dissolved in warm water, [forms crystals when the water cools]. The arable soil is ground crystal, the seed contains the power to become a plant and fruit, and the vertebral bone has the potential to develop into a skullcap. Thus the lancelet, which consists only of the spinal column, is a miniature image of the first living, sentient form in which the Logos manifested itself. The enormous first fish, which consisted only of a gelatinous mass, is the ancestor that carried in its vertebrae the possibility for the development of amphibians, fish, mammals and humans. Thus, the physical human being is to be understood only as a temporary phenomenon that changes its mineral substances daily and whose sense organs will not remain as they are today, but will adapt to the higher human stages of development and carry the power of transformation within themselves.

[ 11 ] The second quality to be developed is the appreciation of what is lasting. Knowledge becomes perception. We learn to value what is lasting more highly than what is passing, which increasingly loses its value in our estimation. And so the developing chela is led by the development of the first two qualities to the third by itself, to the development of certain soul abilities.

[ 12 ] a) Thought control.

[ 13 ] The chela must not allow himself to look at things from only one point of view. We grasp an idea and consider it to be true, while in fact it is only true from that one aspect or point of view; we must later also look at it from the opposite point of view and hold up the reverse side to every obverse. Only in this way do we learn to control one thought with another.

[ 14 ] b) Control of actions.

[ 15 ] Man lives and acts in the material world and is placed in the temporal. He can only comprehend a small part of the world of phenomena and is bound by his activity to a certain circle of the transitory. Daily meditation helps the chela to focus and control his actions. He will consider only the enduring in them and place value only on the action with which he can helpfully serve the higher development of his fellow human beings. He will lead the abundance of the phenomenal world back to the highest unity.

[ 16 ] c) Tolerance.

[ 17 ] The chela will not allow himself to be dominated by feelings of attraction and repulsion. He will seek to understand all - criminals and saints - and although he experiences emotionally, he will judge intellectually. What is correctly recognized as evil from one point of view can be judged as necessary and logical from a higher aspect.

[ 18 ] d) Tolerance.

[ 19 ] Accepting good and bad fortune with equanimity, not letting them become determining powers that can influence us. Not letting joy and pain push us out of our direction. Keeping oneself free from all external influences and influxes and asserting one's own direction.

[ 20 ] e) Faith.

[ 21 ] The chela should have a free, open, unbiased heart for the higher spiritual. Even where he does not immediately recognize a higher truth, he should have faith until he can make it his own through knowledge. If he wanted to proceed according to the principle of “testing everything and keeping the best,” he would apply his judgment as a standard and place himself above the higher spiritual, closing himself to its penetration.

[ 22 ] f) Equilibrium.

[ 23 ] The last soul ability would result as the outcome of all the others as equilibrium, as a sense of direction, soul balance. The chela gives direction to himself.

[ 24 ] And so he would now have to develop the fourth quality within himself: the will to freedom, to the ideal. As long as we still live in the physical, we cannot attain full freedom, but we can develop the will to freedom within us, strive towards the ideal. We can free ourselves from external circumstances and no longer react to external impulses, but make the law within us, the enduring, the guiding principle of our thinking and acting, living not in the passing personality, but in our individuality, which is enduring and strives for unity.