The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Theosophical Cosmology: Second Lecture

[ 1 ] Following on from last Thursday's introductory remarks, I would now like to begin by giving you an outline of world development as we understand it according to our theosophical knowledge. Please bear in mind that, as we only have a few hours at our disposal, I can only give a brief outline in which some things can only be touched upon. Perhaps there will be an opportunity to elaborate on this later.

[ 2 ] Before we follow the history of the development of the universe in the theosophical sense, and above all the formation of our earthly planet, we must acquire some concepts that Western man no longer has because he has been concerned exclusively with physical phenomena for so long. Every book on cosmology repeatedly points out that we need only cast our gaze into outer space to see thousands upon thousands of worlds spread out before our eyes, worlds that are like our own solar system, and that our Earth, the planet on which our life has been taking place for millions of years, looks like a tiny speck of dust within these many worlds; and that human beings look like tiny creatures on this speck of dust in the universe. Science has recognized all this since the advent of the Copernican theory. Science tells us how wrong it was for humans in ancient times to view the Earth as the center of the world and to believe that cosmic events were merely a preparation for their own human existence. Science has impressed upon us how small humans are in comparison to the universe. It is arrogant of humans to believe that the world is shaped the way it is for their sake. Schiller already addressed this view and way of thinking with the beautiful words “To the Astronomers”:

Don't talk to me so much about nebulae and suns!
Is nature only great because it gives you something to count?
Your subject is certainly the most sublime in space;
But, friends, the sublime does not dwell in space.

[ 3 ] And Goethe, whom you know from other lectures to have had occult knowledge, expresses his thoughts on this point as follows: What purpose would the whole world with its solar systems and stars serve if it did not aim at man, so that he could be edified and delighted by it all? — You see, people with a true spiritual worldview like these two could not be satisfied with the idea of the tiny nature of man and the dust-like nature of the world.

[ 4 ] Let us now consider cosmology and human beings in relation to the entire history of development from a theosophical perspective. I must preface this with a few mental images. Let us take a look at the position of modern human beings in the world from a cosmological point of view. Everything that humans can perceive with their senses — be it the coarse senses of everyday life or the finer ones that natural science can offer us with its microscopes and methods of dissection — everything that we encounter in humans is ultimately only the outer, physical human being. Those who have heard theosophical lectures frequently know that this outer human being is only the shell, the outer manifestation of the actual, inner human being. What, then, is the physical human being? If you study the physical human being anatomically, you will find that it consists of various systems: the skeletal and muscular systems, the nervous system, which has formed into a brain, and so on. You also know that the brain is the organ of thought. As theosophists, you also know that it is not the brain that thinks, but that the brain is only a tool, that is, that the actual essence of the human being only uses the brain as a thinking tool. This essence, which thinks in the human being, cannot be perceived with physical sense organs; even those whose astral senses are open cannot see it. It takes a highly trained clairvoyant sense to truly perceive what is actually thinking within human beings. In theosophical terms, we refer to that which thinks within human beings as the true self of the human being. This inner core of being, this true self of the human being, is of a spiritual nature. It is not something that expands in space, nor is it something that flows through time. It is timeless and spaceless, it exists beyond time and space, it is eternal. You have received a description of this self in my lectures on devachan, and you will find a detailed description in my book on “Theosophy,” which will be published in the next few days.

[ 5 ] In order to live and think in this present epoch of human development, the spiritual Self needs a physical brain. We could perceive with this spiritual Self in the astral world and in the devachanic or mental world without a physical brain, but in this outer, physical world we can only perceive with the physical brain. If we want to understand the present human being correctly, we must say: The present human being is a spiritual self, embodied in a physical brain. But this physical brain first had to come into being, it first had to develop; it is not eternal like the spiritual self. We can trace the spiritual self back to infinitely distant times in the past and also follow it into infinitely distant times in the future. At a certain point in time, this spiritual self clothed itself in the brain; it created the brain for itself; it formed this brain in accordance with its own nature. Such an organ cannot be formed so easily in physical nature. It would be completely impossible for anyone to create a viable brain in space through any process in the world. It would be an artificial thing, but not a viable brain that a spirit could use as a tool. In order for such a brain to develop, other organs had to develop first. A brain can only develop in a physical body such as the human body. Therefore, it was necessary for the development of the rest of the human body to precede the development of our brain tool. When we look back on the stages of development that preceded our present one, we see how slowly and gradually what humans now possess as their tool for communicating with their environment first developed. The fact, dear attendees, that human beings, with their spiritual selves, were given organs that could lead them to understand the world in this way is the goal and purpose of our present earthly development. Everything that has happened on this earth for millions of years has happened with the goal of enabling development to reach the point where a spiritual self can make use of a brain.

[ 6 ] Let us go back for a moment to the beginning of our earthly development. Those whose mental vision is trained will have the following perception: At the beginning of our planetary development, our spiritual self had reached a certain stage of existence. Each of us was at a certain stage of development when the Earth was in its embryonic state. You can imagine all the spiritual selves that are, were, or will be incarnated on our Earth today being transported back to the time when our earthly development began. They all already existed at that time, but not as they are today, rather in a completely different state. We have a very specific task in earthly development; human beings must become something through this earthly development. Let me briefly describe in narrative form what the spiritual self was when it entered earthly development. When it stood at the gates of our earthly existence, our spiritual self had a completely different consciousness than we have today. We can understand this if we put ourselves in the position of someone in a deep dream, who is unable to think in concepts about the images that flit past their consciousness, but simply has them placed before them and sees them playing out like a panorama. Every single spiritual self had this dream consciousness, and it had to go through earthly development and must also go through further developments in order to evolve from the dull consciousness of pictorial perception to bright, clear, conceptual daytime consciousness. The dreamlike state of consciousness in which the spiritual self was at the beginning of earthly development is comparable to that of the animal, but the level of consciousness is not the same. This is the task that our spiritual self has to accomplish during the course of this planetary period, that consciousness becomes brighter and brighter; and when we emerge from this earthly development in the distant future, we will have brought this bright, clear consciousness to its highest peak.

[ 7 ] We call the beings who entered earthly development at that time “Pitris,” which means “fathers.” We were such Pitris at that time; we had acquired this nature in the earlier state of development. Before we entered earthly development, we had already gone through preliminary stages, and we had worked our way up to the dreamlike state of the Pitri. So now we know where we ourselves stood when earthly development began. The Pitris had to gradually surround themselves with all the organs they needed in order to be able to communicate with their environment, which is also physical, by means of a physical brain within the physical body that we know today. The last thing that human beings had to achieve — as is clear from the preceding considerations — was this: in order for their selves to be able to think in the physical realm, they themselves had to become physical thinking beings.

[ 8 ] And now I come to the second mental image that I must put forward. If you examine the brain, if you investigate it scientifically from all sides, you will find that this human brain, when examined merely with the senses, consists of the same substances and is governed by the same forces as the other physical beings on earth. If you look at a rock crystal, a piece of calcite, a piece of rock salt, a plant, or an animal, and examine them chemically and physically, you will find that the whole of physical nature, insofar as it can be seen with the eyes and touched with the hands, consists in the same way of the same chemical and physical forces that are at work in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. That is why we say in theosophy: in order for human beings to reach their present stage of development, they had to clothe their spiritual self in a mineral body. The spiritual self has created a mineral body for itself. This took a long time, and the process is still not complete today. Human beings will continue to develop within this mineral shell in the future. There are still embryonic organs in our bodies that have yet to develop, new senses that are only hinted at today. You see, it took a long time for humans — their spiritual selves — to clothe themselves in the physical bodies they have today.

[ 9 ] Now put yourself back in the time when the spiritual self of human beings began the work of forming this mineral body that can walk and stand, that has all the growth and reproductive functions necessary for human beings, that has a nervous system and a brain as human beings need. Transport yourself back to the time when all this was in its earliest embryonic state, and then transport yourself to a time when human beings will have reached the highest point of their development, when an organ will have developed in the middle of their heads through which they will be able to perceive things in ways that we cannot today. The entire mineral development of present-day human beings takes place in the period between these two points. In theosophical terminology, we call such a period of time a “round.” The round I have just described to you, this stage of development, we call the “mineral round.” But before humans developed this body in order to create the tool of the brain, they first had to prepare other parts of their being. The spiritual self, this purely spiritual being, could not simply have directed such a mineral body. For my sake, imagine the spiritual self as a point, and imagine that point inside a mechanism such as our body; that point would never be able to move the mechanism, it would never be able to think through a physical brain.

[ 10 ] So we have two things: we know that our spiritual self had a dreamlike consciousness in the beginning, but it could never have directed the mineral body. It had to create a mediator in order to be able to move the body. How do I move my hand? First I form the thought: I want to move my hand. If I only had the thought, the thought would live within me, but it would never be able to move a physical hand upward, just as the mere thought could not lift a bottle, for example. If you want to move the bottle, a force must be added to the thought, which is the mediator between the thought and my physical body. And we call this force an astral force. It is a force that exists in the astral world. I would not be able to move my arm if there were not an astral force within me, between my thought and my physical body, to which my arm belongs, acting as a mediator between my thought and my physical body, my physical arm. There must be a mediator between my spiritual self and my physical body, and this mediator is of astral nature. Whether I move my leg or my hand, whether I set my brain in motion to formulate thoughts — my physical body must be connected to my thoughts through the astral organism.

[ 11 ] You know from previous lectures that human beings have such an astral body, which clairvoyants see as an astral cloud, which we call the aura, in which their wishes, their will, and their desires live. When I form a thought, the thought alone is powerless to do anything. When desire and will are added, this becomes a force, a radiation that is recognizable to the clairvoyant. Before building the physical-mineral body that we have today, human beings first had to create an astral body, a body of desire that could act as a mediator between their thoughts and their physical-mineral being. The epoch of development that I have called the “mineral round” had to be preceded by another epoch of development that brought about the development of the astral body. You must therefore transport yourselves back to an epoch that prepared the human astral body. Only then could the mineral-physical body be embedded in the astral body. We call this epoch, which again has a beginning and an end and which preceded the mineral round, the “astral round.”

[ 12 ] You see, we have two “times.” One is the one in which we now live: the mineral round. This was preceded by another, the astral round. But the human astral body itself needed further preparation. It is only possible to integrate it into human nature in a very specific way. The astral body was not there before we were born, and it will no longer be there some time after our death. It arises and passes away; it is subject to certain laws of arising and passing away. Look at a child. In a child, the astral body is correspondingly small; it grows with the physical growth of the child. Growth and reproduction are fundamental to the mineral-physical and etheric beings of human beings. It is the laws of growth and reproduction according to which human beings must develop within earthly life. The fact that we come into being and grow, that we are living beings at all, is not based on our astral body. The astral body contains only desires, will, and cravings. We are astral beings, just as animals are astral beings, and we share with plants and animals the essence that is capable of producing its own kind from the organism, of making it grow from small to large. If you want an expression for this, you can say: what I have described is the form-giving, the form-shaping. Our physical and etheric bodies must have a very specific form when they are created, and this form must be able to grow and enlarge. You can get an idea of this if you take a seed... [gap in the transcript].

[ 13 ] The formative power does not belong to the astral. The astral can live out within the formed, but it must first be formed itself. The astral body of the human being could not have come into being if it had not been preceded by another epoch of development, the epoch in which the form of the human being was prepared. Let me call this epoch the formative epoch, theosophically the “Rupa round.” It is the epoch in which the form of the human being was prepared so that its present form could be formed.

[ 14 ] All we can follow in these three “rounds” are the coverings, the sheaths for the spiritual self of the human being. In the mineral round, the human being clothed itself in the mineral sheath. In the preceding epoch, the astral round, the human being prepared its astral shell, and in the epoch before that, the Rupa round, the human being acquired the ability to give itself the form it needs in order to perceive, think, and act as a human being.

[ 15 ] As theosophists, we can say: when we were still Pitris, when we still lived in this dreamlike consciousness at the beginning of our earthly development, we were, if I may say so, the result, the fruit. We did not arise out of nothing at that time, but had already developed to this state; we were the result of earlier epochs, which we will describe later. In a similar way to how a seed sprouts into a plant when it is planted in new soil in spring, we too had to prepare ourselves for the stage of Earth in order to be able to develop there. We were the result of another world, and now we had to become the beginning of a whole new world, but we first had to find our way into it. Just as you let a seed that you receive in autumn overwinter and sink it into new soil in spring, so does the Pitri nature behave, as it were. It must first be planted in a new environment, in the substances of the earthly world that were not present in the earlier planetary epoch. If you wanted to get a mental image of what forces and substances were present on the earlier planetary stage, on which we developed into Pitri, you would find completely different forces and substances there. Therefore, this epoch of development had to be preceded by another in which the spirit itself of the human being, which had been carried over from an earlier epoch, first had to become accustomed to the new milieu, to the new environment. Here we are already approaching a development epoch that lies far back in time.

[ 16 ] The further we move away from the present, the more difficult it becomes to form mental images. Theosophists do not believe that they can go back to the beginning of the world with their questions. When people hear about theosophy for the first time, they often ask: How did the world actually come into being? As theosophists, we can no longer ask many of these questions, because we cannot go back to the beginning. You have seen the moment when we came over from the Pitri nature. The clairvoyant can trace this moment using certain methods. But human beings did not come into being at that time; they were already at a certain level of development. Theosophists do not indulge in speculation; they do not think about these things in abstract terms. They follow their experiences, their intuitions, their adventures in the supersensible realm, and they recount these experiences and adventures to the extent that they have them. Just as an explorer on earth would do nothing other than describe the areas he has seen, say in Africa, and would not describe anything else he has not seen, so the theosophist will say nothing about the beginning of the world, which lies far, far back in time. The theosophist can only follow a part of our development, and we follow this part through experience and not through speculation.

[ 17 ] It was a seed that came over from earlier times into our development. Man was a formless earth seed. We call this period the “Arupa round,” the formless round. Thus we have four periods of time up to the one in which we stand today. We call these periods of time “rounds.” The first, second, and third rounds have passed; we are now in the fourth round, and three more rounds will follow, which we will discuss later. We call the human being of the fourth round the human being of the mineral kingdom, because he has formed himself in the mineral forces; and we call a human being of the previous round, the astral round, in which he was able to form his astral body, a human being of the third elemental kingdom. We distinguish between the human beings of the third, second, and first elemental kingdoms. During the first elemental kingdom or the first round, human thoughts moved in formless thought matter. During the second elemental kingdom or the second round, human thoughts moved in formed thought matter. And in the third elemental kingdom, human thoughts could already form themselves into desires; they could take on the form that we can follow as astral rays in the astral world. Only in the fourth round is man ready to master the mineral kingdom. Just as in the third round a human astral brain was formed from astral matter, so in the fourth round man was able to form a physical brain in which he can think.

[ 18 ] So we have three elemental kingdoms and the mineral kingdom. Human beings of the past lived in the three elemental kingdoms. I can only hint at what follows, but you will be able to understand it by analogy. Our present round will be followed by another in which human beings will reach an even higher stage of development. They will then be able to think not only in their physical brain, but also in the power we call the astral power. Human beings will then be able to control not only physical matter, but also the astral power. Let me give you an example to illustrate this: if I want to move this glass from here to there today, I need a physical medium—my hand. Human beings in the fourth round have progressed so far that they can act consciously in the physical, mineral world. However, they cannot yet consciously wield astral power; they have not yet developed an astral organ of will. But they will be able to do so in the fifth round. Humans in the fifth round will be able to control the astral world just as they control the physical world today. In the sixth round, humans will be even further along. They will then be able to control the creative world, just as they control the physical world today and will control the astral world in the fifth round. In the fifth round, humans will be able to fulfill a wish not only in the place where it is desired. They will be able to send their wishes to distant places. In the sixth round, humans will be able to shape things themselves. They will then be able to master the rupa power themselves. After the sixth round, our earthly development will have reached its completion, and only then will human beings have absorbed within themselves everything they could learn on earth. Only then will they have attained true, clear self-awareness in the true sense of the word. They will then no longer need mediation; they will have reached their goal directly. In the seventh round, the human being has reached his goal. He will be formless again. But he will have absorbed everything he had to learn.

[ 19 ] Human beings have to go through seven rounds. I have only been able to describe these seven rounds in approximate terms. Now we must note one more thing: during our mineral round, human beings and the earth were not always physical, but had to develop towards this state first; they had to accept this state first in order to become physically perceptible. From our mineral round, we look back on the other stages of development. We can see that we are dealing with a seven-stage development of our Earth and that the spirit itself had to go through seven stages or rounds. During each of these seven rounds, the spirit itself was in one of the natural kingdoms. Let us look at the human being. He has passed through the first, second, and third elemental kingdoms and is now in the fourth round, which is our present world.

[ 20 ] Next time, I will show that only human beings reach the mineral stage during this fourth round. But what is mineral today, what is inanimate natural material, what is rock crystal, calcite, and so on, already reached the height of its development during the first round. What is plant today reached the height of its development during the second round, and what is animal today reached the height of its development during the third round. Human beings reached their physical-mineral development during the fourth round.

[ 21 ] So we see that millions of years ago, our Earth was preceded by another. At that time, the mineral kingdom came into being. But human beings were only in the first elemental kingdom. In the second round, plant nature appeared; now mineral and plant nature were already present; humans were then in the second elemental kingdom. The third round comes, and animal nature is incorporated into earthly development. Humans as such, however, are only astral beings; they cannot yet descend to mineral embodiment. Only in the fourth round, when minerals, plants, and animals already exist, can humans achieve mineral embodiment. Therefore, in the four rounds, we have four coexisting kingdoms: the mineral kingdom in the first round, the plant kingdom in the second round, the animal kingdom in the third round, and the human kingdom in the fourth round. The human kingdom has the three other kingdoms as preparatory stages. Therefore, Goethe is right when he says: What would nature be if it did not aim at the human being? This great cosmic event had to happen; through three rounds, the human being had to develop so that it could take on a mineral form in the fourth round. Humanity has been the creator, the co-creator, in invisible form. As Pitri, it came over from another epoch of development. With our dreamlike consciousness, we worked on the first rounds. We worked preparatory on the formation of our Earth so that a realm could be formed that could become the basis for our development.

[ 22 ] This is the course of Earth's development from its beginning, which I have been able to present to you today, up to the point in time where we now stand. We will add to this next time.