The Rudolf Steiner Archive

8. The Relationship of the Human Senses to the Outside World

[ 1 ] As we gather on the eve of our general meeting, and in view of the next few days, which we hope will be quite stimulating, it seems quite appropriate to open our gathering today with a lecture for our guests from outside Berlin and, of course, for our Berlin members as well. Such a lecture, which is included outside the program as a free gift, may also offer something that would not fit so well into the normal course of theosophical lectures; something for the advanced theosophist and at the same time for those who are just beginning. The latter, however, must first try to work their way up to the things that are being discussed. Only if they engage with the subject more seriously and intensively will they be able to follow along completely. On the other hand, something should also be offered for those who want to hear about the parts of the higher worlds that are accessible to us.

[ 2 ] Our topic will be the relationship of the human senses to the outside world, to what surrounds us spiritually and physically in the world. In doing so, we will touch on something that is still far too little appreciated even in our circles, namely the question of how we should actually conceive of the relationship between the four members of the human being.

[ 3 ] One of the very first messages of spiritual science is that human beings consist of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, and a body that we have always referred to in our considerations as the I-body. The seeds for the further development of human beings are incorporated in the I-body. All this is communicated to the theosophist through elementary works and through what he gradually hears in the first lectures. However, it is often said that of these four components of human nature, the I-body is the highest, the astral body is less high, the etheric body is even less high, and the physical body is the lowest.

Atma
Budhi
Manas
-----
Kama-Manas
Astral body
Etheric body
Physical body

[ 4 ] Anyone can read about how these things relate to each other in my “Theosophy.” We are interested in the lower four components, which are called the Pythagorean square. What is referred to as the ego or Kama-Manas is often considered the highest component of the being, while the astral body, the etheric body, and the physical body are considered the lower components. However, this view is very one-sided, and I have often emphasized that it is not correct. In its own way, the physical body is the most perfect, and it is also the oldest thing that human beings have. Consider this physical body in all its parts, study it with the tools of science! You only need to think about it thoroughly once, and you will have to say to yourself: this physical body is wonderfully wisely constructed in all its parts, the wisest thing known in the world. There is nothing in this world, as far as it can be explored by physical means, that is more perfect than the physical body of man. Whether you look at an entire starry cosmos or immerse yourself in a human mechanical work of art, no matter how artfully assembled, you will not discover anything more perfect than the physical body. If you study the human heart with the tasks assigned to it as a purely physical apparatus, or even just a piece of bone with all its wonderful beams, you will find this to be true. Take just a piece of the thigh bone. It has beams that go this way and that way:

[ 5 ] The most intelligent engineer could not construct a framework as perfect as the one built by the cosmos to support the human upper body. The same is true of the human brain and all the organs that belong to the physical body of man. If you study the whole of nature, there is nothing that equals the perfection of this physical body.

[ 6 ] Why is this physical body so perfect? Man has not always been as he is today. He has become this way; he has undergone a long development. What stands before you today as a human being, consisting of these four limbs, has not only undergone a long development on this outer planet Earth. This was preceded by another planet, which was the predecessor of our Earth. That was the old Moon. This was preceded by the old Sun, and the Sun by the old Saturn. Imagine this as the human being passing through its incarnations. The Earth has also passed through similar states. We can trace four such states. We are looking back on immeasurably long periods of time, periods of which an earthly human being cannot even imagine. But everywhere there was already something of the physical body of the human being. On ancient Saturn, the first beginnings of the physical body were already present. At that time, there was still nothing of the present etheric body, nothing of the astral body, let alone the human ego. From this it follows that this physical body has gone through four stages. First, it appeared as a simple physical body, like a basic framework, on the ancient planet Saturn. Then it underwent a transformation and entered a twilight state, a pralaya. Then this physical body reappeared on the ancient sun, which is quite different from today's sun, but at a higher stage. Only now did the etheric body come into being. The etheric body is therefore much younger than the physical body. Under the influence of what was already present in the physical body, which had now emerged at a second stage of perfection, the young etheric body developed. At that time, when the physical and etheric bodies were present together on the sun, there was still no astral body. This only came into being in the third incarnation of the Earth, on the old Moon. At that time, the physical body of the human being was going through its third stage of perfection, while the etheric body was only in its second stage. On the Moon, the physical body is, as it were, in the third grade, the etheric body in the second grade, and the astral body in the first grade. The ego is only added on Earth and has not yet undergone anything. When it appears on Earth, the physical body is already there for the fourth time. When three more planets have been completed, the ego body of the human being will be as far along as the physical body is today. When two more planets have been completed, the astral body will be at the same level of perfection as the physical body is today. And when one more planet has been completed, the etheric body will have attained the same degree of perfection that the physical body possesses today.

[ 7 ] One can also convince oneself through very trivial reflection that the astral body is much more imperfect than the physical body. The physical body, in its wisdom, would never commit such gross errors as the astral body. Just think what the instincts, desires, and passions living in the astral body do, what cravings they develop. The heart must remain healthy for decades, even though the astral body enjoys pleasures that are detrimental to the heart. This is the case, for example, when we drink coffee or tea and so on. The heart does not want these pleasures, but the astral body does. The astral body does what the physical body at its level resists. On the planet we call Venus, the astral body will be so far advanced that it will behave as wisely as the physical body when it is not disturbed.

[ 8 ] We must therefore regard the physical body as the most carefully crafted and most perfectly constructed member of the human being. Every time the physical body has passed a planetary stage, it has always learned something and become more perfect. When you look at the physical human being, you see that it consists of various organs. However, people do not think much about how these organs came into being. Anatomy, the science, describes the human being as consisting of this or that organ, as having a liver, a heart, a nose for smelling, ears for hearing, eyes for seeing. And science also describes these organs in detail. But in doing so, it does something very special that can only be compared to the following.

[ 9 ] Imagine that an old table and a new table were placed next to each other and that both tables were described in a very trivial way. One has four legs, one has a tabletop, one is colored this way — the other also has four legs, the other has a tabletop, the other is colored this way, and so on. The descriptions may be entirely correct, and yet they do not even touch on what is important: namely, that one is an old table and the other is a new table. You can describe the eyes and ears in the same way. You can describe how they look today. You can describe the outer ear, the ear canal up to the auditory nerve, and so on. In the same way, you can describe the human eye. Both will look very nice, and it might seem as if these descriptions were equivalent. They are not, in the highest occult sense. They are not equivalent because these two organs — eyes and ears — have very different times of origin.

[ 10 ] If you were to go back to ancient Saturn and examine the very first formation of the physical human body, where there was still no mention of the later etheric body, astral body, and ego, if you were to examine that peculiar physical body as it was in those ancient times, you would search in vain for the very first formations of the eyes. You would not be able to find them, because they were not yet present in the first form at that time. On the other hand, you would already find the beginnings of the human ear in the Saturn body. There you have this difference in age, which will be understandable to you when you consider that the physical body has gone through as many stages as there have been planetary incarnations. At the first stage, it had progressed to the point where it had completely developed the ears in their rudimentary form. They were actually already preformed when humans came to Saturn from completely different worlds. With the faculty of hearing, man has already entered this evolutionary chain. On this first planet, he then added the faculty of what could be called the sense of warmth, or the feeling of warmth. This is generally referred to as the sense of touch. However, a clear distinction must be made between two things. First, there is the sense of touch, which perceives hard and soft; but then there is also the sense of warmth, which perceives heat and cold. We are now talking about this sense of warmth. This results in the following sequence of stages. First we have hearing, then feeling, the sense of warmth. This sense of warmth was developed on the planetary incarnation of Earth, which we call Saturn. Such a sense is naturally transformed at the various stages of evolution. When it first appears, it is something quite different from what it later becomes. That ancient sense of hearing with which human beings entered planetary evolution was a very peculiar sense of hearing. It could best be characterized by saying that the physical human body was basically just one big ear. Human beings were entirely ears when they began their planetary development. As physical bodies, human beings hardly differed from their surroundings. They sounded, and everything sounded with them. With their whole body, they heard what lived as the sounds of the world outside. Just as one string resonates when another is struck, so for every sound that rang out in the world, there was a related vibration in the human physical body. Everything resonated.

[ 11 ] And now the further development of the senses consists in their specialization. Whereas humans were initially all ear, they now developed a sense of warmth. What had previously been uniform differentiated into two entities. This was also expressed physically. Certain organs appeared that only conveyed hearing, and others that only conveyed the perception of warmth. Thus, with each new appearance of the physical body, the whole human being changes. Their senses become more specialized, and they increasingly transform from simple beings into immensely complex beings. With the development of the sense of hearing, humans thus entered the Saturn stage of development. On Saturn, they acquired the sense of warmth. In the Sun stage of development that followed Saturn, humans acquired the sense of sight. The predisposition for the sense of sight during the solar period is thus the third stage, with which the other senses are transformed in a corresponding manner, so that on the sun, the human being is a hearing, feeling, and a kind of seeing being.

[ 12 ] Now let us continue to follow the evolution and come to the moon. The sun has previously entered into a pralaya again. It then rises anew as the moon. On the moon, the sense of taste is added to the three other senses that humans have. Now humans have developed four of the present senses. In the process, the others specialize, that is, they distribute themselves among the individual organs. You can literally follow how this physical body opens up as an organ for the outside world. The sympathetic nervous system had already developed on the sun. During life on the old moon, the development of the other organs also continues step by step, but let us limit ourselves to the senses. On the moon, the sense of taste is added, and on earth, the youngest of the senses, the sense of smell. If you study the senses today, you can say that the sense of smell is the youngest sense, the last to develop in humans. The sense of taste was already present during the Moon's development and has been transformed once. Every transformation is a perfection. The sense of smell is the most imperfect. The sense of taste has already corrected its flaws once. The sense of sight has corrected its flaws twice, and the sense of warmth three times. The sense of hearing, however, is the most perfect, because it has already undergone four transformations and experienced the fifth on Earth.

[ 13 ] You must therefore regard this human body as a very complex being and be aware that much was necessary to gradually build up the physical body of the human being. One must know the relative age of the various parts of this body if one wants to form an opinion about it. And so the senses, also in terms of their degree of perfection, are again in different relationships to other entities. A sense organ that is more perfect, that has undergone more transformations, is related to completely different worlds than a sense organ that has undergone only a few transformations.

[ 14 ] Let us first consider the sense of hearing. This sense has gone through a whole series of stages. It was already present as a predisposition on Saturn when human beings entered into their evolution. So what happened? Physical development on Saturn took the sense of hearing a step further and added the first predisposition for the sense of warmth. Then came the development of the Sun, and the etheric body was added to the physical body. This introduced a new element into human nature, which contributed to the transformation of the senses. From the Moon onwards, the astral body has been involved, and from the development of the Earth onwards, the I-body has been involved. But this whole context also conditions something else. Because the sense of smell only entered the series of senses on Earth, the ego has no influence on the sense of smell yet. It is still entirely involved in its purely physical development. The etheric body of the human being only has an influence on the sense of taste. The astral body of the human being has an influence on the sense of sight, and the ego body on the sense of warmth and feeling. And what has developed as the first beginning of manas in the human being, as the first predisposition to this higher spiritual self, has an influence on the sense of hearing. In fact, therefore, that which belongs to the higher nature of the human being has an influence only on the sense of hearing today. Nothing that is conquered by the lower four senses is yet incorporated into the eternal soul. Only what can be expressed in words, what human beings can clothe in words — the word need only be thought, and yet it is heard inwardly — counts as part of the eternal, imperishable part of human beings. All thoughts that can be clothed in words, the feelings that live so clearly in human beings that they can be expressed in words, all the impulses that human beings can truly describe, which do not live in them as dark drives but are so clear that they can be translated into words — all this belongs to the eternal part of human beings. The word is therefore something that belongs to the eternal foundation of the human being. So when one begins to speak of the eternal, one must speak of the word in the most literal sense. At that time, when the earth entered into its evolution, when the earth's evolution began on Saturn, this first predisposition for the word was there. Only on earth did this predisposition come to fruition. The sentence “In the beginning was the Word” is to be taken quite literally. Such passages in the Gospels are not only to be understood symbolically, but their meaning must be worked out in such a way that they can be understood literally. The word is also the beginning of what is eternal in human beings. Therefore, the word, the audible word, is also the first thing in human beings that will be useful in the future construction of the world. Everything that the other senses produce is of no use whatsoever for the evolution that the earth still has to undergo.

[ 15 ] Legends and myths often contain the deepest wisdom. Or does the legend not know that what is produced by the sense of smell is not useful for the evolution of the earth at first? That only when further planetary developments have been completed will that which is contained in the sense of smell be useful? That is why the father of all obstacles is the one who leaves behind an unpleasant stench: the devil is subsequently perceptible through the unpleasant smell he leaves behind. Thus, the deepest wisdom is found in mythology, but one must understand to take it literally in the highest sense.

[ 16 ] Contemplating the senses and their connection to the world can lead us even further. Let us single out one of these senses, the sense of sight. It is the middle of the senses. Now follow me into something quite subtle. You know that the astral body, in which the inner drives, desires, and passions of human beings live, becomes visible to the clairvoyant as a light body. The most diverse figures and colors appear in this light body. Every passion, every impulse has a specific color. Everything, even the basic mood, is imprinted in this light body. If you look at the light body of a person who is very nervous, you will see it completely saturated with glittering and glowing points. All of this shines up and disappears and plays in the most diverse colors.

[ 17 ] When there is a terrible emotion, you will find rays like these:

[ 18 ] A person who has a restrained grudge has figures like snakes within them.

[ 19 ] However, this is difficult to draw, as it is constantly in motion, like lightning. Internally, there is anger or resentment or nervousness when the soul is restless. What a person experiences internally is their state of mind. Externally, this state of mind becomes visible to the clairvoyant as a light phenomenon.

[ 20 ] The physical eye sees lights and colors around it. Just as the clairvoyant perceives the aura around the astral body as red, blue, yellow, and green, so the physical eye sees red, blue, yellow, and green around it. In both cases, the cause is exactly the same. Just as a desire lives behind the red in the astral body, so behind the red of the flower there is a desire as the “thing in itself.” The red in the flower is a desire reigning in the flower. What the sense of sight does when it crosses this point is no different than when you turn a skirt inside out, turning it to the other side. While the astral nature of the human being is expressed in the aura, the outer astral nature lives behind the whole world of colors and light, behind the world of the sense of sight. There would never be colors in the world if things were not completely permeated by astral beings. What appears in the world as colors comes from the astral beings, which manifest themselves externally through color. Through the turning of the inner outward, the being descends from the higher to the lower plane. You can achieve the following through meditation: If you have a green surface, such as a leaf, in front of you and now go outside yourself to look at the thing from the other side, you would see the astral being that is behind the green color and that manifests itself through the green color. This is how you must imagine it: as you look out into the world and see this world covered with colors, you must suspect the astral entities behind these colors. Just as you reveal the colors of your aura to the clairvoyant from within yourself, so the color cover of the world is the expression of the cosmic aura. Everything colorful in the world is a reversed aura. If you could turn your aura inside out like a skirt, you would also see your aura physically visible on the reverse side. This applies to the sense of sight, and thus you see that the sense of sight is intimately related to the astral world.

[ 21 ] If you take the sense of feeling, the sense of warmth, this in turn has a universal relationship to the lower parts of the astral world. While the sense of sight is more related to the higher parts of the astral world, the sense of feeling or warmth is equally related to the lower parts of the astral world, more to the area where the astral world already merges into the etheric world. The sense of hearing is directly related to the physical world, and what you perceive as the sense of hearing are vibrations of the physical air.

[ 22 ] This is something I ask you to understand in the most subtle and correct way. If you want to see something, there must be an astral being behind the color you see. There must also be an astral being behind the warmth you feel. If you want to hear something, you have entered completely into the physical world — because the sense of hearing is the most perfect sense — and you can hear a physical being. Only in words has the spiritual world truly descended to the physical world. If we start from the top, we can therefore say: the phenomena of the sense of hearing lie entirely on the physical plane, those of warmth rise higher, those of the sense of sight are on the astral plane, and the phenomena that we perceive through the most imperfect senses belong to the higher parts of the spiritual world. And what descends into the physical world is only the most imperfect. Thus, what the sense of smell can perceive, what it brings down into the physical world, is the most imperfect. If it becomes independent, it separates itself from the world process, from evolution. What manifests itself in the sense of smell today can only occur in close connection with the highest worlds. — Let us therefore take those beings who, just as the sense of smell was beginning to develop on Earth, separated themselves from evolution and became independent. These are beings who make themselves known primarily through the sense of smell. It is therefore a beautiful feature of the legend that the fallen angels are perceptible to the sense of smell in an unpleasant way. Because they have separated themselves from evolution, they are perceptible to the sense of smell.

[ 23 ] So when we ask ourselves what actually lies beyond the skin, which encloses the human sense organs, we must say to ourselves: there indeed lie the various higher planes and their beings.

[ 24 ] All of this is in wonderful harmony with physical research. Just consider how an eye is formed! The eye originally forms from the outside. First, a small depression appears in the skin of the being that is to receive an eye. This depression then deepens,

[ 25 ] so that after a while it looks like this. It then fills with a kind of fluid and finally closes. In this way, the eye actually pushes in from the outside. Human organs do not form from the inside out, but push in from the outside. This is the case with all human and animal organs. Inversion is the technical term. In animals that have a spinal cord, a groove originally formed, and the spinal cord moved into this groove from the outside. In the same way, the senses also move in from the outside.

[ 26 ] What causes the eye to turn inwards in this way? This is the work of the beings working in the light. It is the beings working in the ray of light that form the eye from the organism, that is, those beings that stand astral behind the outer appearance and of whom we have said that we would see them if we could turn our consciousness around. It is they who have drilled the eye into the physical organism. Thus the eye is formed by beings of light. Likewise, the other organs are formed by beings from different worlds. When you feel yourself in your skin, you can feel as if beings from different sides had worked together on your body. When human beings reached Saturn in their very earliest development, only the highest beings could work on their hearing organ. Higher and lower beings taught them to hear, until on Earth the beings embodied in the outer air also began to work on their hearing organs. With their hearing organs, humans hear the moving air; that is where sound lies.

[ 27 ] If we really engrave this in our souls, it will become clear to us in a very profound way why air plays such a special role in the story of creation, why it first had to be breathed into man so that it could also play this role in relation to his hearing organ: “The Creator breathed the breath of life into man, and he became a living soul.” Human beings themselves are created through the word, through sound, in their highest form. From this you can also see the relationship that exists between human beings and their entire environment through their senses. If you look at their faces, you can say to yourself: the beings who live on the astral plane have worked on their faces. They live in the ray of light. The ray of light consists of a physical and an astral part. Now imagine that a ray of light falls somewhere. When this happens, the ray of light contains the outer physical light and at the same time the astral beings living in the ray of light. Just position yourself so that you block the ray of light. Position yourself so that the sun shines on your back. When you do this, you block the physical light, but you do not block the astral beings. The astral being is then in front of you, in your shadow. An astral being lives in your shadow, which falls forward. And this astral being that lives in the shadow is nothing more than an afterimage — an afterimage of what? It is an afterimage of the body, and what lives in it is shaped by the soul. This is one of the methods for gradually seeing one's own soul. Therefore, primitive peoples were not wrong in saying that the soul lives in the shadow. You can find this in numerous legends: the soul departs in the shadow. For astral vision, the soul first becomes visible in the shadow, in form.

[ 28 ] Now you will also appreciate the deeper meaning of Chamisso's description of Peter Schlemihl as the man without a shadow. Peter Schlemihl lost his soul with his shadow. Read Chamisso's novella with this thought in mind, and you will realize that there is something much deeper behind many such stories.

[ 29 ] In fact, it will become increasingly clear to you that people who know nothing about these things go through life more or less like blind people. People who know nothing about the spiritual worlds have no idea what they carry with them in their shadows. All those subtle things that surround us will only be revealed to people again through spiritual scientific knowledge. The world is full of mysteries for those who want to perceive them. When people perceive these mysteries, they will no longer regard the spiritual scientific worldview as something superfluous or as the dream of a few fantasists, but will recognize that the reality that surrounds us only becomes accessible to us through spiritual scientific observation. We must not tire of studying what surrounds us. Many spirits have collaborated in the complex structure that is the human being. That is why this structure exhibits such varying degrees of perfection. Only through this has the physical ear earned the right to hear on the physical plane, because it has passed through many stages. Those who, as chelas, take the Venus stage under a master, can also perceive their fellow human beings on the physical plane in the effect of light; then the effect of light also descends to the physical plane.

[ 30 ] The course of development is quite regular. Just as the sense of hearing has descended to the physical plane, so too does the sense of sight descend to the physical plane, down to actual clairvoyance. This is entirely logical. Anyone who wants to think can understand it, and no one can refute it by mere thinking. This is the case with everything in spiritual science. Only those who do not want to think, or who apply their thinking only to what they are accustomed to thinking about, will oppose spiritual science. There may well be people who say, “I don't want to ride on a railroad,” but that does not deny the reality of the railroad. Similarly, there may be people who say, “There is nothing to the higher worlds.” But that does not mean that the higher worlds can be denied: they exist.

[ 31 ] We have spoken about the human sensory organs and tried to shed light on the environment. In doing so, we have found that the sensory organs only exist because other beings build them. We could have spoken in the same way about the inner being that builds itself up from the environment. Physical science is not in a position to understand these things. It can show the structural differences between the eye and the ear, but it can never show the age difference between the eye and the ear. Only occult science, which sees behind external appearances, can do that. We could also have shown how the liver is a much younger organ than the spleen. It would have turned out that the spleen was already there when the etheric body was connected to the physical body, while the liver only came into being with the astral body, with human passions. This is something that is wonderfully expressed in the legend of Prometheus. The vulture gnawing at the liver of Prometheus, who is chained to the rock, has a deep meaning.

[ 32 ] In this way, you could study the great truths contained in the legends in a new way. There is deep wisdom in the ancient legends and myths. The myths did not arise from the “poetic imagination of the people”; that is a superstition of the scholars. Scholars are the most superstitious people there are. Those who believe in ghosts are not as superstitious as scholars. It is a superstition that there is such a thing as blind folk imagination. In truth, the great myths originate from the initiates who knew what is now being made accessible to humanity again in the great theosophical truths.

[ 33 ] Thus, in ancient times, there were societies on the very ground on which we stand where theosophy was taught. And from there, emissaries went out and proclaimed to the people in myths what they had heard in smaller circles. Thus, myth is a garment of spiritual truths, and those who strive to do so can recognize them again. Only minor myths do not go back to the great initiates. The genuine myths originate from the initiates as their creation. If you keep this in mind, you will see that a miraculous writing is recorded in the myths of the most diverse peoples. First learn to read the myths and look deeply into the souls of the peoples of the past, those peoples who created from within, so to speak. And if you reverse the myths, as we reversed the astral plane earlier, you will have, according to your understanding, today's natural science.

[ 34 ] In natural science, you encounter the same truths — the truths of evolution contained in the myths. Hence the remarkable correspondence between the deeply understood idea of evolution and the most ancient teachings of humanity. Mythical things are seen from within — natural science sees them from without, but they are the same things. This is an indication of the astonishing fact that the truths found in the oldest religious creeds reappear in correctly understood scientific facts. One need not be surprised at this when one knows that natural science is mythology turned around. Therefore, its structure must be the same as what was there before. — That was a reflection on the relationship of the senses to the world around us.

[ 35 ] Tomorrow at two o'clock, we will talk about theosophical questions that are not so far-fetched, but still have an impact on practical life.