The Rudolf Steiner Archive

15. The Lord's Prayer

[ 1 ] From what I was able to share with you last time, we have seen how a well-known prayer actually expresses the entire spiritual scientific view of the nature of human beings. We have been able to convince ourselves how religious movements, religious teachings, and practices have been drawn from what we have come to know through spiritual science itself over the course of time. We can imagine this process as humanity originally starting from a universal, all-encompassing basic view, which is expressed in the religious beliefs of different peoples according to the diversity of their national characters. Now, of course, you may ask the question: How exactly are we to imagine that the fundamental truths, the fundamental wisdom of humanity, are connected with what has been proclaimed in the various individual religious creeds by the founders of religion to this or that people? — It is certainly a striking fact that the seven petitions of the Lord's Prayer really do contain the basic concepts of spiritual science, and to an outsider who has little knowledge of what can be learned through spiritual science today, much of this must seem fantastic, and he may easily say: All this has simply been incorporated into what you have received from religious documents.

[ 2 ] In order to delve a little deeper into the question of how the great fundamental truths originally found their way into religious creeds, we must first start with a fundamental question. We must realize that what we can know today, what we are taught today through spiritual science, was not presented in the same way in the most ancient times in religious beliefs. We must be clear that the form in which such truths were presented to people varied greatly depending on the times. The ancient religious documents that you open speak to people in images rather than concepts. These images, which are often based on sensory perception, have been retained as far as possible in religious documents. For example, knowledge is always referred to as light, and wisdom as a kind of liquid element, as water. If you look closely, you will find the same images again and again in the most ancient times. There is a very specific reason for this, and today we will summarize some of what we already know in order to really immerse ourselves in how the very first teachers of humanity influenced the peoples to whom they brought the benefits of religious teachings. If we want to understand how the founders of religions, whom we call the great initiates, i.e., Hermes, Zarathustra, Buddha, Moses, and finally the greatest of all, Christ Jesus, worked, we must once again immerse ourselves in the difference between the ordinary and the astral or imaginative consciousness of human beings.

[ 3 ] Today, from morning to night, the ordinary human being has what we have called objective consciousness, which shows him things in such a way that they appear to him as existing outside himself, with the characteristics that his senses show him. This consciousness is not the only one. However, for most people today, the other states of consciousness are hidden, submerged in an indefinite darkness that we call dreamless sleep, but which has a very specific meaning for the initiate. For the initiate, who also knows the world behind this physical appearance, there is also a conscious state between falling asleep and waking up, in which he does not perceive the same things that are here as they are here, but he perceives a world in itself. Just as dreamless sleep is an unconscious state for the ordinary person, so for the initiate it is a conscious state in which he sees the spiritual world.

[ 4 ] If we want to understand how this unconscious state becomes a conscious one, we must consider that intermediate state which human beings also know, namely dream-filled sleep, which shows us ordinary, everyday perceptions or the inner states of the soul in symbols. However, you can also find this imagery that dreams show when you study the consciousness of the initiate when he dwells in the spiritual world. He sees things in the spiritual world in images. However, these are not as chaotic images as those shown to you in dreams. They only have in common with the images of dreams that they are constantly changing. The table and the chair always show the same form, as they are once they are there. Plants and people, insofar as they are external objects, show the form they once had. But the more we enter the realm of consciousness, the more we find transformations. The plant that sprouts from the seed and develops a stem, leaves, blossoms, and fruit; the animal that expresses its will; the human being—in the changing gestures and physiognomy we see them in motion. But all this is something permanent compared to what a human being experiences in a higher state in the world of Devachan. There we see a continuous transformation. Those who find their way into the spiritual world through the relevant exercises learn there how the color of a plant stands out from the plant like a flame. They learn to recognize how colors are structures that rise and fall in free space. However, they only have a correct view when they are able to see colors and sounds for themselves and guide them to specific entities. Such entities are constantly around us. If you could bring out the violet of this flower so that the violet moves freely in space, you would have the expression of the life of the plant's spiritual inner world. This is also how the human aura works, and what we call the astral body. All human inclinations, feelings of vanity and egoism, are expressed in it through very specific color currents, so that we can say: inner soul experience is expressed in the human aura. The aura is never still; nothing is stationary, as there are stationary things here in the sensory world. And when a being in the spiritual world has an emotional or volitional impulse, you can always see how this is expressed in very specific changes in colors and tones. Eternal movement is the essence of the higher worlds.

[ 5 ] Of course, this is confusing for those who enter the higher worlds for the first time. But this also means that everything that exists in these higher worlds is revealed instantly. While human beings can hide their inner life from those who can only see them with physical eyes, they cannot hide anything from those who can see with spiritual eyes. Everything is clearly visible, so that you have to say to yourself: if we want to explore a person as they stand before us with our physical eyes, we have to infer their soul from their outward appearance, how they smile or cry. It is different in the higher world. There is no inference from the outward to the inward. The inward is completely open. We live together with the essence of things there. In our time, only the initiated can acquire this consciousness. Only they can consciously live in the higher world. They can add another state to the state of consciousness from waking up to falling asleep, through which they are able to add the inner to the outer. Just as they can consciously experience the inner nature of things, so too could all people in ancient times, in a certain sense. Before their present state of consciousness, people had a state of consciousness through which they saw things from within.

[ 6 ] If we go back to ancient times, we come to people who have less and less of what people have today. People today can count and calculate. In the middle of Atlantis, you would find people who could not yet count and calculate, who could not yet speak of logic. In this respect, even the youngest schoolchild today can do more than any Atlantean could. But the Atlanteans could do something else. When they looked at any creature of nature, a plant for example, they could see a very specific feeling arise within themselves. For them, every plant had a specific emotional value. While modern humans pass by plants with a certain indifference, the Atlanteans experienced vivid sensations and feelings. Indeed, if we go back far enough, to the time of the first Atlanteans, we would find that they did not yet have as vivid a perception of color as modern humans. If such an Atlantean had approached a violet, he would not have seen it as it is here, but as if a kind of misty formation were rising up. Similarly, he would not have seen the red color on the rose itself, but a red aura around the rose, the red color floating freely. If you look at any crystal now, you see it as red if it is a ruby. The first Atlanteans, however, would not have seen the color in such a crystal. It would have appeared to them as if surrounded by a halo of colors, and the ruby would have appeared to them as if it were only a kind of incision in this halo of colors. If you go back to those times, you come to a distant past where people would not have seen the outlines of other people at all, nor the outlines of plants or animals. When they approached another person who was hostile towards them, they perceived a brownish-reddish color. If they perceived a beautiful bluish color, they could say to themselves: This person is peacefully disposed towards me. — This is how the inner life of a person was expressed to them in such colors.

[ 7 ] If we go back even further, we come to the distant past of ancient Lemuria, which lay between Asia, Australia, and Africa. Not only was consciousness in perception completely different, but even everything that can be called volitional impulse was different. The will still had a magical effect; it had power over other objects; it manifested itself like a force of nature acting on other objects. When the Lemurian held his hand over a plant and concentrated his will on it, he could make this plant grow rapidly through his will alone.

[ 8 ] The forces out in nature are none other than those found in human beings. Because human beings have become closed beings, enclosed in skin, their forces have become increasingly distant from the forces of nature, increasingly dissimilar to them. Human thinking is most dissimilar to the forces of nature. Combining and calculating are most foreign to what exists as such in nature. Nevertheless, if you could go back far enough, you would see that there were beings, the spiritual ancestors of humanity, who would have considered it — comparatively — utter nonsense to say: I grasp a concept of some external thing. They could not have said that at all, but would have seen the concept, as it were, as an activity, even as an entity. Anyone who forms a concept of any thing today must imagine that this thing was originally formed from the same concept. You get an idea of this when you remember the process of any human creation. You can form a concept of a finished watch, the mechanism of the movement, the forward movement of the hands. You could never do that if no one before you had been a watchmaker and thought out what you are now thinking. Think about what he put into it.

[ 9 ] All the concepts that humans can form today, everything that thinking does today, existed in our past as reality that was first put into things. Every being is understood through its concept. Once, every being was formed according to this concept. It was no different in the world than it is today in human art: The concepts that humans form today were originally placed into things. If you were to go back even further, you would see how these people could never have said: I form a concept by looking at things – but rather they really saw what happened there, how the concept was placed there. They watched, as it were, the master craftsmen of things.

[ 10 ] This shows you the difference between the human mind of today and the intellect of that time, which we must call creative. But if you were to get to know these beings, who still knew the creative mind from their own observation, in contrast to today's merely receptive mind, you would find that these beings were completely different. They were not yet incarnated in human bodies. What dwells in human shells today was then still enclosed in the womb of divine-spiritual beings.

[ 11 ] We have imperceptibly passed beyond the point in Earth's development that we might compare to the following: Down on Earth there was already physical life; there were beings down there, quite different, but similar to today's minerals, plants, and animals, and then beings that were not human, but stood between animals and humans and were ready to receive the human soul. They were organized enough to be able to receive the human soul. Only comparatively can one say how to imagine this: Down on earth, humans walked around who were actually still animal-humans. Now imagine the human bodies as individual sponges and the souls as drops of water, all of which were still united in a common mass of water; the physical earth with all its swarming beings, enveloped, as it were, by a soul envelope, like today's envelope of air. In this, everything was still undifferentiated, like the drops of water. And just as when you now let the sponges absorb the mass of water, where each one then receives a single drop for itself, so it was in those days. What was a unified soul substance was absorbed by the individual human bodies, distributed among the individual human bodies. This is what first gave rise to the human soul. Without this process, the human substance would never have separated into many individual entities.

[ 12 ] But this also marks the beginning of the process through which human beings gradually separate themselves from their surroundings, thereby acquiring a special objective consciousness. Previously, they had a consciousness that did not form concepts, but the soul was still completely within the world soul, and it received all its wisdom from the communal world soul as if from within. It did not need to look outward. One could truly say that this communal world soul was still capable of everything; it formed everything that exists on earth today according to the communal concepts. Humans received these concepts when that drop of wisdom was given to them by the communal world soul. This is the difference between the ancient knowledge, before it was embodied in the flesh, and today's knowledge, which arises when humans turn their attention outward.

[ 13 ] The moment human beings cease to perceive with their senses, their inner being sinks into the indeterminate darkness that we call dreamless sleep. When humans sleep, their physical body and etheric body remain behind, while the astral body leaves. What is it in humans that perceives the outer world? The astral body perceives colors and sounds. The astral body experiences pleasure when it enjoys something pleasurable, and it feels pain as such. However, this astral body cannot have any effect in human beings today if it is not in the physical body, because in order to perceive its surroundings, it needs eyes, ears, and all the physical tools for pleasure, suffering, pain, joy, and so on. Although the physical body is merely a tool, it is necessary for today's astral body. The moment the astral body leaves the physical body, it no longer perceives anything.

[ 14 ] This astral body is exactly the same as the one that used to be in the common soul substance surrounding the earth. If you were to separate out all the astral bodies and put them together, you would get what surrounded human beings at that time as astral or soul substance. If today all people on Earth could be put to sleep, so that the entire human race would be asleep, and if all astral bodies were then lifted out and mixed with the remaining substance, one would see how dreamless sleep would cease completely. Although the souls would not perceive colors and sounds through the external instruments, colors would begin to rise from all these astral bodies, and constantly changing color images would float around them, and sounds would begin to be heard within. All of this would then surround the earth again, as it was in those days before the first incarnation of any soul took place.

[ 15 ] The darkening of that ancient state of consciousness, which you know today from your dreamless sleep, came about because the common astral substance was separated into individual parts by the world soul, and the individual parts entered into human bodies. You can go even further. What is happening tonight, what is sinking into an indefinite darkness for people today, was at a time we are now talking about, filled with light, filled with perceptions of the spiritual world, it was definitely day. So you have now been led to a state of humanity where the whole of humanity perceived astral, but not in a physical body.

[ 16 ] Now ask yourself the question: What has humanity actually gained since that time? What has been added to what it already had? What has humanity gained through physical embodiment? — It has gained the ability to say “I” to itself. The whole consciousness, however clairvoyant it was, was merely a more or less heightened dream consciousness. Humans were not yet self-aware. So this is what humanity has gained. This is the true gift of God, as reported in religious documents such as the Bible: that at the time when humanity became embodied, self-awareness was given to humans. Humans did not know this before, and this self-awareness will increase more and more in the present humanity. It is what has been revealed since that time, which we no longer spend in dull or clairvoyant consciousness: the “I am,” and we can call it by no other name than “I am the I am.” There you have the word of Yahweh: “I am who was, who is, and who will be.”

[ 17 ] So we have returned to a time when this I Am word was still extinguished. It was not yet present in human beings. Human beings had a consciousness that was instilled in them, which they did not acquire by looking at external objects. Where was the I Am consciousness? Divine beings had this self-consciousness. Human beings acquired it after physical incarnation. Therein lies the difference between what Christianity calls the Holy Spirit and the spirit itself. The Holy Spirit is the one who had self-consciousness above, before incarnation, and the spirit itself is the one who had I-consciousness in human beings. So that if you were to throw all self-consciousnesses together and thereby also separate them from egoism, you would again obtain the Holy Spirit.

[ 18 ] Now you have clothed what we started with in its most radical form. We have gone back to a very strange kind of teaching. While today it is taught that man faces man and the student is told, “This is how things are,” at that time only one thing was possible: a kind of teaching that was at the same time work, action. It was an outpouring of wisdom into individual beings. Wisdom did not come from outside; it flowed to people from within, a process that only the initiate knows today. If you were to measure the time from the period I have just described, when there was no teaching but only enlightenment from within, to our own time, you would find an intermediate period in which people were, so to speak, half in one state and half in the other. That was the middle of the Atlantean period. There, human beings could already recognize certain outlines of things; they could see how color gradually settled on the surface of objects, see how individual things acquired properties. But they saw this only as if everything were shrouded in a fog of color. They still heard the whole world resounding with sounds that were wise sounds, that told them something and brought them news of other beings. But all this was still very confused in this intermediate state. This was also the time when a teaching began that gradually transformed into the later form of religious communication to humans.

[ 19 ] If we could go back to the ancient Atlantean era, we would find a great school of adepts. The fact that someone today can absorb wisdom is possible because the Turanian adepts of that time had disciples; their disciples in turn taught others up to our time, so that a direct tradition leads back to the Turanian school of adepts. At that time, it had to be taken into account that people were in an intermediate state, where they only had part of today's mode of perception. They could only recognize objects in vague outlines. But they were also able to receive the truth from within to some extent. At that time, very few people could count to five. Without self-awareness, this is not possible. But they were able to absorb what was reflected in their inner being, in their semi-somnambulistic consciousness. They had to be enlightened if they were to be taught the highest wisdom. But they had to be taught visually, and the Turanian adepts had certain methods for doing this. They could not have done this in the way we do today with a lecture. The adepts themselves were far ahead of humanity and knew all this themselves, but the rest of humanity was still extremely primitive. People were put into a hypnotic state in order to teach them wisdom. What is wrong today was quite normal at that time. People were put into a kind of sleep state, and this sleep state was used to enlighten them in the following way. Before the first incarnation of the human soul into the body, there was no night; all people were enlightened. Dreamless sleep was precisely what gave people their perceptions. Now they no longer had this. It had disappeared, and in exchange they had gained the ability to see objects in general outlines. As far as external perceptions were concerned, what they had gained was lost in terms of inner perception. But now certain abilities had been developed among the adepts. They had learned what we now call occult writing, what we would also call occult speech today. You all know that there are so-called mantras, certain primordial formulas of prayer, that there is a certain effect in the sound of language. The first words of the Gospel of John were also of this nature. When it says here: “In the beginning was the Word,” there is a certain value in the “beginning” that originally lay in the first words of the Gospel of John. But all this is only a shadow of what was used as a sound composition in the school of adepts at that time. This replaced what people at that time had lost in terms of their ability to attain enlightenment. From the other human beings, who were initiates, they could receive this enlightenment again in hypnotic sleep, so that these disciples received a kind of artificial enlightenment from their advanced brothers, whereby human beings could once again see the spirits at work in the world that had always surrounded them, as before the human soul had incarnated. This was the experience of the disciples of the Turanian period; these were the first religious teachings, and in this way they were taught the laws of the world. And from these enlightenments, formulas and drawings were received, for drawings could also have an effect; if the line had a very specific regularity, it had such an effect that it could teach people great secrets of the world. If you drew a vortex for a person, they would not have seen this vortex with their open eyes. But if this vortex was held up to them in hypnotic sleep or even tapped, it would have evoked very special sensations, for example, how a plant develops into a seed and the seed becomes a new plant. Such formulas, such lines were then handed down from these schools of adepts and later given to the peoples by the various founders of religions.

[ 20 ] The further back we go, the more what was distributed to individual human beings as souls is a unified soul. By being distributed and separated from one another, the individual souls have become different. In sleep, all astral bodies are still similar to each other today; during the day, they look quite different. This was also the case in this hypnotic state, where the astral bodies were actually taught, and which were then all quite similar. There, a certain primordial wisdom could be imparted to all. But when humans lost this ability to receive wisdom in this way, it became necessary to teach in ancient India as the Indian body required, in Persia as the Persian body required, and again differently in Greece, Egypt, and among the Germanic peoples. This was required by the outer physical bodies according to the various influences exerted on them. The founders of religion had poured this into the forms that have been handed down to us today as the Egyptian Hermetic teachings, the teachings of Zarathustra, and so on.

[ 21 ] But in all the basic forms of real religions, that which gave rise to them lives on. The enlightenment that people received in the past is something quite different from what can happen today. It was communicated not through teachings, but through life. It is a much more intimate way for the student to face the teacher. You can imagine, for example, that the vortex directly stimulated sensations. Today, concepts are communicated, and the sensations must first be ignited by the concepts. But it is precisely from this kind of influence through life that the religious formulas arose. Thus, the sevenfold nature of man was something that was communicated in the Turanian school of adepts. Today, however, they are still hidden as thoughts in the Lord's Prayer. This Lord's Prayer is the expression of the sevenfold nature of man.

[ 22 ] This was made clear to the students of the Turanian adepts by playing them a musical scale as a symbol of the seven members of the human being, mixed with certain color concepts and an aroma scale. What lay in the seven-part harmony scale arose in him as an inner experience, for which what was outwardly present was only a means. The great founders of religions poured this into certain formulas, and the greatest of them also poured it into the Lord's Prayer, and everyone who prays the Lord's Prayer has the effect of the Lord's Prayer.

[ 23 ] The Lord's Prayer is a prayer that is not a mantra as such. It will still have its meaning when thousands and thousands of years have passed, for it is a thought mantra. The effect of the Lord's Prayer has been poured into thoughts, and just as it is true that man can digest quite well without first having a physiologist tell him what the effect of the digestive process is, so it is true that he who prays the Lord's Prayer feels the effect of the Lord's Prayer, even if he does not say so. The effect of the Lord's Prayer is there, for it lies in the power of the thoughts themselves. However, there is also a higher insight that gives the Lord's Prayer a deeper meaning, and no one should close their mind to this. Such is the path that religious truths have taken.

[ 24 ] Your souls, which live in your bodies today, once lived in the common divine spirit substance and were enlightened there in a somnambulistic state. Without ego consciousness, they were able to perceive how the spiritual-divine forces create. Then the souls were incorporated. As a result, this perception became increasingly obscured and they were even deprived of the possibility of artificially inducing this state, as it could still be achieved in the Turanian school of adepts. The religious teachings and formulas that have been extracted from the primordial wisdom that created the world itself are only an echo of the sensations that can be communicated from person to person. The wisdom of the Old Testament is like that spoken of by the primordial ideas, the primordial wisdom that underlies all things and that your soul once possessed. In the future, it will be the case that people will once again have what they originally possessed in a dull dream consciousness, but now in bright, clear consciousness, from the soul. Human beings will have their present bright, clear consciousness and, in addition, enlightenment. In order to attain self-consciousness, human beings had to give up their original clairvoyance, and the more this original clairvoyance was suppressed, the more the inner self-consciousness blossomed. Once this has reached its peak, humans will have arrived at their final incarnation, with the old clairvoyance and a newly acquired element as the fruit of their lives.

[ 25 ] Time and again we hear the phrase that human beings must gradually merge into an all-consciousness. That would be salvation if they lost their present consciousness and merged into an all-consciousness. But that is not the case. The ego consciousness, which once did not exist at all, will still exist after the last incarnation. What has separated itself from the common spiritual substance will flow back together again. But imagine it like this: originally you had clear water, which has been absorbed by the many little sponges. During this separation, however, everything that can be absorbed from the environment is absorbed. Each drop takes on a very specific color. When the sponges are squeezed out again, each one brings its color with it. This is a multitude of colors, iridescent, more beautiful than it could ever have been before. Thus, when each human being returns to the universal spirit, they bring their special color with them. This is their individual consciousness, which cannot be lost. A harmony of all consciousnesses, a harmony will be the universal consciousness. In freedom, the beings who have passed through humanity will be one. They will remain many, but because they want to be one, yet are not forced to form a unity, they will be one. Each has retained its consciousness, and all together form a unified consciousness through their will. This is how we must imagine the beginning and end of our present world process.

[ 26 ] We must not use phrases, but must look at things as they are. Talking about “merging into an all-consciousness” is a pantheistic phrase. Especially when we speak from the standpoint of eternity, we must place before our souls a sentence that tells us that humanity was not here in vain, that it had a meaning in the universe. In other words, those who engage in the study of the facts of the world ultimately tell themselves that human beings are called upon to contribute something, to give meaning to this life. Ultimately, they must lay down at the altar of the deity the piece that they have acquired for themselves. And from this, the fabric will be woven, as it is so beautifully said, that the whole spirit of the earth weaves. This contains all human egos, and Goethe spoke as a true initiate when he described it as a real process:

In the floods of life, in the storm of deeds
I surge up and down,
Weaving back and forth!
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life,
Thus I create on the whirring loom of time
And weave the living garment of the Godhead.

[ 27 ] The Deity will wear the immortal garment when the Earth has reached its completion, and individual human beings will have woven the fabric as they move upward through their successive incarnations, passing through birth and death.