The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eighth Lecture

[ 1 ] Let us now take a look at the different embodiments of our planet, one after the other. We must absolutely form the idea that these were embodiments of our Earth planet, that is, the states of the Earth when it was once Saturn, Sun and Moon, and we must imagine that these embodiments were necessary for the formation of the beings, especially of man, that man's own development is intimately connected with the development of the Earth. But we will only get a correct idea of what has happened if we form a thought about how, in relation to certain qualities, what we recognize today as human beings, as ourselves, has changed in the course of development. First, let us look at the changes that have taken place in man in relation to his states of consciousness. Everything, absolutely everything in the world has developed; our consciousness has also developed. The consciousness that man has today is not what he has always had; it has only gradually become what it is today.

[ 2 ] We call our present consciousness the object consciousness or the waking day consciousness. You all know it as what is yours from morning, when you wake up, until evening, when you fall asleep. Let us clarify what it consists of. It consists of the fact that man directs his senses into the outside world and perceives objects; that is why we call it object consciousness. Man looks into his surroundings and sees certain objects in space, surrounded by colors. He listens with his ear and hears that there are objects in space that make a sound, that emit sound. He touches the objects with his sense of touch, finds them warm or cold, he smells, he tastes objects. He reflects on what he perceives with his senses. He uses his reason to understand these different objects, and the waking daytime consciousness that humans have today is composed of these facts of sensory perception and the understanding of them with our minds. Man has not always had this consciousness; it has only developed, and he will not always have it that way, but he will ascend to higher states of consciousness.

[ 3 ] With the means that occultism gives us, we can initially see seven states of consciousness, of which our present consciousness is the middle one. We can see three preceding and three subsequent ones. Some may be surprised that we are so nicely in the middle. This is because other states precede the first state, and these elude our gaze. We see just as far backwards as we do forwards. If we were to stand back one, we would see one more backwards and one less forwards, just as you can go out into the field and see as far to the left as to the right.

[ 4 ] These seven states of consciousness are as follows. First, a very dull, deep state of consciousness that people today hardly know anymore. Only people with a particular mediumistic disposition can still have this state of consciousness today, which all people once had on Saturn. Such people with a mediumistic disposition can enter into a state that is also known to modern psychologists. Their waking daytime consciousness and other states of consciousness are dormant; they are as if dead. But then, when they draw or describe in their memories or during the state what they have experienced there, they bring to light very peculiar experiences that do not take place around us. They create all kinds of drawings that, although grotesque and distorted, correspond to what we in spiritual science call cosmic states. They are often quite wrong, but there is something about them that shows that such beings have a dull but universal consciousness during this dozy state. They see celestial bodies and therefore draw them.

[ 5 ] Such consciousness, which is dull but omniscient in our cosmos, was once possessed by man on the first embodiment of our earth. It is called deep trance consciousness. There are beings in our environment that still have such consciousness; these are the minerals. If you could talk to them, these minerals would tell you what it is like on Saturn. Only this consciousness is very dull.

[6] The second state of consciousness that we know, or rather do not know, because we are then asleep, is that of ordinary sleep. This state of consciousness is not as comprehensive, but although it is still very dull, it is relatively bright compared to the first. This sleep consciousness was once permanent for all people when the Earth was a sun. At that time, the human ancestor slept continuously. Even today, there is still this state of consciousness: the plants have it. They are beings that sleep continuously, and if they could speak, they could tell us what it is like on the sun, because they have sun consciousness.

[ 7 ] The third state, which is still dim and dull in comparison to our daytime consciousness, is that of image consciousness, and we already have a clear idea of this because we experience an echo of it in dream-filled sleep, albeit only a rudiment of what was the consciousness of all people on the moon. It will be good to start from the dream to get an image of the lunar consciousness.

[ 8 ] In dream life, we may find something confusing and chaotic, but on closer observation, this confusion offers an intimate regularity. The dream is a strange symbolism. In my lectures, I have often given the following examples, all taken from life: You dream that you are chasing a tree frog in order to catch it, you feel its soft, smooth body; you wake up and have the corner of the bed sheet in your hand. If you had applied your waking consciousness, you would have seen your hand grasp the bedspread. Dream consciousness gives you a symbol of external action; it forms a symbol out of what our waking consciousness sees as fact.

[ 9 ] Another example. A student dreams that he is standing at the door of the lecture hall. He is jostled, as it is called in student slang. From this a demand arises. He now experiences all the details until he goes to the duel, accompanied by his second and the doctor, and the first shot is fired. At that moment he wakes up and sees that he has pushed over the chair in front of his bed. In the waking consciousness he would simply have heard this fall; the dream symbolizes this prosaic action through the drama of the duel. And you can also see that the time conditions are quite different, because in the single moment when the chair fell, the whole drama flashed through his mind. All the preparation took place in a moment. The dream has reversed the time, it does not obey the conditions of the world, it is a time shaper.

[ 10 ] Not only external events can be symbolized in this way, but also internal processes of the body. A person dreams that he is in a cellar hole, with nasty spiders crawling towards him. He wakes up and feels a headache. The skullcap has symbolized itself in the cellar hole, the pain in the ugly spiders.

[ 11 ] The dream of today's man symbolizes events that are inside and outside. But it was not so when this third state of consciousness was that of man on the moon. At that time, man lived in nothing but such images as in today's dream, but they expressed realities. They signified reality just as the blue color signifies reality today. Only then did the color float freely in space; it was not on the objects. In the consciousness of that time, man could not have gone out on the street as he can today, seen a person from afar, looked at him, approached him, because he would not have been able to perceive such forms of beings that have a color on their surface, quite apart from the fact that man at that time could not walk as today's man does. But let us assume that a man had met another on the moon at that time: a freely floating image of form and color would have risen up in front of him; let us say an ugly one, then the man would have walked to the side so as not to encounter it, or a beautiful one, then he would have approached it. The ugly color image would have indicated to him that the other person had an unpleasant feeling towards him, the beautiful one that the other person loved him.

[ 12 ] Let us assume that there was salt on the moon. When salt is on the table today, you see it as it is in space, as an object, grainy, with a certain color. It would not have been the same in those days. On the moon you would not have been able to see the salt, but a form and color image would have emerged from the spot where the salt was, and this image would have indicated to you that the salt is something useful. Thus, the entire consciousness was filled with images, with floating colors and forms. Man lived in such a sea of forms and colors, but these images of colors and forms meant what was going on around man, especially the things of the soul and what related to the soul, what was beneficial or harmful to him. In this way, man oriented himself in the right way about the things around him.

[ 13 ] This consciousness changed into our present-day consciousness when the moon embodied itself to the earth, and only a remnant remains in the dream that the modern human has, a rudiment, just as rudiments of other things have remained. You know, for example, that there are certain muscles near the ear that now seem useless. They used to serve a purpose. They served to move the ears at will. Today there are only a few people who can do that.

[ 14 ] Thus, there are also conditions in humans that have remained as the last remnant of a once meaningful device. But even though they mean nothing today, these images meant the outside world back then. Even today you still have this awareness in all those animals - pay attention to it! who cannot produce a sound from within. In occultism there is a much more correct classification of animals than in external natural science, namely, into those that are soundless within and those that can sound from within. Of course, you find that some lower animals produce a sound, but this is done mechanically, through rubbing and so on, not from within. Even frogs do not produce sound from within. Only the higher animals, which came into being at the time when man was able to express his suffering and joy through sound, only they have, like man, the possibility of expressing their pain and their pleasure through sounds and cries. All animals that do not make sound from within still have such image consciousness. It is not that lower animals see the images in such limitations as we do. If some lower animal, for example, a crab, perceives an image that makes a certain ugly impression, it avoids it. It does not see the objects, but it sees the harmfulness in a repulsive image.

[ 15 ] The fourth state of consciousness is that which all human beings now have. The images that human beings used to perceive as floating color images in space now envelop objects, as it were. One might say that they are superimposed on them. They form the boundaries of the things. They appear on the things, while they used to appear free-floating. Thus they have become the expression of the form. That which man used to have within him has come out and attached itself to the objects. In this way he has come to his present-day waking consciousness.

[ 16 ] Let us now consider something else. We have already said that man's physical body was prepared on Saturn. On the Sun, the etheric or life body was added, permeated it and worked on it. It took what the physical body had already become and developed it further. On the Moon, the astral body was added; this changed the form of the body again. On Saturn, this physical body was very simple. On the Sun, it was already much more complicated, because now the ether body was working on it, making it more perfect. On the Moon, the astral body was added, and on Earth, the I was added, making it even more perfect. Back when the physical body was on Saturn, when no etheric body had yet penetrated, all those organs that are in it today were not yet in it, because blood and nerves were missing, and there were no glands either. At that time, man had only the rudiments of the organs that are now the most perfect and that have had time to develop to their present perfection: these are the wonderfully constructed sense organs.

[ 17 ] This wonderful structure of the human eye, this marvelous apparatus of the human ear, all this has only reached its perfection today because it was formed out of the mass of Saturn, and the etheric body, astral body and I worked on it. So did the larynx. It was already present on Saturn, but man could not yet speak. On the Moon, he began to send out inarticulate sounds and cries, but it was only through the long process described that the larynx became the perfect apparatus that it is today on Earth. On the sun, where the etheric body was added, these sense organs were further developed, and all those organs were added that are primarily excretory and vital organs and serve nutrition and growth. They were first laid down during the existence on the sun. Then the astral body continued its work during the moon existence, the I during the earth existence; so the glands, the organs of growth and so on matured to their present perfection. Then, on the moon, the nervous system was first formed through the incorporation of the astral body. That was when man had image consciousness. But what enabled man to develop an object consciousness, what at the same time enabled him to express his joy and suffering from within, the I, that formed in man his blood.

[ 18 ] Thus the whole universe is the builder of the sense organs. Thus everything that is glands, reproductive and nutritional organs is formed by the life body. Thus the astral body is the builder of the nervous system and the I is the incorporator of the blood. There is a phenomenon known as anemia or pallor. In this condition, the blood is unable to hold on to the waking consciousness. Such persons often experience a dusky consciousness similar to that on the moon.

[ 19 ] Now let us consider the three states of consciousness that follow. One may ask: How is it possible to know about this today? – It is possible through initiation. The initiate can already have these states of consciousness in anticipation today. The next state of consciousness known to the initiate is the so-called psychic state, a state of consciousness in which one has both the consciousness of images and the waking consciousness of the day. In this psychic consciousness, you see the person as in the waking daytime consciousness, in his limitations and forms, but at the same time you see what lives in his soul, emanating as clouds of color and images in what we call the aura. And then you do not walk through the world in a dream-like state like the man in the moon, but in complete self-control, like today's human being in waking daytime consciousness. All humanity will have this psychic or soul consciousness, the Jupiter consciousness, on the planet that replaces our Earth.

[ 20 ] Then there is still a sixth state of consciousness that man will also have one day. It will unite today's waking daytime consciousness, which the initiate knows only as psychic consciousness, and in addition everything that man sleeps through today. Man will see deeply, deeply into the nature of the beings when he lives in this consciousness, the consciousness of inspiration. Man will not only perceive in color pictures and forms, he will hear the being of the other person resound and ring. Every human individuality will have a certain tone, and all this will resound together in a symphony. This will be the consciousness of man when our planet has passed into the state of Venus. There he will experience the harmony of the spheres, which Goethe describes in his prologue to “Faust”:

The sun resounds in the ancient way
In the singing of the spheres
And completes its prescribed journey
With a thunderous gait.

[ 21 ] When the Earth was a sun, man dimly perceived this sound and vibration, and on Venus he will perceive it sounding and resounding “in the ancient way”. Goethe retained this image right down to this very word.

[ 22 ] The seventh state of consciousness is spiritual consciousness, which is actually the highest consciousness, where man has omniscience, where he will see what is happening not only on his planet, but in the entire cosmic neighborhood; that consciousness that man had on Saturn, which was a kind of all-consciousness, even if it was very dull. He will have this in addition to all the other states of consciousness when he arrives on Vulcan.

[ 23 ] These are the seven states of consciousness that man must pass through on his journey through the cosmos, and each embodiment on Earth creates the conditions through which such states of consciousness are possible. It is only through the predisposition of the nervous system on the moon, which has developed into today's brain, that today's waking daytime consciousness has become possible. Organs must be created through which the higher states of consciousness can also be physically experienced, as the initiate already experiences them spiritually today.

[ 24 ] The purpose of evolution is to enable the human being to pass through these seven planetary conditions. Each planetary embodiment is connected with the development of one of the seven states of consciousness of man, and through what takes place on each planet, the physical organs develop for such a state of consciousness. You will have a highly developed organ, a psychic organ, on Jupiter. On Venus there will be an organ through which man will be able to develop physically the consciousness that the initiate today has on the devachan plane. And on Vulcan there will be that spiritual consciousness that the initiate today has when he is on the higher part of the devachan, when he is in the world of reason.

[ 25 ] Tomorrow we will take a closer look at these planets individually, because just as our Earth used to look different from today, for example in the Atlantean and Lemurian times, and will look different again later, so too have the Moon, Sun and Saturn had different states, and so will Jupiter and Venus.

[ 26 ] Today we have learned about the great, comprehensive cycles of the planets, and tomorrow we will deal with the changes of these planets while they were the scene of human activity.