The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Thirteenth Lecture

[1] It is our task today to discuss the future progress of human development and what is known as initiation, by means of which the human being in the present, anticipating the future, passes through stages of life that will otherwise be passed through by humanity in the future.

[ 2 ] If we deal with the first question first, it may seem to you either as presumptuous to want to talk about the future, or as impossible to be able to make out something about the future of man. Nevertheless, if you think about it a little, you will find that the idea that one can know something about the future is not entirely unfounded. You only need to compare these things with what the ordinary researcher, for example the scientist, can know about the future. He can tell you exactly that if you mix oxygen, hydrogen and sulfur under certain conditions, sulfuric acid will always result. It can be stated exactly what will happen if rays are caught through a mirror. Yes, it goes even much further with regard to the things of outer life; solar and lunar eclipses can be predicted for an indefinite period of time.

[ 3 ] Why is that possible? Because and insofar as one knows the laws of physical life. If someone recognizes the spiritual laws of life, he can likewise say from these laws what must occur in the future. But usually one question weighs heavily on people. It is easily thought that it would be contrary to freedom, to arbitrary human action, if one knew in advance what would happen. This, too, is an incorrect perception. If you combine sulfur, hydrogen and oxygen under certain conditions, sulfuric acid is formed; this is determined by the lawfulness of the combination. But whether you do it depends on your will. And so it is in the spiritual process of human development. Man will do what will happen entirely of his own free will, and the higher man develops, the freer man will be. One must also not think that what man will do in the future is already determined for him because he can foresee it. It is just that most people do not really understand this question, and in fact it is one of the most difficult. Since ancient times, philosophers have agonized over the question of human freedom and the lawful predetermination of phenomena. Almost everything that has been written in this field is highly inadequate, because people usually cannot distinguish between foresight and predetermination. With foresight it is no different than looking at distant points in space. If you look at a distant point in space, let us say at the street corner over there, and you see that a person gives another ten pennies, have you then brought about this action? Has any cause been given for it by your seeing it? No; you only see that he does it, and that exerts no compulsion on him to act in that way. Now in time it is the same in a certain respect, only people cannot grasp it. Suppose you are embodied again in a few thousand years. You then do something of your own free will; that is the same as the example of the ten pennies given. The seer may see what will be done in the future, and this future action is no more determined by the present moment than the gift of the ten pfennigs is by the point in space. It is often said: If you see that something will happen, then it is actually predetermined. But then one confuses the future with the present. It would not be looking into the future if it were already determined. You do not see something that is already there, but something that is yet to come. You must grasp the concept of looking into the future precisely. It must be practiced and cultivated in patient meditation; only then will you find the possibility of grasping these things correctly.

[ 4 ] Having said this much by way of introduction, let us now discuss some of the things that can be said about the future development of humanity. We have arrived at the point where humanity has descended most deeply into matter, where it uses its spiritual powers for the construction and manufacture of tools and machines that serve personal life. Linked to this was an ever-increasing densification of humanity and the earth in general. We have seen that what we today call the densest, the mineral kingdom, only came into being at a certain point in our development. Only with this did man enter into his present earthly development. Hand in hand with this went the appearance of the two sexes and other phenomena. At that time, when man had not yet entered into this physical evolution that the mineral kingdom has, he was also of a much finer, softer nature. Just to evoke an idea of this, it may be said how, in that ancient time, when the two sexes did not yet exist, the reproduction of the human race took place. In those days, when man was still of two sexes and had a thinner, more delicate body, he brought forth another being out of himself. This did not happen in the same way as it does today, but rather in the same way as the etheric body of some other being emerges from the medium during spiritualistic seances. This gives you a rough idea of this materialization out of itself, of how humanity reproduced itself in ancient times: like an outpouring of people who were ripe to continue their own development.

[ 5 ] Thus you see how man's ascent in the cosmos is linked with his descent into the material world. And linked with this is the development of another power, which could not have developed at all without this descent: this is egoism. It has a good and a bad side. It is the basis for human independence and freedom, but in its other aspect it is also the cause of all evil and wickedness. In order for man to learn to do good out of free will, however, he had to pass through this power of egoism. He had to be driven to do good again and again by the powers that had guided him earlier, but he had to be given the opportunity to go his own way. In the same way as he has descended, he must now ascend again in spirituality, and just as this descent is connected with an increase of egoism, so the ascent depends on selflessness, on the feeling of sympathy between people becoming stronger and stronger. Humanity has developed through various epochs, first through the ancient Indian, then through the Persian, through the Egyptian-Chaldean-Babylonian and through the Greek-Latin epoch to the present, the fifth epoch, and this will be replaced by a sixth. And in that the evolution of mankind is working towards this, it is at the same time working towards overcoming that principle which has been strongest since the time when the etheric body found its integration in that point of the brain of which I spoke to you yesterday. That was the time of falling into the deepest egoism.

[ 6 ] In earlier developments, man was also selfish, but that was of a different kind. The selfishness that goes so deep into the soul as in our present age is entirely connected with the expression of the materialistic attitude, and a spiritual age will mean overcoming this selfishness. That is why Christianity and all those movements that had real religious life consciously worked towards breaking the old blood ties; and Christianity has put forward a radical sentence that reads: “Whoever does not leave father, mother, wife, child, brother, sister, cannot be my disciple.” This indicates nothing less than that the spiritual bond between soul and soul, between human being and human being, must take the place of old blood ties. The only question now is: What are the ways and means by which humanity can achieve spirituality, that is, the overcoming of materialism, and at the same time what could be called the brotherhood, the expression of universal human love? One might be led to believe that one need only emphasize universal human love thoroughly, and that this human love would then have to come, or that one would have to found associations that set themselves the goal of universal human love. Occultism is never of this opinion. On the contrary! The more man speaks of universal brotherly love and humanity in the sense of becoming intoxicated with it, the more selfish people become. For just as there is a sensual lust, there is a lust of the soul; and it is even a refined lust to say: I want to become morally higher and higher! It is basically a thought that does not produce ordinary everyday selfishness, but a sophisticated selfishness that arises from such lust.

[ 7 ] It is not by emphasizing love and compassion that they will be generated in the course of human evolution. Rather, it is spiritual knowledge itself that guides humanity to that brotherhood. There is no other means of bringing about universal human brotherhood than the spread of occult knowledge in the world. No matter how well intentioned, talking about love and human brotherhood and founding thousands of associations will not lead to the desired goal. What is needed is to do the right thing, to know how to establish this brotherhood. Only people who live in the common, occult truth that is valid for all people come together in the one truth. Just as the sun unites the plants that strive towards it, and yet each of which is an individuality, so truth must be a unifying one, towards which all strive; then all people come together. But people must work energetically for the truth; only then can they live together in harmony.

[ 8 ] One might object: Everyone strives for the truth, but there are different points of view, and that is where disputes and differences arise. This is an insufficiently thorough understanding of the truth. One should not rely on the fact that there can be different points of view in the truth; one must first experience that the truth can only be one. It does not depend on a referendum; it is true in itself. Or would you put it to the vote whether the three angles of a triangle are equal to 180 degrees? Whether millions of people admit it or not when you have recognized it, then it is true for you. There is no democracy in truth. And those who do not yet harmonize have not yet penetrated far enough into the truth. That is where all the dispute about the truth comes from. One can say: Yes, but one person claims this and the other that in occult matters! This is not the case in real occultism. It is the same with materialistic things: one person claims this and another that, but then one of them is wrong. It is the same in real occultism; the only difference is that there is often the impropriety of judging occult things before one has understood them.

[ 9 ] This is the goal towards which the sixth age of humanity will strive: the popularization of occult truth in the broadest sense. That is the mission of this age. And the task of the Society, which unites spiritually, is to carry this occult truth into life everywhere and to apply it directly there. That is precisely what our age lacks. Just look at how our age searches and how no one can find the right thing. There are countless questions: the question of education, the question of women, medicine, the social question, the question of nutrition. And people are dabbling in these questions, and numerous articles and books are being written, and everyone is talking from their point of view, without wanting to study what is central, the occult truth. The point is not to know something in the abstract about spiritual truths, but to apply them directly to life, to study social questions, educational questions, yes, the whole of human life from the point of view of real occult wisdom. But one must recognize the highest wisdom, one might object. This proceeds from the error that one must always know in advance what one applies in life. But that is not necessary; the recognition of the highest principles often comes much later than one applies them. If humanity had wanted to wait with digestion until the laws of digestion had been recognized, then the development of humanity would not have been possible. So one need not recognize all spiritual laws in order to let spiritual science flow into daily life. That is precisely the way the Rosicrucian method wants to treat the spiritual: less abstraction and more consideration of everyday life issues. What matters is not that one says: spiritual science is spiritual science, but that one takes it seriously in one's immediate life. Do you think that a child knows all the grammatical rules of a language when it has learned to speak? First it learns to speak and then the grammar. Therefore, it is important to emphasize that people should first deal with what directly surrounds them with the help of spiritual teachings before they move on to what can be found in the highest worlds, what spreads knowledge about the astral plane, about the devachanic plane. For only in this way do we understand what exists in our environment and where we ourselves must intervene. Therefore, the specific task is to connect the fragmented humanity, which has been torn from the old blood and tribal associations, through the unified occult spiritual wisdom.

[ 1 ] Thus, as we develop from the fifth into the sixth and then into the seventh age, the old connection in tribal and blood associations is increasingly lost. Mankind mixes itself in order to group itself from a spiritual point of view. It was an impropriety in Theosophy to speak of the races as if they would always remain. The concept of race is already losing its meaning for the near future, by which, however, thousands of years are meant. The eternal talk that seven and seven races have always developed in the world is the speculative extension of a concept that only applies to our age, both backwards and forwards; this has never been said by seers, by occultism. The races came into being as everything comes into being, and they will pass away as everything passes away. Those who have always spoken only of races will have to get used to making their concepts fluid. That is mere laziness! If one looks just a little into the future, the concepts one has applied in the past and present no longer apply. That is the main thing, that man does not mistake what he has once put into a beautiful concept for eternal wisdom. One will have to get used to making concepts fluid, to recognizing that concepts change, and that will be progress. This possibility of moving from rigid, dogmatic concepts to fluid ones is what must be developed in those people who want to be the bearers of the future. Because as times change, so must our concepts, if we want to understand these times.

[ 11 ] Now the souls live in a human body, which you observe clearly through the senses. How did it come into being? It used to be very different from the present one, even strangely different for our present material view, when the soul descended. The soul has taken up residence in it. How did man develop into the present form? By the soul working in the body itself during all its embodiments. You can get an idea of how the soul has worked on the body by considering what remains for a person in our materialistic age in terms of the possibility of working on their body. What a person can do to his dense physical body is relatively quite little. Observe, for example, how you are temporarily working on the body and its physiognomy today. Something, for example, causes you terror, fear. The impressions of fear and dread make you pale. Your physical appearance is also changed by a blush of shame. This too will pass, but you see how it happens: something affects the soul, so that the effect extends to the blood and through it to the physical body, to your immediate appearance. The effect can be even more intense. You know that people who lead a spiritual life have a strong hold on their outer physiognomy to create an impression of their spiritual work. You can tell whether a person has lived a thoughtful or a thoughtless life. In this way, a person continues to work on his outward appearance, and a person who feels noble expresses this in noble movements. These are only small remnants of how humanity has worked on itself over the millennia.

[ 12 ] While today you can only get blood to flow to your cheeks and then make it disappear again, in earlier times humans were completely influenced by a world of images that was the expression of a spiritual world. This had the effect that humans were able to remodel their organism to a much greater extent. At the same time, the body was also softer. There was a time when you could not only stretch out your hand, when you could not only point with your finger, but when you could send your will into your hand and shape it so that you could stretch out these fingers as extensions. There was a time when the feet were not yet permanent, but man stretched them out as an extension of himself as needed. Thus man has formed his own body through the images he has received from the world around him. Today, in our material age, this transformation is the slowest imaginable, but it will happen faster again. In the future, man will again have more influence over his physical body. In the consideration of initiation, we shall see by what means he attains this influence. Even if he cannot achieve this in one life, he can still do a great deal for the next embodiment.

[ 13 ] Thus it is man himself who will bring about the future shape of his body. By becoming softer and softer, that is to say, by separating himself from the hard parts, man is moving towards his future. The time will come when man, as in the past, will live above his earthly part, as it were. This state, which is comparable to your present state of sleep, will then be replaced by another in which man will be able to withdraw his etheric body from his physical body at will. The denser part of man will be down here on earth, as it were, and man will use it from the outside like an instrument. Man will no longer carry his body in such a way that it dwells within him, but will hover over it; the body itself will have become finer and thinner. Today this appears to be a fantastic thought, but one can know it with certainty from spiritual laws, just as one calculates solar and lunar eclipses for the future from astronomical laws. And man will work above all to transform the power of procreation. Many cannot imagine that there will ever be a different power of procreation than there is today. But it will be there, and the mode of reproduction will change. Everything today that has to do with reproduction and is connected with this urge will in future be transferred to another organ. The organ that is already preparing itself today to become the future organ of reproduction is the human larynx. Today it can only produce air vibrations, it can only communicate to the air that which lies in a word, so that the vibrations correspond to the word. Later, not only will the word in its rhythm emerge from this larynx, but this word will be illuminated by the human being, it will be permeated by the substance itself. Just as today the word only becomes an air wave, so in the future man's inner being, his own image, as it is today in the word, will emerge from the larynx. Man will emerge from man, man will speak out man. And that will be the birth of a new man in the future, that he will be spoken out by another man.

[ 14 ] Such things shed light on phenomena that live in our environment that no natural science can explain to you. That transformation of the reproductive instinct, which in turn will be an asexual one, then takes over the functions of the old reproduction. Therefore, in the male organism, during the period of sexual maturity, a transformation of the larynx also occurs. The voice becomes deeper. This directly indicates to you how these two things are connected. Thus, occultism repeatedly shines a light on the facts of life and brings light into the phenomena for which materialistic science cannot provide you with an explanation.

[ 15 ] And just as this organ of the larynx will be transformed, so will the human heart. It is the organ that is most intimately connected with the blood circulation. Now, science believes that the heart is a kind of pump. That is a grotesque, fantastic idea. Never has occultism made such a fantastic claim as today's materialism. What is the moving force of the blood is the feeling of the soul. The soul drives the blood, and the heart moves because it is driven by the blood. So exactly the opposite is true of what materialistic science says. Today, man cannot yet control his heart at will; when he is afraid, it beats faster because the feeling affects the blood and this accelerates the movement of the heart. But what man suffers involuntarily today, he will later have under control at a higher level of development. He will later drive his blood at will and move his heart like he moves the muscles of his hand today. For today's science, the heart with its peculiar construction is a crux, a cross. It has striated muscle fibres that are otherwise only found in voluntary muscles. Why? Because the heart has not yet reached the end of its development, but is an organ of the future, because it will become a voluntary muscle. Therefore, it already shows the predisposition for this in its structure.

[ 16 ] Thus, everything that takes place in the human soul changes the structure of the human organism. And if you now imagine a human being who is capable of creating his own kind through the spoken word, whose heart has become an arbitrary muscle that will also have changed other organs, then you have an idea of the future of the human race in future planetary embodiments of our Earth. On our Earth, humanity will come as far as it can under the influence of a mineral kingdom. This mineral kingdom, although it was the last to come into existence, will in its present form be the first to disappear again. Man will then no longer build his body out of mineral substances as he does today; the future human body will initially only incorporate what is of a plant substance. Everything in man that has a mineral effect today will disappear. To give you a grotesque example: Today, a person spits out his usual saliva. It is a mineral product because the human physical body is an interaction of mineral processes. When the human being has completed his mineral development, he will no longer spit out a mineral saliva, but this saliva will be of a plant nature, and the human being will spit out flowers, so to speak. No gland will secrete anything mineral, only plant material. In this way the mineral kingdom will be overcome, in that the human being will develop again into a plant-like existence.

[ 17 ] In this way the human being lives his way over to Jupiter by excreting everything mineral and passing over to plant-like activity. And later, when he passes over to animal creation – it will be different animals than today – when his heart is ready to be creative, then he will create in the animal world as he does today in the mineral kingdom; then the state of Venus will occur. And when he can then create his own kind by speaking his image, then the meaning of our evolution is complete, then the word: “Let us make man...” is fulfilled.

[ 18 ] Only by observing this point of view, by reshaping the body from the soul, will man truly transform the human race. Only through occult, spiritual thinking will what has been described as the transformation of the heart and larynx come about. What humanity thinks today, that it will be in the future. A humanity that thinks materialistically will produce terrible beings in the future, and a humanity that thinks spiritual thoughts will have such a transforming effect on the organism of the future that beautiful human bodies will emerge.

[ 19 ] What the materialistic way of thinking brings about is not yet complete. Today we have two currents, a great materialistic one that fills the whole earth, and the small spiritual one that is limited to a few people. Distinguish between soul and racial development. Do not believe that if the races change into a grotesque form, then the souls do the same. All materialistically thinking souls work towards producing evil races, and what is spiritually worked towards produces a good race. Just as humanity has produced that which has regressed into animals, plants and minerals, so a part of humanity will split off and become the evil part, and in the now softened body, the inner evil of the soul will express itself outwardly. Just as older conditions, which have descended to the ape race, seem grotesque to us today, so materialistic races remain at the level of evil and will populate the earth as evil races. It will be entirely up to humanity whether a soul wants to remain with the evil race or wants to ascend through spiritual culture to a good one.

[ 20 ] These are things we need to know if we want to live into the future with real knowledge. Otherwise we would go through the world blindfolded, for there are forces at work in humanity that must be recognized and taken into account, and anyone who did not want to familiarize themselves with the forces that go in one direction or the other would be neglecting their duty to humanity. Recognition for the sake of recognition would be selfish. Anyone who wants to recognize in order to look into the higher worlds is acting selfishly. But he who wants to carry this knowledge into the immediate practice of daily life is working on the further development of the coming evolution of humanity. It is extremely significant that we are learning more and more to put into practice what exists as spiritual-scientific insight.

[ 21 ] So you see that the spiritual movement has a very specific goal, namely to shape the future of humanity. This goal cannot be achieved otherwise than by absorbing spiritual occult wisdom. This is how someone who grasps spiritual science as humanity's great task thinks. He thinks of it in connection with development, and he regards it not as a desire but as a duty that he has recognized. And the more we acknowledge this, the more quickly we approach the future shaping of humanity in the sixth age. Just as in ancient Atlantis, near present-day Ireland, the advanced people moved east to found new cultures, so now we have the task of working towards the great moment in the sixth age when humanity will undertake a great spiritual ascent.

[ 22 ] We must try to get out of materialism again, and so spiritual societies must think of playing such a leading role in humanity, not out of immodesty and pride, but out of duty. So a certain group of people must come together to prepare the future. But this coming together is not to be understood in a local sense. All concepts of locality have then lost their meaning, because it is no longer a matter of tribal relationships; rather, what matters is that people all over the world come together spiritually to shape the future positively. That is why, when our age was sailing deepest into matter, the practical spiritual science was founded four hundred years ago by the Brotherhood of the Rosicrucians, which seeks to provide answers to all questions of everyday life. There you have the ascending development to the descending one.

[ 23 ] Just as the old knowledge has a disintegrating effect, as shown in Mauthner's “Critique of Language”, so the spiritual direction seeks the unifying bond of spiritual wisdom. Hence the new training in initiation, which aims directly at guiding humanity into a new cycle of time. Thus the principle of human development is linked with the concept of initiation.