The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Theosophy and Rosicrucianism II

[ 1 ] After discussing the purpose and nature of the Spiritual Science movement in a sort of introduction yesterday, let us now delve directly into the nature of this science itself. This does have the disadvantage that, for those who are not yet familiar with these matters, the result may be somewhat shocking; but one must be patient and realize that some things which seem downright nonsensical at first will, over time, appear to be coherent and comprehensible in themselves.

[ 2 ] Of the topic presented to us, we must first examine the nature of human beings.

[ 3 ] This human being, who is none other than ourselves, must step before our soul. He is a very complex being, the most complex that can ever confront us in the world as we know it. That is why, throughout the ages, this human being has been called the microcosm by those with deep insight, in contrast to the macrocosm, the universe. Paracelsus used a very beautiful comparison to express the essence of the human being figuratively: Look at the nature that surrounds you, and imagine every being—plant, animal, stone—as a letter of an alphabet, and a word written from these letters; thus you have the human being.

[ 4 ] In this regard, we will find Goethe’s words to be true: One must understand all of nature in order to comprehend human beings. — To begin with, what I say today is, so to speak, merely a sketch of the nature of the human being. Just as a charcoal drawing relates to a painting, so today’s presentation is meant to relate to what we will be discussing over the next few days regarding the nature of the human being.

[ 5 ] When we, as earthly beings, observe a human being with our physical senses—as he stands before us, as our eyes see him and our hands touch him—he is perceived, from the materialist’s point of view, as a whole human being, as a being in his entirety. For a deeper, that is, a spiritual understanding of the world, however, this is only a small part of the human being that we can perceive here with our physical senses; it is that part of the human being which the anatomist dissects and breaks down, and which he seeks to comprehend in this way with his intellect, breaking it down into its minutest parts, into cells perceptible only under a microscope, thereby seeking to form a picture of the structure and mode of action of the individual organs.

[ 6 ] In science, all of this is considered part of the physical body. However, people today very often view this physical body incorrectly, believing that what stands before them in life as a human being is nothing more than this physical body. But that is not the case at all; rather, higher aspects of human nature are closely connected to it, working through this physical body and causing it to appear as it does when we encounter it in each of our fellow human beings. This physical body would look quite different if we could separate it from the higher aspects of human nature. This physical body is something that human beings share with the entire mineral world. All the substances and all the forces that play their part among the individual mineral substances—iron, arsenic, carbon, and so on—also play a role in the substances of the human body, the physical bodies of animals, and plants.

[ 7 ] We are immediately reminded of the higher aspects of human nature once we realize what the enormous difference is between this physical body and the other physical substances that surround us in the mineral world. You all know that this marvelous structure of the physical body contains within itself what we call inner life, consciousness, pleasure and pain, joy, love, and hatred; that this physical body contains not only substances from the mineral world, but also thoughts. You may well see the blush on the cheeks and the color of the hair, but you do not see what is taking place within this physical body in terms of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, and so on. We do not see any of this, yet it all takes place within the skin’s covering. This is already the clearest and most irrefutable proof that, apart from this body, there must be something else besides mere physical matter.

[ 8 ] When you see a tear roll down, that tear is the purely physical expression of the grief taking place within. Now look at the world of minerals. This world of minerals gazes back at you in silence. No joy, no pain—none of that can be perceived. The stone has no feelings, no consciousness like ours. For the person studying Spiritual Science, this stone is comparable to the nails on our fingers or to our teeth. Consider a fingernail; it, too, has no feeling, no sensation; and yet the nail is a part of us. Just as we must have something within us that causes nails and teeth to form, so there is also something in the world that forms the minerals. The nails themselves have no consciousness, but they belong to something that does have consciousness. If a little beetle crawls over the nail, for example, the nail may be a mineral to that beetle. So it is when we crawl over the earth and do not realize that there is a consciousness behind this mineral earth; for just as there is a consciousness behind the nail, so too is there one behind the minerals. We shall yet see that there is a world and that there is a consciousness underlying the mineral world. This “I-consciousness” of the mineral world lies as far above us as the consciousness of the beetle crawling over our fingernail is surpassed by our own consciousness, which lies behind the nail.

[ 9 ] Rosicrucian philosophy attributes this consciousness of the mineral world to a realm it calls the world of reason; that is where the consciousness of minerals resides, and that is also where human reason originates, through which we form our thoughts. But the thoughts that live within us are a highly deceptive thing; the human world of thought relates to the entities of this world of reason much as our shadow on the wall relates to ourselves. Just as the shadow on the wall is not myself, but merely the shadow of me, so the thoughts of human beings are only shadows of the world of the spirit. But the fact that a thought is conceived here has its reason in the fact that in the world of reason there truly is a creative entity that produces this thought. It is a world where our thoughts are real entities that one encounters there, just as one encounters other people here. For the initiate, this is the upper Devachan world, the Arupa Devachan of the Indians, or also the upper mental world—that is, the world of reason of the Rosicrucians. When an initiate walks through this physical world, life speaks to him on every patch of earth, and he feels in everything the manifestations of another world. Since we, in our physical bodies, are nothing other than parts of this physical world, we also possess a subordinate physical consciousness that extends upward into the higher world of reason, precisely to the point where the consciousness of the mineral world also lies.

[ 10 ] So our physical body is of a mineral nature in terms of its material composition, and the consciousness of this physical body is also found where the consciousness of this mineral world is to be sought.

[ 11 ] But what, then, is the difference between this physical body and a mineral, such as rock crystal? If we compare our body to a crystal, we readily find that, in comparison to it, our body is a very complex thing. Let us consider for a moment what the difference is between a mineral and a living being. In terms of substances, there is no difference at all, for the living being contains exactly the same substances as the mineral; it is only the structure that is much more complex.

[ 12 ] When you have the mineral in its natural form before you, it remains the same mineral in and of itself. But this is not the case with living beings—plants, animals, and humans. For as soon as matter becomes so complex that it can no longer sustain itself—that is, it would have to disintegrate within itself—there is something within this matter, precisely when it becomes too complex to sustain itself, that prevents this decay, and then we have before us what we call a living being. Hence Spiritual Science states: A living being would disintegrate of its own accord into the individual components of its matter if the factor preventing this disintegration were not present within it. And what prevents this living being from disintegrating at every moment—that is, the preventer of this disintegration—we call the etheric or Life-Body, which is, however, a formation of a completely different nature than the physical substances of which the physical body consists, but which has the ability to form and maintain the complex physical substances in every living being and to prevent their disintegration. What manifests itself so purely externally in an organism, we call life. This etheric or Life-Body, or body of formative forces, cannot be perceived with physical eyes, but it can be perceived through the first degree of clairvoyant vision, and the task of the seer is to train themselves so that they can see this etheric body just as we see the physical body with our physical eyes. Modern science, too, is searching for this etheric body, but it seeks to form a mental image of it only through speculation and speaks, for example, of life force or life energy.

[ 13 ] How, then, does this etheric body appear to the clairvoyant eye—that is, to the clairvoyant?

[ 14 ] For example, if you observe an object from the mineral world—say, a rock crystal—with the eye of the seer, and for this purpose block out the physical substance by diverting your attention, you will see nothing in the space occupied by the physical crystal. The space is empty. But if you observe any living being in the same way—that is, a plant, an animal, or a human—then this space occupied by the physical body is not empty, but is still filled with a kind of luminous form, and that is precisely the etheric body mentioned earlier. This etheric body is not the same in all living beings, but is in fact extraordinarily diverse; it also differs from the physical body of the living being in question in terms of form and proportions, depending entirely on the stage of development at which the living being stands. In plants, this etheric body is shaped quite differently from the plant itself; in animals, it is already more similar to the animal’s external form; and in humans, the etheric body appears as a luminous form that corresponds almost exactly to the physical body in shape. If, for example, one looks at a horse from this perspective, one sees this etheric body protruding quite far outside the head, in front of the forehead, in the form of a luminous figure that roughly conforms to the shape of the horse’s head, whereas in the average person of today, one sees the etheric body protruding only very slightly above the head and on both sides of it.

[ 15 ] As for the substantiality of the etheric body, people usually have mental images of the material nature of this etheric body. Even within the Theosophical Society, much erroneous and confusing talk and writing has been directed toward this etheric body, but this is part of the Theosophical Society’s growing pains and must be overcome. To form a correct mental image of the material nature of the etheric body, please follow me in a comparison.

[ 16 ] Imagine you have a hundred marks and keep spending more and more of it; then your wealth grows thinner and thinner, and eventually you have nothing left. That would be the thinnest state of wealth. But there is an even thinner state, in which one reduces one’s nothingness of possessions even further by incurring negative wealth—that is, debt. One can thus reduce one’s wealth even further, for now one would have less than nothing if, for example, one incurred ten marks of debt.

[ 17 ] Or imagine this applied to something else. Imagine a battle with its tremendous din; as you move further away from it, the din grows fainter and fainter, it grows quieter and quieter, until you can no longer hear a thing. If you now diminish this state of not hearing: it becomes quieter than quiet, more soundless than soundless—such a stillness does indeed exist. And it is something supremely blissful, even if the ordinary person cannot easily create a mental image of it.

[ 18 ] But if you now apply these examples to the density of matter, you first have the three generally known states of matter: solid, liquid, and gaseous; but we must not stop there, in accordance with the example of property mentioned above. Just as we can dilute wealth into negative wealth, so too does the substance here become thinner and thinner, extending beyond the gaseous state. And so imagine a kind of substance that would be the opposite of physical matter; then you will arrive at a rough mental image of what the ether consists of.

[ 19 ] Just as negative wealth has the opposite conditions of positive wealth—positive wealth makes one rich, negative wealth makes one poor; the more wealth I have, the more I can buy; the less wealth I have, the less I can buy—so too does the world ether, of which the etheric body of every living being is a part, possess the exact opposite properties of physical matter. Just as solid matter tends to fall apart, so the etheric body strives to hold everything together and prevent the physical body, which it has permeated, from disintegrating. This disintegration into its individual constituent elements occurs in every living being immediately as soon as the etheric body leaves the physical body, or, in other words, when the physical death of the living being occurs. Thus, we have followed matter into a world where it has the opposite effect of our physical matter.

[ 20 ] When I say that in human beings the etheric body resembles the physical body, I am stating a fact that must be understood and that should be mentioned here, since important conclusions arise from it for the later lectures. This statement requires a very important qualification, for in truth the etheric body is very different from the physical body and is actually similar to it only in its upper part, the head; but it differs greatly from the physical body in that it has a gender opposite to that of the physical body: the etheric body of a man is, in fact, female, and conversely, that of a woman is male. Every human being is thus of two sexes; the physical sex is merely an outward expression that has its opposite pole in the etheric body. Just as a magnet has a north pole and a south pole, and just as there is no such thing as a magnet with only a north pole, so too here there is a pole and an opposite pole.

[ 21 ] This etheric or Life-Body, also known as the formative body, is thus the second component of the human being and remains intimately connected to the human physical body from birth until death; and the separation of this Life-Body from the physical body is precisely what death is.

[ 22 ] The physical body is first built up by the etheric body; this etheric body is, so to speak, the architect of the physical body. If you want to visualize this, consider the image of water and ice. When water cools, it takes on a different form; it becomes ice. And just as ice is formed from water through condensation, so the etheric body is formed from the physical body.

[ 23 ] Ice: water; physical body: etheric body; that is to say, the forces of the etheric body have become tangible and physically perceptible in the physical body. Just as the forces that later manifest in solid ice were already present in the water, so too are all the forces necessary for the formation of the physical body already present within the etheric body. Thus, for example, there is already a force within the etheric body from which the heart, the stomach, the brain, and so on develop. Thus, for every organ of our physical body, there is a predisposition in the etheric body; but these predispositions are not substances, but rather currents of force. This etheric body, then, is shared by human beings with all plants and all animals—that is, with all physical beings that manifest life.

[ 24 ] One might now ask: Do plants possess a kind of consciousness in the same sense that we have found consciousness in the world of minerals? — We saw earlier that the consciousness of minerals is found in the higher world of reason through spiritual research, which is also where our thoughts originated.

[ 25 ] Just as our fingers do not possess an independent consciousness, but rather the consciousness of a finger is part of the consciousness of the whole human being, so too do plants belong to a consciousness, and this lies in the lower world of reason, the world of the stars, the heavenly world, the Rupa Devachan. When the spiritual researcher enters this world, he encounters the souls of the plants there. The souls of the plants are beings just like us here; and these beings relate to the plants in much the same way as a human relates to his fingers.

[ 26 ] The consciousness of plants is thus anchored in this lower Devachan world. The forces underlying all growth and all organic development are rooted in it. It is also the source of the forces that build our own physical body; that is to say, the forces of our etheric body, which we have already described as the architect of the physical body. This consciousness of the plant world is vastly higher and wiser than human consciousness.

[ 27 ] This will become clear to you immediately when you consider how wisely constructed not only the human physical body is, but also the bodies of all beings permeated by an etheric body—that is, all living beings. What immense wisdom is required to construct the simplest physical body of any living being, let alone the most artful structure of all earthly living beings: the human body!

[ 28 ] Just consider, for example, the upper part of the human femur: how wonderfully the individual bone beams are joined together according to all the rules of architecture! At this very point, the femur is a far more complex structure than it appears to be when viewed from the outside; it is composed of a framework of beams whose angles are so wisely aligned that the entire body can be supported with the smallest amount of material. Truly a greater work of art than the most complex bridge construction, and no engineering in the world can replicate anything like it. Or consider the structure of the heart; it is so wisely constructed that man, with all his wisdom, is but a child compared to the wisdom revealed within it. And what does this human heart endure, even though human folly attempts to ruin it almost daily, for example through our so-called stimulants—coffee, alcohol, nicotine.

[ 29 ] To construct a marvel such as the physical body, forces are required that extend all the way up into the astral world, and it is only the beings of this astral world who are, to put it simply, intelligent enough to build such a physical body.

[ 30 ] And now we come to the third aspect of the human being. Plants have a physical body and an etheric body; but there is something they lack that animals and humans possess: they do not experience suffering, pleasure, pain, or sensation. This is the difference between animals and humans on the one hand, and plants on the other. The difference lies in the fact that inner processes take place within animals and humans. Modern science has even sought to attribute sensation to plants based on the processes observed in them. It is lamentable to see what nonsense is made of these concepts, for no inner processes whatsoever take place here as they do with any sensation; one could just as rightly attribute this “sensation” to blue litmus paper. But that is what happens when one seeks sensation here in the physical world. In the physical world, one cannot find sensation in a phenomenon such as that observed in some plants; one must go into the heavenly worlds. To prevent misunderstandings, it should be noted here that in the so-called responsive plants, for example the mimosa, this process of stimulation is not reflected as sensation in the physical world, but only in the lower world of reason, where the consciousness of plants is located. Here below in the physical world, only humans and animals have desires and passions, joys and pains. Why? Because in addition to the physical body and the etheric body, they also possess the astral body, the third member of the human being.

[ 31 ] To the seer, the astral body appears as if the entire human being were enveloped in an egg-shaped cloud, and within this cloud every sensation, every impulse, and every passion finds expression. This astral body is thus the vehicle of pleasure and suffering, joy and pain. This third member differs from the physical body and the etheric body. For when a person sleeps, only the physical body and the etheric body lie in bed, while the astral body has withdrawn along with the ego; when, on the other hand, the astral body and the etheric body step out of the physical body, then death occurs, and with it the decay of the physical body.

[ 32 ] Why is this aspect of the being called the astral body? There is no more fitting term for it. Why? This aspect of the being has an important task, and we must make this important task clear to ourselves. This astral body is not idle at night, for at night it works, as the seer can see, on the physical and etheric bodies. During the day you wear down the physical and etheric bodies, for everything you do is, after all, a wearing down of the physical body, and the expression of this wearing down is fatigue. Now, what you wear down during the day, the astral body repairs again during the night. In fact, the astral body eliminates fatigue during sleep. This explains the importance and necessity of sleep. The seer can consciously carry out this repair. The restorative quality of sleep is based on the astral body having worked properly on the physical and etheric bodies. However, because the astral body must first return to the physical and etheric bodies, the restorative effect of sleep occurs only gradually, that is, about an hour after waking.

[ 33 ] There is another important aspect associated with this projection of the astral body during sleep. For when the astral body comes into contact with the external world during waking life, it must coexist with the physical and etheric bodies; but when it detaches itself from the body—that is, during sleep—it is freed from this bond with the physical and etheric bodies. And then something wonderful happens: the forces of the astral body reach into the world of the stars, where the soul-beings of the plants reside, and from this world it draws its strength. The astral body rests in the world in which the stars are embedded. This is the world of the Pythagoreans’ spherical harmony. It is a real reality and not a fantasy. If one lives consciously in this world, then one hears the harmonies of the spheres; then one hears the forces and relationships of the stars resonating with one another. In this sense, Goethe was an initiate, and it is from this spirit that the opening of the “Prologue in Heaven” from *Faust* is to be understood:

The sun resounds in the ancient way
In the spheres of the heavens, a song of competition,
And its prescribed journey
It completes with a thunderous roar.
Its sight gives strength to the angels,
Though none may fathom it;
The incomprehensibly lofty works
Are glorious, as on the first day.

[ 34 ] People know very little about Goethe and are generally unaware that he was an initiate; they simply say: A poet needs such imagery. — But Goethe knew that the sun stands at the very center of a circle, and that it resounds as the spirit of the sun! That is why Goethe remains within this image and continues:

Listen! Hear the storm of the Horae!
Resounding to the ears of the spirit
The new day is already born.
Rock gates creak and rattle,
Phoebus’ wheels roll with a crackling sound;
What a din the light brings!
It thunders, it trumpets,
The eye blinks and the ear is astonished,
The unheard is not heard.

[ 35 ] The astral body dwells in this celestial realm during the night. And while during the day it enters into a kind of disharmony with earthly things, at night, during sleep, it is once again nestled in the bosom of the starry world. And then it returns in the morning with the powers it has brought back from that world. One brings the harmony of the spheres with one from this astral world when one emerges from sleep. In the world of the stars, the astral world, the astral body has its true home, and that is why it has been given this name: astral body. — Thus we have now become acquainted with three members of the human being: the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body.

[ 36 ] We will explore the fourth element, the “I,” next time. The “I” is the element that makes human beings the crown of creation and elevates them above the animal kingdom.

[ 37 ] Animals do not yet possess a consciousness like that of humans; they do, however, have a consciousness, just as we have seen in plants and minerals; but this consciousness of animals lies in the astral world. The fourth member of the human being, this “I,” joins with the other three members to form the sacred quaternity of the human being, of which all the ancient schools speak.

[ 38 ] Thus, human beings share the physical body with minerals, the etheric body with plants, and the astral body with animals. Only the ego is unique to them; and this elevates them above all else. In human beings, we find, so to speak, an essence of everything we see spread out around us. Indeed: a microcosm! Therefore, if we wish to understand human beings, we must first understand what surrounds us.

[ 39 ] Thus, we must conceive of the three constituent elements—these three bodies—as three sheaths woven from the most diverse regions, and within these sheaths we dwell, that is, the “I,” together with the higher elements of the human being, our immortal part.