The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Theosophy and Rosicrucianism II

[ 1 ] After yesterday's sort of introduction, in which we spoke about the goal and nature of the spiritual-scientific movement, today we want to penetrate directly into the nature of this science itself. This has the disadvantage that for those who are not yet familiar with these things, something shocking may result from it; but one must have patience and be aware that much of what seems downright nonsensical for the first beginning will, in the course of time, turn out to be something that is self-sustaining and comprehensible.

[ 2 ] In regard to the subject we have been set, we shall first have to consider the nature of man.

[ 3 ] This man, who is ourselves, should step before our soul. He is a very complicated being, the most complicated that can confront us in the world as we know it. Therefore, this human being has been called microcosm by those who see more deeply at all times, 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 think of every being – plant, animal, stone – as a letter of an alphabet, and written from these letters a word, so you have the human being.

[ 4 ] In this respect, we will find the Goethe's words to be true: One must understand the whole of nature to comprehend man. — What I have to say today is intended only as a sketch of the human being. Just as a charcoal drawing is preparatory to a painting, today's exposition is preparatory to what we will be discussing about the nature of man in the coming days.

[ 5 ] When we, as earthly beings, observe a person with our physical senses, as he stands before us, when our eyes see him and our hands touch him, then from the materialist's point of view he is understood as a whole person, as a being in a totality. For a deeper, more spiritual view 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 the part of the human being that the anatomist dissects and breaks down, and which he seeks to grasp intellectually in this way, which he breaks down into its individual parts, into cells that can only be perceived with a microscope, and in doing so, he seeks to form a picture of the structure and functioning of the individual organs.

[ 6 ] All of this is considered physical body in science. But today this physical body is very often wrongly regarded, in that one believes that what stands before one in life as a human being is only this physical body. But that is not the case at all. Rather, higher members of human nature are closely connected with it, working through this physical body and making it 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 members of human nature. Man has this physical body in common with the whole mineral world. All the substances and all the forces that interact between the individual mineral substances – iron, arsenic, carbon, and so on – also interact in the substances of the human body, the physical body of animals and plants.

[ 7 ] We are immediately pointed to the higher aspects of human nature when 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 wonderful structure of the physical body contains what we call inner life, consciousness, pleasure and pain, joy, love and hate; that this physical body contains not only substances from the mineral world, but also thoughts. You see the blush of the cheeks and the color of the hair, but you do not see what is going on in this physical body in terms of pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, and so on. We do not see any of that, but it all takes place within the skin. That is the clearest and most irrefutable proof that something else must be there besides these physical substances.

[ 8 ] If you see the tear, the tear is the purely physical expression of the grief that is taking place inside. Now look at the world of minerals. The world of minerals looks at you silently. No joy, no pain, nothing of the sort can be perceived. The stone has no feelings, no consciousness like we do. For the humanities scholar, this stone can be compared to the nails on our fingers or to our teeth. Look at a fingernail, it also has no feeling, no sensation; and yet the nail is a limb of us. Just as we must have something in us that causes nails and teeth to form, there is also something in the world that forms minerals. The nails themselves have no consciousness, but they belong to something that has consciousness. If a little beetle crawls over the nail, then for this beetle, for example, the nail will perhaps be a mineral. This is how it is when we crawl over the earth and do not realize that there is consciousness behind this mineral earth; because just as there is consciousness behind the nail, there is also consciousness behind the minerals. We shall see that there is a world and that there is a consciousness underlying the mineral world. This consciousness of the mineral world is as far above us as the consciousness of the beetle crawling over our fingernail is above our consciousness, which lies behind the fingernail.

[ 9 ] The Rosicrucian philosophy attributes this consciousness of the mineral world to a world which it calls the world of reason; there lies the consciousness of minerals, and there also originates human reason, according to which we form thoughts. But the thoughts that live in us are a most deceptive thing; the world of human thought bears about the same relation to the entities of this world of reason as our shadow on the wall bears to ourselves. Just as the shadow on the wall is not I myself, but only the shadow of me, so are the thoughts of men only shadow-images of the world of the spirit. But the fact that a thought is conceived here is due to the fact that in the world of reason there really is a creative entity that produces this thought. It is a world where our thoughts are real entities that one encounters there 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, this is the world of reason of the Rosicrucians. When an initiate walks through this physical world, life speaks to him on every piece of earth, and he feels in everything the manifestations of another world. Since we are nothing but pieces of this physical world in our physical bodies, we also have a subordinate physical consciousness that reaches up to the upper world of reason, to the same place where the consciousness of the mineral world is located.

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

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

[ 12 ] If you have the mineral in front of you in its form, it remains the same mineral by itself. But this is not the case with living beings, with plants, animals and humans. As soon as the substance becomes so complicated that it can no longer hold itself, that is, would have to disintegrate into itself, then there is something that prevents this disintegration in this substance when it becomes too complicated to hold itself. That is why spiritual science says: a living being would disintegrate into the individual components of its substance by itself if the preventer of this decay were not present within it. And that which prevents this living being from disintegrating into matter every moment, that is, the preventer of this disintegration, we call the etheric or life body, which, however, is 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 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 himself to see this etheric body just as we see the physical body with our physical eyes. Modern science also searches for this etheric body, but it seeks to form an idea of it only through speculation and speaks, for example, of the life force, life energy.

[ 13 ] So how does this etheric body present itself to the clairvoyant eye, that is, to the clairvoyant?

[ 14 ] If, for example, you look at a thing from the mineral world, let's say a rock crystal, with the eye of the seer, and for this purpose switch off the physical substance by a kind of deflection of attention, then you see nothing in the space that the physical crystal occupies. The space is empty. But if you look at any living being, plant, animal or human, in the same way, then the space occupied by the physical body is not empty, but still filled with a kind of light form, and that is precisely the etheric body mentioned earlier. This etheric body is not the same in all living beings, but is extremely different, even in relation to the shape and size of the physical body of the living being in question, and it is completely dependent on the stage of development of the living being. In plants, this etheric body is shaped quite differently than the plant itself; in animals, it is already more similar to the external animal form, and in humans, the etheric body presents itself as a luminous form that corresponds almost exactly to the shape of the physical body. If you look at a horse from this point of view, you can see this etheric body protruding quite a way outside the head, in front of the forehead, in the form of a luminous figure that roughly matches the shape of the horse's head, whereas in the case of the average modern human being, you can only see the etheric body protruding above the head and on either side of it to a very small extent.

[ 15 ] As for the substantiality of the etheric body, people usually have false ideas about the materiality of this etheric body. Much that has been said and written about this etheric body in the Theosophical Society has been erroneous and confusing, but that is one of the teething troubles of the Theosophical Society and must be overcome. To get a correct idea of the materiality 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 gets thinner and thinner and finally you have nothing left. That would be the thinnest state of wealth. But there is an even thinner state, in which one reduces the nothingness of one's possessions even further by running up debts, in other words, negative wealth. So one can reduce one's wealth even further, because now one would have less than nothing if, for example, one runs up a debt of ten marks.

[ 17 ] Or think of it applied to something else. Imagine a battle with its tremendous roar; now move further away from it, and the roar will become weaker and weaker, quieter and quieter, until you no longer hear it at all. If you now reduce this non-hearing: it becomes quieter than quiet, more soundless than soundless, such a calm does indeed exist. And it is something extremely blissful, even if the ordinary person cannot easily imagine it.

[ 18 ] But if you now imagine these examples applied to the density of the substance, then you have, first of all, the three states of matter that are generally known: solid, liquid, gaseous or air-like; but we must not stop there. Just as we can dilute the positive power to a negative power, so here too the substance becomes thinner and thinner, beyond the gaseous state, thinner and thinner. And so imagine a kind of substance that would be the opposite of physical substance; then you will get a rough idea of what the ether consists of.

[ 19 ] Just as the negative capacity has the opposite conditions of the positive – positive capacity makes you rich, negative capacity makes you poor; the more capacity I have, the more I can buy, the less wealth I have, the less I can buy for myself. The world ether, of which the etheric body of every living being is a part, also has the opposite properties of physical matter. Just as solid matter tends to fall apart, so the etheric body tends to hold everything together and to prevent the physical body, which it has permeated, from disintegrating. This disintegration into its individual basic elements occurs in every living being 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 to our physical matter.

[ 20 ] When I say that the etheric body of a human being resembles the physical body, I am stating a fact that needs to be known and should be mentioned here because it has important implications for 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 only similar to the latter in its upper part, in the head part; but it is very different from the physical body in the sense that it is of the opposite sex: the etheric body of a man is female and vice versa, that of a woman is male. Every human being is therefore of two sexes; the physical sex is only an external expression, which has its opposite pole in the etheric body. Just as a magnet has a north pole and a south pole, and a magnet cannot exist alone, so too here is pole and opposite pole.

[ 21 ] This etheric body or life body, also called the formative forces body, is therefore the second link of the human being and remains intimately connected with the physical body of the person from birth to death, and the release of this life body from the physical body is precisely death.

[ 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, use the image of water and ice. When water cools down, it takes on a different form, it turns into ice. And just as ice is formed from water through condensation, so the etheric body is differentiated out of the physical body.

[ 23 ] Ice: water, physical body: etheric body; that is, the forces of the etheric body have become tangible, physically perceptible in the physical body. Just as the forces that later express themselves in the solid ice are already present in water, so all the forces for building the physical body are already present in the etheric body. Thus, for example, a force already lies in the etheric body, out of which the heart, stomach, brain and so on are formed. Thus, for every organ of our physical body, there is a predisposition in the etheric body; but these predispositions are not substances, but currents of force. This etheric body is now shared by humans with all plants and all animals, that is, with all physical entities that express life.

[ 24 ] Now one may ask: Do plants have some kind of consciousness in the sense that we have found consciousness in the world of minerals? — We have seen earlier that the consciousness of minerals is found in the upper world of reason through spiritual research, where our thoughts also arise.

[ 25 ] Just as our fingers do not have an independent consciousness, but rather the consciousness of a finger belongs to the consciousness of the whole human being, so too do plants belong to a consciousness, and this now 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 being relates to his fingers.

[ 26 ] The consciousness of plants is anchored in this lower devachan world. The forces that underlie all growth and all organic development are rooted in it. In it are also rooted the forces that build our own physical body; that is, the forces of our etheric body, which we have already referred to as the architect of the physical body. This consciousness of the plant world is an immensely higher and wiser consciousness than that of man.

[ 27 ] This will become clear to you as soon as you consider how wisely not only the physical body of man, but of all beings permeated by an etheric body, that is, of all living beings, is constructed. What tremendous wisdom is required to build the simplest physical body of any living creature, let alone the most elaborate structure of all earthly creatures: the human body!

[ 28 ] Just consider, for example, the upper part of the human thigh bone, and how marvelously the individual bony struts are joined together, in accordance with all the rules of construction! In this part, the thigh bone is a much more complicated structure than it appears to be when viewed externally; it is composed of a framework of beams whose angular positions are so wisely arranged that the smallest amount of material is enough to support the entire body. Truly a greater work of art than the most complicated bridge construction, and no engineering in the world can imitate something like this. Or consider the structure of the heart; it is so wisely constructed that man, with all his wisdom, is a mere child compared to the wisdom revealed in it. And what this human heart can endure, despite the folly of man trying to ruin it almost daily, for example, through our so-called stimulants, coffee, alcohol, nicotine.

[ 29 ] For the construction of such a miracle as the physical body, forces are needed that extend up into the astral world, and only the entities of this astral world are, to put it trivially, so clever that they can build such a physical body.

[ 30 ] And now we come to the third link of the human being. The plants have a physical body and an etheric body; but they do not have something that animals and humans have: they do not have suffering, desire, pain or sensation. This is the difference between animals and humans on the one hand and plants on the other. The difference is based on the fact that internal processes take place in animals and humans. More recent science has even wanted to ascribe sensation to plants from the processes observed in them. It is lamentable to see what nonsense is made of concepts, because no inner processes take place here as they do with every sensation; with the same right, this “sensation” could also be ascribed to blue litmus paper. But that is what happens when you look for the sensation here in the physical world. In the physical world, one cannot find sensation in a phenomenon such as that displayed by some plants; one must go to the heavenly worlds. It should be noted here, to avoid misunderstandings, that in the case of so-called reacting plants, for example the mimosa, this stimulus is not reflected as a sensation in the physical world, but only in the lower world of reason, where the consciousness of plants is located. Down here in the physical world, only human beings and animals have desires and passions, joys and pains. Why? Because, in addition to their physical body and etheric body, they also have the astral body, the third aspect of the human being.

[ 31 ] For the seer, the astral body presents itself in such a way that the whole human being is enveloped in an egg-shaped cloud, and in this cloud every feeling, every urge, every passion is expressed. This astral body is therefore the carrier of pleasure and suffering, joy and pain. The situation with this third link is different from that with the physical body and etheric body. When a person sleeps, only the physical body and etheric body are in the bed, while the astral body with the ego has been lifted out; on the other hand, when the astral body and the etheric body leave the physical body, death occurs, and with it the disintegration of the physical body.

[ 32 ] Why is this aspect of our being called the astral body? There is no better term for it. Why? This aspect of our being has an important task, and we must be clear about this important task. This astral body is not idle during the night, for during the night it works, as the seer can see, on the physical and etheric bodies. During the day you wear out the physical and etheric bodies, for everything you do is wear and tear on the physical body, and the expression of this wear and tear is, of course, tiredness. What you wear out during the day is repaired by the astral body during the night. In fact, it is the astral body that removes fatigue during sleep. This shows the importance and necessity of sleep. The seer can consciously carry out this repair work. The refreshing quality of sleep is based on the fact that the astral body has worked properly on the physical and etheric bodies. However, because the astral body must first return to the physical and etheric bodies, the refreshing quality of sleep only occurs gradually, that is, about an hour after awakening.

[ 33 ] There is something else important associated with the emergence of the astral body during sleep. When the astral body comes into contact with the external world during the waking hours of the day, it has to live together with the physical and etheric bodies; but when it detaches itself from the body, that is, during sleep, it is freed from this fetter of the physical and etheric bodies. And then something wonderful happens: the powers of the astral body extend into the world of the stars, where the soul essences of plants are, 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 harmony of the spheres of the Pythagoreans. It is a real reality and not a fantasy. If you live consciously in this world, then you hear the harmonies of the spheres, then you hear the forces and relationships of the stars resonate with each other. Goethe was an initiate in this sense, and the beginning of the “Prologue in Heaven” from “Faust” is to be understood in this spirit:

The sun resounds according to ancient custom
In brotherly spheres of song,
And their prescribed journey
They complete with a thunderclap.
Their sight gives strength to the angels,
When none can fathom them;
The incomprehensibly high works
Are glorious, as on the first day.

[ 34 ] People know very little about Goethe and usually do not know that he was initiated, but simply say: A poet needs such images. - But Goethe knew that the sun is in a dance within it, and that it sounds like the spirit of the sun! That is why Goethe also remains in this image and continues:

Hark! hear the storm of the Hours!
For the ears of the spirit
The new day is already born.
Rock gates creak and rattle,
Phoebus' wheels roll and clatter;
What a din is brought by the light!
It trumpets, it trompets,
The eye blinks and the ear is amazed,
Unheard-of things are heard.

[ 35 ] During the night, the astral body lives in this stellar world. And while it comes into a kind of disharmony with worldly things during the day, it is embedded again in the lap of the stellar world at night, during sleep. And then in the morning it comes back with the forces it has brought from this world. The harmony of the spheres is brought from this astral world when one comes out of sleep. The astral body has its true home in the world of the stars, the astral world, and that is why it has been called that: the astral body. — So we have now got to know the three members of the human being: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body.

[ 36 ] Next time, we will get to know the fourth part, the I. The I is the part that makes man the crown of creation and elevates him above the animal.

[ 37 ] The animal does not yet have the same consciousness as man; it also has consciousness, just as we have seen in plants and minerals; but this consciousness of animals lies in the astral world. The fourth link of the human being, this I, is linked with the three other links to form the holy fourness of the human being, of which all the ancient schools speak.

[ 38 ] Thus, man has the physical body in common with the mineral, the etheric body in common with the plant, and the astral body in common with the animal. He alone has the I; and that elevates him above everything else. In the human being, we find, as it were, an essence of all that we see spread out around us. Indeed: a microcosm! Therefore, if we want to recognize the human being, we must first recognize what surrounds us.

[ 39 ] So we have to think of the threefold nature, these three bodies, as three sheaths woven from the most diverse regions, and it is in these sheaths that we dwell, that is, the I dwell with the higher limbs of the human being, our immortal part.