The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Twelfth Lecture

[ 1 ] These considerations, which we have been pursuing for several evenings now, are intended to supplement or expand on what we have been working on over the winter. It may therefore be natural for one or two remarks to be included in these considerations that appear to be aphorisms. We want to use these reflections to supplement and round off this or that thought, this or that idea that has been aroused in us.

[ 2 ] In the last reflections, we were mainly concerned with the presence of all kinds of spiritual beings that can be found, so to speak, between the sensual-physical natural kingdoms that surround us. In particular, in our last reflection, we saw how, where beings from different kingdoms of nature touch, where plants nestle up to stones as they do to springs, where ordinary stones nestle up to metals as they do under the earth in numerous cases, where such a community exists as between the bee and the flower, how there are forces everywhere that draw into earthly existence various types of beings that we have called elemental beings. And in connection with these elemental beings, we have been concerned with the fact that we have called the severing of certain entities from their greater context. We have seen that such elemental beings, which in spiritual science are called, for example, “salamanders”, partly originate from severed parts of the animal group souls that have ventured too far into our physical world, so to speak, and then no longer found their way back to reunite with the group soul of the animal after the dissolution of the animal's body. For we know that in the regular course of life the beings of our earth, the beings of the animal kingdom, the plant kingdom and the mineral kingdom have their - if we may call them that - “ego-souls”, basically have the same ego-souls as man, differing from the human one only in that the ego-souls of the other beings are in other worlds. We know that man is the entity in our cycle of development that has the individual ego here on the physical plane, at least during the waking hours. We also know that the entities we call animals are in a situation where, roughly speaking, animals of the same form have a group soul or a group ego, and that these group selves are in the so-called astral world. We also know that the entities we call plants have only a dreamless consciousness of the physical world here, but that they have group-selves that dwell in the lower parts of the devachanic world, and finally that the stones, the minerals, have their group-souls in the upper parts of the devachanic world. The person who moves clairvoyantly in these worlds, in the astral and devachanic worlds, so to speak, associates there with the animal souls, which are group souls there, with the plant souls and the mineral souls, just as he associates here in the physical world during day waking with the human souls or human I's.

[ 3 ] Now we must realize that man is still in many ways a very complicated and composite being, a being of which we have already discussed enough of the complicated in the various considerations. But he will appear to us more and more complicated and complicated, the further we get involved in the context of the great cosmic facts. To understand that this human being is not the simple creature that a naive way of looking at things might see him as, we need only consider that during the night, from the time we fall asleep until we wake up, the human being of the present cycle of development is a completely different being than during the day. His physical body and etheric body lie in bed; the I, with the astral body, is lifted out of this physical and etheric body. Let us consider the two, first the physical body and the etheric body. They lie there, and if we disregard the transitional state of dream-filled sleep, they have what we call a content-less, perception-less and also dream-less sleep consciousness. But even that which is outside the physical and etheric bodies, the I with the astral body, has exactly the same dreamless sleep consciousness in the human being of today's state of development. The consciousness that has the spreading plant cover here in the physical world has the sleeping person both in those parts that remain here in the physical world and in those parts that are in the astral world during sleep. But now we have to deal with these two separate parts of the sleeping person a little.

[ 4 ] We know from other considerations that this human being of the present has emerged slowly and gradually. We know that he received the first predisposition for the physical body in an embodiment of our earth in the distant past, which we call the Saturn state. We know that on the second embodiment of our Earth, the solar state, he then received the etheric body or life body in addition to the physical body, that on the third embodiment of the Earth, the lunar state, he received the astral body in addition, and that on Earth, the present embodiment of the planet, he received what we call the ego. Thus, man has developed very slowly and gradually. This physical body, as worn by man today, is actually the oldest part of man and the one that has undergone the most transformations. It has transformed itself four times. The first structure on ancient Saturn, which the human being received and which has since been perfected three times – once on the sun, the second time on the moon and finally on the earth – is expressed in the sense organs that the human being has today. They were very different organs on ancient Saturn; but at that time they were there in their first structure, and the other human body was not yet present. We can regard ancient Saturn as a single being with nothing but sense organs, completely covered with sense organs. On the sun, the etheric body is added. The human physical body transforms, and the organs that we today call glandular organs arise. At that time, they are still very imperfect, but their first structure is present; the sense organs are becoming more perfect. Then, on the moon, those organs are added that we today, after the physical body has been transformed a third time through the imprinting of the astral body, call the nerve organs. And finally, on our earth, the present-day blood system is added; for this is the expression of the I, just as the nervous system is the expression of the astral body, the glandular system is the expression of the etheric body, and the sensory system is the physical expression of the physical body itself.

[ 5 ] In our previous lectures, we saw that the blood system actually appeared first in our evolution on earth. Today we look at the physical body and ask ourselves: Why does blood flow in the veins in its present form? What does this blood express? We say: This blood is the expression of the I. At the same time, we want to consider a possible misunderstanding, namely that the human being actually misunderstands the present physical human body. This present physical human body is, so to speak, only one form that the physical human body can take. It was present on the moon, on the sun, on Saturn, but always different. On the moon, for example, the natural kingdom that we today call the mineral kingdom of the earth did not yet exist; on the sun there was no plant kingdom in our sense, and on Saturn there was no animal kingdom in our sense; but only the human being in his first physical form. If we consider this, we have to realize that the human body today is actually not only a physical body, but a physical-mineral body, that in addition to the laws of the physical world - which is why it is the “physical” body - it has appropriated the laws and substances of the mineral kingdom, which now permeate it. On the moon, this physical human body has not yet acquired the laws of the mineral kingdom; if it had been burned at that time, there would have been no mineral ash. Minerals in the modern earthly sense did not yet exist at that time. So let us bear in mind: physicality and mineralization are two very different things. The human physical body is physical because it is governed by exactly the same laws as stones; the human physical body is mineralized at the same time because it has impregnated mineral substances within itself. The first germ of the physical body was present on Saturn. But there were no solid bodies, no water, no gases. On Saturn there was only warmth, only this state of warmth. Today's physicist does not know this state of warmth because he believes that warmth can only occur in gases, in water or in solid bodies. But that is a mistake. This physical human body, which today has appropriated the mineral kingdom, was a connection of physical laws on Saturn. These are physical laws that work in lines and in forms, which you get to know as laws in physics. Externally, this physical human body revealed itself on Saturn only as an entity that lived in warmth. So we must distinguish between the mineral and what is actually the physical principle of the human body. These are the physical laws that govern the physical body. It belongs, for example, to the physical principle that our ear and our eye are formed in such a way that they absorb sound and light in a very specific way. The mineral nature of the ear and the eye includes those substances that are impregnated into this framework of physical laws.

[ 6 ] Once we have made this clear to ourselves, and particularly directed our attention to how the sense organs, glands, nerves and blood are the expressions of the fourfold human being, we want to turn back to the contemplation of the sleeping person. In the bed of the sleeping person lie the physical body and the etheric body, outside are the astral body and the I. But now we consider that the astral body is the principle of the nervous system and the I is the principle of the blood system. So during the night the astral body has left that in the physical body of which it is, so to speak, the cause, namely, the nervous system. For it was only when the astral body integrated itself into man on the moon that the nervous system could come into being. So the astral body disdainfully leaves that which belongs to it, which it actually has to take care of in the human being; and in the same way, the I leaves that which it has brought into being. The principles of the circulatory and nervous systems are outside the sleeping physical body and the sleeping etheric body. They are now completely alone. But now, no material or physical thing can ever exist in the form in which it was brought into being by a spiritual principle, without that spiritual principle. That is completely out of the question. A nervous system can never live without astral beings being active in it, and a blood system can never live without I-beings being active in it. So, during the night, you all leave your nervous and circulatory systems in your ego and astral body and leave them to other beings that are of an astral nature. Beings that are of the same nature as your ego now enter your organism, so to speak. Every night, the human organism is actually occupied by such beings that are suitable to maintain it. The physical body and etheric body of the person lying in bed are then simultaneously penetrated by these astral and ego beings, which are actually in the physical body. We could call them intruders, but that is not always correct. In many cases we would have to call them guardian spirits, for they are the sustainers of that which the human being disdainfully leaves at night.

[ 7 ] Now it is not so bad that man leaves his body every night. I have already told you that the astral body and the I are constantly active during the night. They remove from the physical body what the wear and tear of the day has caused, what we broadly call fatigue. In the morning, a person is refreshed and rested because during the night his astral body and his ego have carried away the fatigue that befell him during the day through the impressions of daily life. This is a fact for clairvoyant observation: the astral body's activity, perceptible throughout the night, of carrying away the fatigue substances. From the outside in, I and my astral body work on the physical body and etheric body. But in the present cycle of their development, human beings are not yet able to carry out such activity entirely independently. They can only do so under the direction of other, higher beings. Thus, every night, so to speak, the human being is taken up, as it were, into the bosom of higher beings, who give him the ability to work on his physical and etheric bodies in the right way; and at the same time these beings — that is why we must not call them intruders — are the ones who, during the night, spiritually nourish his blood and nervous systems in the right way.

[ 8 ] As long as no abnormalities occur, the interaction of spiritual beings in humans during the night is correct. But such irregularities can very well occur, and here we come to a chapter of spiritual science that is extraordinarily important for the practical human soul life, and which one would like to see not only theoretically known in the broadest sense, but also to provide the basis for certain activities of the human soul life in the broadest sense. Man does not usually imagine that the facts of the soul life have a far-reaching effect. In certain contexts, I have already drawn your attention to the fact that the facts of the soul life can only be properly explained by looking at them from the point of view of spiritual science. We are all familiar with the profound significance of the saying: “From a spiritual point of view, a lie is a kind of murder.” And I have told you that in the astral world a kind of explosion occurs when a person tells a lie – and in a sense it occurs when a person merely thinks it. But such things, which are also mentioned at a certain level of spiritual scientific observation and also characterized as far as it is already possible there, become more and more clear and well-founded as one progresses in spiritual scientific knowledge.

[ 9 ] Today we will learn about another effect of lying and slandering, even if the words 'lying' and 'slandering' are not meant here in the wild way in which these words are usually applied in a rough sense. But even if a person colors the truth in that more subtle sense, for example out of convention, out of all kinds of social or party considerations, we are dealing with a lie in the spiritual-scientific sense everywhere. In many cases, the whole life of a person is steeped, if not in lies, then in lie-colored manifestations. The materialistically enlightened person at best recognizes that someone hitting him over the head with an axe leaves an impression on his physical body. He also at best recognizes that his physical body is affected when his head is cut off by a train, or when he develops an ulcer on any part of his body, or when germs enter his body. The enlightened man will find it understandable that effects are exerted on the physical body. The fact that man, as a spiritually created being, is a unity, that what takes place in the higher members of his body, in the astral body and in the ego, is to be regarded as continuing its effects down into the physical part of his body, is usually not considered at all. For example, it is not considered that telling lies and untruths, even being untruthful in one's living conditions, has real effects on the human physical body. We can experience the following clairvoyantly: If a person has told a lie during the day, for example, the effect of this lie remains within the physical body and can be seen by clairvoyant perception while the person sleeps. Now let us assume that the person is a liar at all, that he accumulates lies. Then he has many such effects in his physical body. All this hardens in a certain way during the night, and then something very significant happens. These inclusions, these hardenings in the physical body do not go well with those entities that have to take possession of the physical body at night, which, as we have seen, exercise those functions of the physical body from other worlds that the astral body and I exercise during the day. The consequence of this is that in the course of a lifetime, through such a body, one might say, that is riddled with lies, parts of those entities that take up residence in the person during the night are constricted. Again, we have constriction processes. These lead to the fact that when a person dies, his physical body not only takes the paths that it would take in the regular course of becoming, but that certain entities remain, which, so to speak, have been generated in the physical body by the effect of lying and slandering and are cut off from the spiritual world. Entities strangled in this roundabout way now also buzz around in our world. They belong to the class of entities we call “phantoms”. In them we have a certain group of elemental entities that are related to our physical body, invisible at first to the physical eye, that multiply through lies and slander. In fact, lies and slander populate our world with such phantoms. In this way we get to know a new class of elemental beings.

[ 10 ] Now, not only lies and slander, which are present in the soul, but also other things of the soul life exert their effect on the human body. Lies and slander, in particular, affect the physical body in such a way that they make it a separator of phantoms. Other things, in turn, affect the etheric body in a similar way. Do not be surprised at such manifestations of the soul's life; in the spiritual life, one must be able to take things calmly. Such facts, which have a bad effect on the etheric body, are, for example, bad laws or bad social institutions in any community. Everything, for example, that leads to discord, that plays from person to person through bad institutions, has an effect through the mood that it creates through the coexistence of people, so that the effect continues into the etheric body. And what accumulates in the etheric body through the effect of such facts of the soul, in turn delivers constrictions of these spiritual entities that are now also in our environment. They are called “spectra”; in German, one would say “ghosts.” These entities, which are present in the etheric world, in the world of life, we in turn see growing out of the lives of people. Thus, some of us may go around with our physical body, for those who are spiritually able to recognize these things, riddled, we may say, with phantoms, and our etheric body riddled with spectra or ghosts; and all of this, as it were, scatters and populates the world after the death of the person or some time afterward.

[ 11 ] Thus we see how the spiritual events of our lives, such as lies, slander, and bad social institutions, continue to exist, and how they deposit their spiritual creations between us here on our earthly globe. Now you can also understand that if in the normal human daily life the physical body, etheric body, astral body and I belong together, and so to speak the physical body and the etheric body even have to let other beings penetrate into them or do something with them, that the astral body and the I are also not in the normal state of their present cycle. Admittedly, they are in a somewhat different situation from the physical body and the etheric body. While a person sleeps, the physical body and the etheric body have the same consciousness as plants. But the plants have their ego up in Devachan. Therefore, the physical body and etheric body of the sleeping human being must also be cared for by such beings, who unfold their consciousness from Devachan. Now, the human being's astral body and I am higher by one world; but the human being also sleeps dreamlessly like the plants. That plants have only a physical body and an etheric body, and that man, in his sleeping state, still has an astral body and an ego, makes no difference with regard to the nature of plants. Man has indeed ascended into the spiritual world, into the astral world; but he has not ascended so far with his ego that it would not be justified when he sleeps. The consequence of this is that entities must also penetrate the astral body of the sleeping person. And so it is: influences from the devachanic world are constantly penetrating the astral body of the human being. These influences need not be abnormal at all; they can be influences from what we call the higher self of the human being. For man gradually lives his way up into the devachanic world by constantly progressing towards his spiritualization; and what is being prepared there influences him even now during his sleeping state.

[ 12 ] But there are not only these normal influences. It would be unique if people understood each other perfectly in terms of appreciating the freedom of the soul of the other person. But present-day humanity is still very far from this. Just think for a moment how today's soul still wants to overwhelm the other soul for the most part, how it cannot stand it when the other soul thinks and loves differently, how one soul wants to overwhelm the other and have an effect on it. In everything that takes effect from soul to soul in our world, from the unjustified judgment that one gives to all the means that people use to overwhelm souls, in everything that does not work in such a way that the free soul faces the free soul, but, even if only in the slightest way, means of coercion are used, whether or not it is only to awaken what is already dormant in the other soul. Forces are at work from human soul to human soul, which in turn influence these souls in such a way that this is expressed in the night in the astral body. The astral body develops inclusions, and as a result, beings are cut off from other worlds, who now in turn flit through our world as elemental beings. These beings belong to the class of “demons”. They are only present in our world because intolerance of thought, rape of thought, has been practised in it in the most diverse ways. The host of these demons has entered our world in this way.

[ 13 ] Thus today we have again met entities that are there as surely as the things we perceive through our physical senses are there, and that very much express their effects in human life. Humanity would have progressed quite differently, for example, if people had not created these demons through intolerance, which permeate our world and exert constant influence on people. At the same time, they are the spirits of prejudice. Thus, one understands life in its subtleties by getting to know these entanglements between the spiritual world in the higher sense and our human world. All these entities are, as I said, there, and they are swarming through the world in which we live.

[ 14 ] Now let us recall something else that has already been said. We pointed out that in the case of the people of the last third of the Atlantean era, the people before the Atlantean flood, the relationship between the human etheric body and the physical body was quite different than in previous times. Today, the proportions of the human head are such that the physical and etheric parts of the head are essentially the same. This was still different in ancient Atlantis. There, the etheric part of the head protruded far more, especially in the forehead area. Now we have a central point in the etheric body of the head and in the physical body of the head, roughly between the eyebrows. These two points coincided in the last third of the Atlantean period and coincide today. This has enabled the human being to say “I” to himself and to perceive himself as an independent human being. Thus, the etheric body of the head and the physical body of the head have joined together. This has happened so that the human being could become the being of meaning that he is within our physical world, so that he can enrich his inner life through what he takes in through the impressions of the physical senses, through smell, taste, sight and so on. All this is incorporated into his inner being so that he can use it for the further development of the whole cosmos. This acquisition could not be made in any other way. That is why we have always said that we must not understand spiritual science in an ascetic sense, not as an escape from the physical world; but everything that happens here is taken from the physical world, and it would be lost to the spiritual world if it were not collected here.

[ 15 ] Now, however, man is approaching a new state more and more. In the post-Atlantic period, we have gone through various cultural epochs: the ancient Indian, the ancient Persian, then the one we have referred to as the Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldean-Egyptian epoch, then the Greek-Latin epoch, and we are now in the fifth cultural epoch of the post-Atlantic period. Ours will be followed by a sixth and a seventh cultural epoch. While the structure of the etheric body and the physical body has become more and more solid over the course of this period, becoming more and more internally firm and bound, towards the future, the human being is moving towards a period in which the etheric body gradually loosens again and becomes independent. The path is being retraced. There are people today who have much looser etheric bodies than others. This loosening of the etheric body is only right for the human being if he has absorbed so much through the various embodiments during those cultural epochs of which we have spoken that his etheric body , when it leaves again, takes with it the right fruits from the physical-sensual world, fruits that are suitable for incorporation into the etheric body, which is becoming more and more independent. The more spiritual the ideas are that a person finds within the physical world here, the more he takes with him in his etheric body. Everything that a person absorbs in our present earthly existence in terms of utilitarian ideas, of mechanical, industrial ideas, that serve only external needs, only the external life, is unsuitable to be incorporated into the etheric body. But everything that it absorbs in the way of artistic, beautiful and religious ideas – and everything can be steeped in the sphere of wisdom, art and religion – all this gives its etheric body the ability and the possibility to be organized independently. Because this can be foreseen, it has been emphasized here many times how a spiritual-scientific worldview must send its effects and impulses into practical life, and how spiritual science must never remain a matter for tea parties or a spiritual occupation that falls outside of ordinary life, but that it must be incorporated into our entire cultural life. Once people understand spiritual ideas, they will also understand that everything that fills our time must be imbued with spiritual principles. Some spiritualists, such as Richard Wagner, have anticipated such a permeation with spiritual principles in certain areas. One day we will understand how to build a train station so that it exudes wisdom just like a temple, if it is truly adapted to what lives in it. There is still a lot to be done. These impulses must be allowed to work, and they will work if spiritual-scientific thought is more and more and more fully understood. I still vividly remember how, about twenty-five years ago, an important architect spoke about architectural style during a principal's address and said the wonderful sentence: architectural styles are not invented, architectural styles grow out of spiritual life! And at the same time he showed why our time, when it does revive architectural styles, only revives old architectural styles and is incapable of finding a new architectural style because it as such still has no inner spiritual life. When the world will again produce spiritual life, then everything will be possible. Then we will experience that the human soul will shine out at us from everything that looks at us, just as in a medieval city the spirit expressed itself in every door lock and in every key. Only then will theosophy be understood when it confronts us everywhere in this way, as crystallized in its forms. But then one human being will also live with another as spirit with spirit. But then man prepares more and more for himself, which he takes with him when he moves up into the spiritual world again, when his etheric body becomes independent. Thus men must plunge into the spiritual world if evolution is to continue in an appropriate way.

[ 16 ] Nothing symbolizes the interpenetration of the ego with the spirit more beautifully than the account of the miracle of Pentecost. If you think about it, how prophetically it points to the world being imbued and permeated with spiritual life through the descent of the 'fiery tongues'. Everything must be spiritually revitalized again. Even the abstract, conceptual and intellectual relationship that people have to the upcoming festival must become concrete and alive again. Let us try to occupy our soul with a thought such as can arise from today's meditation, especially at the time we call the time of Pentecost. Then such a festival, which was instituted for spiritual reasons, will again have something vital to say to people when their etheric body is ripe for spiritual activity. But if man does not absorb the spirit of Pentecost, then the etheric body leaves the physical body and, above all, is not strong enough to overcome what has been created before, those spectral, phantom and demonic worlds that the world creates as their by-products. But how evolution is furthered by the spirit, what we can say prophetically about it, shall be the subject of our next reflection.