The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fifth Lecture

[ 1 ] Today we will start with simple forms of pain, with its elementary manifestations. When you cut your finger and feel pain, or when your hand is crushed, or when your hand is cut off and you feel pain, this is the simplest, most primitive form of pain; this is where our consideration will begin. When we ask scholars of the soul, psychologists, what they can contribute to the explanation of the simplest pain, these psychologists have become somewhat comical, especially in the present day. They have made a remarkable discovery: They have found that pain cannot be explained other than by adding a sense of pain to the various senses, such as smell, sight, and hearing, so that humans perceive pain with this sense, just as they perceive light with their eyes and sounds with their ears. They say that humans feel pain because they have a sense of pain. External experience does not give us any indication that we should assume a sense of pain, but nevertheless, science, based on pure observation, does not hesitate to assume it; it simply invents the sense of pain. But let us not dwell on this, but ask ourselves: How does such a simple, primitive pain come about, how is it felt when one cuts one's finger?

[ 2 ] The finger is part of the physical body. The substances of the external physical world are present in it. The finger is permeated by the etheric and astral parts of the body that belong to the finger. What is the function of these higher parts, the etheric and the astral? This physical structure of the finger, which consists of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and so on, these cells arranged within it, could not be what they are if there were not behind them the active agent, the former and builder, the etheric body, which has worked both in the development of the finger, so that the cells have joined together to form the finger, and also maintains these cells in their present arrangement, for it prevents the finger from falling off and decaying. This etheric body permeates and etherizes the entire finger; it is in the same space as the physical finger. But the astral finger is also there. When we have any sensation in the finger, a pressure or some other perception, it is naturally the astral body of the finger that is the mediator of this sensation, for the sensation is in the astral body.

[ 3 ] However, there is by no means a mere mechanical connection between the physical, etheric, and astral fingers; rather, this connection is a constantly living one. The etheric finger always glows and energizes the physical finger; it works continuously on the formation of its inner parts. What interest does the etheric finger actually have in the physical finger? It has an interest in bringing all the parts with which it is connected, down to the smallest parts, into the right place and into the right relationship.

[ 4 ] Let us now imagine that we make a small cut in the skin and thereby injure it: through this incision, we prevent the etheric finger from arranging the parts in the right way. It is in the finger and should hold the parts together. This mechanical incision keeps them apart, so the ether finger cannot do what it is supposed to do. It is in the same position as we would be if, for example, we had prepared some tool for working in the garden and someone destroyed it. Then we cannot do our work as we would like to. Now you have to do without what you wanted to do. This inability is best described as deprivation. The astral part of the finger perceives this inability to intervene as pain.

[ 5 ] If you knock your hand away, you can only knock away the physical hand, not the etheric hand, and this etheric hand can then no longer function; the astral hand perceives this tremendous deprivation as pain. Thus, through the interaction of the etheric and astral, we have come to know the nature of the most primitive, most elementary pain. This is how pain actually arises, and it lasts until the astral part in this individual part has become accustomed to the fact that this activity is no longer being carried out.

[ 6 ] Let us now compare this with the pain in Kamaloka. There, the whole body is suddenly snatched away from the person, it is no longer there, and the etheric forces can no longer intervene. The astral body senses that the whole can no longer be organized, it desires the activity that can only be carried out with the physical body, it feels this deprivation as pain. Every pain is a suppressed activity. Every suppressed activity in the cosmos leads to pain, and because activity in the cosmos often has to be suppressed, pain is something necessary in the cosmos.

[ 7 ] However, something else can also happen. To a certain extent, the hand can be [held back] from its particularly lively activity through processes of deprivation and the like, and as a result its functions can be suppressed. This is the case, for example, when a person begins to mortify themselves. In doing so, they bring the previously active organs of the body to a standstill in a certain way. Then, for example, the astral part of the etheric hand withdraws from the hand. This then has an excess of energy; it has lost its tasks, even though it could continue its activity just as vigorously. In this way, even though there is no actual injury, it has lost its task. If a person treats themselves in such a way that they begin to feel this excess energy in the astral body and can say to themselves: I have excess energy left over; before, I needed all my energy to regulate the physical body, but now I have tamed the physical body. It no longer requires so much energy. The astral body then perceives this excess energy as bliss. For just as suppressed activity causes pain, accumulated energy gives a feeling of bliss. The possibility of doing more than he was originally predisposed to do means bliss for the astral body. This awareness of a bursting energy that can rise up in production, that can be directed from within because the outer body does not demand it: that means bliss.

[ 8 ] What is the point, then, of doing something in religious communities to mortify the physical body? What does that mean? It means not making use of the functions of the physical body, thereby calming them and thus retaining some strength in the etheric body. Let us imagine two people side by side, one who has lived a life of deprivation and has gradually brought about a state in which the metabolism of the physical body proceeds calmly without making much use of the etheric body, and another who wants to eat as much as possible, in whom everything is in turmoil and much is digested. In the one, where everything proceeds calmly, where even the physical functions show a certain sluggishness and do not consume the forces of the etheric body so much, the etheric body has strength left over. In the other person, however, all the energy of the etheric body must be used for the needs of the palate and stomach; all the energies of the etheric body are used to maintain the physical body in its functions. The result is that those who have brought their bodies to rest and undemandingness have excess forces in their etheric bodies, and the astral body reflects these as powers of cognition, not merely as bliss, and the imaginative images of the astral world appear before them. Savonarola, for example, did not have a physical body that made particular demands on him; he was weak, even continually sickly, he had much in his etheric body that was not used up in the physical body, and he was able to use these forces to find his powerful thoughts and impulses, he was able to make those powerful speeches that inspired his listeners. Through the visions he also had, he was able to powerfully present to his listeners what was to happen in the future.

[ 9 ] And now we can transfer this to the spiritual worlds. Just as inhibited activity in Kamaloka is deprivation—and in Kamaloka there is always deprivation—when a person enters Devachan, all inhibited activity falls away because there is nothing left there that is in any way connected with the physical and longs to return to the physical with greed. There, the spiritual substance is handed over to the human being, which gradually builds up the form of his future incarnation. There is the purest, most uninhibited activity, and the human being experiences this as the purest bliss. Human beings learn continuously throughout their lives from everything around them. However, the bodies they now have, they have built up according to the powers of their previous incarnations; they have built them up through these powers. What they now learn in their lives is not yet in their bodies. Human beings change during their lives, their feelings and sensations change, their ideals grow, and there is a great deal of inhibited activity within them – but they cannot transform their bodies; they must leave them as they are, built up according to the experiences of their previous incarnations. In Devachan, he is freed from these inhibitions, and as a result, his uninhibited urge to be active is lived out in bliss. There he creates his astral body, his etheric body, and his physical body for his new life. What remains unused here is put to use in Devachan. He takes up into Devachan not only his present consciousness, but also that which goes beyond his personality. This gives him a higher existence in Devachan, so that he adds to what is his individuality here what he has gained in Devachan and what he has not yet been able to express during his life. In this way we understand pain and deprivation from the lowest level up to bliss. In one world we can always trace the traces of what passes through all worlds.

[ 10 ] This enables us today to appreciate the ascetic methods of development more fully. We can say that just as pain is connected with an external injury to the physical body, so the bliss that is felt is connected with a reduction in external activity and thus with an increase in internal activity. This is the reasonable side of ancient asceticism, and we can understand why renunciation was sought as a means of ascending to the higher worlds. Thus, we often have to clarify the most primitive aspects of a matter in order to learn, in a certain sense, how spiritual science explains to us, through the simplest things, such as the injury of a finger, the path from deprivation and renunciation to bliss, and how the endurance of physical pain can become a kind of path to knowledge. For everything is a parable, and when we explain the small things before us as spiritual science reveals them, we gradually rise to a spiritual height that enables us to comprehend the greatest things.

[ 11 ] If we compare this with what was said yesterday, it becomes understandable that enduring physical pain can be a kind of training, a kind of path to knowledge. Let us imagine a person who has never had a headache. He can say: I know nothing about having a brain, because I have never felt it. Let us imagine that such a headache does not come about through external influences, but through a certain stage of Christian initiation called “the crowning with thorns.” The person then has the feeling of experiencing the following: Whatever suffering, pain, and inhibitions come my way that want to undermine what is most important to me, my mission—I want to stand upright, even if I stand alone! If someone were to practice these feelings for months or even years, they would eventually come to feel a headache as if thorns were piercing their head. This is a transition to recognizing the occult forces that have formed the brain. When the etheric forces of the brain do exactly what they have to do, they find nothing that could bring these forces to human consciousness. But the moment the physical brain is wounded in a certain way under the influence of these feelings, the etheric body must detach itself, it must withdraw from the brain, it is driven out of the brain, and the result of this independence of the etheric head is knowledge. This temporary pain is only the transition to the attainment of the powers of knowledge, and that is nothing other than the objectification of what the human being did not know before. Previously, he did not know that he had a brain; now he learns to recognize the etheric forces and their effectiveness, which have built up his brain and which maintain it.

[ 12 ] One could say various other things as well. When a physical organ is separated from its etheric member so that the etheric body cannot intervene, one feels pain. Then, when the astral body has become accustomed to this, when scarring occurs, which means that the etheric body is freed, when, in other words, not all the forces of the etheric body are being used, the opposite occurs: namely, the feeling of pleasure and bliss.