The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fourth Lecture

[ 1 ] Yesterday’s session concluded with a reference to the two boundaries within which human beings are confined by their normal consciousness, and today we wish to begin, in a certain sense, to look out into the realms that lie beyond these boundaries—realms that human beings encounter when, through the development of their soul (which has already been hinted at and will be elaborated upon later in these lectures), they pass through one or the other of the gates and cross over what is called the lesser and the greater guardian of the threshold.

[ 2 ] Today, let us first try to come to terms with what a person experiences when, passing by the little guardian of the threshold, they consciously descend into their own inner being. We know, of course, that this descent is repeated every day in ordinary life when we wake up, and we have already emphasized sufficiently how, in this moment of waking, it becomes impossible to truly see what one is living into as one enters one’s own inner being. If one now wishes to understand what one is living into, then it is necessary to place something precisely before one’s soul—something that has already been briefly hinted at in the public lectures, but which we now wish to discuss in detail. It is something connected with the whole of human development.

[ 3 ] We know that human beings develop step by step over the course of their lives. Even in the life that spans from birth to death, human beings undergo a development that leads them from the initial stages of life—in which they possess limited abilities and strengths—to an ever-increasing unfolding of abilities, talents, and strengths. How does this development actually take place in ordinary life? Well, as we have already emphasized, it proceeds in such a way that falling asleep and waking up play an essential role in it. When we consider what a person experiences day by day in their youth through the process of learning, and when we imagine how these learning experiences are transformed into abilities and skills, we must turn our attention to the state of sleep, which alone makes it possible for experiences to be transformed within the human soul into abilities and powers. After all, every evening when we fall asleep, we truly take something from our daily life into our soul, and what we take with us—the fruits of our experiences—we weave together during sleep; we shape and transform it so that it solidifies into our abilities and powers. A vivid example presents itself to us when we look back at how, in our youth, we had to exert ourselves day by day, say, to learn to write. We allowed all manner of experiences to pass through our soul. None of these experiences stand before our soul when we put pen to paper today and practice the art of writing to express our thoughts. What we experienced there in our attempts to form this or that letter has, as it were, coalesced into the ability to write. And that which transformed all these day-to-day experiences into the ability to write lies, in essence, within our soul, but can only function properly when we are, so to speak, not present.

[ 4 ] From this we can already conclude that there is something within our soul that is higher than all our conscious life. For if we were to transform our experiences solely through our own powers, something beautiful would come to light. There are higher powers within us than those we wield in our conscious life. These higher powers come into play during sleep, when we are in an unconscious state. In this sleep life, experiences are transformed into abilities, and the soul is made ever more mature. Thus, a deeper being within us works on our further development, and this being receives the experiences of the day as we fall asleep and weaves them together so that they are then available to us as abilities in a later period of life. But we bring out of sleep much more than just what we ourselves have brought into it through our conscious experiences. During the day, from morning to evening, we expend forces by participating in events taking place around us. In the evening, we feel these forces depleted through fatigue. And what we expend in energy during the day is in turn refreshed during the night in the life of sleep. We feel this in the morning. Other forces flow to us from the life of sleep to replace those we have expended during the day’s work. Thus, a whole sum of forces flows to us from our life of sleep, which we need for our daily life.

[ 5 ] This is how we develop from stage to stage, but we know that this development has certain limits. Every morning when we wake up, we find the same physical body and etheric or life body, and we know that, fundamentally speaking, we are also able to do very little—through our own powers, through our own achievements—to transform this physical body, this etheric body, and to shape it into higher forms. Anyone who knows a little about life is aware, however, that to a certain degree the possibility exists to transform oneself even into one’s physical body. If we observe a person who has spent ten years devoting themselves to deeper experiences of insight—experiences that do not remain mere external theories but penetrate the entire life of the soul, transforming the person, so to speak, into something else— then, when we compare their current appearance with their former one after ten years, we can form an idea of how the insights gained have worked their way into the features of their face, how these have changed. There we see how what develops in the soul is also plastically shaped in the outer physical body. But we also see how strictly limited this actually is, and it must be strictly limited, for every morning we essentially find our physical body and our etheric body in the same form and with the same predispositions they were born with. We can do little to change these predispositions. While we can develop relatively much in our soul—in our intellectual and spiritual powers, and also in the willpower of our soul—we can do little to alter the transformation of our outer sheaths, our physical and etheric bodies, in the life between birth and death. Yet inner forces must be at work throughout the entire life between birth and death, and these forces must be continually rekindled if life is to continue. For we see at the moment of death what becomes of the physical human body if the etheric or life body is not continually working upon it. The actual physical, the physical and chemical forces of the physical body come into play from the moment of death onward. There they have a decomposing and dissolving effect on the physical body. The fact that what otherwise happens to the physical body at the moment of death cannot take place between birth and death is due to the etheric or life body with its inner forces. In the time between birth and death, it is a faithful fighter against the decay of the physical body. At every moment, our physical body would be ready to decay if new forces were not supplied to it from the etheric or life body. This etheric or life body, however, in turn receives what it needs from even deeper inner forces, from what we call the astral body, the bearer of pleasure and suffering, of joy and pain, and so on, so that the corresponding inner body is always working on and building up the corresponding outer body. Thus, what is visible on the outside is continually sustained by the inner forces. How the astral body works on the etheric or life body, and how the etheric body in turn works on the physical body—this is precisely what a person would have to see if, upon waking, they consciously descended into their physicality, and what eludes them because their gaze is diverted to external things and events during this descent.

[ 6 ] Now, however, by gradually developing his soul so that he is able to consciously experience the moment of waking—that is, the descent into his physical body—a person can, in a certain sense, gain knowledge of what is at work and alive within him, what is creating and forming there. We will participate in the inner driving force of our own humanity when we are able—and here the word is meant in the best sense—to immerse ourselves mystically into our own inner being. What, then, must we achieve—how we achieve it, we shall discuss later—if we wish to descend so consciously into our own inner being? What we must achieve is precisely that, upon waking, external impressions do not disturb us. We must prepare ourselves so that we are able to wake up without the impressions of the eyes, the impressions of the ears, and so on, approaching our soul at the moment of waking. We must put ourselves in a position to emerge from a different state of consciousness—such as that which exists during sleep—and immerse ourselves in worldly existence, so that we can bring all external impressions to a standstill. If we can bring all external impressions to a standstill in this way, then we pass by the little guardian of the threshold. We will discuss what he looks like shortly. Let us now assume for a moment that we have passed him by, that we have entered through the gate that leads into our own inner being. There, as genuine, true mystics, we come to know something of which we previously had no conception whatsoever. The external descriptions given in most theosophical handbooks of the astral body, the etheric or life body, and the physical body—when viewed from within—are, after all, little more than very approximate descriptions that may indeed point to what is involved, but a true understanding of that into which we enter upon waking is only possible when one patiently approaches the great truths of existence from the most diverse angles over a long period of time. And so today we shall attempt to penetrate these mysteries from a very specific angle.

[ 7 ] So while a person does not initially need to perceive what may affect them from the outside, they come to know—let us say—emotionally what is usually called the soul, which is, however, something quite different from what corresponds to the common conception of the soul. They come to realize that this human soul is actually something small, yet comparable to something great, and that the individual capacities possessed by the human soul—and within which it can develop—are insignificant compared to the capacities of that great entity to which the human soul can feel akin. And one comes to realize, when one enters the physical and etheric bodies, that one has truly emerged from a reality upon waking, that from falling asleep until waking one was in another world, in a world in which there exists a being that is similar to our own soul, but which possesses qualities and abilities that are far greater, far more powerful than those of our own soul. This human soul feels so very small at the moment of waking, once it has passed the Guardian of the Threshold. There it can say to itself: Yes, I am truly small, for if I had nothing within me at this very moment of waking but what I can give to myself, I would not have flowed out and poured into great, mighty worlds that possess abilities similar to my own, only heightened to infinity, and had these not allowed that which I need to flow into me, oh, I would now be quite at a loss if I were to face my own inner self. — The soul now realizes that it needs what has flowed into it throughout the night; it now realizes that what has flowed into it bears a resemblance to its own three fundamental forces.

[ 8 ] What are these three fundamental powers of the soul? First, what is called the will; everything that is of a volitional nature is the one fundamental power of the soul, the one that guides us to will this or that in life. The second fundamental force of the soul is feeling; it is the force that causes our soul to be attracted to one thing and repelled by another, to feel joy at one thing and pain at another. And the third fundamental force is thinking, the ability to form concepts about things. These are the three fundamental forces of the human soul. And we also know that these three fundamental forces are what is truly valuable, that which we can develop in life between birth and death. If we develop our will more and more, making it stronger and stronger, then we become people who are able to intervene powerfully in life. If we develop our feelings more and more, then we become people who are able to judge with ever greater and greater certainty what is right or wrong in the world, by feeling pleasure in what is right and just, and pain in what is wrong and unjust. And if we cultivate our thinking, we will become increasingly capable of developing what we call a wise understanding of the world, through which we find our way into the phenomena of the world with wisdom. Throughout our entire life, between birth and death, we work on these three fundamental powers of the soul.

[ 9 ] But when we wake up in the morning in the state that has been described—having passed the Guardian of the Threshold—we realize that everything we can develop within ourselves in terms of will, feeling, and thought is a mere trifle compared to the power of thought, the power of feeling, and the power of will that are spread out in the spiritual world from which we emerge in the morning at the moment of waking; and we realize that we need what we have absorbed during the night, for we would not get very far if we developed only those thoughts, feelings, and will that we can develop through our daily life. So, like a gift from the spiritual worlds, from the higher forces of world-thinking, world-feeling, and world-will, that which now descends with us into our own inner being must flow to us throughout the night. Once we have first become aware that we have absorbed into our soul world-will, world-feeling, and world-thinking, we realize that these three fundamental forces are not what we have acquired for ourselves from life in terms of thinking, feeling, and willing, but rather something that flows to us without our intervention from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up.

[ 10 ] As we immerse ourselves in our own physicality with our soul—which has, as it were, become saturated with these qualities—we notice that these fundamental forces are transformed and take on a different aspect. Specifically, we notice that what we know in a faint reflection as the will of our soul—but which we bring with us from an infinitely greater measure of the world’s will—is transformed as it flows in into something that gives us the possibility of being mobile beings who, from within, have the ability to move our limbs, in small and large ways. The possibility and the ability flow into us that we see manifesting outwardly when we observe a person performing the work of the day through their movements. What flows into us there, what we draw from the world will, becomes outwardly visible in the movement of our limbs, in our entire mobility. That which is the world will comes to light within us as a force, as an inner force that fills us. We now see how the force that permeates us—which we otherwise sense only in a soul-like way—actually flows to us from the world will. Now it becomes a truth for us that will flows through the world, that the will of the world flows through us, and that we are only mobile human beings—human beings who can move their limbs, human beings who possess self-activity—because... in the morning, the world-will flows into us, which we have absorbed into our soul during sleep. We use up this world will that flows into us in the morning during the day. We do not feel this inflow in ordinary, normal life. But once we have passed the Guardian of the Threshold, we feel the entire will of the macrocosm continuing to work within us; there we feel ourselves having grown together as one with the world will. It is an infinitely significant feeling that we experience there. How connected, how integrated into the entire world will we feel in this moment.

[ 11 ] But what we know in our ordinary spiritual life as the power of feeling, we have drawn from a sort of infinite reservoir of cosmic feeling, and this now flows into us. And this transforms in such a way that, for those who are sufficiently developed, it becomes as visible within as if something were flowing through them within this sense of the world—something that, if one were to compare it to anything in life, could only be compared to light. It is as if we were being illuminated from within; this is what it is like when one looks upon what flows into us as the effect of the world-feeling absorbed during sleep. The inflowing sense of the world becomes light within us, inner light; outwardly it is not visible, but the person who has become clairvoyant sees, once they have passed the little guardian of the threshold, that the light they need for their inner experience is in fact nothing other than a result of what they have absorbed during the night as a sense of the world. Thus we can already see how the human being, when devoted to his own inner self, experiences something entirely new through his soul. He experiences what flows to him from the macrocosm and what becomes of it within him. And one truly and essentially has before oneself that which is the astral body when one feels the forces and abilities of the outer world beings flowing into oneself.

[ 12 ] The power of thought functions within us like an organizer or regulator between what flows to us as the force of movement and what flows to us as inner light. A kind of balance must be established between these two so that an improper relationship never arises between what emerges as inner feeling and what emerges as the urge to act. If the right balance were not established between inner light and the urge to act, the human physical body would not be properly nourished from within. If one or the other were present in excess, the human being would perish. Only with the right balance can a person develop their inner powers in such a way that they serve their outer existence in the right way.

[ 13 ] Thus we see these three forces at work within the human being during sleep, and they continue to act within us in such a way that they energize our outer being from morning to night, enabling it to accomplish what it is meant to accomplish. When we consider this, we can say to ourselves that our soul is indeed quite small compared to what exists in the vast world into which we were poured out during sleep; yet our soul is nevertheless similar to it. Just as thinking, feeling, and willing develop in our soul step by step to ever higher and higher levels, so too is poured out into the invisible, supersensible world that which is world-feeling, world-thinking, and world-willing.

[ 14 ] And then one has another experience that arises as an immediate sensation. Even though this soul is small today compared to the great world soul, it is nevertheless on the path to becoming like it. Its capacity to think, its capacity to will, and its capacity to feel are still small today, but it is on the path to becoming like this great world feeling, world thinking, and world willing. — That is one thing one experiences. The other is that one knows quite precisely: what appears to us as a very powerful macrocosm—as world feeling, world thinking, world willing—was once just like our soul; it had to develop from such small beginnings into such immense grandeur.

[ 15 ] When one has these two feelings, something settles upon the mystic’s soul like a fruit, and this consists in his asking himself: What would have become of those beings who created what is now spread throughout the world and provides us with what we need for our lives, if they had done nothing to further their own development? In the infinite distance of the past, they were just as weak in their emotional powers, their powers of thought, and their powers of will as we are. Once they were as weak as our soul, and today they are so strong that they no longer depend on receiving, but only give. What would have become of us if they had not developed further? Nothing could have become of us on our own! We could not exist! This is the living feeling that settles upon our soul, a feeling of infinite gratitude. When we know how to appreciate the value of our existence, a feeling of infinite gratitude overwhelms us. This feeling of gratitude is a reality for every genuine, true mystic; it is not something that can be compared in the slightest to what a person feels as gratitude in ordinary life. This is a feeling that arises within us as blissful and soul-pervading, and it must be there, for it belongs to the most important experiences of the mystic. What the outside world calls mysticism today is usually nothing more than a collection of clichés. The genuine, true mystic knows this feeling of gratitude with which he looks out upon the great world and says to himself: What would you be if not for these beings who came before you, who did everything to ascend to this height, which makes it possible to give you every night what you need and to let it flow into your physical being? — Whoever has not felt this sense of gratitude toward the macrocosm in the deepest recesses of their heart is not a true mystic.

[ 16 ] And this feeling of gratitude is followed by another feeling, one that can be described in the following words: If we stand at the beginning today, just as those beings once stood at the beginning, must we not work on ourselves so that we may achieve our goal in our existence in this world? Must we not do everything in our power to break free from our narrow-mindedness, feelings, and will, so that one day we may not merely take, but also give, so that we may pour out and let flow something in a similar way to how something pours into us when, in the state of sleep, we are surrendered to the macrocosm? This feeling takes shape as a colossal obligation for the development of our soul. We then say to ourselves as genuine, true mystics: You are neglecting your duty if you do not do everything to develop the powers of your soul—which are still present only to a small degree today—to the heights they can reach, and which are shown to you as an example when you consciously look up to the macrocosm from which you draw your powers. If you do not develop yourself, if you become angry and oppose your own development, then you will contribute to the fact that beings will one day be unable to develop in the same way that you are developing today. Then, instead of contributing to progress, to renewal, to the creation of the world, you will contribute to its destruction. — This is the other feeling that arises for the mystic, and we see that what is otherwise experienced in the soul—the sum of desires, drives, and passions, and so on—is transformed in a remarkable way. What we otherwise know as a feeling of gratitude becomes an immeasurable gratitude toward the macrocosm, and what we feel in life as a duty grows into an immeasurable obligation toward our own conscious development.

[ 17 ] These are two feelings and impulses that flow through our soul as we pass the Guardian of the Threshold. And it is these two feelings that enable us to truly recognize the human astral body in its essential nature. When these feelings live within a person as they have been described, and the person surrenders more and more to these feelings—the feeling of gratitude toward the macrocosm and the feelings of duty toward the unfolding of the world—when they allow their soul to be completely permeated and pulsed through by them, then their seer’s eye opens; then, little by little, his own astral body stands before his eyes—the next sheath that surrounds him, which he does not see in ordinary consciousness but which he can perceive if he has the patience to allow these feelings to work upon his soul long enough. Then the true form of our astral body stands before us, that body which has been born out of the macrocosm. However, if we wish to see this astral body and perceive with sufficient clarity the truth that the spirit underlies all the sensible world, then we must pass by the Guardian of the Threshold. We must also consider the reverse side of what has just been described as the light side.

[ 18 ] We have seen that everything that constitutes the will of the world flows through us as a force for action, that everything that constitutes the feeling of the world flows through us as light, and that the thinking of the world flows through us as an organizing force. These are the elements we need; without them we could not live, and if they were not supplied to us, we could not exist as human beings. Now let us compare what works within us with what is already our own. Then it becomes very clear to us what the soul has developed up to that point in terms of powers of thought, powers of feeling, and powers of will. In particular, it becomes very clear to us how much we have failed to acquire in terms of the strength of the will, in terms of the intelligence of thought, and in terms of correct and appropriate feeling. It now becomes apparent that everything we have done to acquire intelligence can unite with what flows through us from the world-feeling with light, and that everything we have neglected in the development of our intelligence acts as a stumbling block. To the extent that we have failed to work on the development of our intelligence and our own power of thought, so much less flows to us from the light of the world-feeling. If we wish to progress in our existence within the world, our thinking must be in the right proportion to what we absorb within ourselves from the world-feeling.

[ 19 ] Anyone who merely sought to combine these things might easily be tempted to believe that what we acquire through the powers of thought as human intelligence must add up to and merge with what flows to us from the thinking of the world. But that would be an external combination, a mere theory, and does not correspond to reality. In truth, human thinking adds up to the feeling of the world. The mistake is often made of combining the given hints into something false, for example, like with like or similar with similar. But things are not such that one can manage with human combinatory thinking. Thus, world-feeling, as we absorb it in sleep, adds up to human intelligence. The more intelligence one has, the more it illuminates that which the feeling of the world gives us as an inner light. At the same time, however, we see darkness and gloom flowing into this light, into this feeling of the world, when we fail to do anything to develop our thinking and our intelligence. All sins of omission that a person commits by being too lazy to develop their thinking powers take their revenge in that the person deprives their inner light of something, that they impose darkness and gloom upon this inner light of their own accord. Thus we see the spirit weaving within our own inner being.

[ 20 ] Now, someone might say: It actually strikes me as rather unsettling to think that there is a strange movement in the world—such as the spiritual science movement—which is now even beginning to draw people’s attention to such things. Haven’t people lived up to now—and lived quite happily—by, so to speak, confining themselves within these two boundaries, by staying nicely within the span of life that stretches between the small and the great guardians of the threshold? The spiritual powers, of which they have had no conception until now, have provided for their progress; couldn’t things continue this way? — Even if they do not say so explicitly, the people of today think: Oh, what do we care today about this cosmic current! We would rather stick to life as it has flowed until now. In the end, one might even be tempted to become aware of how light and darkness mingle within ourselves. Until now, the spiritual powers have ensured that history did not fall into disorder; now we might experience it for ourselves, and we might throw history into disorder. Let’s rather refrain from doing so! — One might come to this state of mind, and there are still very many today in this state of mind, who say to themselves: We want to eat and drink, develop the necessary strength in the external world, but we do not want to go beyond that; we’ll leave that to the gods, who have taken care of it so far.

[ 21 ] This would not, in essence, be an unreasonable objection, for it has indeed been the case up to now that, up to their present stage of development, human beings have been able to draw sufficient strength from sleep; that the forces of the macrocosm were there, from which the soul had drawn sustenance; and that the soul was supplied with what these great spiritual beings had stored up. That was the case until now. But we must not remain with abstractions; rather, we must stick to reality, especially in this field. And this reality looks like this: the fundamental spiritual conditions of our worldly life also change from epoch to epoch. Those world powers to which we are surrendered every night have, from the very beginning—since there was a human being developing—counted on this human being; they have counted on light also flowing upward from human beings. They do not possess an inexhaustible reservoir of light, but one that gradually diminishes, one that would gradually radiate ever lesser and lesser forces were it not for the fact that new strength and new light flow into the general world feeling and world light from human life itself through work on human thinking, feeling, and willing, and through striving upward into the higher worlds. And we are now living in a time when it is necessary for people to truly become aware that they must not simply leave themselves to whatever flows toward them, but that they must, for their part, cooperate in the becoming of the world. It is by no means some ordinary ideal that spiritual science sets for itself. It truly does not work like other spiritual movements and worldviews that are merely enthusiastic about this or that ideal and cannot help but preach it to others. Such an impulse is not present in those who today proclaim spiritual science out of a genuine world mission. Rather, there is the realization that certain forces within the macrocosm are beginning to be exhausted, and that we are heading toward a future in which, if human beings did not work on the development of their own souls, too little would flow down from these higher worlds, because the measure of the flowing-down forces is beginning to be gradually exhausted. We live in this time. That is why spiritual science must step into the world. Not out of some arbitrary impulse, but out of the necessity of our time, spiritual science must come into being so that it can lead people to replace what has been exhausted in the down-flowing forces. Based on this insight, spiritual science draws its impulses from the present, and it would not be active today if this fact did not exist; rather, it would quietly leave the development of humanity to its own devices, as before. But it foresees that if, in the coming centuries, a sufficiently large number of people do not work their way up into the spiritual worlds, then the human race would bring down fewer and fewer forces from these spiritual worlds, and the consequence would be an impoverishment of human beings in spiritual power, a general desolation of human life. People would grow weak in regard to what they have to do in the world. Human life would wither away, just as a tree becomes woody when it no longer receives life-sustaining sap. Until now, these forces have been supplied to the human race from outside, and those who consider only external life—who live thoughtlessly and believe that only the external sensory world exists—know nothing of the changes taking place behind this sensory world. And among these important changes is the drying up of spiritual forces and the necessity that such forces be generated by human beings themselves. If the further development of humanity were left to superficial people who cling only to the external physical world, then a withering, a desolation of the entire human race on Earth would ensue.

[ 22 ] Here we have touched upon the lowest point from which the spiritual scientist gains the realization that spiritual science must be proclaimed so that people may decide for themselves whether they wish to participate in this necessary work or not. We will have more to say about this turning point in human development in the following lectures. But now let us turn our spiritual gaze once more to what we have just touched upon. Let us turn our gaze to all that in our soul constitutes sins of omission, which manifest in our soul as an inhibition of those forces flowing to us from above. All sins of omission in thinking pierce, as it were, like darkness into the light flowing in from the feeling of the world. And in a similar way, our sins of omission regarding feeling bore into the forces of our movements, and our sins of omission regarding willing hinder the ordering activity of world-thinking. It comes vividly before our eyes what our soul has failed to do through its development thus far and what stands as a powerful stumbling block in the very progress of life. What higher powers give us, what is at work within us, what develops strength from the world-will, what develops light from world-feeling, what develops order and harmony from world-thinking—into all this stands that which we ourselves are in our utter powerlessness, precisely because we have developed so far only to the extent that we have developed. There we stand before true self-knowledge. And as before a luminous image, that which we have become through our sins of omission appears as darkness, as a dark silhouette—that which we must rectify within ourselves by developing our soul forces in the right way. That which we have not become stands before our soul and reveals itself to us very clearly by sending out its rays in three directions. That which we have not become sends out its rays in three directions. First, it reveals to us the obstacles we present to the unfolding of the world by having committed sins of omission regarding our will. Then it reveals the obstacles we have created for the unfolding of the world by having committed sins of omission regarding our thinking, and finally regarding our feeling. In these three directions, the imperfection of our being radiates. Each one tells us something very specific.

[ 23 ] First, there is that which, as a hindrance, radiates from within ourselves—from our own will—into what flows through us from the will of the world. What clings to our own will-nature in the form of sins of omission presents itself as inhibiting and obstructing. This tells us: With all that you have failed to do, you will be bound to the declining forces of the Earth; this will bind you as with iron chains to everything that drives the Earth toward its destruction. — What we have in the way of sins of omission regarding our thinking tells us: Because you have these sins of omission regarding your thinking, you will not find the possibility of establishing harmony between your will and your feeling. — And what we have failed to do regarding our feeling tells us: The world’s becoming will pass you by. You have done nothing to contribute anything to the unfolding of the world from within yourself; therefore, what the unfolding of the world has given you will be taken away from you by this same unfolding, and this unfolding will pass you by as if you had never existed at all. — Thus we see standing before us, separate from us, all the forces that bind us to the earth, and we see the unfolding of the world passing us by, because we ourselves have done nothing through our own work. Then, at this threshold, we feel how the forces that bind us to the earth and the forces that pass us by tear apart that which is our own true being. What we ourselves have failed to do in our souls becomes soul-destroying forces. We feel our sins of omission in this moment of passing by the little guardian of the threshold as the destroyers of our soul-life.

[ 24 ] Only one thing can enable us to endure this terrible moment, and that is if we make a vow to ourselves never to fail to act again in the future. We have, after all, received signs that are clear enough. As we pass before the little guardian of the threshold, these signs tell us: These forces are pulling you down, so you must work on your will, your thinking, and your feelings. We can even be grateful for the horrific sight that meets us there, for it makes this vow possible—a vow we can make to ourselves.

[ 25 ] This is another aspect of mystical experiences. If we were able to characterize the sense of gratitude and duty as necessary, we must now also mention the “mystical vow,” which, in essence, everyone naturally makes upon seeing their own shortcomings—the vow to work on their soul as much as possible in the future to make amends for what has been caused by their omissions. Then, through this vow, life acquires a new, special content—a content that corresponds to true self-knowledge, to active self-knowledge, which does not merely brood within but works upon one’s own self. This experience can be had in two ways. One has it in an initial way by sensing everything that has been described so far. As long as one experiences it only as a feeling of gratitude and a sense of duty, one has the feeling: Something is missing in you; something still binds you to the existence of transience; there is still a reason why the unfolding of the world passes you by. When one feels this, one has experienced it in one’s astral body. But when one feels this sense of gratitude and duty again and again, it eventually transforms into a very specific perception that now becomes an inner experience, arising from the fact that we have gathered so much inner strength through our mystical thinking, feeling, and willing that our astral experience is reflected in our etheric or life body and is cast back upon us. There we now have, as an outer reality, our own counter-image before us, which stands out, as it were, against a background. The background shows us how the outer world forces, into which we have poured out during sleep, work light and power into our sheaths. What we ourselves have made of ourselves stands out against this background. Just as animals, plants, and minerals otherwise confront us in outer reality, so now our own self confronts us in a real form. Our inner self becomes vividly apparent to us in the outer world. Previously, as we immersed ourselves in the outer bodies, our gaze was diverted toward the outer world. The outer impressions of the sensory world flowed into us so that we could not see what we must now see if we resolve to contribute to the progress of human development. Just as we normally see the external world, we now see our own inner self. It is, as it were, depicted against a background. Everything that binds us to the earth, that connects us to the transitory, so that we ourselves must leave it behind as transitory, is revealed to us there in a very specific image, in the image of a distorted bull. We can compare this image, which is perceived through astral vision, to nothing other than the image of a distorted bull pulling us down. Everything that otherwise creates harmony between our will and our feeling in our soul appears to us, in relation to sins of omission, in the image of a distorted lion. And everything that passes us by when we have sins of omission in our thinking appears to us in the image of a distorted eagle. These three images are interwoven with our own distorted likeness. There, the image reveals what we have made of ourselves and what we must correct in the future, so that we may add to the unfolding of the world all that is necessary. Three distorted images of animals and one distorted image of ourselves. From the way these images relate to one another emerges the measure of what we still have to work on within ourselves.

[ 26 ] Thus, as we pass the little guardian of the threshold, our thinking, feeling, and willing are split into three distorted images. Here we have true self-knowledge, for what we have become stands before us in symbolic form. It is a self-knowledge that serves as an inspiration for our entire future life. One might easily shrink back from this self-knowledge. But one will only recoil if one believes that what one does not see is not there. There may indeed be such people. They resemble a person who closes their eyes at the sight of a falling brick instead of dodging it. The fact that the person does not see it does not change the situation; at most, because the person is unaware of this destroyer, they actually allow it to be their destroyer. These people do not want to see that. The only help in making progress on this point is self-knowledge. Until now, the forces of the world have been sufficient to hold back the extreme distortion of our image of humanity. In the future, these forces will no longer suffice. We ourselves must work on ourselves. We ourselves are the guardians of the threshold. We ourselves, in this distorted image, appear to us as the little guardians of the threshold. It is we ourselves who prevent us from entering into our own being. Only this realization makes it possible that in the future, when the necessary strength will no longer flow to us from above, humanity will not lose its strength, will not grow weaker and weaker, that is, will not fail to fulfill its mission on Earth.

[ 27 ] In this way, we have, from a certain perspective, passed through the region that we might call the region of our own sensory body, into which we immerse ourselves upon waking. But in ordinary life we are not aware of this, because our consciousness is distracted by the impressions of the external world that flood in upon us. Now, however, we have seen what we can experience within ourselves if, upon waking, we do not allow the impressions of the external world to enter. We have characterized a part of our astral body, a part of our human being—the sensory body—from within, in such a way that we can now form an idea of what we are like. We have reached the boundary where our sensory body meets the etheric body. There, something like a mirror image has revealed itself to us. The distorted form that appears to us is merely an image, but that is all we need to know what we are truly like. If a person wants to know what their face looks like, then the discussion about whether the image they see in the mirror is an illusion or a reality has no particular value. For the person who wants to see their face, the image is entirely sufficient; it serves its purpose; it has a real value. If a philosopher were to come and say: “What you are telling us about the three-headed beast with the human in the middle—we know that is merely a figment of the imagination”—then we would say: It is, in the same sense, merely a mirror image cast by the etheric or life body, just as the image reflected by the external mirror, but it serves us for self-knowledge, and therein lies its reality. The clairvoyant already knows the reasons that an external philosophy might put forward against the reality of what the clairvoyant consciousness experiences. The error would only begin if the clairvoyant were to believe that the mirror image were a reality, if he did not know that this image reveals his own inner self, but instead believed that a four-headed being were truly coming toward him. If the clairvoyant were to believe that the image fills the space just as a physical being does, then he would resemble a person who sees his nose in the mirror and, because he does not like it, strikes out at the reflection, believing he is striking something real.

[ 28 ] This is what one must learn if one wishes to ascend to the higher worlds: not to perceive things as anything other than what they truly are. As soon as one regards the mirror image as something that fills the space, rather than seeing it for what it is, one succumbs to illusion. But one is certainly not a person who succumbs to hallucinations if one knows that one’s own self is confronting one in such a mirror image. That is why it is so important that, before one begins to penetrate the spiritual world through vision, one equips oneself with the ability to recognize and understand things in their true value through reason. One should therefore not make anyone clairvoyant who takes something for a reality of physical space that is merely a reflection, who might confuse mirror images of the soul with spiritual beings. That is why great importance is placed on the fact that no one other than those who possess rational thinking should enter into true, genuine spiritual training, so that they are always able to assess the significance of what they see. It is not the act of seeing alone that matters, but learning to assess what one sees, so that one can distinguish what one sees.

[ 29 ] We will also encounter beings that truly exist outside of us, but what we have described today—and we must be clear about this—are experiences of our own inner world that appear to us as mirror images; that is to say, our own inner world appears to us as an external world. The path of self-knowledge and mystical deepening leads to real experiences; but these become hallucinations as soon as the person seeking mystical contemplation imagines that the figures appearing to them are outside themselves in space and fails to see that they are mirror images of their own inner being. Human beings encounter beings that are truly space-filling and outside of us only when they descend into their etheric or life body, on the path that leads past the great Guardian of the Threshold. We will speak about this tomorrow.

[ 30 ] So today we have only managed to gauge the current that flows into our experience at the moment of waking. What the mystic can experience in his soul when, upon waking, he diverts all his attention away from the tapestry of external sensations and descends into his own inner self—that is what we wanted to describe today.