The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Tenth Lecture

[ ] In these lectures, my aim has been to present, in a certain sense, the insights that are currently meant to be revealed—for reasons rooted in the evolution of humanity—from a different perspective than, for example, the books on this subject that are available to you. I wanted to illuminate these insights from the perspective of more direct experience, and it is precisely through this that we may well hope that, by imbuing the truths otherwise presented with the immediate facts of consciousness, many things will become clear in a new way for this or that person. However, those who have only heard these lectures and have engaged even less with the subject will be able to find an important supplement to what has been said here in my books, for example in the recently published *Esoteric Science* or in *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?*. It is understandable, following the explanations in yesterday’s lecture, that as soon as one begins to describe the higher worlds at all, one can do so from various points of view. For we have seen from how many different points of view our own “I” appears to us as soon as we view it from the outside by entering the higher worlds.

[ ] I would now like to continue, in a certain sense, to develop this description from within, and therefore pick up where we left off yesterday regarding the logic of the heart, as opposed to what is known in external life as the logic of the head or the intellect. We were already able to gather from yesterday’s lecture that the logic of the heart can confront us twice in human development. It can confront us in that form of development in which what the heart thinks is not yet permeated by the logic of the intellect, the logic of the head. We have pointed out that there are still people today who would very much like to refuse to engage with the logic of the intellect and to translate what they feel and sense as true into concepts and ideas. This state of human development no longer exists entirely in our present day; it can no longer exist. For wherever you might look among people today, you will find at least some concepts and ideas of the intellect everywhere, even where judgments are still made almost entirely on the basis of the heart’s immediate impressions. If we were to seek a stage of development that still entirely excludes the intellect, we would have to go far back in the development of humanity and would then find a preliminary stage of our present human development. It can therefore be said that it follows naturally from the nature of what has been described that our present stage of development points to an earlier one, in which the heart judged from a subconscious state, from a consciousness not yet permeated by the intellect. Today we live in an age in which this original judgment of the heart, this original logic of the heart, is permeated by concepts and ideas—in short, by what we call the logic of the intellect. And when we take stock of everything we said yesterday and consider that human beings are capable of development, we may, from our present stage of development, point to a future stage of development that is being strived for today by a few individuals who, from their present consciousness, have the longing, the impulse, to anticipate the future in a certain way. We can look toward a future state of humanity in which the “logic of the heart” will once again be fully present, meaning that human beings will once again be able to perceive the truth directly through the immediacy of their feeling. But by then they will have passed through the stage of development that lies between these two, the stage of logic, of the intellect. So that we can say: We—all of humanity—are now passing through the stage of development of the intellect, of the head, in order to attain once again at a higher level what had already been attained at a lower level: the logic of the heart. — Whereas at the lower stage this logic of the heart was not permeated and illuminated by what the human being acquires through his intellect, at a higher stage the logic of the heart will be permeated, illuminated, and infused by what he has acquired at the present stage of development through concepts and ideas.

[ ] So we have before us three stages of human development: one preceding our present, one corresponding to our present, and a future stage of development. And from this we also see the purpose of development: that new elements are added to what was achieved at an earlier stage. The new is thus incorporated into the old, which is to be carried forward into the future.

[ ] But we can learn even more precisely from the experiences of those who have already, in a certain sense, achieved what was described yesterday as attainable: a kind of higher state of consciousness through which they can see into the higher worlds clairvoyantly. You can easily understand that such a transformation affects not only the power of thought, but that other soul forces will also take on different forms when the power of thought changes.

[ ] So we must ask ourselves: When someone works their way up to a higher level of understanding through spiritual scientific training—when they progress from the logic of the head and the intellect to the logic of the heart, from thinking with the head to thinking with the heart—do the other faculties of the soul also change? — Let’s take any one faculty—after all, we can only explain these complicated things through examples—let’s take memory as an example. Memory is a soul power, just as thinking is a soul power. Thinking changes; it shifts from thinking with the head to thinking with the heart as the spiritual student progresses. So what about memory? In ordinary life, under normal consciousness, memory presents itself to us in the following way: A person first has an awareness of the present. They see the things that surround them in space in the present moment; they make their perceptions and form their ideas from them. They can incorporate all of this into their consciousness. But a person can also have an awareness of what was spatially present but is temporally separated. They become aware of this through memory; through memory, a person moves back from the present into the past. When you recall something you experienced yesterday, you look back in time. You look at something that is no longer in your surroundings now, but which once was in your surroundings. Anyone who examines memory in this way realizes that memory is not bound to space like present-moment consciousness, but rather that memory is bound to time. When we engage our memory, we look backward in time. This mode of conscious activity changes dramatically for the student of spiritual science.

[ ] Now I must expressly point out that the spiritual researcher, of course, does not need to use his higher faculties at every moment of his life. He possesses them, but he only puts them into action when he wishes to explore the higher worlds. When he explores the higher worlds, his intellectual thinking gives way to the thinking of the heart. But for ordinary daily experiences, the spiritual researcher naturally does not need these soul faculties with which he transports himself into higher consciousness; in everyday life, he thinks just like other people do. It is therefore the ability to shift from a normal to a supernormal state of consciousness that the spiritual researcher must possess. We must always bear this in mind. We must not say that the spiritual researcher must always display the characteristics [of higher consciousness] that have been described.

[ ] The spiritual researcher’s memory changes in all those instances where he is in the state of consciousness with which he conducts his research in the spiritual world, such that he perceives in the spiritual world through an ability similar to ordinary memory, except that he now perceives not in time but in space. It is a complete transformation that takes place with the memory. While a person, when in ordinary consciousness, wants to remember something they experienced yesterday, looks back in time and seeks, as it were, to bring yesterday’s events to mind, the spiritual student, as they progress in spiritual knowledge, experiences the past simultaneously with the present, separated from it only spatially, much as when one stands here and looks through the door into the next room. Thus, yesterday’s events stand simultaneously in space, separated only as if by a distance from today’s events; and that which lies further back in time is only correspondingly further away in space than the present. One can therefore say: For the spiritual researcher, the events that otherwise appear one after another in the temporal sequence of memory occur side by side, and he must, as it were, move from one event to the next.

[ ] If you think carefully about what has already been said in the previous lectures, you will realize that what has just been discussed is quite consistent with what was said earlier. It was said that in the spiritual world one must unite with things and beings. If these things and beings are now far away from you in time, then you must go to them in order to unite with them. You must go back; you must walk along the timeline as if it were a line in space in order to be able to unite with the beings and things. One can say that, with regard to the soul’s capacity for memory, time transforms into a kind of space as soon as one enters the spiritual world. Thus, memory has become an essentially new faculty for the spiritual student. He sees a past event as if it were still present, and he judges the time that has passed by the distance at which it is separated from him. So that you can infer from this that the past presents itself to the spiritual student as something that stands spatially side by side. In fact, once this form of memory has been attained, exploring the past is like reading from the recorded events. This reading of the recorded events is called reading the Akashic Records. It is a world in which time has become space. Just as we refer to the world in which we live as the physical world, so can we refer to the world in which time has become space as the Akashic world. This transforms the entire inner state of the genuine, true mystic, for what is called time in ordinary life no longer exists here in that form.

[ ] This example beautifully illustrates how, when viewed from their true perspective, things are wonderfully in harmony. Just imagine what would become of a person in everyday life if they could not bring their thinking into harmony with their memory, if they found their intellectual logic to be in contradiction with what their memory tells them. You can easily construct such a scenario. Imagine you have before you some document that, for the sake of argument, bears the date of March 26. That is a perception you have in your present consciousness. But you were there when the event described in this document took place; you go back through the days, and your memory tells you it must have been a day earlier. There you have, so to speak, a glaring case where your present consciousness comes into conflict with your memory consciousness. Such cases can generally be corrected very easily in the physical world. It is much more difficult to correct an error in the spiritual world, for one can, through one’s own nature, carry errors into the spiritual world. In the physical world, an error in thinking is generally not all that bad, because the external conditions of the physical world correct the errors on their own. If, for example, someone—let’s say—does not pay proper attention to the street, if they forget that they must take the right street to get home and instead take the left street, they will soon realize the error. So on the physical plane, an error is not all that bad. But on the spiritual plane, we do not have such convenient corrections for errors; there one must have the inner certainty to avoid such mistakes. One must devote the most careful preparation to acquiring this certainty. An error in the spiritual world would come at a much higher cost; a single mistake could lead one into the abyss. There must be a certain harmony between the logic of the heart and this type of memory just described, just as there is a harmony between the logic of the mind and the memory of ordinary consciousness.

[ ] However, the way in which we evolve spiritually, according to spiritual science, guarantees that such harmony exists. And this brings us to a principle that students of spiritual science should always keep in mind: that the external physical world can only truly be understood when it is not taken at face value, but rather interpreted as a metaphor for the supersensible, for the spiritual. Indeed, we have a physical tool for the logic of the mind in our brain. This is something that everyone can know through ordinary science. In the same way, however, we cannot say that we have a physical organ in our heart for the logic of the heart. For the logic of the heart is something far more spiritual than the logic of the head, and our heart is not to the same degree a physical organ for the thinking of the heart as our brain is a physical organ for the thinking of the intellect. Yet, in a certain sense, a parable does lie before us in our physical heart system. For when the thinking of the heart “transforms time into space,” then at the very moment one enters the spiritual world, one must actually wander ceaselessly with one’s entire being; one must be caught up in a continuous cycle. This is also decidedly the sensation experienced by those who ascend from ordinary memory to the higher memory of the spiritual researcher. While the person with ordinary memory believes they are standing firmly in the present and looking back at the past, the spiritual researcher has the inner experience of walking backward through time, of pacing through time. And this consciousness is expressed outwardly in the experience of our circulatory system, which must also be in constant motion if we are to live at all. In our blood, we are constantly making the movement from the heart through the body and back again. The circulation of the blood gives you the image of a movement. The blood is in constant motion, so that what belongs to the heart is actually in constant motion. What belongs to the head, you will not find in a corresponding constant motion. The parts of the brain always remain where they are, so that in fact the brain is a physical metaphor for the consciousness that takes place in space. The flowing blood, the sap of the heart, is in its circulation an image of the mobility of the spiritual researcher’s heart-thinking. Thus, every physical aspect is a parable for the corresponding spiritual aspect. It is indeed an extraordinarily interesting fact that in our blood system we have an image of certain abilities of the spiritual researcher and also of the worlds in which the spiritual researcher moves.

[ ] Thus, as we ascend toward the comprehension of a higher consciousness, we literally look into another space—a space that ordinary consciousness does not even know, a space that would come into being if the flow of time were to freeze. Consider this: If you wanted to have before you what you experienced yesterday, then a moment of what was experienced yesterday would have to be frozen in place. In the next moment, the whole world is already different; the moment that is now and is already no longer would have to be captured, so to speak, as in a snapshot. Every moment would have to be captured in this way, and then these successive photographs would have to be arranged side by side in space. Then you would have what the spiritual researcher actually has vividly before him. He has before him not merely ordinary space, but a space of an entirely different nature. Such a space differs quite fundamentally from the space in which we usually live. You cannot possibly sketch an image of the spiritual space within ordinary space. For if you take physical space and try to draw a line somewhere, you can only draw that line within this space. You do not go beyond this space at all. You cannot, therefore, draw into ordinary space what the spiritual researcher traverses in spiritual space. For the spiritual researcher, time becomes the space in which he moves from one point to another.

[ ] So you see that ordinary consciousness is confined within space; it cannot escape it at all. But the spiritual researcher manages to break free nonetheless. He knows how to move if, for example, he wants to access events that took place four or five days ago. He traces back through the images of the events of the last four or five days, as if along a line. This line is such that it cannot be drawn in two dimensions nor represented in three dimensions in space. It is, in fact, inconceivable to ordinary consciousness, for ordinary consciousness cannot step out of three-dimensional space. The spiritual researcher, however, moves out of ordinary space and enters a space that has an additional, in the true sense, fourth dimension. The space that the spiritual researcher enters when he acquires this new memory has one more dimension than ordinary space; this is a dimension that you cannot find in physical space. Therefore, we must say that the spiritual researcher, at the moment he acquires this higher memory, steps out of the three dimensions of space. We have now not only indicated that such a concept of four-dimensional space is conceivable, but that there is a very specific faculty—namely, the human being’s higher memory—for which this four-dimensional space is a reality.

[ ] Every matter has, in a certain sense, its downside, and this downside is also present in the development of that spiritual capacity that has just been described. When someone receives guidance on how to evolve into the higher worlds, their goal is to attain this spiritual spatial memory. But if you undergo such a development yourself or hear accounts from others who have begun such a development, you will find that such people may complain when they do not yet understand the matter—for once they do understand it, they do not complain but regard the matter as something entirely natural—: I used to have such an excellent memory, and since I began preparing myself, my memory has declined. — That is something that corresponds to a very real experience. Ordinary memory does indeed suffer a loss at this stage of development. This is an experience that can be gone through. Whoever knows this will have no qualms about it, for they know that they will receive a fully effective substitute for it just when they might be nearing the point where things could become dangerous. It is precisely there that they will notice they are receiving a substitute for memory. While they will find it very difficult to recall something they experienced yesterday, they will receive the substitute of an image appearing before their soul. In this image, the events they have experienced stand vividly before their inner eye; these past facts press themselves upon their consciousness in images. And this is a much more faithful, more reliable memory than the one one usually has in life. That is why you may well hear from those who have undergone a certain development that they have gone through a kind of darkening of their memory and that they have then received a brightening of this memory in a new form. And this new memory is very remarkable, because it presents past events vividly before one’s eyes. This memory is better than ordinary memory, for ordinary memory has a great flaw: it shows things very shadowy and faded, and the details are lost. But for the memory that presents them as if in spatial images, the details reappear. Everything is shaded and nuanced, and the fidelity of the memory increases immensely.

[ ] So we see a new faculty of the soul emerging, one that, however, does not present itself like memory—like the recollection of thoughts or images of the past—but rather like the act of beholding the past. We see a new faculty of the soul emerging; but between what corresponds to this faculty today and what this faculty can become, we perceive something like a kind of obscuring of the corresponding faculty. In order to acquire the new memory, the old one diminishes in a certain way, becomes obscured. Then the new one gains momentum more and more. There is thus something like a darkening between the two soul capacities. We must therefore now distinguish, as it were, three soul states of memory: that of ordinary memory, which can possess a certain degree of fidelity; then a kind of darkening; and finally a rekindling of memory in a new form. The state in which such a soul faculty is at its peak is called a “Manvantara” in the terminology of Eastern philosophy, and the state in which a darkening occurs is referred to as a “Pralaya.” First we have a strong memory, a Manvantara; then a darkening of it occurs, a Pralaya of memory; and thereafter another Manvantara, where the capacity of memory reappears at a higher level.

[ ] If we now recall what has been said about human development, we can point out that in earlier times human beings already possessed a kind of logic of the heart, that in the present they are passing through the logic of the intellect, and that in the future they will once again possess a logic of the heart, which will be like a fruit of the logic of the intellect. But then, in that earlier state, there must also have been something in the soul’s faculties that corresponded to what will be regained in the future through the logic of the heart. We have thus referred not only to the ancient state of the soul, in which intellectual thinking was not yet present, but also to something similar to the higher memory just described, only at a lower level. Linked to the primordial state of thinking was a kind of memory that saw in images, just as a memory that sees in images must be linked to the future state of humanity. And now you can quite imagine the nature of a primeval human being. He did not think as modern humans do, for thinking in concepts was acquired only later. He did not have the logic of the heart illuminated by reason and science in the modern sense. Linked to this, however, was a kind of spatial memory, so that time became space. Today, if a person wants to look back into past times, they must strain their memory as far as it reaches. Where it does not reach, they must consult documents and research them. You know how the past is researched today. It is researched from what has been preserved in individual human memory, researched from what peoples have still preserved in their traditions, and from what is preserved in stone documents, for example in monuments and so on; and if we go further back, from what remains in the form of bone fragments, seashells, and stones that still reveal their former use in their appearance. All of this points us to earlier stages of development. In short, everything that exists is examined so that we may thus form a picture of the past. One must certainly take the standpoint of the present and reconstruct the past from there.

[ ] We are now looking into a primal state of humanity, where this was not the case, where human beings could perceive the past as something present, spatially and visually before them. And this gives us a kind of explanation for an earlier state of the human soul. In the past, human beings did not need to search for their origins; instead, they could see them. Depending on their stage of development, they were able to look back more or less far into the past. And by looking back, they saw that from which they themselves had emerged. This explains the reverence with which people looked back into the past, and the direct knowledge they had of the past.

[ ] Now that we have considered these three successive stages of human development, we must examine the nature of the human being more closely if we are to make further progress in understanding human evolution. As a mere physical observation can already teach us, the human being as he is today has only recently come to be this way; he was not always like this. Humanity has necessarily evolved from other states, from other forms of existence, to its present condition. With regard to the soul, we have recalled an earlier state because we could recognize that it is similar to a state that humanity will attain in the future, once it has passed through the power of human thought.

[ ] If you now consider what was said yesterday and the day before—that in his present state, a person can apply the methods provided by the spiritual teacher to his soul in order to develop further—then you must admit: It would be unthinkable that one could have done this at an earlier stage. It would be unthinkable that one could have transformed oneself directly from an earlier state into the future state. This was, after all, so strongly emphasized: one must first take in the fruits of the present state into one’s soul in order to ascend to higher stages. No stage of human development can be skipped; every stage must be traversed. Thus, in order for human development to be made possible in the future, so that humanity might ever advance toward what we have set before us as such a significant ideal, humanity first had to be developed to its present stage. Before humanity can attain the higher logic of the heart, it must develop the logic of the head. This has its instrument in the brain and spinal cord. We have now seen that the brain and spinal cord have been formed from those forces we found in the realm of reason, which thus flowed to us from the realm of reason. Everything else has been pushed aside, and only those forces present in the realm of reason were allowed to flow in, so that this marvelous structure of our brain could be formed within us. Thus we can say: The human brain has become possible because human beings have become capable of excluding all other realms from the formation of the brain and allowing only the realm of reason to flow into it. — But just as the human brain must be present if humanity is to continue developing in order to advance to the future stage of heart-thinking, whose organ is formed from the forces of the realm of archetypes, so you can easily imagine that something must have been present beforehand before the brain could form from the realm of reason. Just as we must now work on the basis of our brain if we wish to work our way up into higher realms, so too must the foundation for the work of the realm of reason have been guided from other realms beforehand. That is to say, just as our further development presupposes the logic of the intellect with its instrument, the brain, so the instrument of the brain presupposes the work of the realm of reason, and this in turn presupposes another foundation, a work originating from the next lower realm.

[ ] We are thus looking back on something we can understand as an upward development from an earlier stage, when the realm of reason had not yet flowed into the human being, but rather the spiritual realm had flowed into them, as we have described, at a time when the realm of reason was not yet active within them at all. We are looking toward a future in which forces will flow to the human being from the realm of archetypes. We look at the present, where the brain was formed in human beings from the realm of reason. And we look at a past where, from the spiritual realm, that which corresponded to the foundation of the earlier stage of development was formed in human beings. We will find this easy to understand if we apply everything we have said in a meaningful way.

[ ] Our brain has evolved from the realm of reason. And we have found that the logic of the heart preceded the logic of the mind, which is only possible through the actions of the realm of reason. From this, it will become clear to us that man’s present heart was formed from that spiritual realm as a preliminary stage. This present heart is, in fact, closely related to what constitutes the unconscious logic of the heart. The future higher logic of the heart is, of course, much more spiritual. But the ordinary logic of the heart, which has not yet been corrupted by the intellect, does indeed have a kind of means of expression in the physical heart, just as reason has a means of expression in the physical brain. When a person regards something as beautiful, as true, as great, as magnificent, as good—not through deliberation, not through cold, sober intellectual reflection, but when he approaches the beautiful, the true, the good directly, without intellectual deliberation—then he already notices his approval of the beautiful, the true, good. Our heart truly beats differently in the presence of the beautiful, the magnificent, the great, and the good than in the presence of the corrupt, the evil, the ugly, and the base. There is something in this original logic of the heart that can be called an immediate shared experience. When this logic of the heart, which operates in the subconscious, manifests itself in clearer language, the heart itself, through the movement of its blood, clearly demonstrates how it is an expression of the logic of the heart. We can see how repeated pain over some loss that is constantly before our eyes can immediately trigger something within us that then expresses itself in the entire physical body, perhaps even to the point of the body wasting away.

[ ] Thus we will find it understandable that just as our brain has been formed from the realm of reason, and just as our future spiritualized heart must be formed from the realm of archetypes, so our present heart has been formed from the spiritual realm. Our heart thus reveals itself to us as an organ that points to that foundation within the human being which must already have been there before the organ of thought was formed. What is present in the human head today—the brain—could only be formed after the human heart had been created. Here you are looking at something that can give you a completely different understanding of the human body, of the outer human physicality. Just as the organs stand side by side in space, so they indicate to us that they are not of equal value, but that the brain is a later formation than the heart. The heart is an older organ. The heart must first have been formed in a certain way; only then could the brain integrate itself as a further formation on the basis of the heart. What is revealed to us here is something extraordinarily interesting. It shows us, namely, that when we have two organs side by side, we are completely mistaken if we assume them to be of equal value. We are only correct when we say: This brain is a more recent formation; the heart is an older formation. — To find the origin of the heart, we must look back to earlier times than when we seek to understand the origin of the brain.

[ ] But an organ does not stop developing just because another one is present. We can therefore say: The heart must have existed before the brain. But as the brain emerged and developed, the heart also continued to develop; it underwent a transformation. — So the heart, as it is now, shows two transformations, while the brain shows only one. We do not, therefore, understand the heart by simply placing it in space next to the brain, but we understand it only when we regard it as an organ older than the brain. Anyone who simply places the heart next to the human brain in space is like a person who sees a forty-year-old man standing next to a fifteen-year-old youth and says: They are standing side by side, so I will also consider them together and form an idea of what they are like by looking at them very closely side by side. Such a person would, of course, be committing a folly if they were to classify the two according to the same principles of development; for in order to understand the fifteen-year-old, they must take into account fifteen years of development, and in the case of the forty-year-old, they must assume forty years of development. One would regard as a fool a person who failed to realize that he might well ask himself: Is the fifteen-year-old youth not perhaps the son of the forty-year-old man? Does not much become clear to me when I regard him as the latter’s offspring? — It would be folly not to take this into account. But modern anatomy stands on the ground of this folly. It knows nothing of the fact that one must not simply view the organs of the human body side by side, but that one must view them differently because they are at different stages of development, and that one will only truly understand the brain alongside the heart if one conceives of the brain as a younger formation and the heart as an older formation. And as long as there is no such anatomy that does not simply view the various organs as standing side by side in space, but rather considers them in terms of their significance as younger or older formations, so long will we understand very little of the true nature of the human being at all.

[ ] So we see that the spiritual-scientific method must provide the key to understanding these organs, something that conventional science fails to reveal. Only those who undergo a genuine process of development in order to ascend into the higher worlds can attain true knowledge of the organs; conventional reasoning actually achieves nothing of significance. Those who merely combine facts externally will get nowhere, for from the outside one cannot really tell which organ is the older and which is the younger. Only the person who attains spiritual spatial memory learns to distinguish these things. When they go back with their spatial memory, they do not need to go very far to find the brain in its beginnings. One must go much further to find the heart at its origin. And when one then seeks out the relevant phenomena in the physical world using the insights of spiritual science, one finds them confirmed there. Indeed, one will only truly understand the human organism when one explains it through spiritual science.

[ ] Now let us recall that we said: Between the soul’s capacity that manifests as memory in ordinary, normal consciousness, and the new capacity of spatial memory, there lies a darkening—something like a kind of erasure of memory. The spiritual researcher now finds something similar throughout the entire course of development, corresponding to this Manvantara and Pralaya state of memory. If we imagine, for example, the heart and brain of a human being as they exist side by side in the physical body today, we find that the heart and brain developed side by side for a time. If we go further back, we arrive at the beginning of brain formation. This, however, is not the beginning of heart formation. We must go much further back, to a stage where the heart had not yet been connected to the brain, where the forces of the realm of reason had not yet flowed down, but only the forces of the spiritual realm. So that we can distinguish a state of humanity in which the forces of the spiritual realm flow down into its being as the highest forces, and then a state in which the forces of the realm of reason also flow into its being. Between these two states lies something like a great Pralaya, that is, the entire course of human development darkens and then emerges in a new form. We look back from the present human being, who has a heart and a brain, to an earlier human being who did not yet have a brain, who was a heart-human; but if we wish to go back from the present human being to this heart-human, we must pass through a Pralaya in which external human existence was extinguished. And when, sometime in the future, the higher state that the spiritual researcher can attain in the spirit today is reached to the point where it also expresses itself outwardly in the body, then we will have yet another state of humanity. For you can imagine that a human being who has a brain looks different from one whose constitution is expressed in the heart. The heart-human must look different outwardly than the brain-human. But today the spiritual researcher cannot yet change his physical form. When a God descends, He must appear in a human body of today. So that what can be achieved today through spiritual development is first achieved in the invisible members; in a future state of humanity, the change will also be expressed in the physical body. This means we must imagine that in the future, human beings will also look quite different outwardly. They will have completely transformed their brain and their heart, and they will have formed a new organ in addition to the brain. And just as the brain arches over the heart today, such a future organ will in turn stand in a certain relationship to the brain. But between the present state of human beings and their future form lies yet another Pralaya; that is to say, the present state of human existence must be physically eradicated, and a new state must follow.

[ ] Thus we have been able to point to three successive stages of human development, the first of which was characterized by the human being as a “heart-centered” person, where everything was related to the heart, just as today everything is related to the brain; and from this we have seen the emergence of the present-day human being; and we can gain a glimpse of a future human being who will be a consciously “heart-centered” person. When we consider modern humanity, we must say that, just as it stands before us today in its physical form with its entire organism, it can only exist on this Earth in its present form. Anyone who considers humanity in the context of the entire existence of the Earth will say: Humanity is just as the whole Earth is, for it is closely connected to all the forces, qualities, and conditions of the Earth. — Just imagine the Earth slightly altered; human beings in their present form could not live on it. If, for example, the chemical composition of water and the proportions of air were not as they are, or if atmospheric pressure were stronger or weaker, the human form would have to be entirely different. This means that we cannot conceive of a human being today as a physical entity without also conceiving of the entire Earth as it is.

[ ] So when we speak of an earlier state of humanity—the “heart-centered human” as we have described it—we must conceive of it as connected to a different planetary condition. And when we speak of the future human being, who will one day possess what the spiritual researcher has today, we must again conceive of them as connected to a different planetary condition, not on our present Earth. If we are to find our way at all, we must have something like Ariadne’s thread. We must imagine that, just as humanity has developed from an earlier state, so too has the entire Earth; that is, our present Earth points back to an earlier planetary state from which it has gradually developed, and points toward a future planetary state toward which it will develop. And between these states lies a Pralaya, a state of darkness. The state from which the Earth developed, where humanity could take on that earlier form we have spoken of, we call the Earth’s old lunar state, and we refer to the state into which the Earth will transform when humanity takes on a new form as the Jupiter state. That is to say, we arrive at three successive states of the Earth itself. We can say: The Earth has evolved from the old Moon into the Earth and will evolve into a Jupiter.

[ ] Now, however, you must realize that these transformations can only take place if all conditions change. The changes in human beings could only take place because all conditions have changed. During the old lunar state, only the forces from the spiritual realm flowed into the human realm, whereas on today’s Earth the forces from the realm of reason flow toward us, and on Jupiter the forces from the realm of archetypes will flow in. These three states exist under entirely different influences emanating from the spiritual worlds.

[ ] We have now, so to speak, touched upon something that our conventional science cannot discover. I have already mentioned how our conventional science attempts to explain the formation of a planetary system using a rotating drop of oil. After this experiment, which is done in schools—where a drop of oil is pushed through a cardboard disc and made to rotate with a needle—a bright boy would actually have to say: But then there would also have to be a giant teacher out there in space, spinning the cosmic nebula around. Only because the boy has been weaned from asking such questions does he settle for the teacher’s explanation. But now we at least have an idea of how a planet arises from a preceding form. We may not have a teacher who sets a drop of oil in rotation, but we have been able to see certain cosmic beings working down from various spiritual realms. We have been able to see how the old moon is formed from the spiritual realm, how the old moon is transformed through the intervention of forces from higher worlds, and how forces from an even higher world will then intervene. Now we see the spiritual at work within the physical.

[ ] I have now explained to you that human beings, as they are today, could not exist unless they were in harmony with everything that constitutes our present-day Earth. The formation of human beings must correspond to the formation of the entire Earth, just as the formation of the entire Earth must correspond to the formation of human beings. Now you can imagine that our present-day Earth, as it is, could not possibly exist any other way than at a certain distance from the Sun and in a certain relationship to the planets. Imagine if anything in the solar system were shifted; everything would be completely different, and human beings along with it. So when we go back to an earlier planet, to the ancient Moon, it must have been in a system arranged quite differently from the present Earth. Thus, through the intervention of the beings of the realm of reason, not only did our Earth change, but our entire solar system became different as the ancient Moon transformed into the present Earth.

[ ] Thus we see that a thread can indeed be found that leads us from the transformation of the human being—the microcosm, the small world—to the transformation of the entire macrocosm, the great world. We see the various realms at work, reshaping the macrocosm and the microcosm; it is the same beings that are active in both. If we look back to the time before our present solar system, we first encounter a kind of obscurity. Outwardly, this appears to be a kind of gas nebula, but beings from the spiritual realms are constantly at work on this gas nebula. Before that, we look upon an even earlier system from which our present solar system emerged. If we go even further and further back, we finally arrive at a state that is entirely different from today’s, so unlike today’s that ordinary questioning ceases in the face of this state. We must learn to ask differently when we come to these entirely different states of the world. Why do we actually ask? We ask because our mind is constituted in a certain way. But we have seen that our mind only formed itself with our brain. Our intellectual questions therefore no longer make any sense at all when we enter such states where our brain had not yet formed. In the worlds that form the very foundation of the world of the mind, asking questions based on the concepts of the mind makes no sense; there we must turn to other means of inquiry and cognition than those provided by the mind. Those people, however, who cannot see beyond the end of their noses, will indeed believe that one can explore the entire world using the ordinary form of questioning. But this is not possible; rather, one must be clear that every single thing can only be inquired into in its own way. We will only be able to cope with the world that preceded ours if we stimulate within ourselves those powers that find expression in the thinking of the heart.

[ ] We see, then, that human beings must change even in terms of their curiosity about questions. And although we need not be as rude as the man who, when asked what God had been doing before He created the world, replied he had been cutting rods to punish the useless questioners, such an answer nevertheless indicates in a certain way that human beings must also change their very manner of asking questions if they wish to ascend to insights into the higher worlds.