The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] Introductory Remarks to Welcome the Audience

[ 2 ] My dear friends, kind words of welcome have just been addressed to me here before you, and what I would like to say first and foremost in response to these kind words is a most heartfelt greeting in the spirit in which we, my dear friends, greet one another as seekers of the spirit throughout the world. Having come up here with a number of our close German friends to this wonderful land, which speaks to us through old memories and ancient legends, I would like above all to recall—in order, so to speak, to connect the universal with the very particular—that within a large area of those regions of Central Europe where it is my task and duty to work in the field of Spiritual Science, the greeting “Grüß Gott!” or “Gott zum Gruß!” is used there to greet even the most unfamiliar person with love. This is a German greeting commonly used in certain regions of Central Europe. I would like to think of it when I speak of the greeting dearest to me, which I would like to offer you and which actually already lies in the fact that we all, my dear friends, as we are spread throughout the world with our outlook and our striving for a certain kind of knowledge, call ourselves seekers of God. And in calling ourselves this, there is something all-encompassing in the greeting that goes from one God-seeker to another, simply through the name we allow ourselves to give to ourselves. By calling ourselves seekers of God, we appeal to the deepest, most intimate part of every human being. And we speak to this most intimate, this deepest part of every human being—while at the same time calling ourselves by that name—from our own deepest, most intimate core, or at least we intend to speak in this way. Thus, what we express by calling ourselves seekers of God unites the divine within our souls, and by calling ourselves thus, we also greet one another, for we allow the divine within ourselves to speak. That what lies in this name may bring more and more people together in the world—that is, after all, our common goal, our common striving. And even if, when we gather in a place like this, we may find it difficult to understand one another in terms of the outward form of our language, we understand one another immediately as seekers of God, so to speak, across the entire world, if we truly strive to be this, if we allow the innermost part of our being to speak within us. That is why it feels so much like a refreshing of ancient, sacred memories shared by all people when we come together as seekers of God. We tell ourselves that all, all human beings come from a common spiritual-divine origin and that, however they may have gone their separate ways according to territories and linguistic idioms, it is possible to strike a chord in the soul that resonates with the most ancient, most sacred human memories, which encompass within themselves the spiritual-divine from which we originated. And so we feel like brothers of the all-encompassing human family, who set out from a common home, have undergone their development and evolution in the most diverse regions, and have not forgotten that which reminds them of their ancient, sacred origin. What, then, is the search for God in our present time? Something like a mighty cry of longing from people who already understand today what is meant to bind all people ever more closely in the future, what is meant to revive in all hearts the unifying force ever more deeply into the future, just as it was ever more so the further back we look into our past. That is why it goes without saying that we come together in the best greeting we can offer one another when we gather as seekers of the spirit.

[ 3 ] People meet one another across the vast expanse of the globe. Some know each other better, others less so; some are friends, some are in love. Such is everyday life. And those people who share common goals and interests—especially in our time—unite under common ideals, for they know that they find one another in these shared ideals. But there is something else at play when we come together as seekers of spiritual knowledge. We come together in such a way that, fundamentally, everyone knows everyone else immediately. For how do people know one another? By knowing something about one another. We pass by indifferently those in the world about whom we know nothing; we lovingly extend our hand to those who are our old acquaintances; we smile at those whom we have not met for a long time and who fill us with deep joy through our encounter—in short, a bond is formed from person to person through the fact that one knows something about the other. When we come together as seekers of the spirit, we all know something about one another, and no one is a stranger to us. We know of the other that within their deepest inner being, in their very human core, the same spiritual ideal lives as within us, and thus they appear to us as an old acquaintance, as a natural acquaintance. In addition to all else that spiritual knowledge can bring to humanity, it will be this: that people who have never seen one another on the outer physical plane will be able to meet one another across the entire globe in such a way that they will know the most important things about one another simply by finding common ground in spiritual knowledge. This gives everything we do and say that tone of cordiality that should not be missing when we come together, that tone of cordiality that has just been expressed and for which I am so deeply grateful. If you, my dear friends, in the lectures that have been requested of me—despite all that is seemingly merely spiritual, into which the first lectures in particular will lead us—recognize something of this heartfelt tone, then you will have understood me correctly. This is something we must do so often as spiritual researchers and seekers of spiritual knowledge: first traverse the realms of the spiritual, so that ultimately, after having allowed the manifold aspects of spiritual life to take effect upon us, we may find our way back together again in the results of these spiritual insights, as in a harmonious tone of the heart. And so I would like you to understand me a little from this perspective. Although the facts we must explore may at first appear to be purely intellectual or purely spiritual—in accordance with the task set for me by our friends—nothing will be said in the course of these days that is not intimately connected with the goal just described here.

[ 4 ] And having prefaced these remarks, let me now turn to the subject that defines our task.

[ 5 ] When our friends called me here in love, they asked me to speak about what we, as spiritual beings, find in the natural realms and in the celestial bodies. In doing so, as the topic implies, we will touch upon a realm that is, at first glance, far, far removed from all that current knowledge in the intellectual world offers humanity today. Right from the start, we will be dealing with a realm whose reality is currently denied by the outer world. I would like to make just one assumption, dear friends: that from your previous studies in Spiritual Science, you bring to me an emotional and intuitive understanding of the spiritual world. As for the way in which we will name things, we will come to an understanding in the course of the lectures. Everything else will, in a certain sense, follow naturally once we have, over time, acquired an emotional and intuitive understanding that behind our sensory world, behind the world we initially experience as human beings, there stands a spiritual world, and that just as one penetrates the physical world—not merely by viewing it as a single, vast entity, but by specifying it into individual plants, individual animals, individual minerals, individual peoples, and individual human beings—so too can one specify the spiritual world into individual classes and individuals of spiritual, of ethereal beings. So that, on the basis of Spiritual Science, we do not merely speak of a spiritual world in general, but of very specific beings and forces that lie behind our physical world.

[ 6 ] What, then, do we count as part of the physical world? Let us first be clear about this. We count as part of the physical world everything that we can perceive with our senses—what our eyes see, our ears hear, and our hands can touch. We also include in the physical world everything that we can encompass with our thoughts, insofar as these thoughts relate to external perception, to what the physical world can tell us. We must also include in the physical world everything that we ourselves, as human beings, do within this physical world. It could, of course, easily raise objections to say that everything we do as human beings in the physical world belongs to the physical world, for one must realize that human beings, by acting in the physical world, bring spiritual elements down into this physical world. After all, human beings do not act merely as their physical drives and passions dictate, but they act, for example, according to moral principles; morality permeates our actions, our deeds. Certainly, when we act morally, spiritual impulses play a role in our actions, but the arena in which we act morally is still the physical world. And just as spiritual impulses play a role in our moral actions, so too do spiritual impulses reach us through colors, through sounds, through warmth and cold, through all sensory perceptions.

[ 7 ] The spiritual is, at first, in a sense hidden and veiled from external perception—from what the outer human being can perceive and do. This is the defining characteristic of the spiritual: that a person can only perceive it when they make an effort, even if only to a small degree, to become different from what they are at the outset. We work together in our Spiritual Science societies. Indeed, we do not merely hear this or that truth there—such as that there are different worlds, or that the human being consists of various members or bodies, or whatever one wishes to call them—but by allowing all of this to take effect within us, even if we do not always notice it, our soul gradually becomes something different, even without undergoing an esoteric development. What we learn on the basis of Spiritual Science transforms our soul into something different from what it was before. Compare, for instance, the way you feel after having participated in spiritual life within a spiritual science working group for several years; compare the way you feel, the way you think, with the way you felt and thought before, or with how people who are not interested in Spiritual Science feel and think: Spiritual Science does not merely mean the acquisition of knowledge; Spiritual Science means education in the most eminent sense, a self-education of our soul. We transform ourselves into something different; our interests change, and the focus that a person develops for this or that after a few years of delving into Spiritual Science becomes different. What interested him before no longer interests him; what did not interest him before begins to interest him to the highest degree. One must not simply say: Only those who have undergone esoteric development gain a relationship with the spiritual world. — Esotericism does not begin only with occult development. The moment we join any association of Spiritual Science and are fully committed to it with all our heart, and feel what lies in the teachings of Spiritual Science, that is when esotericism begins; that is when our soul begins to transform; that is when something similar begins to take place within us as would, say, occur with a being who previously could only perceive light and darkness and who, through a special different organization of the eyes, to see colors: the whole world would look different to such a being. We need only notice it, we need only admit it to ourselves, and then we will find: the whole world begins to look different when we undergo a period of spiritual self-education, which we can have in a Spiritual Science association. This training of oneself toward a very specific sensibility toward the spiritual world, this training of oneself to look toward something that lies behind physical facts—this is a fruit of the Spiritual Science movement in the world, and this is the most important aspect of spiritual understanding. We must not believe that we can acquire spiritual understanding through mere sentimentality, by always saying that we want to imbue our feelings with love. Other people want that too, if they are good people; we would only be cultivating a certain arrogance in ourselves. Rather, we must be clear about how we cultivate our feelings by allowing the knowledge of the facts of a higher world to work upon us, and by transforming our soul through this knowledge. This particular way of cultivating our soul to perceive a higher world—this way of doing things—is what defines the Spiritual Science practitioner. We need this understanding first and foremost if we are to speak about the things that will be discussed in this lecture series.

[ 8 ] Those who, with an occultly trained gaze, are able to look beyond physical facts will find, behind all that unfolds as color, as sound, as warmth, as cold, and behind the laws of nature, beings that do not reveal themselves to the outer senses or the outer intellect—beings that lie beyond the physical world. Then they penetrate ever deeper and deeper, and discover, so to speak, worlds inhabited by beings of an ever higher order. If we wish to acquire an understanding of all that lies beyond our sensory world, then, in accordance with the specific task set before me here, we must actually begin with the very nearest thing we encounter beyond our sensory world; with what we encounter, as it were, when we lift only the very first veil that sensory perception spreads over spiritual events. In fact, the world that presents itself as the closest to the occult-trained gaze is actually what surprises the modern mind, the present capacity for comprehension, the most. Well, I am speaking to those who have already taken Spiritual Science into themselves, so I may assume that you know that behind what first meets us externally in the human being—what we see in the human being with our eyes, grasp with our hands, and comprehend with our intellect in ordinary anatomy or physiology—that behind what we call the physical human body, we immediately recognize, in the sense of Spiritual Science, a next supersensible member. We call this next supersensible member of the human being the etheric body, or indeed the Life-Body, the etheric body. We do not wish to speak today of even higher members of human nature, but only to make it clear to ourselves that the occult gaze, which is capable of looking beyond the physical body, first encounters the etheric or Life-Body. The occult gaze can do something similar with regard to nature outside. Just as we can look at a human being occultly to see whether there is something else behind their physical body—and just as we then find the etheric body, the life body—so too can we look at the natural world outside in its colors, its forms, its sounds, its realms—the mineral, plant, animal, and human realms—insofar as they appear to us physically, with the occult gaze, and we then find: Just as we have the etheric or life body behind the human physical body, so too do we find a kind of etheric or life body behind the whole of physical nature. There is, however, a vast difference between this etheric or life body of the entire physical nature and that of the human being. When the occult gaze is directed toward the etheric or life body of the human being, it sees it as a unity, as a coherent structure, as a coherent form or shape. When the occult gaze penetrates what appears in nature as color, as form, as mineral, plant, and animal structures—when the occult gaze penetrates all of this—it finds the etheric or life body of physical nature as a multitude, as an infinite variety. That is the great difference: a single, unified being as the etheric or life body in the human being, many different, differentiated beings behind physical nature.

[ 9 ] Now I must show you the path by which one can arrive at a statement such as the one just made—the assertion that an etheric or Life-Body—actually an etheric or life world—a multitude, a diversity of differentiated beings, lies behind our physical nature. If I want to explain how one can arrive at this, I can put it in simple terms: one comes to recognize this etheric or life world behind physical nature more and more by beginning to perceive the entire world around us in a moral sense. What does it mean to perceive the world in a moral sense? First of all, we direct our gaze, looking up from the earth, into the vastness of outer space, from which the blue of the sky meets us. Let us suppose we do this on a day when not a single cloud, not even the faintest white silvery cloud, interrupts the blue of the sky. Let us assume we gaze in every direction at the blue of the sky stretching out above us. Whether we acknowledge this in a physical sense as something real or not is irrelevant; what matters first is the impression this expanse of blue sky makes on us. Let us suppose we can surrender ourselves to the blue of the sky intensely, for a long, long time, and we can do so in such a way that we forget everything that is otherwise familiar to us from life or that is otherwise around us in life. Let us suppose we could forget all external impressions, all memories, all the cares of life, all the sorrows of life for a moment and be completely absorbed in the single impression of the blue sky. Yes, what I am telling you now, every human soul can experience, if only it takes the appropriate steps; what I am telling you now can become a universal human experience. Suppose a human soul gazes at nothing but the blue of the sky: Then a certain moment occurs, a moment when the blue of the sky ceases, when we no longer see blue, no longer see something that we would describe as blue in any human language. But if we turn our attention to our own soul at the moment when the blue ceases to be blue for us, then we will notice a very specific mood within our soul: The blue vanishes, as it were; an infinity opens up before us, and into this infinity a very specific mood of our soul, a very specific feeling, a very specific sensation of our soul wants to pour itself into the emptiness that arises where blue was before. And if we wish to name this feeling of the soul, if we wish to name what is striving out into all infinite distances, then we have only one word for it: our soul feels devout, devout in the face of infinity, devoutly surrendered. All religious feelings in the development of humanity essentially possess a nuance that encompasses what I now call “devout.” Pious devotion, a religious mood, a moral sentiment—this is what the impression of the blue vault of heaven has become. The blue that stretches far and wide has evoked a moral sentiment in our soul: as it has vanished as blue, a moral sentiment toward the outer world has come to life in our soul.

[ 10 ] And now let us turn our attention to another sensation, one that allows us to attune ourselves morally to the natural world in a different way. Let us look on as the trees bud and the meadows fill with green, let us direct our gaze to the green that can cover the earth in the most manifold ways or meet us from the trees, and let us do so again in such a way that we forget everything that might affect our soul through external impressions, and devote ourselves solely to what appears before us in the external world as green. If we are once again able to surrender to what actually sprouts as the green, we can take this so far that the green disappears for us as green, just as the blue once disappeared as blue. So we cannot say again that a color spreads out before our eyes, but instead—I note expressly that I am describing things that anyone can experience for themselves who engages in the relevant activities—the soul feels something peculiar. It feels: Now I understand what I experience when I imagine within myself, when I think and create within myself, when a thought springs up within me, when a mental image resounds within me! I understand this only now; this is what the sprouting of green all around me teaches me. I begin to understand the innermost depths of my soul through external nature, when it has vanished as an external impression of nature and a moral impression remains in its place. The green of the plants tells me how I should feel within myself when my soul is gifted with the ability to think thoughts and nurture mental images. — Once again, an external impression of nature is transformed into a moral sensation.

[ 11 ] Or we look out upon a white expanse of snow. In the same way as has just been described here for the blue of the sky and the green of the vegetation, it can evoke a moral sensation within us. It will evoke a moral sensation for everything we call the manifestation of matter in the world. And only when, gazing over the white blanket of snow, one has forgotten everything else and perceives the white—and then lets it fade away—does one gain an understanding of what fills the world as matter. Then one feels matter weaving and existing in the world.

[ 12 ] And so one can transform all external visual impressions into moral ones; one can transform auditory impressions into moral feelings. Let us suppose we hear a tone and then hear its octave. If, in response to this two-tone combination of a fundamental tone and its octave, we in turn attune our soul so that it forgets everything else, shuts out everything else, and then, wholly devoted to this two-tone combination of the fundamental tone, the prime, and the octave, finally manages—even though these two tones are sounding—to no longer hear them, as it were, to turn our attention away from this two-tone combination, then we find that a moral sensation is once again aroused in our soul. We then begin to receive a spiritual understanding of what we experience when a desire lives within us that seeks to lead us toward something, and our reason acts upon this desire. The harmony of desire and reason, of thought and longing, as they live in the human soul—this is what the soul perceives in a tone and its octave.

[ 13 ] In this way, we could allow the most diverse sensory impressions to affect us. We could, as it were, make what we perceive through our senses in the natural world around us vanish, so that this sensory veil is lifted; then moral feelings of sympathy and antipathy would arise everywhere. And if we accustom ourselves in this way to set aside everything that our eyes see, that our ears hear, that our hands grasp, that our intellect—bound to the brain—understands, and accustom ourselves to facing the world nonetheless, then something deeper within us takes effect than the sight of our eyes, than the hearing of our ears, than the intellectual power of our brain’s thinking: then we face the external world with a deeper being. Then the vastness of infinity affects us in such a way that we are moved to a religious mood. Then the green blanket of vegetation affects us in such a way that we feel and sense ourselves blossoming spiritually within. Then the white blanket of snow affects us in such a way that we gain an understanding of what matter, what substance, is in the world. Then something deeper within us grasps the world than what otherwise grasps the world. Thus, in this way, we also arrive at something deeper in the world than usual. The outer veil of nature is, as it were, drawn aside, and we enter a world that lies behind this outer veil.

[ 14 ] Just as we, when we look beyond the physical body of a human being, enter the etheric or Life-Body, so in this way we enter a realm in which manifold beings gradually reveal themselves to us—those beings who act and work behind the mineral kingdom, behind the plant and animal kingdoms. The etheric world gradually reveals itself to us in all its details. In occult science, what gradually reveals itself to the human being in the manner described has always been called the elemental world, and those spiritual beings we encounter when we tread the path we have spoken of—these spiritual beings are the elemental spirits that lie hidden behind all that is physical and sensory.

[ 15 ] As I have already said, while the human etheric body is a unified whole, what we perceive as the etheric world of all nature is a multitude, a diversity. Since what we perceive there is something entirely new, how can we enable ourselves to describe something of what is gradually coming to us from behind outer nature? Well, we can do so if we relate it, by way of comparison, to what is already known. In the whole diversity that lies behind the physical world, we first find entities that present complete images to the occult eye. Yes, I must indeed build upon the familiar to characterize what we first find there. We perceive complete images, entities with definite boundaries, of which we can say that they can be described in terms of their form or shape. These entities constitute one class of what we initially find beyond the physical-sensory world. A second class of entities that we find there can only be described if we look beyond what appears in fixed forms, what has fixed shapes—if we use the word metamorphosis, or transformation of form. This is the second thing that presents itself to the occult gaze. Beings that have definite forms belong to one class; beings that actually change their form at every moment—who, just as they appear before us and we believe we have grasped them, are already different again—so that we can only follow them if we ourselves make our soul flexible and receptive—belong to this second class.

[ 16 ] The occult gaze actually encounters the first class of beings—those that have a very specific form—only when it penetrates into the depths of the Earth based on the conditions described to you. I have told you that we should elevate everything that affects us in the outer world to a moral effect, as has been described. We have cited as an example how one can elevate the blue of the sky, the green of the plants, and the white of the snow to moral impressions. Let us suppose we penetrate into the interior of the Earth. If we make ourselves companions, say, of miners, then, as we penetrate into the interior of the Earth, we do indeed enter regions where we cannot initially train our eyes to transform a glance into a moral impression. But there we perceive warmth in our feelings, subtle differences in temperature. We must first sense these; this must be the physical impression, the physical impression of nature, when we plunge into the realm of the earthly. If we take these temperature differences, these shifts in warmth, into account and disregard what otherwise affects our senses as we descend, then it is precisely through this penetration into the Earth’s interior, through this feeling of being connected to the active forces of the Earth’s interior, that we gain a specific experience: For when we disregard everything that makes an impression there, when we strive to feel nothing down there—not even the temperature differences through which we have merely prepared ourselves—when we strive to hear and see nothing, but allow the impression to linger so that it emerges from our soul as a moral force, then the class of creative natural beings that is actually real and active for the occultist in all earthly things, particularly in all metallic substances, arises before our occult gaze, and this class expresses itself to his imagination, to his imaginative knowledge, in sharply defined forms of the most varied kinds. He who, with an occult education and at the same time with a certain love for the subject — which is particularly relevant in this field — makes himself a companion to miners, who penetrates into mines and can forget all external impressions down there, feels the next class, so to speak, of beings rising before his imagination, beings who are creating and weaving behind all earthly things, especially all metallic ones. I will not speak today of how folk tales and legends have taken hold of what is real in this way; I would first like to recount to you, so to speak, the bare facts that present themselves to the occult gaze. For according to the task set before me, I must proceed empirically; I must first describe what is found there in the various kingdoms of nature. This is how I understood it when the topic was assigned to me.

[ 17 ] Just as one perceives natural beings clearly defined within one’s imagination through the occult gaze, just as one can have before oneself beings thus firmly formed, for which one sees boundaries that one could trace, so another possibility arises for the occult gaze to gain an impression of beings standing immediately behind the veil of nature. If, let us say, on a day when weather conditions change from moment to moment, when, for example, clouds form and rain falls from them, when perhaps, rising from the earth’s surface, mist also rises upward — if, on such a day, one surrenders to these phenomena in the same way as described earlier, so that one allows a moral impression to take the place of the physical one, then one can again have a specific experience. It is particularly suitable when one surrenders to the peculiar play of, say, a mass of water breaking up and tumbling in a waterfall; when one surrenders to the mists forming and dissolving and the water vapor that fills the air and rises like smoke, or when one sees a fine rain streaming downward or feels a gentle drizzle passing through the air. If one perceives all this with a sense of the moral, this yields the second class of entities to which we wish to apply the word metamorphosis, transformation. We could not draw this second group of entities, any more than one can actually paint a flash of lightning. One can capture a specific form that exists for only a moment; in the next, it has already transformed. Thus, such ever-changing entities, whose symbol we can at best find in the imagination in the shifting cloud formations, appear to us as the second class of entities.

[ 18 ] But as occultists, we come into contact with these very beings in yet another way. When we observe plants emerging from the earth in the spring—mind you, when they are putting forth their first green shoots, not later, when they are already preparing to bear fruit— then the occult gaze senses that the very same beings it has discovered in the atomizing and surging masses of water and in the gathering mists are washing around the plant buds. So that we can say that when we see the plant sprouting from the earth here, we see it surrounded on all sides by such metamorphosing beings. And the occult gaze then senses that what is weaving and moving invisibly above the plant bud has something to do with what causes the plant to strive upward from the ground, to draw itself out of the ground. Yes, you see, my dear friends, ordinary physical science recognizes only the growth of plants; it knows only that the plant has a driving force that sprouts from the bottom upward. The occultist, however, recognizes: With flowering, it is different. Let us suppose there is a young plant shoot. The occultist perceives metamorphosing beings around the young plant shoot, beings that are, as it were, released from the surroundings and descend; beings that do not merely, as the physical principle of growth does, move from bottom to top, but which, acting from top to bottom, draw the plants out of the ground. So that in spring, when the earth is covered with green, the occult gaze senses something like natural forces descending from the cosmos, drawing out what is in the earth’s soil so that the earth’s interior may become visible to the heavens, the outer environment. There is something ever-moving above the plant, and the characteristic feature is that the occult gaze acquires a sense that what envelops the plant is the very same thing that is present in the water as it evaporates and gathers into rain. This is the second class of, let us say, natural forces and natural beings.

[ 19 ] When we move on tomorrow to describing the third and fourth classes, which are even more interesting, this will become even clearer to us. We must bear this in mind when we engage in such reflections, which are so far removed from humanity’s present consciousness: Everything we encounter in the physical world is permeated by the spiritual. Just as we must conceive of the individual human being as permeated by what the occult gaze perceives as the etheric body, so must we conceive of everything that weaves and flows out there in the world as permeated by a multitude, a diversity of spiritual, living beings and forces. This is to be the course of our reflections: that we first simply describe the facts that the occult-trained eye can perceive in the external world; facts that emerge when we observe the depths of the earth, the atmosphere, what occurs in the individual kingdoms of nature, what happens in the vastness of the heavens among the moving planets and the fixed stars that fill the celestial spaces, and that only at the very end do we synthesize the whole into a kind of theoretical insight that can enlighten us regarding what spiritually underlies our physical universe and its various kingdoms and realms.