The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Sixth Lecture

[ 1 ] The question of how the first stages of human life relate to development has also been discussed here on numerous occasions. Many years ago, I pointed out that until about the time of the change of teeth, human beings behave primarily as imitative beings. Everything that happens in their environment is experienced instinctively and intensely, just as in later life what happens in the external world is experienced only through the sense organs, but without the individual being aware of it.

[ 2 ] In fact, we have a process in our eyes, for example, that in a certain way imitates what is happening externally, just as a photographic camera imitates what is in front of it. The human being then experiences what is being imitated in his eyes and thereby gains knowledge of the external world. The same is true of the other senses. The fact that this principle of imitation is, so to speak, limited to the periphery of the human being only becomes apparent in later life. In childhood, until the change of teeth, the whole body participates in this imitation, albeit to a lesser degree. The whole body is, in a certain sense, in the same relationship to the outside world as the senses are. Human beings are primarily imitative beings. They orient themselves internally in the same way that the external world affects them internally when they imitate it from the outside. That is why it is so important that we do not allow anything to happen in the child's environment at this age, including thoughts and emotional formations, that cannot be absorbed and appropriated by the child.

[ 3 ] With the change of teeth, the child then begins to have the opportunity to behave not as a sensory organ, but to take in what is imaginative. The child begins — and then develops this more and more — to take what is said to him as a guideline. Before that, they take everything that is done in their environment as a guideline; afterwards, they come to understand what is said to them. This is why authority becomes decisive for the child between the change of teeth and puberty. The child must be able to follow what is said to them in a natural way and be able to act according to it. The child still learns language itself through imitation; but what can be expressed in language, what adults can communicate to children through language, only becomes decisive for children from the time they lose their baby teeth. And the actual ability to judge, when children or young men or young women, as we must now say, begin to assert their own judgment, begins with puberty. Only then can we assume that the child begins to form judgments from within itself.

[ 4 ] Now, this characterizes the matter externally, I would say, in the way the child grows into the world, which can always be brought to consciousness through unbiased perception. But all this is connected with very remarkable inner processes, and it is these inner processes that I would like to talk to you about today. Up to now, I have always pointed out how the etheric body of the human being lives in an intimate connection with the physical body until the time when the change of teeth begins to take place. That is why I said: We can also call the change of teeth the actual birth of the etheric body of the human being. In the same way, we can speak of the actual birth of the astral body at the onset of sexual maturity. However, as I said, these processes are only characterized externally, and today we want to come to a somewhat more internal characterization.

[ 5 ] When we look at human beings long before they develop the inclination to descend from the spiritual world into physical embodiment, we see them as spiritual-soul beings in a spiritual-soul world. That is what we all were before we descended to connect with what was prepared as the physical body in the maternal organism. We then connect with this physical body in order to go through our period of existence on earth between birth and death. For a long time before that, I would say, we were spiritual-soul beings in a spiritual-soul world. What we call the soul and what we experience there differs considerably from what we experience here on earth between birth and death. That is why it is so difficult to describe the experiences between death and a new birth, because they are ultimately very different from earthly conditions, and human beings form their ideas based on their earthly experiences, so we always have to resort to such ideas. However, we do not want to dwell on this for the moment—we will come to that tomorrow and the day after—how human beings are in the spiritual-soul world, but we want to consider how they approach their descent to earth in order to then pass through with a physical body.

[ 6 ] What happens first, before human beings come into contact with their physical bodies, with the embryonic, germ-like stage of their physical bodies, is that they draw the forces of the etheric world to themselves. We live here on Earth in the physical world, which is characterized by everything we see with our senses and understand with our earthly mind. But in this world there is nothing that is not permeated by the etheric world. This physical world that we see, hear, and so on, is permeated everywhere by the etheric world. Human beings develop an affinity for the etheric world earlier than for the physical world. Before they develop the inclination to connect with the physical world through the embryo, they draw on the forces of the etheric world. And by drawing on the forces from the etheric world, they form their etheric body.

[ 7 ] In order to understand these ideas more clearly, let us draw a diagram on the board. Let us assume that I want to characterize the spiritual-soul element that comes from the spiritual world by means of this figure (drawing on p. 114, violet). The drawing on plate 10 will be completed gradually during the following explanations). This is, of course, only a very schematic representation. Only that which the human being initially draws to himself becomes his etheric body. So, in a sense, he clothes himself with his etheric body (hatched in orange) as he descends from the spiritual world. But to say that “human beings clothe themselves in their etheric bodies” does not say very much; we need to go into the nature of this etheric body a little further. This etheric body that forms within human beings is, in a sense, a world unto itself. However, one might say that it is a world unto itself in image. For example, this etheric body shows stars (yellow stars) in its surroundings, and in its lower part it shows something that looks more or less like an image of the earth itself. Yes, it even has a kind of image of the sun and moon within it.

[ 8 ] It is extremely significant that when we draw the etheric forces from the general etheric world as we descend into the earthly world, we take with us into our etheric body a kind of image of the cosmos. If we could remove the etheric body of the human being at the moment when it connects with the physical body, we would see much more beautiful than anything that has ever been mechanically formed, a sphere with the stars, the zodiac, the sun, and the moon.

[ 9 ] These configurations of the etheric body remain in place as the human being grows together more and more with its physical body during the embryonic period. They only fade somewhat, but they remain present. And they also remain present until the age of seven, until the change of teeth. This world sphere can still be recognized in the child's etheric body. With the seventh year, with the change of teeth, the structures that can be seen inside the etheric body begin to become radiant, so to speak, whereas before they were more star-like. I have drawn this schematically for the period from the seventh to about the fourteenth year, from the change of teeth to sexual maturity (see drawing, red rays). As I said, it fades during the embryonic period and then more and more, but it is still clearly present. From the change of teeth, however, it begins to fade completely, but in return it sends out rays inward (red). I would say that the stars dissolve in the human etheric body and become rays that tend to come together in the inner part.

[ 10 ] All this happens slowly and gradually throughout the entire period of life from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. At sexual maturity, these rays have grown together to such an extent that they form a kind of separate structure, an etheric structure (red), within the body. One might say that what were the peripheral stars first radiate inward; then they cease, and these stars become completely pale. Of course, something always remains, but it becomes very pale. These rays also become pale. In contrast, what has gathered in the middle, so to speak, becomes particularly lively. And in what has gathered in the middle, at the time when sexual maturity also occurs, the physical heart hangs within. This is therefore the place in the human organism where the physical heart hangs with the veins (blue).

[ 11 ] This is therefore the peculiarity of the star ether body, that it draws inward. It naturally remains present as the ether body for the whole human being. It is only then in outer space, that is, at the periphery of the human being, where it is later undifferentiated, and one cannot distinguish much within it. But during the period from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, it is very radiant from the outside to the inside.

[ 12 ] And then this clusters together, and then the physical heart is clearly suspended inside. You must not think that the human being does not have an etheric heart before this; they do, but they receive it in a different way than what then becomes the etheric heart. For in fact, what has gathered together from puberty onwards becomes the etheric heart. Until then, as I said, they also have an etheric heart, but they have received it as an inheritance, they have received it through the forces that are within the embryo. For when the human being has his etheric body and moves with his etheric body toward the physical organism, a kind of etheric heart, a substitute etheric heart, so to speak, is also drawn together by the forces of the physical body. However, this etheric heart that humans have in childhood — which is an expression that is somewhat unattractive to our habits, but which describes exactly what it is — gradually decays, and in its place, as it were, constantly replacing what falls away as etheric decay, there arises that etheric heart which is a condensation of the entire world sphere, which is truly an image of the cosmos, and which we bring with us as an etheric structure when we enter earthly existence through conception and birth.

[ 13 ] One can therefore really observe a distinct change in the entire etheric body structure that humans carry within themselves from birth, or even from conception, until sexual maturity. One might say that it is only with sexual maturity that the human being's own etheric heart, formed from his etheric body and not provisionally formed by external forces, actually comes into existence.

[ 14 ] And all the etheric forces that are active in the human being until puberty tend to give him such a fresh etheric heart. It is really something that can be compared to the change of teeth in relation to the etheric. Isn't it true that when we lose our teeth, we have the teeth we inherited; they are cast out, and the other teeth, which are then our own, replace them? And so the etheric heart we inherited, which we have until we reach sexual maturity, is cast out, and we receive our own etheric heart. The essential thing is that we receive our own etheric heart.

[ 15 ] But now something else happens in parallel with this, something that takes place within the human being. If we look at the human being as he has entered the physical world, that is, as a very small child, we find that there are an extraordinary number of individual organs to be distinguished in his astral body. As I have just described, human beings construct an etheric body for themselves that is a reflection of the external world. But in their astral body, they bring with them a reflection of what they have experienced between their last death and this birth. One can see an extraordinary amount in the astral body of a child. Great mysteries are inscribed there. One can really see much of what has been experienced between the last death and this birth. This astral body is extremely differentiated and individual. And the peculiar thing is that at the same time as what I have described for the etheric body takes place, the highly differentiated astral body becomes increasingly undifferentiated. Originally, it is a structure which, when you look at it intelligently, you say: This is a structure from another world, it has come in from a world which is neither in the physical world nor in the world of the ether. But everything that lives in the astral body as an extraordinary number of individual structures slips, so to speak, into the physical organs until sexual maturity, and only into those organs which, if I may express myself approximately—it is not entirely accurate—lie up to the diaphragm. Wonderful formations, which are present in the astral body in the first days of life, gradually slip into the brain formation and also fill the sense organs. Then others slip into the respiratory organs, others into the heart and through the heart into the arteries. They do not slip directly into the stomach, but first spread through the arteries into the organs of the lower abdomen. But little by little, one sees, as it were, the entire astral body that the human being brings with him into physical existence through birth, submerge into the organs. It slips into the organs. So that if one wants to express this in a sense that is entirely true, that is entirely in accordance with reality — but of course it seems paradoxical compared to the ideas that people generally have today — one can say: When we are adults, our organs have imprisoned the individual structures of our astral body within themselves. This is the more intimate knowledge of the human organs, which can only be understood if one understands the astral nature of the human being, which he brings with him. It is important to know that each individual organ carries a certain amount of astral substance as an inheritance, just as the etheric heart is initially also an inheritance, but that this inherited astral substance is gradually permeated by what the human being brings with them as their astral body and which gradually sinks into the physical and etheric organs. The heart is, in a sense, an exception. There, too, something astral sinks in. The etheric activity is concentrated in the heart just as much as the astral activity. That is why the heart is such a particularly important organ for human beings.

[ 16 ] So the astral body becomes more and more indefinite because it sends down into the physical organs the concrete structures it brings with it from another life through birth on earth, so that they are locked up there. As a result, the astral body more or less always becomes a mere cloud of mist.

[ 17 ] But what is interesting now is this: from this perspective, the astral body becomes a cloud of mist, but other differentiations occur only slowly and then, from sexual maturity onwards, with increasing regularity.

[ 18 ] When the child kicks its legs, very little of this kicking is noticeable in the astral body. The effects are already present in the astral body, but the differentiations that the astral body has brought with it are so strong that the whole thing actually behaves as follows: When I draw the astral body here, there are wonderful structures inside it. This is only meant schematically, but it is borrowed from reality. These structures gradually disappear; they slip down into the physical organs. The astral body becomes more and more like a cloud of mist. But, as I said, when the child fidgets, all kinds of things rise up into the astral body from the fidgeting movements, but they collide with what is already there, reflect back (red) and disappear again. It is like when you make an impression in an elastic ball; it immediately returns to its original shape. These fidgeting movements of the child, however vigorous they may be, do make an impression on the astral body, but it does not remain. Now, to the same extent that the child then learns to speak and develops ideas that remain in its memory, that is, to the same extent that the child learns to speak and form memories, to that extent one sees more and more how this is not actually rejected, but how the movements that the child no longer as fidgeting movements, but as intelligent movements, as walking around and so on, including the movements of the arms and so on, remain in the astral body. Yes, an extraordinary amount can be recorded in this astral body.

[ 19 ] When you are forty-five years old, almost all movements are recorded in traces in the astral body, and many others as well, as we shall see in a moment. The astral body can absorb much of what has happened since the child learned to speak and think and since it dissolved its own configuration. Thus, the wonderful structure that is the astral body of the child gradually becomes undifferentiated, because all of this gradually disappears into the organs. The astral body becomes an undifferentiated structure, not completely, of course, but relatively undifferentiated. Everything we do with our arms and legs is now recorded in this undifferentiated structure. But what we do with our arms and legs is also recorded: for example, when we guide a pen, everything we have done in the outside world is recorded. When we chop wood, when we slap someone, this is recorded. Even if we do not do something ourselves, but give an order to a servant who then carries it out, this is also recorded through the relationship between the content of our words and what the servant does. In short, the entire activity of a human being that finds expression in the external world is now recorded in this astral body (red in yellow). Thus, the astral body is configured in the most diverse ways by what human activity is. [During the following explanations, the drawing on the right, is completed.]

[ 20 ] This begins, as I said, when the child learns to speak, when the child learns to embody thoughts in language. With regard to the ideas that the child absorbs but cannot remember later, this does not yet take place; it only begins from the time until one can later recall them in ordinary consciousness. But then, so to speak, everything that a person does is written down there.

[ 21 ] Now the peculiar thing is that everything that is written there tends to meet there in a similar way, just as the rays of the etheric body meet in the etheric heart. Everything that is human action also comes together there. And this coming together actually has a kind of external cause. Simply by virtue of being human, we must engage in certain activities from childhood onwards. This activity expresses itself, as I have just indicated, throughout the entire astral body. But on the other hand, there is a constant resistance. The effects exerted on the organism cannot always develop up to that point (at the top of the drawing), so to speak. There is resistance everywhere; they are pushed down. What we do when we adhere to physical organs wants to flow up into the head, but the human organization does not allow it to rise, it holds it back. And as a result, it also accumulates here in a certain way (red) and forms a kind of astral center. So that we—and again, this is very clearly developed at the time of sexual maturity—have an astral structure at the same place where this etheric heart, which is now our own, has formed, which centralizes all our actions. And because this is the case from the time of sexual maturity, a central organ is created in which all our actions, all our human activity, are centralized. It is so that in the same area where the human being has the heart, all their activity is now centralized, neither physically nor etherically, but astral. And the important thing is that at the time when sexual maturity occurs—for astral events do not coincide completely with physical events, but only approximately—this etheric heart is sufficiently developed to be able to absorb the forces that develop here from activity in the outer world. One can therefore say, and this is indeed a real event within the human being: from the onset of sexual maturity, all human activity is connected via the astral body to the etheric heart, to that organ which has become the image of the stars, the image of the cosmos. Everything is connected there.

[ 22 ] This is an extraordinarily significant phenomenon, because when you consider all this, you have the union of what human beings do in the world with the cosmic. In the heart, insofar as the etheric world is concerned, you have a contracted cosmos; but at the same time, insofar as the astral world is concerned, you have a contraction of what human beings do. Here, the cosmos with its events and human karma come together. Such an intimate correspondence between the astral body and the etheric body with the entire human organism exists only in the region of the heart. It is indeed the case that the whole world, of which man has brought an image into his etheric body through birth, that this whole world, which is there as if in an essence, takes in everything that man does and permeates it. And now, through these connections, through this interconnection, there is an opportunity for human activity to be continuously integrated into the essence of the images of the cosmos throughout the entire human life.

[ 23 ] When the human being then passes through the gate of death, everything that the human being takes with him into his further spiritual and soul life after he has laid down his physical body and that etheric structure is now present in this etheric-astral structure in which the heart, I might say, floats. And as he now becomes spiritually greater and greater, he can—because the substance of the entire cosmos is within him, it is only contracted in the heart in the etheric body—surrender his entire karma to the cosmos. That which came from the cosmos and became the etheric structure, which contracted in the heart and became essence, wants to return to the cosmos. The human being spreads out throughout the entire cosmos and is then taken up into the soul world and goes through what I have described in my “Theosophy” as the passage through the soul world and then through the spirit realm. But it is indeed the case that when we consider the human organization in its becoming, we can say to ourselves: In the region of the heart, there is a union of the cosmic with the earthly, in such a way that the cosmic, in its cosmic configuration, is taken into the etheric and prepares itself there to receive our deeds, everything we do. And with what has been formed there through an intimate interpenetration of the etheric with human activity, we go out and enter again into a new cosmic existence when we have passed through the gate of death.

[ 24 ] This describes in a very concrete way how human beings grow into their physical bodies and how they can withdraw from these physical bodies, because their deeds give them the power to hold together what they have formed from the cosmos as an essence.

[ 25 ] The physical body is formed within the physical-earthly world through the forces of heredity, that is, through the forces of embryonic formation, of germ formation. This is connected with what human beings bring down from the spiritual world after they have first drawn their etheric body to themselves. Human beings connect with this on the one hand. But in the astral body, which he has brought with him as such a wonderful structure, there also lives his ego, which has passed through many earthly lives and has undergone a whole process of development. And this ego lives in a certain sympathetic connection—and in using this word I am again referring to something very real—with everything that exists as a structure in the astral body. And as these structures slip into the organs of the physical body, as I have described, the ego retains this sympathy and also develops this inner sympathy toward the organs, spreading more and more into the organs and taking possession of them. Certainly, the ego has already been in a certain relationship with the organs from early childhood. But there are precisely those hereditary conditions I spoke of earlier, and the relationship of the ego is an external one. But the ego gradually slips into the organs of the physical body with its astral body, and as it slips in, the following happens: whereas before the ego was present in the child along the bloodstream, I might say externally, it now connects itself more and more intensively internally with the blood circulation until it has entered into full maturity at puberty. And while you have here an astral structure around the etheric, around the physical heart, while you have here, then, an astral structure (drawing, orange), the ego takes the other path: it slips, let us say, into the organs of the lungs; with the veins that go from the lungs to the heart, the I comes closer and closer to the heart. The ego follows more and more, intimately connected with the blood circulation, the path of this blood circulation. So that, in turn, on its detour through these ego forces running with the blood circulation, the ego intervenes in what has been formed from the union of the etheric and astral hearts, whereby an etheric element from the cosmos grows together with an astral element from ourselves. I said earlier that this astral body gradually contains an extraordinary amount because all deeds are recorded in it. But since the ego stands in a sympathetic relationship to everything the astral body does, the intentions and ideas from which the human being carries out his actions are also recorded. So that here, in fact, there is a complete union of karma with the laws of the cosmos.

[ 26 ] We know very little about what goes on inside human beings. Given the circumstances, we would like to say emphatically: “very little,” because everything we do not know relates to the heart. We know very little about it today. We know what happens here in the physical world and consider it according to the laws of nature; and we know what human beings do morally and consider it according to moral laws. But everything that happens morally in human life and, on the other hand, everything that happens physically, comes together in the human heart; so that these two things, which today run so independently side by side in human beings, moral events and physical events, are found to be connected when one really learns to understand the overall configuration of the human heart, that is, when one learns to understand what takes place in this heart in a naturally much more hidden way than it does openly when teeth are replaced. We inherit teeth, and then we form teeth from our organism. The former fall out, the latter remain with us. The former have a certain tendency to perish; they would not be able to sustain themselves if they did not fall out. The permanent teeth are preferably destroyed by external conditions, which of course also include the external conditions within the organism itself. In an invisible way, our etheric heart is handed over to decay at sexual maturity, and we gain a kind of permanent heart, a kind of etheric heart. This permanent etheric heart, however, is only then fully capable of taking up our activity. That is why it is indeed quite different whether a person dies before or after sexual maturity. If a person dies before reaching sexual maturity, then only the tendency remains within them for what they have done here on earth to be passed on karmically. Individual elements may be incorporated into karma, even if children die before reaching sexual maturity, but this always has something indefinite and shimmering about it. The correct formation of karma only takes place from the moment when the astral heart fully intervenes in the etheric heart, when these two connect. But this is also, if I may say so, the organism of karma formation. For with death, what is concentrated in the human being, what has come together there, becomes more and more cosmic and is then incorporated from the cosmos back into the human being in the next earthly life, so that everything we do does not concern us alone. Rather, something comes into us that comes from the cosmos and retains the tendency to return our deeds to the cosmos after death, from which the karmic laws for the formation of our karma prove effective, so that we then carry what the cosmos makes of our deeds back into earthly life at the beginning of our next earthly life.