| 125. Three Lectures on the Mystery Dramas: Self-Knowledge as Portrayed in the Rosicrucian Mystery, The Portal of Initiation
17 Sep 1910, Basel Translated by Ruth Pusch, Hans Pusch |
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| We also put our efforts into the production of a Rosicrucian Mystery in which we tried in a variety of ways to bring to expression what is living in our movement. |
| Therefore, I wish to start my lecture with a recitation of the scenes from the Rosicrucian Mystery that portray the self-knowledge of Johannes. SCENE TWO A place in the open; rocks and springs. |
| I can assure you that nothing of what afterward I could say about the Rosicrucian Mystery, and that I know now is in it, was in my conscious mind as I wrote down the various scenes. |
| 125. Three Lectures on the Mystery Dramas: Self-Knowledge as Portrayed in the Rosicrucian Mystery, The Portal of Initiation
17 Sep 1910, Basel Translated by Ruth Pusch, Hans Pusch |
|---|
Many of you know that recently in Munich we repeated last year's performance of Schuré's drama, The Children of Lucifer. We also put our efforts into the production of a Rosicrucian Mystery in which we tried in a variety of ways to bring to expression what is living in our movement. For one thing, it was meant to show how the life of anthroposophy and its impulses can flow into art, into artistic form. Besides that, we should be aware that this Rosicrucian Mystery contains many of our spiritual scientific teachings that perhaps only in future years will be discerned. Please do not misunderstand me when I say that if people would exert themselves to some degree to read what is in it—not between the lines but right in the words themselves, though certainly in a spiritual sense—if people would exert themselves during the next few years to try to work with the drama, I would not have to give any more lectures for a long time. Much could be discovered in it that otherwise I would have to put forth as one or another theme in lectures. It is much more practical, however, to do this together as a group rather than as single individuals. It is fortunate in one sense that everything that lives in spiritual science also exists in such a form. In relation to the Rosicrucian Mystery I should today like to speak about certain peculiarities of human self- knowledge. For this we will have to remind ourselves how the individuality living in the body of Johannes Thomasius brings about a characterization of himself. Therefore, I wish to start my lecture with a recitation of the scenes from the Rosicrucian Mystery that portray the self-knowledge of Johannes. SCENE TWO A place in the open; rocks and springs. The whole surroundings are to be thought of as within the soul of Johannes Thomasius. What follows is the content of his meditation.
Johannes:
Johannes
Maria
Johannes
Maria
Johannes
SCENE NINEThe same placed as in Scene Two
Johannes
Maria
Johannes
Maria
Johannes
In these scenes two levels of development, two steps in the unfolding of our souls, are shown. Now please do not find it strange when I say that I do not mind interpreting this Rosicrucian Mystery just as I have interpreted other pieces of literature in our group. What I have often said about other poetry can also be brought before our souls in a lively, spontaneous way by this drama. In fact, I have never failed to point out that a flower knows little, indeed, of what someone who is looking at it will find in it; yet, whatever he finds is contained in it. And in speaking about Faust, I explained that the poet did not necessarily know or feel everything in the words he was writing down that later would be discovered in them. I can assure you that nothing of what afterward I could say about the Rosicrucian Mystery, and that I know now is in it, was in my conscious mind as I wrote down the various scenes. The scene-pictures grew one by one, just like the leaves of a plant. One cannot bring forth a character by first having an idea and then turning this into a concrete figure. It was continually interesting to me how each scene grew out of the others preceding it. Friends who knew the earlier parts said that it was remarkable how everything came about quite differently from what one could have imagined. This Mystery Drama exists now as a picture of human evolution in the development of a single person. I want to emphasize that true feeling makes it impossible to throw a cloak of abstractions around oneself in order to present anthroposophy; every human soul is different from every other and, at its core, must be different, because each one undergoes the experience of his own development. For this reason, instruction to the many can provide only general directions. One can give the complete truth only by applying it to a single human soul, to a soul that reveals its human individuality in all its uniqueness. If, therefore, anyone should consider the figure of Johannes Thomasius in such a way as to transfer the specific description of that figure to general theories of human development, it would be absolutely incorrect. If he believed that he would experience exactly what Johannes Thomasius experienced, he would be quite mistaken. For while in the widest sense what Johannes Thomasius had to undergo is valid for everyone, in order to have the same specific experiences one would have to be Johannes Thomasius. Each person is a “Johannes Thomasius” in his own fashion. Everything in the drama is presented, therefore, in a completely individual way. Through this, the truth portrayed by the particular figures brings out as clearly as possible the development of the soul of a human being. At the beginning, Thomasius is shown in the physical world, but certain soul-happenings are hinted at that provide a wide basis for such development, particularly an experience at a somewhat earlier time when he deserted a girl who had been lovingly devoted to him. Such things do take place, but this individual happening has a different effect on a man who has resolved to undertake his own development. There is one deep truth necessary for him who wants to undergo development: self-knowledge cannot be achieved by brooding within oneself but only through diving into the being of others. Through self- knowledge we must learn that we have emerged from the cosmos. Only when we give ourselves up can we change into another Self. First of all, we are transformed into whatever was close to us in life. When at first Johannes sinks more deeply into himself and then plunges in self-knowledge into another person, into the one to whom he has brought bitter pain, we see this as an example of the experience of oneself within another, a descent into self-knowledge. Theoretically, one can say that if we wish to know the blossom, we must plunge into the blossom, and the best method of acquiring self-knowledge is to plunge again, but in a different way, into happenings we once took part in. As long as we remain in ourselves, we experience only superficially whatever takes place. In contrast to true self-knowledge, what we think of other persons is then mere abstraction. For Thomasius at first, what other people have lived through becomes a part of him. One of them, Capesius, describes some of his experiences; we can observe that they are rooted in real life. But Thomasius takes in more. He is listening. His listening is singular; later, in SceneEight, we will be able to characterize it. It is really as if Thomasius' ordinary Self were not present. Another deeper force appears, as though Thomasius were creeping into the soul of Capesius and were taking part in what is happening from there. That is why it is so absolutely important for Thomasius to be estranged from himself. Tearing the Self out of oneself and entering into another is part and parcel of self-knowledge. It is noteworthy, therefore, that what he has listened to in Scene One, Thomasius says, reveals:
Why has it made a “nothing” of him? Because through self-knowledge he has plunged into these other persons. Brooding in your own inner self makes you proud, conceited. True self-knowledge leads, first of all, by having to plunge into a strange Self, into suffering. In Scene One Johannes follows each person so strongly that when he listens to Capesius he becomes aware of the words of Felicia within the other soul. He follows Strader into the loneliness of the cloister, but at first this has the character of something theoretical. He cannot reach as far as he is later led, in Scene Two, through pain. Self-knowledge is deepened by the meditation within his inner Self. What was shown in Scene One is shown changed in Scene Two through self-knowledge intensified from abstraction to a concrete imagination. Those well-known words, which we have heard through the centuries as the motif of the Delphic Oracle, bring about a new life for this man Johannes, though at first it is a life of estrangement from himself. Johannes enters, as a knower-of-himself, into all the outer phenomena. He finds his life in the air and water, in the rocks and springs, but not in himself. All the words that we can let sound on stage only from outside are actually the words of his meditation. As soon as the curtain rises, we have to confront these words, which would sound louder to anyone through self-knowledge than we can dare to produce on the stage. Thereafter, he who is learning to know himself dives into the other beings and elements and thus learns to know them. Then in a terrible form the same experience he has had earlier appears to him. It is a deep truth that self-knowledge, when it progresses in the way we have characterized, leads us to see ourselves quite differently from the way we ever saw ourselves before. It teaches us to perceive our “I” as a strange being. Man believes his own outer physical sheath to be the closest thing to himself. Nowadays, when he cuts a finger, he is much more connected with the painful finger than when, for instance, a friend hurts him with an unjust opinion. How much more does it hurt a modern person to cut his finger than to hear an unjust opinion! Yet he is only cutting into his bodily sheath. To feel our body as a tool, however, will come about only through self- knowledge. Whenever a person grasps an object, he can feel his hand to some degree as a tool. This, too, he can learn to feel with one or another part of his brain. The inward feeling of his brain as instrument comes about at a certain level of self-knowledge. Specific places within the brain are localized. If we hammer a nail, we know we are doing it with a tool. We know that we are also using as tool one or another part of the brain. Through the fact that these things are objective and can become separate and strange to us, we come to know our brain as something quite separate from us. Self-knowledge requires this sort of objectivity as regards our body; gradually our outer sheath becomes as objective to us as the ordinary tools we use. Then, as soon as we have made a start at feeling our bodily sheath as separate object, we truly begin to live in the outside world. Because a person feels only his body, he is not clear about the boundary between the air outside and the air in his lungs. All the same, he will say that it is the same air, outside and inside. So it is with everything, with the blood, with everything that belongs to the body. But what belongs to the body cannot be outside and inside—that is mere illusion. It is only through the fact that we allow the internal bodily nature to become outward that in truth it finds a further life out in the rest of the world and the cosmos. In the first scene recited today there was an effort to express the pain of feeling estranged from oneself—the pain of feeling estranged because of being outside and within all the other things. Johannes Thomasius' own bodily sheath seems like a person outside himself. But just because of that—that he feels his own body outside—he can see the approach of another body, that of the young girl he once deserted. It comes toward him; he has learned how to speak with the very words of the other being. She says to him, whose Self has widened out to her:
Then guilt, very much alive, rises up in the soul when, plunging our own Self into another and attaching ourselves to the pain of this other being, the pain is spoken out. This is a deepening, an intensifying. Johannes is truly within the pain, because he has caused it. He feels himself dissolving into it and then waking up again. What is he actually experiencing? When we try to put all this together, we will find that the ordinary, normal human being undergoes something similar only in the condition we call kamaloka. The initiate, however, has to experience in this world what the normal person experiences in the spiritual world. Within the physical body he must go through what ordinarily is experienced outside the physical body. All the elements of kamaloka have to be undergone as the elements of initiation. Just as Johannes dives into the soul to whom he has brought such grief, so must the normal human being in kamaloka dive into the souls to which he has brought pain. It is just as if a slap in the face has to come back to him; he has to feel the same pain. The only difference is that the initiate experiences this in the physical body, and other people after death. The one who goes through this here will afterward live otherwise in kamaloka. But even all that one undergoes in kamaloka can be so experienced that one does not become entirely free. It is a most difficult task to become completely free. A man feels as if he were chained to his physical conditions. In our time one of the most important elements for our development—not yet so much in the Greco-Roman epoch but especially important nowadays—is that the human being must experience how infinitely difficult it is to become free of himself. Therefore, a notable initiation experience is described by Johannes as feeling chained to his own lower nature; his own being seems to be a creature to which he is firmly fettered:
This belongs to self-knowledge; it is a secret of self- knowledge. We should try to understand it correctly. A question about this secret could be phrased like this: have we in some way become better human beings by becoming earth dwellers, by entering into our physical sheaths, or would we be better by remaining in our inner natures and throwing off those sheaths? Superficial people, taking a look at life in the spirit, may well ask: why ever do we have to plunge down into a physical body? It would be much easier to stay up there and not get into the whole miserable business of earthly existence. For what reason have the wise powers of destiny thrust us down here? Perhaps it helps our feelings a little to say that for millions and millions of years the divine, spiritual powers have worked on the physical body. Because of this, we should make more out of ourselves than we have the strength to do. Our inner forces are not enough. We cannot yet be what the gods have intended for us if we wish to be only what is in our inner nature, if our outer sheaths do not work some corrections in us. Life shows us that here on earth man is put into his physical sheaths and that these have been prepared for him by the beings of three world epochs. Man has now to develop his inner nature. Between birth and death, he is bad; in Devachan he is a better creature, taken up by divine, spiritual beings who shower him with their own forces. Later on, in the Vulcan epoch, he will be a perfect being. Now on the earth he is a being who gives way to this or that desire. Our hearts, for one thing, are created with such wisdom that they can hold out for decades against the excesses we indulge in, such as drinking coffee. What man can be today through his own will is the way he travels through kamaloka. There he has to learn what he can be through his own will, and that is certainly nothing very good. Whenever man is asked to describe himself, he cannot use the adjective “beautiful.” He has to describe himself as Johannes does in Scene Two:
Our inner nature stretches flexibly within our bodily sheaths and is hidden from us. When we approach initiation, we learn really to see ourselves as a kind of raging dragon. Therefore, these words are drawn up out of the deepest perception; they are words of self-knowledge, not of self-brooding:
At bottom, they are both the same, one the subject, the other the object.
This flight, however, merely leads the human being directly to himself. But then the crowd turns up, the crowd we find ourselves in when we really look into ourselves. We find ourselves to be a collection of lusts and passions we had not noticed earlier, because each time we wanted to look into ourselves our eyes were distracted to the world outside. Indeed, compared to what we would have seen inside, the world outside is wonderfully beautiful. Out there, in the illusion, in the maya of life, we stop looking at ourselves inwardly. When people around us, however, begin to talk all kinds of stupidity and we cannot stand it, we escape to where we can be alone. This is quite important at some levels of development. We can and should collect ourselves; it is a good means of self-knowledge. But it can happen that, coming into a crowd of people, we can no longer be alone; those others appear, either within us or outside us, no matter; they do not allow us to be alone. Then comes the experience we must have: solitude actually brings forth the worst kind of fellowship.
Those are genuine experiences. Do not let the strength, the intensity, of the happenings trouble you. You do not have to believe that such strength and intensity as described must necessarily lead to anxiety or fear. It should not prevent anyone from also plunging into these waters. No one will experience all this as swiftly or with such vehemence as Johannes does; it had to come about for him in this way for a definite purpose, even prematurely, too. A normal self-development proceeds differently. Therefore, what occurs in Johannes so tumultuously must be understood as an individual happening. Because he is this particular individual, who has suffered a kind of shipwreck, everything he undergoes takes place much more tempestuously than it otherwise would. He is confronted by the laws of self-development in such a way that they throw him completely off balance. As for us, one thing should be awakened by this description of Johannes, that is, the perception that true self-knowledge has nothing to do with trite phrases, that true self- knowledge inevitably leads us into pain and sorrow. Things that once were a source of delight can assume a different face when they appear in the realm of self- knowledge. We can long for solitude, no doubt, when we have already found self-knowledge. But in certain moments of self-development it is solitude we have lost when we look for it as we did earlier, in moments when we flow out into the objective world, when in loneliness we have to suffer the sharpest pain. Learning to perceive in the right way this outpouring of the Self into other beings will help us feel what has been put into the Mystery Drama: a certain artistic element has been created in which everything is spiritually realistic. One who thinks realistically—a genuine, artistic, sensitive realist—undergoes at unrealistic performances a certain amount of suffering. Even what at a certain level can provide great satisfaction is at another level a source of pain. This is due to the path of self- development. A play by Shakespeare, for instance, an immense achievement in the physical world, can be an occasion for artistic pleasure. But a certain moment of development can arrive when we are no longer satisfied by Shakespeare because we seem inwardly torn to pieces. We go from one scene to the next but no longer see the necessity that has ordered one scene to follow another. We begin to find it unnatural that a scene follows the one preceding it. Why unnatural? Because nothing holds two scenes together except the dramatist Shakespeare and his audience. His scenes follow the abstract principle of cause and effect but not a concrete reality. It is characteristic of Shakespeare's drama that nothing of underlying karma is hinted at; this would tie the scenes together more closely. The Rosicrucian drama grew into a realistic, spiritually realistic one. It makes huge demands on Johannes Thomasius, who is constantly on stage without taking part actively or showing a single important dramatic characteristic. He is the one in whose soul everything takes place, and what is described is the development of that soul, the real experience of the soul's development. Johannes' soul spins one scene realistically out of the one before it. Through this we see that realistic and spiritual do not contradict each other. Materialistic and spiritual things do not need each other, and they can contradict each other. But realistic and spiritual are not opposites; it is quite possible for spiritual realism to be admired even by a materialistic person. In regard to artistic principles, the plays of Shakespeare can be thought of as realistic. You will understand, however, how far the art that goes hand in hand with a science of the spirit must finally lead. For the one who finds his Self out in the cosmos, the whole cosmos becomes an ego being. We cannot bear then anything coming toward us that is not related to the ego being. Art will gradually learn something in this direction; it will come to the ego principle, because the Christ has brought us our ego for the first time. In the most various realms will this ego be alive. In still another way can the specific human entity be shown within the soul and also divided into its various components outside. If someone asked which person represents Atma, which one Buddhi, which one Manas? ... if someone in the audience could exclaim, “O yes, that figure on the stage is the personification of Manas!” ... it would be a horrible kind of art, a dreadful kind of art. It is a bad theosophical habit to try to explain everything like this. One would like to say, “Poor thing!” of a work of art that has to be “explained.” If it were to be attempted with Shakespeare's plays, it would indeed be absurd and downright wrong. These habits are the childhood diseases of the theosophical movement. They will gradually be cured. But for once at least, it is necessary to point them out. It might even happen that someone tries to look for the nine members of the human organization in the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven! On the other hand, it is correct to some extent to say that the united elements of human nature can be assigned to different characters. One person has this soul coloring, a second person another; we can see characters on the stage who present different sides of the whole unified human being. The people we encounter in the world usually present one or another particular trait. As we develop from incarnation to incarnation, we gradually become a whole. To show this underlying fact on the stage, our whole life has somehow to be separated into parts. In this Rosicrucian Mystery, we will find that everything that Maria is supposed to be is dispersed among the other figures who are around her as companions. They form with her what might be called an “egoity.” We find special characteristics of the sentient soul in Philia, of the intellectual soul in Astrid, of the consciousness soul in Luna. It was for this reason that their names were chosen. The names of all the characters and beings were given according to their natures. In Devachan, Scene Seven, particularly, where everything is spirit, not only the words but also the placing of the words is meant to characterize the three figures of Philia, Astrid, and Luna in their exact relationships. The speeches at the beginning of Scene Seven are a better description of sentient soul, intellectual soul, and consciousness soul than any number of words otherwise could achieve. Here one can really demonstrate what each soul is. One can show in an artistic form the relationship of the three souls by means of the levels at which the figures stand. In the human being they flow into one another. Separated from each other, they show themselves clearly: Philia as she places herself in the cosmos; Astrid as she relates herself to the elements; Luna as she directs herself into free deed and self-knowledge. Because they show themselves so clearly in the Devachan scene, everything in it is alchemy in the purest sense of the word; all of alchemy is there, if one can gradually discover it. Not only as abstract content is alchemy in the scene but in the weaving essence of the words. Therefore, you should listen not merely to what is said, nor indeed only to what each single character speaks, but particularly to how the soul forces speak in relation to one another. The sentient soul pushes itself into the astral body; we can perceive weaving astrality there. The intellectual soul slips itself into the etheric body; there we perceive weaving ether being. We can observe how the consciousness soul pours itself with inner firmness into the physical body. Soul endeavor that has an effect like light is contained in Philia's words. In Astrid is contained what brings about the etheric-objective ability to confront the very truth of things. Inner resolve connected at first with the firmness of the physical body is given in Luna. We must begin to be sensitive to all this. Let us listen to the soul forces in Scene Seven: Philia (Sentient soul)
Astrid (Intellectual soul)
Luna (Consciousness soul)
I would like to draw your attention to the words of Philia,
and to those of Astrid that carry the connotation of something heavier, more compact,
“Dass dir,” “Dass du,” and then we have the “Du” again in Luna's speech woven together with the still heavier, weighty
There the “u” is woven into its neighboring consonants, so that it can take on a still firmer compactness.1 These are the things that one can actually characterize. Please remember, it all depends on the “How.” Let us compare the words Philia speaks next:
with the rather different ones of Astrid:
Just here, where these words are spoken, the inner weaving essence of the world of Devachan has been achieved. I am mentioning all this, because the scenes should make it clear that when self-knowledge begins to unfold into the outer cosmic weaving and being, we have to give up everything that is one-sided. We have to learn, too, to be aware—as we otherwise do only in a quite superficial, pedestrian way—of what is at hand at every point of existence. We become inflexible creatures, we human beings, when we stay rooted to only one spot in space, believing that our words can express the truth. But words, limited as they are to physical sound, are not what best will communicate truth. I would like to put it like this: we have to become sensitive to the voice itself. Anything as important as Johannes Thomasius' path to self-knowledge can be rightfully experienced—it depends on this—only when he struggles courageously for that self-knowledge and holds on to it. When self-knowledge has crushed us, the next stage is to begin to draw into ourselves, to harbor inwardly what was our outer experience, learning how closely the cosmos is related to ourselves (for this comes to us after we understand the nature of the beings around us); now we must attempt courageously to live with our understanding. It is only one half of the matter to dive down like Johannes into a being to whom we have brought sorrow and have thrust into cold earth. For now, we have begun to feel differently. We summon up our courage to make amends for the pain we have caused. Now we can dive into this new life and speak out of our own nature differently. This is what confronts us in Scene Nine. In Scene Two the young girl cried out to Johannes:
In Scene Nine, however, after Johannes has undergone what every path to self-knowledge demands, the same being calls to him:
This is the other side of the coin: first the devastation and despair, and now the return to equilibrium. The being calls to him:
It could not have been described otherwise, this lifting into perception of the world, this replenishing of himself with life experience. True self-knowledge through perception of the cosmos could only have been described with the words Johannes uses when he comes to himself. It has begun, of course, in Scene Two:
Then—after he has dived down into deep earth, after he has united himself with it—the power is born in his soul to let the words arise that express the essence of Scene Nine:
The words, “O man, unfold your being!” are in direct contrast to the words of Scene Two, “O man, know thou thyself!” There appears to us once and again the very same scene. It leads the first time downward to:
Then afterward it is the opposite; it has changed. The scene characterizes soul development.
But Scene Nine shows how the being of the girl attains first hope and then security. That is the turning point. It cannot be constructed haphazardly; it is actual experience. Through it we can sense how self-knowledge in a soul like Johannes Thomasius can ascend into a self- unfolding. We should perceive, too, how his experience is distributed among many single persons in whom one characteristic has been formed in each incarnation. At the end of the drama a whole community stands there in the Sun Temple, like a tableau, and the many together are a single person. The various characteristics of a human being are distributed among them all; essentially there is one person there. A pedant might like to object. “Are there not too many different members of the whole? Surely nine or twelve would be the correct number!” But reality does not always work in such a way as to be in complete agreement with theory. This way it corresponds more nearly with the truth than if we had all the single constituents of man's being marching up in military rank and file. Let us now put ourselves into the Sun Temple. There are various persons standing in the places they belong to karmically, just as their karmas have brought them together in life. But when we think of Johannes here in the middle and think, too, that all the other characters are mirrored in his soul, each character as one of his soul qualities—what is happening there if we can accept it as reality? Johannes Thomasius [IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW] Karma has actually brought these persons together as in a focal point. Nothing is without intention, plan, or reason; what the single individualities have done not only has meaning for each one himself, but each is also a soul experience for Johannes Thomasius. Everything is happening twice: once in the macrocosm, a second time in the microcosm, in the soul of Johannes. This is his initiation. Just as Maria, for example, has a special connection with him, so, too, there is an important part of his soul with a similar connection to another part of his soul. Those are absolute correspondences, embodied in the drama uncompromisingly. What one sees as outer stage- happening is, in Johannes, an inner happening in his development. There has to come about what the Hierophant has described in Scene Three:
It has already formed itself, and this truly entangled knot shows what everything is leading toward. There is absolute reality as to how karma spins its threads; it is not an aimless spinning. We experience the knot as the initiation event in Johannes' soul, and the whole scene shows us a certain individuality actually standing above the others, that is, the Hierophant, who is directing, who is guiding the threads. We need only think of the Hierophant's relationship to Maria. But it is just there that we can realize how self- knowledge can illuminate what happens to Maria in Scene Three. It is not at all pleasant, this emerging out of the Self. It is a thoroughly real experience, a forsaking of the human sheaths by our inner power; the sheaths left behind become then a battleground for inferior powers. When Maria sends down a ray of love to the Hierophant, it can only be portrayed in this way: down below, the physical body, taken over by the power of the adversary, speaks out the antithesis of what is happening above. From above a ray of love streams down, and below arises a curse. Those are the contrasting scenes: Scene Seven inDevachan, where Maria describes what she has actually brought about, and Scene Three, where, from the deserted body, the curses of the demonic forces are directed toward the Hierophant. Those are the two corresponding scenes. They complete each other. If they had had to be “constructed” theoretically from the beginning, the end result would have been incredibly poor. I therefore have based today's lecture on one aspect of this Mystery Drama, and I should like to extend this to include certain special characteristics that underlie initiation. Although it has been necessary to bring out rather sharply what has just been shown as the actual events of initiation, it should not let you lose courage or resolve in your own striving toward the spiritual world. The description of dangers was aimed at strengthening a person against powerful forces. The dangers are there; pain and sorrow are the prospect. It would be a poor sort of effort if we proposed to rise into higher worlds in the most convenient way. Striving to reach the spiritual worlds cannot yet be as convenient as rolling over the miles in a modern train, one of those many conveniences our materialistic culture has put into our everyday lives. What has been described should not make us timid; to a certain extent the very encounter with the dangers of initiation should steel our courage. Johannes Thomasius' disposition made him unable to continue painting; this grew into pain, and the pain grew into perception. So, it is that everything that arouses pain and sorrow will transform itself into perception. But we have to search earnestly for this path, and our search will be possible only when we realize that the truths of spiritual science are not at all simple. They are such profound truths for our whole life that no one will ever understand them perfectly. It is just the single example in actual life that helps us to understand the world. One can speak about the conditions of a spiritual development much more exactly when one describes the development of Johannes, rather than when one describes the development of human beings in general. In the book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment,2 the development that every human being can undertake is described, simply the concrete possibility as such. When we portray Johannes Thomasius, we look at a single individuality. But therewith we lose the opportunity of describing such development in a general way. I hope you will be induced to say that I have not yet spoken out the essential truth of the matter. For we have described two extremes and must find the various gradations between them. I can give only a few suggestive ideas, which should then begin to live in your hearts and souls. When I gave you some indications about the Gospel of St. Matthew,3 I asked you not to try to remember the very words but to try—when you go out into life—to look into your heart and soul to discover what the words have become. Read not only the printed lectures, but read also in a truly earnest way your own soul. For this to happen, however, something must have been given from outside, something has first to enter into us; otherwise, there could be self-deception of the soul. If you can begin to read in your soul, you will notice that what comes to you from outside re-echoes quite differently within. A true anthroposophical effort would be first of all to understand what is said in as many different ways as there are listeners. No one speaking about spiritual science could wish to be understood in only one sense. He would like to be understood in as many ways as there are souls present to understand him. Anthroposophy can tolerate this. One thing is needed, however, and this is not an incidental remark; one thing is needed: every single kind of understanding should be correct and true. Each one may be individual, but it must be true. Sometimes it seems that the uniqueness of the interpretation lies in being just the opposite of what has been said. When then we speak of self-knowledge, we should realize how much more useful it is to come to it by looking for mistakes within ourselves and for the truth outside. It shall not be said, “Search within yourself for the truth!” Indeed, truth is to be found outside ourselves. We will find it poured out over the world. Through self- knowledge we must become free of ourselves and undergo those various gradations of soul experience. Loneliness can become a horrid companion. We can also perceive our terrible weakness when we sense with our feelings the greatness of the cosmos out of which we have been born. But then through this we take courage. And we can make ourselves courageous enough to experience what we perceive. Then we will finally discover that, after the loss of all the certainty we had in life, there will blossom for us the first and last certainty of life, the confidence that finding ourselves in the cosmos allows us to conquer and find ourselves anew.
Let us feel these words as genuine experience. They will gradually become for us steps in our development.
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| 96. Original Impulses fo the Science of the Spirit: The Way to Higher Knowledge and Its Stages I: The Rosicrucian Way
20 Oct 1906, Berlin |
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| It will essentially be a matter of considering the way in so far as it exists in the Western Rosicrucian tradition which has been spiritually guiding and directing European cultural life by means of hidden threads. The Rosicrucian movement was working in completely hidden ways up to the last third of the 19th century. No book would tell people about true Rosicrucianism, and the matter was not for public discussion. In about the last thirty years, some of the Rosicrucian principles have been made known to the world in general through the theosophical movement; before that they were taught only in closely restricted groups. |
| 96. Original Impulses fo the Science of the Spirit: The Way to Higher Knowledge and Its Stages I: The Rosicrucian Way
20 Oct 1906, Berlin |
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A picture will be given of this way, and we shall also consider its fruits. You know some of the main aspects already, but even those of you who have heard lectures on the subject or read Lucifer,60 especially No. 32, will hear something that is new to you, for we are going to consider the subject in a way that is only possible when we are among ourselves like this, as students in the science of the spirit. It will essentially be a matter of considering the way in so far as it exists in the Western Rosicrucian tradition which has been spiritually guiding and directing European cultural life by means of hidden threads. The Rosicrucian movement was working in completely hidden ways up to the last third of the 19th century. No book would tell people about true Rosicrucianism, and the matter was not for public discussion. In about the last thirty years, some of the Rosicrucian principles have been made known to the world in general through the theosophical movement; before that they were taught only in closely restricted groups. The most elementary principles are in many respects part of theosophy, as it is called today, but only the most elementary. It will only gradually be possible to let people gain deeper insight into the wisdom taught in European Rosicrucian schools from the end of the 14th century. In the first place we have to understand that there is not just one way, but there are three to be considered. This should not be taken to mean that there are three different truths. The truth is one and one only, just as everyone has the same view from the top of a mountain. But there are different ways of getting to that mountain top. During the ascent, the view changes at every step. Only at the top and one can climb the mountain from different sides—does one have the full, open view as one sees it with one’s own eyes. It is the same with the three ways of gaining higher knowledge. One is the Oriental yoga way, the second the Gnostic Christian way, and the third the Rosicrucian Christian way. These three ways lead to the one and only truth. There are three ways because people differ in nature here on this earth. We may distinguish three types of people in this respect. Just as it would not be right for people wanting to climb the mountain to choose a path that is not the nearest to them but a long way away, so it would not be right for people to chose a spiritual training that is not the right one for them. People still have rather confused ideas about this, even within the theosophical movement, which is still only in its early stages. Many people think that there is only one way, meaning the yoga path. But neither is the Oriental yoga way the one and only one, nor is it in fact the right one for people living within European civilization. Taking a superficial view, one might find it difficult to see what this is about, for basically speaking human nature does not seem to differ that much between the races. However someone with occult powers who considers the big differences between types of human beings, will find that something which may be right for Oriental people, and perhaps also for individual people in our own culture, is certainly not right for everyone. There are people, but only a few of them in the European context, who can follow the Oriental yoga way, but it is impossible for most Europeans. It creates illusions and destroys the soul. Eastern and Western nature may not seem that different at first sight, even to a modern scientist, but they are completely different. An Oriental brain, Oriental powers of imagination and an Oriental heart function very differently from the organs of Western people. You should never ask the things of Western people that you can ask of someone who has grown up in Oriental conditions. You'd have to believe that climate, religion and social life have no influence on the human mind and spirit to think that the external conditions under which someone goes through occult training do not matter. If you know the profound spiritual influence all these outer circumstances have on human nature, however, you will understand that the yoga way is suitable for only few Europeans, really only individuals who completely and radically tear themselves away from European conditions of life, and that it is not possible for people who remain within the European culture. People who are still inwardly straight and honest Christians, to whom some of the main theses of Christianity still mean much, may chose the Gnostic Christian training. This does not differ much from the cabalistic way. Generally speaking, however, the Rosicrucian training is the only right one for Europeans. This will be considered today, with the different things people are asked to do and the fruits that beckon for those who choose it. No one should think that it is only for people with scientific training, or indeed academics. Any ordinary person can take it up. When one does take it up, one will soon be able to meet every objection based on European science that is raised against occultism. One of the main tasks of Rosicrucian masters was to arm those who followed the road to higher insight so that they would be able to defend occult knowledge and follow that road also in the world in general. An ordinary person who has just a few of the popular notions gained from modern sciences, or even none of them, but an honest desire to know the truth, will be able to take up the Rosicrucian way just as well as the most highly educated and academic people. There are major differences in the three ways. The first concerns the relationship between pupil and occult teacher; the latter gradually becomes the guru or mediates the relationship to the guru. The nature of the Oriental yoga way is such that this relationship is the strictest imaginable. The guru is absolute authority to the pupil. If this were not so, the training would not give the right result. Oriental yoga training is quite impossible unless one makes oneself strictly subservient to the guru’s authority. With the Gnostic Christian and the cabalistic way, the relationship to the guru on the physical plane is less strict. The guru guides the pupils towards Christ Jesus, he acts as a mediator. With the Rosicrucian way the guru becomes more and more a friend whose authority is based on inner assent. The only possible relationship in this case is one of complete personal trust. The least bit of distrust between teacher and pupil would break the bond that has to exist between them, and then the powers that come into play between teacher and pupil would not longer be effective. The pupil will sometimes have the wrong idea about his teacher’s role. It may easily seem to him that he simply must speak to the teacher at some point or another and often needs to be physically with him. Now it may sometimes be that a teacher must physically approach a pupil as a matter of urgent necessity, but this is not as often as the pupil may think. In the early stages a pupil cannot properly judge the influence the teacher has on him. A teacher has means that only gradually reveal themselves to the pupil. Many a word which the pupil thinks has been spoken at random is of tremendous significance. It continues to influence the pupil's soul at an unconscious level, like a guiding principle that gives him his direction. When a teacher makes rightful use of occult influences, the bond between him and his pupil will be a very real one. Then there are also influences sent from a distance, influences based on loving sympathy, which the teacher always has at hand and which the pupil will only come to recognize gradually as time goes on and he finds his way into the higher worlds. The one thing that is absolutely essential is the most complete trust; without this it would be better to undo the bond between teacher and pupil. Brief mention will now be made of the rules that play a certain role in Rosicrucian training. They need not be exactly the way they are presented here. Depending on the person, their occupation and age, the teacher will have to select various elements from different areas and arrange them in one way or another. Only an overview will be given. One thing that is extremely important in Rosicrucian training is not normally given much consideration in all occult training. This is clear, logical thinking, or at least the effort to do so. The first step is to give up all confused or biased thinking. One has to get used to seeing things as they are in the world, from a great, selfless points of view. The best way of doing this for an ordinary person wanting to follow the Rosicrucian way is to study the elementary things taught in the science of the spirit. There is no justification in saying: ‘What good will it do for me to study the things taught about higher worlds, human races and cultures, karma and reincarnation when I am unable to see and perceive these things for myself.’ It is not an acceptable objection, for working with these truths cleanses one’s thinking and disciplines it, so that one will then be ready for the steps that follow in occult training. In ordinary life people are generally very chaotic in their thinking. The guiding principles and stages of human development and planetary evolution made known by those able to perceive them bring order to one's thinking. All this is part of Rosicrucian training. The teacher will therefore ask the student to think himself into the elementary teaching of reincarnation and karma, the three worlds, the akashic record, the evolution of the earth and the human races. The whole elementary subject matter now taught in the science of the spirit is the best possible preparation for the ordinary person. Those able to give greater acuity to their thinking and enter with greater intensity into the actual basic supporting structure of the human soul, may study the books that have been specially written to discipline people’s thinking. The books written for this purpose—and they may not actually include the word ‘theosophy’—are my Truth and Science and Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. One does of course write such books so that they may serve a purpose. People wishing to take their thinking through energetic training to enable them to take their studies further, will do well to subject their minds to the ‘mental and spiritual gymnastics’ these books demand. This will give them the foundation on which to build their Rosicrucian studies. Observing the physical plane, you gain sensory impressions in colour and light, heat and cold, smell and taste, sensations of pressure and touch, and auditory perceptions. Thought and the rational mind are brought to bear on these. The rational mind and thought, are still part of the physical plane. You can perceive all these things on the physical plane. Perceptions gained on the astral plane look very different. And those made on the devachan plane are very different again, let alone those in even higher regions of the spirit. Someone who has not yet gained insight into the higher worlds can, however, picture them to himself. The way I habitually seek to describe things is also intended to provide images of those worlds. Anyone who then rises to the higher regions will see for himself how they influence him. We learn new things on each plane. One thing, however, remains the same through all worlds up to the devachan. It is trained logical thinking. Only on the buddhi plane will thinking no longer have the same value as on the physical plane, then a different way of thinking has to develop. But thinking is the same for the three worlds below the buddhi plane—the physical, astral and devachanic planes. If therefore you train your thinking well by means of study in the physical world, this thinking will prove a good guide in the higher world, so that you do not stumble as easily as someone who wants to ascend into regions of the spirit with confused thinking habits. Rosicrucian training therefore teaches people to move freely in the higher worlds by encouraging them to discipline their thinking. Reaching those worlds you will get to know ways of perceiving things that do not exist on the physical plane, but you will be able to control them with the thinking you have developed. The second thing a student following the Rosicrucian way learns is vision in images. You prepare for this by gradually learning to enter into the kind of ideas expressed in images that represent the higher worlds in the sense of Goethe’s words ‘All things that are transient are but a likeness.’61 The way we usually move through the physical world, we take in the things as they present themselves to the senses and not the things that are behind them. We shall only be free of this physical world when we learn to take the things that surround us as allegories or symbols. We therefore have to try and develop a moral relationship to them. Teachers will give directions on how external phenomena may be seen as symbols of spiritual elements, but pupils can also do a great deal themselves. You may look at an autumn crocus, for instance, and a violet. Seeing the autumn crocus as a symbol for a melancholy state of mind, I have taken it not just the way it presents itself on the outside, but as an allegory for a quality. The violet, on the other hand, may be seen as an allegory for a quiet, godly mind. You thus move on from one thing to another, from plant to plant, animal to animal, and see spiritual qualities reflected in them. This will make your ability to form ideas flexible, freeing it from the hard outlines of sensory perception. You may begin to see a quality reflected in every animal species, taking one animal to be the symbol of strength, another of cleverness. We have to pursue this seriously, wherever we are, and not be superficial about it. Essentially the whole of human language is in symbols. Language is nothing but speaking in symbols. It has to be used even in science, where people feel the need to be objective in referring to things, and the words act as symbols. If you speak of the ala or wings of the nose, you know they are not wings, but they are given that name. For those who wish to remain on the physical plane it will be better not lose themselves too much in such symbolism, but advanced students will not lose themselves. Going into the matter one comes to realize the depths of our language in its original form. Deep thinkers like Paracelsus62 and Jakob Böhme63 partly owed their development to the fact that they did not hesitate to enter into conversation with country people and tramps and study the imaginative quality of language. At their time, words like ‘nature’, ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ still had much more of an influence. A country woman plucking a feather from a goose would call the inner part of the feather its ‘soul’. The student must find such symbols in the language for himself. He then comes free of the physical world and learns to rise to seeing in images. When the world thus becomes parable, likeness, to the student, this has a powerful effect. If he practises this for long enough he'll notice the effects. Looking at a flower, for instance, something will gradually come away from the flower. The colour which at first was merely there on the flower's surface rises like a small flame and floats freely in space. The ability to see in images thus develops. It will be like this with all objects, as if their surface comes free. The whole of space fills with the colour which floats away in space like a flame. And so the whole world of light seems to withdraw and come apart from the physical reality. When such a colour image comes free to float in space, it soon begins to attach itself to something. It does not stop somewhere at random; it embraces an entity which then shows itself in the colour as a spiritual entity. The colour which the student has drawn away from the objects of the physical world clothes the spiritual entities in astral space. This is the point where the occult teacher's counsel is needed; otherwise the pupils might easily lose the ground from under their feet, which may be for one of two reasons. One is that every pupil has to go through one particular experience. The ideas we gain of physical things, not only through colour, but also smell and sound, show themselves in peculiar, ugly and sometimes also beautiful forms—animal faces, shapes of plants and also ugly human faces. This first experience is a mirror reflection of one’s own soul. One's own passions and drives, the evil that still lies in the soul, appear in astral space before the pupil as though in a mirror. Pupils then need their occult teacher’s counsel; their teacher will tell them that this is not something objective but a mirroring of their own inner nature. You’ll realize that the pupils depend on their teacher's counsel if we also consider the way in which such images appear. It has often been stressed that everything is the other way round in astral space, everything is in mirror images. The pupil may easily be misled by delusive visions, especially if they mirror his own nature. The mirror image of a passion not only presents itself as an animal coming towards you—that would be the least of your problems—but you also have to take something else into account. Let us assume someone has a really evil passion lying hidden within. Such a drive or an appetite will very often show itself in enticing forms in the reflection, whilst good qualities sometimes do not look at all attractive. This is something legend speaks of in a most beautiful way. You find an image of it in the myth of Hercules. As he set out on his way, his bad and good qualities presented themselves to him, with vice clad in the enticing form of beauty and virtue wearing the garment of unpretentiousness. There is also something else. Even if a pupil is already able to see things objectively, there is always still the other possibility, which is that inner arbitrariness acts as a power that guides and directs the phenomena. Pupils have to learn to see through this and understand it, for wishes have tremendous power on the astral plane. Everything that gives direction here in the physical world will not be there when you enter into the world of images. If you’ve deceived yourself into thinking you have done something here on the physical plane when in fact you have not done it, you'll soon discover the truth of it, for the facts will show it to you on the physical plane. It is not like that in astral space. There your own wishes present illusory images to you, and you need the guidance of someone who knows how these imaginative images must be put together to show their true significance. The third element in Rosicrucian training is to learn the occult script. What is this? There are certain images, symbols, shown in the form of simple lines or combinations of colours. Such symbols are a specific occult sign language. The following may serve as an example. There is a process in the higher world that also has an effect in the physical world—a rotating vortex. You can see this in a stellar nebula, the Orion nebula for instance. There you see a spiral. This, however, is on the physical plane. But you can also see it on all other planes. This (Fig. 8a) is a figure found in all kinds of configurations on the astral plane. If you understand this figure, you will also understand, with its aid, how one human race changes into another. When the first sub-race of our present root race came into being, the sun was in the sign of the Crab. At that time, therefore, one race swung into another; because of this the occult sign for the Crab is this (Fig. 8b). The signs of the zodiac are thus all occult signs. We only have to get to know and understand their significance. [IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW] The pentagram is another such sign (Fig. 8c). The pupils learn to connect particular inner responses and feelings with this sign. They are the counter image of things that happen in the astral world. This sign language, the occult script which pupils learn, is no more and no less than reflecting the laws of higher worlds. The pentagram thus is a sign for several things. Just as the letter B is used in many different words, so the signs of the occult script may have different meanings. The pentagram, the hexagram, the angle and other figures may be used together in occult writing which in itself is a signpost in the higher worlds. The pentagram is the sign for the five-fold human being, the sign for reticence, keeping silent, and also the sign behind the species soul of the rose. If you connect the petals of a rose in your picture, you have pentagram. Just as the letter B means something different in ‘band’ and in ‘bibber’, so do the signs signify different things in occult writing. You learn to arrange them in the right way. These are the signposts on the astral plane. Just as someone who is illiterate may be seen relative to someone who is able to read, so someone only seeing the images as images relates to someone who has learned the occult script. The letters used on the physical plane are often arbitrary, but originally they reflected the astral sign language. Take an ancient astral symbol, the staff of Hermes with the serpent. In our script it has become the sign E (Fig. 9). [IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW] Or take the W, which indicates the wave motion of water. It is the sign for the human soul and also for ‘word’. The M is nothing but the upper lip of man: [IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW] All this has grown more arbitrary in the course of evolution. On the occult planes, however, necessity rules. There you can live these things. The fourth thing is the life rhythm, as it is called. People know very little of this in ordinary life. They go through life egoistically. Only children at school have a certain life rhythm still in their timetable, for the lessons of each day are repeated week after week. But who does such a thing in ordinary life? Yet we only progress to higher development by bringing rhythm, repetition, into our lives. Rhythm prevails everywhere in the natural world. Everything is arranged in rhythms—the movement of the planets around the sun, the annual appearance and fading away of plants, and even the animal world, the sexual life of the animals. Man alone is permitted to live without rhythm, so that he may act out of freedom. But he must bring rhythm into the chaos again by choice. A good rhythm is to do occult things at particular times each day. Pupils must therefore do their meditation and concentration exercises at the same time each day, just as the sun sends its energies down to the earth at the same time in spring. This is one way of bringing rhythm into life. Another way is to make one's breathing rhythmical, as instructed by the occult teacher. Breathing in, holding one’s breath and breathing out must be made rhythmical for a short time each day, and this is done under the occult teacher's experienced guidance. A new rhythm thus replaces the old one. Bringing such rhythm into life is one of the preconditions for ascent to the higher worlds. No one can do this without the guidance of a teacher. Here the aim is merely to tell you the principle of it. The fifth thing is to learn the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm, as it is called. It involves the teacher giving the pupils directions to concentrate their thoughts on certain parts of the body. Those of you who have heard the lecture on the way the senses relate to the higher worlds will remember that the whole world has a part in creating the physical body. The eye is created by the light, by the spirits active in the light. Every point in the physical body has a connection with a specific power in the cosmos. Consider the point at the root of the nose. There was a time when the etheric head extended well beyond the physical body. The Atlanteans still had a point on the forehead where the etheric head extended above the physical, as is still the case in horses and other animals today. The ether head of a horse still projects a long way today. In human beings, the ether body and the physical body have been made to coincide in the point I spoke of, and this allows them to develop the parts of the physical brain that enable them to say I to themselves. The organ which enables man to say I to himself is connected with a specific event during the Atlantean period of earth evolution. The occult teacher will instruct his pupil: ‘Direct your thoughts and concentrate them on this point.’ He’ll then give him a mantra64 This awakens a power in this part of the head which corresponds to a particular process in the macrocosm. Correspondence is thus established between microcosm and macrocosm. In the same way concentrating on the eye will give understanding of the sun. The whole organization of the macrocosm is thus found in the spirit in our own organs. [IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW] When pupils have practised this for a sufficiently long time, they will be permitted to enter more deeply into the things they have discovered in this way. They can go to the akashic record for instance and choose the point in time during Atlantean evolution when the point at the root of the nose on which they have been concentrating came into existence, or they find the sun by concentrating on the eye. This sixth stage, entering deeply into the macrocosm, is called ‘contemplation’. It gives the pupils insight into the world, enabling them to take insight into their own nature beyond the personal level. This is different from le popular chit chat about self knowledge. You do not find your self by looking inside yourself, but only if you look beyond yourself. This is the same self which created the eye and brought forth the sun. To look for the part of your self that corresponds to the eye you have to look to the sun. You must perceive the world outside you to be your self Looking inside only leads to hardening in oneself, to a higher form of egoism. When people say: ‘I only have to let my self speak’, they have no idea of the danger this holds. Self knowledge must not be practised unless the pupils following the white path also practise self renunciation. If they learn to say ‘That is me’ to every thing around themselves, they are ripe to have self knowledge, as Goethe let Faust say: Before my eyes The parts of our self are everywhere out there. This is also shown in the myth of Dionysus, for example, and it is why Rosicrucian training puts such value on objective, calm contemplation of the outside world. ‘To see yourself in your reality, look in the mirror of the outside world and essence. You will perceive much more clearly what lives in your soul if you look in the eyes of your fellow human beings than if you concentrate on yourself and enter into your own soul. This is an important, essential truth, and no one who takes the white path dare ignore it. Today many people have transformed their ordinary egoism into a sophisticated egoism. They call it theosophical development when they take their ordinary, everyday self to the highest possible level. They really want to bring out the personal aspect. True occult insight will show, on the other hand, that the inner life opens up when we come to know our higher self in the world. When the pupil has developed this attitude of mind in contemplation, with the self flowing out over all things, when he feels the flower that grows towards him just as he does the finger he moves towards himself, when he knows that the whole earth and the whole world is his body, he comes to know his higher self. He will then speak to the flower as to a part of his own body: ‘You are part of me, part of my self.’ He will gradually come to feel inwardly what is known as the seventh level of Rosicrucian training—being in harmony with God. This evolves as the element of feeling that guides the human being into the higher worlds, where he must not just think about the higher worlds but, learn to feel in these worlds. The fruits will then be apparent to him, if he endeavours to learn under the continued guidance of his teacher and he need not be afraid that this occult way might lead to an abyss. All the things referred to as dangers of occult development do not arise if development is guided along the right lines. When this happens, the occult seeker of the way becomes a true helper for humanity. During the Imagination the possibility arises that the individual spends a particular part of the night in conscious awareness. The physical body will be asleep, as usual, but part of this sleep state will be filled with a life of dreams that have meaning and content. This is the first sign of entering into the higher worlds. Pupils will gradually bring their experiences across into ordinary consciousness. They then see the astral spirits everywhere in the world around them—also here, in this hall, among the chairs, or out in the woods and fields. People reach three levels in the process of imaginative insight. At the first level they’ll perceive the spirits that are behind the sensory impressions gained in the physical world. There is a spirit behind the colour red or blue, behind every rose; every animal has its species or group soul behind it The individuals gain daytime clairvoyance. If the pupil waits a while longer, calmly practising the Imagination, and also entering deeply into occult writing, he will be day-clairaudient. The third level is where he gets to know all the things that are to be found in the astral world and draw human beings down, leading them astray into evil, and they are now really there to guide him upwards. You come to know kama loka. With the fourth, fifth and sixth parts of Rosicrucian training—life rhythm, relationship between microcosm and macrocosm, contemplation of the macrocosm—pupils reach three more levels. At the first of these they gain insight into conditions of life between death and a new birth. This comes to them in devachan. The next level is the possibility of seeing how forms change into one another—transmutation, the metamorphosis of forms. Human beings have not always had the lungs they have today, for instance; lungs only go back to Lemurian times. During the preceding Hyperborean time human beings had a different form, and before that a different one again, which is because they were in the astral state, and before that because they were in devachan. One also says that at this level pupils get to know the relationship between the different globes,66 that is, they have direct perception of how one globe, or state of form, changes into another. Finally, before they move on to even higher worlds, they have direct perception of the metamorphosis of states of life. They perceive how the different spirits move through the different realms, or rounds and how one realm becomes another. After that they must move to yet higher levels, but these cannot be discussed today. The things that have been said today will give you enough material to work with for the time being. You really have to work on these things. That is the first step towards reaching the heights. It is good to have the Rosicrucian way presented in an orderly fashion for once. It may be possible to travel on the physical plane even if one does not have a map, but on the astral plane it is necessary to have such a map. Consider the things I have said as a kind of map; this will be useful not only in this life but also when you go through the gate to the higher worlds. Those who gain these things from the science of the spirit will find that the map serves them well after death. The occultist knows that human beings often have a miserable time as they arrive on the other side and have no idea where they actually are in life and what it is that they are experiencing. People who have gone through the teachings of spiritual science know their way about and know how to characterize the things themselves. It would be of great benefit to humanity if people were not to shrink from setting out on the road to higher understanding.
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| 232. Mystery Knowledge & Mystery Centres: Strivings for Spiritual Knowledge During the Middle Ages and the Rosicrucian Mysteries
23 Dec 1923, Dornach Translated by E. H. Goddard, Dorothy S. Osmond |
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| The spiritual striving of that period is often described under the name of the Mysteries of the Rosicrucians. This designation is in a certain sense quite justifiable, but it must not be confused with the charlatan element we often meet in literature without realising how much charlatanry there is in the things of which we read. The name ‘Rosicrucian’ must direct our attention to that deeply earnest striving for knowledge which existed during these centuries in almost every region of Europe, Central, Western and Southern. |
| This went on even as late as the fifteenth century. The Nature Spirits could still approach the Rosicrucian investigators who were prepared in the right way. But the Rosicrucian investigators knew that in ancient times investigators had not merely been able to reach the Nature Spirits, but could come in touch with the higher Cosmic Intelligences who spoke to them of the gold-secret connected with the Sun, of the silver-secret and the carbon-secret connected with the Moon, and of the important secrets of history connected with Venus, and so on. |
| 232. Mystery Knowledge & Mystery Centres: Strivings for Spiritual Knowledge During the Middle Ages and the Rosicrucian Mysteries
23 Dec 1923, Dornach Translated by E. H. Goddard, Dorothy S. Osmond |
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We will utilise the last lecture before the Course which is to be given here, by bringing together what has been said about the various Mysteries belonging to this or that region of the Earth, and attempting to describe to you, at any rate from one point of view, the very nature and being of the Mysteries, in the form they took in the Middle Ages, approximately from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries. I do not speak of this epoch because it is particularly complete in itself but because it can be used to show the form human striving was taking during that period in the most civilised parts of the Earth. The spiritual striving of that period is often described under the name of the Mysteries of the Rosicrucians. This designation is in a certain sense quite justifiable, but it must not be confused with the charlatan element we often meet in literature without realising how much charlatanry there is in the things of which we read. The name ‘Rosicrucian’ must direct our attention to that deeply earnest striving for knowledge which existed during these centuries in almost every region of Europe, Central, Western and Southern. We must realise that the figure of Faust as described by Goethe, with all his deep striving of soul, with all his earnest effort, is a later figure, no longer anything like as profound in soul as many a researcher to be found in the mediaeval laboratories. These are individuals of whom nothing reaches us by way of history but who nevertheless laboured earnestly during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I spoke in the last lecture of the tragic note that predominates in the investigators of this epoch. The outstanding trait in them is the feeling that they must needs strive after the highest knowledge that can be creatively active in man; and yet they felt, not only that they could never reach this highest goal but that from a certain point of view the very striving after it gives ground for serious doubt. I have said that we do not find among these scientists in their alchemical laboratories a knowledge that is ready-made and theoretical but a knowledge that is intimately connected with the whole human being, with the innermost feelings and deepest longings of the heart; it was indeed a knowledge of the heart. What was its origin? You will most readily understand it if I try now to give you a picture of this tragic scepticism of the mediaeval investigators. Let me first direct your attention once again to the form taken by human cognition on the Earth in very ancient times. The most ancient form of human knowledge, intimately bound up as it was with the life of the individual human being, was not of such a nature as to lead man to look up to the planets and perceive the grandeur and sublimity of their mathematical movements, such as men reckon out and devise today. At that time, each planet, as all else spread out in the Heavens, was a living being, and not only a living, but an ensouled being, nay even a being of spirit. Men spoke constantly of the families of the planets, of the families of the heavenly bodies, for they knew that just as there exists a blood-relationship between the members of a human family, similarly there exists an inner relationship between the members of a planetary system. There was an absolute parallel between what is to be found in man and what reveals itself outside in the Cosmos. Let us take on region of the Earth as an example, and show from that the kind of knowledge man learned to acquire in the most ancient of the Mysteries when he looked up to the Sun. At that time there still existed Mystery-sanctuaries arranged with a specially prepared skylight, so that at certain definite times of day the Sun could be seen in a diminished light. Thus you must imagine the most important chamber in many an ancient Sun Temple with a skylight in the roof and the window filled with some kind of material—not glass in our modern sense but a material through which the orb of the Sun was seen in a dim light as of twilight at a certain time of day. The pupil was prepared in his soul to observe the solar orb with the right mood and feeling. He had to make his feeling receptive and sensitive, he had to quicken the inner perception of his soul, so that when he exposed it, through his eye, to the orb of the Sun, the latter made an impression on him of which he could form a clear idea in consciousness. Now, of course, many people today look at the Sun through smoked glass, but they are not prepared in their power of feeling to receive the impression in such a way that it remains in their soul as a very special impression. The pupil in those ancient Mysteries, however, received a very definite impression of the dimmed solar orb after he had undergone long exercises beforehand. A man who was able once to have such an impression could truly never forget it. With this impression the pupil also gained more understanding for certain things around him than he formerly had. Thus after he had been prepared by the majestic impression made upon him by the Sun, the special quality of the substance gold was allowed to work upon him; and through this Sun-preparation, the pupil actually came to a deep understanding of the quality of gold. When one looks into these things, it is painful to realise the triviality of our modern consciousness, when we find in so many historical works the reason why this or the other ancient philosopher allocated gold to the Sun or gave the same symbol to gold and to the Sun. Man has no longer any idea that what was thus known in those olden times, proceeded from long exercises and preparations. A pupil who looked with his whole soul, who as it were steeped his sight in this dimmed light of the Sun, was thereby prepared to understand the gold of the Earth. How then did he understand it? His attention awoke to the fact that gold is not receptive for that which constitutes for living organisms the breath of life, namely oxygen. Many, indeed most of the other metals are thoroughly receptive to oxygen, but oxygen does not affect or alter gold. This non-receptivity, this obstinacy of gold in the face of that in which man, as you know, has his very life, made a deep impression on the pupil of the ancient Mysteries. He received the impression that gold cannot directly approach life. Now neither can the Sun approach life directly; and the pupil learned that it is well that neither gold nor the Sun can directly approach life. For then he was gradually led to realise the fact that because gold has no relationship with oxygen, the breath of life, when it is introduced in a certain dose into the human organism, it has a quite special effect. It has no relation to the etheric body, no direct relation to the astral body; but it has a direct relation to what lies in human thinking. My dear friends, just consider how far thinking is removed from life—especially in our modern age! A man can sit like a block of wood and think quite abstractly. He can even think quite livingly in an abstract way. But on the other hand, he cannot by thinking bring about any change in his organism. Man’s thought has become more and more powerless. But this thinking is set in motion by the Ego-organisation, and gold inserted in the right dose into the human organism, can bring back power to thought. It restores to the life of thought the power to work down into the astral body and even into the etheric body; thus through the working of gold man is quickened in his thinking. One of the secrets of these ancient Mysteries was the secret of gold in connection with the Sun. This relationship between the substance gold and the cosmic working of the Sun was perceived by the pupil of these ancient Mysteries. In a similar way the pupil was led to experience the working of the opposite pole of gold. Gold is an impulse for the quickening of human thinking, so that human thought can work down as far as into the etheric body. But what would be the opposite pole of that? [IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW] Ego-organisation, astral body, etheric body and physical body are the members of the human organism, and we may say that through gold the Ego-organisation becomes capable of working down into the etheric body. The etheric body can then go further and work upon the physical body, but gold brings it about that one can actually hold the thoughts in all their power as far as the etheric body. Now what is the opposite pole of this? It is an activity that manifests itself when the breath of life—oxygen—is attracted by something in man or in nature. For as gold is obstinate in the face of oxygen, repels it, will have nothing to do with it, and has therefore no direct influence on the etheric body or on the astral body but only on the thought-world of the Ego-organisation—as gold repels oxygen, so carbon on the other hand has in man a direct affinity with oxygen. We breathe out carbonic acid gas. We make it by uniting carbon with oxygen. And the plants require carbonic acid for their life. Carbon possesses the exactly opposite property of gold. Now carbon played a great part in the very ancient Mysteries. They spoke on the one hand of gold as a very specially important substance in the study of man, and on the other hand of carbon. Carbon was called the Philosopher’s Stone. Gold and the Philosopher’s Stone were very important things in olden times. Carbon appears on Earth in a variety of forms. Diamond is carbon—a hard carbon; graphite is carbon; coal is carbon; anthracite is carbon. Carbon appears to us in most diverse forms. Through the methods which were practised in the ancient Mysteries, men learned however to understand that there exist still other forms of carbon, besides those we find here on Earth. And in this connection the pupil in the Mysteries had to undergo another preparation. For besides the Sun-preparation of which I have spoken, there was also in addition the Moon-preparation. Along with the ancient sanctuaries of the Sun Mysteries we find too a kind of observatory, wherein a man could open his soul and his physical vision to the forms of the Moon. Whereas in the Sun-training the pupil had to behold the Sun at certain times of day in a diminished light, now for weeks at a time he had to expose his eyes to the different forms which the orb of the Moon assumes by night. Gazing thus with his whole soul, the pupil received a definite inner impression, which gave him a new knowledge. Just as the soul by exposing itself to the Sun became endowed with the power of the Sun, similarly, by exposing itself to the phases of the Moon, the soul became endowed with the power of the Moon. Man now learned what metamorphoses the substance of carbon can undergo. On the Earth, carbon is coal or graphite or diamond or anthracite; but on the Moon that which we find here on the Earth as diamond or anthracite or coal—is silver; and that was the secret possessed in these ancient Mysteries. Carbon is silver on the Moon. Carbon is the Philosopher’s Stone, and on the Moon it is silver. The knowledge that was impressed so profoundly on the pupil in the ancient Mysteries was this: any substance whatsoever is only what it seems in this one place, at this one time. It was sheer ignorance not to know that carbon is diamond, coal or anthracite only on the Earth. What exists on the Earth as diamond or graphite, on the Moon is silver. If we could at this moment dispatch a piece of ordinary black coal to the Moon, it would there be silver. A vision of this radical metamorphosis was what the pupil attained in those ancient times. It is the foundation, not of that fraudulent Alchemy of which one hears today, but of the true Alchemy. This ancient Alchemy cannot be acquired by any such abstract means of acquiring knowledge as we have today. We observe things and we think about them. Alchemy could not be attained in that way at all. Today man directs his telescope to a certain star, he determines parallel axes and the like, and reckons and reckons; or if he wants to study a certain substance, he applies the spectroscope and so on. But everything that can be learned in this way is infinitely abstract compared with what could once be learned of the stars; and this ancient wisdom, this true astrology, could only be learned, as I explained in the last lecture, by establishing a real and living intercourse with the Intelligences of the Cosmos. That itself was attainment of knowledge, when man was able to hold converse, in his soul and spirit, with the Intelligences of the Cosmos. What gold signifies for the human organism is connected with the secret of the Sun; and through exposing his soul to the Sun-existence, man thereby entered into relation with the Intelligences of the Sun. They it was who could tell him of the properties of gold. In like manner he entered into relation with the Intelligences of the Moon. And man learned to know how the Intelligences of the Moon were themselves once in olden times the great Teachers of Earth-humanity, who taught on Earth the primeval wisdom. They were the same who today let their forces and impulses work from the Moon. They withdrew from the Earth at a certain time in evolution, and there on the Moon they founded, as it were, a colony after the Moon had separated from the Earth. Thus those Intelligences who once lived on the Earth and are today the Moon-Intelligences have to do with this second secret, the carbon-silver secret. Such was the character of knowledge in ancient times. Let me quote another example. As the pupil could receive impressions from the Sun or from the Moon, so by means of a still further preparation of soul he could also receive impressions from the other planets; and one of the secrets thus obtained was that relating to Venus. Venus is studied today through the telescope, and is regarded as being like any other star or planet. The human body, on the other hand, is studied by investigating, say, a section of the liver and then a section of the brain, and analysing them according to their cellular structure, just as though brain substance and liver substance were not radically different. And in the very same way a student will direct his telescope to Mercury, Venus, Mars, and so on, believing all of them to be composed of substances of a like nature. But in ancient times it was known that if a man were considering the Moon or the Sun, he was able to come to an idea of them by means of that which has direct relation to the physical Earth: the earthy, the watery, the airy, the fiery. And if he extended his observation in a spiritual way to the Moon, he came to the ether. If, however, he extended his observation to Venus, then he knew that he came into a spiritual world, a purely astral world. What we see as physical Venus is but the external sign for something which lives and has its being in the astral, in the astral light. Physical light is in the case of Venus something quite different from physical Sunlight, for instance. For physical Sunlight still has a relationship with what can live on the Earth as Earth-produced fight; whereas Venus-light—it is childish to think it is simply reflected Sunlight—Venus-light shines forth from the spiritual world. If the pupil exposed his soul to this light, he learned to know the Intelligences connected with Venus. These were Intelligences who lived in continual opposition to the Intelligences of the Sun; and a great role was played in the ancient Mysteries by this opposition between the Intelligences of Venus and the Intelligences of the Sun. Men spoke, with a certain justification, of a continual conflict between them. There were starting-points of such conflicts, when the Venus Intelligences began to combat the Intelligences of the Sun. There were times of intensified conflicts, there were culminations, catastrophes and crises. And in that which lay between an attack and a catastrophe or crisis, you had, as it were, a section of that great battle of opposition which takes place in the spiritual world, and appears in its external symbol only in the astrological and astronomical relationships between Venus and the Sun. It worked itself out in successive phases. And no one can understand the inner impulses of history on Earth if he does not know of this conflict between Venus and the Sun. For all that takes place here on Earth in the way of conflict, all that happens in the evolution of civilisations, is an earthly picture, an earthly copy, of this conflict of Venus versus Sun. Such knowledge existed in the ancient Mysteries because there was a relation between the human beings on the Earth and the Intelligences of the Cosmos. Then came the epoch of which I have spoken, the epoch from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries a.d. The mediaeval investigators in their alchemical laboratories were no longer able to reach up to the Cosmic Intelligences. They could get only as far as the Nature Spirits. They made countless experiments—of which I gave you an instance in the last lecture, when I spoke of the transformation of oxalic acid into formic acid—countless experiments of such a kind as would reveal to them the divine working and weaving in the processes and things of Nature; but they could only do so inasmuch as they had prepared themselves in the right way through that spirit of piety of which I told you; then, through their experiments, the Nature Spirits spoke to them. Now let us realise quite clearly the position of such an investigator at that time. He stood in his laboratory, and he could say: ‘I bring to my laboratory the substances, the retorts, the heating ovens, and I make various experiments. I put certain questions to Nature. And when I do this the Nature spirits enter my laboratory with their revelations. I can perceive them.’ This went on even as late as the fifteenth century. The Nature Spirits could still approach the Rosicrucian investigators who were prepared in the right way. But the Rosicrucian investigators knew that in ancient times investigators had not merely been able to reach the Nature Spirits, but could come in touch with the higher Cosmic Intelligences who spoke to them of the gold-secret connected with the Sun, of the silver-secret and the carbon-secret connected with the Moon, and of the important secrets of history connected with Venus, and so on. It is true they had records preserved from still older traditions, records that told them how there had once been this knowledge, but the records were not specially important for them; if one has once been touched by the spiritual, then historical documents are not so terribly important as they are for our modern materialistic age. It is really astounding to see how infinitely important it is to many people when some discovery is made such as the recent case when the skeleton of a dinosaurus was found in the Gobi desert. Of course it is an important find, but such discoveries are never anything but isolated, broken fragments; whereas in a spiritual way we can really enter into the secrets of the Cosmos. Historical documents were certainly not likely to impress those mediaeval investigators. It was in another way that the mediaeval alchemist acquired a knowledge of how man had once been able to attain this cosmic knowledge but that he could now reach only the Nature Spirits, the Spirits behind the Elements. It happened in this way. In moments when certain observations of Nature were made, or certain experiments performed, when these investigators were thus approaching the sphere of the Nature Spirits, then certain Nature Spirits were there present and told how there had once been human beings who stood in connection with the Cosmic Intelligences. That was the pain that gnawed at the heart of these mediaeval investigators! The Nature Spirits spoke to them of a former age when man had been able to come into connection with the Intelligences of the Cosmos. And the investigators had to say: ‘These Nature Spirits tell us of a past age now vanished into the abyss of human knowledge and human existence.’ Thus this gift of the mediaeval alchemist, his gift of access to the Nature Spirits, was really a doubtful one. On the one hand he approached the spiritual of Nature, the spiritual of air, and of water—he approached Gnomes, Sylphs and Undines in all their living reality. On the other hand, there were some amongst these beings who told him of things that overwhelmed him with despair, telling him how humanity had once been in connection not only with the Nature Spirits but with the Intelligences of the Cosmos, with whom the Nature Spirits themselves were still connected but whom man could no longer reach. That was the feeling of these mediaeval alchemists and it often came to expression in a far more sublime, a far more grandly tragic manner than we find in Goethe’s Faust, beautiful and powerful though it is! The utterance which Faust addresses to the Moon, to the silver shining light of the Moon in which he would fain bathe, would have been made with much greater depth by the investigators of the Middle Ages when the Nature Spirits told them about the secret of carbon and silver, a secret which again is closely and intimately bound up with man. For what was it that man experienced in ancient times in this connection? He experienced not merely how gold is connected with the Sun, but how gold works in man, how silver and carbon work in man, and similarly how other metals related to the other planets work in man. In olden times man experienced these things in the circulation of the blood in his body. He experienced them in a conscious way. He felt the blood streaming and pulsing through his head, and at the same time he felt it as a picture of the whole Earth, this streaming of the blood through the head. And in that sphere where the head is not enclosed by bone, where it opens downwards towards the heart and the breast, he felt a copy in miniature of the rising up of the atmosphere from the Earth. Thus in what man learned from the Cosmos he recognised the metamorphoses that went on in his own organism; he could follow the planets as he passed through the various organs of the body. We find here a confirmation of the penetrating words of Mephistopheles, where he says, ‘Blood is a very special fluid’. For in its metamorphosis our blood reflects the magnificent metamorphosis from carbon to silver. It all lives in man’s blood. Thus did the mediaeval investigator regard man’s loss of the knowledge of the Cosmic Intelligences as a loss of his own humanity. And it is in reality but a faint reflection of this experience that we find in Faust when he opens the Book of the Macrocosm and wants to rise to the Cosmic Intelligences, then shuts the Book again because he cannot do it, and contents himself with the Spirit of the Earth. We have here only a faint echo of the tragic mood we find in these mediaeval investigators, whose names even have not come down to us. They had to hear from the Nature Spirits, whose sphere they entered through their alchemical investigations, how there had once been a connection between man and the Cosmic Intelligences. Now all this is very deeply linked with what had to develop in ancient Greece when it became necessary for the Mysteries of Samothrace, the Mysteries of the Kabiri, to be diluted and weakened down into the philosophy of Aristotle, which then played such an important role in the Middle Ages. All the time, below the surface of what we know as Aristotelianism, there continued to work powerfully, although tragically, right on into the fifteenth century what I have been able to sketch for you in this fragment out of those times. Behind the Macedonian epoch lie two kinds of Mysteries. There lie the Mysteries that saw deeply into the secrets of the cosmic substances and their connections with the Cosmic Intelligences; and there lie, too, the Mysteries with which man began to descend from the Cosmic Intelligences to the Nature Spirits. Man’s vision was closed to those Cosmic Intelligences, but it was turned for that very reason to the Nature Spirits. That was the crisis which came to fulfilment at the time of Alexander and Aristotle. In all that happened at that time we can still see how the abstractions of Aristotle are rooted in the ancient Mysteries. Anyone who knows about the carbon-silver secret, and then reads the observations of Aristotle that have come down to posterity—his most important writings have not come down to us—but anyone who reads what is written there relating to the secret of the Moon, will at once understand the connection with those olden times. These are things which will be illuminated in the lectures 2 I now intend to give on the historical development of humanity from the standpoint of Anthroposophy.
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| 97. The Christian Mystery (2000): How do we Gain Insight into the Higher Worlds in the Rosicrucian Way?
11 Dec 1906, Munich Translated by Anna R. Meuss |
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| The term ‘Rosicrucian’ may sound strange and peculiar to some of you. One has heard of the Rosicrucians as a secret brotherhood which first appeared under that name in about the 14th century. |
| 157 Even there you'll find nothing about genuine Rosicrucianism, for the secrets of the Rosicrucians were passed on by the oral tradition. Things that are outwardly given the name ‘Rosicrucian’ are hardly suitable for getting at the essence of the Rosicrucians. |
| Strict adherence to such a rhythm was an important part of Rosicrucian training. At the 5th stage of Rosicrucian training the pupil would have living experience of the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm. |
| 97. The Christian Mystery (2000): How do we Gain Insight into the Higher Worlds in the Rosicrucian Way?
11 Dec 1906, Munich Translated by Anna R. Meuss |
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One of the less well known poems written by Goethe is called The Secrets.153 It has remained a fragment. Goethe speaks of a pilgrim, Brother Mark, whose peregrinations remind us of the destiny of Parsifal. Having travelled a long way he comes to an isolated house, a monastic kind of building. There he finds a federation, a gathering of twelve persons. He ultimately gets to know the nature, the character of the twelve and of a thirteenth who is their leader. Each of the twelve has something to do that is extraordinarily important. It is to give a kind of description of the life of the thirteenth. This thirteenth individual has worked his way through chaos and obstacles of all kinds. Goethe says of him:
meaning someone who develops the higher human being in himself. This thirteenth individual, called Humanus, has grown completely beyond himself. The greatness, the influence of this wise individual, as we feel and intuit him to be, is even greater because, as we are immediately told, he is dying and before entering the higher worlds of the spirit has the ultimate, most beautiful and greatest gift to give to the twelve. And the ‘pure fool’ is to win through and take the place of the thirteenth. There is some kind of Good Friday magic about this fragment. And the whole should indeed have been presented in the Good Friday setting. Goethe himself explained the poem more or less by saying that there are many confessions in the world but we must see the same kernel of truth in all of them.154 He suggested this in the poem by putting one of the twelve world religions before us that represents the common kernel of truth in the twelve. And the thirteenth is the representative of this original truth itself. The poem really outlines the theosophical view of the world. Using a poetic image, Goethe wanted to show how a synthesis of all religions can be brought about in peace. When Brother Mark comes to the monastery gate, a cross with roses wound around it shines out. Goethe knew the deep significance of this symbol, and also hinted at it in his verses:
These are words of truly esoteric meaning. The question we are going to consider today is ‘How do we gain knowledge of the higher worlds in the Rosicrucian way?’ We are going to discuss some aspects of the Rosicrucian method. It is one of the ways of gaining insight into and access to the higher worlds. The term ‘Rosicrucian’ may sound strange and peculiar to some of you. One has heard of the Rosicrucians as a secret brotherhood which first appeared under that name in about the 14th century. Anything one finds in encyclopaedias and the current literature about them is of no account. A number of highly influential people have represented a quite specific spiritual stream as Rosicrucians. It is only too easy to flail into the most serious error when seeking to discover the greatest truths, as may be seen from many publications on the Rosicrucians. They were one of the closest secret brotherhoods and had to go through severe trials and tests. Anyone wishing to become a member of the order had to go through many things. The aspirant had to go through specific occult training to gain self-knowledge. Ignorance may, however, make the sublime appear in caricature. And that is also how Rosicrucianism was completely misunderstood and distorted to become caricature. What has been written about Rosicrucianism is utter charlatanism. Someone who is able to judge it rightly will see the kernel of truth in it. But it has always been difficult to find out about Rosicrucianism, as you can see from the fact that Helmont,155 Leibniz156 and others were unable to do so. Rosicrucian initiation is said go back to a book written in the early 17th century which says, among other things, that the Rosicrucians were involved in alchemy and also other things such as higher education. That's what is says in the Fama Fraternitatis.157 Even there you'll find nothing about genuine Rosicrucianism, for the secrets of the Rosicrucians were passed on by the oral tradition. Things that are outwardly given the name ‘Rosicrucian’ are hardly suitable for getting at the essence of the Rosicrucians. Today we'll consider the methods used by the genuine Rosicrucians, in so far as this is possible on a public occasion. The theosophical movement initially started in the Oriental way. The truth can be found anywhere if one knows how to look for it and is sufficiently mature. People had a different way of thinking things at the time when the ancient Indians received the teaching of the holy Rishis, a different way of feeling and using their will, of seeing and perceiving. The things they did in those days can no longer be done today. The methods used in the past can no longer be used today. Nothing in the world is absolute; humanity is in a continuous process of evolution. People now have a very different, more subtle structure to their brains, and even the way the blood is formed is different. Because of this, all truth must be transformed today, and initiation methods must be such that they are suitable for present-day Europeans. These are the reasons why there had to be Rosicrucianism, a completely different way of initiation. The Rosicrucian stream is in the care of great teachers who have always stayed in the background. Rosicrucian initiation is in seven stages. These provide a standard method that makes it possible for Europeans to go through the trials they have to go through. The stages do not necessarily have to be consecutive, for the teacher would choose what was best for the individual nature of the pupil. The seven stages are study, imagination, inspired insight or reading the occult script, preparing the philosopher's stone, correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm, entering into the macrocosm in a living way, and the 7th or highest stage which is godliness. Study meant developing concepts and ideas that made a person able to form a sound, comprehensive idea of essential relationships. For the Rosicrucians, study involved everything we have in theosophy today, having taken away the Oriental garb. Theosophy today offers Rosicrucian wisdom. We have also spoken about the elementary Rosicrucian teaching in public lectures.158 The main point is to gain a sum of concepts relating to the world that form a complete whole, in a strictly established, firm set of ideas. A system of thinking is created that is entirely sensible. A Rosicrucian had to be a sober, thinking individual. These teachings are truths accessible to the simplest hearts as well as intellectual minds. What is the aim of such study? It leads to insight into higher worlds—the astral world and then the spiritual or devachanic world—that are invisibly all around us. Man has the same number of abilities to perceive as there are worlds around him. To begin with, these abilities are of course undeveloped. For someone born blind, gaining sight is like a new birth. In the same way, the appearance of yet another world is always like a new birth for the human being. The astral world—we call it that for specific reasons—is around us, and so is the spiritual or devachanic world. It would be arrogance for someone who does not know the higher worlds to insist that they do no exist. The astral world and the devachanic world both differ tremendously from the physical world we are able to see around us. We gain completely new impressions in the astral and again in the devachanic world. Yet although our perceptions in these worlds differ greatly from those we have in the physical world, the logic is always the same. Thinking is the same in all three worlds; it only changes in worlds that lie beyond. Having learned to think in one of these three worlds, the laws of this are the same also in the higher ones. The problem is, however, that in the physical world human errors are corrected from experience. In those other worlds there is no such easy correction, and we therefore need a solid standard of objectivity. You will be completely unsupported if you enter those worlds without this objectivity. This is why a guru was needed for initiation in earlier times. The guru had to be the ultimate authority in the soul of an individual who was being initiated into Indian yoga wisdom. In Rosicrucian training, the guru-pupil relationship is replaced by the support gained from trained thinking. The pupil must be his own guide. Because of this, study is an important part of training. Fundamental truths of theosophy have been written in Truth and Knowledge and The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity for both the simplest hearts and people who aim higher. Reading those books it is necessary to be completely given up to inner work, letting one thought evolve from another. The 2nd stage of the Rosicrucian path was imagination. A comprehensive method meant that one was then able to take the first step into the higher worlds. Experiencing imagination we perceive the deeper meaning of Goethe's words ‘All things corruptible are but a parable’.159 Looking at a plant we can experience in its form and essential nature how true it is that the spirit of the earth, as it were, reveals itself in it when it is sad and when it is cheerful. It is a great truth that man is part of the earth just as a finger is part of the human body. Man is only part of the whole but he has the illusion of living a separate life. The finger is protected from such illusion because it cannot walk about on the human body. If you feel yourself to be an integral part of the earth, you have a feeling not only for the poetry but for the truth of Goethe's words of the earth spirit.160 When human beings enter into the things which the earth spirit produces on its surface, many a plant will be the earth spirit's tears for them, and many a plant its smile. Something else was brought to the pupil's awareness by all possible means. He would be told: ‘Look at the calyx with its organs of fertilization, chastely held up to the sun. The sun ray kisses the inner calyx. The plant innocently holds out its organs of fertilization to cosmic space. Think of this transformed and taken to a higher level. Consider the animal first, and the human being, and see how the human being veils the principle which the plant holds out to the sun. And then say to yourself: “One day man must reach a higher level where anything base will have gone from his organs. At this higher level he will offer to the sun the principle which today is the calyx of the plant. All drives and instincts will then have been purified, the human individuality will have overcome its natural desires.”’ In Rosicrucian wisdom this transformation was called the grail, the sacred chalice. When a person has lived for some time with such ideas, he will be ready to move on to even higher experiences. The physical eye only sees the seed of the plant. When the soul has been prepared, it will be able to penetrate to the image that arises for it from the seed grain. A flame form will arise from the seed for that soul. The individual thus learns to see the spiritual aspect that is behind things; he comes to know that everything physical has been born from a world of the spirit. The 3rd stage is called reading the occult script in Rosicrucian training. The cosmic powers active in the world are revealed in certain currents and in colour and sound combinations. This occult script is written into the structure of the world. An example is the spiral we see as two intertwined vortices in the Orion nebula far out in the cosmos. At the microcosmic level, the incorporation of the human seed takes a corresponding form. The image of a double spiral is the sign of cancer in the zodiac. In occult script, it shows the transition from one stage of evolution to another. The sun's spring equinox was in fact in the sign of cancer when a new period of human evolution started in ancient India after the end of Atlantis. Another sign in occult script is the triangle. This, too, is written into the macrocosm. At the microcosmic level the figure of the equilateral triangle with its centre marked is the symbol of balance restored between the three powers of soul. Harmonization of thinking, feeling and will gives rise to the higher power of love. This 3rd stage, where conscious awareness of inspiration was gained, was followed by the development of rhythm in life and in breathing. In the language of the Rosicrucians this is called preparing the philosopher's stone. Later on it will be a stage in the evolution of humanity as a whole. Today people need oxygen to breathe. They exhale carbon dioxide, which is a poison. It is the other way round with plants, for they breathe in carbon dioxide and release oxygen. In the distant future man will consciously use the carbon which today is taken in with the food to build his physical body and no longer exhale it. The human body will then consist of an entirely different substance than it does today. It will be a soft, transparent form of carbon. Man's body will then have become the philosopher's stone. The symbol for this is the crystal clear diamond, which is also carbon. The whole process was prepared for by bringing rhythm into our breathing and altogether into all vital processes. These are regulated from outside in plants and animals. But this no longer happens for modern man. He must create the rhythm for himself which nature gives to all its life forms. Strict adherence to such a rhythm was an important part of Rosicrucian training. At the 5th stage of Rosicrucian training the pupil would have living experience of the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm. Paracelsus said: ‘Everything that exists around us in space is related to us.’ The individual letters are in the world,161 and man is the word. Man has everything that exists out there in the world in him on a small scale, in its essence. To know yourself so that you might know the world, that was the task set for this stage. At the next, the 6th stage, the pupil had to enter into the macrocosm in a living way. Here the human being had to leave himself behind, abandoning all that was his own. He then truly came to know the macrocosm. The highest stage that could be reached by a Rosicrucian was that of godliness. Here the initiate grew to unite with the whole universe, he knew the summit of human evolution which humanity is to reach in the far distant future. The Rosicrucian pupils would make every endeavour to prepare for this evolution. A lower, passive nature lives in man and also an active element. If he develops in the way I have described he will overcome his lower nature and be reborn through the spirit. This aspect of human evolution has been put into words by Goethe:
The symbol for ‘to die’ is the cross, the symbol for a new birth are the roses. The human physical body is the cross. Everything connected with powers of growth is the passive element in us. This means above all the milk. In the blood, on the other hand, the human being develops an active element as he seeks to attain to higher things. That is the secret of the white and the red rose. Our higher nature seeks to find the balance between the white and the red rose. In Goethe's poem The Secrets the thirteenth is the image of someone who has reached this exalted level. We may therefore take the words spoken by this thirteenth as a guide for all Rosicrucian endeavour:
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| 109. Rosicrucian Esotericism: Soul in the World Around Us
04 Jun 1909, Budapest Translated by Helen Fox |
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| 109. Rosicrucian Esotericism: Soul in the World Around Us
04 Jun 1909, Budapest Translated by Helen Fox |
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As I said yesterday in the introductory lecture, the intention in this course is to give a picture, a kind of review of the theosophical world conception. It will be necessary to speak of a number of subjects with which many in the audience are already familiar. But only by learning of these truths from their very foundations will it be possible later on to consider higher regions. Before beginning the actual theme, I want to speak of a matter of exceptional importance. Why is it that we must concern ourselves with theosophical ideas and theories before we can ourselves actually experience anything in the spiritual world? Many people will say, “The results of clairvoyant investigation are made known to us, but I myself cannot yet see into the spiritual world. Would it not be wiser if, instead of the results of investigation being communicated to us, I were told how I can myself develop clairvoyance? Each individual would then be able to undertake the further development himself.” Those who are unacquainted with the principles of occult investigation may believe that it would be better if such facts had not previously been made known. But in the spiritual world there is a definite law, the significance of which we will make clear by an example. Suppose that in a certain year some properly trained clairvoyant had perceived this or that in the spiritual world. Now imagine that ten or twenty years later, another equally trained clairvoyant could see the same thing even if he had known nothing whatever about the result obtained by the first clairvoyant. If you were to believe that this could happen, you would be making a great mistake, for the truth is that a fact of the spiritual world that has once been discovered by a clairvoyant or by an occult school, cannot be investigated a second time if the would-be investigator has not first been informed that it has already been discovered. If, therefore, in the year 1900 a certain fact had been investigated and in the year 1950 another clairvoyant reaches the stage of being able to perceive the same thing, he can succeed only if he has realized that someone has already investigated and fathomed it. Therefore, already known facts in the spiritual world can be perceived only when their import has been consciously grasped as communications already made. This is the law that establishes for all epochs the foundation of universal brotherliness. It is impossible to penetrate into any domain of the spiritual world without a link having first been made with what has already been fathomed by the Elder Brothers of humanity. The spiritual world sees to it that nobody can become a law unto himself, saying, “I am not concerned with what is already there. I shall investigate only for myself.” None of the facts communicated in spiritual science today could be perceived by individuals, however highly developed and advanced, if they had not been previously known. Because a link must be there with what has already been discovered, the theosophical movement had also to be founded on this basis. In a comparatively short time from now, many individuals will become clairvoyant, but they would be able to see only unreality, not truth, in the spiritual world if they had not heard of what had already been investigated. First one must have knowledge of these truths, such as is given by theosophy, or the science of the spirit, and only then can they be actually perceived. Even a clairvoyant must get to know what has already been discovered, and then, after conscientious training, he can perceive the facts himself. It may be said that the divine beings fertilize a faculty of seership only once in a human soul and if this single, virginal fertilization has been achieved, then other human beings must pay attention to what this first soul has discovered in order to have the right to see it themselves. This law lays the foundations of an inner, universal brotherliness, a true brotherhood of men. From epoch to epoch wisdom has passed through the occult schools and been faithfully harbored by the Masters, and we, too, must help to preserve this treasure and maintain brotherliness with those who have already achieved something if we wish to make our way into the higher regions of the spiritual world. What is striven for on the physical plane as moral law is natural law in the spiritual world. Theosophy teaches us that everything physical or material is born out of the spiritual. But in our epoch it behooves us not to be satisfied with this bare realization of a spiritual world. That behind everything material, everything physical, there is the spiritual, is an essential, but abstract, consciousness of spirit. What is necessary is to develop definite concepts and ideas of how the spiritual becomes manifest in each domain. Today one can only guide some other individual by conscientiously ensuring that he takes all the steps leading from the external into the spiritual world. The first kingdom to be observed among the physical kingdoms around us, is that of the minerals, the world of stones. The kingdom of the minerals is distinguished from the human kingdom, for example, by the fact that a man knows that if he has given someone else a hard blow, the latter feels pain. There is no outer evidence that a mineral feels pain from a blow. From this the conclusion is drawn that in man there is a soul that feels pleasure and suffering, but not in the mineral. We will not at the outset insist that the mineral also has a soul, because there we must already take note of the results of clairvoyant investigation. The stone as it lies before us has in it nothing of the nature of soul. But what is essential in a spiritual world conception is that observation shall be directed to the right place and not to a false one. Think of a tiny animal observing a human being but actually able to see only his fingernails. It would say that these fingernails are objects on their own, for the tiny animal cannot realize that the nails belong to and are part of an organism. When it is able to survey and see the whole, then its observation will be true. The same principle applies to the spiritual investigator and the mineral world. If you regard the stone as being something complete in itself, you are in the position of the tiny animal that takes the fingernails or the teeth to be the whole man, a complete being. Think of the rocks on the earth. They can only be conceived as having grown out of the whole organism of the earth. But where is the being of which these rocks are parts, to which all these rocks belong? There are spiritual beings to whom the whole world of stones belongs. These beings feel happiness and pain, pleasure and suffering just as does the human soul, so that we can properly speak of a mineral soul. You must not, however, judge on the basis of mere analogies, because that might lead you to think that when a stone is smashed the mineral soul feels pain, but that is not the case. A man feels pain if one of his fingers is crushed, but in similar circumstances the mineral soul feels contentment and pleasure. The being belonging to the mineral experiences great happiness when stones are crushed, and pain when the fragments are put together again. Because in the external world, mineral fragments are constantly being separated off and put together again, pleasure and pain are continually being felt in the souls of the beings who belong to the mineral kingdom. Suppose we have salt here and a glass filled with warm water. What happens if we drop the salt into the water? To clairvoyant observation the grains of salt do not only dissolve in the water but feelings of well-being arise; actual pleasure becomes evident when the salt permeates the water in the glass. Then, when the water cools and a cube of salt crystallizes out, this causes suffering to the mineral soul. In mountain ranges where rocks have formed this is what has happened. When crystals form in the earth the process is accompanied by suffering and pain for the beings belonging basically to the mineral kingdom. When a planet is born, collects into a coherent mass and condenses, this process causes pain and suffering to the spiritual beings involved in it. When a planet such as our earth comes into existence, the process is accompanied by pain and suffering. You may now ask me where then these beings are that the eye does not see, that feel pain and suffering, well-being and happiness, when, for example, stones are broken up by workmen in a quarry. Where are these beings? In a comparatively lofty spiritual world! The mineral substance seen by the eye is only a shadowy image of these beings. They live in a world we call the world of formlessness. Spiritual beings live in our whole mineral world-in the world of formlessness according to occult investigation. Why do we use this expression, “world of formlessness?” This will be understood at once when we turn to the world of plants. The plant, too, is the expression of certain beings of soul. Here again we will study the results of spiritual investigation. This tells us that when, for example, in the autumn, the corn is mown and the scythe cuts through the stalks, no suffering is felt by the soul-beings whose bodies are the plants. No indeed! We must not think of suffering here because whole streams of joy and contentment weave over the area. Equally, when the animal is turned out to graze, it means happiness for the plant souls, not pain. It can be compared with the feeling experienced by a mammal when its offspring sucks its milk; this gives a feeling of bliss. What our planet furnishes on its surface in the way of nourishment for the beings inhabiting it, is, so to speak, milk for the beings that belong to the planet and have their habitation in the center of the earth. You may ask if all of them are able to find a place there. Certainly they are, because of the prevailing law of permeability. Their self-surrender, when a certain degree of maturity has been reached, means bliss for the plant soul. Pain is caused when plants are torn out of the soil. Now you. may say: Yes, but when mischievous boys and girls uselessly tear off flowers how can that possibly cause happiness to the plant soul? Would it not be much better to root out the plant altogether? How can that cause it pain? From the point of view that is valid for the physical world you are certainly right in saying this. But it must not be forgotten that these points of view are by no means always authoritative for the spiritual worlds. A person may look more handsome when he has torn out the first grey hairs that have appeared on his head but pain is caused nevertheless. It is all a matter of the point of view concerned and we cannot struggle against the occult world with moral considerations. Beings, souls—they also belong to the plants—beings and souls for which the plant world supplies the bodies. We will now try to form an idea of how happiness and suffering take their course in the plant world. The plant world is a shadow of the spiritual world. Where, then, are the beings that belong to it? In the world of form. They are also known by different names. The spiritual beings belonging to the mineral kingdom inhabit a spiritual realm, the realm of formlessness; the spiritual beings belonging to the plants live in the realm of form. Realm of Formlessness, Arupa or Upper Devachan. Realm of Form, Rupa or Lower Devachan. The souls of the minerals belong to a definite region of the spiritual world, indeed, to its upper region. This must not surprise you, for the higher the realm in which the souls live, the more thoroughly they conceal themselves. Why is the one realm called the realm of formlessness and the other the realm of form? When a crystal is smashed it is its form alone that is destroyed. This can, however, be reconstructed somewhere else, independently of the form that was destroyed. When a salt crystal comes into existence in nature it need not necessarily do so out of another crystal. It can only arise from the substance of salt and disappear again as form. That is the characteristic of formless substance. In the case of the plant, the form cannot come into existence in the same way, out of substance, out of the formless. The plant—this is its essential characteristic—must develop out of a parental plant. The form must pass over from progenitor to offspring in the case of the souls of the beings in the realm of form; procreation takes place as the result of transmission of the form. The form alone, nothing else, is contained in the seed. It is a superficial belief of science that there is no great difference between plant seed and animal egg. In the animal egg, form and life are transmitted from progenitor to off-spring: Life is transmitted. In the seed of the lily nothing except the form is preserved and it is transmitted to the new lily. What happens in the mineral is that the forces that, so to speak, implant the form arise in the higher realm of Devachan. In the case of the crystal, the formlessness shoots as it were into the form confronting the eye. We must, therefore, say that the whole planet upon which plant life unfolds is surrounded by collective life containing the impulse that enables the life of the plant to arise from it, and from the plant seed only the form. From the life of the old lily nothing passes over to the flower bed or flower pot in which the seed is lying. That the new lily is imbued with life is due to the fact that the seed has been received into the. universal life of our earth. Here we come to the transition to the animal kingdom. The form alone is passed on through the seed; life arises because the seed is received into the universal life of our earth. The quality of soul in the animal is visually perceptible and it is therefore self-evident to speak of happiness and suffering, joy and pain in this case. If we are to be clear about what happiness and suffering mean in the plant kingdom, we must turn to the study of other beings because happiness and suffering are felt outside single plants; the whole organism of the earth feels them, just as when you cut a finger the pain is not in the finger itself but is led over to the whole organism. If you want to understand what pain is in the plant, you must turn to the earth as a whole in order to contact the soul of the plant there. The essential difference lies in the fact that if an animal is wounded, the pain is situated inside its skin, as is also the case with the animal nature of the human being. Here we are coming ever nearer to individualization; the higher the evolution of the kingdoms of nature ascends, the nearer we come to beings whose center is within themselves. We study the plant rightly only when we study it in connection with the earth as a whole. The animal has a soul and admittedly feels happiness and suffering within the limits of its skin. We do not actually see this soul because it is in the realm we call the astral world. The animals are creatures that have a center in themselves and their souls live in the astral realm. Thus there is a certain systematic order in our idea of the world. The mineral conceals its soul deeply, the plant less deeply and the animal less deeply still; the animal has its center in itself, in the realm that is invisible. We must look for the souls of the animals in a world other than the physical. Thus we distinguish four kingdoms. Firstly, the realm of the visible forms of minerals, plants and animals, the physical world. Secondly, the realm where the invisible nature of the animal is to be found, the astral world. Thirdly, the realm of the plants, the souls of which are hidden in lower Devachan. Fourthly, the realm of beings whose souls are hidden in upper Devachan. The differentiation is obvious even from observation of the external world. We will now, however, turn to the results of clairvoyant investigation. In the space occupied by the mineral as such, nothing of the nature of soul is present. This space is void of soul, black, but round about and outside it luminosity begins; further away this luminosity increases in strength. What is it? It is the etheric body of the mineral that originates in the cosmos, drawn from a part of the ether where no actual mineral exists. The cosmic soul forces of the mineral experience joy and sorrow in the space where the etheric body of the mineral is present. There suffering begins, or happiness, perhaps, anticipates the severance of stone from a quarry like a spiritual ray of light. The etheric body of the mineral encircles its physical body. It could be said that where the mineral exists as such, the etheric body has densified to such a degree that it has become physical. The difference between mineral and plant arises through the fact that the etheric body of the plant is within it, permeating every single part. The green pervading the plant is the substance described previously as being the etheric body of the mineral outside it. But if all that could be said about the plant were that it is permeated by an etheric body, it would not blossom but only produce green leaves. When the plant begins to blossom, clairvoyant consciousness sees something spreading over and playing around it. This is the astral life, which brings about the crowning of the growth. The green plant grows and finally something new, the astral element, spreads over and plays around it but never penetrates into it. The animal has spiritually within it what hovers around the plant. When what hovers around the plant is inside the skin, the being is an animal. What hovers above the plant, the astral element, surrounds the whole earth. It is the collective astrality of the earth that hovers like smoke above the plant when it is about to flower. Happiness and suffering are not seated within the plant itself but are felt by the earth. The animal itself experiences happiness and suffering; the astral body within the animal weaves and is astir in the whole astrality of our earth. The mineral kingdom is as though embedded in an etheric world and has its etheric body around it. The plant is permeated by an etheric body and because the plant world is embedded in an astral body that is part of the collective astrality of the earth, pain and happiness are experienced outside the plant itself. The being that is not only swathed by the astral element but can actually take it into itself, is the animal. Thus we have now surveyed the three kingdoms of the world surrounding us and their connection with the higher worlds. Man is a little world in himself, the product of all that surrounds him. What we have discovered today we will use tomorrow in order to comprehend the structure of the human being. |
| 109. Rosicrucian Esotericism: The Nature and Being of Man
05 Jun 1909, Budapest Translated by Helen Fox |
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| 109. Rosicrucian Esotericism: The Nature and Being of Man
05 Jun 1909, Budapest Translated by Helen Fox |
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In the lecture yesterday I endeavored to give a general survey of the different manifestations and functions of the life of soul in the world around us. Today we will study the nature and being of man himself in greater detail, referring as well to a great deal of what is already known. We will think, to begin with, of facts connected with the nature of man that form part of the picture I was able to give you yesterday. To begin with, in respect of his lowest body, the human being seems as if he had grown out of the first kingdom that surrounds us, that of the minerals. What immediately catches our eye when a man is standing in front of us, is the most tangible part of all, namely, his physical body. But the occultist knows that this is only one member of his constitution. It is easy to form an erroneous idea of this physical body when it is taken for granted that the physical body is what can be seen with the eyes and touched with the hands. That would be as mistaken as it would be to take hydrogen for water. The higher members of man's constitution are intermingled with his physical body. As it confronts us, this physical body is already permeated by the other members of man's nature, so that the structure of flesh and bones before us cannot without further ado be called the physical body. This physical body of man consists of the same substances and forces that are to be found in the mineral world outside, interwoven with consummate art in the structure of the human body. That this body looks and feels as it does is due to the fact that the other members of man's nature and constitution are mingled with it. The body of man seen by the eye is not, properly speaking, the physical body. The physical body as such is present when the human being has gone through the gate of death. The remaining corpse is the real physical body, the body freed from all the higher members of man's nature. When it is left to itself this physical body follows laws quite other than those followed until the moment of death. Before then, it has, in truth, been consistently repudiating the laws of physical chemistry. In earthly existence the body of man would be a perpetual corpse if it were not permeated by the etheric body that throughout life fights against the decay of the physical body. The ether or life body is the second member of man's being. We will now take it for granted that both the plant and the animal have etheric bodies. Nevertheless, in a certain respect the human being differs from the animal in his etheric body as well, and it is this difference that is of particular interest to us. In what respect does the etheric body of man differ from that of the animal? First let us ask how clairvoyant consciousness is able to acquire knowledge of man's etheric body. To answer this question we must describe what clairvoyance is. An individual who has developed a certain faculty of clairvoyance has also acquired such mastery of his mental activity that he is able to focus his attention upon or divert it from something with far greater strength than before. If you were to expect an average human being to be able to control his attention to the extent of suggesting away a physical form in front of him, you would find that it would be possible in the rarest instances. A clairvoyant, however, is quite capable of doing this. The space otherwise occupied by the physical body is then, for the clairvoyant, filled through and through by this etheric body. It has approximately the human form in the head, torso and shoulders, but the lower the area in the body, the less similar it is to the human figure. The etheric body of an animal is different from its physical body. The etheric body of the horse, for example, extends far beyond its physical form. If you could see the etheric body of an elephant clairvoyantly you would be amazed at its gigantic proportions. In the case of the human form, the lower the level the greater is the difference between the etheric body and the physical form. Otherwise, in a certain respect, left and right correspond in the physical body and in the etheric body. The physical heart lies slightly to the left; the corresponding organ in the etheric body is the etheric heart, which lies to the right. The greatest difference, however, between the physical and the etheric body is that the etheric body of a man is female and the etheric body of a woman, male. This is a fact of great significance and many riddles of human nature are explicable on the basis of this finding of occult investigation. Thus, in the case of the human being there is a kind of correspondence, and in the case of the animal a great difference, between this second member of man's nature and the first. Of man's astral body it is possible to have a much clearer idea. It is the third member of his constitution. The etheric body of man is a reality to one who is clairvoyant; to a materialist it is simply an illusion. Anatomists and physiologists investigate man's physical body only. But in this physical body there is something—the blood and nerves—that is much more closely related to man's consciousness. This consciousness is aware of his happiness, suffering and joy, all of which take effect in the space filled by his physical body. The bearer of these experiences is invisible to the individual concerned but it is visible to clairvoyant consciousness as a luminous cloud. This is the astral body. It differs greatly from the etheric body. Movement in the physical body cannot be compared with the extraordinary mobility of the etheric body. In a healthy human being the color of this etheric body is that of the blossom of a young peach tree. Everything in the etheric body gleams and glitters in shades of rosy red, dark and light, becoming a radiant white. The etheric body has a definite boundary, although this fluctuates. The astral body is quite different. It displays the greatest possible variety of colors and changing forms, like a cloud floating by with ever changing movement. The colors and forms that appear in the cloud are expressions of the feelings and experiences that play between one human being and another. If a clairvoyant sees a bluish-red color in the astral body, he perceives love streaming between human beings, but another time he will also see the feelings of animosity that pass between individuals. As a man's activity of soul is constantly changing, so, too, do the colors and forms change in the astral body, appearing and disappearing in a multicolored play. The fourth member of man's constitution is the bearer of the ego. Thus we have his physical body, which in external nature is comparable with the mineral, then his etheric body, which is comparable with the plant, and then his astral body, which is common to both animal and man. The astral body in man, however, is far more mobile than it is in the animal. The ego bearer, the fourth member of man's nature, is seen as a kind of oval form, the source of which can be traced to the anterior part of the head. It is visible there to the clairvoyant as a bluish, luminous orb. A kind of bluish sheen streams out from this orb and passes into the human being. When, but not until, the clairvoyant can also suggest away a man's astral body, he is able to perceive the ego bearer. Man has the other three bodies in common with the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms of nature. But the ego bearer distinguishes him from these kingdoms and he becomes thereby the crown of creation. In studying the fourfold nature of man we have actually been envisaging the dowry he has received from the higher worlds, no matter what his stage of evolution may be. The fact that he has the fourfold constitution of which we have spoken makes him man. Not until the “I,” the ego, works on the three bodies does his own task begin in the real sense. Whether the development achieved by a human being has reached a higher or lower stage depends upon how effectively he has worked upon the lower members of his constitution. The ego begins first of all to work upon the astral body. The effect of this work differs depending upon whether the individual concerned has reached only a low stage of development or is a highly evolved personality such, for example, as Schiller. The one has achieved less than the other in the process of transforming his astral body. This inner work upon oneself is known in occultism as purification, cleansing or catharsis. In this way the ego works at the perfecting of the astral body. In every human being, therefore, it will be found that the astral body is twofold. One part has been worked upon and purified, not so the other. Let us now suppose that the ego continues to work unswervingly upon the astral body. If this is the case, the individual concerned will gradually reach the stage of no longer having to force himself to do what is good, because it will become habit. There is obviously a difference when an individual is obeying a command, or has so much love in him that willy-nilly he will do what is good, meaningful and beautiful. If an individual is simply obeying a command, his ego is indeed working upon his astral body, but if doing the good becomes a habit, then the ego is working upon the etheric body as well. To understand how the ego works upon the etheric body we will think of an example. When something or other is explained to you and you have understood it, then the ego has worked into the astral body. But if day after day you repeat a prayer, perhaps the Lord's Prayer, you are working into the etheric body because of the repetition every day; the soul is exercising the same activity over and over again. Repetition is an entirely different matter from a momentary understanding. We will clarify our minds as to how, in the latter case, the ego works upon the astral body and, in the former, upon the etheric body through repetition. Think of the growth of a plant. The living seed produces the stalk and leaf after leaf; constantly new green leaves are added. This is possible because the plant is endowed with an etheric body and the underlying, active principle of the etheric body is repetition. Wherever repetition occurs, an etheric body is at work. The culminating feature of the plant, the blossom, is the product of a different principle, namely, the overshadowing astral body. Culmination, therefore, is brought about by astrality. This can also be observed in the structure of man's physical body. The spine with its numerous vertebrae is an expression of the etheric body in the physical body. Now think of man's head, of the brain. There you have the culmination, the work of the astral body in the physical stature. Spiritually, this is the same process as the manifestation of understanding resulting from the effect made upon the astral body; activity generated through daily repetition of the same prayer or meditative exercise is the product of work upon the etheric body. The essence of meditation is that through repetition it has an effect not only upon the astral body but also upon the etheric body. The reason why the effect made by the great religious teachers has been so dynamic is because they have imparted to humanity principles embodying a power that works ever onward. The etheric body of man is also twofold; one part has been worked upon by the ego, although in the average individual still to a limited extent, while the other part has not yet been worked upon at all. There is still a third possibility for man. He can work from his ego into the physical body. This is the hardest task of all. Man has already worked continuously upon his physical body unconsciously, but not from his ego. This is possible only for the most advanced individuals. We have thus studied the four lower members of man's constitution and have been made aware that three higher members are products of the transformation of the lower members as the result of the work of the ego. In this work upon the three lower members there is considerable difference in that it proceeds either consciously or unconsciously—unconsciously, that is to say, without the individual concerned being aware of it. The transformation occurs perhaps through the study and contemplation of works of art, pictures, and so forth, or through pious devotion and prayer. But these individuals are not conscious that they are working upon their astral and etheric bodies; conscious work begins at a comparatively late state. We have therefore to distinguish between conscious and unconscious work upon the lower members of man's being. His astral body is twofold; one part is the product of unconscious activity, the other of conscious effort. The part of the astral body that was worked upon unconsciously by the ego is called the sentient soul, which today is finished and complete in man. What was worked upon the etheric body unconsciously from the ego is the intellectual or mind soul. What has been worked upon in the physical body, unconsciously for long ages, is the consciousness or spiritual soul. Thus in man we distinguish physical body, etheric body, astral body and the ego. The ego, working unconsciously upon the astral body produces the sentient soul, upon the etheric body, the intellectual or mind soul, upon the physical body, the consciousness or spiritual soul. We have, therefore, spoken of six, or rather seven members present in man's nature because he has worked unconsciously upon his own nature and constitution. Now the conscious work begins. What comes into existence as a result of it? Spirit self, or manas, is the outcome of what a man consciously instils into his astral body; what he consciously instils into his etheric body, but this is dependent upon occult training, is known as buddhi or life spirit. What happens if the ego eventually becomes able to work consciously into the physical body, to inculcate forces into the physical body itself? Through occult training this can actually be brought about consciously through the breathing process but there must be great caution and sensitivity of procedure, for through false methods of training such as are often given in public literature, a European body can be seriously harmed; knowledge of what is suitable for the constitution of a modern human being is essential. Through a conscious method of breathing the physical body can be transformed by the ego into atman or spirit man. Man was a fourfold being when he assumed earthly form. In his first incarnation on earth he had already begun to work upon his own being through the ego. In the course of the following incarnations he has developed, unconsciously, the three functional aspects of the soul: sentient soul, intellectual or mind soul, consciousness or spiritual soul. We shall subsequently learn how the conscious transformation is achieved of physical, etheric and astral bodies into the three higher members. Meanwhile, you have heard how the sevenfold being of man evolves through the incarnations. The four members, physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego, form the so-called sacred quaternary that was revered in all occult schools and with which a sacred trinity was allied, consciously forming a sevenfoldness or tenfoldness. We have thus a picture before us of man who has within him everything that is out-spread around him but which he transcends by virtue of his ego bearer. We will now study the human being in waking life and in sleep in order to learn how the bodies are connected. What is happening when joy and pain in a man are stilled, when his consciousness sinks into sleep? His astral body and ego are then outside his physical and etheric bodies. In the state of sleep something striking happens to man. In sleep at night he has descended as it were to the level of the plant by day. He has become a twofold being; his physical and etheric bodies remain in the bed and his astral body and ego are outside. You may now ask whether it can be said that man is a plant while he is asleep. No, but man and plant then consist of the same combination of bodies. On our earth a being with a physical body and an etheric body only is a plant. When an astral body and ego are present, the physical and etheric bodies change. In the plant there are no nerve strands, and it is only a physical body in which there is an ego, that has warm blood. The higher animals must be regarded as degenerate forms of the original man. In the physical body the ego comes to expression in the blood, the astral body in the nerves, the etheric body in the glandular system and the physical nature of man in his own body. If, therefore, the astral body is the creator of the system of nerves, which is actually the case, this system of nerves is in a doleful situation, for during sleep it is abandoned by its creator. Not so the glandular system, for the etheric body remains with it. But the blood system of the physical and etheric bodies is faithlessly forsaken by the ego during the night. The physical body can exist on its own, because the physical nature remains the same, as does the glandular system, since the etheric body remains in the physical body during sleep. The system of nerves, however, is forsaken by its master. We will now ask clairvoyant consciousness what is then happening in the physical body? To the extent to which man's astral body goes out of the physical and etheric bodies during the night, to that same extent a “divine-spiritual” astral body moves into the bodies lying in the bed. The same applies to the blood system; a divine-spiritual ego enters into it and provides for its maintenance. In the night, too, man is a fourfold being but beings of a higher order take possession of the two bodies remaining in the bed. When man's astral body and ego return in the morning to his etheric and physical bodies, his own astral body expels a being of greater power. The same happens in the case of the blood system. Man's ego drives out the divine-spiritual ego that has provided for the blood system during the night. Divine-spiritual beings are present in our environment all the time. By day they must withdraw, just as we ourselves withdraw during the night. These divine-spiritual beings sleep by day, whilst human beings sleep by night. In the evening a divine-spiritual ego and a divine-spiritual astral body draw into the physical and etheric bodies of the man asleep in bed and leave these bodies in the morning. The process in man is exactly the reverse. In the evening he abandons his bodies and in the morning resumes possession of them. Even in religions a feeling has remained that the gods sleep by day. There are countries where the churches are shut at midday because the gods are then most deeply asleep. We will now think about what is outside man's body at night, namely, the astral body and the ego. We know that desires, urges and passions are rooted in the astral body but during the night man is not aware of them. Why is this? It is because at the present stage of evolution man's astral body and ego have no organs that would make this awareness possible. Man as he is at present can perceive only by means of physical organs. There are around man as many worlds as he has organs to perceive them. If he has one organ more, a new world reveals itself to him. His astral body, if he has not yet become clairvoyant, has no organs, hence during the night he cannot be aware of anything. It is easy to imagine that during sleep he may be without senses. There are blind people and also people in whom other senses are lacking. No world is present for one who is unable to use his senses. Hence, in the morning, when a man can again make use of his physical senses, he becomes aware of the world around him. But at death it is different. Through the whole of life the etheric body and the physical body remain connected with each other; at death, the etheric body, for the first time as a rule, abandons the physical body. The moment of death is therefore described by those who have knowledge of the subject as the moment when a retrospect of the whole past life passes like a panorama before the human being. What is the explanation of this? It is because the etheric body is the bearer of memory and this memory now becomes free. As long as the etheric body is in the physical body it cannot unfold all its power but only as much as the physical instrument permits. Now, however, at death the etheric body becomes free of the physical body and can unfold what has been inscribed in it during life. This panorama can also arise as the result of a shock but in that case the man concerned must not lose consciousness as he does at death. The shock may be caused by danger of death. But this is an exceptional case. Now you may ask how long this tableau lasts. The time varies a great deal in human beings. Speaking generally, it can be said that the tableau lasts for as long as the individual concerned could stay awake during life without being overcome by sleep—twenty hours, fifty, sixty to eighty hours. The extreme limit of time during which waking consciousness can be sustained is approximately that of the duration of this panorama. The retrospect persists for as long as this. Then it fades away and a clairvoyant sees how the etheric body detaches itself at the same time—not entirely, however, and that is the important point. The individual concerned takes with him an essence, an extract of his etheric body and with it the fruits of his last life. He ascends, retaining the essence of his etheric body, his astral body and his ego until he also lays aside his astral body. He has now laid aside two corpses, and then he passes into the spiritual world. Tomorrow we shall study the life after death and the entry into the devachanic world. |
| 109. Rosicrucian Esotericism: Man Between Death and Rebirth
06 Jun 1909, Budapest Translated by Helen Fox |
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| 109. Rosicrucian Esotericism: Man Between Death and Rebirth
06 Jun 1909, Budapest Translated by Helen Fox |
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Yesterday we heard about what takes place at the moment of death, how the etheric body, the astral body and ego bearer pass out of the physical body and the tableau of memory is arrayed before the soul. An intrinsic feature of this tableau is that the events present themselves simultaneously and provide a review in the form of a kind of panorama. The essential point, however, is that it is perceived as a picture. Events in physical life are connected with happiness or pain but there are no such experiences during the first few days after death. The tableau of memories is an entirely objective picture. Let us try to make this clear by means of an example. We see ourselves in a fatal, agonizing situation and follow the course it takes, but there is no experience of pain. It is like a picture at which we are looking, which, let us say, depicts martyrdom. We do not feel the pain that is involved, but merely see the event objectively. The same applies to the memory tableau after death. It appears directly the etheric body emerges, frees itself from the physical body and then dissolves in the universal cosmic ether. The extract, or essence containing the fruit of the past life, remains. There now begins for the soul an essentially different period, the period of breaking its attachment to the physical world. The best way to think of this is to remind ourselves that for an occultist, urges and desires are realities. What is contained in the astral body is not nullified after death when the physical body has been laid aside, but all the urges and desires are present. An individual who was a bon vivant during his life does not, at death, lose his desire for tasty foods, for desire clings to the astral body and he has lost only the physical equipment of palate, tongue and so forth, by means of which his greed can be satisfied. His condition—the same applies in different circumstances—is comparable with that of someone suffering from terrible thirst without any possibility of quenching it. He suffers from these longings and from having to forego the prospect of satisfaction. The purpose of this suffering is to realize what it means to have desires that can be satisfied only through physical instruments. This condition is called kamaloka, the realm of desires, where habits are broken. It lasts for a third of the time spent by a human being between birth and death; perhaps it may be possible later on to go into the matter with greater exactitude. So if somebody dies at the age of sixty, it can be said that he spends twenty years, a third of his past life, in kamaloka. As a rule, therefore, kamaloka lasts until a man has rid himself of all the desires that still link him with the physical plane. This is one aspect of the period of kamaloka, but we will study it from still another. What a human being experiences in the physical body is of value to him because he evolves to higher and higher stages as the result of what he achieves on earth. That is the essential point. On the other hand, between birth and death there are many inducements for individuals to create hindrances to their development, for example, everything that we do to injure our fellowmen. Every time when, at the cost of our fellowmen, we provide satisfaction for our own aims or embark for self-seeking reasons on a project that in some way affects the world, we create a hindrance to our development: Suppose we give someone a box on the ear. The physical and moral pain connected with it is a hindrance to our development. This hindrance would cling to us for all our subsequent lives in future epochs if we did not expunge it from the world. During the kamaloka period an impetus is given to a man to get rid of these hindrances to his development. During the period of kamaloka the individual concerned lives over his whole life in backward order, three times as quickly. The significant characteristic of the astral world, of kamaloka, is that things appear as mirror images; this is the confusing element for a pupil when he enters the astral world. For example, he must read the number 346 as 643; he must reverse everything when he is looking into the astral world. So it is, too, in the case of all passions. Suppose that as the result of genuine training or of pathological conditions, someone becomes clairvoyant. To begin with he sees his own urges and passions streaming out of him; they appear to him in the form of varied shapes and figures and approach him in rays from all sides. Whoever becomes clairvoyant in the astral realm, either in a well-regulated or irregular way, immediately sees these figures, which in the form of goblins or demonic beings, rush upon him. This is a distressing experience, especially for individuals who become clairvoyant but know nothing of it. It will become less and less infrequent because we are living today in a stage of evolution when in a number of people the eyes for sight of the spiritual world are opening. This must also be said in order that those who have the experience shall not be alarmed. Spiritual science is there in order to lead human beings into the spiritual world. For many who become clairvoyant this process is fraught with much unhappiness of soul because they are ignorant of the facts and conditions. They see things in the astral world as mirror images and they see other things too in the spiritual world. In the physical world, when a hen lays an egg, you see the hen first and then the egg; astrally you see the process of the egg going back into the hen. Everything is experienced in reverse order. Think of a man who dies at the age of sixty and then, in kamaloka, comes to the point when, at the age of forty he gave someone a box on the ear. Now, in kamaloka, he experiences everything that the other person experienced; he is literally within the body of the other. Thus, a man lives his life in backward order to his birth. But he does not experience pain only, he also experiences the happiness, the joy he has given to others. Little by little the soul discards the hindrances to its development and evolution and must be thankful to the wise guidance that makes compensation possible. Together with the will to make compensation, the soul receives something like a token, an impulse of will, to make reparation for what hinders its development, and in the coming life it is able to do this. We realize, therefore, that the objective tableau is something altogether different from the retrospective experiences in kamaloka. In kamaloka a man experiences exactly what the other person felt as the result of his behavior; he experiences the other side of his own deeds. But not only has this cross to be experienced. What has been experienced here (in physical life) as pain, is experienced in yonder world as happiness and joy—happiness and joy, therefore, as the opposite of what they were in the physical world. The purpose of kamaloka is to impart to the soul what the tableau of memory cannot impart, namely, the experiences of pain and joy in retrospect. When kamaloka has been lived through, a kind of third corpse is discarded. The physical corpse was the first to be discarded, then the etheric corpse, which dissolves in the cosmic ether, and now the astral corpse is laid aside. This astral corpse comprises whatever from a man's astral body has not yet been purified and regulated by his ego. What was once his as the bearer of his urges and passions and has not been transformed and spiritualized by his ego, frees itself after the period of kamaloka. On his further path the human being takes with him an extract of his astral body: firstly, the sum total of all the good will impulses, and secondly, what he has transformed through his ego. Whatever urges he has ennobled into beauty, goodness and morality form the extract of his astral body. At the end of the kamaloka period the human being consists of the ego and around it he has laid, as it were, the extracts of the astral body and of the etheric body, the good impulses of will. There now begins for a man a new condition, namely a life free from sorrow, the spiritual life of Devachan. It is encouraging when the occultist experiences these truths as realities and then finds them again in the sacred records and scripts. An example is this sentence in the New Testament: “Except ye become as little children ye cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” This is an indication of the experience of living the course of life in backward order; it is an example of a sublime moment when studying the sacred records of religion. You must understand me correctly here. An occultist does not swear by any original record or authority. The facts of the spiritual world alone are conclusive as far as he is concerned, but the value of the original records dawns upon him anew. Spiritual science is not based upon any original record or religion but upon the investigation of spiritual facts. The foundation of all spiritual science is objective investigation. Then, if the content of the original records proves to be identical, the occultist will be in a position to value them truly. Life now begins in Devachan, in the Spiritland, the “World of the Spirit.” This spiritual world can at all times be seen; although it is actually entered for the first time at death, it is always present. Later on we shall hear about the methods by means of which it can be observed. It is difficult to describe this spiritual world because our words are coined for the physical world. Hence, it can be described only by using analogies. Here, in our terrestrial world, we have the solid earth upon which we move about, fluidity, a sphere of air and the whole permeated by warmth. You can form an idea of the Spiritland by means of analogy. A solid land can be found there, formed in a remarkable way. It is the “continental” region of Devachan, containing the archetypal forms of everything mineral. You know that where a mineral appears, a clairvoyant sees nothing in the space concerned; the space is hollowed out and round-about the mineral are the spiritual forces that appear to clairvoyant sight rather like etheric figures of light. Try to visualize a crystal. When consciousness is raised into the spiritual world, the physical substance is not the important thing; what is important are the spiritual forces visible round about it. The crystal cube presents itself to the clairvoyant in negative. The forms in our physical world form a solid soil in Devachan. There is, of course, a great deal else in Devachan. All life on earth and its distribution among the different plants, animals and humans appears to the seer as the fluid element of the spiritual world, like the sea and water systems of our earth. This flowing life in Devachan cannot, however, be satisfactorily compared with our rivers and seas but far rather with the blood that flows through the human body. This is the “oceanic” and the “fluid” region of Devachan. The solid and fluidic regions do not appear in stages but in a relationship similar to that between land and sea here on earth. The third region is comparable with our air. This region of Devachan is formed of that of which our feelings and those of animals consist. It is the sum total of whatever is present in the astral realm. Flowing pain, flowing joy is the substantiality in Devachan that can be compared to the air on earth. Picture to yourselves a clairvoyant looking from Devachan at a battle. Watching it physically you would see soldiers, guns and so forth, but the clairvoyant would see more than the physical figures of human beings and physical weapons. He would see the passions of the fighters arrayed in opposition. From Devachan you would see what is present in the souls of those involved in the battle, how passion is hurled against passion. Like a terrible tempest raging among high mountains—that, approximately, is how such a battle would appear to a clairvoyant looking from Devachan. But loving feelings are also seen from there; they pervade the airy sphere of Devachan like a sound of wonderful sweetness. Thus we have named three regions—solid, flowing and airy—and have compared them with those of our earth. Just as warmth pervades the three lower regions in our physical world, so does one common element pervade the three regions of Devachan that have been named. What pervades everything is the substance of our thoughts, which live there as forms and beings. What the human being experiences here in the way of thoughts is only a shadow image of the thoughts in their reality. Think of an outstretched canvas with living beings and figures behind it; on the canvas, however, you would be able to see only their images. This is exactly how the thoughts familiar to man in the physical world are related to what thoughts are in Spiritland. There they are beings with which one can associate and which pervade the whole sphere of Devachan as states of warmth. It is into this world that a man passes. During this life after death he has a definite feeling of the moment when he enters Devachan. It must also be stated that to the extent to which the human being in kamaloka has broken away from physical connections, to that extent his consciousness lights up again. After the clear tableau of his life, a darkening of consciousness begins during postmortem existence, its intensity depending upon the strength of desire for physical life. But the more the human being breaks his attachment to physical things, the clearer does his darkened consciousness become. In Devachan a man's experiences are conscious, not dreamlike; all events are experiences in Devachan. We will speak later of how the relevant organs are formed. A human being knows with exactitude when he enters the spiritual world. The first impression he has of Devachan is that he is seeing the form of the physical body of the previous life outside his ego, his “I.” This body is, of course, incorporated into the “continental” region of the spiritual world and belongs to the solid land of Devachan. When in physical life, you say, “I do this,” you affirm that you are living in your physical body and hence say “I” to it; not so in Devachan. You are then outside the physical body but in its form you become conscious of it when you enter Devachan and you say to it, “That art thou!” You no longer say “I” of your physical body. This is an incisive, significant event for the soul, which now realizes, “I am now no longer in the physical but in the spiritual world.” Hence you no longer speak of your physical body as “I,” but you say, “That art thou!” These words from the Vedanta philosophy, Tat twam asi, are based upon this experience. Utterances of this kind in Eastern philosophy represent facts of the spiritual world. When the Vedanta teaches the pupil to meditate on the “That art thou,” it means that already in this life, he should awaken in himself those ideas and conceptions that will arise in him when he enters Devachan. Genuine meditative formulae are actually “photographs” of facts of the spiritual world, and the Tat twam asi is the boundary sign or signal that one is about to enter the spiritual world. We learn gradually to contemplate objectively, without sympathy or antipathy, what is connected with our own physical lives, like pictures at which we gaze. The soul's experiences in connection with the flowing life of Devachan are again different. In the physical world, life is distributed among the many individual beings. In Devachan, life manifests as a single whole. We encounter there the one all-embracing life, and perception of it is of great intensity, for in this uniform life experiences are not contained as abstractions. Just think of how everything introduced into life by the great founders of religion is in turn received by man into his astral and etheric bodies; such truths are experienced again in Devachan as a source of exaltation. What had flowed from the founders of religion into the individual incarnations—and the most valuable knowledge is seated in the etheric body—is an experience facing you in Spiritland. Everything that had streamed into the physical life is present before you in great, impressive pictures. You experience in Devachan what unites human beings and promotes harmony among them; what divides us, what is alien to us here, we bring into unison in yonder realm. The pleasures and sufferings in which we are so strongly involved here are made manifest to us there as wind and weather. We experience in pictures or images around us what we formerly experienced inwardly; it is now the airy sphere around us. What we feel personally in physical life is experienced in yonder world in connection with the totality. We only feel joy in connection with the totality of joy, pain in connection with the totality of suffering. Thus, the importance of our personal joy and suffering for the totality is made manifest. Such is the knowledge concerning joy and suffering that we acquire in the life after death. We live there with thoughts that are realities. Now we ask how man's being is affected by this life within the whole in Devachan. Let us clarify this by means of a comparison. What enables man to have sight in the physical world? The fact that light comes to him and forms the organ for its reception. Goethe said with deliberate purpose, “The eye is formed by the light for the light.” The truth of this is confirmed by the fact that if animals go to live in dark caves, their eyes may degenerate, and other organs, for instance, the organs of touch that are essential there, develop greater sensitivity. The organ of perception is created by the relevant external element. If there were no sun there would be no eye; the light has produced the eye. Our organism is a product of the elements surrounding it; everything physical in us has been created by the surrounding world. Similarly, in Devachan the spiritual organs in man are built by the spiritual environment. During the time in Devachan, a man takes in something from the life of his environment, and from the elements around him builds for himself a kind of spirit organism. In Devachan he feels always as if he were a being in process of becoming, in whom member after member of his spirit organism is coming to birth. Now think of this. All awareness of productivity is accompanied by a feeling of blessedness, as indeed is the case in physical life, too! Think of an artist, or an inventor. This growing and becoming give rise to a feeling of blessedness in a human being as he passes through Devachan, and there he creates for himself the spiritual archetype of a man. He has already often done this whenever he sojourned in Devachan after death, but every time there is built into this archetype, as something new, what the man has taken with him into Devachan as the fruit of his last life, as an extract in his etheric body. When man entered Devachan for the first time, he had already created spiritually an archetype that then densified to become physical man. Now, when he has lived through many incarnations, he takes with him every time into Devachan the extract of the past life, and then, in accordance with it, he creates the archetype of a new man. This operation takes a long time; today we will speak of it only in general terms. Thus, it is by no means fortuitous that the human being appears on the earth in successive incarnations and passes through Devachan ever and again. The earth reveals a different countenance to him each time and new experiences are available in external culture and through relationships of every kind. The soul does not return to the physical plane until new experiences can be offered there. I will give you in figures later on the length of time between two incarnations; it is the time needed by the human being for the creation of his new archetype. Once it is created, this archetype has the impulse every time to appear on the earth again. This archetype is, after all, the human being himself. It is not easy to describe this impulse so we will take an example. Someone has a particular thought and also the urge to give expression to it. The impulse has led the thought to take on physical form. The power to shape and elaborate the archetype that has been created by himself in Devachan does not yet lie within the power of human will. In the present cycle of life, man cannot yet direct his reincarnations himself; he needs lofty spiritual beings to guide him to the parents who are able to provide the physical body that is suitable for the archetype. These beings direct him to the people and the race best suited to the archetype. If the time for the reincarnation has come, man surrounds himself first of all, in keeping with the archetype created in Devachan, with astral substance. This actually forms itself and shoots in, as it were. The process of being directed by higher beings to the parental pair now begins. Because the physical body to be provided by the parents can be only approximately suitable for the astral body and ego, these higher beings meanwhile incorporate into the individual concerned the etheric body through which the best possible adjustment is achieved between the earthly and what comes from the spiritual world. Of this incorporation of the etheric body and of the physical birth we will speak tomorrow, but we now realize today that at birth, when the human being appears again on the earth, the course of the process is the exact opposite of what takes place after death. At birth the astral body is incorporated, then the etheric body and finally the physical body, whereas at death the human being first lays aside the physical body, then the etheric body and lastly the astral body. When a human being receives the etheric body, something happens to him analogous to what takes place when he goes through the gate of death. Then he had a backward view of his past life, now he has a preview, a prophetic view of the life he is about to begin. This is of great importance for him. It takes place at the moment when the etheric body is being incorporated. The moment then vanishes from his memory. He does not see particular details but a picture of the life's possibilities. This preview can be disastrous for him only to the extent to which he is shocked by it, which means that he struggles against entering into the physical body. If the entry is as it should be, the etheric body and the physical body harmonize; in cases where there is a shock they do not. The etheric body then does not pass in its entirety into the physical body, but especially around the head projects outwards. It cannot then mould the organs of intelligence properly. Some cases of idiocy are due to this, but by no means all, emphatically not all. Physical life becomes intelligible through the spiritual life behind it. This recognition will help us to dedicate our knowledge to the service of altruistic life. |
| 109. Rosicrucian Esotericism: The Physical World as an Expression of Spiritual Forces and Beings
07 Jun 1909, Budapest Translated by Helen Fox |
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| 109. Rosicrucian Esotericism: The Physical World as an Expression of Spiritual Forces and Beings
07 Jun 1909, Budapest Translated by Helen Fox |
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Some explanation must now be given of how the conditions prevailing in our physical world are related to the spiritual world through which man passes between death and a new birth. For anyone who concerns himself with the truths of spiritual science it is self-evident that every happening in the physical world is an expression of spiritual influences, facts and beings. The foundations of all physical happenings are therefore to be sought in the spiritual world, in Devachan. You may now ask if, inversely, our physical world produces effects in the spiritual world. Yes, that is the case, and the best way to understand these relationships will be to study the life of a human being. Threads from soul to soul are woven here in the physical world as the result of the manifold circumstances of existence. Bonds of friendship, of love, and so on, are firmly knit, and every contact made between one human being and another has significance and reality not only for this physical world but also for the spiritual world. Indeed, it may be said that the more spiritual the relationships here have been, the more significant they are for the world of Devachan. When the individual dies, everything that is physical in these relationships of love and friendship falls away from them and only what was of the nature of soul and spirit remains. The relationship between mother and child is an example. To begin with, this relationship is founded upon nature; it becomes more spiritual as time goes on, until finally the original, natural circumstances simply provide an opportunity for a bond to be woven between soul and soul. When the human being dies, the factors provided by nature are eliminated but the bond that has been woven remains. If you try to picture the whole human race on the earth and all the bonds of friendship and of love that have been woven, you must picture these relationships as a great network or web, which is, moreover, actually present in Devachan. When a clairvoyant gazes at the earth from the standpoint of Devachan, he perceives this web of spiritual relationships that a human being finds again when he passes into Devachan after death. He is involved in all the spiritual relationships he himself has woven. This is also the answer to the question: In Devachan do we see again those who were dear to us? Yes, we see them again, freed moreover from all the obstacles of space and time that here on earth lie like veils over these relationships of the soul. In Devachan, souls confront each other directly. The relationship of soul to soul is far more intimate and inward than it is in the physical world. There can never be any doubt in Devachan about one soul recognizing the other again, even when one of them passes into Devachan before the other. Recognition of loved ones is not particularly difficult there, for each soul bears his inner, spiritual reality inscribed as it were upon his spiritual countenence. He himself proclaims his name, indeed, in a much truer form than is possible here, as the basic tone, which, as it is said in occultism, he represents in the spiritual world. An absolutely undisturbed communion is actually possible only when both souls are in Devachan. Nevertheless, the disembodied soul does not lose all consciousness of the one who is still on earth; he can actually follow the latter's actions. The soul who is first in Devachan is naturally unable to see physical colors and forms belonging to the earth because in that spiritual realm he has no physical organs. But everything in the physical world has its spiritual counterpart in Devachan and that is what is perceived by the soul already there. Every movement of the hand in the physical world, because it is preceded by an impulse of will that is either conscious or unconscious, every change in the physical human being, has a spiritual counterpart that can be perceived in Devachan by the soul whose death preceded that of the other human being concerned. Existence in Devachan is not a kind of dreaming or sleeping but in all respects a conscious life. It is in Devachan that a human being develops the predispositions and impulses that enable the bond with those whom he loved to remain closer, in order that in a later incarnation he will find them again on earth. In many respects the purpose of incarnation on earth is to forge bonds of ever greater intimacy. Companionship in Devachan is, to say the least, as intimate as any life here on earth. Fellow feeling in Devachan is much more alert, much more intimate than it is on earth; one experiences another's pain there as one's own. On earth, greater or less personal prosperity is possible at the cost of others but in Devachan that is out of the question. There, the misfortune caused by someone to another human being in order to better himself, would reverberate upon him; nobody could prosper at the expense of another. Adjustment starts from Devachan. It is from there that the impulse is brought to make brotherliness a reality on the earth. A law that is a matter of course in Devachan is a task that has to be fulfilled on earth. A great deal more could be said about the connection between the spiritual world and the earth. You can now think exhaustively about this and be able to answer many questions yourselves about meeting and being together in Devachan with those we love. It was said yesterday that when the human being in Devachan has developed his spiritual archetype, the impulse comes to him to descend again to the physical plane. To express it more or less abstractly, it is rather as if a thought matures and you feel an urge to turn it into deed. What is it that actually induces the soul to descend again into the physical world, that gives it the definite impulse to do this? During the kamaloka period, when the soul gradually rids itself of the urge to cling to physical life, it is continually receiving, in the experience it undergoes, impulses that kindle the will to sweep away hindrances to evolution. The soul itself experiences the pain and harm it has caused to others. In thus experiencing the pain of the other being, there arises in the soul the temporarily ineradicable impulse that reparation must he made for this. Thus, step by step the soul takes with it from kamaloka into Devachan the impulse to rectify its faults. In the higher worlds there is even more possibility of everything remaining preserved in the suitable way. When, after the period of kamaloka, the human being lays aside his astral body as a third corpse, everything upon which the ego has not yet worked separates from him. But in the astral world there remains behind something like a web, consisting of whatever hindrances to evolution he has himself brought into the world. The human being himself paves his path through the world with all the forms that are evidence that he has caused injury of some kind to others. If the human being concerned has completed the development of his archetype in Devachan and has woven into it everything that came with him from the last incarnation as the extract of his etheric body, a kind of fecundation now takes place. The archetype is permeated by the web of its own unrequited deeds. Thus, the first thing that happens to the soul after it has reached maturity in Devachan is that it is permeated with what we call karma, and this gives it the impulse to descend again to the earth in order to make compensation for as much as possible of the harm previously caused. At the end of the period in Devachan the soul is permeated with the consequences of its own deeds. Not until then is there complete readiness for the descent into a new existence on earth. Everywhere in the astral world a clairvoyant sees souls who want to incarnate. Conditions of space and time in the astral world are of course different from those in the physical world. Such a soul can move with tremendous rapidity in the astral world and is impelled by certain forces to the locality where a physical and an etheric body befitting this soul are produced. Distance such as that between Budapest and New York plays no part whatever. Time factors come into consideration only insofar as the earthly possibilities of the most favorable conditions for incarnation can be achieved. From the earth there comes to this soul, which has the form of a bell, widening from above downwards as it flies through astral space, the physical element produced by the line of heredity. We must now speak briefly of what draws the soul down to the earth and what it is that will incarnate. You know that procreation is connected with certain impulses of feeling, impulses of love, sympathy born of love. The process of procreation is preceded by “sympathy born of love,” which is perceived by a clairvoyant as a play, a surging hither and thither of astral forces, of astral streams, between the man and the woman. Something is alive there that is not present if the human being is alone; the companionship between the souls themselves is expressed in the play of the astral streams. But of course every process of love is individual and issues from a specific individuality. Now, before earthly fertilization, before the physical act of love, there is reflected in this play of astral forces, the individuality, the being who is coming down again to the earth. That is the essential reality in the procreative act. So one can say that before physical fertilization, what is descending from the spiritual world is already beginning to be active. The spiritual world is also instrumental in bringing about the meeting of the man and woman. A wonderfully intimate play of forces from the spiritual world is taking place here. The being who is descending is, generally speaking, connected from the beginning with the product of fertilization. It is emphatically not the case that an individuality connects with it only after a certain time. From the moment of conception this individuality is in touch with the outcome of physical procreation. There are exceptions, of course, there, too. During the first days after conception, this spiritual individuality who is descending does not yet actually affect the development of the physical human being, but it is close by, as it were, is already in contact with the developing embryo. The actual attachment takes place from about the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first days after conception; what is descending from a higher world is then already working together with the being who is in process of coming into existence. Thus the delicate, organic texture that is necessary if the human individuality is to use the physical body as an instrument, is prepared from the beginning in accordance with the earlier faculties. That the human being is an integrated unity originates from the fact that the smallest organ is in keeping with the organism as a whole, that is to say, even the smallest unit must be such that the whole structure is able to ensure that from the eighteenth to the twenty-first day after conception, the ego can participate in the development of the physical and etheric bodies. Now to what extent have the female and male elements influence upon the development of the being who is coming into existence? If you study what occultly and spiritually underlies the physical creation, a great deal will become intelligible to you; naturally only the essentials can be touched upon here. We shall hear presently that in earlier times, before the separation of the sexes, procreation took place without participation by the male. If it were still the same today, what would happen? If the female element alone were to participate in the process of human procreation, to what extent would it be involved? If the female element alone were to operate, the further evolution would result in the child resembling the forefathers to the highest possible extent. Beings coming into existence would all be completely homogeneous. The principle of generality, homogeneity, originates from the female element. Only through the separation of the sexes has it become possible for human individuality to develop, for it is due to the influence of the male that there are differences between the successor and his forefathers. The male element provides individuality. Hence, not until bi-sexuality had been established on the earth were successive embodiments or reincarnations possible. Not until then was man able to embody on the earth the product of earlier existence. That there is harmony between what is executed below on the earth and the individual entity who must evolve and be enriched from incarnation to incarnation, is due to the fact that the male element and the female element work together. The human ego would no longer find a suitable body today if the principle of the “universal human” were not modified by the activity of the male element, that is to say, if the universal type were not individualized. It is essentially the etheric body that is worked upon by the female element. In the etheric body, where the permanent tendencies are rooted, the driving force of the female element is at work. The principle of generality, of the generic., is anchored in the etheric body. In the etheric body of the woman there is still present today the counterpart of what exists outwardly as the folk soul, the race spirit. Folk soul and race spirit are identical. If we now bear in mind the spiritual reality underlying conception, we must say that conception in itself is nothing else than a kind of deadening of the living forces of the etheric body. Death, at conception, is already woven into the human body. It is a happening that hardens, as it were, and deadens the etheric body, which otherwise would multiply ad infinitum. The etheric body, which originates from the female principle and would otherwise produce copies only, is densified as a result of the male influence and thereby becomes the producer of the new human individuality. Propagation consists in the production of a copy of the etheric body of the woman; through being hardened, in a certain respect killed, it is at the same time individualized. In the deadened etheric body there lies hidden the formative force that brings forth the new human being. Thus do conception and propagation amalgamate. Thus we see that two conceptions take place: below, the physical, human conception, and above, the conception of the archetype as the result of its own karma. We said that from the eighteenth to the twenty-first day after conception onwards the ego is already working on the embryo; but not until much later, after six months, do other forces also work on the embryo, forces that determine the karma of the human being. This can be expressed by saying that the web woven out of karma there takes hold; gradually these forces come into play. Now exceptions occur here, too, so that later on an exchange of the ego may take place. We will speak of that later. The ego is the first factor to intervene for the purpose of development. If we want to have an approximate picture of what exists in the spiritual world and is about to descend, we must say that it is the individual who is in the process of incarnating who brings together those who love one another. The archetype wishing to incarnate has drawn to itself the astral substance that now has an effect upon the passion, the feeling of love. The astral passion surging hither and thither on the earth below, mirrors the astral substances of the descending entity. So the astral substance coming from above is encountered by the astral feeling of those who love each other, which is itself influenced by the substance of the entity descending to incarnation. When we think through this thought to its conclusion, we must say that the reincarnating individual definitely participates in the choice of his parents. According to who and what he is, he is impelled to the parental pair concerned. It is often glibly stated that if the choosing of parents were accepted as a fact, the feeling of finding a new life in one's children would be lost and that the love based upon having transmitted one's own nature to them would thereby be lessened. This is a groundless fear, for maternal and paternal love assume a higher and more beautiful meaning when we realize that in a certain sense the child loves the parents even before conception and is thereby impelled to them. The parents' love is therefore the answer to the child's love, it is the responsive love. We have thus an explanation of parental love as the reproduction of the child's love that precedes the physical birth. It has already been said that higher beings participate in the embodiment of the new human being. You will grasp what this means if you realize that there is never a perfect correspondence between what is coming down from above to embodiment and the sheaths that this entity acquires down below. A perfect correspondence between the higher and the lower cannot take place until man has reached the goal of his evolution, when he has attained spirit man. When he has transformed the physical body into spirit man, the etheric body into life spirit, and the astral body into spirit self, man stands at the point in evolution where, with a will that is completely free, he himself chooses his final incarnation. Before this point, full accordance is not possible. As he is today, man has transformed only part of his astral, etheric and physical bodies, and of this part alone is he master. But what he has not yet transformed must be integrated into him from outside by other beings. Two different categories of beings participate in this process, those who integrate the etheric body into him and those who lead him to the parents. At the present stage of his evolution, man could not himself make the etheric body an integral member of his constitution. It is through the forces contained in the etheric body that the human being has the pre-vision spoken of in the lecture yesterday. When the human being already has the etheric body and the astral body, and the physical body is added, the moment comes when the pre-vision must disappear; the etheric body must blend with the physical body. The etheric body is, of course, not only the bearer of memory but of everything to do with time, that is, remembrance and foresight. But when the etheric body passes into the physical body it becomes subject to the laws of physical existence and these laws extinguish its power in a certain respect. Just as through the influence of the physical body a man can unfold his memory only to a certain degree, whereas after death, when the etheric body is again free, it presents the whole tableau of memories, so it is with the pre-vision; in the physical world, vision of the future is limited by the physical body. That is the normal course of incarnation. The shock mentioned previously is experienced by the soul as the result of an abnormal pre-vision of difficult circumstances in the future life. We have now come to the point when the ego itself, the real man, begins to work upon what has been given him and with which he has been connected in the physical world. The forces of the various spiritual members of man that are at work in the period before birth, are first active through the corresponding members of the maternal organism. During the period just before birth, the human being is able to live only because he is enveloped on all sides by the maternal sheath. At birth the human being thrusts away this physical maternal sheath. At first, it is only the physical body that becomes free; the etheric body—the clairvoyant sees this—is still enveloped by a maternal etheric sheath and remains protected and guarded by this sheath until the time of the second dentition. It is an important point in the evolution of humanity when the maternal etheric sheath is cast off and a second birth takes place. Then, when the etheric body has cast off its maternal sheath, the etheric body as such is born, it becomes free. This is an event of great significance for the evolution of a human being. Until the change of teeth there is still the possibility of the bodily structures remaining elastic in one direction or another, of changing in certain respects. From this time onwards they will only be subject to growth. When the change of teeth takes place, the development of the bodily forms has, in essentials, been completed. It is important that this should be known. Hence, everything that from outside is to become a formative influence on the physical body, to be a permanent quality of it, must be thoroughly taken into consideration and carefully formulated until the time of the change of teeth. But now, every external factor—light and color, for example—that has an effect upon the human being, has a formative effect upon his finer members and organs. All external factors have an essentially formative effect until the seventh year of life. Hence, it is not a matter of indifference what color, what environment the child has around it, and what he is allowed to do. If you were never to use your hands, they would atrophy. The same applies to all organs; the more delicate ones also develop through activity. The effect of red, for example, upon the finer organs in the hurnan being, is different from the effect of blue. Thus the effect differs according to the color that is around the child. While there is activity, the organs develop. The eye sees by habit, certainly, but what it sees has an effect upon the whole of man's nature. For the child's development it is not a matter of indifference whether the eye is looking at red or blue. It is here that spiritual science, in a time by no means far distant, will prove to be eminently practical. Why do we put spiritual science into practice? We do this out of love for man, because it equips us even in this sphere of activity to play a useful part in such subtle matters. At the seventh year of life, then, the etheric body becomes free. It is the bearer of memories. In regard to a child's memory, the most important thing of all is that before the seventh year of life it shall not be developed by current pedagogical methods. Only from the seventh year onwards has the time come when a true art of education should influence the training of the memory. It is often argued that nature sees to it that the child uses memory long before the age of seven. That is true, but it is the preliminary work that is accompanied by nature. The eyes of a child have been made ready by nature before birth in the mother's body, but what would happen if you were to allow the sunlight to work upon the eye of the embryo? Precisely in order that later on the sunlight can have the right effect upon the eye, the preliminary work upon it must be done by nature, before birth. The same applies to the other organs before physical birth. Nature produces them in advance but they are protected by the outer covering of the maternal sheath. So up to the seventh year of life, the child's memory should be worked upon by nature in order that then, from the seventh year onwards, it can be further developed in the right way. How, from then onwards, ought one to work on the child's memory? Just in the way that nature works until the child's physical birth. The human being bears a maternal astral sheath around him until puberty in his fourteenth or fifteenth year. Then this sheath is cast aside and the astral body becomes free; a third birth, so to speak, takes place. The astral body is the bearer of the faculty of human judgment, of discrimination. The opinion that the child ought to develop the faculty of independent judgment at as early an age as possible, should be abandoned. From the seventh to the fourteenth year it is essential to amass a rich store of memories for the purposes of life, in order that when the astral body is born, as ripe and rich a content of soul as possible shall be produced. Only then should the power of judgment begin to be exercised. The earlier method used in schools which let the “one times one” be learned by heart, that is, 1 x 1 = 1, and so on, being a matter of actual memorizing, is decidedly preferable to the abstract method at present in vogue of demonstrating the “one times one” with red and white beads on the abacus. This method is decidedly harmful. The same principle applies here as in the case of the young child; he understands speech a long time before he is able to speak himself. He should therefore not be encouraged to excercise judgment until he has gathered a good store of memories for the etheric body, until he has developed certain lasting inclinations and habits. It is important to develop the life of feeling. Gratitude, reverence and holy awe are feelings that in later life come to expression as the power of blessing, as outstreaming human love. The strongest impulses are given to the etheric body through religious experiences, through the feeling of being attached to the divine-spiritual, to the cosmic All. The faculty of abstract judgment should first be developed about the time when what flows from the etheric body has been made by the human being so pliable and flexible that the danger of forming the habit of abstract thinking lacking in piety is averted. The more the knowledge conveyed to the child is illustrated with imagery and symbols, the better. The world of feeling develops through being made acquainted with allegories and symbols, especially through the narration of the history of representative men and through intense absorption in the mysteries and beauties of nature. How a child's questions are answered is of great importance; for example, as explanation of the birth of a human being, of death and birth, the butterfly coming into existence out of the chrysalis. This is a picture of man's soul nature emerging from the physical body. But naturally, when we tell this to the child, we must believe it ourselves, for otherwise the child will not believe it either. Facts that confirm the truth of this imagery are to be found in nature everywhere. The occultist knows that the imagery of the butterfly and the chrysalis can serve as a symbol of a process at a much higher level. We must learn to believe again in what only an abstract philosophy will stigmatize as saga and fairy tale. The fairy tale of the stork, also songs such as, “Fly, beetle, fly,” can be ingeniously interpreted. The fairy tale of the stork was not invented in days of yore in order to tell children an untruth, but it was devised by one who knew that at birth something comes down from the spiritual world. In future time it may well be declared that it is a lie that in the past there were people who were expected to believe that at the birth of a new human being the only process that takes place is the physical connection of man and woman. This is a fairy tale, the fairy tale of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. “We ourselves know better,” that is what will be said in the future. It is to be hoped that those who come after us will understand and be more lenient with our weaknesses than we are with those of our predecessors! The symbol is the best means for working on the astral body. Ideation, mental pictures, should he cultivated until the time comes for the training of the liberated astral body, and only then should the power of judgment be developed. Why is it that so many human beings of the present age are, sad to say, crippled in their life of soul? Why is this? Because they have to say “Yes” and “No” to things at much too early an age. In the period until puberty they should learn to revere the great prototypes, the great processes in nature; only between the fourteenth and twenty-first years should the power of judgment come to maturity. Fewer voluble authors would then be let loose upon humanity. The outcome of premature forming of judgment in immature, though literary-minded men, is the shallow materialism of our present age. This veiled materialism is far more sinister than the scientific kind. An opinion has weight only when it is supported by what the soul has genuinely experienced. Human beings must learn how to form judgments; opinions are so deeply at variance because they have been formed at far too early an age. It is not until the twenty-first year that the ego is born and only from then onwards can there be any question of the individual being able to judge the world correctly, because it is only now that he confronts the world as a truly independent being. Further, from about the twenty-first to the twenty-eighth year the development of what is called sentient soul takes place, then the mind soul and the consciousness (or spiritual) soul in periods each of seven years duration. Hence it is an occult law that no individual before his thirty-fifth year is in the position of being capable of imparting or attaining anything in the field of occultism. The thirty-fifth year is particularly important. Let me remind you of Dante, of his vision of the spiritual world; if you can calculate it you will find that he had the vision in his thirty-fifth year. Where occult tradition survived it was known that such cycles also occur in the lives of individuals. It was known how the spiritual forces of the human being who is descending, work, where they take hold and how long they need for their proper development. It was known that all life is one great whole and that community in human society must be formed on the basis of this insight. Theosophy should teach us that wisdom must pass into deed, into social deed and into the daily round of life. The value of theosophy is that the greater it is, the less it remains abstract wisdom and the more forcibly it streams through the soul into the dexterity of the hands. Manual skill is then a kind of physical expression of the spirit of the world, a material expression of the spiritual. |
| 109. Rosicrucian Esotericism: The Configuration and Metamorphoses of Man's Physical Body
08 Jun 1909, Budapest Translated by Helen Fox |
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| 109. Rosicrucian Esotericism: The Configuration and Metamorphoses of Man's Physical Body
08 Jun 1909, Budapest Translated by Helen Fox |
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In continuation of the lecture yesterday concerning man's evolution, we will go back in thought today to epochs in the remote past and consider matters relating to them. Before speaking of the fact of reincarnation and discussing questions of human destiny, however, we will pass in review lengthy periods in ancient epochs of the evolution of humanity. Man of the present age confronts us as an assemblage of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego—the bearer of the ego, which means complete independence. Neither the ego nor the astral body are the most perfect members of man's being by reason of being more spiritual; the physical body, a structure consisting of the most wonderful components, is the most perfect member. What a truly magnificent structure it is, this physical body of man! The astral body is admittedly more inherently spiritual but it is less perfect; it is the bearer of joy and pain of urges, desires and passions. Why is the physical body the more perfect? Think of man's physical heart. It is a marvellous structure, holding its ground all through life against attacks! The same applies to all the other organs of the physical body. Wisdom itself is articulate in them. How does the astral body behave toward the heart? Certainly not always wisely! Because of its longings, the astral body needs to have the means for enjoyment and it continually maltreats the physical body, continually launches attacks upon the physical heart, which offers resistance. Why? Because the process of building the physical body has occupied a far longer period in the past than have the other bodies. The physical body is the oldest member of man's being, hence also the most perfect. A host of more advanced beings have already worked on it. Everything physical and material has evolved from spirit, has developed into its present form. The very first beginning of the human being in the physical world was the establishment of his physical body. At that time there were still no rudiments in the physical world of the etheric body, none of the astral body nor of the ego-bearer. Everything in the universe is subject to the process of evolution, not only man but also a planet such as our earth. Our earth, like man, has already existed in other planetary embodiments, the first of which we call Saturn, the second, Old Sun, and the third, Old Moon. We must not think here of the present moon, which is only residue, dross or slag of the Old Moon. We will now hear why our moon has since olden time been called “moon.” Here it must be remembered that the giving of names by the old occultists was by no means fortuitous but of deep significance. The name given to a thing or a being was always organically linked with what each was to express. The preceding planetary embodiment of our earth was the Old Moon; the still earlier embodiment was the Old Sun, not the present sun, which is like a remembrance of that ancient Sun. Then we come to that cosmic body to which it is now possible to look back with occult sight; this cosmic body is Saturn, Old Saturn, of which we have already spoken. I will now speak briefly of the evolution of this ancient Saturn. To begin with, we must be clear in our minds about the character of the basic elements of our outer world, according to occultists. Ancient occultism distinguished the four elements of earth, water, air, fire or warmth. For a modern physicist this no longer has meaning; what modern science calls an element does not coincide with what the occultist means by the word. The modern expression “aggregate condition” means roughly the same as “element.” Everything that is solid in present temperatures on the earth is called by the occultist, “earthy” or “solid”; a quartz crystal, for example, in conditions of present-day temperatures, is “earth” for the occultist. Everything fluid, also fluid metals and so on, is “water” for him; everything aeriform is “air.” What the modern physicists regards as a state of the three “aggressive assemblages,” namely, fire, is for the occultist, the fourth element. I well know that modern science considers it a veritable abomination when fire is regarded not merely as a condition but as something on a par with earth, water or air. On Old Saturn you would have found no earth, water or air; warmth or fire alone was in existence. If at that time—perhaps by putting a chair in cosmic space—you had been able to observe the Saturn evolution with clairvoyant sight, perception of it could only have been through the sense of warmth; at first, this was purely warmth of soul, inner warmth. With the exception of man, no single one of the beings on the earth today was present. There was no mineral, plant or animal kingdom. Under the conditions prevailing today, man needs the three kingdoms for his organic structure; in that period of ancient Saturn it was not so. The whole human being was a formation consisting only of warmth. Otherwise, nothing whatever of man was in existence. Try to think away from man as he is today everything physically perceptible, even the in-haled air, and imagine that he consists only and entirely of the warmth of the blood circulating in him, thus forming a picture of the blood system as it is today. Such was the constitution of all human beings on Saturn. For the occultist, a celestial body is only an assemblage of spiritual beings. The earth, too, is an assemblage of beings belonging to the mineral, plant, animal and human kingdoms. The consciousness of the men of ancient Saturn was also evolving. It was dull but comprehensive. Only on the earth has the clear day consciousness of the present time become possible. The consciousness of human beings on Saturn was dull and in a curious state. Man, as you know, is today unconscious during sleep. Now think of the plant, simply the physical plant without the beings concealed behind it. There you have a demonstration of a still deeper state, namely, dreamless sleep. The plant is a being in a condition of deep sleep. Now think of a state of sleep that is still deeper, still dimmer. this is the state of deep trance—the Saturn consciousness. I will describe it to you by means of an example of conditions that are abnormal in the modern age, occurring in a human being whose consciousness remained backward. A girl who up to her eighteenth year was totally unaccustomed to any form of alcoholic beverage was tempted by certain circumstances to drink rapidly a number of glassfuls of red wine. On account of certain organic conditions this made such an impression that she fell into a moribund state. A pencil was put in her hand and she began to make all kinds of drawings to which she added names. She had no consciousness whatever of what she was doing. She was like a machine, without life or consciousness. If you were to compare what this girl wrote down with what is said in theosophical books about planets, the structure of the universe today, and so on, you would find that what she wrote is, it is true, a strange cosmology but, for all that, one that in certain respects tallies with occult cosmology. The girl was in a state of consciousness deeper than that of ordinary sleep. In such a state the individual concerned is able in his dull consciousness to move far, far over the earth and to give expression to cosmic facts. The occultist knows that such a consciousness, dull and comprehensive, without the pertinent ego, is present in a physical stone, and that if the stone could be articulate it would be able to do what the girl did. This consciousness, although dull, embraces vast regions. Such was the consciousness of men on ancient Saturn. Saturn itself was an entity unconscious of its own identity, or better said, was possessed of a low form of consciousness to be described by saying that it bore within it a mirror-image of the whole cosmos and would have been capable of delineating it. To understand what this implies we must consider other matters. While man was finding on Saturn the sphere where the first rudiments for his physical body could take shape, Saturn was at the same time the stage at which other beings also were able to evolve, beings whose rank today is much higher than that of man. We will clarify this by quoting an utterance once made by an Egyptian sage to a Greek. He said, “You Greeks remain forever big children. You know nothing about the greatest secret of the Mysteries, namely, that gods were once men.” It is no longer necessary for these beings to enter into physical existence. On ancient Saturn, then, man was a kind of mineral; his consciousness was also on a par with that of the mineral. But beings who today are at a stage far higher than that of men once lived in human bodies. These are the Archai, First Beginnings, or Spirits of Personality. They passed through their “human” epoch on Old Saturn.1 They were not men as we are today but merely made use of the then “physical” body in order to experience their human epoch, to acquire ego consciousness. These sublime beings therefore acquired ego consciousness on Saturn and used the human body as a vehicle deputizing as their bodily dwelling place. Certain beings permeated the human physical body together with their distinctive characteristics and for these, man today owes twofold thanks. First, the faculty that alone enables an ego-bearer to find a footing in him; it was these Spirits of Personality who endowed the human body at that time with the form proceeding from their own nature. But second, they also made it possible for man to develop selfishness. Through the influence of the Spirits of Personality, man's body was endowed with the germinal capacity to develop as a free personality but at the same time to cultivate selfishness, egoism. If I wanted to describe all the pertinent details of this process I should need not one lecture or one lecture course but years. Hence, we can study steps or stages only and we will consider seven such stages in the Saturn evolution, each differing from the others. At the first stage you must picture to yourselves that as yet no physical warmth was present but that this was only in preparation. All that was present was purely of the nature of soul; soul warmth was present, and not until the midpoint of Saturn evolution was the physical human body in existence, composed of physical warmth substance. At the end of the Saturn evolution this human body of warmth dissolves. There are seven stages: three preliminary stages, a stage of physical warmth and three descending stages; each of these seven stages has again seven sub-divisions of which it is better not to speak at this point and to which we will return in the course of studying the evolution of the earth. In modern theosophical literature these stages are called rounds and globes. But now we will ask, “Whence came the substance out of which the human body was formed?” Sublime spiritual beings poured forth their own being and let it flow down as substance for the physical body of man. These beings were the Spirits of Will or the Thrones. They made the sacrifice of allowing the outpouring of their own being to take place. On Saturn, then, we find the Spirits of Will or the Thrones who give the substance for the human body, then the Spirits of Personality who inhabit Saturn during their human epoch and man himself as a physical germinating entity. The Saturn evolution takes its course in such a way that we must picture the beginning, the zenith and the ebb. Thereafter, the whole planet passes through a pralaya. We can think of the process in connection with the plant. The seed is laid in the earth, decays and carries over the form into a new existence. Just as between the first and the second plant there is an intermediate condition, a hidden condition, so is it in the case of the planet. This condition is called the “sleep of worlds.” After this sleep of worlds, when Saturn appeared again but metamorphosed, it was the Old Sun that now came into existence. The difference between Saturn and Sun is that the warmth substance of Saturn had densified to a gaseous state. Old Sun retained the warmth but evolved something as well, namely, air, so that on the Old Sun there was now warmth and air, and moreover light. Saturn consisted of dark warmth; the second planet, Old Sun, consisted of light—burning gas—warmth ether and air. Through Saturn there came into existence once and forever the foundation for the existence of the seed of the physical body of man. Now, on Old Sun, something new is added. The etheric body is poured into this substance by spiritual beings. This is the second planetary condition in which man has achieved the status of a plant. There is life in him. Through the integration of the etheric body, however, the physical body of man has also changed. It does not retain the egg-form of the Saturn period but is membered in itself. It is now a vibrant warmth egg in which forms of light gleam and fade away and in which there are indentures. The etheric body now works upon and elaborates the physical body. Whereas on Saturn the Thrones poured out from them-selves the substance of the physical body, it is now other beings who pour out substance as their great sacrifice. These beings are the Spirits of Wisdom, Dominions or Kyriotetes. The more difficult sacrifice had been made by the Thrones. Had they not created the foundation, the Spirits of Wisdom could not have begun their work. Again there were beings who passed through their “human” epoch on the Sun, namely, the Archangels or Fire Spirits—Archangeloi in Christian esotericism. Acting as substitutes they indwelt the body of man and in this way developed their ego consciousness. Something must here be mentioned that it is important to remember. If, after pralaya, Saturn had emerged directly as Sun, the bodies of men could not have received the etheric body into themselves. On the new planet, Old Sun, there had first to be a brief recapitulation of Saturn, during which the beings concerned were obliged to assume their old form once again. What other kind of beings were to be found on Old Sun? Certain Spirits of Personality had not reached their human stage on Saturn, had not succeeded in acquiring their ego consciousness on Saturn. They were obliged to make up for this on Old Sun and were therefore still at the same stage as their companions on Saturn. Hence, on Old Sun they were obliged to live as it were in a husk, in a mineral body that was not permeated by an etheric body. On Old Sun, therefore, a structure consisting only of physical body came into existence. Thus, structures of a lower grade existed side by side with those that consisted of physical body and etheric body, and these were the predecessors of our present animals. On Old Sun, therefore, there were two kingdoms: a human kingdom and the kingdom of the beings who, on Old Sun, were at the stage of the Saturn evolution. They constitute our present animal kingdom. On Old Sun there were thus two preliminary kingdoms, a human kingdom and an animal kingdom. The successors of the latter are the present higher animals. Old Sun now passes again into a kind of “cosmic night” and is born again in a third metamorphosis as Old Moon, which is able, at the beginning, to recapitulate the earlier stages to which fluid or watery substance is now added. When the separation of the Sun takes place, warmth and light go with it; sublime beings also go forth together with the finer essences. What has become fluid or “watery” goes forth as Moon, condenses further and becomes a kind of secondary planet. At that time on Old Moon, therefore, there were warmth, light and water. Man has his etheric or light body as on Old Sun; the new element that is added on Old Moon is what may be called tone or sound. In order to realize more clearly what this means I will give an illustration. Think of a metal plate covered with powder, across the edge of which a violin bow is drawn. The powder shapes itself into definite forms—the sound figures of the physicist. What we today recognize as sound or tone is the physical configuration of the sound. The “water” on the Old Moon was permeated with sound and thereby stirred into regular movement. Inner experience is thereby made possible in the physical bodies of beings on Old Moon; organs take shape, for example, the liver, but it passes away again. The process is one of the forming and disappearance of organs, an experience of figures and rhythms. The bodies present are thus made ready to receive astral substance into themselves. The impact of the primeval tone in the watery substance is expressed in the Bible as follows: God arranged everything according to measure, number and weight. The essentially new feature of Old Moon evolution is therefore the process of inner oscillation that is forced, as it were, into the physical substance. You must think of Old Moon as being permeated by this inner oscillation, which is diversified into regular, numerical rhythms. Earlier, on Saturn, it had been warmth formations that built the human body; later, on Old Sun, it had been aeriform formations, appearing like an aerial mirage, like a Fata Morgana. On Old Moon, substance was now water, stirred into movement by inner oscillation. Organic members involved in a process of inner metamorphosis were brought into existence by this oscillation and shimmered through the human body. You must conceive of this as a transient process of coming into being and passing away again; thus, a liver or lung was formed in the human body and then dissolved. Such were the conditions on Old Moon. The Bible expresses it as follows: God once ordered everything according to number, measure and weight. The inner oscillation is here meant. Within Old Moon there now, firstly, come into existence again the earlier structures of the human body; the physical and etheric bodies are formed again. Why? Because what first takes place on Old Moon is a repitition of the Saturn and Old Sun embodiments. Only then does the real Old Mood come into existence. Into the physical human body, which now contained the watery substance on the one hand, and on the other, as a result of the inner oscillation, was permeated by the primal tone and the etheric body, the Spirits of Movement, Powers or Dynameis pour the astral body of man. They, as the Spirits of Will on Saturn and the Spirits of Wisdom on the Sun had done, now offer up, out of their own substance, the human astral body. Thus, the development of the earth is continually progressing, and also that of man himself who is to inhabit it. The human physical body, as you have heard, developed on Saturn. Through the three metamorphoses—Saturn, Sun, Moon—it has now reached the third stage of perfection. On Old Moon this physical body of man had come still nearer to resemble its present form. But the further development that was necessary for man's astral body would not have been possible on the earth if a severance had not taken place at a certain point of time. A basic mass of substance of the planet—the Old Moon—remained; part of it went out and surrounded the basic mass. Firstly, there was Saturn; secondly, Sun; thirdly, Moon. The best substances and beings have now separated into a basic body which, during the earth period, again separates and becomes a fixed star, higher in rank than a planet. Still another body separates and remains a planet. The sun of today was once a planet. If you were to take the present sun, the present moon and the substance of our earth with its beings, and combine them in a huge vessel, you would have Old Sun. If you were to combine earth and moon you would have Old Moon. In the course of the evolution of humanity, our sun separated from the planet earth. With it the best substances and the best beings went out of the earth. The watery element, becoming denser and denser, accompanied the sun. The dense figures and forms are the bearers of the beings who inhabited Old Moon. Human beings now chose a separate scene of action. A fixed star, a sun, always comes into existence as the result of a planet having advanced. During this process of evolution, men were not the only beings who were present and had evolved to the stage of having as members the three bodies, physical body, etheric body and astral body. There were also other beings who had remained behind in their development. The beings who had passed through their “human” epoch. on Old Moon were the Angels, called Angeloi in Christian esotericism and in India, Lunar Pitris. The consciousness of these beings was different from that of men today. But on Old Moon there were other beings as well. There were certain Archangeloi who had remained backward on Old Sun and were now obliged to repeat their “human” stage on Old Moon. There were also beings who had reached the stage of Spirits of Personality, (i.e., the Saturn stage of humanity) on Old Moon for the first time. The Archangeloi who had become backward on Old Sun, produced as human bodies structures that had physical and etheric bodies only. This was a kingdom below that of man, a kingdom that continued on the earth as the animal kingdom; the beings belonging to it were the precursors of the physical bodies of the present animal world, and beings who on Old Moon had only a physical body were the precursors of the present plant kingdom, Thus, on Old Moon there was a human kingdom, an animal kingdom and a plant kingdom, on Saturn there was a human kingdom only, and on Old Sun a human kingdom and and animal kingdom. The mineral kingdom is the last of the kingdoms that have come into existence in the process of cosmic evolution. Man, the human kingdom, is the oldest kingdom in the evolutionary process; he was already there before the earth was in existence. On the earth he then receives, in addition to this three bodies, the fourth member of his being, the bearer of the ego.
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| 109. Rosicrucian Esotericism: Evolutionary Stages of our Earth before the Lemurian Epoch
09 Jun 1909, Budapest Translated by Helen Fox |
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| 109. Rosicrucian Esotericism: Evolutionary Stages of our Earth before the Lemurian Epoch
09 Jun 1909, Budapest Translated by Helen Fox |
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The lecture yesterday brought our study of the evolution of our planet to the stage known as Old Moon. We heard that the first embodiment of our planet was that of Old Saturn, the second that of Old Sun and the third that of Old Moon. We came to the point in yesterday's lecture where it was made clear that if everything had progressed exactly as hitherto, man would not have been able to keep pace with the tempo of the cosmic evolution of other beings. Hence a kind of severance took place at a certain point during the Old Moon embodiment. The Sun, progressing as it was within the cosmic expanse, separated from the planetary body together with the finest substances and higher beings. The less progressed part of the planetary body, namely, Old Moon itself, still containing all that constitutes our present earth and present moon, remained as a kind of cloud-body. Certain conditions brought about a densification or hardening on Old Moon and the same happened to the beings inhabiting it. When the Sun had separated, its forces worked upon Old Moon from outside. The subsequent human-animal-plant kingdom that came into existence on Old Moon now received the forces of the Sun from outside. After the separation, the three kingdoms on Old Moon came into existence. As yet there was no mineral kingdom but what took shape, after the hardening process, as the lowest kingdom was a kind of mineral-plant kingdom—mineral substance that was plantlike in character, or, if you prefer, plant substance that was mineral in character. This formed the ground of Old Moon; it was a kind of semi-solid, semi-fluid foundation. On the earth today we walk about on a mineral ground, on Old Moon it was semi-solid, semi-fluid ground, a kind of plant-mineral soil. Think of a mass of spongy, plantlike substance on which human beings walked. This was the character of the lowest kingdom on Old Moon, a kingdom that was at the same time half-living. The ground of our earth today has become comparatively static; volcanic activity is the only reminder of a certain inner life. On Old Moon there were no such conditions. We may perhaps speak later on about what an occultist has to say on the subject of earthquakes and volcanic activity. Just as organs in a plant grow and subsequently die, so did this half-living substance on Old Moon. The Old Moon was like a great organism, living and mobile, on which the beings living might have felt like parasites of today. These Old Moon plants were composed of mineral substance, had life in them and were mobile; they were plant-mineral in character. Nothing would have been found resembling our rocks of today; instead, there were horny or woody formations. In the environment of Old Moon, like a kind of atmosphere, were a few cloud-masses composed of a half-watery, half-living substance in which the beings of the next kingdom, half animal, half plant in character, were embedded. If you were to crush a tree, causing something akin to the feeling experienced by an animal, that would be remotely comparable with what was experienced by this animal-plant kingdom, which could not exist as such on the earth today. As has often been said, not only are there pupils in school who make no progress but in the whole process of evolution there are always beings who remain at a standstill and who, together with the forms that belong to them and express what they are, become retarded. Thus, on the earth itself there were still certain moon beings who were not sufficiently advanced to keep abreast of evolution on the earth. These beings were obliged to create in their outer expressions the condition that had been essential to their life on Old Moon. As you know, plants on Old Moon were not rooted in mineral soil as they are today but in the half-living ground of the planet. Mistletoe, for example, is a descendant, a straggler, of an Old Moon form; it is obliged to take root in plant-soil. In folk myths there are many indications of this, for example, in the legend of Baldur and Loki. The latter is a being belonging to Old Moon, whereas Baldur is a being inwardly connected with earth and sun evolution. To interpret a legend or myth it is necessary to know in which sphere of occult investigation the connections can be discovered. External science could be so enriched by the fruits of clairvoyance that it would recognize in a legend much more than folk fantasy. Spiritual science must teach one to investigate with the whole soul instead of with the intellect only. There was still a third kingdom on Old Moon, between the animal and human kingdoms; it was the animal-human kingdom. The forms of those animal-men were quite different from what is pictured by materialistic science today. They were animal-men although certain important members of their constitution were not yet actually within them. While he is asleep today, man's physical and etheric bodies remain in the bed and his astral body is outside. Fundamentally speaking, during sleep he is therefore in the physical world with only the lesser half of his constitution. Man's physical and etheric bodies belong to an earlier, cosmic stage of consciousness. Clairvoyant vision reveals this condition to have been permanent on Old Moon. The astral body then was never entirely within the physical and etheric bodies but was nevertheless connected more fundamentally and definitely with the human being than is the case during sleep today. The head of the man of Old Moon was not self-enclosed as is the case today. A residue of what the organs in the head were at that time is the place at the top of a baby's head that stays soft and open for a long time. On Old Moon the head of the human being was still open. Were you to draw a line vertically downward from this soft area, you would meet the pineal gland. Today it is stunted and withered but it was an important organ during the Old Moon embodiment. It was a kind of sense organ that connected man's physical and etheric bodies with his astral body. Through this organ, which was a delicate, luminous body, man's astral body radiated into the other bodies. His consciousness was neither that of sleep nor of waking life. He did not perceive outer objects. His consciousness might be compared with that of the dream to-day. The pineal gland at that time was a kind of warmth organ, emitting powerful, luminous rays of warmth. When on Old Moon man was moving about, the function of this organ was to show him the direction he must take. Man's perception on Old Moon consisted in something like a dream picture rising up within him. There was as yet no seeing or perceiving objects but man felt an inner up-and-down surge of living pictures of which the dream pictures of today are only a feeble shadow. Everything a man set out to do on Old Moon, how he searched for his food and so forth, was always activated by these pictures that were connected with the outer world. He could allow himself to be directed and led by them. When he was looking for food he was guided by certain pictures that rose up before him, and he was warned of danger also by them. The astral body extended far beyond the physical and the etheric bodies; the form of the physical body alone could be called human. On Old Moon man's inner warmth was not yet constant. Today, on the earth, this has been achieved. On Old Moon man absorbed warmth from the warmth around him and emitted it again, just as he inhales and exhales air today. The process became visible in his organ of warmth. It gleamed and was luminous when he was absorbing warmth and darkened when he was exhaling it. If you could have seen what was happening, the process would have suggested the image of a fire-breathing dragon. All these happenings have a deep significance. Figures such as the Archangel Michael with the fire-breathing dragon under his feet, or St. George. fighting with the dragon, are pictures reminiscent of those conditions. The fire breather of Old Moon, the ancient Dragon, is a figure that once actually existed. It portrays a stage that would have to be surmounted. This is the explanation of such matters that is derived from occult knowledge. Later on, when spiritual science is more widely known, there will be a different view of truths that have been preserved in imagery and pictures of this kind. This animal-man form was quite different from that of man today because the astral body did not sink into the physical body as deeply as it did later on the earth. Man is the figure he is today because the astral body eventually sank right down into him. It could be said that what did not, during the Old Moon period of evolution, allow itself to descend into the depths of the physical world, now resolved to do so during the earth period. But if this process in the cosmos had taken place at an earlier time, man would have remained at a much lower evolutionary stage. During the period of earth evolution, he succeeded, with the help of the spirit, in acquiring for himself the noble, godlike form that is now his. If the possibility of developing this stature had already existed on Old Moon, the descent of the astral body would have taken place prematurely. The divine Guides have always chosen the right moment. The essential achievement of Old Moon evolution was that time was left for the evolution of the physical body, and on the earth man was to be permeated by the astral body after having evolved physically on Old Moon at a lower stage. Then again there took place a certain recession of the Moon into the Sun, which had previously separated; the Old Moon globe was again absorbed by the Sun and everything passed into a cosmic sleep, a pralaya. This began at the time when the Moon returned again into the Sun. Hence the evolution of Old Moon proceeded by the following stages: firstly, a kind of preparation; secondly, separation into Sun and Moon; thirdly, formation of three kingdoms on Old Moon; fourthly, return into the Sun; fifthly, ebb; sixthly, the cosmic sleep. The fourth metamorphosis of our earth, our own planet earth itself, then came forth from the cosmic sleep. This first configuration of the earth was, of course, quite different from its configuration today. When the earth emerged from the cosmic night, from the darkness of twilight, it was gigantic in size, for again sun and moon were contained within it; the separations took place later on. So enormous was the size of the earth that it reached as far as the Saturn of today. Differentiation in the solar system did not take place until a much later time. As far as is possible in terms of philosophical thinking, the Kant-Laplace theory is an entirely intelligible exposition of this first form of our earth. It speaks of a kind of archetypal nebula in which everything was dissolved and out of which the whole solar system came forth. Through the rotation of this nebula, rings took shape; they densified and then, still as the result of rotation, the planets were formed. In schools this process is often illustrated by means of an experiment. A globule of oil in liquid of equal density is made to rotate by a simple mechanical device. It can then be observed that this globule flattens, that drops separate from it and form themselves again into globules that circle round the central globule. In this way one can see in miniature a kind of planetary system coming into being through rotation. This has an immensely suggestive effect. Why should we not picture the process in this ways This experiment shows how a planetary system comes into existence through rotation; it is there before our very eyes. But one thing is forgotten. One of us, or the teacher, actually causes the rotation! Nothing is really explained by this external illustration. No cosmic system comes into existence out of nothingness. It does not arise of itself from the nebula, but it comes into existence because many spiritual beings have been working on it and at a certain point in their evolution have drawn out the finest substances from the chaotic root substance and cast out the coarser substances, namely, the moon. During the first period after pralaya, the earth, in which all the substances and beings were again united, recapitulated the Saturn condition. At the beginning of this phase of evolution the earth was not a globe of gas as has often been falsely assumed, but a globe of warmth. For it (the earth) was re-capitulating the condition of the Saturn embodiment and extended to the sphere of the present Saturn. At a certain stage the spiritual beings involved take their substances with them. Spirit is the foundation of everything, both when the Sun separates and during the evolution of Old Moon. No external factor was responsible here; it was an inner necessity for one section of the beings. The higher beings separate what they need from the chaotic substance. Everywhere it is the spirit that directs the external reality. When the earth first came into existence everything was contained in it; the spiritual beings indwelling it were at different stages of their evolution. We shall bear this in mind during the following studies. Thus after pralaya the earth first of all recapitulated the Saturn condition; it was a condition of warmth. Then this gigantic globe of warmth condensed to the gaseous state and only when a definite point had been reached was it possible for the globe to form the fluid element and recapitulate the Old Moon condition. At this point on the earth there was a repetition of what had previously happened on Old Moon: the sun separated from the earth and earth-plus-moon became one independent body, containing the substances and beings of earth and moon, as they are still present today. Thus for a time earth and moon, and sun were one united whole. The earth-plus-moon was ejected because man could no longer keep pace with the tempo of the sun. Had the sun remained in the earth man would have been old practically at birth. The beings of the cosmos are at entirely different stages of evolution. It will only be possible to indicate the most important features of this evolution during the fourth period, that of the earth. Even the more mature beings belonged to grades at every possible level. There were some who could neither profit by the rapid tempo of the sun nor by the slow tempo of the earth. These beings departed already before the separation, when sun, earth and moon were still united. They created special arenas for their activity and these were the domains suitable for their rulership. It was thus that the outer planets, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, were formed. During the recapitulation of the Saturn embodiment, Uranus, Vulcan and Saturn separated from the earth. During the recapitulation of the sun embodiment, Jupiter and Mars separated. After the sun had left the earth, Mercury and Venus separated from it. After the separation of the sun, the earth cast out the moon. The dispersal of Old Moon was brought about by the forces of the progressed beings who drew out the solar body, while the normal and retarded beings produced the moon circling around it. In all the mysteries these happenings were called the strife in heaven. The detached planetoids are the ruins of that battlefield. It is here that the primal secret of the origin of evil must be sought. The planetary spirits involved could not have waited until the sun separated from the earth because they would not have found the right soil for their activity; evolution at this time was turning into different channels. The planetary conditions of space and movement are all the expression and effect of the activity of their beings; these conditions indicate the evolutionary rank of the spiritual beings inhabiting the planets. Beings who had believed that they, too, could accompany the sun because this had formerly been possible but who could not now do so, separated from the sun, but only after it had itself separated from the earth. These beings separated from the sun after this event and are at a far higher stage of evolution than men. Venus and Mercury are the two bodies that, having separated from the sun after the latter's separation from the earth, formed the inner planets of our solar system. After the severance from the sun a difficult, sombre period now began for the earth, in a certain respect its darkest, hardest era. While still united with the moon, the earth drew into itself all the forces that were retarding evolution. To obstruct life is characteristic of the forces principally active in the moon. During this period, these obstructive forces were working far too strongly in the earth. If the earth had remained connected with them, life would not have taken its course in the right tempo. Man would have hardened to the stage of mummification. The earth would have become a veritable cemetery, one vast graveyard containing statues of mummified human bodies. No procreation would have been possible. When the sun had left the earth, fearful desolation and hardening of all life took place. So already at that time there were periods when the human physical body was abandoned by its spiritual members, just as today the physical body is abandoned by its spiritual members at death. In that past era, withdrawal and emergence of the being of spirit and soul from the physical already took place and a new search for the physical body began, as happens today when incarnations are to take place. But more and more frequently it happened that when the being of soul and spirit desired, while the moon was still united with the earth, to find a human body again, none was to be found, because bodies were no longer fit to receive the being of spirit and soul. Just imagine that great masses of human beings were to have died today and because of the character of the physical substance these bodies had become so decadent that the souls would have said: We cannot make use of these bodies, they are too decadent for us, they offer no possibility of further evolution. Suppose that because of an extensive spread of alcoholism, for example, successive generations had gradually become so degenerate that the bodies were simply useless for the descending souls. This is more or less a picture of the state of the earth at that time, before the exit of the moon. Everything that should have been habitable down below was often hardened, crusted, withered, mummified. There was actually a period when souls were seeking in vain for bodies for their own evolution on earth. The consequence was that certain beings simply could not at that time have returned to the physical plane as men. They could not have incarnated again on the earth. These beings then went to other cosmic bodies that had separated from the sun, namely, to Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Mars. There was a time when the majority of these beings who should normally have incarnated on the earth according to their nature and their stage of evolution, placed themselves under the protection of the beings of Mars, Jupiter, Venus or Saturn, having ascended to and populated these cosmic bodies. Only the strongest souls found it possible to cope with the stubborn bodies and keep them flexible. Please understand me well. It was only the best soul material that then came again to the earth, because its power to master the stubborn bodies was the greatest. But under such conditions evolution could not have progressed. The beings of the highest rank belonging to our solar system now adopted a new procedure. The most impermeable substances were extracted and separated from the earth; the severance of the moon was brought about. The result of this was that the forces that had remained behind were no longer frustrated in their evolution. But it was not until later that this moon became what it is today. The time had now come when the physical and etheric evolution of man could find the tempo befitting its stage. The forces both of the sun and the moon now worked upon the earth from outside, maintaining the balance. Gradually, while the moon was emerging, a kind of softening, an amelioration of the bodies of men, again took place. The period just described is called in occultism the Lemurian epoch, the epoch of the separation of the moon during the physical embodiment of the earth. The epoch when the sun left the earth is called the Hyperborean age, and the epoch when the sun, moon and earth were still united is called the Polarian age. During the whole period when the sun was separated from the earth and the moon produced a hardening process on the earth to begin with and then left the earth during the whole of that period, sublime beings were influencing the differentiation. Their most important servants were the Spirits of Form, called the Exusiai in Christian esotericism, also Spirits of Revelation, Powers. On Saturn it was the Thrones, the Spirits of Will who made the sacrifice of pouring out from their own substance the material for man's physical body. On Old Sun it was the Dominions or Spirits of Wisdom who provided the substance for the etheric body, and on Old Moon it was the Spirits of Movement or Mights who made possible the formation of the astral body. On the earth the Spirits of Form or Powers instill the ego, bringing it about that in this phase of evolution the ego enters gradually into what had come into existence, namely, man's physical body, etheric body and astral body. This is the work of the Spirits of Form. In order that an ego-man could come into existence at all as the expression of ego consciousness, and that this coordination of the physical, etheric and astral bodies could take place, everything that has now been described was essential. The separation of sun and moon from the earth was necessary; it was also necessary for man to undergo a process of hardening followed by a certain softening. This could take place because the wise beings who guided and directed these happenings undertook it all as probationary measures for the good of evolution. A great deal in the evolutionary process of the earth is still done today by the sublime beings concerned, as probationary measures. What, then, is the anthroposophical movement? It came into the world because the lofty beings we call the Masters, who live in human physical bodies but have reached the far higher stage of evolution than the average man of today, poured out a certain amount of wisdom from the last third of the nineteenth century onwards. The living influx of this wisdom from higher realms into our culture is the actual basis of our anthroposophical movement. Do not imagine that there was no possibility of the attempted influx of wisdom falling upon deaf ears in humanity. Even if there had been deaf ears, the Masters would have said that an attempt must be made later on, when human beings would be ready to receive the wisdom. In occultism this is known as the test of maturity in men. The fact that wisdom pours into humanity from higher beings such as these is not in itself sufficient; what matters is how it is received; the success of the test depends upon that. Such tests have already been made several times but have not always succeeded. It was often within narrow limits that humanity proved to be ripe for the tests; receptive souls and hearts were not always to be found. When the ego of humanity was to be instilled, the test consisted in gradual attempts to permate what had formerly been astral body only, with the ego. Then it turned out that the astral body, permeated by the ego, was incapable of penetrating the physical body. Adjustment was therefore necessary and this was made possible by the separation of the moon. It was in the middle of the Lemurian epoch that the entry of the ego, the Christ principle, was first achieved. But the following was connected with this. During and after the separation of the moon, the earth was depopulated. We have heard that the bodies had become so contaminated that they could no longer provide habitations for the souls. Cosmic happenings such as these have been preserved in legend and saga, but occult investigation reveals their true origin and teaches us that while the separation of the moon was taking place, when the earth was depopulated, many souls were searching for suitable embodiment in cosmic space; they departed from the earth and assumed bodies on other planets. But when the moon had finally left, it became apparent that the earth was capable again of providing suitable bodies. Now, the souls, who during the latest Lemurian epoch and thereafter in the Atlantean period had gone to the planets, presented them-selves again on the earth and incarnated in the bodies there. Groups of human beings now formed on the earth. Some provided bodies for souls coming from Jupiter incarnations, or from Mars, Venus or Saturn. These souls now found bodies that were appropriate for them. This grouping of souls gave rise to the birth of races. Hence there is a certain connection between the races and cosmic bodies and thus it was possible to speak of Saturn men, Jupiter men and so on. What can be called the concept of race had now, for the first time, its justification. On Old Moon, and also on the earth while it was still united with the moon, there were human beings at different stages of evolution. This can be perceived right on into the Lemurian epoch, when owing to the exodus of the moon, differentiation took place in humanity. Thereafter the concept of race arose and from then on began to have a certain meaning, a certain significance. Race is something that comes into being and subsequently passes away again. The epoch of the formation of the races is that embraced by Lemuria and Atlantis. Today only stragglers of the races are present. |