| 145. The Effect of Occult Development: Lecture VI
25 Mar 1913, The Hague Translated by Harry Collison Rudolf Steiner |
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| But the etheric body can, in a certain sense, be more easily seen; it may indeed be seen if we try in a certain way to seize the moment of going to sleep, so that we do not pass over at once into unconsciousness, but remain conscious for a time after having, with the astral body and the ego, left the physical body and etheric body. We then look principally at the etheric body, and see the moving realities in the etheric body in the form of very vivid dreams. |
| Everything depends upon being outside with the astral body and ego, and only looking in; that is to say, we are only inside the etheric body with our consciousness. |
| Thus, when we penetrate into our own etheric body, it is as though we had reached an abyss, and across it we could see what goes on in the etheric body; and all this appears in mighty pictures representing the processes of the spiritual man during sleep. The ego and astral body—the spiritual man—descends into the castle, which is formed of that which is only seen symbolically in the skull. |
| 145. The Effect of Occult Development: Lecture VI
25 Mar 1913, The Hague Translated by Harry Collison Rudolf Steiner |
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We have now considered the changes in the physical body and etheric body of the student, in so far as they are experienced by him in the course of his endeavour towards development. If we wished to express the fundamental character of these changes we might say that in the course of his development he is more and more conscious inwardly of his physical body and etheric body. With regard to his physical body, we have emphasised that he feels the several organs becoming more and more independent the more he progresses—they become to a certain extent more independent of each other. We might say that the physical body as such feels as though it had more life within; and as to the etheric body, we emphasised that not only does it feel more alive, but grows altogether more sensitive, and permeated by a sort of consciousness; for it begins to sympathise with the course of outer events in a delicate manner. We pointed out that in his esoteric development the student grows more sensitive to the course of spring, summer, autumn and winter; this becomes very pronounced, so that the successive facts of time are more distinct from one another than is the case in the ordinary course of life; they become separate and differentiate themselves. Thus we may say that the student begins to experience sympathetically the processes in the external ether. This is the first beginning of his really becoming free from his corporeality. He becomes more and more independent of his own corporeality as he really begins to experience what goes on around him. He will experience spring, summer, autumn and winter within himself, as it were; but through this living in the outer he ceases to live in his own corporeality. Now, in the last lecture we laid stress on the close association of all this with a gradual sensitiveness to one's own corporeality. As we become more independent of it, we gradually perceive it to be a sort of calamity; we notice that all that relates merely to our own corporeality becomes a sort of reproach. A very great deal is attained towards a higher development when we begin, in conceptions and feelings such as were described in the last lecture, to be no longer quite at one with our own human personality; and when we experience this to a greater and greater extent, a very great deal has been gained towards the higher spiritual experience. In this lecture I will endeavour, by making a leap as it were, to strengthen the further progress of our observations—which we so far have followed more from within—by first trying to describe the standpoint of the human being, when with his astral body and his ego he has already become independent of his physical body and etheric body. We will speak of the intermediate conditions in the following lectures, but in order to make this, to a certain extent, easier to understand, I will put forward the hypothesis that ‘while in the middle of sleep’ we experience the moment when we become clairvoyant outside our body, and can look back at our physical and etheric bodies. So far we have only taken a few steps towards this condition, we have reached the point of coming forth from ourselves to a certain extent, and have thus learned to experience such matters as the seasons of the year and the times of the day; we will now consider the conditions which would come about if, on the one hand, we had the physical body and etheric body, and on the other, we had lifted out the ego and astral body as occurs in sleep; and we will suppose that we could look back at the physical body and etheric body we had left behind. What we look back at then would appear to us in a very different light from that of conscious, ordinary life. For ordinary life, by means of our everyday observation, or by means of external physical science, we look at our material body, and see in it, with a certain justice in a physical sense, the crown of the earthly creation. We so divide this earthly creation that we speak of a mineral kingdom, a vegetable kingdom, an animal kingdom, and the human kingdom; and we see all the sundry qualities which have been spread over the various groups of animals, united, as it were, in this physical crown of creation, the human body. We shall see that external physical observation is, in a way, justified in this view, and the present lecture should not give rise to the thought that what may be seen in looking back at the physical and etheric body, if we suddenly became clairvoyant during sleep, can enable us to come to any final conclusion as to the physical body. It is only a moment of clairvoyant looking back, as it were, firmly retained. Such a moment may give rise to the following: We look back and first of all we see, so to say, our etheric body, which appears something like an articulated cloudy structure, a misty form showing various currents which we will describe more clearly later—a marvellously constructed form, which is in continual motion, never at rest or still in any part; and then we look at what is embedded in this etheric body, that is, our physical body. Now, remember we have been told that our own thinking must be laid aside. So we do not form our own thoughts about what we see there. First and foremost it is a fundamental requirement for this clairvoyant vision that we should let ourselves be entirely inspired, as it were, by the cosmic thoughts which flow into us. So we contemplate what we see there; but this works above all upon our feeling; it affects our feeling and will. As regards our thought, when we have really attained the detachment referred to, we seem to have lost our own thinking. Thus, with the feeling which we still retain, we look back upon what is there embedded in the misty structure, in the ever-moving misty structure of our etheric body, that is: our physical instrument. We first have a general impression. This general impression is such that what we thus see imbues us with infinite sadness, with terrible sadness. And it must be said, my dear friends, that this feeling of the soul, this dreadful sadness, does not depend at all upon the nature of the particular human being experiencing it, for it is quite universal. There is no man when he looks back in the manner described at his physical body, as it lies embedded in his etheric body, who would not be filled through and through with an immeasurable sadness. All that I am now describing is expressed primarily in the feelings, not in thought. Immeasurable sadness, a feeling of great melancholy, overcomes when we look up to the cosmic thoughts which flow into us. These thoughts, which are not our own, but creative thoughts, weaving and working through the world, throwing light on this structure of our physical body, by the way in which they illuminate it, tell us what it really is that we see there. They convey to us that all we see is the last decadent product of an absolute splendour long passed by. Through what these thoughts say to us we receive the impression that what we see there as our physical body is something which was once mighty and glorious, now dried and shrivelled; a former glory once widely displayed, appears to us as a tiny shrivelled structure. That which is embedded in our etheric body appears as a last remembrance of long-past glory hardened into the physical. We look at the various physical organs which now belong to our digestive system, to the circulation of our blood and our breathing apparatus; we look at them from outside, seeing them spiritually—and behold, they so appear to us that we say: All we have before us in the physical body is the shrivelled, dried-up product of once-existing living beings, living beings with a glorious environment, now shrivelled, and withered. And the life possessed by the lungs, the heart, the liver and other organs to-day is only the last decadent life of a primevally powerful inner life. In this clairvoyant vision the organs gradually assume the form they once possessed. Just as a thought which we can only distantly remember in quite a hazy manner, grows into what it once was, if we take the trouble to draw it forth from memory, so does that which we bear within us, as the lungs, for example, and it appears as the lost remembrance of a primeval splendour and glory. We feel that it goes back again like a present thought to a distant memory, which then develops into what it formerly was. In our vision the lungs develop into the imaginative picture of that which was once known to the occultist as a recognised symbol, which he still knows to-day, as a symbol of the human form—into the imaginative picture of the Eagle. And we have the feeling that these lungs were at one time a being, not to be compared with the Eagle of the present-day animal world; for this, too, represents, though from another side, the decadent products of a formerly mighty being, which occultism designates as the Eagle. The occultist comes, as though in cosmic remembrance, to the Eagle which was at one time there. If we look back upon the heart, we feel in a similar manner that this, too, appears as a dried-up and shrivelled product, something reminding us of a long-past glory; and we feel as though that led back into primeval times, a far-distant past, to a being which the occultist designates the Lion. Then the organs of the lower part of the body appear as a memory of what in occultism is called the Bull, an ancient primeval being once alive in glorious surroundings, now dried up and shrivelled in the course of evolution, and appearing to-day as the organs of the lower part of the body.   Thus might I sketch what once existed, and what we still see when we observe these bodily organs, clairvoyantly, from outside. They are only roughly sketched; the Bull below, the Lion in the middle, and the Eagle above. Thus do we look upon something which once lived as three glorious, living beings in a primeval past. I will now draw these somewhat smaller, and only sketch them in diagram. (Diagram 2.) Round these principal organs we can also see the others as they formerly were in a primeval past; and what appears in this way to clairvoyant vision may be compared to almost all the forms in the earthly animal kingdom. If we once more turn our gaze back to the physical body embedded in the etheric body, looking at what anatomy calls the nervous-system, this also appears as a shrivelled, dried-up product. The nervous system, which at the present time is embedded in the physical body, appears to the retrospective clairvoyant vision as a number of wonderful plant-like beings, embedded in the etheric body, beings intertwined in various ways in and through the other beings known by animal names, so that we see plant-like entities passing through them in every direction. The whole of the nervous system resolves itself into a number of primeval plant-like entities, so that we actually see something like a mighty, outspreading plant, within which dwell the animal beings of which we have just spoken. As already said, I am relating what is seen by the clairvoyant vision, which has been described as being exercised in a condition similar to sleep; that is, when we look from outside at the physical body embedded in the etheric body. When the student sees all this before him, he then says (that is, he is able to say this because, to a certain extent, the cosmic thoughts give this information, and interpret what he has before him), he says to himself: ‘All that I, as a human being, have within me is the withered and shrivelled remnant of what now appears before me clairvoyantly as though in cosmic remembrance.’ Now, it is important that the pupil should exercise continual self-control, and continual self-knowledge, while developing to this point. Self-knowledge enables him at this point to become aware of and to feel the following: ‘I am outside my physical body. That which appeared to me as my physical body embedded in the etheric body has transformed itself in my vision into what has just been described. What I behold does not now exist; it had to exist in a primeval past in order that my physical body which is there below might be able to come into being. In order that this shrivelled product might be formed, what I now see before me with clairvoyant vision had to exist at one time.’ The physical body makes this sad impression because we recognise in it the last withered product of the former glory, now appearing to the clairvoyant vision. I pray you, do not misunderstand what I am about to say; I am describing facts, and you will soon see how these facts, unravelled, constantly honour the wise guides of the world; we have only to learn the facts, and in the following lectures I will make clear what is in question. If introspection has been carried to this degree of development, the student then becomes aware that in the astral body in which he now is, outside the physical body and etheric body, he cannot do otherwise than recognise himself as an absolute egotist, as a being who knows nothing but himself, and he learns to recognise that there is reason enough to be sad. For the impulse now arises to know why this has come about, why all this has shrivelled up. And, now the question comes: who is to blame for this shrivelling together? Who has made the form which I see clairvoyantly before me, this wonderful plant-being with the animal-like, perfect structure within it—who has made this into the present shrivelled product, the physical body? There now sounds forth from oneself as an inner inspiration: ‘You yourself have brought it to this, you yourself! And the fact that you have become what you now are, you owe to the circumstance that you have possessed the power to impregnate all this glory with your own being. Your being has trickled like poison into this ancient glory, and it has reduced this ancient glory to what it now is!’ Thus it is we ourselves who brought this about, and the possibility of being a self such as we are, we owe to the circumstance that we ourselves sowed the seed of death in all this glory, and so impregnated it that it shrivelled up. Just as you may have a mighty tree growing in its glory and nourishing the various animals living upon it, and you pierce it so that from a certain spot it dries up, withers and shrivels to insignificance and with it die all the beings nourished by it, so the shrivelling of the human physical body is clairvoyantly unfolded before you. This is the awful impression produced by this moment of clairvoyant vision. More and more the student is impelled in his astral body to understand how this came about. At this moment there actually appears to him among the archetypal animal beings, which he here perceives ... Lucifer at the back of the garden, as it were, twisting in and out. I have drawn it in diagram—Lucifer in a wondrously beautiful form, actually—Lucifer! Here, for the first time, through clairvoyant observation, he makes the acquaintance of Lucifer, and now he knows that this is what happened to the forces, now shrivelled in the physical human body, at the time when Lucifer appeared within this whole being which is now presented to him clairvoyantly.  And the student now knows that he was present in that far-distant past when all this, that appears to his clairvoyant vision, was a reality; he knows that he then vividly felt himself to belong to all this; he was within it, this was his kingdom, and within this kingdom Lucifer drew him to himself. Man united himself with Lucifer, with the result that the beings of the higher Hierarchies pressed from the back in currents of force which might be sketched in these lines, and pressed out the human being who united himself with Lucifer in these parts towards the front, as is visible to clairvoyant observation. In this part openings were formed; and, in the shrinking up, these openings have developed into our present sense organs. Through these openings the human being who previously lived in this part was pressed out, because he united himself with Lucifer. And because he was pushed out, he now lives in the world outside this structure, and this structure shrank together and is now his physical body. Now imagine—in order to have a diagrammatical idea—the physical body of to-day growing larger and larger, all the organs becoming larger, all the organs of digestion, circulation and breathing developing as though into mighty, animal-like, living beings in growing larger, and the nervous system becoming plant-like beings, and the human being ruling in this mighty structure. On the one hand now appears Lucifer, and because the human being is attracted by Lucifer, beings belonging to the higher Hierarchies press from the back and press the human being out. By reason of the pushing out of the human being, the whole structure gradually shrinks into the small compass of the human body of to-day, and the human being, with his consciousness, with his whole day consciousness, is outside his body. The result is that man no longer knows, as he did before, what is within his body, only that which is outside. He has been chased out through the openings which are now the senses; to-day he is in the sense-world, and that in which he lived in the primeval past has shrivelled up and forms his inward parts. I have now given you an idea of how, through clairvoyant observation, the student arrives at what is called Paradise. In fact, this was the conception of Paradise to which the students in the mystery-schools were led. ‘Where was Paradise?’ people ask. Paradise formed part of a world which is no longer present in the sense-world to-day. Paradise has shrunk together, yet multiplied; for Paradise has left behind the physical inward parts of the human body as its last relics; the human being himself has, however, been driven out of it, he no longer lives in these inward parts. He can only learn to know them by means of clairvoyance, as we have seen. A man knows of the objects outside him, he knows of what is before his eyes and about his ears. Previously he knew of what was within; but this within was grandiose, it was Paradise. Try now to form an idea of how man, through having become a being who spreads his consciousness over the external sense-world, actually compressed the world in which he dwelt before he entered the sense-world, into the withered or shrivelled-up product of the interior parts of his body. Then the beings who first drove man out and then continued to work, made use of Ahriman and other spirits, whose activity they turned into good, forming the limbs, hands, feet, and countenance; these they formed, and thus made it possible for man to use this shrivelled-up Paradise by means of his hands and feet and that which passes through his sense organs into the inner parts of his body. Thus before our spiritual vision we have seen, enlarged to gigantic proportions, the physical human body, which in its present condition represents the shrivelled-up product of the former Paradise. When we consider this, we may obtain some slight idea of how clairvoyance really progresses. We have seen how the student at first becomes more and more sensitive with respect to his physical body and etheric body. And now, by making a sort of leap forward over an abyss, we have seen what sort of impressions come when from outside the pupil looks back at his physical body embedded in the etheric body. I have said that the etheric body is itself in continual motion; when we look back into it from outside we see nothing really stationary in it, nothing is at rest, everything is in continual motion. Something is continually taking place; and the more we learn through spiritual training to observe what happens, the more does the tableau of these events enlarge, as it were, and everything becomes full of meaning. Just as, in a certain way, the physical body becomes the true Garden of Paradise, so also what goes on in the etheric body becomes significant processes. We might now make the attempt to describe in a general way what facts and processes are to be observed when we look at the etheric body, and turn our attention away from the physical body. Now, we could really only see the physical body clairvoyantly in the way I have described, if we were suddenly awakened clairvoyantly from the very deepest sleep. Then would the physical body expand into the structure described. But the etheric body can, in a certain sense, be more easily seen; it may indeed be seen if we try in a certain way to seize the moment of going to sleep, so that we do not pass over at once into unconsciousness, but remain conscious for a time after having, with the astral body and the ego, left the physical body and etheric body. We then look principally at the etheric body, and see the moving realities in the etheric body in the form of very vivid dreams. We then see ourselves divided, as by a deep abyss, from what goes on in the etheric body; but we now see everything not as happening in space, but as events in time. When we are outside our etheric body we have to perceive these experiences of movement in the etheric body, as though we had slipped back into it again with our consciousness. Thus we must feel as though we were separated from our etheric body by an abyss filled, as it were, with ether, with universal cosmic ether; as if we stood on the further shore of the etheric body, and there various processes took place. And as, in this case, all these processes take place in time, we feel like a wanderer returning to our own etheric body. In reality, we are going further and further from it, but in our clairvoyant consciousness we approach it. And in approaching this etheric body of ours we feel ourselves approaching something which thrusts us back. We come, as it were, to a spiritual rock. Then it is as if we were allowed to pass into something. At first we are outside, and then it is as though we were let into something, it seems as though we had first been outside and now were inside, but not in the manner in which we had been within it during the day. Everything depends upon being outside with the astral body and ego, and only looking in; that is to say, we are only inside the etheric body with our consciousness. And now we can see what is going on within it. In a certain way, everything changes just as the physical body is transferred into Paradise; but that which goes on within the etheric body is in a still more interior connection with the everyday processes in man. Let us consider what sleep really signifies, what this ‘being outside the physical body and etheric body’ means. For we have assumed that the clairvoyant power is exercised at this moment through the person's suddenly becoming clairvoyant during sleep, or remaining consciously clairvoyant on falling asleep. Let us consider what sleep is! That which permeates the physical and etheric body with consciousness is now outside; within the body only vegetative processes take place—everything is done to restore the forces used up during the day. And we perceive all this, we perceive how the forces of the physical, particularly those of the brain, are renewed; but we do not see the brain as the anatomist does—we see how the man of the physical world, of whom we make use for our consciousness during our waking condition, we see how this man, who has indeed been forsaken by us, but who clearly shows that he is our instrument, lies enchanted in a castle, as it were. Symbolised by the brain lying within the skull, our human nature on the earth appears as a being under enchantment living in a castle. We see this humanity of ours as a being imprisoned and enclosed by stone walls. The symbol of this, the shrunken symbol, as it were, is our skull. We see it externally as a little skull. But when we look at the etheric forces which lie at its foundation, the earthly man actually appears to us as if he were within the skull, and imprisoned in this castle. And then from the other parts of the organism there stream up the forces which support this human being who is really within the skull as if in a mighty castle; the forces stream upwards; first the force which comes from that in the organism which is the outspread instrument of the human astral body; there streams up all that makes the human being ardent and mighty through his nerve fibres. All this streams together in the earthly brain-man; this appears as a mighty sword which the human being has forged on the earth. Then stream up the forces of the blood. These, as we gradually learn to feel and recognise, appear as that which really wounds the brain-man lying in the enchanted castle of the skull. The forces which in the etheric body stream up to the earthly human being lying in the enchanted castle of the brain are like the bloody lance. And then we arrive at a unique perception. This is, that we are able to observe all that may stream up to the noblest parts of the brain. Before this we have not the slightest idea of it. Thus you see that from a different standpoint I have come back again to what I have already touched upon in these lectures. No matter how much animal food a human being may eat, it is all useless for a certain part of his brain, it is merely ballast. Other organs may be nourished thereby, but in the brain there is something from which the etheric body at once thrusts back all that comes from the animal kingdom. Indeed, the etheric body even thrusts back from one part of the brain, from one small, vital part of the brain, all that comes from the plant kingdom, and allows only the mineral extract to be of value; there this mineral extract is brought into contact with the purest of what comes through the sense organs. The purest of light, the purest sound, the purest heat, here come in touch with the purest products of the mineral kingdom; for the most vital part of the human brain is nourished by the union of the purest sense impressions with the purest mineral products. The etheric body separates from this noblest part of the human brain all that comes from the plant or animal kingdoms. But all the things that the human being takes in as his food pass up also; for the brain also has less noble parts. These are nourished by all that streams up, by which the whole organism is nourished. Only the noblest part of the brain must be nourished by the most beautiful union of the sense perceptions and the highest part of the purified mineral extract. We now learn to recognise a wonderful cosmic connection between man and the whole of the rest of the cosmos. We can now see, as it were, a part of man wherein we perceive how human thought, by means of the instrument of the nervous system which serves the astral body, prepares the sword for human strength on earth; therein we become acquainted with all that is mingled with the blood, and to a certain extent contributes to the killing of the most precious thing in the brain. And this noblest thing in the brain is ever sustained by the union of the most delicate sense perceptions with the purest products of the mineral kingdom. And then, during sleep, when thought is not making use of the brain, there stream to the brain the products which have been formed lower down in the inner parts from the plant and animal kingdoms. Thus, when we penetrate into our own etheric body, it is as though we had reached an abyss, and across it we could see what goes on in the etheric body; and all this appears in mighty pictures representing the processes of the spiritual man during sleep. The ego and astral body—the spiritual man—descends into the castle, which is formed of that which is only seen symbolically in the skull. Here the human being lies sleeping, wounded by the blood, the man of whom we see that thoughts are his strength—that which must be capable of nourishment by all that comes from the kingdom of nature, that which in its purest parts must be served by the finest, this we have described. All this symbolically represented resulted in the Legend of the Holy Grail. And the Legend of the Holy Grail tells us of that miraculous food which is prepared from the finest activities of the sense impressions and the finest activities of the mineral extracts, whose purpose it is to nourish the noblest part of man all through the life he spends on earth; for it would be killed by anything else. This heavenly food is what is contained in the Holy Grail. And that which otherwise takes place, that which presses up from the other kingdoms, we find clearly represented if we go back to the original Grail legend, where a meal is described at which a hind is first set on the table. The penetrating up into the brain where for ever floats the Grail, that is, the vessel for the purest food of the human hero who lies in the castle of the brain, and who is killed by everything else—all this is represented. The best presentation of this is not that by Wolfram, but it is best represented in an external exoteric way (because almost everyone can recognise, when his attention has been drawn to it, that this legend of the Grail is an occult experience which every human being can experience anew every night), it is best represented, in spite of the profanation which has even crept in there, by Chrestien de Troyes. He put what he wished to say in an exoteric form, but this exoteric form hinted at what he wished to convey, for he refers to his teacher and friend who lived in Alsace, who gave him the esoteric knowledge which he put into exoteric form. This took place in an age when it was necessary to do this, on account of the transition indicated in my book, ‘The Spiritual Guidance of Humanity.’ The Grail legend was made exoteric in 1180, shortly before the transition. In the outer world these things still appear fantastic ideas, because the only reality recognised by the man of the present day is that which is outside him. Man recognises himself as the crown of creation in a much higher sense, when he sees his physical body in its original, sublime grandeur; and when he sees his etheric body working inwardly upon his physical body to reawaken into life that which has been injured and killed by the sting which I have spoken of as coming from the blood. The etheric body works upon that in order at once, so far as is possible to reawaken it to life; it maintains it throughout its period of human life, although, when born, it is already doomed to death. This the etheric body does by casting out of a small portion of the human organisation all that comes from the animal and vegetable kingdoms, keeping only the purest mineral extract, and bringing that in contact with the purest impressions from the external world of the senses. If this is really felt deeply enough, it enables us to see this noblest part in the human organism as the multiplied Holy Grail. I wished to-day to show by these two indications how typical imaginations appear, and how, to the true clairvoyance, the vision of the physical body gradually passes over into imaginations. And these two, the Paradise-Imagination and the Grail-Imagination, belong to the most sublime imaginations it is possible to experience—at least in this Earth-period. |
| 198. Healing Factors for the Social Organism: Thirteenth Lecture
10 Jul 1920, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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| At the other pole, in phantasms, which also live in memory, we recognize very well: our will rules there – and our will is also quite appropriately there, and we notice in two respects that these phantasms, insofar as they shape memory, very much have to do with our ego, with our personality, with what our reality is. No matter how much we rail against mere fantasy or phantasmagoria, by sensing that our ego is at work in it according to its own arbitrariness, we feel at the same time that our ego, our personality, is contained in these phantasms. |
| Imagine that everything you detach from your organism, so to speak, so that you can control it at will with your ego, with your personality, everything would surge in your organism. You would not say: I will – but you would feel the surging of your blood that drives you to your movements; you would not say: I take up the pen – but you would feel the mechanism of your arm muscles. |
| And if we look further, we say to ourselves: This personal life between birth and death is what makes us experience the ego here between birth and death. But we do not experience the whole of our inner life, that which lies within our skin; this remains a shadow of that which constitutes our being after death. |
| 198. Healing Factors for the Social Organism: Thirteenth Lecture
10 Jul 1920, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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Today I would like to present you with something specific from the whole sequence of ideas on which the considerations presented here are based, in order to expand on it tomorrow from a more general point of view. You have gathered from the reflections that we have been cultivating here for some time that, in order to revive the declining culture of the West, it is necessary to develop a true knowledge of the human being based on spiritual science. This knowledge of the human being has been prevented for a long time. In the form in which it is needed for the future development of humanity, it has been prevented, first of all, by the kind of intellectual life that emerged in the 13th and 14th centuries of the Middle Ages, and then, again, by the intellectual trend of the time from the middle of the 15th century to the present, which has moved more and more towards materialism. On the one hand, we have seen the development of a detached, unworldly, religiously colored way of looking at things, which separated the spiritual from the world, did not allow it to approach the human being and therefore left the human being unexplained in terms of his essence. One might say: In the last centuries of the fourth post-Atlantean period, in the last centuries of the Greek-Latin development up to the middle of the 15th century, humanity increasingly began to look up to a completely unworldly divine-spiritual and lost the opportunity to get to know the human itself in its divine origin. Then came the time when mankind directed its gaze to the subhuman, to what nature principles are, but which only explained everything in the world that is not human, the mineral, the vegetable, the animal , and in this way again left man unexplained, so that in a certain sense in an older time there was a looking up to a foreign spiritual, from the later time to our days a looking at a subhuman material. Man fell through in between. To consider the human being in his entirety, spiritually and soulfully, is the task of our time, and to this end we have tried to bring more and more elements into anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Today I would like to talk about how the human being initially finds himself in the world between two extremes in his inner experience. Let us dwell first on the inner experience of the human being. On the one hand, the human being experiences the world of ideas, but he experiences it in such a way that the more he immerses himself in this world of ideas, the more abstract and cold it appears to him. When man rises to the level of ideas, he feels that he cannot become inwardly warm. But he feels something quite different. He feels that in these ideas, which are then also expanded into natural laws, into world laws, he has something that, as an idea, does not include a reality, that as an idea is basically merely an image. Therefore, when faced with the world of ideas, the human being does not feel, let us say, that he wants to somehow implant his own existence in this world of ideas in a cognitive way. No matter how much the human being likes to reflect, he gradually retains the feeling, even with the most perfectly spun philosophy, that he cannot find proof of his real existence in the universe in the world of ideas. The ideas have something, as it were, rootless about them, as they are experienced in ordinary life between birth and death. That is the one, so to speak, the one pole of outer experience in ordinary existence: the abstract, sober, cold ideas, in which one cannot anchor, nor would one want to anchor, the reality of the actual human being. And finally, modern humanity has not warmed to Descartes' maxim: “I think, therefore I am” (cogito, ergo sum), because no matter how much people think, they also feel: there is no getting out of thinking for the time being. The other pole of inner experience is memory. Anyone who really practices psychology, not the art of words that is often practiced as psychology at universities today, knows that these memories we have are substantially exactly the same as the fantasies we create by working at them, so to speak, only that we use the same power we apply in weaving the fantasy differently when remembering. By remembering, by cultivating our memory, we ultimately live in the same element as in the creative process, only that we build on what we have experienced through the senses or through life in general and thus shape the “phantasms” in memory in a logical way, while in the imagination we let them roam freely. This is the other pole in our inner experience. In the world of ideas, which we then also develop into laws of nature, we have the decisive awareness that our will cannot actually achieve anything through itself in the shaping of the world of ideas; it must submit to the inner logic, to the fabric of reality of the ideas. If we want to grasp reality, we cannot use our will to string one idea to another; we must adapt to the inner laws of this world of ideas, which is only pictorial and does not directly support any being. At the other pole, in phantasms, which also live in memory, we recognize very well: our will rules there – and our will is also quite appropriately there, and we notice in two respects that these phantasms, insofar as they shape memory, very much have to do with our ego, with our personality, with what our reality is. No matter how much we rail against mere fantasy or phantasmagoria, by sensing that our ego is at work in it according to its own arbitrariness, we feel at the same time that our ego, our personality, is contained in these phantasms. That is one thing. The other is: in the moment when, due to some illness, our memory continuity is disturbed, when the thread of our memory breaks somewhere, so that we cannot remember a piece of our life, in this moment the real solidity of our inner I-experience is also disturbed. So, on the one hand, our sense of self is not directly connected to our world of ideas. On the other hand, we feel that this sense of self is part of what we call our world of phantasms, although we cannot rely on this world of phantasms and, in a sense, in this phantasmal world, although we know that it is active in it, and that it cannot properly live in our consciousness if this memory is not in contact with it. The deepest riddles of life are contained in what I have now more or less abstractly discussed, and we can approach these riddles by taking together various aspects of what is scattered in our anthroposophical considerations today. The world of ideas appears abstract to us, pictorial to us! Where do we use it first? We use it when we think through what affects our senses from the outside world – colors, sounds, warmth and cold. We think through our perceptions. You will find more precise details in my books 'Truth and Science' and 'Philosophy of Freedom'. When we penetrate our perceptions with thinking, we use this world of ideas to imprint it, as it were, on our spiritual and psychological experience, on what we have as a world of perception. But we need to look a little more closely at what is actually happening. And this can be done by directing one's own soul abilities through spiritual scientific methods, as described in my books. One can actually raise the question: What would it be like if our sensory perceptions only penetrated us from the outside, if only what penetrates our eye as color, our ear as sound, our sense of warmth as heat, and so on, from the light, what would happen to us then? Let us be clear about this: when we are awake, we never let this world flow into us alone. Even if we develop only a little active thinking in ideas, we nevertheless bring, as it were, from within ourselves, to meet these sounds, colors, smells, tastes, and all sensory qualities that are rushing towards us, the counter-attack of the world of ideas that rises from within us. And anyone who does not think according to the abstract psychology of words of the present time, but who has really learned to observe, can ask themselves: How do the contents of perception that rush in from outside and the counterattack from within, the world of ideas, meet in our sense organs? If we were merely given over to the world of perceptions, then we would actually live as human beings in our etheric body and with our etheric body in an etheric world. Just imagine how you, surrendered through your eyes to the world of colors, would live in a surging, ethereally surging world of colors, how you, surrendered through your ears to the sounding world, would live in a surging sea of sound. This is not ethereal at first, but it would be ethereal if you did not provide the counterblow through ideas. The way in which sounds are for us human beings is the way they are in the etheric. We swim in the ocean of air and thus in the condensed etheric. It is therefore aetheric that is only condensed materially up to the air; the tones are only the air-shaped material expression of the etheric. And so it is with the warmth qualities, with the taste qualities, with the smell qualities, with all sensory qualities. So, imagine the counterattack of the world of ideas from within. Imagine that you live in an ethereal sea as an ethereal being. You would never come to that human consistency with which you actually stand in the world between birth and death. How can you come to this consistency? By being organized to kill this ethereal, to paralyze it. And how do we paralyze it? How do we kill it? Through the counter-attack of ideas! It is really so: the world of the content of perception in living ethericity (red) would come from outside, so to speak — if I am to draw schematically — and we would swim as etheric beings in living etheric substance, if we did not send out from within the counter-impact of the world of ideas (blue), which, as it is the world of ideas between birth and death, kills the etheric substance and allows us to perceive the world as a physical world. We would have an etheric world around us if we did not kill this etheric substance through the world of ideas, bringing it down to physical form. The world of ideas, as we have it as human beings, connects with the sensory qualities in our organs, paralyzing these sensory qualities and bringing them down to what we experience as the physical world.  That is the fact of the matter. You can see from Dr. Stein's short paper, from his dissertation, how close he has come to this, through a spirited interpretation of what can be gained in the field of anthroposophy, of the character of the world of perception. In fact, there is nothing in the current physiological literature as good as this little book by Dr. Stein regarding the physiology of the senses. So on the one hand we have this fact: that through the world of ideas we dampen the etheric surge of the sense qualities. What is the broader context of this? It is connected with the fact that the world of ideas that we experience as human beings between birth and death, as rising up from within, does not appear in its true form. People cannot see through this, that the ideas as they are experienced by them as human beings in the physical body do not have the true form of these ideas. People are still so crudely organized in present-day civilization that they would never think of saying to themselves, for example: You wake up from sleep, you have experienced a whole dream that has symbolically expressed to you what is screaming “Fire!” outside on the street. One experiences symbolically something that is quite different outside. What we have in ideas is very different from the way an external event is formed in the dream fantasy; but in the world of ideas we nevertheless also have something that is nothing other than the reflection of a completely different world. And what world is it? We have often spoken of this. It is the world that the human being has gone through before birth, or let us say before conception. This is what is shadowed here in life, up to the abstract world of ideas, experienced in a concrete way. Between death and a new birth, we live in the reality of what is only present here in the world of ideas in these shadow images of concepts, perceptions and ideas. Just as the outer world shines into the dream, so the prenatal world shines into our world between birth and death, by having an effect on the formation of ideas. But while everything is alive in what the ideas are between death and a new birth, while what is real in the world of ideas touches our own being, while we touch our own substantial being by touching ourselves, as we now touch our physical body, only that which we do not even know is cast into this earthly life from the world of ideas. But we use this shadow of our spiritual existence to make our very existence on earth possible. What do the gods give us when they send us into this world through birth? They give us the shadow image of the existence we have between death and a new birth. These shadows are the ideas, and these ideas serve us here to become physical human beings at all, otherwise we would swim as ethereal beings in the ethereal sea. We kill off the etheric life with the shadow images of our life between death and a new birth. In this way, we place the human being in the whole universe, in the cosmos. This is another point where we gain real human insight. Here we connect what we have in our present experience with eternal experience. Here we say: When you think, when you look at the outer world through your senses and dull the etheric life that takes place in your eyes and ears with your ideas so that you can bear it and be human, then you do so with the inheritance, with the after-effect of your eternal human being, as you have developed it between death and a new birth. Thus expanding human consciousness, thus pouring into the human being some of the knowledge that connects us with the whole universe — that is a need of the present. And all outer science will wither away, all outer culture will lead to decline. The death of the West will occur when people do not decide to acquire such a knowledge of the human being that, by observing the external conditions of life, reconnects the human being to the cosmos and thus reconnects the human being to the cosmos in such a way that the human being, by experiencing the world of ideas here, becomes aware of the eternal. It is precisely for this reason that this world of ideas is something so sober and abstract, because it is only the shadow image of the eternal and because it is basically intended to deadening the sense life that otherwise floods us ethereally. Thus we are connected with our life with the prenatal. The traditional religious denominations do not like to point to this prenatal, indeed they even decisively reject it. I have already touched on the fact that it is precisely the peculiarity of the present traditional religious denominations that they speak only of the after-death, not of the prenatal, of the pre-existence. They do not want to speak of this because then one cannot appeal to man's egoism, to which one appeals when one preaches to man only about the life after death; for man wants to enjoy the knowledge of the life after death between birth and death. That which imposes obligations on them for this life, because the gods have released them from the spiritual world to fulfill their mission, does not appeal to human selfishness, it appeals to human responsibility and human obligation. That is why one finds little agreement when one speaks of this prenatal life. And these religious beliefs have managed to make people sleep so much about this prenatal life that we may well have a word 'immortality', that is, we negate mortality, but we have no word 'unbirth', which would be equally justified. For just as little as we die with our spiritual-mental, just as little are we born with our spiritual-mental. We should have a word in the language that suggests this. Yes, the German language needs the word unbirthlich (unborn) as much as it needs unsterblich (immortal), for man recognizes only half of himself if he can only say the word unsterblich but not the word unbirthlich. From the inability of language we can recognize the inability to rise to spiritual heights in this realm. If we now look at the other pole, we see that man has in the phantasms, from which he also forms his memory images, something in which his I surges and surges, but often surges and surges in a chaotic way. Although man knows that his I lives in it, he does not rely on letting himself be told something about the nature of this I from the phantasms. If we look at the facts — and you can see this in the most diverse passages of our anthroposophical literature —, we have to ask ourselves: What exactly is it that develops from within us as the sum of our memory images, or, for that matter, as the sum of our imaginative images? It is nothing other than the transformation of that which, before it is metamorphosed into the power of memory or the power of imagination, lives in us as a growth force. What lives in the body as a growth force, when it emancipates itself from the physical, becomes the soul-spiritual power of memory. You know that up to the age of seven, when the change of teeth occurs, the same force appears in the human being that later forms well-contoured memories in the soul memory; it works on the body, shaping it. What ultimately drives out the teeth is the same force that lives in us as the power of imagination. In short, in what lives in us as phantasms, we have the same power that actually makes us grow, that underlies our becoming organic. We emancipate it from the organism. What does that mean? There is another significant life riddle hidden there; it says: We are, so to speak, tearing this phantasmagorical power out of our organism. If we think that we leave it inside, how would we stand in the world? Imagine that everything you detach from your organism, so to speak, so that you can control it at will with your ego, with your personality, everything would surge in your organism. You would not say: I will – but you would feel the surging of your blood that drives you to your movements; you would not say: I take up the pen – but you would feel the mechanism of your arm muscles. You would feel yourself inside, losing yourself in the world, if you did not tear the world of phantasms away from your organism. Your independence would disappear. What moves within you, what lives within you, would be only a continuation within your skin of what is outside. Man must therefore say to himself: the grass grows out of certain forces outside my skin, within my skin my spleen grows, my liver; but I would not feel any difference if I could not tear my phantasms away from what organizes within me. Out there, I do not tear something away; I take the entity in its totality. Within my skin, I tear away the world of my phantasms. In this way I come to my independence. This is how we can find the bed, the substrate for the 'I'-ness in man. That is the other pole of inner experience. While we have to kill our sensory experience through the world of ideas so that we can place ourselves in the physical world, for otherwise we would flood as spectra in the etheric sea, we have to tear away the world of phantasms from our organic events, otherwise we would simply be a link in nature like the growing tree. We would not stand there as an independent entity, emancipated from the rest of the world. In this way, we recognize ourselves as human beings in our essence within the human being. And if we look further, we say to ourselves: This personal life between birth and death is what makes us experience the ego here between birth and death. But we do not experience the whole of our inner life, that which lies within our skin; this remains a shadow of that which constitutes our being after death. Just as we are connected to the pre-birth through the pole of ideas, we are connected to the after-death through the pole of phantasms, in which the will lives. We are attached to our unborn through our world of ideas, and to our immortal through our world of phantasms, which is now a world of phantasms, so that when we pass through the gate of death, it is shaped into a regular cosmos in which we then weave, live and are after death. This is the effect of a true knowledge of the human being, of a spiritual realization of one's place in the cosmos. By answering these questions in terms of what he really recognizes in himself, in terms of what has entered from the cosmos into our inner being, the human being knows where he comes from, where he stands, and where he is going. Such knowledge is not like the knowledge that has gradually destroyed the culture of the West. Such knowledge has a different significance. This culture of the West has really been destroyed by its knowledge. Look back at the knowledge that people had until the middle of the 15th century. People today scoff at this knowledge. They consider it the childish knowledge of a childish humanity. They say to themselves: We have come so gloriously far in the present; only now do we have real chemistry, real physics, real biology, and so on. But there is a significant difference between the old knowledge, when it can only be properly understood in its truth and the rootless knowledge of the present. If you look into the old knowledge, as it existed until the middle of the 15th century, you will see: by appropriating elements of knowledge from the world, the human being always took something with him, through which he was connected to the world. Just consider: however cleverly you reflect on a tree and however much conceptual content you absorb into your soul about the tree, you are still aware that more lives in the tree than you can absorb with your ideas; the same applies to a flower and even to a crystal. If you look at the modern world, which has gradually become machine-like, then the human being is, I would say, standing in front of the object that has become completely transparent in terms of ideas. The machine we build, the mechanism we construct, we see through it. We know: the machine is built from these forces, in this and that combination. - Following the pattern of what man has built in technology, he has then also formed a world view and he now also imagines the universe as a large machine. Because we have lost reverence for the enigma in the mechanical cultural order, because the machine has become ideationally transparent to us, we need to reconnect with the human being today in order to rediscover spirituality. People who could still seek spirituality by looking for it in natural objects did not need knowledge that was brought forth from the human being as we need it. We, who have gradually torn ourselves away from the world to the point of mechanically grasping it, to the point of building a mechanized technology, need the living spiritual science in contrast to dead technology, which also impacts our thinking life. This spiritual science connects human beings to the spiritual universe, to the spiritual cosmos, in the way we have again indicated today. But we must achieve this connection in the present by truly transforming our inner being before we go to the outside world. This transformation is taken into account by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wherever it occurs in practice. We founded the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. Little by little, people come to observe in the Waldorf School. This is what people of the modern age do; when something interests them here or there, they go and see it, then they “know” it, and under certain circumstances they can also set something like that up. That is how our lives have gradually become. But that is not what the Waldorf School is about. What it is about is the fact that, above all, one can delve into the inner life that has been introduced into the didactics and pedagogy at the Waldorf School. It is about the fact that one can grasp the relationship between the human being and the world in a completely new way. In terms of the world of ideas, people are indeed generous. Man does not want to keep his world of ideas to himself. He would like everyone to have the same ideas, that is, he would like to give his ideas to all people. Man is not so generous with regard to other goods; he prefers to keep them to himself. He is happy to give everyone his ideas. This is precisely what makes the radical difference between the spiritual world on the one hand and the economic world on the other. This difference is radically present if one only wants to look at it, and basically, if someone under the old system tends to be a teacher, it only consists of generosity with regard to the world of ideas. This is because children are even better at accepting gifts than adults, who may encounter you with criticism and resistance. It is even easier to give gifts of knowledge to children. Of course, these instincts must also be taken into account in Waldorf schools and by Waldorf teachers. But a new element is introduced that can only come from the spirit of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. That is, to what was always traditional in the earlier confessions, to the afterlife, is added the decisive view of the prenatal, so that we are clear that in the child that grows up, what comes down from the spiritual worlds is gradually revealed. We came down from the spiritual worlds at a certain time. The gods sent us into this world, and we carry out what the gods have placed in us. The children come down later; they have been in the spiritual world longer. We look to what shines out of the children's souls. They carry messages from the spiritual worlds, where they were longer than we were. A feeling that something is coming down from the spiritual world into the present, that falls into the children, that the teacher first has to unravel, that a giving, which one so gladly does, is joined by a taking - that can only come from the spirit of true spiritual science, when the idea of pre-existence is joined by the idea of post-existence in living feeling. What is new and what is poured into the pedagogy and didactics of the Waldorf school is what matters; that is to say, basically only someone who has taken up anthroposophically oriented spiritual science into his own heart and soul can understand the Waldorf school. And only then should he sit in on classes, otherwise the few hours he has sat in on classes at the Waldorf school will show him nothing but writing on the board or speaking to the children and so on. But it is so inconvenient for people in the present day to really find their way into spirituality. Basically, why should we want to find the cause of this? If we take such works, which are truly born out of a current of the old, into our hands, we can ask: What is thought about the acquisition of spirituality by the human being? I have laid out in front of me the “Textbook of Philosophy on an Aristotelian-Scholastic Basis for Use in Higher Educational Institutions and for Self-Teaching” by Alfons Lehmen, a Jesuit priest, fourth expanded and improved edition, published by Peter Beck, a Jesuit priest. The work was first published in 1899 and the fourth edition was published in 1917. I would like to read to you what is written on page 8 of the introduction about the spirit of this philosophy, which is thus genuinely Catholic philosophy. We will see in a moment that we are dealing with genuine Catholic philosophy. It says: "From what has been said, it is not difficult to see what is to be thought of the principle of the ‘absolute freedom of science’. This principle grants every individual the right to form and advocate any opinion they choose, without fear of any doctrinal authority objecting to it. But freedom is not boundless. The Church's teaching authority has the right to condemn a philosophical opinion if it contradicts a revealed teaching or logically leads to such a contradiction. We assume here that an ecclesiastical teaching authority has been established by God with the task of protecting and interpreting divine revelation. With this mandate, the right in question is directly established. For the execution of the mandate given to it, the teaching office of the Church must be able to explain the true meaning of the word of God and to designate false interpretations as false. Hence, when the opinion of a philosopher or of a school of philosophy directly or indirectly challenges the true meaning of the content of revelation, the teaching authority of the Church has the power to judge the error as such and the authority to condemn it before the public. This is quoted as the preface to a textbook on philosophy! Now, if you take the whole spirit of such a controversy, as is also the case today, what does it reveal? It reflects the whole Christian spirit that Paul meant when he spoke the word: “Not I, but the Christ in me.” As the Christ lives in us, He awakens the spiritual element in us, and it is precisely through this Christ-ization that we become able to connect man to the spiritual cosmos. We have often spoken about this meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha and we will speak about it again in more detail tomorrow. But there is one thing the Christ had to make clear to people, in order to show people how man has to gain his truth from the spirit, from the divine spirit. One need only recall another saying of Christ Jesus, and everything in this direction is given: “My kingdom is not of this world”; that is, the kingdom that the Christ wants to ignite in man must not be established in this world. It must be established by man's finding the way out of this sensual world and into the supersensible world. My kingdom is of that other world, which is not this sensual world. Who has sinned most against this Word of Christ? The one who claims that a kingdom founded on this world, a kingdom that has its center in Rome, in physical Rome, a kingdom that works with physical advice and counsel, such a physical kingdom that is entirely of this world, is the kingdom that can somehow spread the Christian truth. Since the Kingdom of Christ is not of this world, it is certainly not of Rome. We are thus pointing out that in the present time, all that is of this world, all that wants to stamp even the truth so strongly with the character of this world that it says: ” The teaching authority of the Church has the right to condemn a philosophical opinion when it is in contradiction to a revealed doctrine or when it leads consistently to such a contradiction,” that is, insofar as the Church decrees it! Therefore, such books do not appear as books, for example, by anthroposophists, that one enters with one's whole personality and only with this and says: What I have to represent, I represent out of my connection with the spirit of Truth” — but here is the title: ‘Textbook of Philosophy on an Aristotelian-Scholastic Basis’, by Alfons Lehmen S. J., fourth edition 1917. If you turn the pages, you will find: Imprimatur Friburg, Thomas, Archbishop. That is, here not a personality represents what she has to represent as a personality, but a worldly body, from which everyone who wants to publish something that is to be recognized must get the imprimatur. Here a body, which is of this world and stamps truth from this world, represents that which is established as truth! Today, we must not be cowardly, but look courageously at what true Christianity is and what alleged Christianity is. We are living in a time that has led to this catastrophe because people have been cowardly enough not to live outwards what they have more or less recognized inwardly. Our catastrophe is, in its origin, a spiritual catastrophe – as we have often said – and we will not emerge from this catastrophe until we turn to the Spirit of Truth, which, in spiritual vision, seeks that power which gives it the “Imprimatur”, not an ecclesiastical authority established by a worldly organization. |
| 156. Occult Reading and Occult Hearing: Inner Mobility of Thought
06 Oct 1914, Dornach Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond Rudolf Steiner |
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| What is it that happens when real communion with the spiritual world is cultivated in the way described? Ego and astral body—but the Ego has reached a higher stage because it has become selfless and has been submerged in the astral body—Ego and astral body are outside the physical and etheric bodies. With his Ego and astral body man is outside the physical and etheric bodies when, during life between birth and death, he is engaged in acts of spiritual perception; but he looks back to the etheric body and it is the etheric body that reflects these ‘vowels.’ |
| A different radiance and resonance are perceived, as emanating from the being into whom the Ego and astral body have been transposed. What I have said up to now has referred to the ‘vowels’ of the spiritual world. |
| 156. Occult Reading and Occult Hearing: Inner Mobility of Thought
06 Oct 1914, Dornach Translated by Dorothy S. Osmond Rudolf Steiner |
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Yesterday I tried to speak of certain inner experiences which can be called the ‘vowels’ of the spiritual world. We heard how occult reading and occult hearing are very living inner experiences to which the whole personality, the whole soul must be dedicated. I mentioned three such experiences for which careful preparation has to be made. One of these arises when we learn gradually to enter with consciousness that supersensible world in which we always are, but unconsciously, and thereby reach the Gate of Death. I also spoke of the experience which comes when we acquire the so-called faculty of transforming ourselves into other beings. And then I tried to show how we can so regard evil in the world that we recognise its origin in a misuse of higher spiritual forces which in their place and in their own mode of working are entirely justified. Another such experience comes if we. take in earnest something that is linked with the last. We must transform ourselves into other beings but in such a way that the threads of inner soul-experiences are held intact. If they cannot be held intact it is just the same as when a man on the physical plane cannot remember what happened yesterday or some years ago in his physical life. Just as this continuity of experience has to be maintained in normal physical life, so the connecting thread must be maintained through the transformations in the spiritual world. This means that when a human being has transformed himself into a certain being or event he must not lose himself. He must retain a kind of higher, purely spiritual memory of other forms, processes and beings of the spiritual world. In other words: man has to become a multiple being, to ‘split up’ as it were in the spiritual world, to be able to divide himself. This inner experience produces a strange feeling: ‘You are here, you are this being, but you are also another being. You are within separate beings.’ Without this feeling of multiplicity, we should never be able to attain a real picture, for example, of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. Along the paths we described yesterday and along others too we can get a picture of the Angeloi, the Hierarchy immediately above us. But to reach a more spiritually adequate picture of the Archangeloi, we must understand through inner feeling something of the experience of being multiplied. For it is only gradually that we learn to understand these Beings of the Hierarchies. We only gradually learn to understand because in the physical world all human conceptions, all human thoughts are bound up with the ordinary conditions of space and time. But quite different conditions of space and time exist when we ascend to the Beings of the Hierarchy of Archangeloi. Starting from the ordinary physical consciousness, we have a certain basic feeling which is quite natural to this physical consciousness. If, for instance, through seership, I want to approach a human being who is living between death and a new birth, then—I am not speaking of myself here but quite generally, of one who has seership and is seeking for a dead soul—I have this feeling: ‘The dead is there, together with me!’ So far as the time element is concerned I can seek him just as on the physical plane I can seek another human being who is a contemporary ... it is only a matter of finding the way to him. When we are seeking one who is dead, this idea is also quite correct. In a certain sense it is still correct when it is a question of finding a Being of the Hierarchy of Angeloi. But it is no longer correct if we are seeking for a Being of the Hierarchy of Archangeloi, because such a Being has concentrated his consciousness at a time that is not our present time.  Suppose this line represents the flow of time. If the seer lives at this point, 1914, and is seeking a dead soul or a Being of the rank of the Angeloi, he finds that Being somewhere in the spiritual world at the same point of time. But this does not succeed if we are trying, for instance, to find a certain Being of the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi.  In this case we have to transcend time, to overcome the principle of synchronism (Gleichzeitigkeit). In order to find a certain Archangelos we must go back, for example, to the fifteenth century. Thus we do not remain in our own epoch. Supposing this were the year 1914, we have to go back, say, to the year 146.5. and seek there (EE) for the Archangelos. His influence, it is true, rays over into our own epoch but here we have merely the influence, we do not find the Archangelos in his own real identity. Other Archangeloi must be sought for at different points (see the upper circles in the diagram). We have to go beyond time. It is a difficult conception, but we have to reach it.  We must realise that the name ‘Archangelos’ has meaning. We know for the first time why they have this name when we find them in the way described. They are ‘Angeloi of the Beginnings.’ They are always to be found at the beginnings of epochs of time on the stage of world-history. It is there that we find them in their full consciousness, in their real self; this remains through the following epochs in the influences streaming into the flow of time. To find the Archangeloi we must not remain in the present; we must go out of time and seek for the beginnings of epochs. Thus, nobody whose soul is only able to live, let us say, in October 1914, is in a position to find all the Archangeloi—perhaps not even one. This is possible only to one who can transfer his soul back into other epochs, in such a way that he can actually experience those other epochs, live in those other epochs. But then it is necessary not to forget how we got there—just as in the physical world we must not forget what we did yesterday. This is a law of the multiplicity, of the outpouring into number. And as regards the Primal Beginnings, the Spirits of Personality, the Archai, we find them only by going back to the middle of the Lemurian epoch, when the Earth was at the beginning of its physical evolution. There we find the Archai in their essential nature. We cannot find the Archai if we remain in the present. Thus, you can see that the whole relation of the soul to time must change before we can penetrate into the spiritual world with knowledge. What We experience in this way—or even if we envisage these things and continue to feel them inwardly—imparts a kind of mood to the soul, a feeling of being outpoured into spiritual reality. This again is a ‘vowel’ in the spiritual world. You can see how in the way described a man becomes more and more independent of the standpoint of Space, of the standpoint of Time, which are his in the physical world. He does not only go out of himself, but also into something: into the living weaving and working of the Cosmos, not only one-pointedly, inasmuch as he experiences himself in the spheres of Space, but many-sidedly, inasmuch as he experiences himself in Time as a living being, having in himself the centres of consciousness of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. When, therefore, a man no longer lives only in himself, no longer even in the Space and Time known to him as a physical being, but when he has ‘taken Space to his body’ and ‘Time to his soul’—mark this well, for its full meaning only dawns upon us gradually—when he has taken Space to his body and Time to his soul, he then experiences something that is not an abstract feeling in spiritual generality, but a living weaving and working in a cosmic existence full of meaning. Everywhere there is meaning; it pours into his soul. Universal meaning, weaving and living in the Universe forms itself out of individual meaning. The meaning of things bursts forth like fruit out of many centres. And the Spiritual bursting forth in the single individual meanings weaves itself into a Cosmic Word that is full of meaning. Man lives and weaves within the Cosmic Word. This experience again is another vowel of the spiritual world—the original, primal vowel of the spiritual world. This experiencing of the Cosmic Word which must be pictured in its living wealth and not merely as a spiritual hearing, is Inspiration in the higher sense. With this Inspiration we can say: ‘What I know in this Cosmic Word, the Cosmic Word knows in me. It is not I who know, but the Cosmos knows in me. I fall short in knowledge of the Cosmic Word only because I am an imperfect instrument which can only let the Cosmic Word sound into me in broken streams. But it is the Cosmic Word itself which sounds in me.’ Humility increases the more we succeed in surrendering ourselves selflessly, without any pretentiousness in regard to our own achievement, our thinking, feeling and willing. The more we succeed in letting the Cosmic Word hold sway in the weaving of our own being, the more objectively do we reproduce, through the Cosmic Word, the mysteries pervading the universe. Thus, again we have spoken of a cosmic vowel. As I can tell you only the essential principles, I wanted to give you an idea—although quite a primitive one—of what may be called the ‘vowels’ of cosmic Being. When a man is inwardly schooled in such feelings as I have described them in these five cosmic vowels, when he can experience what can be experienced in the life of soul as an echo of these feelings, then the soul can listen to what is going on in the spiritual world and is there in the spiritual world. And then the spiritual world can speak to the soul. What is it that happens when real communion with the spiritual world is cultivated in the way described? Ego and astral body—but the Ego has reached a higher stage because it has become selfless and has been submerged in the astral body—Ego and astral body are outside the physical and etheric bodies. With his Ego and astral body man is outside the physical and etheric bodies when, during life between birth and death, he is engaged in acts of spiritual perception; but he looks back to the etheric body and it is the etheric body that reflects these ‘vowels.’ The etheric body has the power of a seven-fold reflection. I have spoken of five of these reflections. There are still two other experiences of which we could speak if it were possible to go into greater detail. But the characteristic weaving and working of the etheric body, what it reflects in its life-processes, may be described as these ‘vowels.’ In other words: something happens in the etheric body when a man has developed the feelings connected with the experience of standing at the Gate of Death, or is able to face Evil with understanding, or when he lives in the Cosmic Word. According to the particular mood with which he confronts the spiritual world, something is reflected in the etheric body which he is then able to perceive. It is very difficult to describe these things. Cosmic Being reflects itself in a sevenfold way in the etheric body. Let me make a diagram.  If this represents man's etheric body (quite diagrammatically)—then, if a man confronts the spiritual world with the feeling that arises from the preparation for standing at the Gate of Death, his etheric body is as it were compressed up to here, at a, and acquires a certain radiance and resonance. And out of this radiance and resonance proceeds something that may be called one of the vowels of the spiritual world. If a different mood is developed, the etheric body concentrates in another region—let us say, in the region of the heart (b). A different radiance and resonance are perceived, as emanating from the being into whom the Ego and astral body have been transposed. What I have said up to now has referred to the ‘vowels’ of the spiritual world. But there are also ‘consonants’ of the spiritual world, twelve consonants. We get at these consonants most easily by taking the physical body in the same way as we have taken the etheric body with its ‘vowels.’ The physical body is then revealed in its twelve-foldness. There is not sufficient time even to hint how we can experience the twelve-foldness of the physical body as we have experienced the seven-foldness of the etheric body. But this I must say: To a man who is conscious outside his physical and etheric bodies, they become something quite different from what they are when he is living in them. The etheric body, then, is what contains the life-process which makes us living beings. The physical body is that which builds up the organism of our senses. We are within and we use our physical and etheric bodies to make us the beings we are on the physical plane. But when, in the sense indicated, we are outside the physical and etheric bodies, they appear to us as signs. True, the etheric body is still composed of life; but its task, that of being the life-principle of our physical organism, does not now reveal itself. The etheric body reveals itself as the signs of the seven vowels. It becomes objective, something at which we look and which in its variability and mobility becomes the ‘vowels’ of the Cosmic All. We become as foreign to our etheric body as to the vowels of physical script. And we become as foreign to the physical body—which is now revealed as a totality of twelve consonants brought together- as we are to the consonants of ordinary script. And just as consonants and vowels interpenetrate in the words of ordinary script, enabling us to read or hear, so in the spiritual world do we hear or read the etheric body which reveals itself in a sevenfold aspect by being joined with two or with three consonants of the physical body. On the physical plane, when we meet a human being we can understand him because he speaks to us, perhaps also by gesture or facial expression—but we must have eyes to see and ears to let the word enter our soul. Just as everything that constitutes a relationship to other human beings is transmitted by way of the senses, a similar thing happens in the spiritual world. We prepare ourselves, let us say, to find a human soul who is living between death and a new birth. We know through inner experience that we are now united with that soul, that we are having experiences with it at the same time and in the same place in the spiritual world. Just as in the physical world we have sense-organs in order to come, to terms with other human beings, so in the spiritual world we have to look back to the etheric body and the physical body. And in their interplay, they reflect how the single processes of the etheric body are joined with those of the physical body—vowel processes with consonant processes. This interplay expresses the speech that is going on with the soul of the dead and is therefore necessary for understanding that soul. Try to picture the following.—In the spiritual world you are united with the soul of one who is dead and is living between death and a new birth. You look back on your physical form which you can observe because you lived or are living in it on the physical plane; you also look back on the etheric form, and this reflects back all that you speak with the dead, what he has to communicate to you, what he is thinking, feeling and willing. The etheric and physical bodies have become one collective sense-organ. And we can say: In our physical life we have received the physical and etheric bodies so that we may have sense-organs for the spiritual world. A new light is now thrown on the truth that life in the physical world is not merely life in a vale of sorrow of which we must long to get rid, as false asceticism teaches. We realise that life in the physical world has its sublime, divine mission. Within the physical world we acquire what becomes sense-organs for the spiritual world. You will understand this still more precisely if I tell you about the perception of spiritual beings and happenings when we ourselves are living between death and a new birth, that is to say, when we are not seeing the spiritual world clairvoyantly from the physical plane but are united in the spiritual world with spiritual beings. As long as we bear a physical and an etheric body as a garment, so long have we instruments for reflecting; these bodies serve us as sense-organs. When we lay aside these bodies at death, we naturally no longer have them as external realities. You may easily ask: Does this mean that in the spiritual world between death and a new birth, we cannot become aware of what we experience in connection with the other beings and processes of the spiritual world? But then everything is different, we become aware of it differently I Even the seer in the physical world must have what he experiences in the spiritual world reflected by the physical and etheric bodies. This is correct as long as he is living in the physical world, as long as the physical body has not passed away through decay m•; to the physical world and the etheric body through dissolution into the spiritual world. When we are in the spiritual world and no longer have physical and etheric bodies, then we are able, out of what is the substance of the spiritual world, to form the world of signs out of which the physical body was put together, and also the world of signs out of which the etheric body was given shape. Suppose, as a soul between death and a new birth, you are to live together with another human being. You are aware of this common life. What the other soul says to you or you say to him expresses itself spiritually in such a way that you inscribe into the spiritual world what, in other circumstances, would have been reflected. But now with your own power you inscribe the picture into the spiritual world. What you otherwise express in the signs of the physical and etheric bodies, in vowels or consonants, you now inscribe, you actually inscribe with your own power into the spiritual world, into the Akashic Record, what you are saying to the other soul—obliterating it again, figuratively speaking, when it is no longer needed. These communications and experiences are to be read and heard in the spiritual world as the result of mutual activity on the part of the souls. I gave the first indications of these things at the beginning of the chapter in my book Theosophy, where the so-called ‘Spirit-Land’ is described. It is there said that at a certain stage of development in Devachan, in the ‘Spirit-Land,’ the human being sees his previous incarnation in the ‘Continental Region’ of the Spirit-Land. It is an inscription of a spiritual record. The ideal would be if study of a book like Theosophy were so zealous that many a reader, from the indications given there, would arrive at these things for himself. There is a very great deal in these books and merely through one's own reading—if the contents are read with the heart and experienced with deep inwardness—everything can be gleaned from them. But books on Spiritual Science are, as a rule, not read with the attention that they really require. If they had been so read, after Theosophy and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and perhaps also Occult Science—an Outline, had been written, the lecture-courses could have been written or given by someone else than me. Everything, really, is contained in these books, only people do not generally believe it. And how much could be written if everything contained in the Mystery Plays were really to be assimilated 1 I am not saying this for advertisement's sake—I have already said enough about the humility of the occultist and the spiritual investigator—but I say it in order to stimulate genuine reading of the writings which had to be given out precisely in our epoch, and for which one really has, personally, so little merit. So you see that the human being, as he lives on the physical plane, develops something in regard to the spiritual worlds which can be a seed for experiences in these higher worlds. The etheric body of man as it is in the physical world is not only his life-principle, but it is at the same time an instrument of preparation for unfolding understanding of the vowels of the spiritual world. And the physical body also is an instrument of preparation for experiencing the consonants of the spiritual world. Much can be done if we try in all earnestness to get rid of the purely materialistic conception of the human physical body. Much can be done in the way of preparation in order that these feelings for the vowels and consonants of the Cosmos, these inner experiences and impulses in the soul may awaken. For this preparation we must call up an experience which, as regards development into the higher worlds, is somewhat similar to what a child must do in order to be able to read in the physical world—what it must do in order to learn the words of our physical language. With the materialistic conception of the physical body, this body is taken just as it presents itself in the physical sense. It is as though somebody were to write down the signs: I N K. ... and then someone comes and says that he will investigate it. This is how we approach the physical body. It is looked at as though it were a scroll with flourishes going up here and down there ... and then it is described. Heart, lung, and so on, are described just as they present themselves externally. This really is the way it is done. But the only people who get anything out of it are those who have learnt to read the word ‘ink’ out of the signs. Thus, must we ascend from the physical plane into the higher spiritual worlds with the experiences of which we have spoken to-day. What we learn to read and hear in this way is an individual experience of the soul. But we can prepare if in the physical world we try to comprehend the physical body in its sign-nature. What is meant by this? I will give you a brief example of understanding this sign-nature. I can do it only very briefly and must leave it to your own earnest meditation to see what is meant. For in many cases speech is not really adequate for understanding these things. It will become adequate only when Spiritual Science has worked for a while in the world and has given the words a stamp which really links them with spiritual activity and spiritual reality. Speech must become more pliant, and this will only be possible when contact with Spiritual Science has been cultivated for some hundreds of years and people have become accustomed to taking words differently from what is the case to-day when they are applied only to things and happenings of the physical plane. Now for the examples. We find what transpires in the human head to-day enclosed in the bony formation of the skull. There it all is. With a few exceptions it is all physically shut up, as it were, inside. When we begin really to think about the human head, and not merely describe it in its material appearance, we find a tremendous significance in the fact that inside it complicated processes are going on which are shut in practically on all sides by a bony sheath. One part of the physical human being is separated off, surrounded on all sides by the hardest substance, namely that of the bones. It is, however, only a part of the human organism. The human being is by no means a simple entity! The primitiveness of the ideas prevailing at the present time are revealed by the criticisms of my books which grumble at someone who speaks of a Sentient Soul, a Mind-Soul and a Consciousness—or Spiritual Soul, whereas it was a splendid achievement—so it is said—to have been able to conceive of the soul as a unit. It is understandable that our materialistic culture should prefer the hotchpotch that goes by the name of Psychology to-day, to the real membering of the soul. These members of the soul are a reality; they belong to different worlds and are not designated without reason. It is comprehensible that modern culture should consider this foolish, but thereby it simply characterises itself, not what it condemns. The physical organism of man is highly complicated and study of it may give rise to the following thoughts which may, certainly, seem foolish to those who call themselves scientists to-day. Yes … but St. Paul said that much that is wisdom in the eyes of God is foolishness in the eyes of men. And so perhaps it will be profitable to think of this ‘foolishness in the eyes of men’ which may be ‘wisdom in the eyes of God.’ Let us think about the following.—What about our hands? Our hands are quite definitely connected with our soul. If anyone has a living feeling for what goes on in his hands, it is not without significance if what he says to another human being expresses itself in the gestures of his hands. This means something in itself! I will pass over many of the intermediate steps, leaving this to your own meditation. Just suppose that as the result, not of a process emanating from the human body, but of a process rooted in the Cosmos, our hands were not formed in such a way that we could move them freely or make them follow our will. Suppose our hands were fettered to our body, were obliged to remain quite rigid, having been affixed to the body, as it were from outside, by external Nature. How would things be then? We should have hands but be unable to move them. But if we had hands and could not use them, we should still have the urge to do so! Although we could not move them physically, we should always be wanting to move the etheric hands! The physical hands would lie still, the etheric hands would move. This, in reality, is what we do with our brain. Certain lobes of the brain which now lie enclosed in the skull were freely mobile during the Old Moon evolution. To-day they are rigid and can no longer move physically. But they do move etherically, when we think. We move the etheric brain when we think. If we had not this firm skull enclosing the lobes of the brain, we should stretch out with these lobes and make gestures with them—gestures such as we now make with the hands—but we should not think. The lobes of the brain had first to be made physically rigid and it had to be possible for the etheric brain to tear itself free. What I am now saying is not fantasy. The time will come when our hands and much else too will become rigid. This will be in the Jupiter epoch. That which to-day appears so free—attached as it were to the heart-region—will then be enclosed by a sheath, just as the brain to-day is enclosed by a skull. That which is most visibly expressed in the hands is something that is preparing to become an organ of thought. For the time being we have only rudimentary organs which at present are small structures because they have not fully developed. Suppose that to-day we had only certain portions of the skull here in front ... behind there are the shoulder-blades. They lie in the plane which later on will enclose the brain of the future. You have a true conception of the shoulder-blades in the human body when you regard them as small pieces of bone which really belong to a skull that will form—only the other parts have not yet developed. Therewith you have, as it were, added a second man to the first. Moreover—and here I shall say something very strange—there are other organs in the body which are also pieces of another skull which will develop in a still more distant future. These organs are now quite tiny compared with the organism as a whole: they are the knee-caps. The knee-caps are now these tiny surfaces—mere indications which later on will turn into a different spiritual organ. We characterise the human organism aright if we say (though this is only one isolated example): The human being has, in reality, three skulls. One is fairly well developed, shut off on all sides. The second has only pieces, in the shoulder-blades, the third only in the knee-caps. But the two latter—shoulder-blades and knee-caps—can, in thought, be expanded and rounded off into spherical forms. Thus, we get three brains. What we are as inner men is only slightly developed externally in the second brain. To-day it manifests externally; later on it will become an inner brain. When you make gestures with your hands to-day you are preparing for what will be thoughts later on—thoughts which will be quite as capable of grasping processes of the elemental world as your head now grasps the processes of the physical world. And strange though it sounds: everything lying outside and beyond the knee-caps, that is to say, the lower legs, the feet—these are still quite imperfect organs connected with the gravity of the Earth. These organs, in conjunction with what they receive spiritually from the Earth to-day, are preparing to become not only physical but spiritual organs, which will lead into the spiritual worlds when the Earth is replaced by the later Venus evolution. The present physical form must fall away and something else take its place. So you see, much, very much is contained in the occult study of the world. The most important is not that we know: This or that book exists and contains this and that concerning the higher worlds. That is not the most important. What the books contain must, naturally, be assimilated because that is the only way of finding what is right and true. But the necessary thing is a certain ‘temper’ of the soul, whereby a man relates himself in a new way to the world, whereby he learns to have a different view of the things of the world. The important thing is that by this reading we prepare for the inner mobility and movement of the life of thought, for the weaving of thought, for the experience of thought-in-itself; that we also prepare to see the physical world in a different way. For even in their outer form things are not as they seem. Strange as it sounds, the shoulder-blade is not what you see physically. That it has such definite limits is Maya, is false. The shoulder-blade expands, when we really set about comprehending it, into an organ with much greater detail. And when we see a man kneeling, we should gradually get the impression: That is a false picture! The knee-caps there, those tiny parts, are illusory; this kneeling man is surrounded by a great spherical surface and he lives within that orb. The surface becomes a sphere and when a man prays he is preparing himself in the brain to live in the sphere in which he will live when the sphere of which the knee-caps are only tiny parts, encloses him. Thus, we gradually learn to read in the physical world. We do not merely look at a man kneeling or making some gesture, but we begin to realise that although what presents itself immediately, is reality, none the less it is false and untrue. In the ‘letters’ we learn what the Cosmos is, not only in the present but what it expresses in its ‘Becoming.’ A man in prayer becomes, in his form, what the Venus man will sometime be. Thus, do we learn, step by step, to decipher, interpret, read in the true sense, and grasp the world as it really is. The physical world is no more than a written page before us. If we only stare at it, we can observe it without being able to read it at all. Neither do we know anything of the world if we look at it merely with the faculty of physical perception, for then we do not decipher, we do not really penetrate into the world. We must read the world, learn its meaning. If we become more and more conscious that the world is a book which the Hierarchies have written for us, in order that we may read in it, then only do we become Man in the full sense of the word. The building on which we are working is intended in its form to draw out those feelings and intimate moods of soul which make us capable of reading the world and of hearing the secrets of the Universe. The building is as it is in order that it may draw out what is within us—a certain part, at least. It is good, my dear friends, to take a picture in our meditations of the task which Spiritual Science has in the world over against what is in the world to-day; it is good to picture what must develop out of Spiritual Science and how Spiritual Science must find its way into the further development of history. If only there could be in the Anthroposophical Society a body of human beings filled with the living consciousness that Spiritual Science has to be worked and woven into the evolution of humanity! It was not merely in order to impart truths to you, but to stimulate such feelings in your souls, my dear friends, that I have given these lectures. |
| 156. How Does One Enter the World of Ideas?: Second Lecture
13 Dec 1914, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
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| We must only realize once and for all what we are actually talking about when we speak of the human ego. We speak of the human ego, and we must of course be quite clear about the fact that the actual essence of the ego is outside of everything that can be observed as the physical human body. The ego experiences itself only in inner experiences. As is well known, the etheric body and the astral body are not experienced directly at all. |
| Now, in an interesting way, we can study the transition from the ego to the astral body, from conscious experiences to subconscious experiences, through taste experiences. |
| 156. How Does One Enter the World of Ideas?: Second Lecture
13 Dec 1914, Dornach Rudolf Steiner |
|---|
Yesterday I pointed out that much will depend on how at least the main concepts and main images of spiritual scientific knowledge are incorporated into general cultural life. Yesterday I tried to give some examples of how it might be thought that the way people think would really take up the main ideas of the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I, and really make these ideas fruitful for the most diverse areas of life and science. Today I would like to point out another example. What we distinguish as physical body, etheric body, astral body and I, these are members of the human soul, we could also say of the human soul life, which, of course on a much higher plane, are related to each other in much the same way as, I would say, on a lower plane the individual color nuances of our color scale. And just as there can be no real knowledge of the inner nature of light and its inner relationships to the rest of the world without imagining this division into color shades, so there can be no real knowledge of the soul without having ideas about how soul members such as I, the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body relate to one another. But just as the individual colors do not simply stand next to each other, but merge into one another, so that one cannot always exactly indicate in the color scale where one shade ends and where the other shade begins, so it is also with these soul members: they merge into one another, and only our minds actually separate them as we usually do. Now it is important to consider, for example, the transition of the I and the astral body into the eye. What we call the I of the human being really merges into the astral body, just as the red nuance of the color spectrum merges into the orange nuance. We must only realize once and for all what we are actually talking about when we speak of the human ego. We speak of the human ego, and we must of course be quite clear about the fact that the actual essence of the ego is outside of everything that can be observed as the physical human body. The ego experiences itself only in inner experiences. As is well known, the etheric body and the astral body are not experienced directly at all. Rather, the physical body is experienced through external observation, through external perception, and the I in its manifold experiences is experienced in an internal way. This is absolutely the case for experiences on the physical plane. Between the physical body and the I within stand the astral body and the etheric body; both belong to such facts of the event, we can say, that are not directly experienced by the human being on the physical plane. Neither can the etheric body be directly observed externally without prior esoteric training, nor can the astral body be experienced. It contains everything that is often called the sum of subconscious or unconscious mental experience. The I is divided into the most diverse experiences of consciousness. And now let us single out one such experience of consciousness, or rather, one conscious mode of experience. Conscious life is indeed very diverse, but we want to highlight, as I said, a very simple, elementary mode of experience, the way we experience taste. Just as the I experiences the experiences of sight, hearing, smell and imagination, so it also has taste experiences, interactions with the external physical world. I am referring to the very ordinary taste experiences that are related to nutrition, not those that are called artistic. What we experience when we have a taste sensation is an experience of the I, in that this taste experience is consciously occurring for us. So when we bring a food into our mouths and have a taste experience, this taste experience is an experience of our I. The manifold taste experiences are simply manifold experiences of the I. Now, in an interesting way, we can study the transition from the ego to the astral body, from conscious experiences to subconscious experiences, through taste experiences. It is not difficult to see that the taste experiences, as it were, die away when the food has travelled a certain distance through the digestive system. For conscious life, the taste experiences die away, but this is only apparent. In reality, to put it in rough terms, the taste experience of the mouth merges into the taste experience of the whole organism; and the whole organism is basically permeated by taste experiences in the course of the food entering our body, in the course of digestion and so on; and what we consciously taste is only a small part of the general tasting that our whole body experiences. Not only the nerve endings of our mouth taste, but our entire digestive tract tastes, and as the nutrients enter the organism, into the blood and so on, the whole organism tastes again what the digestive organs have prepared for it. One could say that the whole organism is permeated by taste sensations. And this organism is so permeated and permeated with taste sensations that one can speak of differentiated tastes. One can speak of organ tastes. Each organ has its own specific taste experience; the stomach has its own specific taste experience, the liver, lungs and heart have their own special taste experiences. The general taste differentiates into the organ taste. Here we see how the sphere of I-experiences submerges into the sphere of astral experiences. These differentiated organ tastes are unconscious; they do not come to the consciousness of the human being, and yet they are infinitely significant. For the normal development of human life depends on the normal development of these organ tastes, and aging consists partly in the fact that the astral body gradually becomes dulled to the habit of tasting. Do understand me. The astral body dulls in relation to the habit of tasting; but the word “habit” is used in the sense in which I used it yesterday; little by little it dulls. But if the stimulus is no longer exerted on the astral body and thereby also on the etheric body and the physical body, which finds its expression in the fact that one tastes, then the possibility no longer exists for the astral body to permeate the life events of the etheric body and the physical body through taste experiences. A good deal of what we call aging is based on the astral body becoming dulled to tasting, and the fact that a single human organ loses the fresh ability to taste, that is, is not permeated by its astral body in the appropriate way, results in organ diseases. Now you understand that certain perspectives arise under this condition. Firstly, there is the perspective that is important in a pedagogical-hygienic sense: it is not to be underestimated to have a well-developed sense of taste. I have already discussed this for our friends on one occasion when I was talking about child education. It is important to realize that one should develop a living relationship with the different foods one eats, that it matters to a certain extent whether one eats lettuce or spinach, but that one should have a living relationship with the differentiations of the plant world in lettuce and spinach. For what one experiences in tasting lettuce and spinach are living relationships between the macrocosm and the microcosm, and these living relationships continue in the subconscious taste experience of the astral body, which passes through all the organs. Those who become vegetarians, for example, should not associate this with false asceticism, for instance by using their vegetarianism to dull themselves as much as possible to the friendly relationship with the nature of nature. Instead, they should develop the ability to taste the subtle differences between the individual food types. One can do this particularly well as a vegetarian because one is able – if the word is not misunderstood, I would like to say – to taste those fine, refined differences between the individual plants and what one prepares from them as food, whereas, of course, if one is not a vegetarian, one has more brutal differences with meat dishes. Because if we become blunted in this respect, there is a real danger that we will extend this blunting from the conscious part of the astral taste experiences to the subconscious part of the taste experiences. But by doing so, we cut off the living influences that emanate from the astral body to the lower limbs of our organism. And it is an uncomfortable sight to come to some vegetarian restaurants and see how people pile a mountain of all kinds of mixed food on their plates and stuff it into their mouths without understanding, and then act particularly superior to what the ordinary person has in terms of a friendly relationship with their natural environment when it comes to taste experiences. That is one thing, my dear friends. Once our understanding of the outer experience in relation to eating is penetrated by our understanding of the astral body and its workings, then a healthy hygiene of eating will really arise, and we will need it because the unconscious instinctive life of the human race will gradually be lost and must be replaced by a conscious relationship with the cosmic environment. But on the other hand, there is also another perspective, and that is that there really is a certain relationship between the whole plant world that is spread out over the earth and the human organism, the microcosm. And this relationship is expressed in the specific taste of an organ. What I am saying is really true and not just a symbol: any plant growing outside tastes only to a certain organ in the human being, it does not taste to other organs. A particular organ can be stimulated by the forces of this plant, but not another. Once these relationships have been studied, something very important will have been gained.  I have told you on various occasions: although the plant, when we take its form, consists of the physical body and the associated etheric body, it stretches, as it were, as it develops upwards, its flowering into the surrounding astrality, and when we look over a bed of plants, we find astrality spread over the plants, astrality that belongs to the plants. Not every plant has its own particular astral body, but it is the case that the general astrality – spread over the surface of the earth as air is spread out physically – becomes specific. That which, as it were, descends from the earth's astral body to a particular flower, let us say a lily flower, expresses itself differently than that which descends to a clover flower. There the general astrality is specified. This relationship that exists between the astrality of the earth and the entire spread out carpet of plants, this relationship also exists internally between the human astral body and its individual organs. In this respect, too, the human being is a microcosm, only that an unhealthy relationship can arise between the human astral body and its individual organs, in that individual organs lose their living sense of taste and become dulled. The relationship that exists between the general astrality of the earth and the entire plant cover is essentially - and I say essentially - a healthy one, and if one finds out the relationships between the individual plants and the human organs, then one also finds the possibility of stimulating the organs again by supplying the substances of the individual plants and making them healthy from within. For when the substances of a particular plant are introduced into the human organism, the affinity that the plant has with the general astrality of the earth is also introduced. If this affinity to the astrality of the earth is dulled in individual organs of the human organism, it can be stimulated again, also in the human astral body, by introducing the forces of the plant in question into the human organism. You can see from this the possibility of setting up a plant system that corresponds in some way to the human organization and which at the same time represents a rational system of certain remedies for certain organ diseases. One would get beyond the purely empirical, trial-and-error search, and one would really be able to rationally ascend to a rationalization of plant therapy by parallelizing the human organ tastes with the forces of the plant world. All these aspects arise in an extremely fruitful way if one really wants to engage in making anthroposophy or spiritual science fruitful for life. And just imagine, after the few samples that could be given yesterday and today, what wonderful and stimulating tasks for contemporary life arise from spiritual knowledge! One can only hope that humanity will not be too lazy in the near future to devote itself to a greater extent to the penetration of science with what spiritual science has to offer in detail. It is certainly infinitely important that the central insights of spiritual science be communicated to humanity, because if these central insights were not communicated, the basis for further development would be lacking. But instead of taking these central insights, as many feel tempted to do, in all sorts of new, poorly written repetitions of what already exists, but to say the same thing over and over again, the focus should be on developing the individual chapters of these central insights and really introducing spiritual-scientific insights into science and life. I mention this for the reason that there are really quite a lot of people within our movement, and some of them stand out in particular, who find it more comfortable to reproduce and repeat what is already available in the literature, instead of getting involved in introducing spiritual scientific knowledge into the areas that are particularly close to them. When we consider this, the repeated emphasis on the fact that spiritual science must become a pervasive attitude in human life takes on a different shade of meaning. When we see in our time how human thinking and human judgment and human action have led to a point that demands infinite sacrifice, and on the other hand shows how human judgment and human feeling have reached an impasse, this should be accepted as a significant sign of the times that a revival of soul forces is necessary for humanity. This should be seen as the main thing, that a revival of the soul is necessary now.Not so much the setting up of these or those program points, as it was popular in the time immediately preceding our sad epoch, but rather the living-grasping of spiritual-scientific knowledge, that will bring about a more dignified epoch, that we can lead out of the chaotic events of our present time. The less people believe that what we have to defend now already exists in any real area of European humanity, the less they will believe that and the more they will believe that they have a new future to expect and hope for, a more spiritual future, a future of more spiritual views, the more they will find what is right. The fact that there has always been a presentiment of what spiritual science must one day bring to clear consciousness has often been touched upon here, especially in this place, and even provided with external evidence. Again and again we have to be reminded that, while spiritual science is in a certain sense something radically new in our time, it was well prepared in the entire newer spiritual life, so that wherever there is active spiritual life, intuitions have arisen not only of spiritual scientific knowledge, but intuitions of the far-reaching significance of this spiritual scientific knowledge. You see, the following is an interesting example: a European spirit once tried to reflect on which influences had become particularly significant for his inner life. This European spirit, who was thinking about which influences had become particularly significant for his inner life, then mentioned three relatively newer spirits that had had a great influence on his life. He mentions Emerson, whom you have also characterized from certain points of view in these lectures, Ruysbroek and the German mystic Novalis. These three spirits have had a particular influence on this Central European spirit, as he himself explains. Now this European spirit seeks to gain a certain measure of what must enter into human spiritual life if this spiritual life is to truly experience the necessary new fertilization. And here the spirit says something most remarkable. It says: If you look, for example, at Shakespeare or Sophocles, you will find that human conflicts are presented, but ultimately - so the person concerned thinks - what kind of conflicts are they that play out around Hamlet and Ophelia, around Antigone or Electra? Of course, he says, they are highly significant conflicts for the earthly beings called human beings, but, he says, if a spirit were to come down from another planet, that is, from completely different experiences, from a planet where experiences are completely different, he would not be particularly interested in what is going on around Ophelia or Wallenstein or Mary Stuart. That may interest people from the earth, but if a spirit came from another planet, he would demand that people have something to tell him that is not only of interest to creatures from the earth, but that is of interest to creatures that belong to the cosmos in the broader sense. And the person in question believes that there are still very few such souls who have something to say that could also give a spirit descending to earth something. And the thinker in question counts the poet Novalis among these souls. He finds the soul experiences in Novalis's poetry so fine, so intimate, so brought out of what cannot only interest people, what does not only live in the temporal, but what weaves and lives in the eternal, so that for such a spirit as Novalis, a being could also be interested that descended from another planet. I will read to you the words he wrote when he got to know Novalis, or got to know what Novalis has to give as his soul experiences. They are very beautiful words, so beautiful that I would like to read what the thinker in question has to say with reference to the Novalis experiences: “But if other proofs were needed,” says the thinker in question, in connection with what he himself experienced with Novalis, and which he thinks would also interest the spirits of other planets: “But if other proofs were needed, it would” - namely the human soul - “lead him among those whose works almost stir to silence. She would open the gate of the realm where some loved her for her own sake, without caring about the small gestures of her body. They would climb together to the lonely plateaus where consciousness is heightened by a degree, and where all those who are plagued by restlessness about themselves attentively survey the immense ring that connects the world of appearances with our higher worlds. She would go with him to the borders of humanity; for at the point where man seems to end, he probably begins, and his most essential and inexhaustible parts are only in the invisible, where he must be on his guard unceasingly. On these heights alone are thoughts that the soul can approve of, and images that resemble her, and that are as imperious as she is. There humanity has reigned for a moment, and these dimly illuminated peaks are perhaps the only lights that announce the earth to the spiritual realm. Their reflection truly has the color of our soul. We feel that the passions of the mind and body would resemble the tolling of bells in the eyes of a higher reason; but in their works, the people mentioned have come out of the little village of passions and said things that are also of value to those who are not of the earthly community." These are truly beautiful and glorious words! The speaker believes he experienced them through Novalis, beautiful and glorious words that characterize how humanity must truly come to something that directly connects with the eternal, that leads us beyond mere earthly experiences into the experiences of the cosmos. Maurice Maeterlinck spoke of Novalis in the words I have read to you, and that was some time ago, not in the last few months! But you can see from this that wherever there are people who are able to reflect, and when they have time to reflect, there is a true and genuine awareness of the path into the spiritual world that the evolution of humanity must truly take. I would like to give you another example. In spiritual science today, we consciously speak of how, through initiation, one can experience oneself in the I and astral body, separate from the physical body and etheric body, a conscious experience of oneself, as otherwise happens unconsciously during sleep. At the same time, spiritual science is able to provide the necessary information about the experience of death. What the spiritual scientist experiences outside the body with regard to the physical body and ether body is the same as what the soul experiences after death, looking back at its physical body and the fate of the ether body. spiritual scientist speaks in a special way of a view of the physical body and the ether body merging into the world process from the point of view that the soul gains when it has passed through the gate of death. It means an infinity for the further development of all human consciousness, of all human spiritual-cultural life, that such conceptions can enter into this spiritual-cultural life, such as the conception that people will more and more come to know that when the soul has passed through the gate of death, it looks back on the whole past life and on what is happening to the body, just as you now look back in your memory on your experiences in the ordinary life between birth and death. When the time comes that it is as trivial as looking back at experiences in the body after death, just as one looks back at experiences of earlier times in the life between birth and death, when it has become natural to look back in this way, then something tremendous will have been achieved. And from various things that I have discussed with you, you will realize how necessary it is that such an awareness of general humanity be achieved as quickly as possible. And now let us see whether these ideas, which are now being given fully consciously in such clear outlines in elementary spiritual science, whether such ideas - if we look for an intuitive understanding - were always completely foreign to the human race before spiritual science arose. When Fichte delivered a series of lectures in which he sought to transform the way his people were brought up - a transformation such as Pestalozzi had called forth, only more universally - Fichte said that there were certainly many people who could not go along with the idea that one could, as it were, reshape and revive the human race through such thoughts. Such people cling to the old that they can imagine, Fichte said. And now he sought a comparison to express very clearly what they have learned and to which they cling. Fichte sought a comparison, and this comparison is very strange. I will read it to you. “Time,” says Fichte - he means all the people of the time who cannot imagine that something new can arise from the old - “time appears to me like a shadow that stands over its corpse, from which an army of of diseases has just driven out, stands and laments and cannot tear his gaze away from the once-so-beloved shell and desperately tries every means to get back into the dwelling of the plagues. The invigorating breezes of the other world, into which the deceased has entered, have already taken her in and surround her with a warm, loving breath. Secret voices of the sisters (by which he means the other spiritual beings that surround us) already greet her and welcome her, and she is already stirring and expands within her in all directions, in order to develop the more glorious form into which she is to grow; but she has no feeling for these airs or hearing for these voices, or if she had, she is overcome with pain at her loss, with which she believes she has lost herself at the same time. Yes, is it not as if someone who comes from the field of spiritual science were to take a comparison from that field of looking at the corpse after death? This is how Fichte spoke in 1808. We can see from this how everything tends towards spiritual science, and how in the best minds this spiritual science arises as an inkling, but, as this example shows, as an inkling that expresses itself in very specific forms. You will understand, from what you are accustomed to hearing from me, and especially how you are accustomed to hearing it, how such words are meant. But could not a very definite intuition, a very definite feeling arise in the souls of men when they read something like this, which was expressed in 1808? Could it not evoke a very definite feeling in the souls of those who take human culture seriously? Could these souls not say to themselves: Should we not, in view of the fact that such presentiments existed, have clung to them and actually have made some progress long ago in the spiritual-scientific knowledge of the world? And then such souls might perhaps come to the realization: How ashamed we are! If only many souls were to have such feelings, it would be a great blessing for the development of the spiritual life of humanity. But I think that many souls will continue to choose the easier way for a long time to come, accepting what they like, for example, in the words of Fichte, but reading right over the things they do not like. And when one points this out to them, they will say: Well, great minds are allowed to be contrary in certain respects. And then they make such comparisons that are not taken from reality at all. It will be possible to permeate life with what spiritual science, through its concepts, stimulates in the human soul. And it is truly for no other purpose than to point out as forcefully as possible how life can be permeated by spiritual concepts that our building was actually built and will show all the details that it will contain. In this building, no sin is to be committed against the naive life and feelings of human beings. All those who repeatedly emphasize that artistic creation must proceed unconsciously believe that they do not commit this sin in themselves or in others. In truth, it is only more comfortable when artistic creation proceeds unconsciously than when it is elevated to knowledge. For knowledge, when it becomes knowledge of the cosmos, is just as naive as the primitive unconscious, which so often in life, out of people's comfort, is presented as that which is necessary in art, in phrases such as I have just given. Consider the following, which you can draw as a consequence from a variety of discussions. You will also get the impression that important impulses can and must be given from spiritual science for artistic details as well. When we look at a person in the light of today's spiritual science, we know that this person has not developed in the way that today's natural science presents it one-sidedly, but that this person needed a Saturn, Sun, and Moon development and then the previous Earth development to become what he has become. And we know, even when we consider the individual parts of the outer physical human form, that whole generations of beings from the higher hierarchies have been working on it over long periods of time, and that their activity was as specified as we have described it in the evolution of Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth. We know that what appears today as a finished part of the human being, for example the head, first had to go through the evolution of the sun, moon and the whole of the earth so far in order to become what it is today, that it had to be transformed and remodeled, that it first existed during the evolution of the sun, that it reappeared and was transformed during the evolution of the moon, and that it was again transformed during the evolution of the earth. If we then consider how man should actually be studied, we will first come to feel the full complexity of this human organization and its connection with the macrocosm, and then gradually learn to recognize it. Today I will only hint at a few things that will be explained in more detail in the near future. I will hint at them because they will lead us to a final thought. As I said, I will elaborate on this in the next few days. For example, we have parts of our organism which, in their configuration, still clearly bear the original impulses of the old Saturn development, but which have been transformed and reshaped many times, so that they cannot easily be recognized in their present form without studying the Akasha Chronicle. Schematically represented (see drawing p. 148, a), the bones surrounding the spinal cord were first laid down during the ancient Saturn evolution, still in the element of warmth, and were always transformed during the next evolutions. Those bones that attach as ribs were then added at the time of the moon evolution. They have been less remodeled because their first rudiments were laid less long ago. Other organs have been set upward, first during solar evolution, and then remodeled. That which we today call the human skull, the human head, was laid down during solar evolution and then remodeled many times. But if only the changes that the evolution of the sun has brought about in the human skull had taken place, then man would have to carry his head in a way that it cannot be carried, namely, so that it would always be directed upwards. Therefore, during the evolution of the earth through the influence of the sun, a ninety-degree turn has occurred, so that what should be directed upwards is now directed that way. Instead of thus drawing the solar arrow for the evolution of the earth, we must now draw it for the evolution of the earth (see illustration). It is part of the normal evolution that the human form has undergone under the influence of the cosmos that the shape of the head, having been directed upwards, has been directed forwards, turned towards the front. Those spirits, then, who have remained behind in their development on the moon, have brought with them the endeavour to turn people's heads upwards by penetrating and pervading them. People who have the tendency to carry their nose high in an unsympathetic way, as one says, are seduced by such Luciferic spirits. There is a real background to this. It is truly a truth of physiognomy and the cosmos, and one is quite right when one says of someone who carries his nose up: Well, Lucifer is in his neck! That is absolutely true. Therefore, it is infinitely important for life to really know these cosmic relationships. If we take the human outer limbs – arms and legs – the legs are limbs that belong directly to the development of the earth and are completely aligned with the earth. However, the arms are developed in such a way that if a person had only followed the development of the earth, they could only lower their arms downwards. But since he can also raise them upwards, he can direct them at will towards the lunar evolution, that is to say, with each raising of the arms he gives them a Luciferic character. Therefore, anyone with a fine intuitive perception will feel that every arm movement performed in this way (arms raised forward and upward) has a Luciferic character. Let us bear this in mind and now imagine a person who simultaneously bows his head and raises his hand, but in such a way that these two movements are captured in a human gesture: the person bows his head and raises his arm. This bowing of the head is a counteraction against the luciferianity of the head. The raising of the arm is a bringing of a luciferian element into the arm. But now it is so: by letting Lucifer enter into the arm, and supporting the bowed head with the forehead on the arm, one redeems the Luciferic power flowing through the arm through the counteraction of the Christ-power in the head. One redeems, as it were, Lucifer in the arm through Christ in the head.  Paint the human figure with the correct gesture, the head resting on the arm, and you have expressed it in this gesture. Man forms a gesture that expresses: Lucifer is redeemed by Christ! - And if you add a bending of the knees, you have intensified this gesture. Raise both arms up and suppress the force of the lifting, as happens when folding the hands (so the arms are raised with folded hands), and then try to lead the Christ force with the folded hands to the Luciferic force streaming upwards, by paralyzing it, as it were. Human gestures become an expression of the whole life of the world, of the spiritual life of the world. One must feel how such knowledge of the secrets of the cosmos can deepen the ordering of the human form in art! But you can also ask yourself: What actually happened when the upward orientation of the head, which can be compared to the Luciferic, was turned forward, and the human being stands on the earth with the head turned forward? He thereby became an earthly being! That which is not an earthly being cannot have legs and feet in the human sense. Man does not get his head, and with it his countenance, from the earth, but from the cosmos; but it comes into being in its form through turning to the earth. If we take other genii, other spirits, we cannot possibly make them with human legs. To make genii, who do not belong to earthly existence, with human legs is simply wrong, is actually wrong. This can really be seen from spiritual scientific knowledge. And our art in our building should take full account of these perceptions that come from spiritual scientific knowledge. You can see, therefore, that a new impulse can really be given in relation to artistic design. When spiritual science is no longer understood as a gray theory, but as something that will enter into people as perception and feeling, then it will be recognized that it can have a fruitful effect on all endeavors of human cultural development. A small beginning is to be made with this in our building. |
| 230. Man as Symphony of the Creative Word: Lecture IX
04 Nov 1923, Dornach Translated by Judith Compton-Burnett Rudolf Steiner |
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| We human beings are always present in what is there taking place; and the fact is—even if in his ordinary consciousness man is at first incapable of grasping what surrounds him—that every night we are involved in the weaving and working of these beings, that we ourselves take part as ego and as astral body in what these beings are carrying out. But it is the gnomes especially which really find it quite an entertainment to observe a person who is asleep, not the physical body in bed, but the person who is outside his physical body in his astral body and ego, for what the gnome sees is someone who thinks in the spirit but does not know it. |
| On the physical plane, you see, it is certainly often unpleasant to have gnats and the like buzzing around one at night. But the spiritual man, the ego and astral body—at night these are surrounded and woven about by elemental beings; and this being surrounded and woven about is a constant admonition to man to give an impetus to his consciousness in order to know more about the world. |
| The gnomes know that man possesses his ego as though in a dream, that he must first awaken in order to arrive at his true ego. They see this quite clearly, and call to him in his sleep: You dream your self —they mean during the day— And shun awakening. |
| 230. Man as Symphony of the Creative Word: Lecture IX
04 Nov 1923, Dornach Translated by Judith Compton-Burnett Rudolf Steiner |
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We only learn to know the beings of the sense-world when we observe them in the way they live and act, and it is the same with those beings about which I have been speaking and shall continue to speak in these lectures, the elemental beings of nature. Invisibly and super-sensibly present behind what is physical and sense-perceptible, they participate in all the happenings of the world just as, or rather in a higher sense than do the physical, sense-perceptible beings. Now you will readily be able to imagine that to these beings the world appears somewhat other than to the beings of the sense-world, for they do not possess a physical body such as is possessed by these latter. Everything which they grasp or perceive in the world must be different from what enters the human eye. This is indeed the case. The human being experiences the earth, for instance, as the cosmic body upon which he moves about. He even finds it slightly unpleasant when through some atmospheric condition or other, as occasionally occurs, this cosmic body becomes softened and he sinks into it even in a slight degree. He likes to feel the earth as something hard, as something into which he does not sink. This whole way of experiencing things, this whole attitude towards the earth, is, however, completely alien to the gnomes; they sink down everywhere, because for them the whole earth-body is primarily a hollow space through which they can pass. They can penetrate everywhere; the rocks, the metals, present no hindrance to their—shall I say swimming around. There are no words in our language which really express this wandering about of the gnomes inside the body of the earth. It is just that they have an inner experience, an inner perception, of the different ingredients of the earth; when they wander along a vein of metal they have a different experience from when they take their way along a layer of chalk. All this, however, the gnomes feel inwardly, for through all such things they penetrate unhindered. They have not the least idea that the earth exists. Their idea is that there is a space within which they perceive certain experiences; the experience of gold, the experience of mercury, of tin, of silica, and so on. This is to express it in human language, not in the language of the gnomes. Their language is far more perceptive; and it is just because their whole life is spent in journeying along all the veins and seams—ever and again journeying along them—that they acquire the very pronounced intellectuality about which I have spoken to you. Through this they acquire their all-comprehensive knowledge, for in the metals and in the earth everything outside in the universe is revealed to them; as though in a mirror they experience everything which is outside in the universe. But for the earth itself the gnomes have no perception, only for its different constituents, and for the different kinds of inner experience which they offer. Because of this the gnomes have a quite particular gift for receiving the impressions which come from the moon. It is towards the moon that they continually direct their attentive listening, and in this respect they are—I cannot say the born—it is so difficult to find the appropriate words—but the inherent neurasthenics. Of course, what for us is an illness is for these gnome-beings their actual life-element. For them this is no illness; it is simply a matter of course. It is what gives them that inner sensibility towards all those things of which I have spoken. But it also gives them their inner sensitivity towards the phenomena connected with the phases of the moon. They follow the changes in the moon-phenomena with such close attention—I have already described their power of attention to you—that it actually alters their form. When, therefore, one follows the existence of a gnome, one receives quite a different impression at full moon from that one receives at new moon, and again at the intermediate phases. At full moon the gnomes are ill at ease. Physical moonlight does not suit them, and at that time they thrust the whole feeling of their being outwards. They circumscribe themselves, as it were, with a spiritual skin. At full moon they press the feeling of their existence towards the boundary of their body. And in full moonlight, if one has imaginative perception for such things, they really appear like little shining, mail-clad knights. They are clad in a kind of spiritual armour and this it is which presses outwards in their skin to arm them against the moonlight which so displeases them. But when the time of new moon approaches the gnome becomes transparent, wonderful to see, inwardly irradiated with a glittering play of colours. One sees within him, as it were, the processes of a whole world. It is as though one were to look into the human brain, not as an anatomist investigating the fabric of the cells, but as one who perceives inside the brain the shimmering and sparkling of the thoughts. That is how these transparent little folk, the gnomes, appear to one, its though the play of thoughts is revealed within them. It is just at new moon that the gnomes are so particularly interesting, for each of them bears a whole world within himself; and one can say that within this world there actually lies the mystery of the moon. If one unveils it, this moon-mystery, one comes upon truly remarkable discoveries, for one reaches the conclusion that at the present time the moon is continually approaching nearer—naturally you must not take this in a crude way, as though the moon would collide with the earth—but each year it does in fact come somewhat nearer. Each year the moon is actually nearer the earth. One recognises this from the ever more vigorous play of the moon-forces in the gnome-world during the time of the new moon. And to this coming nearer of the moon the attentiveness of these goblins is quite specially directed; for it is in producing results from the way in which the moon affects them that they see their chief mission in the universe. They await with intense expectation the epoch when the moon will again unite with the earth; and they assemble all their forces in order to be armed in readiness for the epoch when the moon will have united with the earth, for they will then use the moon substance gradually to disperse the earth, as far as its outer substance is concerned, into the universe. Its substance must pass away. Because they hold this task in view these kobolds or gnomes feel themselves to be of quite special importance, for they gather together the most varied experiences from the whole of earth-existence, and they hold themselves in readiness, when all earthly substance will have been dispersed into the universe,—after the transition to the Jupiter-evolution—to preserve what is good in the structure of the earth in order to incorporate this in Jupiter as a kind of bony support. You see, when one looks at this process from the aspect of the gnomes, one gains a first stimulus, a first capacity, to picture how our earth would appear if all the water were taken away from it. Just consider how, in the western hemisphere, everything is orientated from north to south, and how, in the eastern hemisphere, everything is orientated from east to west. Thus, if you were to do away with all the water, you would get in America, with its mountains and what lies under the sea, something which proceeds from north to south; and looking at Europe you would correspondingly find that, in the eastern hemisphere, the chain of the Alps, the Carpathians and so on, runs in the east-west direction. You would get something like the structure of the cross in the earth.  When one gains insight into this, one receives the impression that this is really the united gnome-world of the old Moon. The predecessors of our Earth-gnomes, the Moon-gnomes, gathered together their Moon-experiences and from them fashioned this structure, this firm structure of the solid fabric of the Earth, so that our solid Earth-structure actually arose from the experiences of the gnomes of the old Moon. These are the things which reveal themselves in regard to the gnome-world. Through them the gnomes acquire an interesting, an extraordinarily interesting relationship to the whole evolution of the universe. They always carry over the firm element of a preceding stage into the stage which follows. They are the preservers in evolution of the continuity of the firm structure, and thus they preserve the firm structure from one world-body to another. It belongs to the most interesting of studies to approach the super-sensible world from the aspect of these spiritual beings and to observe their special task, for it is through this that one first gains an impression of how every kind of being existing in the world shares in the task of working upon the whole formation of the world. Now let us pass over from the gnomes to the undines, the water-beings. Here a very remarkable picture presents itself. These beings have not the need for life that human beings have, neither have they the need for life that the animals have even though instinctively, but one could almost say that the undines, as also the sylphs, have rather a need for death. In a cosmic way they are really like the flying creature which casts itself into the flame. They only feel their life to be truly theirs when they die. This is extraordinarily interesting. Here on the physical earth everything desires to live, for all that has life-force in it is prized. It is the living, sprouting life that is valued. But once we have crossed the threshold, all these beings say to us that it is death which is really the true beginning of life. This can be felt by these beings. Let us take the undines. You know, perhaps, that sailors who travel a great deal on the sea find that in July, August and September—further to the west this is already the case in June—the Baltic Sea makes a peculiar impression, and they say that the sea is beginning to blossom. It becomes, as it were, productive; but it produces just those things which decay in the sea. The process of decay in the sea makes itself felt; it imparts to the sea a peculiar putrefactive smell. All this, however, is different for the undines. It causes them no unpleasant sensations; but when the millions and millions of water-creatures which perish in the sea enter into the state of decomposition the sea becomes for the undines the most wonderful phosphorescent play of colours. It shines and glitters with every possible colour. Especially does the sea glitter for them, inwardly and outwardly, in every shade of blue, violet and green. The whole process of decomposition in the sea becomes a glimmering and gleaming of the darker colours up to the green. But these colours are realities for the undines, and one can see how, in this play of colours in the sea, they absorb the colours into themselves. They draw these colours into their own bodily nature. They become like them, they themselves become phosphorescent. And as they absorb the play of colours, as they themselves become phosphorescent, there arises in the undines something like a longing, an immense longing to rise upwards, to soar upwards. Upwards they soar, led by this longing, and with this longing they offer themselves to the beings of the higher hierarchies—to the angels, archangels and so on—as earthly sustenance; and in this sacrifice they find their bliss. Then within the higher hierarchies they live on further. And thus we see the remarkable fact that each year with the return of early spring these beings evolve upwards from unfathomable depths. There they take part in the life of the earth by working on the plant-kingdom in the way I have described. Then, however, they pour themselves, as it were, into the water, and take up by means of their own bodily nature the phosphorescence of the water, the element of decomposition, and bear it upwards with an intensity of longing. Then in a vast, in a magnificent cosmic picture, one sees how, emanating from earthly water, the colours which are carried upwards by the undines and which have spiritual substantiality, provide the higher hierarchies with their sustenance, how the earth becomes the source of nourishment in that the very essence of the undines' longing is to let themselves be consumed by the higher beings. There they live on further; there they enter into their eternity. Thus every year there is a continual upstreaming of these undines, whose inner nature is formed out of the earthly sphere, and who radiate upwards, filled with the longing to offer themselves as nourishment to the higher beings. And now let us proceed to the sylphs. In the course of the year we find the dying birds. I described to you how these dying birds possess spiritualized substance, and how they desire to give this spiritualized substance over to the higher worlds in order to release it from the earth. But here an intermediary is needed. And these intermediaries are the sylphs. It is a fact that through the dying bird-world the air is continually being filled with astrality. This astrality is of a lower order, but it is nevertheless astrality; it is astral substance. In this astrality flutter—or hover might be a better word—in this astrality hover the sylphs. They take up what comes from the dying bird-world, and carry it, again with a feeling of longing, up into the heights, only desiring to be inhaled by the beings of the higher hierarchies. They offer themselves as that which supplies breathing-existence to the higher hierarchies. Again a magnificent spectacle. With the dying bird-world, this astral, inwardly radiant substance is seen to pass over into the air. The sylphs flash like blue lightning through the air, and into their blue lightning, which assumes first greener, then redder tones, they absorb this astrality which comes from the bird-world, and dart upwards like upward-flashing lightning. And if one follows this beyond the boundaries of space, it becomes what is inhaled by the beings of the higher hierarchies. Thus one can say: The gnomes carry one world over into another in regard to its structure. They progress, as it were in a direction—the expression is only used as a comparison—which is horizontal with evolution. The other beings—the undines, the sylphs—carry upwards what they experience as bliss in yielding themselves up to death, in being consumed, in being inhaled. There they continue to live within the higher hierarchies; within them they experience their eternity. And when we pass over to the fire-beings, only think how the dust on the butterfly's wings seems to dissolve into nothing with the death of the butterfly. But it does not really dissolve into nothing. What is shed as dust from the butterfly's wings is the most highly spiritualized matter. And all this passes over like microscopic comets into the warmth-ether which surrounds the earth, each single particle of dust passes like a microscopic comet into the warmth-ether of the earth. When in the course of the year the butterfly-world approaches its end, all this becomes glittering and shimmering, an inner glittering and shimmering. And into this glittering and shimmering the fire-beings pour themselves; they absorb it. There it continues to glitter and shimmer, and they, too, get a feeling of longing. They bear what they have thus absorbed up into the heights. And now one sees—I have already described this to you from another aspect—how what the fire-beings carry outwards from the butterfly's wings shines forth into world-space. But it does not only shine forth; it streams forth. And it is this which provides the particular view of the earth, which is perceived by the higher hierarchies. The beings of the higher hierarchies gaze upon the earth, and what they principally see is this butterfly-and-insect-existence which has been carried outwards by the fire-beings; and the fire-beings find their highest ecstasy in the realization that it is they who present themselves before the spiritual eyes of the higher hierarchies. They find their highest bliss in being beheld by the gaze, by the spiritual eyes, of the higher hierarchies, in being absorbed into them. They strive upwards towards these beings and carry to them the knowledge of the earth. Thus we see how these elemental beings are the intermediaries between the earth and the spirit-cosmos. We see this drama of the phosphorescent uprising of the undines, which pass away in the sea of light and flame of the higher hierarchies as their sustenance; we see the up-flashing of the greenish-reddish lightning, which is in-breathed there where the earth continually passes over into the eternal, the eternal survival of the fire-beings, whose activity never ceases. For whereas, here on earth, it is particularly at a certain time of the year that butterflies die, the fire-beings see to it that what it is their task to look to is poured out into the universe throughout the entire year. Thus the earth is as though cloaked in a mantle of fire. Seen from outside the earth appears fiery. But everything is brought about by beings who see the things of the earth quite differently from how man sees them. As already mentioned, man's experience of the earth is of a hard substance upon which he walks about and stands. For the gnomes it is a transparent globe, a hollow body. For the undines water is something in which they perceive the phosphorizing process, which they can take into themselves and feel as their life-element. Sylphs see in the astrality of the air, which emanates from dying birds, that which makes their lightning flashes more vivid than they would otherwise be, for in itself the lightning of these sylphs is dull and bluish. And then again the disintegration of butterfly existence is something which continually envelops the earth as though with a sheath of fire. When this is beheld it is as though the earth were surrounded by a wonderful fiery painting; and, on the other side, when one looks upwards from the earth, one beholds these lightning flashes, these phosphorescent and evanescent undines. All this makes us say: Here on earth the elemental nature-spirits live and weave; they strive upwards and pass away in the fire-mantle of the earth. In reality, however, they do not pass away, but there they find their eternal existence by passing over into the beings of the higher hierarchies. All this, however, which at first appears like a wonderful world-picture is the expression of what happens on earth, for initially it is all played out upon the earth. We human beings are always present in what is there taking place; and the fact is—even if in his ordinary consciousness man is at first incapable of grasping what surrounds him—that every night we are involved in the weaving and working of these beings, that we ourselves take part as ego and as astral body in what these beings are carrying out. But it is the gnomes especially which really find it quite an entertainment to observe a person who is asleep, not the physical body in bed, but the person who is outside his physical body in his astral body and ego, for what the gnome sees is someone who thinks in the spirit but does not know it. He does not know that his thoughts live in the spiritual. And again for the undines it is inexplicable that man knows himself so little; likewise with the sylphs, and likewise with the fire-beings. On the physical plane, you see, it is certainly often unpleasant to have gnats and the like buzzing around one at night. But the spiritual man, the ego and astral body—at night these are surrounded and woven about by elemental beings; and this being surrounded and woven about is a constant admonition to man to give an impetus to his consciousness in order to know more about the world. Now, therefore, I can try to give you an idea of what these beings—gnomes, undines, sylphs and fire-beings—mean with their buzzing about, of what happens when we begin to hear what amuses them in us, and of what they would have us do when they admonish us to give a forward impetus to our consciousness. Yes, you see, here come the gnomes and speak somewhat as follows:
The gnomes know that man possesses his ego as though in a dream, that he must first awaken in order to arrive at his true ego. They see this quite clearly, and call to him in his sleep:
—they mean during the day—
Then there sounds forth from the undines:
Man does not know that his thoughts are really with the angels
And from the sylphs there sounds to sleeping man:
—the strength of Creative Might—
Such approximately are the words of the sylphs, the words of the undines, the words of the gnomes. The words of the fire-beings:
—with the strength of Divine Will—
The aim of all these admonitions is to give man a forward impetus in regard to his consciousness. These beings, which do not enter into physical existence, wish man to make a move onward with his consciousness, so that he, too, may participate in their world. And when one has thus entered into what these beings have to say to man, one also gradually understands how they give expression to their own nature, somewhat in this way: The gnomes:
The undines:
The sylphs:
And the fire-beings—there it is very difficult to find any kind of earthly words for what they do, because their sphere is far removed from earthly life and earthly activity. Fire-beings:
You see, I have endeavoured to the best of my ability to give you an idea of how these beings of the elemental kingdom characterize themselves; and of the admonitions which they impart to man. But they are not so unfriendly to man as only to suggest to him what is negative in its nature, but pithy and positive sayings also proceed from them. And man experiences these sayings as being of immense, of gigantic import. In such matters as these you must acquire a sense for whether a saying is uttered merely in human words, however beautiful they may be, or whether it sounds forth as though cosmically from the whole mighty chorus of the gnomes. It is the whole manner of its arising which brings about the difference. And when man hearkens to the gnomes after the admonitions which I have written down have been imparted to him, then there sounds towards him from the massed chorus of the gnomes:
Here the significance is the mighty moral impression created by such words when they stream through the universe, arising from the massed chorus of infinitely many single voices. And from the undine chorus resounds:
With the chorus of sylphs things are not so simple. When the gnomes appear like shining armoured knights in full moonlight there resounds from them as though from earth-depths:
When the undines soar upwards filled with the longing to be consumed, then in this upsoaring there sounds back to the earth:
But for the sylphs, in that, up above, they allow themselves to be inhaled, disappearing in bluish-reddish-greenish lightning into the world-light, then, as they flash into the light and therein disappear, from the heights there sounds down from them:
And as in fiery anger—but anger which is not felt to be annihilating, but rather as something which man must receive from the cosmos—as in fiery but at the same time enthusiastic anger, the fire-beings carry what is theirs into the fire-mantle of the earth, their words resound. Here the sound is not like that of single voices massed together, but from the whole circumference there resounds as with a mighty voice of thunder:
Naturally, one can turn one's attention away from all this; then one does not perceive it. Whether or no man does perceive such things depends upon his own free decision. But when man does perceive them he knows that they are an integral part of cosmic existence, that something actually occurs in that gnomes, undines, sylphs and fire-beings unfold their evolution in the way described. And the gnomes are not only present for man in the way I have already portrayed, but they are there to let their world-words sound forth from the earth, the undines to let their world-words soar upwards, the sylphs theirs from above, the fire-beings theirs like a chorus, like the massing of a mighty uplifting of voices. Yes, this is how it could appear when transposed into words. But these words belong to the Word of worlds, and even though we do not hear them with ordinary consciousness, these words are yet not without significance for mankind. For the primeval idea which had its source in instinctive clairvoyance, that the world was born out of the Word, is indeed a profound truth, but the world-word is not some collection of syllables gathered from here or there; the world-word is what sounds forth from countless, countless beings. Countless, countless beings have something to say in the totality of the world, and the world-word sounds forth from the concordance of these countless beings. It is not the general abstract truth that the world is born out of the Word that can bring this to us in its fullness. One thing alone can do this, namely that we gradually arrive at a concrete understanding of how the world-word in all its different nuances is composed of the voices of individual beings, so that these different nuances contribute their sound, their utterance, to the great world-harmony, the mighty world-melody, in the Word's act of creation. When the gnome-chorus allows its “Strive to awaken” to sound forth, this—only transformed into gnome-language—is the force which is active in bringing about the human bony system, the system of movement in general. When the undines utter “Think in the spirit”, they utter—transposed into the undine-sphere—what pours itself as world-word into man in order to give form to the organs of digestion. When the sylphs, as they are breathed in, allow their “Live creatively breathing existence” to stream downwards, there penetrates into man, weaving and pulsating through him, the force which endows him with the organs of the rhythmic system. And if one attends to what sounds inwardly—in the manner of the fire-beings—from the fire-mantle of the world, then one finds that this sounding manifests as image or reflection. It streams in from the fire-mantle—this sounding force of the word. And every nerve system of every man, every head I would add, is a miniature image of what-translated into the language of the fire-beings—rings out as: “Receive in love the Will-Power of the Gods”. This saying, “Receive in love the Will-Power of the Gods”, this is what is active in the highest substance of the world. And when man is experiencing his development in the life between death and a new birth, this it is which transforms what he brought with him through the gate of death into what will later become the human organs of the nerves and senses. So we have:
Thus you see that what lies beyond the threshold is akin to our own nature, you see how it leads us into the creative divine forces, into what lives and works in all forms of existence. And when one calls to mind what an earlier epoch divined, and is expressed in the words:
—one is impelled to say that all this must become actuality in the further course of the development of mankind. We cramp all knowledge into words if we have no insight into the germinating forces which build up the human being in the most varied ways. We can therefore say that the system of movement, the metabolic system, the rhythmic system, the system of nerves and senses merge into a unity in that they resound in harmony. For there sounds upwards from below: “Strive to awaken”; “Think in the Spirit”—and from above downwards, mingling with the upward-striving words, “Live creatively breathing existence”; “Receive in love the Will-Power of the Gods”. This “Receive in love the Will-Power of the Gods” is the calm creative element in the head. Then what strives from below upwards in “Think in the Spirit”, from above downwards in “Live creatively breathing existence”, in their combined activity is what so works and weaves that it creates an image of the way in which human breathing passes over in a rhythmical way into the activity of the blood. And what implants into us the instruments of the senses, this is what streams from above downwards in “Receive in love the Will-Power of the Gods”. But what works in our walking, in our standing, in our moving of the arms and hands, everything in fact which brings man into the manifestation of his element of will, this sounds forth in “Strive to awaken”. Thus you see how man is a symphony of that world-word which can be interpreted on its lowest level in the way I have presented it to you. Then this world-word ascends to the higher hierarchies, whose task it is to unfold other aspects of this world-word in order that the cosmos may arise and develop. But that which has, as it were, been uttered as a call into the world by these elemental beings is the final reverberation of that creative, upbuilding, form-giving world-word which lies at the base of all activity and all existence.
Chorus of gnomes: Strive to awaken!
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| 235. Karmic Relationships I: Lecture IV
24 Feb 1924, Dornach Translated by George Adams, Mabel Cotterell, Charles Davy, Dorothy S. Osmond Rudolf Steiner |
|---|
| The union of the soul-spiritual man as Ego, astral body, and ether-body, with the physical human embryo, can only take place inasmuch as the ether-body of the mother-organism gradually withdraws itself from the physical embryo. |
| Especially with respect to your life of action, you have the impression that it is receding from you. Between death and a new birth you lose the Ego-feeling—the sense of “I” which was yours when in the body on earth. Indeed, you have lost it long ago. |
| You come to life in the mirroring of your deeds, in the souls with whom you were during your earthly life. On earth, your “I,” your Ego, was in the body—as it were, a point. Between death and a new birth, it is mirrored to you from the surrounding circumference. |
| 235. Karmic Relationships I: Lecture IV
24 Feb 1924, Dornach Translated by George Adams, Mabel Cotterell, Charles Davy, Dorothy S. Osmond Rudolf Steiner |
|---|
Today I wish to bring before you certain broader aspects concerning the development of karma, for we shall presently enter more and more into those matters which can only be illustrated—shall we say—by particular assumptions. To gain a true insight into the progress of karma we must be able to imagine how man gathers his whole organisation together when he descends out of the spiritual world into the physical. You will understand that in the language of today there are no suitable forms of expression for these events which are practically unknown to our present civilisation. Therefore the terms we employ cannot but be inexact. When we descend out of the spiritual into the physical world, for a new life on earth, we have our physical body prepared for us, to begin with, by the stream of inheritance. This physical body is none the less connected in a certain sense, as we shall see, with the experiences we undergo between death and a new birth. Today, however, it will suffice us to bear in mind that the physical body is given to us from the earthly side, whereas those members which we may describe as the higher members of the human being—the ether-body, astral body and Ego—come down out of the spiritual world. Take first the ether-body. Man draws it together from the whole universal ether, before he unites himself with the physical body which is given to him by heredity. The union of the soul-spiritual man as Ego, astral body, and ether-body, with the physical human embryo, can only take place inasmuch as the ether-body of the mother-organism gradually withdraws itself from the physical embryo. Man therefore unites himself with the physical germ after having drawn together his ether-body from the universal ether. The more precise description of these events will occupy us at a later stage. For the moment we are mainly interested in the general question, whence come the several members which the human being has in earthly life between birth and death? The physical organism comes, as we have seen, from the stream of inheritance, and the ether-organism from the universal ether from which it is first drawn together. As to the astral organism, we may truly say that the human being remains in all respects unconscious of it, or only subconsciously aware of it, during his earthly life. This astral body contains all the results of his life between death and a new birth. For between death and a new birth—according to what he has become through his preceding lives on earth, man enters into manifold relations with other human souls who are in the life between death and a new birth, and also with the spiritual Beings of a higher cosmic order who do not descend to earth in a human body, but have their being in the spiritual world. All that a man brings over from his former lives on earth—precisely according to how he was and what he did—meets with the sympathy or antipathy of the beings whom he learns to know during his passage through the world between death and a new birth. Not only is it of great significance for karma, what sympathies and antipathies he meets among the higher Beings according to the things he did in his preceding earthly life. Not only so; it is also of deep significance that he now comes into relation to those human souls to whom he was related on the earth, and there takes place a wonderful “reflection” as between his being and the being of the souls to whom on earth he was related. Let us assume he had a good relation to a soul whom he now meets again between death and a new birth. All that the good relationship implies, was living in him during his former life, or lives on earth; and this good relationship will now be mirrored in the other soul when he encounters him between death and a new birth. Yes, it is really so. As he goes through the life between death and a new birth, man sees himself reflected everywhere in the souls with whom he is now living, because in effect he was living with them on the earth. If he did good to another human being, something is mirrored to him from the other's soul. If he did evil, something is mirrored likewise ... And he now has the feeling—if I may use the word “feeling” with the reservations I made at the beginning—he has the feeling: “This human soul, you helped. All you experienced in helping him, all that you felt for this soul, the feelings that led you on to act thus helpfully towards him, your own inner experiences during the deed that helped him, are coming back to you now from his soul.” Yes, they are actually mirrored to you from the other's soul. Or again, you did harm to a human soul. That which was living in you while you did him harm, is mirrored back. And so you have your former earthly lives (and notably your last life) before you as though in a far and wide-spread reflector, mirrored by the souls with whom you were together. Especially with respect to your life of action, you have the impression that it is receding from you. Between death and a new birth you lose the Ego-feeling—the sense of “I” which was yours when in the body on earth. Indeed, you have lost it long ago. But you now get the feeling of “I” from this far-spread reflection. You come to life in the mirroring of your deeds, in the souls with whom you were during your earthly life. On earth, your “I,” your Ego, was in the body—as it were, a point. Between death and a new birth, it is mirrored to you from the surrounding circumference. This life is an intimate being-together with the other human souls—according to the relations you have entered into with them. And this is a reality in the spiritual world. When we go through a room hung with many mirrors, we see ourselves reflected in each one. But—in ordinary human parlance—we know that the reflections are “not there.” They do not remain when we go away; we are reflected no longer. But that which is reflected here in human souls remains; stays in existence. And there comes a time in the last third of the life between death and a new birth when we form our astral body out of these mirrored pictures. We draw all this into our astral body. In deed and truth, when we descend from the spiritual world into the physical, we carry in our astral body what we have re-absorbed into ourselves, according to the way our actions of the former life on earth were mirrored in other souls between death and a new birth. This gives us the impulses which impel us towards or away from the human souls with whom we are born again in the physical body. In this way the impulse to karma in a new earthly life is formed between death and a new birth—though I shall have to describe it more in detail in the near future; for we must take the Ego also into account. Now we can trace how an impulse from one life works on into other lives. Take, for example, the impulse of love. We can do our deeds, in relation to other men, out of the impulse which we call love. It makes a great difference whether we do them out of a mere sense of duty, convention, respectability and so on, or whether we do them out of a greater or lesser degree of love. Assume that in one earthly life a man is able to perform actions sustained by love, warmed through and through by love. It remains as a real force in his soul. What he takes with him as an outcome of his deeds, what is now mirrored in the other souls, comes back to him as a reflected image. And as he forms from this his astral body, with which he descends on to the earth, the love of the former earthly life, the love which he poured out and which was now returned to him from other souls, is changed to joy and gladness. Such is the metamorphosis—if so we may describe it. A man does something for his fellow-men, something sustained by love. Love pouring out from him accompanies the actions which help his fellow-men. In the passage through life between death and a new birth, this outpouring love of the one life on earth is transmuted, metamorphosed, into joy that streams in towards him. If you experience joy through a human being in one earthly life, you may be sure it is the outcome of the love you unfolded towards him in a former life. This joy flows back again into your soul during your life on earth. You know the inner warmth which comes with joy, you know what joy can mean to one in life—especially that joy which comes from other human beings. It warms life and sustains it—as it were, gives it wings. It is the karmic result of love that has been expended. But in our joy we again experience a relation to the human being who gives us joy. Thus, in our former life on earth, we had something within us that made the love flow out from us. In our succeeding life, already we have the outcome of it, the warmth of joy, which we experience inwardly once more. And this again flows out from us. A man who can experience joy in life, is again something for his fellow-men—something that warms them. He who has cause to go through life without joy is different to his fellow-men from one to whom it is granted to go through life with joyfulness. Then, in the life between death and a new birth once more, what we thus experienced in joy between birth and death is reflected again in the many souls with whom we were on earth and with whom we are again in yonder life. And the manifold reflected image which thus comes back to us from the souls of those we knew on earth, works back again once more. We carry it into our astral body when we come down again into the next life on earth—that is the third in succession. Once more it is instilled, imprinted into our astral body. What is it in its outcome now? Now it becomes the underlying basis, the impulse for a quick and ready understanding of man and the world. It becomes the basis for that attunement of the soul which bears us along inasmuch as we have understanding of the world. If we find interest and take delight in the conduct of other men, if we understand their conduct and find it interesting in a given earthly life, it is a sure indication of the joy in our last incarnation and of the love in our incarnation before that. Men who go through the world with a free mind and an open sense, letting the world flow into them, so that they understand it well—they have attained through love and joy this relation to the world. What we do in our deeds out of love is altogether different from what we do out of a dry and rigid sense of duty. You will remember that I have always emphasised in my books: it is the deeds that spring from love which we must recognise as truly ethical; they are the truly moral deeds. How often have I indicated the great contrast in this regard, as between Kant and Schiller. Kant, both in life and in knowledge, “kantified” everything (“Kante,” in German, means a hard edge or angle.—Note by translator.) In science, through Kant, all became hard and angular; and so it is in human action. “Duty, thou great and sublime name, thou who containest nothing of comfort or ease ... ”—this passage I quoted in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity to the pretended anger (not the sincere, but the pretended, hypocritical anger) of many opponents, while over against it I set what I must establish as my view: “Love, thou who speakest with warmth to the soul ...” Over against the dry and rigid Kantian concept of duty Schiller himself found the words: “Gern dien' ich dem Freunde, doch tue ich es leider mit Neigung, drum wurmt es mich oft, dass ich nicht tugenhaft bin.” (Gladly I serve my friends, yet alas, I do it with pleasure, wherefore it oftentimes gnaws me, I am not virtuous.) For in the Kantian ethic, that is not virtuous which we do out of real inclination, but only that which we do out of the rigid concept of duty. Well, there are human beings who, to begin with, do not attain to love. Because they cannot tell their fellow-man the truth out of love (for if you love a man, you will tell him the truth, and not lies), because they cannot love, they tell the truth out of a sense of duty. Because they cannot love, out of a sense of duty they refrain from thrashing their fellow-man or from boxing his ears or otherwise offending him, the moment he does a thing they do not like. There is indeed a difference between acting out of a rigid sense of duty—necessary as it is in social life, necessary for many things—there is all the difference between this and the deeds of love. Now the deeds that are done out of a rigid concept of duty, or by convention or propriety, do not call forth joy in the next life on earth. They too undergo that mirroring in other souls of which I spoke before; and, having done so, in the next life on earth they call forth what we may thus describe: “You feel that people are more or less indifferent to you.” How many a person carries this through life. He is a matter of indifference to others, and he suffers from it. Rightly he suffers from it, for men are there for one another; man is dependent on not being a matter of indifference to his fellows. What he thus suffers is simply the outcome of a lack of love in a former life on earth, when he behaved as a decent man because of rigid duty hanging over him like a sword of Damocles. I will not say a sword of steel; that would be disquieting, no doubt, for most dutiful people; so let us say, a wooden sword of Damocles. Now then, we are in the second earthly life. That which proceeds as joy from love, in the third life becomes as we have seen, a free and open heart, bringing the world near to us, giving us open-minded insight into all things beautiful and good and true. While as to that which comes to us as the indifference of other men—what we experience in this way in one earthly life, will make us in the next life (that is, in the third) a person who does not know what to do with himself. Such a person, already in school, has no particular use for the things the teachers are doing with him. Then, when he grows a little older, he does not know what to become—mechanic or Privy Councilor, or whatever it may be. He does not know what to do with his life; he drifts through life without direction. In observation of the outer world, he is not exactly dull. Music, for instance—he understands it well enough, but it gives him no pleasure. After all, it is a matter of indifference whether the music is more or less good, or bad. He feels the beauty of a painting or other work of art; but there is always something in his soul that vexes: “What is the good of it anyhow? What's it all for?” Such are the things that emerge in the third earthly life in karmic sequence. Now let us assume, on the other hand, that a man does positive harm to another, out of hatred or antipathy. We can imagine every conceivable degree. A man may harm his fellows out of a positively criminal sense of hatred. Or—to omit the intermediate stages—he may merely be a critic. To be a critic, you must always hate a little—unless you are one who praises; and such critics are few nowadays. It is uninteresting to show recognition of other people's work; it only becomes interesting when you can be witty at their expense. Now there are all manner of intermediate stages. But it is a matter here of all those human deeds which proceed from a cold antipathy—antipathy of which people are often not at all clearly aware—or, at the other extreme, from positive hatred. All that is thus brought about by men against their fellows, or against sub-human creatures—all this finds vent in conditions of soul which in their turn are mirrored in the life between death and a new birth. Then, in the next earthly life, out of the hatred is born what comes to us from the outer world as pain, distress, unhappiness caused from outside—in a word, the opposite of joy. You will reply: we experience so much of suffering and pain; is it all really due to hatred—greater or lesser hatred—in our preceding life? “I cannot possibly imagine,” man will be prone to say, “that I was such a bad lot, that I must experience so much sorrow because I hated so much.” Well, if you want to think open-mindedly of these things, you must be aware how great is the illusion which lulls you to sleep (and to which you therefore readily give yourself up) at this point. You suggest-away from your conscious mind the antipathies you are feeling against others. People go through the world with far more hatred than they think—far more antipathy, at least. It is a fact of life: hatred gives satisfaction to the soul, and for this reason, as a rule, it is not at first experienced in consciousness. It is eclipsed by the satisfaction it gives. But when it returns as pain and suffering that comes to us from outside, it is no longer so; we notice the suffering quickly enough. Well, my dear friends, to picture, if I may, in homely and familiar fashion, the possibilities there are in this respect, think of an afternoon-tea, a real, genuine, gossiping party where half-a-dozen (half-a-dozen is quite enough) aunts or uncles—yes, uncles, too—are sitting together expatiating on their fellows. Think of it. How many antipathies are given vent to, what volumes of antipathy are poured out over other men and women, say in the course of an hour and a half—sometimes it lasts longer. In pouring out the antipathy they do not notice it; but when it comes back in the next earthly life, they notice it soon enough. And it does come back, inexorably. Thus, in effect, a portion (not all, for we shall still learn to know other karmic connections) of what we experience as suffering that comes to us from outside in one earthly life, may very well be due to our own feelings of antipathy in former lives on earth. But with all this, we must never forget that karma—whatsoever karmic stream it may be—must always begin somewhere. If these are a succession of earthly lives: a b c (d) e f g h and this one, (d), is the present life, it does not follow that all pain which comes to us from without, is due to our former life on earth. It may also be an original sorrow, the karma of which will work itself out only in the next life on earth. Therefore I say, a part—even a considerable part—of the suffering that comes to us from outside is a result of the hatred we conceived in former lives. And now, as we go on again into the third life, the outcome of the suffering which came to us (though only of that suffering which came, as it were, out of our own stored-up hatred), the outcome of the pain which was thus spent in our soul is a kind of mental dullness—dullness as compared with quick, open-minded insight into the world. There may be a man who meets the world with a phlegmatic indifference. He does not confront the things of the world, or other men with an open heart. The fact is, very often, that he acquired this obtuseness of spirit by his sufferings in a former life on earth, the cause of which lay in his own karma. For the suffering which subsequently finds expression in this way, in dullness of soul, is sure to have been the result of feelings of hatred, at least in the last earthly life but one. You can be absolutely sure of it: stupidity in any one life is always the outcome of hatred in this or that preceding life. Yet, my dear friends, the true concept of karma must not only be based on this; it is not only to enable us to understand life. No, we must also conceive it as an impulse in life. We must be conscious that there is not only an a b c d, but an e f g h. That is to say, there are the coming earthly lives and what we develop as the content of our soul in this life will have its outcome and effect in the next life. If anyone wants to be extra stupid in his next earthly life but one, he need only hate very much in this life. But the converse is also true: if he wants to have free and open insight in the next earthly life but one, he need only love extra much in this life. The insight into and knowledge of karma only gains real value when it flows into our will for the future, plays its part in our will for the future. And the moment has now come in human evolution when the unconscious cannot go on working as it did when our souls were passing through their former lives on earth. Men are becoming increasingly free and conscious. Since the first third of the 15th century we are in the age when men are becoming ever more free and conscious. And so for those men who are men of the present time, a next earthly life will already contain a dim feeling of preceding lives on earth. A man of today, if it occurs to him that he is not very bright, does not ascribe it to himself, but to his native limitations; following the current theories of materialism, he will generally ascribe it to his physical nature. Not so the men who return as the reincarnation of those of today. They will already possess at least a dim, disquieting feeling: if they are not very bright, somewhere or other there must have been something connected with feelings of antipathy or hatred. And, if we now speak of a Waldorf School educational method, naturally for the present we must take account of the prevailing earthly civilisation. We cannot yet educate frankly towards a consciousness of life in terms of reincarnation, so to speak. For the people of today have not yet a feeling—not even a dim feeling—of their repeated earthly lives. Nevertheless, the beginnings that have been made with the Waldorf School method will go on developing, if they are truly received. They will develop in the coming centuries, in this direction. This principle will be consciously applied in moral education. If a child has little talent, if a child is dull, It is somehow due to former lives in which he developed much hatred. With the help of spiritual science, you will try to find against whom the hatred may have been directed. For the men and women who were hated then, against whom the deeds inspired by hatred were done, must be there again somewhere or other in the child's environment. Education in coming centuries will have to be placed far more definitely into life. When you see what is coming to expression in such a child, in the metamorphosis of unintelligence in this life, you will then have to recognise from what quarters it is mirrored or rather was mirrored in the life between death and new birth. Then you will do something as educator so that this child will develop an especial love towards those for whom he felt specific hatred in former lives on earth. You will soon see the beneficial result of a love thus specifically roused and directed. The child's intelligence, nay, the whole life of his soul, will brighten. It is not the general theories about karma which will help us in education, but this concrete way of looking into life, to see where the karmic connections lie. You will soon notice it; after all, the fact that destiny has brought these children together in one class is not a mere matter of indifference. People will get beyond the hideous carelessness that prevails in these things nowadays, when the “human material”—for so they often call it—which is thrown together in a class, is actually conceived as though it were bundled together by mere chance; not as though destiny had brought these human beings together. People will get beyond this appalling indifference. Then they will gain a new outlook as educators; they will be able to perceive the wonderful karmic threads that are woven between the one child and the other, as a result of their former lives. Then they will bring consciously into the children's development that which can create a balance. For karma is, in a certain sense, inexorable. Out of an iron necessity we may write down the unquestioned sequence: Love—Joy—an open heart. These are necessary connections. Nevertheless, we also stand face to face with a necessity when we see a river run its course; yet rivers have been regulated, their, course has been known to be altered. So likewise it is possible, as it were, to regulate the karmic stream, to work into it, to affect its course. Yes, it is possible. If therefore in childhood you notice there is a tendency to dullness and stupidity and you perceive the connections, if now you guide the child to develop love in its heart, if you discover (which would be possible already today for people with a delicate observation of life), if you discover which are the other children to whom the child is karmically related, and you now bring the child to love them especially, to do deeds of love towards these other children—then you will give, to the antipathy that was, a counter-weight in the love: and in a next earthly life the dullness will have been improved. There are educators, trained, as it were, by their own instinct who often do these things instinctively. Instinctively they will bring dull-witted children to the point where they develop love, thus educating them by degrees into more intelligent and perceptive beings. It is only when we come to these things that our insight into the karmic connections becomes of real service to life. Before we go on to pursue the detailed questions of karma, one other general question will naturally come before our souls. What sort of person is it—generally speaking—whom you may confront so as to know that you are karmically related to one another? I must reply with a word which is sometimes used in a rather off-hand way nowadays: such a person is a “contemporary”; he is with us simultaneously on the earth. Bearing this in mind, you will say to yourself: If you are with certain human beings in a life on earth, then you were with them in a former life (generally speaking, at least; there may of course, be displacements). And you were with them again in a life before it. Now what of those who live fifty years later than you? They again were with other human beings in their former lives on earth. As a general rule, according to this line of thought, the human beings of the B series—shall I call it—will not come together with human beings of the A series.  It is an oppressive thought, but it is true. I shall afterwards speak of other doubts and questions, such as arise, for instance, when people say—as they so often do—“Humanity goes on increasing and increasing on the earth,” and other things of that kind. Today, however, I want to put this thought before you; perhaps it is an oppressive thought, but it is none the less true. It is a fact that the continued life of mankind on earth takes place in rhythms. One shift of human beings—if I may put it so—goes on, as a general rule, from one life to the next; so does another shift, and they are in a certain sense separated from one another. They do not find their way together in the earthly life, but only in the long intervening life between death and a new birth. There, indeed, they find their way together, but not in the earthly life. We come down again and again with a limited circle of people. Precisely from the point of view of reincarnation, to be contemporaries is a thing of inner importance, inner significance. Why is it so? I can assure you, on the basis of spiritual science, this question, which may well occupy one intellectually to begin with, has caused me the greatest imaginable pain. For it is necessary to bring out the truth, the inner nature of the fact. Thus you may ask: Why was I not a contemporary of Goethe's? Not having been a contemporary of Goethe's in this life, generally speaking—according to these truths—you can more or less conclude that you have never lived with him on earth. Goethe belongs to another shift. What lies behind this? You must reverse the question; but to do so, you must have a real feeling, a perception of what the life of men together really is. You must be able to ask yourself a question on which I shall have very much to say in the near future: What is it really to be another man's contemporary? What is it, on the other hand, only to be able to know of him from history, as far as earthly life is concerned? What is it like? We must indeed have a free mind, a sensitive heart, to answer these intimate questions: What is it like—with all the accompanying inner experiences of the soul—when a contemporary man is speaking to you, or doing any actions that come near you? What is it like? And having gained the necessary perception of this, you must then be able to compare it with what it would be like if you encountered a person who is not your contemporary, and probably has never been so in any life on earth, whom you may none the less revere—more, perhaps, than any of your contemporaries. What would it be like if you met him as a contemporary? In a word—forgive the personal note—what would it be like if I were a contemporary of Goethe? If you are not an insensitive, indifferent kind of person ... Needless to say, if you are insensitive and have no feeling for what a contemporary can be, you are scarcely in a position to answer such a question. What would it be like if I, walking down the Schillergasse, let us say, towards the Frauenplan in Weimar, had suddenly encountered “the fat Privy Councilor,” say in the year 1826 or 1827? One knows quite well, one could not have borne it. You can stand your contemporary; you cannot bear a man who, in the nature of the case, cannot be your contemporary. In a sense, he acts like a poison on your inner life. You can only bear him inasmuch as he is not your contemporary, but your predecessor or successor. Of course, if you have no feeling for such things, they remain in the unconscious; but you can well imagine a man who has an intimate feeling for spiritual things ... if he knew that as he went down the Schillergasse towards the Frauenplan in Weimar, he would encounter the “fat Privy Councilor”—Goethe, with the double chin—he would feel himself inwardly impossible. A man who has no feeling for such things—he no doubt would just have taken off his hat! These things are not to be explained out of the earthly life. The reasons why we cannot be contemporary with a man are in fact, not contained within the earthly life. To see them, we must penetrate into the spiritual facts. Therefore, for earthly life, such things appear paradoxical. Nevertheless, they are as I have said. I can assure you, with genuine love I wrote the introduction to Jean Paul's works, published in the Cotta'sche Bibliothek der Weltliteratur. Yet, if I had ever had to sit side by side with Jean Paul at Bayreuth, it would have given me a stomach-ache, without doubt! That does not hinder one's having the highest reverence. And it is so for every human being—only with most people it remains in the sub-conscious, in the astral or in the ether-body; it does not affect the physical. The experience of the soul which affects the physical body must also become conscious. You must be well aware of this, my dear friends. If you want to gain knowledge of the spiritual world, you cannot escape hearing of things which will seem grotesque and paradoxical. The spiritual world is different from the physical. Of course, it is easy enough for anyone to turn to ridicule the statement that if I had been a contemporary of Jean Paul's, it would have given me a stomach-ache to have to sit beside him. That is quite true—it goes without saying for the everyday, banal, Philistine world of earthly life. But the laws of the banal and Philistine world do not determine the spiritual facts. You must accustom yourselves to think in other forms of thought, if you wish to understand the spiritual world; you must be prepared to experience many surprising things. When the everyday consciousness reads about Goethe, it may naturally feel impelled to say: “How I should like to have known him personally, to have shaken him by the hand!” and so on. It is a piece of thoughtlessness; for there are laws according to which we are predestined for a given epoch of the earth. In this epoch we can live. It is just as in our physical body we are predestined for a certain pressure of air; we cannot rise above the earth to a height where the pressure no longer suits us. Nor can a man who is destined for the 20th century live in the time of Goethe. These were the things I wanted to bring forward about karma, to begin with. |