| 270. Esoteric Instructions: Fourth Lesson
07 Mar 1924, Dornach Translated by John Riedel |
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| Then we may recollect that lying within us, made by means of the earth, is all that draws us down and under, beneath the human, that darkens our ego, that drives us into sub-humanity. However, we must bring this into awareness, this being united so with the earth, in spite of all the beauty and livability spread over the face of the earth, this being pulled down and under as human beings, sinking in this way into sub-humanity. |
| 2. Here das Ich may be translated as the ego, which although proper in English, carries some psychological overlay. What is here referred to is that part of one’s essential nature that produces the phrase I am. |
| 270. Esoteric Instructions: Fourth Lesson
07 Mar 1924, Dornach Translated by John Riedel |
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My dear friends! We have endeavored in the previous lessons to become acquainted with the Guardian of the Threshold. And this acquaintanceship with the Guardian of the Threshold must become more and more solid, so solid in fact, that the intended solemnity of this acquaintanceship with the Guardian of the Threshold, in its entirety, in reality can stand before our souls at all times. For in this way we will have entered an area that is substantially different from other areas of spiritual life, areas usually visited in today’s civilization in contemplating the nature of what is called the spiritual world, and in forming an acquaintanceship with it. A meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold is most certainly the first thing that a person comes upon, if in a truly earnest sense a person’s relationship with the spiritual world becomes possible. A relationship with the spiritual world cannot come into being without this appreciation for meeting the Guardian of the Threshold. For only on the other side of the Threshold is the spiritual world. As one receives messages from the spiritual world, then these messages are so to be taken up, merely as messages, as to establish for us a relationship to the spiritual world. I would like to present to you, initially, of all that should be surveyed by our souls today, an anecdote, my dear friends, an anecdote taken from ancient esoteric traditions. Once upon a time a student was taken into the mysteries. He fulfilled the necessary prerequisites. He had achieved a certain condition of worthiness, more than others who had never engaged their hearts and minds in such a manner, so that in a short time he was drawn into the sort of state that most people would possibly see as clairvoyant, but actually, he had just stepped into relationship with the spiritual world. And as he stepped into such a relationship, moreover into the only proper sort of relationship in which one intuitively receives impartations from the spiritual world, the master spoke to him: Behold, when I speak to you in purity, then the words that I speak to you are no longer merely human words; the words I use to speak are only clothed in the words of men. The words I use to speak to you are the thoughts of gods, and these thoughts of gods will at first be openly spoken to you through human words. You must likewise be clear that I call upon all that is in your soul. You must bring forth to the words that I say to you in the service of the gods, all your thinking, all your feeling, and all your willing. You must bring forth to what I speak to you all the enthusiasm of your soul, all the inner warmth, all the inner fire. You must bring this forth in vigilant awareness, a mindfulness as intense as you are able to deploy in your inner life of soul. But there is another force of soul, which I am not calling to your attention initially, most certainly not appealing to, namely your memory, your ability to recollect. And I would be most happy if you do not just gather into your memory, all that I say to you. I would be most happy, if tomorrow you have simply forgotten what I am to say to you. For what you usually call your memory, what other people call your memory, is initially only appropriate for matters of the earth, is not appropriate for matters of the gods. And when you appear before me again tomorrow, and when I once again speak to you, appealing to your thinking, feeling, and willing, to all of your enthusiasm, to all your warmth, to all your inner fire, to all your vigilant mindfulness of soul, then all should be new in confronting these forces of your soul, all you should accept. It should all be new, fresh, full of life, and so likewise for the next day, and the next day afterward. On every day it should be new and fresh and full of life. I speak, I appeal not to your memory. I appeal not to your ability to recollect. At the same time, I am not saying that you should not retain some of what has been spoken of today. You should just not entrust it solely to your memory. You should be on watch as to what your memory does with it. But what should lead you to me tomorrow with a new state of mind, that should be your direct sensing of it, that should be your innermost soul-impression. You should preserve what is being spoken to you today. Please take note that memory, the ability to recollect, is there for the sake of learning. But what is said to you of esoteric matters should not be there merely for the sake of learning, but rather, it should be there throughout life, and should in every hour that you chance upon it be able to be newly alive, without your needing the appropriate conceptions and visualizations of your memory to come to your aid. It is in fact so. We should approach whatever sort of esoteric truth we chance upon in such a way that the thought never comes to us, that it is already known by us. For the ways of the esoteric do not pertain to knowledge, but to direct experience. And inwardly, where memory also abides, in deep layers of our soul-life, there the esoteric should also be enfolded by us and held in trust. My dear friends, when you mull this over, your contemplation of this will mean a great deal for achieving a perception of genuine esoteric life in times to come. And so what must be taken quite in earnest, at the very moment that we come face-to-face with the esoteric, our simple understanding of the esoteric calls forth in us quite another relationship to thinking, to feeling, to willing, than we are used to in everyday awareness. For in everyday awareness a person's thinking, feeling, and willing are bundled together. We can take a rather trivial example, and be overwhelmed by citing such a trivial example, at just how narrowly our thinking, feeling, and willing are bundled in ordinary awareness. Just think, you may be acquainted with someone, no one in particular, and your relationship with this person may be either somewhat close, or somewhat distant. Whatever you have mutually experienced you have tucked away in your memory and infused with your feelings. If and when you happen to come upon this person, a certain impetus arises in you in regard to your manner, in regard to your whole demeanor towards the person. Your thoughts and feelings in regard to this person continue to live in you. One day someone might come along who either reminds you about, or says something about this person, so that thoughts about the person burst forth from within you. At the same time the selfsame feelings you have been holding for this person, either for or against, also flash up from within. If you regarded him fondly, your fondness flashes up, if in distaste, your distaste flashes up. If you had embarked with him on some intended course of action, this also flashes up, that you had embarked on some sort of intentional activity with him. You simply cannot separate all that you carry in your feelings and force of will in regard to this person, from your thoughts about the person. All of this, which in a manner lies wholly dormant in one's organization of soul, can in no way be held to be esoteric truth in the true sense. Just that can be held to be esoteric truth, in its true sense, which can be present in the moment. If someone is acquainted with a person, then he has a certain predisposition toward this person. To him certain things about this person may be extraordinarily antipathetic. But he has the possibility of remembering this person, of visualizing this person, without the antipathies that he carries for this person in his soul, which he has the possibility of somehow snuffing out. He can simply think about him. My dear friends, you may imagine that it is really somewhat difficult, shall we say, to simply think about your enemy without allowing unfriendly feelings to emerge. But in properly musing about such things poetically, then you can cultivate this in yourself. For example, you can present the question of whether one can be really clear in understanding people who are spoken about as having abhorrent natures, as sometimes portrayed by Shakespeare, who has portrayed such people moderately clearly in imagination. If such people were introduced to me in the course of my life, I would have quite a bit of antipathy toward them. But as a poet I can also, in all likelihood, even though they are so obviously villains, place such people in my mind's eye objectively. I can simply think about them. It is sometimes possible to do this as a poet, for one certainly does not always want to see a Shakespearean villain laid flat on his back, thrown down, and thoroughly thrashed. As a poet it is possible for thoughts to lose their connection to feelings. You must of course do this as a proper esoteric, and also have the ability to bring it forward into life. At the moment something esoteric is presented, in order for it to be drawn into the soul in the right way, it must be possible to detach thoughts as such from their connection to feelings. For it is not lost by itself. When we are thinking about esoteric material, or I might say, when it is so starkly drawn into thoughts, initially it should lie very far removed from any personal feelings, for it simply cannot be comprehended unless it is comprehended in pure thoughts. Therefore, if we are to hearken to the esoteric, and not as a sack of straw allow it all to pass complacently before us, then we must disassociate from that which the thought gives to us, which the feeling, the impulse of will develops in us. Feelings subsequently ought to be developed, for the esoteric should not remain a cold icy field that simply pours itself out and into our minds. The esoteric should immerse us in most brilliant enthusiasm. But such enthusiasm, such wealth of feeling, should really come forth from a source far removed, and should not come forth from thoughts. You see, about this we must be quite clear, if from here on our wealth of feelings are to achieve inner warmth in the right manner. When esoteric matters have been spoken outwardly, they have been spoken outwardly out of the sphere of the gods, and we bring forth our feelings not now as thoughts, but rather as realities. It was concerning this, in the very first lesson I delivered to this first class, concerning this I spoke in the first lesson, that the school itself speaks, namely the real spirit that runs through the school, and that it is necessary for us to perceive that the school has not grown out of just any particular personal viewpoint, but rather that it has been willed and has been initiated by the spiritual world. When we regard the school in this way, then will the school as an existence aware of itself give us the enthusiasm that we need. And then I would like you to understand still something more. Of course, my dear friends, in conventional life and in conventional knowledge we speak to one-another in words. In doing this we conceptualize the words, and thoughts come to us, thoughts meant to be communicated, for these thoughts are in the words. An esoteric must also utilize words, for he must of course speak. But he needs the words only in order to make apparent just how the spirit streams around and about in his reality and may flow into the hearts of men. So, in an esoteric school it is essential to gradually develop a sense of hearing behind the words. And when this sense has been developed, one may align with the esoteric, in what in all times, in all esoteric streams, has been known with such reverence, namely a familiarity with silence, a silence filled with holiness. And this holiness-filled silence is an essential and integral component of something else, without which the esoteric cannot be conveyed to a person. It is a key component of what we most definitely need in esotericism. It is a key component of a person's most inner humility. And without a person's innermost humility the esoteric cannot initially be approached. And why not? Well, if we are admonished to hear behind the words, then this applies to the most inwardly essential part of our souls. Not to our memories, it applies rather to the most inwardly essential part of our souls. And this brings into question our ability, it brings into consideration just how capable we are of hearing behind the words. And it would be good for us, for our own souls, to hear as much as possible. Moreover, it would be good to postpone thinking about it with too much confidence, about what has just begun to dawn within our souls, as if it were something that we ourselves could simply bring into the world as something definitely valid. We will need a long time, especially as we begin to hear behind the words, we will need a long time to personally come to terms with it. And we should develop this demeanor, that the esoteric must first live itself out in wordless weaving of the soul, before it can be considered to be inwardly mature. And so it is, with the esoteric we must indeed move away from what in normal life lies in the sense of the words, to what lies in the deeper constitution of soul. And that is just what was bestowed upon us here in the last Class lesson, in the mantric verses I laid out for you, my dear friends. A chant of rhythmic meters appeared, appearing in the first verse in trochaic rhythm, in the second verse in iambic rhythm, and in the third verse in spondaic rhythm. Only when we inwardly feel the flow of trochees in rhythm, descending from hill to vale, may we feel properly attuned therein to what our thoughts are drawn from. When we feel with the soul this valley-bound descent from the heavens to the earth, then we may feel a proportionate sense of what lies within our living thinking weaving. So the trochaic verse began with a syllable that was stressed, and proceeded to an unstressed syllable, and thereby should have produced in us a clarion call, a call to the blood to circulate, to circulate filled with soul, to place itself within the abode of the spirit. We don't simply stay there, with such a mantra beginning to ̄ within our souls, and to some extent also within our thoughts, but rather we bring ourselves into motion with just what with lively spirit moves in the world, by means of which a person's thoughts live and weave in a person's soul. In the first verse it came forth as a calling out to one's weaving thoughts.
Yes, the gods have gathered us into their midst from afar, in that they have given us thoughts. And we stride, insofar as we allow these thoughts to move with life in our souls, we stride from the summit, where the gods have laid out the thoughts for us, which they have bequeathed on us, we stride from this summit down into the valley, where with these thoughts we encompass and comprehend earthly things. It's quite different with feelings. There we have the correct inward bearing when we feel ourselves remaining down in the valley, and by means of our feelings we mount up with springing step, as if on a ladder, up to the gods. Feelings bring us conversely into waves of motion from below upward. So the mantric verse is constructed iambically. It begins with the unstressed syllable and rises to the strongly stressed syllable. And we should sense this.
It is different again when we come to willing. If we would come to willing, then we must become aware of how our human nature is actually somewhat split apart. Then we must approach the gods in sensing, and must through strength in sensing be halfway able to bear the impulse of willing. That is bestowed solely when we meditate in spondees, with a stressed syllable following the beginning stressed syllable.
As I already said the last time, what is needed here is not merely to grasp the meaning of the words, but also to grasp what lies in the inner movement of the words. We must wrench our souls into motion. In this way we no longer remain merely within ourselves, but we expand outward into the world. Remaining with words, remaining attached merely to the meaning of words, leaves us within ourselves. The esoteric indeed has much to say about this, about our need to grow out into the world, out into togetherness with the world, ever more and more to come out of ourselves. For only so, by ever more and more coming out of ourselves, will we be able to endure the discontinuity of thinking, feeling, and willing, which are initially held together in awareness in daily life by the embodiment of our I. Without, they must be held together by the gods. For this, however, we must enter into the reality of the gods. For this we must grow out into togetherness with the world. For this we must really learn to develop an inner demeanor, by means of which we may learn to say honorably and quite in earnest, "Here is my hand; I regard it so. There is the tree; I regard it so. I regard my hand so; there you are. I regard the tree so; there you are. I regard the clouds so; there you are. I regard the rainbow so; there you are. I regard the thunder so; there you are. I regard the bolt of lightning so; there you are. I am at one with the world.” Abstractly, disingenuously, it is easy to pass right by this. Concretely, with genuine purity and honor, a person would have to inwardly skip over quite a lot to pass it by. Only when one does not shy away from this, but has a steadfast inner state of mind, does one have the inner demeanor that is needed. For the esoteric, my dear friends, the question must be ever prominent, "I regard my hand; it belongs to me.” Where would I be in this life on earth, begun so many decades ago, without having had my hand? It is an essential part of all that has occurred, of all that I have become. But the tree, the tree as it stands before us today, was formed in all its details out of the whole organism of the earth, during ancient moon-existence. It was formed specifically out of what was in the entire earth organism at that time, and it could not be as it is, the tree in all its detail, except in having been formed in this way. In the same way, moreover, the composition of my thinking also originated out of the whole being of the ancient moon-existence. Were the tree not to have come into being, today I would not be able to think. It is not only the hand that is painfully necessary for my present-day earth existence. The tree is painfully necessary in importance for my having become a thinking being. And so, in what way is the hand worth more than the tree? Why should I consider the hand to be dearer to me than the tree? I come to a reckoning, that everything that I call the external world is much, much more related to my inner nature, than what I can regard as my delightful inner nature in this incarnation. That, however, to be felt in all its depths and honesty, must be learned. And today we will place before ourselves three verses, mantric verses, through which this feeling of unity with all so-called external existence may gradually be stamped upon the soul. How do we stand at first in relation to external existence? We look down upon the earth. We feel dependent upon this earth; it gives us just the things that we need in external life. We look around into the distance. There comes the sun, arising in the morning. There goes the sun, setting in the evening. The light shines steadily down upon the earth. It appears in the distance, and it sets in the distance. We look overhead. At night the star-filled heavens mysteriously speak to us. In this three-part gazing, we have defined our relationship with the world. I look down, I look around, and I look overhead. But doing it with the most intense awareness possible, is just how we should do it, as delineated in the following mantric verse.
[The verse was now written on the blackboard.]
Well, there it is, my dear friends, these are the things that fetter and bind us on the earth, if we do not bring them together as human beings in full awareness. We look down on the earth, knowing that contained therein are crystals, each tiny one of which is held in earth-embrace, knowing, that earth exerts the power of gravity, that it pulls each tiny particle, causing it to fall to earth, knowing that it pulls on each of us as well. We tend not to think about all of this. We do not think about the appetites, instincts, ambitions, and passions that are within us, of all that is living in us, that we are in the midst of in our lowly human nature, in the midst of all that belongs to the earth. When we direct our gaze down and downward, and say, just what is it that the earth is doing in us? Then we may recollect that lying within us, made by means of the earth, is all that draws us down and under, beneath the human, that darkens our ego, that drives us into sub-humanity. However, we must bring this into awareness, this being united so with the earth, in spite of all the beauty and livability spread over the face of the earth, this being pulled down and under as human beings, sinking in this way into sub-humanity. In honorably owning up to this we are developing ourselves into true human beings. But then, we may become conditioned, not merely to turning our gaze down in developing our human potential, but rather more to turning our gaze outward, all the while holding ourselves up high, turning our gaze around and about, upon all that the earth forcefully encompasses, upon all that our humanity encircles and gathers unto itself. Something begins, already on the physical level, something that in a certain measure lifts us up on top of the downward-drawing powers of the depths of earth. The forces of the depths of earth can cause a man to become evil, but not so easily the air that we breathe, which also belongs to the circle of earth, and still less easily the light, left in the circle of the earth by the sun. We may look upon the air that we breathe and upon visible light as having little spiritual significance, but the very gods live in what we breathe and in the light. And we ourselves must be aware of this, that especially in light the might of gods is made to rule, and that something else rules beside all that runs through us as forces from the depths of earth. All of which brings us into alignment with the second mantric verse. [The second verse was now written on the blackboard.]
We may not always be aware that we can love the substance of what radiates down upon the earth as light, be it sunlight, or starlight. We may not always be aware of this, although when we become aware of it, that we can love the sunlight, that we can love it warmly as a friend, then we may also learn that gods circle the earth in this raiment, in these robes of light. Then sunshine ceases to appear simply as earth's illumination, but rather, sunshine becomes the garb of gods, of gods wandering the earth arrayed in light. And then something comes into being for us, arising out of this experiencing of the light, namely, wisdom arises. For the gods bring their wisdom into our hearts, deep into our souls. And then, in having differentiated in feelings, we actually have begun to ascend, to soar. Initially we developed feelings corresponding to the forces of the depths of earth. That part of our humanity belonging to the forces of the depths of earth we rightfully spurned. We lifted ourselves up into the higher part of our humanity, into the part adherent to the essence of the gods spread out over the earth and arrayed in light, into the part we do not allow to remain within the circle of earth, but rather, while still wandering on the earth, into that part with which we enter into the circle of the gods of light, so that later, when we go through the portal of death, we may continue to wander in the circle of the gods. For the gods do not wish us to remain alone upon the earth; they wish to draw us into their circle. They wish us to become beings living under their care. The forces of the depths of earth, however, wish to snatch us away from the force of the gods. We were acquainted with this in an earlier verse, which will now be repeated.
And of course, we must feel it, we must put ourselves out into the world, we must feel and identify ourselves as being one with the world. But we have still not gathered up a conscious mindfulness of our full humanity, if we are not able to also look up into the heights. We must look into the depths and we must look into the surrounding expanse, but we must also look up into the heights. And in what otherwise reigns in our everyday consciousness as a mixture of the depths, the expanses, and the heights, in this we must differentiate between a conscious mindfulness of the depths, a conscious mindfulness of the expanses, and a conscious mindfulness of the heights. [The start of the third verse was now written on the blackboard.]
We can feel this, if and when we are fully aware when communing with the heights. But just think for a moment, my dear friends, as if you were standing outdoors in a field, looking up at the star-bedecked sky in the heavenly heights. It is most noticeable then, if we choose this happenstance, but of course it can also occur in full sunshine. But it is most noticeable when we picture ourselves standing outdoors in a field, looking up at the star-bedecked sky. We feel at one with the world. We feel, there you are. But the single spot we are standing on, on the earth, held in such high respect, normally regarding it as a part of ourselves, why, this simply melts away when we look into the far-off distance splayed out over the whole vault of the heavens above. Done properly, our limited sense of self ceases, and we become selfless as we expand outward without end into the far-off distances of the heights.
[More of the third stanza was written down.]
Whoever has really felt the sunlight streaming radiantly over the earth as being the illuminated raiment of gods, drawn in and out of the human soul with every breath of air, and whoever then looks out and beyond, feeling selfless in selfhood in heaven's heights, such a person soon comes upon, and furthers the development in his awareness, of what arrives within the following lines, and is contained within the following lines.
[The third stanza was completed on the board.]
The heights have spoken. And so, as we may grow together in love with the gods, radiant over the earth in illuminated garb, we may likewise grow together with the words intoned from the heights, if we develop an appreciation for it, aspiring to align with the powers of thought from on high. However, my dear friends, you may only become inwardly filled through and through with a proper appreciation of your conscious awareness extending out, of consciously becoming aware of the depths, the breadths, and the heights, when with proper depth and clarity of soul, you are able to compare the contradistinctions between the three verses [The first, second, and third stanzas were indicated.]. You arrive before the Guardian of the Threshold. From this experience your thinking, your fully alive conceptualization, should hold sway in your soul. The Guardian of the Threshold shows you the third beast, of which we have spoken of in previous lessons. It resounds within you; just what characterizes the third beast resounds within.
This is the one that draws us down and under. We wrest ourselves away from this one, by means of saying to ourselves with fortified soul:
It makes little difference, I may say, in one's perspective, whether you gaze upon the beast, or whether you gaze upon yourself doing the wrestling. Think a moment, how similar people cling to one another, both characterized by being drawn down and under, the one openly displaying the beast, the other becoming its attentive servant. But now let us turn to the second beast, and take up just what wrests us away from the second beast. Let us place both mantric verses side by side. The sentiment, the spirit, is altogether different. On the one hand the ghastly display of the second beast, on the other hand the appeal to the gods, coming to us arrayed in light. Listen and hear, next to one another, how these two mantric verses are so very different in their whole style.
As we characterize the third beast first, we should place the corresponding mantric verse next to the third beast’s characterization. At first, we just try to avoid losing our way, given the challenge of remaining aware of just where the third beast is leading us. As we turn our awareness to the second beast and to the associated mantric verse [Feel how from world expanse…] however, the verse itself has already done it, and carried us off and away from the beast, the one we characterize in its horrid manner of mockery. And as we progress to the first, we will see how the character of the first beast contains willfulness in impeding us in human life in our pure and holy overview of the heights of heaven. This first beast is characterized by this style; it is willful in trying to throw us deeply into disarray within, as we turn our attention to the mantric verse that is proclaimed to us in heaven's heights.
And so, just as we would be scorched by what has been said in this verse and would rise into the flame, just then the other verse appears, becoming a comfort and giving grace concerning what the first beast is. Through our own brave strength of soul, thus appears the other verse concerning him.
You see, as we have already seen in the last lesson, that we are taking on an inner rhythm. If we want to come into the midst of the weaving of the high illuminated being of the world with our own being, then we have to make known to ourselves now, that the things which up to now have approached us in the esoteric have a certain inner coherence, and how we must ever and ever again re-engage and re-form a relationship not merely with the sense of the words, for they try to remain earthly, but rather we must re-engage in a relationship with the demeanor of the words. And this demeanor will confront us in the entirety, but will also confront us in the individual details. So, we take up the first verse, "Feel how the depths of earth," in which we are redirected to the depths of earth. And the other verse directs us to "The third beast's glazed eye.” They stand next to one another. In the second verse, "Feel how from world’s expanse," we feel we have come upon the gods garbed in light. Here we are lifted up, if we can really feel it, over whatever in the world mocks matters of the gods. "The second beast, the mocking face," will in truth be effaced through the bright sunshine, if we will only embrace the bright sunshine in spirit. And most certainly, the third verse, beginning with "The first beast, the bony mind," should arrest our attention. We will only warm ourselves if and when we emerge from our immobility through an overview of the heights of heaven. And so we may therefore say:
And so, we may gradually feel our way into spiritual living, and spiritual living will ever more and more become second nature to us. [IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW] [IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]
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| 56. The So-Called Dangers of Initiation
12 Dec 1907, Berlin |
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| First, it concerns penetrating deeper and deeper into the truth and knowledge of occult science, and not taking such ideals as, for example: you shall overcome your ego.—With such a phrase nothing at all is done. Nothing is done if, for example, a stove stands here and I say to it: you should be a good stove; you must make the room warm. |
| Because it detracts the interest in many respects from the small point, which one calls the ego. The theosophical or spiritual-scientific truth is so great, so mighty, and significant, and claims us so strongly that we feel very uninteresting as a single personality. |
| 56. The So-Called Dangers of Initiation
12 Dec 1907, Berlin |
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It is not the only reproach against occult science that it is dreamy and fantastic, but also many people believe that dangers are connected with it. Downright bizarre views exist in certain circles about these so-called dangers of spiritual science. At first one points in general to such dangers even without trying to qualify the supposed dangers or to say in what they consist. For where one speaks so much of these dangers sometimes, a profound unawareness prevails what the occult science entails. One has only the uncertain idea that it entails something dangerous. One also does not dwell on this on which one should absolutely dwell: whether occult science itself is the dangerous or only the deeper penetration in it while one familiarises with the methods, the exercises that lead the human being into the invisible and indiscernible spiritual world surrounding him. However, he who generally wants to speak of dangers in this field must differentiate this. Often it does not at all concern a tip to certain dangers only, but one says: oh, this occult science or this theosophy makes the human beings unworldly, it removes them from that what they would have to deal with, actually, in life in which they should be interested.—Some circles regard it as tremendously deplorable that this or that member is apparently wrested from it because he/she starts being interested in theosophy or in occult science underlying it. For that reason the often enough pronounced judgement probably originated that theosophy makes the human being impractical, allures him from the immediate duties of life, betrays him into asceticism and unworldliness. Although it has already been mentioned here from the one or the other side, I would like to draw your attention again to the fact that it is the most unfair and at the same time the most impossible reproach against occult science and its working that it makes the human being anyhow unworldly or entices him into asceticism. I have emphasised repeatedly that a spiritual world underlies our world of the senses, our world of the physical life. Therefore, someone must be called unworldly who does not mind the true and real forces of existence and confines himself to the outer world only, on that what the senses say and what they can enjoy. There can be no talk that theosophy urges its supporters to an ascetic life, to privations or to unworldliness. However, it is true that someone who becomes interested in occult science has other sympathies and antipathies than many people have. Nevertheless, in many cases it is not in such a way that those who approach occult science attain this interest only within a spiritual-scientific or theosophical circle. People bring these emotions with them as a rule; the interests carry them into the theosophical circles, and theosophy wants to offer nothing but what they demand. Not because they are expelled from the circles which say: they become strange to us, because theosophy takes them away, but these circles themselves alienate them more and more because they are lifeward and have selfish interests. If such a circle complains that this or that member is taken away from it, it should ask itself: has theosophy taken this member from us or have we expelled it by boredom? If one compares the life, as it should be in the theosophical circle with the life of a worldly circle, which says one must not dedicate himself to asceticism, then I answer that the theosophist does not withdraw because he wants to escape from life, but because he wants to get to the true, real life. Those who are interested in spiritual science experience no bigger asceticism, no bigger privation than dedicating themselves to the activities that one calls “life” in many circles. If one calls this “life:” getting up in the morning, reading his newspaper, doing this or that which has a practical use, taking part in this or that banal activity in the evening—if one calls this “life,” indeed, it is “asceticism” for the theosophist, an awful privation, namely if one makes him participate this life. If then in spite of all resisting forces, the interest in theosophy becomes bigger and bigger, it is only an evidence that more and more people want to escape from the “ascetic” life of the usual pleasures and give themselves up to the real life. The human beings would have to realise this if they communed with their hearts once, since the life in spiritual science does not mean wailing and whimpering because of sufferings and privations. Life praxis is a chapter that we have also already discussed in the various talks. Those who are so often vain of their life praxis say, theosophy with its quixotic ideas puts a bug into the ears of the people, and the people who dedicate themselves to such a thing never accomplish a real work in life. However, if they looked only at the world and at the practice on the one hand, at impractical idealism on the other hand, perhaps they would speak different. The German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte said: the idealists know as well as the so-called practical people, maybe better, that ideals are not to be applied immediately in life. However, the fact that certain people cannot realise that all life flows out of the life ideal, from that which is not yet there what should become first shows only that one does not count on them in the plan of the improvement of humanity. Hence, God may give them rain and sunshine, food, and clever thoughts at the right time!—The theosophist may console himself out of an objective consideration of life if one points to the danger of the so-called impractical. There one can cite an example of a clever board of practitioners in a southern German country. When one wanted to build the first railway in Germany, one requested whether it is good if this railway were built. The board said—everybody can convince himself that the document exists—, one should build no railway, because the human beings would suffer serious damage of their nervous systems. However, if people wanted to drive with a railway, and it were built, one would have to erect high wooden walls on both sides, so that those whom it goes past do not get concussions.—This is not long ago! It is not still long ago that a man who was no practical person, but an “impractical teacher” advised to introduce the cheaper postcards (?) instead of the expensive postage. The impractical person was Rowland Hill (1795–1879). There was a postmaster who said, I cannot realise that one has an advantage introducing this way of paying postage (pre-payment by the sender with stamps instead of direct payment by the receiver). If the traffic developed in such a way, the post-office buildings would no longer be sufficient to take up and convey all letters and postal items.—Judgements of this sort appear from circles of those people who are hostile to theosophy. The dangers that are described there resemble those, which the people experience from the railway, after they drive with it now since decades. The future will produce the evidence. As little as the Bavarian Medical Board could prevent the construction of the railway, the postmaster in London could prevent the increase of the post traffic, just as little the necessary expansion of theosophy can be stopped by similar objections in our time. However, many concerns do not oppose the general; one senses something particular. Hence, one may also speak of that once publicly which gives cause, perhaps, for such concerns and such talking of dangers. At first, we must not forget: something that should work that should have significance and power in the world works different on the different human beings. It works in the way as it can influence and impress human beings. Now theosophy is something like a sort of a purifying thunderstorm in our spiritual atmosphere and will be it more and more. What fulfills this spiritual atmosphere? It is fulfilled with all possible confident and sure of victory judgements, which appear the surer of victory, the less deeply they introduce in the being of the things. In particular, it is the materialistic thinking and feeling, the materialistic disposition that regards itself as infallible with immense arrogance as the only true doctrine and douses everything with scorn that wants to point to the spiritual world, as if it only concerns fantasies. True, someone who trains his thinking in that logic necessary to control the areas that are beyond the sensuous world is always in danger that the logic of the materialists could sicken him. However, the superficial judgements that are quite usual ones today and appear with an unequalled certainty and an arrogance of infallibility are sometimes very short-winded. Their flimsiness becomes obvious very soon if that logic faces them which goes with inner thinker's patience from concept to concept as it is necessary if one cannot advance on the bridge of the outer sensuous experiences but wants to have a sure support in himself and inner certainty. Already in this respect, the thinking flowing from occult science for the present must often appear to us as a purifying thunderstorm. It appears for the human masses in such a way and for the single human being. There we cannot help stressing that this is, nevertheless, no risk. There is the risk for the great majority at most that it brings uncertainty into the judgements that are worth to be presented that way. With the single human being, the matter is worse. Something comes into question that works in the innermost soul, a disharmony between feeling and judging. This disharmony is the biggest with those persons who believe to be most certain in any materialistic creed. A materialistic creed namely has the peculiarity that it can satisfy, after all, the reason only, the abstract judgement only. The deeper interests of the soul, all wishes, all feelings, and all sensations are much truer and deeper with all human being than their judgements often are. While everybody sticks with his judgment, with his materialistic concepts and his materialistic disposition to the surface, in the depth of his soul—often quite unconsciously to him—the urging and the longing for something spiritual lives. To someone who observes this more precisely it appears rather clear sometimes if one sees how many disharmonies are in the speeches and remarks of the human beings. There one can realise that they, actually, do not at all feel corresponding to that what they say. To a minor degree that applies to a big percentage of the human beings what a poet expressed absurdly with the words, which he lets one of his figures say: as true a God is in heaven, I am an atheist.—This is the emotional adherence—only radically, absurdly pronounced—to something traditional-conventional and the adherence of the superficial judgement to a radical denial. That appears with few persons in this radical form. However, for someone who can observe more precisely almost every conversation offers examples that the human beings live in their souls in such a way. In which condition can one live this way? One can live in the condition that one remains superficial in his soul life. For nobody who descends into the depth of his soul can tolerate such a disharmony as it often exists today. That becomes apparent to someone who is used to logic in the entire materialistic or—as one calls it more sophisticatedly—monistic literature. Imagine a person who is embedded in the atmosphere of our time and wants to get out it not with inner freedom, not with inner strong urge: he remains embedded; he lives on dully but contently in general. However, it does no longer depend on the things with which many people want to stop, whether the human being can live so dully. Numerous people can no longer live this way. What the popular literature—magazines, books, even newspapers—offers is not at all something for sophisticated heads and deeper minds that answers the big questions of existence, but it only causes new questions. Yes, also the modern science itself, as it appears with it adherence to the facts gives answers only to the superficial mind. For the deep-minded human being, for the sophisticated one this science is something quite different. It is a sum of question marks. Where many people believe that they can be ready if they frame a worldview from the scientific facts, the questions only just start for many people. However, people who believe to be ready notice nothing of it. Thus, you see numerous human beings reaching for a book like Haeckel's World Riddles to get the world riddles solved. When they have read this book, they only start putting the big questions. Because no solutions are in it but questions, which are put there. Then such minds and such heads can be once brought to theosophy, on this or that way. They face theosophy with its strict, in itself logical thinking which has the origin of certainty, like mathematics, in itself, and an immense disharmony between that which they were used up to now from the outside world, and the requirements which are suddenly put to them. They stuck to the surface of the things up to now; they look into abysses now. They have often lost half a life and more. They are anxious whether the rest of life would be still sufficient to pour everything that faces them in the holes of their souls, which the world has cut. On the other hand, however, they come from these or those circles and cannot break away from them; then the most dreadful obstacles originate. The most practical and most certain way would be if they got involved in the spiritual-scientific research, however, thousand threads pull back them. There the disharmonies face them that must appear if the soul longs for deepness compared to the superficial, the exterior. There a peculiar phenomenon appears with some persons that we make clear to ourselves best of all by a comparison. Imagine, in any corner of a room one would not have cleaned for weeks, a lot of dirt is there—you forgive for the comparison. If now in this room no proper lighting exists, those who look into it can believe that everything is clean. However, if one once illuminates it properly, the mess strikes. It depends only on the fact that one illuminates properly. Something similar applies to the soul. It is used to casualness. It is maybe forced to be superficial among superficial ones. Now, however, it comes to the light which lights up this superficiality that allows this superficiality to appear in its entire inferiority. If this soul is feeling, what happens then? If it is accustomed to superficial judgements, the light that shines on it has to distract it above all. Hence, we see that numerous souls are maybe somewhat distracted by the contact with the spiritual-scientific truth. Does occult science bear the blame for it? Indeed, he who thinks here logically does not put the blame on occult science that is the light, but on the fact that the soul has so much addicted itself to the superficiality of judgement. The matter still goes further. We see human beings who are not up to our complex civilisation suffering from our complex civilisation. Why? They do no longer find their way with their judgement! Theosophy or occult science is the means to find the way in our civilisation, and it can work recovering for someone whom our civilisation has sickened. However, cannot anything else still happen? We can also realise this using a comparison. A dish can be externally healthy; however, it can bring an upset stomach. Even if the dish is rather healthy for the healthy, the upset stomach cannot stand just this healthy dish. This applies to many cases if the human beings with ill souls come out of our civilisation into the cheerful and beatific air of occult science. Then it may happen that they cannot stand the healthy dish with their ill souls. Nevertheless, these are exceptional cases. However, about them is mostly written in the world. One says, theosophy is something that makes the people crazy.—I do not deny that it can also annoy this or that soul, as the healthy dish the upset stomach. However, has the healthy dish caused the upset stomach? Many so-called ditched souls approach theosophy; it is virtually remarkable how many ditched souls approach it. Someone who is obliged to work in this movement could tell some sad chapter, could tell that the cry for help comes from here and there: I do no longer find my way rightly in the world; I do no longer know how to satisfy the longing of my heart.—The most wailful cries for help come in numbers every day. Our materialistic civilisation has caused this passing stones instead of bread to the human beings—you forgive the trivial turn of expression. The superficiality of judgment could be sometimes satisfied. The wishes and interests resting in the soul could not be satisfied. For a while, they can be forced back and deadened, then, however, they forge ahead, and the human being come with their cries for help. One cannot deny that some people come then too late. However, spiritual science cannot be pursued in such a way that it turns to choice ones. One has to bring the things to the public. The elementary basic concepts cannot be denied to anybody, and today the ABC of initiation, as it was indicated in the last talk, cannot be refused to anybody. If today single human beings, ruined by the contemporary civilisation, approach theosophy and when these ditched souls are even more disarranged by the purifying thunderstorm at first, should the remedy be kept, therefore, from all souls, only because single ones were ruined mentally by their wrong way of thinking? Any fanaticism does not talk this way, the experience in the field of the spiritual life of our time talks this way. Admittedly, on the other side, there is a serious danger for the relationship between our contemporaries and the spiritual-scientific worldview. This danger is caused by the fact that our contemporaries approach the spiritual scientific worldview with their worldview and such characters, which our time has bred. Which prejudices, which superficial judgements they introduce in this spiritual-scientific worldview! How much danger exists that the theosophical worldview is spoilt by the trend of our time here and there! Here a danger does exist. One has there to point to some matters, so that we are able to look deeper and deeper into the so-called and into the real dangers of the spiritual-scientific striving. Spiritual worlds are round the human being—we have shown this in the preceding talks, and we penetrate deeper and deeper into these profundities. These worlds relate to the usual sensory world like the world of colours and light to the world of touching with the blind human being; and there is a world that is much higher than what the blind person experiences if one operates him and light and colours shine to him from the darkness. These worlds are round us. However, these worlds are not only worlds of paradise and bliss, although paradise and bliss are in them, but they are also worlds that can be dreadful for the human being, dangerous because of their facts and beings. If the human being wants to get knowledge of the great and beatific of these worlds, he cannot help making acquaintance of the dangerous, of the dreadful that they contain. The one is not possible without the other. Now we must realise once to what extent a danger exists. Imagine a human being who is near a powder magazine without knowing it. He knows nothing about it. However, suddenly he comes to know it and he gets immense fear thinking that he could be busted in the air if the powder magazine explodes. Outdoors nothing has changed; nevertheless, his life has changed. The only thing that is different from before is that he knows about the danger now. This knowledge distinguishes him from that who knows nothing. That applies also to the higher worlds. The danger, the dreadful that is included in them is always round the human being. Yes, immense dangers lie in wait for the human soul in the worlds of which the human beings have no idea. The only difference concerning these dangers and dreadful things and beings is for that who has never moved up to spiritual science, and that who has moved up to it that the latter does know about this danger and the former not. Nevertheless, it is not completely in such a way, namely for the following reasons: we enter the spiritual world in which the spiritual is effective. The powder magazine does not become dangerous because you have fear that the powder explodes; but your fear signifies something in the spiritual world! It is a difference whether you have it or not. Your thoughts are inserted as something real in the spiritual world. A feeling of hatred that you have for a person is more real in the spiritual world and much more efficient than a blow that you give the person concerned, with a stick. Even if the dreadful does not happen immediately before your eyes, it is this way. Indeed, fear and anxiety, such negative feelings are something that puts the human being in a fateful relation to the spiritual world. For in the spiritual world there are beings to whom fear and anxiety emitted by the human beings, are welcome nourishment. If the human being is not afraid and does not fear, these beings are starving! They who have not yet penetrated deeper into the soiritual world, may take this as comparison. However, those who know this matter, know that it concerns something real. If the human being emits fear, anxiety, and panic, these beings indeed find welcome nourishment, and they become mightier and mightier. These beings are hostile to the human beings. Everything that feeds itself from negative feelings, from fear, anxiety and superstition, from hopelessness, from doubt, are powers in the spiritual world that are hostile to the human being, and that make cruel attacks on him if and when they are fed by him. Hence, it is necessary, above all, that the human being who enters the spiritual world, makes himself strong against fear, anxiety, hopelessness, and doubting. However, these are just rather modern cultural feelings, and materialism is suitable because it cuts off the human beings from the spiritual world to call these hostile powers against him by hopelessness and fear of the unknown. To express myself quite clearly, I have to say, when the human being sees that gate of death, he also sees numerous pernicious forces hampering him. Most human beings attract forces by fear of death. The bigger the fear of death, the stronger is their power. The fear of death is generally a part of the feelings of fear. These powers appear like dried up bags if the human being makes himself strong and knows that he cannot change the event of death by the fear of death. The human being is only able to overcome the fear of death and to face death courageously if he knows that an immortal everlasting core is in his inside for which death is only a change of the way of life. As soon as the human being finds the immortal core in himself with the help of occult science, he educates himself more and more for overcoming all such feelings, last also the fear of death. However, the more materialistic the human being becomes, the more he is frightened at death. No occult science can protect the human being to see the truthful behind the scenery. It has to show how the everlasting life, how karma entails the big balance in the spiritual life. This spiritual science has to show various things. It cannot show the beatitudes behind the scenery of life without showing the dreadful powers at the same time, the enemies who lie in wait for him. This is true. However, it also shows how he can overcome any fear of these enemies. It shows how he can face all that with free, courageous eye. It teaches him to become objective and impartial if he leaves himself patiently to its education. However, many human beings come to theosophy with the usual feelings of our time. What they hear here works on them sometimes deeply depressing, as something that attacks their souls frightfully because they have fear of life because of their materialistic thinking. Many people bring this immaturity into theosophy and they overcome it only gradually. Again, theosophy or occult science does not bear the blame for it. It does its bit not to shock the human being too strongly. If it revealed the complete truth of something obvious to the human being, it would say how the cowards separate from the intrepid ones, and some of you would be shocked how big the number is on the one and the other side. However, the immature human beings bring some immature matters into the theosophical movement, while they translate certain concepts that theosophy and occult science give simply into the usual trivial language. As strange as it sounds, here a big danger exists sometimes in the relations between theosophy and our contemporaries. Thus, immature theosophists and such people who approach theosophy externally say repeatedly that the first demand is to become unselfish, to overcome any egoism. Some people can never assert often enough if they want to say anything rather theosophical to anybody: all that I do and want is quite unselfish. I want to work only for the other human beings.—They mostly do not sense how selfish this belief is. It is true that by the acquaintance with the truth of occult science the human being comes gradually to that which is indicated so nicely in Goethe's words: From the force that binds all creatures It is true, but almost everything is necessary that occult science can offer, its highest and its deepest, to reach this ideal. One reaches it best of all if one speaks of it as little as possible and strives for it very directly. Those are unselfish least of all who boast mostly of their unselfishness, as those are normally the most false who use the word “truly” after every third sentence. A deep law underlies that in occultism. First, it concerns penetrating deeper and deeper into the truth and knowledge of occult science, and not taking such ideals as, for example: you shall overcome your ego.—With such a phrase nothing at all is done. Nothing is done if, for example, a stove stands here and I say to it: you should be a good stove; you must make the room warm.—You can stroke it and treat it affectionately, but with it, nothing is done. Not before you give wood to the stove, it heats. Thus, it is also useless at all to preach virtue, unselfishness, and freedom to the world. The right thing is to heat, to give the human being heating material; and the heating material is the spiritual-scientific truth. As the wood and the coal make the stove warm, the real spiritual-scientific truth makes the human being unselfish gradually. Why? Because it detracts the interest in many respects from the small point, which one calls the ego. The theosophical or spiritual-scientific truth is so great, so mighty, and significant, and claims us so strongly that we feel very uninteresting as a single personality. One learns only how uninteresting the single personality is. This learning, how uninteresting the single human personality is, if it is caused by the heating material of the spiritual-scientific truth, only frees the human being from egoism. If you look at the things basically, then egoism is not at all anything that is not included in the divine world order from a higher viewpoint. It is something very healthy from a higher viewpoint. Imagine once if many human beings of our time did not refrain from this or from that if they did not do that or this out of selfishness because they know for selfish reasons what may result. Imagine which pests they would be in the human development! Really, the world wisdom planted egoism into the human being to lead him to a developmental stage to seize his self, so that he makes it as important and valuable as he can only do it. It is a high truth on the one side and a shocking phrase on the other side if one says to the human being, you have to sacrifice your personality.—At an example I want to make clear to you how it can be that something is elated once and rhetorical another time. Imagine, you ask a person who has a ten-pfennig coin in his pocket to sacrifice it for anything. He makes this sacrifice easily. However, if you ask a person, who has 20,000 mark by chance with him—perhaps his whole property—to sacrifice them, this is another thing. The imposition to somebody who has not yet worked on himself who has not yet raised his personality to renounce his personality is something different from that who has worked on it for a long time to make it as competent as only possible. The one sacrifices a genius on the altar of human development, the other a fool. It does not depend on the fact that one sacrifices, but what one sacrifices. To be able to present a personality for humanity, one has to develop this personality at first. Thus, it is once a phrase to speak of the sacrifice of personality; on the other side, it is a great significant truth. Hence, it is useless at all; if in theosophical books, the demand of the sacrifice of personality is pronounced and is not demanded at the same time: make your personality as strong as only possible. We learn this by a real thinking that has its roots in the spiritual world. True theosophy is that logic which does not put one-sided principles but knows that every sentence as every coin has two sides, maybe even more sides, that teaches to look from the appearance at the inside. It does often not at all teach what one calls theosophy superficially today. One calls danger only that which is not a superficial, but a real danger. I was still very young, when I sat with somebody together who had celebrated his fiftieth birthday recently in another country, who had interests in common with me concerning my studies of Goethe. The man said in those days, he did not want to go among the authors. He was in those days, although still relatively young, already older than many who write today. He bethought, I will not write reviews. I want to write something else, because only someone should write reviews who has big experience of life; actually, only old people should write reviews.—This was, in any case, a very good idea of the man. Most people do not believe that maturity is necessary to work in the cultural field. The further we grow into the times, the younger become in particular the people who write under the line, and because the reader usually does not think and has, actually, no means to investigate how young the writer is, he has no notion by whom he is taken in. Everybody knows that today it is not difficult to write wittily. Indeed, still some people are surprised that the one or the other writes wittily. A person who has maybe dealt since his fifteenth, sixteenth year with nothing else than reading such stuff who has learnt the craft substantially needs to publish only something, and he can impress by his radical or blurred judgments enormously. It is possible there that a person seriously suffers from dementia. As strange as it sounds: somebody can be crazy today and he can write wittily for the world, so that he is admired as a witty author. This case is possible. Decades ago, it was already a correct judgement if anybody said, it is not difficult in our time to make a good poem; culture and language versify.—Today, this applies even more, so that some pupils can write newspaper articles. Quite different powers judge there, which use the human beings for their purposes. More and more humanity must demand maturity from that who should have true judgements. Real maturity just also belongs to the work in spiritual-scientific field. Hence, it is also necessary, that those who are leaders of secret schools work only in their circles and do not appear before an age of 35 years to the world and proclaim spiritual-scientific truth. Before, they can bring judgements about philosophy in the world. However, one only becomes mature to scoop from the spirit when one does no longer have to use the spiritual power to the construction of the body. As long as the body is growing, the forces from which a logical judgement builds itself up must go into the body. Hence, it can be possible that a poet got real poems before the middle years. However, the human being misjudges so easily that the biggest maturity of life is necessary to penetrate really into the depth, so that one understands not only anything for his satisfaction and for his advance, but gets around to stepping before humanity and representing spiritual-scientific work with full responsibility. This biggest maturity can only be reached at an advanced age. However, you do not need any maturity to talk in theosophical platitudes. This is something peculiar that maturity belongs to the highest matters if one shall work on them thoroughly. However, they can be treated also as phrases because many people are unable to realise the deepness but they adhere to the phrase. Everything that can be spread in theosophy can be serious and deep to the highest degree, can be a force of life. If one reverses it into its opposite, it can be the most terrible phrase. Therefore, we experience just on this field so often that phrase by phrase blossoms, and that just immaturity works permanently. Besides, that who represents the immature damages himself more than the world. The world rejects what comes from this side. If you are involved in this direction, you do not make progress. For someone who works outward in the spiritual-scientific field has to make sacrifices. There is a great difference if spiritual science is protected like a secret in the chaste soul or if it is cast out in the world. The word applies there that one says about the treasure seeker: he must be taciturn. If he speaks a word, the treasure cannot be attained. Thus, the depths of the higher world are also attained the better, the more one can be quiet. For that who has understood these matters there is no talking generally if he is not forced to it if the world does not demand it from him. Nobody shall talk without being asked. The demand does not need to come from here or there, this demand can come from invisible, from supersensible powers. With it, one can say, because our time is so little able to think properly about maturity and immaturity, it forms a sort of theosophy. It can be the highest; but in its reversal, it is a caricature and a risk. It does not bear the blame. It will gradually replace the absurd judgement with the correct one concerning maturity and immaturity. Nobody may be surprised that it is that way. If he were surprised, he should also be surprised about the fact that where strong light is also black shades are. Where less strong light is, even weaker shades are. Theosophy possibly throws black shades; this is only an evidence of the fact that it should be a strong light. Where one speaks of the so-called dangers, one must take stock of the fact that against the big danger simply a bulwark is there that no real teacher in this field exposes the human beings to this serious, big danger, and that everything that looks like a danger does not come from theosophy but from that which opposes it. If one knows this, one will be quiet, even if apparently bad effects appear. These can also appear. One can experience that persons, as long as they have no connection to theosophy, are reasonably decent persons. If they come to theosophy, they become vain, ambitious, and haughty. Why? For very simple reasons. As long as a person towers only a little above the judgements of his surroundings, he cannot be particularly bad, but also not particularly good. However, if he comes to something original, the possibility of the good increases but also the possibility of the bad. What appears here already with the usual theosophist can appear with the pupil all the more. With him, the mistakes that exist on the bottom of his being if he must gain his free judgment appear with big clearness. However, this is necessary. If anybody wants to develop quicker, a sum of bad qualities may come out with him overnight. These qualities would maybe have spread over sixty years. If one dissolves a drop of colour in a big quantity of water, one sees nothing of the colour. That also applies to the pupil. What should come out in some days becomes noticeable. However, if one acts out anything for sixty years, one notices nothing of it. Yes, in secret science there appear some devils of arrogance. Relatively soon, one had to experience that persons who are not haughty in themselves approach one with wishes. Then they come and say, I want to start being a pupil and becoming an adept as quickly as possible.—One does often hear that. It is experience that the devil of arrogance seizes somebody. Towards the great, they often become the haughtiest, and then they hard understand that this feeling is the biggest obstacle for their further development, and that it is the best for the further development to renounce arrogance.—However, this is connected also with the fact that we are great laughers and great blabbers. With it, I have spoken about the dangers of occult science. I made no secret that there are such cases, I have also tried in the course of these talks to point where, actually, the more dangerous cases are. Today, I wanted to point only in general to what one finds everywhere in theosophy and occult science. He who searches occult science is not deterred by the dangers of it, but he finds the welfare, the recovery of the soul just in occult science. He knows that it does not cause damage that it does not bring dangers, but that it uncovers damages and points to dangers where they also exist, otherwise, and where they would keep on working if they were not led to recovery. Hence, this so-called danger shall deter nobody from penetrating into the spiritual fields. As we are led by all the other considerations and viewpoints, we are also led here to realise that the human being shall not refrain from developing the forces and abilities slumbering in him to penetrate into nature. For what is material is revelation of the spirit. As around us are dreadful beings if we look into them, they are in nature. Only because the human being closes his eyes he avoids this fact. Those who knew something of occult science also knew this. Already in his youth, Goethe heard some objections against the penetration into the inside of the things. He heard the words of the Swiss naturalist Haller (Albrecht von H., 1708–1777) who said:
Goethe who dared to look into her knew that the human being can penetrate into nature everywhere. Hence, he felt repeatedly urged to say:
In his peculiar kind, Goethe still opposed the quotation that limits the human cognitive faculties. He protested against it with the words, which just are suitable to point a soul to the practical-active of the theosophical worldview, while he reminded of Haller's words in old age:
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| 4. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1963): Thinking in the Service of Understanding the World
Translated by Rita Stebbing |
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| Philosophers have started from various primary antitheses: idea and reality, subject and object, appearance and thing-in-itself, ego and non-ego, idea and will, concept and matter, force and substance, the conscious and the unconscious. |
| 4. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1963): Thinking in the Service of Understanding the World
Translated by Rita Stebbing |
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[ 1 ] When I see how a billiard ball, when struck, communicates its motion to another ball, I remain entirely without influence on the course of this event which I observe. The direction and velocity of the second ball is determined by the direction and velocity of the first. As long as I do no more than observe, I cannot say anything about the motion of the second ball until it actually moves. The situation alters if I begin to reflect on the content of my observation. The purpose of my reflection is to form concepts of the event. I bring the concept of an elastic ball into connection with certain other concepts of mechanics, and take into consideration the special circumstances prevailing in this particular instance. In other words, to the action taking place without my doing, I try to add a second action which unfolds in the conceptual sphere. The latter is dependent on me. This is shown by the fact that I could rest content with the observation and forgo all search for concepts if I had no need of them. If, however, this need is present, then I am not satisfied until I have brought the concepts ball, elasticity, motion, impact, velocity, etc., into a certain connection, to which the observed process is related in a definite way. As certain as it is that the event takes place independently of me, so certain is it also that the conceptual process cannot take place without my doing it. [ 2 ] We shall consider later whether this activity of mine is really a product of my own independent being or whether the modern physiologists are right who say that we cannot think as we will, but that we must think exactly as the thoughts and thought-connections present in our consciousness determine.17 For the time being we wish merely to establish the fact that we constantly feel compelled to seek for concepts and connections of concepts standing in a certain relation to objects and events given independently of us. Whether this activity is really ours, or whether we accomplish it according to an unalterable necessity, we shall leave aside for the moment. That at first sight it appears to be our activity is beyond doubt. We know with absolute certainty that we are not given the concepts together with the objects. That I myself am the doer may be illusion, but to immediate observation this certainly appears to be the case. The question here is: What do we gain by finding a conceptual counterpart to an event? [ 3 ] There is a profound difference between the ways in which, for me, the parts of an event are related to one another before and after the discovery of the corresponding concepts. Mere observation can follow the parts of a given event as they occur, but their connection remains obscure without the help of concepts. I see the first billiard ball move toward the second in a certain direction and with a definite velocity. I must wait for what will happen after the impact, and again I can follow what happens only with my eyes. Let us assume that at the moment the impact occurs someone obstructs my view of the field where the event takes place: then—as mere onlooker—I have no knowledge of what happens afterward. The situation is different if before my view was obstructed I had discovered the concepts corresponding to the nexus of events. In that case I can estimate what occurs, even when I am no longer able to observe. An object or event which has only been observed does not of itself reveal anything about its connection with other objects or events. This connection comes to light only when observation combines with thinking. [ 4 ] Observation and thinking are the two points of departure for all spiritual striving of man insofar as he is conscious of such striving. What is accomplished by ordinary human reason as well as by the most complicated scientific investigations rests on these two fundamental pillars of our spirit. Philosophers have started from various primary antitheses: idea and reality, subject and object, appearance and thing-in-itself, ego and non-ego, idea and will, concept and matter, force and substance, the conscious and the unconscious. It is easy to show, however, that all these antitheses must be preceded by that of observation and thinking, as the one the most important for man. [ 5 ] Whatever principle we wish to advance, we must prove that somewhere we have observed it, or express it in the form of a clear thought which can be re-thought by others. Every philosopher who begins to speak about his fundamental principles must make use of the conceptual form, and thereby makes use of thinking. He therefore indirectly admits that for his activity he presupposes thinking. Whether thinking or something else is the main element in the evolution of the world, we shall not decide as yet. But that without thinking the philosopher can gain no knowledge of the evolution of the world, is immediately clear. Thinking may play a minor part in the coming into being of world phenomena, but thinking certainly plays a major part in the coming into being of a view about them. [ 6 ] As regards observation, it is due to our organization that we need it. For us, our thinking about a horse and the object horse are two separate things. But we have access to the object only through observation. As little as we can form a concept of a horse by merely staring at it, just as little are we able to produce a corresponding object by mere thinking. [ 7 ] In sequence of time, observation even precedes thinking. For even thinking we learn to know first by means of observation. It was essentially a description of an observation when, at the opening of this chapter, we gave an account of how thinking is kindled by an event and of how it goes beyond what is given without its activity. Whatever enters the circle of our experiences we first become aware of through observation. The contents of sensation, of perception, of contemplation, of feelings, of acts of will, of the pictures of dreams and fantasy, of representations, of concepts and ideas, of all illusions and hallucinations are given us through observation. [ 8 ] However, as object of observation, thinking differs essentially from all other objects. The observation of a table or a tree occurs in me as soon as these objects appear within the range of my experience. But my thinking that goes on about these things, I do not observe at the same time. I observe the table; the thinking about the table I carry out, but I do not observe it at the same moment. I would first have to transport myself to a place outside my own activity if, besides observing the table, I wanted also to observe my thinking about the table. Whereas observation of things and events, and thinking about them, are but ordinary occurrences filling daily life, the observation of thinking itself is a sort of exceptional situation. This fact must be taken into account sufficiently when we come to determine the relation of thinking to all other contents of observation. It is essential to be clear about the fact that when thinking is observed the same procedure is applied to it as the one we normally apply to the rest of the world-content, only in ordinary life we do not apply it to thinking. [ 9 ] Someone might object that what I have said here about thinking also holds good for feeling and for all other soul activities. When, for example, we feel pleasure, the feeling is also kindled by an object, and it is this object I observe, and not the feeling of pleasure. This objection, however, is based upon an error. Pleasure does not have at all the same relationship to its object has has the concept which thinking builds up. I am absolutely conscious of the fact that the concept of a thing is built up by my activity, whereas pleasure is produced in me by an object in the same way as, for instance, a change is caused in an object by a stone which falls upon it. For observation, a pleasure is given in exactly the same way as that is given which causes it. The same is not true of concepts. I can ask: Why does a particular event arouse in me a feeling of pleasure? But it is never possible to ask: Why does an event produce in me a certain number of concepts? That simply has no sense. When I reflect about an event there is no question of an effect on me. I learn nothing about myself by knowing the concepts which correspond to the change observed in a pane of glass when a stone is thrown against it. But I very definitely do learn something about my personality when I know the feeling which a certain event arouses in me. When I say of an observed object: This is a rose, I say absolutely nothing about myself; but when I say of the same thing: It gives me a feeling of pleasure, I characterize not only the rose but also myself in my relation to the rose. [ 10 ] There can, therefore, be no question of comparing thinking and feeling as objects of observation. And the same could easily be shown concerning other activities of the human soul. Unlike thinking, they belong in the same sphere as other observed objects and events. It is characteristic of the nature of thinking that it is an activity directed solely upon the observed object and not upon the thinking personality. This can already be seen from the way we express our thoughts, as distinct from the way we express our feelings or acts of will in relation to objects. When I see an object and recognize it as a table, generally I would not say: I am thinking of a table, but: This is a table. But I would say: I am pleased with the table. In the first instance I am not at all interested in pointing out that I have entered into any relationship with the table, whereas in the second it is just this relationship that matters. In saying: I am thinking of a table, I already enter the exceptional situation characterized above, where something is made an object of observation which is always contained within our soul's activity, only normally it is not made an object of observation. [ 11 ] It is characteristic of thinking that the thinker forgets thinking while doing it. What occupies him is not thinking, but the object of thinking which he observes. [ 12 ] The first thing then, that we observe about thinking is that it is the unobserved element in our ordinary life of thought. [ 13 ] The reason we do not observe thinking in our daily life of thought is because it depends upon our own activity. What I myself do not bring about, enters my field of observation as something objective. I find myself confronted by it as by something that has come about independently of me; it comes to meet me; I must take it as the presupposition of my thinking process. While I reflect on the object, I am occupied with it, my attention is turned to it. This activity is, in fact, thinking contemplation. My attention is directed not to my activity but to the object of this activity. In other words: while I think, I do not look at my thinking which I produce, but at the object of thinking which I do not produce. [ 14 ] I am even in the same position when I let the exceptional situation come about and think about my own thinking. I can never observe my present thinking, but only afterward can I make into an object of thinking the experience I have had of my thinking-process. If I wanted to observe my present thinking, I would have to split myself into two persons: one to do the thinking, the other to observe this thinking. This I cannot do. I can only accomplish it in two separate acts. The thinking to be observed is never the one actually being produced, but another one. Whether for this purpose I observe my own earlier thinking, or follow the thinking process of another person, or else, as in the above example of the movements of the billiard balls, presuppose an imaginary thinking process, makes no difference. [ 15 ] Two things that do not go together are actively producing something and confronting this in contemplation. This is already shown in the First Book of Moses. The latter represents God as creating the world in the first six days, and only when the world is there is the possibility of contemplating it also present: “And God saw everything that he had made and, behold, it was very good.” So it is also with our thinking. It must first be present before we can observe it. [ 16 ] The reason it is impossible for us to observe thinking when it is actually taking place, is also the reason it is possible for us to know it more directly and more intimately than any other process in the world. It is just because we ourselves bring it forth that we know the characteristic features of its course, the manner in which the process takes place. What in the other spheres of observation can be found only indirectly: the relevant context and the connection between the individual objects—in the case of thinking is known to us in an absolutely direct way. Off-hand, I do not know why, for my observation, thunder follows lightning, but from the content of the two concepts I know immediately why my thinking connects the concept of thunder with the concept of lightning. Naturally here it does not matter whether I have correct concepts of thunder and lightning. The connection between those concepts I have is clear to me, and indeed this is the case through the concepts themselves. [ 17 ] This transparent clarity of the process of thinking is quite independent of our knowledge of the physiological basis of thinking. I speak here of thinking insofar as it presents itself to observation of our spiritual activity. How one material process in my brain causes or influences another while I carry out a line of thought, does not come into consideration at all. What I see when I observe thinking is not what process in my brain connects the concept of lightning with the concept of thunder, but I see what motivates me to bring the two concepts into a particular relationship. My observation of thinking shows me that there is nothing that directs me in my connecting one thought with another, except the content of my thoughts; I am not directed by the material processes in my brain. In a less materialistic age than ours this remark would of course be entirely superfluous. Today however, when there are people who believe: When we know what matter is, we shall also know how matter thinks,—it has to be said that it is possible to speak about thinking without entering the domain of brain physiology at the same time. Today many people find it difficult to grasp the concept of thinking in its purity. Anyone who wants to contrast the representation of thinking I have here developed, with Cabanis 18 statement, “The brain secretes thoughts as the liver does gall or the spittle-glands spittle, etc.,” simply does not know what I am talking about. He tries to find thinking by means of a mere process of observation such as we apply to other objects that make up the content of the world. He cannot find it in this manner because as I have shown, it eludes normal observation. Whoever cannot overcome materialism lacks the ability to bring about in himself the exceptional situation described above, which brings to his consciousness what remains unconscious in all other spiritual activities. If a person does not have the good will to place himself in this situation, then one can no more speak to him about thinking than one can speak about color to a person who is blind. However, he must not believe that we consider physiological processes to be thinking. He cannot explain thinking because he simply does not see it. [ 18 ] However, one possessing the ability to observe thinking,—and with goodwill every normally organized person has this ability,—this observation is the most important he can make. For he observes something which he himself brings to existence; he finds himself confronted not by a foreign object, to begin with, but by his own activity. He knows how what he observes comes to be. He sees through the connections and relations. A firm point is attained from which, with well-founded hope, one can seek for the explanation of the rest of the world's phenomena. [ 19 ] The feeling of possessing such a firm point caused the founder of modern philosophy, Renatus Cartesius,19 to base the whole of human knowledge on the principle, I think, therefore I am. All other things, all other events are present independent of me. Whether they are there as truth or illusion or dream I know not. Only one thing do I know with absolute certainty, for I myself bring it to its sure existence: my thinking. Perhaps it also has some other origin as well, perhaps it comes from God or from elsewhere, but that it is present in the sense that I myself bring it forth, of that I am certain. Cartesius had, to begin with, no justification for giving his statement any other meaning. He could maintain only that within the whole world content it is in my thinking that I grasp myself within that activity which is most essentially my own. What is meant by the attached therefore I am, has been much debated. It can have a meaning in one sense only. The simplest assertion I can make about something is that it is, that it exists. How this existence can be further defined I cannot say straight away about anything that comes to meet me. Each thing must first be studied in its relation to others before it can be determined in what sense it can be said to exist. An event that comes to meet me may be a set of perceptions, but it could also be a dream, a hallucination, and so forth. In short, I am unable to say in what sense it exists. I cannot gather this from the event in itself, but I shall learn it when I consider the event in its relation to other things. From this, however, I can, again, learn no more than how it is related to these other things. My search only reaches solid ground if I find an object which exists in a sense which I can derive from the object itself. As thinker I am such an object, for I give my existence the definite, self-dependent content of the activity of thinking. Having reached this, I can go on from here and ask: Do the other objects exist in the same or in some other sense? [ 20 ] When thinking is made the object of observation, to the rest of the elements to be observed is added something which usually escapes attention; but the manner in which the other things are approached by man is not altered. One increases the number of observed objects, but not the number of methods of observation. While we are observing the other things, there mingles in the universal process—in which I now include observation—one process which is overlooked. Something different from all other processes is present, but is not noticed. But when I observe my thinking, no such unnoticed element is present. For what now hovers in the background is, again, nothing but thinking. The observed object is qualitatively the same as the activity directed upon it. And that is another characteristic feature of thinking. When we observe it, we do not find ourselves compelled to do so with the help of something qualitatively different, but can remain within the same element. [ 21 ] When I weave an object, given independently of me, into my thinking, then I go beyond my observation, and the question is: Have I any right to do so? Why do I not simply let the object act upon me? In what way is it possible that my thinking could be related to the object? These are questions which everyone who reflects on his own thought processes must put to himself. They cease to exist when one thinks about thinking. We do not add anything foreign to thinking, and consequently do not have to justify such an addition. [ 22 ] Schelling 20 says: “To gain knowledge of nature means to create nature.” If these words of the bold nature-philosopher are taken literally, we should have to renounce forever all knowledge of nature. For after all, nature is there already, and in order to create it a second time, one must know the principles according to which it originated. From the nature already in existence one would have to learn the conditions of its existence in order to apply them to the nature one wanted to create. But this learning, which would have to precede the creating, would, however, be knowing nature, and would remain this even if, after the learning, no creation took place. Only a nature not yet in existence could be created without knowing it beforehand. [ 23 ] What is impossible with regard to nature: creating before knowing, we achieve in the case of thinking. If we wanted to wait and not think until we had first learned to know thinking, then we would never think at all. We have to plunge straight into thinking in order to be able, afterward, to know thinking by observing what we ourselves have done. We ourselves first create an object when we observe thinking. All other objects have been created without our help. [ 24 ] Against my sentence, We must think before we can contemplate thinking, someone might easily set another sentence as being equally valid: We cannot wait with digesting, either, until we have observed the process of digestion. This objection would be similar to the one made by Pascal 21 against Cartesius, when he maintained that one could also say: I go for a walk, therefore I am. Certainly I must resolutely get on with digesting before I have studied the physiological process of digestion. But this could only be compared with the contemplation of thinking if, after having digested, I were not to contemplate it with thinking, but were to eat and digest it. It is, after all, not without significance that whereas digestion cannot become the object of digestion, thinking can very well become the object of thinking. [ 25 ] This, then, is beyond doubt: In thinking we are grasping a corner of the universal process, where our presence is required if anything is to come about. And, after all, this is just the point. The reason things are so enigmatical to me is that I do not participate in their creation. I simply find them there, whereas in the case of thinking I know how it is made. This is why a more basic starting point than thinking, from which to consider all else in the world, does not exist. [ 26 ] Here I should mention another widely current error which prevails with regard to thinking. It consists in this, that it is said: Thinking, as it is in itself, we never encounter. That thinking which connects the observations we make of our experiences and weaves them into a network of concepts, is not at all the same as that thinking which later we extract from the objects we have observed and then make the object of our consideration. What we first unconsciously weave into things is something quite different from what we consciously extract from them afterward. [ 27 ] To draw such conclusions is not to see that in this way it is impossible to escape from thinking. It is absolutely impossible to come out of thinking if one wants to consider it. When one distinguishes an unconscious thinking from a later conscious thinking, then one must not forget that this distinction is quite external and has nothing to do with thinking as such. I do not in the least alter a thing by considering it with my thinking. I can well imagine that a being with quite differently organized sense organs and with a differently functioning intelligence would have a quite different representation of a horse from mine, but I cannot imagine that my own thinking becomes something different because I observe it. What I observe is what I myself bring about. What my thinking looks like to an intelligence different from mine is not what we are speaking about now; we are speaking about what it looks like to me. In any case, the picture of my thinking in another intelligence cannot be truer than my own picture of it. Only if I were not myself the thinking being, but thinking confronted me as the activity of a being foreign to me, could I say that my picture of thinking appeared in quite a definite way, and that I could not know what in itself the thinking of the being was like. [ 28 ] So far there is not the slightest reason to view my own thinking from a standpoint different from the one applied to other things. After all, I consider the rest of the world by means of thinking. How should I make of my thinking an exception? [ 29 ] With this I consider that I have sufficiently justified making thinking my starting point in my approach to an understanding of the world. When Archimedes 22 had discovered the lever, he thought that with its help he could lift the whole cosmos from its hinges if only he could find a point upon which he could support his instrument. He needed something that was supported by itself, that was not carried by anything else. In thinking we have a principle which exists by means of itself. From this principle let us attempt to understand the world. Thinking we can understand through itself. So the question is only whether we can also understand other things through it. [ 30 ] I have so far spoken of thinking without considering its vehicle, man's consciousness. Most present-day philosophers would object: Before there can be thinking, there must be consciousness. Therefore, one should begin, not from thinking, but from consciousness. No thinking can exist without consciousness. To them I must reply: If I want to have an explanation of what relation exists between thinking and consciousness, I must think about it. In doing so I presuppose thinking. To this could be said: When the philosopher wants to understand consciousness he makes use of thinking, and to that extent presupposes it, but in the ordinary course of life thinking does arise within consciousness and, therefore, presupposes this. If this answer were given to the World Creator who wished to create thinking, it would no doubt be justified. One naturally cannot let thinking arise without first having brought about consciousness. However, the philosopher is not concerned with the creation of the world, but with the understanding of it. Therefore he has to find the starting point, not for the creation, but for the understanding of the world. I consider it most extraordinary that a philosopher should be reproached for being concerned first and foremost about the correctness of his principles, rather than turning straight to the objects he wants to understand. The World Creator had to know, above all, how to find a vehicle for thinking; the philosopher has to find a secure foundation for his understanding of what already exists. How can it help us to start from consciousness and apply thinking to it, if first we do not know whether it is possible to reach any explanation of things by means of thinking? [ 31 ] We must first consider thinking quite impartially, without reference to a thinking subject or a thought object. For in subject and object we already have concepts formed by thinking. There is no denying: Before anything else can be understood, thinking must be understood. To deny this is to fail to realize that man is not a first link in creation, but the last. Therefore, for an explanation of the world by means of concepts, one cannot start from the first elements of existence, but must begin with what is nearest to us and is most intimately ours. We cannot at one bound transport ourselves to the beginning of the world, in order to begin our investigations there; we must start from the present moment and see whether we cannot ascend from the later to the earlier. As long as geology spoke in terms of assumed revolutions in order to explain the present condition of the earth, it groped in darkness. It was only when it made its beginnings from the investigations of those processes at present at work on the earth, and from these drew conclusions about the past, that it gained a secure foundation. As long as philosophy assumes all sorts of principles such as atom, motion, matter, will, the unconscious, it will get nowhere. Only when the philosopher recognizes as his absolute first that which came as the absolute last, can he reach his goal. But this absolute last in world evolution is Thinking. [ 32 ] There are people who say: Whether or not our thinking is right in itself cannot be established with certainty, after all. And to this extent the point of departure is still a doubtful one. It would be just as sensible to raise doubts as to whether in itself a tree is right or wrong. Thinking is a fact, and to speak of the rightness or wrongness of a fact has no sense. At most, I can have doubts as to whether thinking is being rightly applied, just as I can doubt whether a certain tree supplies a wood suitable for making tools for a particular purpose. To show to what extent the application of thinking to the world is right or wrong, is just the task of this book. I can understand anyone doubting whether we can ascertain anything about the world by means of thinking, but it is incomprehensible to me how anyone can doubt the rightness of thinking in itself. Addition to the Revised Edition (1918): [ 33 ] In the preceding discussion, the significant difference between thinking and all other activities of the soul has been referred to as a fact which reveals itself to a really unprejudiced observation. Unless this unprejudiced observation is achieved, against this discussion one is tempted to raise objections such as these: When I think about a rose, then, after all, this also is only an expression of a relation of my “I” to the rose, just as when I feel the beauty of the rose. In the case of thinking, a relation between “I” and object exists in the same way as in the case of feeling or perceiving. To make this objection is to fail to realize that it is only in the activity of thinking that the “I” knows itself to be completely at one with that which is active-going into all the ramifications of the activity. In the case of no other soul activity is this completely so. When, for example, a pleasure is felt, a more sensitive observation can quite easily detect to what extent the “I” knows itself to be one with something active, and to what extent there is something passive in it so that the pleasure merely happens to the “I.” And this is the case with the other soul activities. But one should not confuse “having thought-images” with the working through of thought by means of thinking. Thought-images can arise in the soul in the same way as dreams or vague intimations. This is not thinking.—To this could be said: If this is what is meant by thinking, then the element of will is within thinking, and so we have to do not merely with thinking, but also with the will within thinking. However, this would only justify one in saying: Real thinking must always be willed. But this has nothing to do with the characterization of thinking as given in this discussion. The nature of thinking may be such that it must necessarily always be willed; the point is that everything that is willed is—while being willed—surveyed by the “I” as an activity entirely its own. Indeed it must be said that just because this is the nature of thinking, it appears to the observer as willed through and through. Anyone who really takes the trouble to understand all that has to be considered in order to reach a judgment about thinking, cannot fail to recognize that this soul activity does have the unique character we have described here. [ 34 ] A personality highly appreciated as a thinker by the author of this book, has objected that it is impossible to speak about thinking as is done here, because what one believes one is observing as active thinking only appears to be so. In reality one is observing only the results of an unconscious activity, which is the foundation of thinking. Only because this unconscious activity is not observed does the illusion arise that the observed thinking exists through itself, just as when in an illumination made by a rapid succession of electric sparks one believes one is seeing a continuous movement. This objection, too, rests on an inaccurate examination of the facts. To make it means that one has not taken into consideration that it is the “I” itself, standing within thinking, that observes its own activity. The “I” would have to stand outside thinking to be deluded as in the case of an illumination with a rapid succession of electric sparks. Indeed one could say: To make such a comparison is to deceive oneself forcibly, like someone who, seeing a moving light, insisted that it was being freshly lit by an unknown hand at every point where it appeared.—No, whoever wants to see in thinking anything other than a surveyable activity brought about within the “I,” must first make himself blind to the plain facts that are there for the seeing, in order to be able to set up a hypothetical activity as the basis of thinking. He who does not so blind himself cannot fail to recognize that everything he “thinks into” thinking in this manner takes him away from the essence of thinking. Unprejudiced observation shows that nothing belongs to thinking's own nature that is not found in thinking itself. If one leaves the realm of thinking, one cannot come to what causes it.
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| The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas: Comment V. The Application of Intelligence to the Human Body
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| The so-called “Creationism”—the doctrine that every soul at birth is created by God absolutely anew—is the inevitable consequence of a thought-system which through “abstract affirmation” would allow heaven to triumph completely over the earth in man, without having the disposal even of the powers of the human Ego, which have been acquired with difficulty through centuries, during which the Ego had to find and assert itself without God or spirit in the universe of material reality, suppressed by Nominalism with its feeble abstractions. |
| The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas: Comment V. The Application of Intelligence to the Human Body
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“Thomas could get no further than the abstract affirmation that the psychic-spiritual really has its effect on every activity of the human organism.” [p. 96] This “abstract affirmation” is—as emerges from the trend of the three addresses—in no sense to be taken as a toying with concepts invalidated by the “pale cast of thought.” The whole drama which surges in the background of scholastic thought, lives in this “abstrahere,” this “abstracting,” in this up-building of the scholastic-gothic cathedral. In this mighty building there is this abstracting, from the bottom to the top; first, from the material things of the world, the “phantasmata,” the sensory images, through the activity of the senses; then from these images, the “species,” the special concepts, through the “intellectus agens,” and finally, the “universalia,” the general concepts, through the “intellectus possibilis.” But this “abstracting” from below upwards, through which man draws into his thought as it unfolds itself “post res,” what before lay “in rebus is to serve the purpose of fitting the created human reason into the spirit forms, through which the Creator's power which works” ante res acts from the top downwards. The innermost impulse of this “abstract affirmation” applied to the ideal transfiguration of the human body (which is found by Thomas to be a vision of the future real transfiguration of the risen body) appears in the works of Thomas Aquinas in the passage which Rudolf Steiner analyses as the dramatic climax: when the problems of creation, of human knowledge and of human individuality concentrate, as it were, in a knot. It is clearest in the answer to the question: Why one human soul differs from another. Since the soul as such (i.e. when abstracted from the body) is not composed of matter and form, the differentiation of one soul from another could only be formal, if they were differentiated only according to their existence as pure soul. But a formal differentiation involves a division of the species; (i.e. men would not then all belong to the same class, but each would be a species in himself, which Thomas grants to the Angels, but not to men). But the division according to mere number within one and the same species arises out of the material difference. And the soul cannot have this material difference from Nature, out of which it is created, but from matter in which it is created. Thus, we can presume the existence of many human souls, which are different within the same species according to their number, if they are united to bodies from their own beginning, (i.e. if they have not a pre-existence in the Kingdom of Nature, out of which they are created) so that their differentiation originates from union with the body as the material principle, even if their differentiation originates from God as the effective principle. (Quaestion Of the Might of God. III. 10.) In the chapter “Reincarnation of the Spirit and Destiny” of the book Theosophy, Rudolf Steiner carries on with compelling logic this Thomistic thought: “... The man who rightly ponders over the essence of biography, comes to see that spiritually every man is a species in himself” This means “secundam naturam ex qua fit,” according to the pre-existing individual “nature” which after previous incarnations enters on birth, the individual human being is a species of his own. The “materia in qua fit,” the bodily material, is no longer the “principle of individuation” though it may retain its full significance as the object, on which the spiritual individual, in accordance with his destiny, works. But this Thomistic train of thought is a necessary preliminary, from the point of view of spiritual history, to the spiritual individualism of Rudolf Steiner. The second of the foregoing quotations comes from the midst of the fight against Averroës. The “material individualism”—if one may call it so—of Thomas is a fortress built of earthly stone as a protection of human individuality against the doctrine of Averroës, who snuffs out the intellectus possibilis and individuality in a universal spirit. Man acquires—according to Thomas—his individual nature precisely by living in this earthly body, from which state (as one then pre-existing) God will after the day of Judgment vouch him eternal life in a transfigured body through the Grace promised by Christ [p. 180]. Each human body is, in the sense of Thomas, the concrete tool, by which God—if one may put it so—takes up the material with one hand from the realm of Nature, by Him created, and into which with the other hand, he impresses the anima humana through the first act of creation of each separate man. The so-called “Creationism”—the doctrine that every soul at birth is created by God absolutely anew—is the inevitable consequence of a thought-system which through “abstract affirmation” would allow heaven to triumph completely over the earth in man, without having the disposal even of the powers of the human Ego, which have been acquired with difficulty through centuries, during which the Ego had to find and assert itself without God or spirit in the universe of material reality, suppressed by Nominalism with its feeble abstractions. The whole force of “abstract affirmation which lives in Thomas' effort to find a knowledge of the body, is an expression of the will: to get an insight into the working of God's” right hand which by the preparation of the body of the newly-created human soul ordains the conditions of its individual form, and there with the conditions of its earthly and heavenly destiny. God as Perfect Creator of the Imperfect The effect pre-exists according to its power in the effective cause. To pre-exist in the power of the effective cause, does not mean, however, to pre-exist in a less perfect, but in a more perfect mode; even if pre-existence in the potentiality of the material cause is pre-existence in a less perfect mode, because matter as such is imperfect, whereas an “agent” as such is perfect. Now, since God is the first effective Cause of things, the perfections of all things must pre-exist in God in a still more eminent degree. And Dionysius touches this thought when he says of God, in the book Of Divine Names: “… He is certainly not this thing; but He is all things, being the Cause of all.” (S. Theol. /. 4. II.) Of the Creation of the Body of the First Man Since God is perfect in His works, He gave perfection to all creatures after their kind ... He Himself is perfect by reason of the fact that He prepossesses all things in Himself: not in the manner of something composed of different elements, but simply and solely, as Dionysius says: that is, in the manner in which different effects pre-exist in their causes, according to their single power. Thus, to the Angels He communicates His perfection in the knowledge of all natural things in divine forms, a perfection which is received by man after an inferior manner: for man has not the knowledge of all natural things. For he is to a certain extent composed of all things; from the type of spiritual substance he has the rational soul. From his likeness to the heavenly bodies he has the differentiation from the opposites by virtue of the extreme balance of his constitution. The elements, however, are substantial in him, and indeed in such wise that the higher elements predominate according to power, namely Fire and Air, since life is passed agreeably divided between warmth, the quality of Fire, and moisture, that of Air; but the lower elements prevail in him according to substance. For in no other way could there be a balance of the mixture, unless the lower elements, with their smaller power, outweighed the higher in man in quantity. And there is this justification, that the body of man is made from a clod of earth, for earth mixed with water is called a clod. Therefore, also, man is called a “small world” because all creatures of the world are somehow found in him. Man's body had to be created out of the matter of the four elements, so that man might be in agreement with the lower bodies—standing half-way between the spiritual and material substances. If Fire and Air, which are greater in effective power, were to predominate also in quantity in the composition of the human body, they would attract the other elements completely to themselves, and there could be no balance which in man's composition is necessary for the excellence of the sense of touch which is the basis of the other senses: for the organ of each sense may not have anything in reality contradictory, which the sense can test, but only in potentiality, either in such a manner that it is altogether free of every kind of this contradiction, as the pupil lacks colour, in order to be “in potentia,” towards all colours—which, however, was not possible with the sense of touch, since it consists of just those elements whose qualities it experiences—or else so that the organ might hold the middle place between the opposites, as is necessarily the case with touch. For the middle is “in potentia” to the extremes ... All natural things are created by divine art, and are therefore equally God's work. But every master endeavours to give his work the best form, not simply for itself, but with an eye to his general purpose. And if this form necessitates leaving something out, that does not worry the master: as a master who prepares a saw for cutting, makes it of steel, so that it is fit to cut; it does not occur to him to make it of glass, which is a more beautiful material, because such beauty would be an obstacle to its purpose. So God constructed every natural thing, also not simply for itself, but according to His arrangement for its particular purpose, as Aristotle says ... …The primary purpose of the human body is the rational soul and its accomplishments. For the matter is there for the sake of the form, and the tools are there for the sake of the efficiency of the worker. I say, therefore, that God has given the human body the best combination in the sense of fitting it to this form and these accomplishments. And if something is found to be lacking in the construction of the human body, it must be remembered that such a defect follows from the necessary arrangement of matter with regard to that which the body requires, so that there may be the right relationship of the body to the soul and its accomplishments. …The sense of touch, the basis of the other senses, is more perfect in man than in any other creature that has a soul; and for this purpose man had to receive the most temperate constitution. And man also exceeds the other creatures in the inner powers of the senses. (N.B.—The doctrine of the four inner senses—the social sense, imaginative power, capacity to reason, and the sense of memory, cannot be discussed shortly.) But from a certain necessity it appears that man falls short of the animals in some outer senses; thus, among all creatures with souls man has the worst sense of smell; for man had necessarily to have the largest brain among all in proportion to his body, so that the accomplishments of the inner sensory powers could develop more freely, which he needs for the achievements of the intellect—and also so that the coolness of the brain might moderate the warmth of the heart, which again must be large in man on account of his more erect posture. The size of the brain is an obstacle to the smell because of its moisture, for the sense of smell is dependent on dryness. And similarly the reason can be given why certain animals have a keener sight and a finer hearing than man—because of the retardation of these senses which is necessarily postulated in man through the complete balance of his constitution. The same reason can be adduced for certain animals being speedier than man, since an immoderate speed is contrary to the balance of his constitution. …Horns and claws, the weapons of certain animals, the thickness of the hide, of hair or feathers, which serve animals as covering, show the preponderance of earthly elements, which are contrary to the balance and delicacy of man's composition; and therefore they were not adapted to him. But instead he has reason and hands, wherewith he can arm himself with weapons and protection and other requirements of life in endless variety. So that Aristotle calls the hand “the organ of organs”—which, however, really applies still more to the power of reasoning, which is open to countless ideas, and gives him an illimitable capacity to make tools. …The erect posture was given man for four reasons: First, because man was given the senses not only to provide himself with the necessaries of life, like the other animals with souls, but also to appreciate. So while the other animals rejoice in the senses only in so far as they are concerned with nutriment and reproduction, man alone rejoices in the beauty of things as such. And because the senses live pre-eminently in the countenance, the other animals have bent their eyes to the ground, in order to search for food and find nourishment—but man has raised up his countenance in order to be able to appreciate freely material things on every side, heavenly as well as earthly, through the senses and especially through that of sight, which is the noblest and reveals the greatest number of varieties in things, so that he may reap the intelligible truth from all. Secondly, so that the inner senses might be more free for their accomplishments, by reason of the fact that the brain in which they are perfected is not depressed but raised above all other parts of the body. Thirdly, because man, if he were bent down, would have to use his hands as fore-feet, which would destroy their fitness for carrying out manifold works. Fourthly, because, if he were in this position, he would have to seize his food with his mouth; and for this he would have to have a prominent snout, and hard thick lips and a hard tongue, as one sees in animals in order not to be injured by things. But such a construction would completely prevent speech, the peculiar work of the understanding. Although man has an erect posture, still he is the furtherest removed from plants. For man has raised his upper part, his head, towards the upper part of the world, and his lower part is towards the lower part of the world, and is therefore arranged the best in accordance with the total arrangement. But plants have their upper part towards the lower part of the world (for the roots correspond to the mouth). Animals behave in a middle manner: for the upper part of an animal is that through which it takes in nourishment, and the lower part that through which it rejects waste. (S. Theol. Quaestio 91, from several articles.) …it was ordained that the woman should be formed from a rib of the man. First, as a sign that there should be a union of a special kind between man and woman; for woman is to be neither the lord over man—otherwise she would have been formed from his head—nor looked down upon by man as his slave—otherwise she would have been formed from his feet. Secondly, because of the Sacrament: for the Sacraments, namely, blood and water, out of which the Church (the Bride of Christ) has been erected, flowed from the side of Christ as he fell asleep on the Cross. (S. Theol. I. Quaestio 92. Art. III.) From Thomas' Teaching concerning the Heart Thomas' teaching concerning the heart is the heart of Thomism. In the heart intellectual activity comes to an end: in the “verbum cordis,” in the heart's word, each thought takes a definite shape. From the heart every movement of the body, and therefore also speech, the formation of the “verbum oris,” the mouth's word, originates. The rhythm of the pulse-beat follows the laws of the heavenly movements: but disturbances of the rhythm come from passions that rise in the earthly body. In the heart given to God passions are purified into virtues: as, for instance, the burning red of anger becomes the illuminant red of charity. Here is translated a passage from Thomas' Commentary on the Treatise of Aristotle “On the Soul,” which shows how through “abstract affirmation” Thomas attempts so to “intellectualize” the form and movement of the heart, that all the manifold facets can combine with the imaginative and conceptual image already there. Aristotle says that the prime mover in the organism must be of such a kind that in him must be both origin and end of the movement, as in a sort of circulation between a convex and a concave form, of which one is the result, but the other also the origin. For the concave appears as a reality, but the convex as an origin of the movement. By virtue of its concavity the heart is compressed, but by virtue of its convexity it expands. And because origin and end are contained in it, and the origin of every kind of movement must all the same be unmoved—as the arm remains still when the hand is moved, and the shoulder, when the arm is moved, and as every movement arises from some sort of non-movement—so there must be something at rest in the organ of movement, the heart, in so far as the heart is the origin of movement, but causing movement in something else, in so far as the movement attains its object in it. And these two, namely, the stationary and the moved are different in their behaviour, though inseparable according to their basis and their size. And that the heart must be at the same time origin and end of the movement, and consequently at the same time stationary and in motion is explained by the fact that every movement in a soul-endowed creature consists of thrust and pull. The thrust is that which gives motion, the origin of it, because that which thrusts something pushes it away from itself. In the pull is also that which gives motion, the objective of the movement, because the puller draws the pulled to itself. And therefore the first organ of the local movement must, in a soul-endowed being, be arranged at the same time as origin and objective of the movement. And there must be a stationary part in it, yet it must all the same be capable of starting movement; as in a circular movement. For a rotating body does not change its position as a whole except relatively, because its centre and its axis remain stationary and stay as far as the whole and its basis are concerned in the same spot. Its parts, however, change their position not only relatively but basically. Thus it is in every movement of the heart. For the heart remains fast in the same place in the body, but moves in the sense of expanding and contracting, in order to produce the movements of thrust and pull. In one way therefore it is moving, and in another stationary. With all this it must be carefully noted that the heart is not presented as a pump for the blood. Scholasticism has as yet no conception of the circulation of the blood. The movements of the heart's thrust and pull are rather regarded as a perpetually available supply, from which the soul when it desires to institute some definite thrust or pull in the body, transmits the necessary movement-action by means of the warmth that moves freely in the body, and the inner life-spirit, to the organ concerned. Noble and Ignoble Bodily Qualities The teaching of “the foundation of the senses,” the sense of touch, is very closely connected with the teaching concerning the heart. We differentiate between hard and soft, warm and cold, dry and moist, etc., not (like colours and sounds) through an organ which is itself without the qualities it perceives, but through our body which is provided with these qualities—but which has in the origin of the heart and lungs a general balance, and this enables it from “the golden mean,” to differentiate the extremes. The real organ of touch is, according to Thomas, the heart and lung region; the flesh is only a medium of touch—like the “transparent” in vision and the atmosphere in hearing. From the formation of this medium, through which we are connected with the elements—particularly, as “earth-clods,” with the heavy elements—deductions can be drawn concerning the “nobility” of individual man. In the Commentary on the 19th chapter of Aristotle's work on the sensibility of the senses (with respect to the treatment of the sense of smell) Thomas writes: Man has the most reliable sense of touch among all soul-endowed creatures, if in other senses he falls behind certain animals. Because of this he is the cleverest. And among the race of men we find from the quality of the sense of touch, and not of any other sense, that some people are endowed with talents and others not. For those people whose flesh is hard and who have in consequence a poor sense of touch are mentally ill-equipped; but those whose flesh is soft and whose sense of touch is consequently good, are mentally well-equipped. And the other beings endowed with souls have also harder flesh than man. To this it might be objected that the capacity of the spirit corresponds more with the excellence of sight than with that of touch, because sight is the more spiritual sense and reveals more numerous and more diverse sides of the senses. But against this must be said that for two reasons the excellence of the spirit corresponds with the excellence of the sense of touch: first, touch is the foundation of all the other senses; for the sense is obviously distributed throughout the whole body, and what is an instrument of every other sense is the instrument of touch. And touch is that by which anything is characterized as material. It follows from this that if someone has a better sense of touch, he has a more sensitive nature, and in consequence a better intellect; for excellence of the sense means a disposition to excellence of intellect. But from the fact that a man hears or sees better it does not follow that he plainly has more acute senses, or has a more sensitive nature, except in a particular respect. The other reason is that the excellence of the touch-sense follows the excellence of the whole constitution or of the balance. For since the instrument of touch cannot be free from the class of touchable qualities, because it is composed of the elements, it must thereby be “in potentia” to the extremes, so that it keeps the mean between them. Good composition of the body results in nobility of soul, because every form is proportioned to its matter. And from this follows that men with good sense of touch are of nobler soul and acuter mind. Touch is “Tactus,” tact! “Tact” as a psychophysical quality is for Thomas the basis of man's sense-nature, on which through the functioning of the intellectus agens and the intellectus possibilis he builds up the gothic cathedral of scholastic wisdom. How thoroughly “kneaded” the clod of earth is apportioned by God to each soul at birth—as delicate or coarse flesh—from this Thomas Aquinas, the scion of generations of highest nobility, the cousin of the Emperor Frederic II of Hohenstaufen, recognizes the “nobility of the soul” in each man. But this bodily delicacy is already a foretaste on earth of the quality of that spirit body which the blessed souls will receive after the day of Judgment, through the transfiguration of earthly bodies put off for a time at death: Because the Blessed soul will be noble and virtuous in the highest degree, in tune with the primeval principle of the world, the body united with it by God's disposition will be substantial in the noblest way, so that the soul can keep it completely in its control, wherefore it will be delicate and spiritual as a breath. It will also be distinguished by the noblest quality, the glory of clarity. And thanks to the virtue of the soul, this body will be incapable of being deflected from its construction by any agent; i.e. it will be impervious to all suffering. And because it will be completely obedient to the soul, as the tool is to the person who moves it, this body will be mobile. Transfigured bodies will therefore possess the four following characteristics: subtilitas, claritas, impassibilitas et agilitas ... (Compendium Theologica. Chap. 169.) A comparison of this “Anatomy” of transfigured bodies with Thomas' doctrine of the Hierarchies [p. 66 et seq.] shows that the transfigured body will resemble the Holy Ghost in spiritual substance, the first Hierarchy in the quality of light, the second in power, and the third in mobility. It will be “sicut Deus” and will have assumed the characteristics of pure Spirits. From Thomas' Teaching concerning the Passions But because substance, quality, virtue and mobility do not “in via,” on the earthly Pilgrim's road, have the perfection they will have “in patria,” in the Fatherland, the path to heaven must be fought for on earth by spiritual building as a guide to the soul's growth. In order to get at least an idea of the mighty edifice which in the second part of the Summa Theologica brings the whole medley of human passions under the influence of the virtues, some chapters from his Teaching concerning them are appended in conclusion. They make clear how Thomas throws the bridge from his knowledge of the body to the spirit world by means of “abstract affirmation.” Of Fear …in the passions of the soul the formal element is the movement of the power of desire itself, whereas the material element is the bodily metabolism; and both stand in a definite relationship with each other. Therefore, the bodily change begins after the likeness and standard of the desire-movement. Now Fear brings with it a certain contraction of the soul's desire-movement. The basis of it is that Fear arises from imagining a threatening Evil, which can with difficulty be driven away ... But that something can with difficulty be driven away comes from the inadequacy of strength ... The more inadequate the strength is, the less far can it reach. And so there results from the imagination itself, which produces Fear, a certain contraction in the desire; as we see in the dying, that nature withdraws into the inside on account of the insufficiency of strength, and as we see in the case of a community, that the citizens, when they are afraid, retire from the outer quarters of the town and concentrate as much as possible in the centre. And similarly with these contractions, which take place in the desires of the soul, there appears also in the body a contraction of warmth and life-spirits into the interior. ... but, as Aristotle says ... even if in one who is afraid the life-spirits are withdrawn from the outer organs to the inner, still the movement of the spirits in one who is afraid and one who is angry is not identical. For in an angry man on account of the warmth the subtlety of the life-spirits which arise from the desire for revenge, an inner movement takes place from the lower to the upper organs, whereby warmth and the spirits are collected round the heart. Hence it follows that the angry become skilful and bold to attack. But in the fearful, on account of the increased cold which arises from the imagined lack of strength, the spirits move from the upper to the lower organs, and so warmth and the spirits of life are not only not increased round the heart, but rather flee from it. Therefore, the fearful do not proceed promptly to attack, but run away. The man or animal that is always suffering, seeks every means to be rid of the trouble which causes him pain. Thus we see suffering animals belabouring themselves with mouth or horns. But the greatest help for everything, among animals, is warmth and the life-spirit; and therefore Nature in pain collects them into the inside, in order to use them in fending off the harmful. For this reason, Aristotle says ... that air is provided for the spirit and the warmth which are collected in the interior, through the voice; and therefore sufferers can scarcely suppress cries of pain. But in the fearful the movement is from the heart to the lower organs, and so Fear prevents the production of the voice, which takes place by the emission of the life-spirit upwards through the mouth. Hence Fear induces dumbness as well as trembling ... Danger of death works not only contrary to the soul's desires, but also contrary to Nature, wherefore in this kind of Fear there is not only a contraction of desire but also of the body's nature. The soul-endowed creature, when in imagining death, it withdraws the warmth inside behaves exactly as if it were in reality confronted with death; and therefore those who are a prey to the fear of death become pale ... But the evil which shame fears is not contrary to Nature, but only to spiritual desire, wherefore there follows a certain contraction in proportion to the spiritual desire, but not in proportion to bodily nature; and the soul keeps itself free from the movement of the life-spirits and the warmth, as if it were itself contracted, which results in their diffusion into the outer members. Hence those who are ashamed blush. ... the result of Fear is a contraction from the outer into the inner organs; wherefore the outer organs become cold. This gives rise to trembling, which is caused by the inadequacy of the strength which holds the limbs together. But such an inadequacy is chiefly the result of a lack of warmth, which is the instrument by which the soul produces movements, as Aristotle says. ... because with Fear the warmth leaves the heart, going from the upper to the lower organs, the fearful tremble most in the heart and in the limbs, which have a connection with the breast where the heart lies. Therefore, also the fearful tremble in voice particularly, because of the proximity of the windpipe to the heart; the lower lip also trembles and the whole lower jaw because of their connection with the heart. From this comes also the chattering of the teeth. For the same reason the arms and hands tremble ... but possibly also because these limbs are more flexible; which applies equally to the knees. In the category of bodily tools Fear as such is always of such a kind that it prevents the outer accomplishment on account of the lack of warmth, which through Fear occurs in the outer limbs. But in the sphere of the soul Fear, if it is moderate and does not confuse the reason too strongly, helps to produce good by causing a certain anxiousness and leads man to reflect and act more carefully. Nevertheless, if Fear so increases that it confuses the reason, it hinders accomplishment also in the province of the soul. (Summa Theologica, II. 1. Quaestio 44, from different sections.) Of Anger If we consider the nature of the genus—i.e., the nature of each man as a soul-endowed being, concupiscence is more natural to him than Anger, because by reason of a common Nature man has a certain tendency to desire what serves to maintain the life of his kind or of the individual. But if we consider human nature in the domain of the species, namely in so far as man is a rational being, then anger is more natural to him than desire, because anger is closer to reason than lust. ... If, finally, we consider the nature of one definite individual in accordance with his own temperament, then Anger is more natural than lust, because from a natural tendency to get angry, which comes from this temperament, Anger is much more easily let loose than lust or any other passion. For man is liable to be angry in proportion as his temperament is choleric. But among all juices, choler is the quickest roused, it—after all—resembles Fire; and so one who is liable to Anger because of his natural temperament, is quicker to become angry than one who is inclined to concupiscence is to become lustful ... … In the sphere of bodily temperament it is natural for man, according to his kind (as rational being), not to have any excess, either of Anger, or any other passion, because of the proper admixture of his temperament. But animals, since they are far removed from this temperate quality, and are extremes in one direction or another, are correspondingly addicted by Nature to excess of one or another passion, as the lion to boldness, the dog to anger, the hare to fear and others similarly. But in the domain of reason both anger and control are natural to man, since reason in one sense induces anger, by making the cause for it conscious, or in another sense assuages it, in so far as the angry man does not entirely obey the command of reason ... (Summa Theologica, I., i. Quaestio 46, 5.) …the bodily metabolism stands in a definite relationship to the rousing of desire ... Every desire strives more strongly towards its opposite, if it happens to be present [p. 123]. The rousing of anger, however, is caused by an inflicted insult, as well as by stubborn opposition, and thus the desire seeks to the utmost to retaliate for the insult by revenge. Hence the violence and impetuosity of irate movement. And because the movement does not occur in the manner of a retirement, corresponding with cold, but rather in the manner of an advance, corresponding with warmth, it causes in consequence a certain glow of the blood and life-spirits round the heart, which is the instrument of the soul's passions. For this reason, on account of the great Turmoil in the heart, which Anger implies, certain signs appear in the outer limbs of those who are angry. Thus Gregory says: “The heart inflamed by the pricks of Anger twitches, the body trembles, the tongue is tied, the face becomes hot, the eyes wild, and friends are no longer recognized; the angry man shouts with his mouth, but knows not what he says.” …Love is felt differently ... True, when a man experiences through insult a diminution of a beloved excellence, Love is felt more strongly; and the heart is more passionately stirred to banish whatever attacks the beloved object, as if the flame of love grew and became stronger through Anger. Nevertheless, the glow following the warmth of love is different from that of Anger; for the warmth of love is characterized by a certain sweetness and mildness; it extends to include the beloved possession, and so is assimilated to the warmth of the air and the blood. Wherefore those of sanguine temperament are more inclined towards Love; and it is also said that the liver, in which a certain blood-production takes place, urges one towards Love. The heat of Anger, on the other hand, is filled with a bitterness and desire to devour, because it urges one to punish what opposes it; and therefore it is assimilated to the heat of Fire and Choler. …As a large fire quickly goes out after the fuel is consumed, so Anger by its very violence, comes soon to an end. … although the reason makes use of no bodily organ for its own ends, bodily disturbances must nevertheless impede the rational judgment, because it is dependent for its functioning on the powers of the senses, whose activity is limited by bodily disturbance, as is seen in drunkenness or sleep. Now Anger produces a disturbance chiefly in the region of the heart, so that it is transmitted also to the outer limbs, and for this reason Anger of all the passions interferes most visibly with the judgment of reason. … one says of someone seized with sudden anger, that he is open, not because it is clear to him what to do, but because he acts openly without seeking any secrecy. This comes partly from the interference with the reason, which cannot differentiate what is to be hidden and what revealed, and cannot think sufficiently for the cunning required for concealment. But partly it comes also from the breadth of heart which is a quality of magnanimity and this is caused by Anger. Therefore, Aristotle also says of a man with large soul, in his Ethics, that he is an open hater and an open lover, and that he speaks and acts frankly. But concupiscence one calls underground and insidious, because for the most part the desired object of delight savours to a certain extent of disgracefulness and voluptuousness, and herein man prefers to remain unseen. But in those concerns which belong to manliness and excellence, man seeks to be frank. [Summa Theologica, II, 1. Quaestio 48, several sections.) Anger, like every other passion, according to Thomistic philosophy, is introduced into the Soul, not by reason of the Soul's own spiritual nature, but by reason of its being tied to the body—i.e., from outside, in so far as the whole, composed of soul and body, undergoes the passion. In the Paradisal condition of “justitia originalis,” the body was completely subject to the soul, whose lower powers, from which the passions rise, were subject to reason, and the reason to God. Through the Fall this condition of “original justice” was lost. Christ, who had no “passions” in the sense of Thomas' doctrine of the passions, because, for instance, his “Anger” was entirely the effluence of the Divine Will, and his “Love” entirely the “actio” of the presence of the Divine Spirit, has through his “Passion” opened up the way for man from out of the chains of the “passiones.” With the simple stress and the endless complexity of a Gothic cathedral, Thomas, in his doctrine of Virtue, with its base the Cross of the “passio Christi,” raises man towards heaven out of the fetters of their “passiones”—towards that condition of the future transfiguration, where the new body will be “impassibilis,” freed from the fetters of passion, [p. 180.] But Rudolf Steiner states that “in the 13th century the Christian principle of Redemption could not be found in the idea-world,” [p. 108.] Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy, the spiritual Goetheanum answers the question: “Where does Thomism dwell in the present day?” In the spirit of the Risen Christ, who in the form of a mighty wooden statue appears in the double-domed chamber of the Goetheanum, Rudolf Steiner in the last of his three Addresses could say: “The redeemed human reason, which has the real relationship with Christ, this forces itself upward into the spiritual world; and this process is the Christianity of the 20th century,—a Christianity strong enough to enter into the innermost recesses of human thinking and human soul-life.” [p. 108.] After seven centuries the Thomistic contribution to knowledge of the human intellect crucified in the body, towering up from the Gothic ground-plan of the Cross, gives way to the contribution of Rudolf Steiner, envisioning the body and releasing and awaking the soul, a contribution whose “Goetheanic” plan is related to the Gothic Cross, as Easter is to Good Friday. |
| 78. Fruits of Anthroposophy: Lecture VIII
06 Sep 1921, Stuttgart Translated by Anna R. Meuss |
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| When the results of Imagination are revealed, man's soul perceives—and I have already described this in these lectures—everything encompassed within his life from the time of birth as one cohesive stream. The ego grows beyond the here and now, sensing and experiencing itself within the whole river of life, from the time of birth. |
| As we begin to find ourselves, as we learn to express in summary form what we experience in our spirit, in our ego, we arrive at the whole of our self opened out and spread out, the self that encompasses temporality and eternity. |
| 78. Fruits of Anthroposophy: Lecture VIII
06 Sep 1921, Stuttgart Translated by Anna R. Meuss |
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The imaginative, inspired and intuitive perception I have attempted to describe to you presents to man the findings of supersensible investigations that guide him towards his own essential nature. It needs to be emphasized, however, that it is not a question of achieving Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition as such. These are just tools for research in the supersensible world, in the same way as scales, units of measurement, are used in the physical world. It is a question of developing these research tools in spiritual science in such a way that we take our starting point from something which is already present in our ordinary consciousness, in our everyday consciousness, in the consciousness on which ordinary science is based. We must, however, find the right way of rising to this ordinary consciousness with its potential for genuine ideas free from sensuality, ideas the mind is able to grasp. All it needs is to bring higher life into an element left unregarded in ordinary consciousness, and this will open the way to supersensible worlds. Anyone wishing to become a spiritual scientist himself must above all see to it that he holds in full awareness to the same element which is also needed for genuine research in the physical world, if such research is to yield results that are in accord with reality. What I have just told you really applies only to the present age. This epoch in human evolution, which started in the 15th century, has advanced to scientific research as such, and in handling this type of research has also established concepts in human consciousness that can be developed and given life in the way I have indicated. In earlier times quite different methods had to be used. Some hint of this has been given in references to the yoga system, etc., but these older ways can no longer be ours. Just as the things an adult person does in life cannot be the same as those a child achieves, so the means used by civilized 20th century man cannot be the same as those used in the ancient Eastern and Greek cultures. We have to start from pure thought, free from sensory elements, as I have tried to show in my Philosophy of Freedom. This sensation-free thinking is best developed—and this may sound paradoxical—by entering into the study of nature based on the scientific approach I have already referred to in these evening lectures. It was not without purpose that I spoke of Haeckel's approach, despite the fact that this has its faults, which I am able to see and admit. This is a particular method of immersing oneself in the evolution of animal and human life. If we strictly apply the discipline spiritual research has to demand with regard to the sense-perceptible world—living interaction of pure perception and pure thought—the results we arrive at for the organic world as it presents itself to external, sense-based empiricism are exactly those arrived at by Haeckel's method. To create a vivid picture of what is achieved by this approach, where external observation is penetrated with methodical thought, we must proceed as follows. We cannot in that case produce all kinds of speculations out of some kind of abstract thinking about a ‘vital force’ of the kind produced by neo-vitalists.1 Nor can we speculate on the basis of pure concepts as to whether there is a supersensible principle or some such thing behind the things we perceive outside us, when using our senses. No, we have to stick to the world of facts the way Haeckel and his followers did. Spiritual science specifically demands that the study of external nature must be limited to this area, limited in this sense, otherwise speculation about outer nature leads to nebulous mysticism. Inevitably I shall be accused of materialism. Such accusation may also be given a special twist by saying that I did previously present things from the materialistic point of view but later abandoned this approach. There can be no question of this. Such objections are foolish, coming from people who take a very literal view and are unable to enter into the whole spirit of spiritual-scientific research. It is exactly by limiting ourselves to phenomenology in the study of nature that we are in a position to practise the inner renunciation in our thinking activity which is necessary if we are not to follow some nebulous mysticism but consider the phenomena as they present themselves in the physical world. We shall then come to use thought activity merely as an instrument, a method of working, I would say, in our study of the outside world. In no way would it serve as some form of constitutive principle, but as something that can go no further in any statement made with regard to the sense-perceptible world than determine an order among the phenomena of that outer physical world so that it reveals its own secrets, which is of course entirely in the Goethean sense. In practising such renunciation we shall come up against the limit set in this field of research. At this point we do not embark on philosophical speculation, coming up with all kinds of ideas as to a transcendental element that is to be revealed. Instead, we begin to experience the inner struggles and conquests that will not induce speculative thought but instil an elixir of life into thought, as it were, so that thinking activity now becomes transformed into the perceptions which then appear in our Imaginations. Thinking will then be able to reach the world which it can never reach through speculation, but only by metamorphosis into supersensible perception. It is only by using such means to gain insight that man really comes alive to himself. It is by starting from exactly this type of thinking and by keeping it with him throughout that the spiritual scientist has to take everything he sees in imaginative perception and reduce it to the form of a pure idea. Then anyone will be able to follow what he presents in the form of ideas, provided they pay the right kind of attention to ordinary consciousness. Even the highest results obtained by the spiritual scientist can therefore be verified, and only lazy minds can insist that it is necessary to enter into the spiritual world oneself in order to verily those results. When the results of Imagination are revealed, man's soul perceives—and I have already described this in these lectures—everything encompassed within his life from the time of birth as one cohesive stream. The ego grows beyond the here and now, sensing and experiencing itself within the whole river of life, from the time of birth. As man advances to Inspiration, the world he lived in before birth, or before conception, opens up before him, and this is also the world he will live in when he has gone through the gate of death. In this way, the immortal element that is part of man's life becomes the object of his perception. In Intuition, finally, the prospect opens up of repeated past earth lives. The things anthroposophical spiritual science speaks of may therefore be defined as such that the individual steps needed to achieve these results are stated in every case, and that the results are verifiable, as I have said, because they have to be expressed in thought forms that are accessible to everyone. Initially, therefore, man is presented with the discoveries made in anthroposophical spiritual science that relate purely to human nature. As we begin to find ourselves, as we learn to express in summary form what we experience in our spirit, in our ego, we arrive at the whole of our self opened out and spread out, the self that encompasses temporality and eternity. We are able to do so by making the findings of spiritual science our own. That is how man finds himself, and it is for the time being the most significant outcome in quite general human terms. At the same time, however, the whole of man's consciousness is expanded. The findings made in spiritual science arise from thought processes that have been enlivened and re-formed and because of this also have an enlivening effect on human souls when taken into those souls and tested for their truth. As a result, human consciousness gains a new kind of insight into the world. Let me first of all briefly describe two of the life fruits arising out of this very expansion of consciousness, out of its intensification. Today, we face the burning social question. The elements which influenced social life right to the present day arose from indefinite and subconscious human instincts. Men established social systems that arose as though by a law of nature, out of all kinds of instinctive backgrounds. This is evident to anyone able to review social life with an unbiased mind. We are now living in an age when such instinctive contingencies in the social organism of humanity are no longer adequate. Just as the individual husbanding of resources became tribal economy, national economy and finally world economy, so the thinking applied to economics had to become more and more conscious. For modern man the necessity has arisen to consider the potential relationships between people involved in the economic sphere and altogether what goes on between people who have to get along together in social life. It has to be admitted that these are complex issues. When the need arose to progress from instinctive to clear consciousness in this field, attempts were made to do this from the point of view which has come to be the scientific way of thinking over the last centuries. I think there is no need here to pay homage yet again to the scientific approach that evolved as the proper one to explore the secrets of external nature. Where the secrets of external nature are concerned this method which has arisen from the teaching of Copernicus, of Galileo, has certainly proved fruitful. Mankind has got well used to this method in the course of recent centuries, using it to bring clarity into a system of nature but dimly perceived with the aid of the senses. Then the necessity arose to get a clear picture also of human relationships in social life. It is not surprising that people first of all applied the skills acquired in the study of external nature to these human relationships. That is how our views on economics and social economics have arisen, ranging from those merely promulgated from professorial chairs to what millions upon millions of people have come to believe, and finally to Marxism. I have discussed this in my Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage.2 Efforts were made to understand how capital has its functions, to analyse labour as a factor in the social context, and the effects of the circulation, production and consumption of goods. All these things form part of a highly complex situation, and the whole thing presents itself to the soul in living processes, I would say, with infinite potential. Even the best of scientific methods will not be adequate for the processes discernible here, and it is because they have not been adequate and nevertheless have been persisted with in the effort to penetrate the social life that we are today finding ourselves in such a wretched situation on the widest scale, for the whole world. Anyone wanting to go deeper than the surface and penetrate to the depths of our social problems will of course realize that they have to do with what I have just tried to present to you. Social forms cannot evolve out of the kind of thinking that has proved effective in science. The kind of thinking however that works its way through to Imagination, taking hold of something objective and coming to expression as something that is alive and astir rather than at rest—a process offering infinite potential within a relatively narrow sphere or also covering a large area—such a process will penetrate this changeable life that has to do with capital, labour, economics, etc. It will be able to come to grips with what is alive in the social order of man, and that really is not surprising, for the things to be discerned in the life of mankind do after all arise from within man. The inner life of man is the life of soul and spirit, or at least it is governed by soul and spirit. When we come upon the social order we therefore come upon something spiritual. No wonder it needs spiritual methods to penetrate social issues. Ladies and gentlemen, forgive me if I bring a personal note into this now—but it was this which gave me courage to look for the spirit where it reveals itself in the immediate intercourse of man's social life. I did so on the same basis on which I wrote my Philosophy of Freedom, my Theosophy and my Occult Science—an Outline. That is how I came to take the road that led to my Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage. I speak with a personal note, but behind this personal note lies my objective conviction as regards the way man can gain insight into the social order, an order that he must create very consciously today, which of course means out of the spirit. That is the one thing. The other—I am merely giving examples of the life fruits yielded by anthroposophical research, and I could give many such examples—the other thing I want to mention is something we may encounter when considering the human organism. We see this before us in the first place in its outer form. The enveloping part of this outer form hides the internal organs. In physiology and biology we study the morphology, the structure, of these inner organs. There is no other way so long as we stay within the context of science as we know it today. In reality, however, the lungs, stomach, heart, liver, kidneys, all the organs of man are not as they present themselves to the eye when it looks at them in their enclosed form, in a structure that on the whole, I would say, is in the resting state, particularly in so far as we perceive them with our senses. No, these organs merely pretend to have such a configuration, for in the living human being the individual organs are constantly alive and stirring. They are anything but organs at rest in a finite form, they are living processes. In fact, we should not really speak of a lung, a heart, of kidneys and a liver. We should speak of a heart process, the sum total of heart processes, the sum total of lung processes, the sum total of kidney processes. Everything that goes on there is in a constant process of metamorphosis, though this is so much shut away that the whole may well be taken for a fixed form, and indeed has to be taken as such from an external point of view. From a view that only sees this form, a form that really only reveals the outer aspect, we need to advance to the living process, to something that fundamentally speaking changes into something else at any moment in these organs, to whatever it is that really gives rise to the process of life out of these organs. This cannot be done by using our senses; we can only achieve it through an inner vision that is alive and astir, and this is given in imaginative perception. Social processes are such by nature that they run away from us in their complexity, as it were, when we approach them with scientific concepts, and the processes in our lungs, heart, liver, kidneys are such that they really hide their inner nature if we apply those ordinary scientific concepts to them. We penetrate into those processes that have shut in upon themselves through Imagination. On the one hand. Imagination is able—if I may put it in such ordinary terms—to run after those volatile complex social processes. On the other hand it is able to resolve the resting form falsely apparent in human organs into the ever changing life of organic processes. These are then perceived directly, not arrived at by speculation or deduction. For in scientific research based on the senses, thinking has to limit itself to what presents itself in the phenomena. Beyond that it has to transform itself into a living, supersensible view. It is only then that it enters into the reality of what goes on there, hidden from sensory perception also where individual organic processes are concerned. This is the way to achieve fertilization of science-based medicine, a discipline given full recognition by spiritual science. We can achieve this with what spiritual science is able to add to that science-based medicine. Spiritual science does not wish to ally itself with quackery, with the mystery mongers in therapeutics. No, in this field, too, spiritual science wants to take into account all genuine research, genuine findings based on sensory perception, but it wants to take them further, to those secrets of life that we also need to uncover if we want to enter into the wholeness of life. Such penetration will then yield fruits again for life itself as we meet it in sickness and health, or in human community life. It will make it possible to perceive the fruits of life that arise out of the perception gained in Anthroposophy of elements beyond the world of the senses. All this then comes together in something I should like to define as follows. People often think that materialism can be overcome by abandoning the whole world of matter to the outside world, in a way saying goodbye to it in one's mind and then ascending into an abstract spiritual sphere, into ‘cloud-cuckoo-land,’ and mystery-monger around there. They consider material life as something inferior which we must rise above. Oh yes, if we do this we shall rise to a state of mind that is very pleasant to be in, a kind of Sunday pleasure for man's spirit after the rough weekday work we devote ourselves to in the material world that we do after all inhabit. That is not the soil on which genuine anthroposophical science can be established. Anthroposophy aims to grasp the spirit in such a way that once it has got hold of it in its working, its creative activity, it can follow it right down into the finest tendrils of material life. It is important for a spiritual science of the kind I am speaking of to do more that establish that in addition to a body consisting of brain, lung, liver and so on man also has a soul and a spirit. That would not take us far beyond talking around things in mere words, for it leads to abstract notions of the world which we inhabit between birth and death. The aim of spiritual science is to immerse itself in everything with the spirit it has taken into itself, to say how spirituality, something essentially spiritual, is active in every single human organ, how the essential nature of lung, liver, stomach, etc. is comprehended in the spirit, how spirit and soul are present everywhere in the whole of the human organism, directing the light of the spirit to every single cell, so that there shall be nothing that is not illumined with the light of the spirit. Then it is no longer a question of matter on one side and spirit on the other; then a unity has arisen, joining what in abstract terms is seen as spirit on the one side and matter on the other. And the same applies to the social life. We must let the spirit enter right into reality, and ourselves enter into reality with it. Then the human soul achieves profundity and the ropes and strings I have spoken of in these evening lectures3 enter into man's awareness. These are the ropes and strings that stretch from the innermost being of man to the innermost nature of the cosmos, the spiritual connection between man and cosmos and, as we become conscious of them, a living flowing movement arises, an inhalation and exhalation of the cosmos, I would say. Something which otherwise is grasped only in theory, in abstract concepts, becomes living experience within free spirituality; it becomes transparent as only ideas can be and on the other hand also as alive as only life itself is, and as free as only the freest of actions can be, yet wholly objective, though in this case the objective element has to be grasped in free spirituality. This is why it is necessary to enliven the faculties that normally fight their way to the surface unconsciously in man, enliven them out of this spiritual research, this insight into the spirit. People who are artists justifiably feel a certain aversion when it comes to the usual academic studies. And modern aesthetics, evolved out of the thinking of more recent times, a form of thinking habitual to science, is also something artists avoid—justifiably so, for it is something abstract, something that leads away from art rather than into it. Spiritual science does not lead to such abstract concepts. It brings to life what to begin with was merely concept, idea, and this in turn enlivens the other faculties of man. This is why the soil from which this spiritual science is growing is also able to produce genuinely artistic work, in a truly natural way. The art we cultivate at Dornach—tomorrow I will be showing some samples of this in pictures—and anything else drawn from the same soil from which spiritual science has arisen, eurythmy for instance4—has nothing to do with translating some idea or another into an artistic approach. No, it is merely the soil that is the same, this soil being the living creativity of the whole human being.On one occasion he will evolve ideas and that will be one branch; another time the other branch, the artistic one, will arise from the same root. That is also why I have always felt extremely uncomfortable when tendencies to produce allegories, to symbolize, emerged within the anthroposophical movement. Anything artistic will have to arise from the same source as Anthroposophy, but it is not Anthroposophy translated into art. And so a particular life-fruit is brought forth in the sphere of art, like those briefly referred to in the field of social life and in medicine. If we consider how man is there brought together with what is immortal and eternal within him, with the forces that give him form out of the spiritual world, we will also understand why the insight in experience and experience in insight gained through Anthroposophy also has to do with deeper religious feeling. In an age which has grown so indifferent to religion we need fundamental religious forces again. We need ways that lead to the areas of spiritual experience where fertilization may be found for man's artistic work, for everything to do with the value and dignity of man. Such fertilization comes from the centre that is God. It is a perversion of the truth to ascribe sectarian tendencies to Anthroposophy, for it certainly has no such intentions. It is a perversion of the truth to believe that it wants to be a new religious foundation. It does not want to do any such thing, for the simple reason that it is endeavouring to understand the progress of human evolution the way it really is. Here we must say that the divine powers that fashioned the world and guided the evolution of man were in earlier times understood in accord with men's capacity to understand. We need to progress to different metamorphoses of perception and of motivations; we need to make our souls appreciate the eternal in accord with the thinking of modern times. Of course, spiritual science will not be speaking of a Christ other than the Christ who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha. But spiritual science has to speak of the qualities of insight and perception which it considers necessary in the 20th century, also where the Christ event is concerned. People who base themselves on some particular confession may feel afraid that the ground will be taken from under their feet by Anthroposophy. They have to be asked again and again: Is someone who is all the time afraid that the truths of Christianity may be diminished really someone who truly professes Christianity? Or is it the person who knows that however many millions of discoveries are made on the basis of the physical world, the soul or the spirit, these can only make the genuine truths of Christianity appear to the soul in even greater glory? No one would ask why there is nothing in the Bible about America, and someone who might have wanted to raise objections to the discovery of America by basing himself on the Bible would have been just like someone who today wanted to fight the views put forward by anthroposophical spiritual science by basing himself on the Bible. It is necessary to take an honest look at these things and think them through in honesty. Otherwise the element contained in denominational religion must always be a drag on genuine research. Yet if genuine research penetrates to the spirit in the way anthroposophical spiritual science wishes to do, it will yield the very life fruit that consists in new life coming to the religious element in the human soul. We need to bring the findings made in our researches in the different worlds into harmony with the element which represents our religious awareness and feeling. And we do not take anything away from the religions when we try to establish harmony, justifiable harmony, a harmony based on insight, between their truths and what has been shown to be the quality of knowledge in different epochs. Our age in particular shall also have this life fruit out of anthroposophical work, a deepening of a religious life which has grown indifferent. When this fruit ripens, it will be from this direction that the warmth and enthusiasm will come which we need if we are to make progress as Christians in this time of decline. Any insights we gain into social life, into the human organization, anything we may produce in the sphere of art: all this can only further the evolution of man if there is the warmth of man's innermost nature and his creative power behind it. This is to be found in the truly religious feelings of mankind. Opposition to these spiritual scientific researches is particularly powerful at the present time. This is profoundly bound up with the fact that contact has gradually been lost with reality. On the one hand, attention is directed to a nature which has had all spirit removed from it, so that modern science is not able to perceive it in its true complexion but only in its outer form perceptible to the senses. On the other hand, attention turns to the spiritual world, perhaps in mere certainty of feeling—I spoke of this yesterday—but here men are unable to get beyond abstract concepts. All of this has its root in the fact that people have gradually grown too lazy to want to grasp the spiritual in spiritual freedom, in free spiritual experience, in inner activity. Yet that is the only way in which the spiritual can be tracked down in every nook and cranny of the material world. Science finds its truths by very close adherence to outer events, basing them on experience, on experiment. No effort is made to think beyond what random experiments, random observation reveal, and a habit has developed of replacing the former dogma of revelation—as I put it in my earliest writings5—with the dogma of evidence, evidence of the outer senses. As a result we have grown dissatisfied in our heart of hearts. Within the soul's capacity for experience, we have got out of the habit of gaining the objective experience that is independent of anything in the outer world; we do not have free inner experience. This free inner experience is what we must seek above all else if we want to achieve genuine spiritual research. It is also what people are now resisting most strongly. I would like to give you an example, not with the intention of using a recently published essay to settle accounts in these lectures with regard to some objection or other which has been raised against spiritual science in the light of Anthroposophy. No, it is not my intention in these lectures to deal thus directly with any particular opponent, least of all with what has been said in the essay I am referring to. The writer of that essay is dealing with something quite different from anthroposophical spiritual science, about which he knows nothing. He has tried to analyze it on the basis of hearsay and after glancing at perhaps a single book and hearing certain reports, in perfect sincerity—this one has to admit—and to the best of his ability. I do not want to discuss the points that essay makes with regard to spiritual science. I merely want to consider the issue in the light of cultural and contemporary history. This extraordinarily distinguished author6 refers to the exercises he has been told I describe, exercises to enable man truly to take the path to the spiritual world in his soul life. And he has obviously also heard or read that the initial, very elementary exercises consist in spending five minutes in reflection on a neutral object. A thought is held on to in genuine inner freedom, when one is under no compulsion and merely follows something one has willed oneself. To indicate what really matters I therefore said one could use a pin or a pencil, for the object one was thinking of was irrelevant. It is not a matter of becoming absorbed in the thought content, but of the thought process being held on to for five minutes, the thought process being transferred to the sphere of free activity. We are not used to keeping our thinking activity within the sphere of free activity in ordinary life. Turning our thoughts to an object we want to rivet attention on that object; we keep it in our thoughts for as long as it holds our attention. It will never be possible to enter into spiritual science in this way. On the contrary, such an approach turns us aside more and more from supersensible study and intuition.7 It is quite typical for a person who insists on continuing in the decline that shows itself in the present time to say: ‘I could not manage that at all at present; and I am afraid, yes, I am afraid, that however much I try to overcome myself I shall never learn it. On the other hand I have been accused of being so engrossed in an object that held my interest that for more than five minutes the rest of the world no longer existed for me.’ That is exactly the opposite path. If we get so engrossed in an object that the rest of the world no longer exists for us, we are given up to that object, we have relinquished our freedom to that object. That is the essential point: to take an object that does not rivet our attention, and keep that object in awareness for five minutes out of inner strength and freedom. It therefore is enormously typical when someone says: T think I prefer to leave such a faculty to people who have nothing in their lives that holds sufficient genuine interest for them to keep their attention for five minutes.’ This is a famous man of the present age, and there is so much that holds his attention, keeping him unfree, over and over again, for five minutes and probably more—let us assume this, to give him his due—that he never gets to a point where he is able to hold a thought complex in his mind for five minutes. This he intends to leave to people who are not as enthralled with the outside world as he is. It also shows him to be completely bound up with the modern point of view, the modern way of thinking and feeling which has evolved and which I have defined for you tonight. That is a long way from the essential aim of spiritual science which is to enter with one's mind into the sphere of free thought activity. Another example I have given of the way man may enter into such a sphere of independent thought is the meditation on the Rose Cross I have described in the second part of my Occult Science. You can look it up there, how the exercise should be done. The author I am referring to had the following to say on this: ‘The cross does not infrequently come before my mind's eye, without volition’—so again it does not come when called to mind in freedom, but involuntarily—‘but it is not a black cross, say of polished ebony, but an absolutely ordinary crude gallows tree, a dirty grey in colour. No circlet of seven radiant red roses hangs on this cross, but a cadaverous man, sorely beaten, who is going through the tortures of death, and indeed the tortures of hell.’ So you give an exercise that is designed to lead to inner freedom of thought, and this person can think of nothing else but what comes to mind under the powerful compulsion of his whole upbringing, out of the whole of his life habits, and he even considers this to be the acceptable, the right thing. With such an attitude of mind it will never be possible to reach what spiritual science really has to offer. That man had no need to refer specifically to the cross I spoke of in my Occult Science. It could, for instance, have happened to him that someone somewhere spoke of the cross formed by the transom and mullion in a window, describing this to him. And in that case, too, he might have said: ‘You have no right to speak of that cross in the window, for what comes to mind for me is not a cross formed by transom and mullion and painted a reddish brown, say, but always a black cross that is a crude common gallows tree’ and so on. And if someone were to try and tell the man how a cross is used in analytical geometry, the cross formed by ordinate and abscissa, he would stop them from doing so. Even if Einstein were to draw the abscissa and ordinate for him, he would conceive of nothing else but his crude gallows tree. We must consider these things with regard to their true content and it will become obvious what forces are present in our time that lead in directly the opposite direction to what is such an urgent necessity today with regard to social issues, religious and scientific issues—as I hope, Ladies and Gentlemen, you have been able to see. It is not surprising, then, that the author in question also says something else that is indeed most curious. I have presented the Akashic Record, as I have called it,8 as something through which man tries to develop his thoughts to such an extent that he is able to survey cosmic evolution through inner activity. What I had to depend on was that when such things are described they are received in an inner soul state that is kept alive, with this soul state elevated in free spirituality to what is open to supersensible perception. But this man said the following: ‘And—believe it or not—I do not even find it difficult to abstain. Even if Dr Steiner were to present me with an illustrated special edition of the Akashic Record, I would not bother to read it.’ Well, this man seems to imagine an illustrated special edition of the Akashic Record may be presented to him, so that he can be sure to stay passive, so that there would be no question of anyone counting on his inner soul activity. It certainly is necessary for anyone wishing to participate in working on the powers for a new beginning coming into our time to view such things dispassionately, without antipathy, seeing them as they are—all the elements of transition and decline. Many people stand there and are not even aware that they have these powers of transition in them, and a great many others rush after them—thousands and thousands of people. They are keen to follow such passive religious natures because they want to remain passive, because they do not want to take hold of the one thing that is so essential: objectivity, the essential nature of objectivity—that is, to take hold of the supersensible in free spirituality. That requires an active inner soul state, a free inner soul state. That is what I want to say in conclusion, summing up: Anthroposophical spiritual science aims to foster supersensible insights, insights that lead to the kind of results I have briefly defined these last few days. Anthroposophical spiritual science does not want to lead up to dead concepts that tell us only of a dead outer reality. Anthroposophical spiritual science does not want to limit scientific work, the discovery of truth, to the kind of results an abstract intellect gathers like wilting leaves from the outer reality perceptible to the senses, wilting leaves that dry up as they are translated to the human soul and in drying up paralyse man's inner strength. Anthroposophical spiritual science wants its findings to be true life fruits, not wilting leaves, life fruits that may become spiritual nourishment for the living soul, just as the circulating blood provides nourishment for the body. For this to be possible, spiritual science needs to breathe the air of freedom. Perception has to be taken into the spiritual atmosphere of freedom, a freedom that is able to awaken the greatest depths of the human soul and make them perceptive, and at the same time also awaken them to the ability to act in genuine freedom, act in a way that may establish harmony, social harmony among men. Certain things will have to happen in the social organism that of necessity must arise from the present and into the immediate future. In the final instance this has to arise from what man attains to in full conscious awareness and free perception, is able to experience in his innermost soul as the independent life fruit of such perception, and is able in turn to bring into human society as a whole, in social action. This will lead to mankind out of the present and into the immediate future through powers that are not those of decline but of a new beginning; it will lead mankind to a new element that is human, healing and creative.
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| 68b. The Circular Flow of Man's Life within the World Of Sense, Soul And Spirit: How Do We Understand Illness and Death?
21 Jan 1907, Nuremberg |
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| The “I”, that power that enables him to do so - let us say the “ego body” - is the fourth link in the human being, so that we initially recognize four links in the human being. |
| When a person sleeps, the physical body and the etheric body lie in bed. The astral body with the ego has stepped out. What does this astral body do at night? If we look at this, it sheds light on the nature of the entire human activity in the world. |
| 68b. The Circular Flow of Man's Life within the World Of Sense, Soul And Spirit: How Do We Understand Illness and Death?
21 Jan 1907, Nuremberg |
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We speak of the mysteries of the world. Fundamentally, man is surrounded by such mysteries [of existence everywhere]; [and] we can ask questions about every thing and every being that lead deep, deep into the depths of life and being. But there are certain individual, particularly towering pillars within this mysteriousness of existence, and among these are undoubtedly those that are designated by the two words that are to be the subject of our consideration today: illness and death. If life is a mystery to many people – illness and death intrude into this life to make it quite mysterious to us, with death as that which confronts life as its opposite, and illness as a troublemaker. And not only in this respect are these two things mysteries of life, in that they encourage us to reflect, but they are mysterious because they cause us worry, and for many people fear and trepidation. Therefore, we should not be surprised that illness and death have always, since time immemorial, challenged the research instinct of all those who have wanted to reflect on existence, on the world. A long list of great thinkers would have to be cited here if I wanted to tell you everything that has been said about the two concepts of illness and, in particular, death. That cannot be my task. We want to penetrate into these two questions in the sense of spiritual science. Just so that you can see what a beautiful task awaits us, let us look at a few things that have been taught by important people in order to approach these things more closely. Schopenhauer, the philosopher of pessimism, who reflected on the suffering of life and was touched by it, said that life is an unfortunate thing and that he first wanted to get to the bottom of it by thinking about it. He has put forward a variety of ideas about death. But if we look at them just a little, we see that even a deep thinker can easily fail on these questions. One thing seems grotesque to us: Schopenhauer tried to open up a kind of emotional understanding of humanity towards death. He said: Man is afraid of death. Truly, since life is such a bad thing, he does not need it, because death is a release. If one feels that life is a painful thing, then death is consoling. One can say to oneself, it puts an end to it. — Thus Schopenhauer saw in the bad sides of life a consolation in the face of death, and in death a consolation in the face of the bad thing of life. In another part of his writings, he attempts to express himself on the necessity of death in a manner that is not so grotesque, but not much more fortunate. There he lets the earth spirit speak. [He says:] I need space for my many living creatures, so I have to clear them away, so I need death. Thus, for the guiding spirit of the earth, death is merely a matter of space. Eduard von Hartmann says in his last book: It is in the nature of living beings, [and] especially of man. I would like to point out that today we will only be talking about humans in the sense of spiritual science when it comes to death and illness. The world's mysteries are so diverse, and only those who want to put everything in the same category can apply what has been researched about one thing to something else. For the genuine spiritual researcher, things that appear to be the same, such as illness and death, are so very different for different beings. Hartmann says that man is so constituted that at a certain time in his life he loses his understanding of his environment, and a younger generation must follow that has this understanding. Man would be a stranger within the world if he were not taken away. — You see, again nothing substantial! What are we to make of this? But one word shines through the ages, which for thousands and thousands of people has contained a kind of solution to the problem of death, albeit a word that is not even understood in its literal sense today; it comes from Paul and is:
It is understandable that a person with today's concepts and ideas, who has little knowledge of spiritual science, cannot become familiar with such a word. He has learned to see death and illness as natural processes, and it is completely foreign to him to see something [purely] natural that takes place within the world of purely natural processes as an effect of something moral, of something that depends on the arbitrariness and free will of man, of sin. That something moral can be the cause of something organic is far removed from the thinking of our time. If the apostle's word were correctly understood according to the wording, it would be quite futile to talk about it to our contemporaries. But it is not even understood correctly according to the wording. The Bible is a strange book of secrets, and those who think they understand it best usually penetrate its spirit the least. We shall gain a better insight into our subject and a better understanding of it if we first try to understand it entirely from the mind of its author and from the thinking of the people from whose circle the Apostle Paul grew, the ancient Hebrew scholars. In this context, “sin” means something quite different from what we call moral transgression today. And anyone who understands sin in the way that it is understood in today's church doctrine does not understand this word. We arrive at an understanding if we imagine what Paul called a doctrine of development. I would like to tell you about it not in a scholarly way, but only in outline. It is a superstition of modern science that the word “development” was only discovered in the last few centuries. People have always talked and thought about development, about the emergence of the perfect from the imperfect. It is just that the secret scientists of the time from which Paul grew up said: living beings represent a sequence of stages, from the most imperfect being up to the most perfect being. The human organism was literally thought of as a goal towards which all other living beings strive. They become more and more perfect in order to become like the human organism. But what is the point of the human organism being structured in this way and the other living beings having it as their goal? For Paul, it makes sense that the human body should contain a soul with independence. He said: If a soul is to live, if it can find within itself the impulse to act, to make decisions out of itself, which is expressed in the word “freedom” or “arbitrariness” as a center of the being, then it must have just such a body. Therefore, the whole series of living beings would have to take this path under the influence of this freedom. The human organism is organized in such a way that a free soul can express itself independently within it. What is an independent soul? Look at the universe, the cosmos. Look at the living beings! They are all connected to their environment; this connection becomes looser the higher we go in the evolutionary scale. The living beings become more independent, and humans are the most independent of all. He confronts the cosmos as a being that can act independently. But he, too, has outgrown this universe. Is it not the case that we can make the whole thing clear to ourselves through a very simple comparison? Take a glass of water; there are many drops in it. Each drop is contained in this mass of water without us being able to distinguish it from the mass. But if you single it out, if it becomes independent, then it presents itself as something independent of the whole, and if it were to develop forces within itself, then we could compare its position to the position of man in the cosmos. As long as the drop is in the whole of the water in it, it expresses those currents that come out of the mass. Having become independent, it has an effect back, like an opposing force on the mass. It is the same with human beings, that is, to be “independent”. But if everything were to stand out as something special, it would destroy the whole harmony, and it must destroy it if harmony is not found again. Thus, from a certain point of view, the human being does go through the universe, opposing it. In other words, it is rooted in Paul's theory of development that the human being, in order to achieve independence, enters into a kind of hostile relationship with the universe. Paul says: independence and freedom must arise out of egoism. If man had never been led to egoism, he could not become free. A being that was always being led by the hand could never become an egoist and could never become free. This liberation, which is built on the basis of egoism, this acceptance of selfishness by a being, is what Paul calls sin. For him, selfishness is the original sin. And so it was connected with the being of man, which developed into sin, that a body was organized through which the whole process of development led to this sin. But such a body could not help being mortal because of its detachment. So the essence of man requires a mortal body for its independence. Whoever penetrates into this will see that what has been said completely coincides with Paul's view. And that will give us the mood for what we have to consider. Another person has also said a beautiful word about death: Goethe. In the essay: “Nature, we are surrounded and embraced by it” — there is also the word: Nature is alive everywhere, it has invented death in order to have much life. — These are to be introductory words to give you an indication of the direction from which we now want to penetrate our topic in the sense of spiritual science. If we want to understand these two important events of human life, illness and death, we have to look at the essence and nature of the human being; and so, with your permission, I will repeat what this essence of the human being is. I can only do this very briefly. What the naturalistic [materialistic] thinker, the sensory perception, regards as the whole of the human being, his physical body, is for spiritual science only a part of the human being. Man has this physical body in common with all so-called inanimate beings that surround us. In this physical body, all substances and forces are found together, or precisely such forces as are at work out there in the so-called inanimate world. It is the same as the mineral. At the end of the eighteenth century and in the first half of the nineteenth century, it was also scientifically accepted to say in a certain direction: That which lives is not merely a combination of substances and forces, but rather that which lives has a special power within itself, which brings the substances and forces of the inanimate world into very specific combinations, brings them into inner activity, kindles them into life; and this was called the vital force. Thus, it was said, humans, animals, and plants have vital force within them. And this makes it so that not only a chemical process takes place in the stomach and in the blood mixture, but that the whole thing is alive. The word “vital force” has become a term that could only be pronounced in the second half of the nineteenth century, and from a certain direction one was regarded as backward, as a fool. But today, for a number of years, one is not such a great fool [before science] when one utters this word. For those who today consider the somewhat advanced state of the science of life phenomena cannot help but say to themselves: there is more to beings than a mere chemical-physical process. And many are of the opinion that they are speaking of a life force. They know that this is speculation. Spiritual science does not take this speculative point of view. It takes the view that there is a higher experience, that man is able to see more when certain powers slumbering in his soul are awakened. Comparison with the man born blind and the man who has received sight: the one who does not see can never decide whether something is there or not, but the one who sees it can. There is no possibility of speaking of limits to knowledge. For man makes the discovery that he has as many worlds around him as he has organs to perceive them. This is how spiritual science differs from what is called science today: it starts from discussing things that enter our existence as something new through the awakening of organs. Imagine there is a piano here, a player is playing, and a deaf person is sitting next to it. They cannot hear anything that the player draws from the strings. But there is a method of making them perceptible to him, these things that are happening. You put paper tabs on the strings, they are thrown off by playing, and he can get a certain idea of what the others hear. The relationship between the world of sounds as perceived by the deaf man, who can only hear them indirectly through the little tags, and the world of the hearing, is the same as that between what is investigated within the material world and what can be experienced by those with higher organs. And the only thing that this claims as its assertion is the truth that there have always been people who had such higher organs and saw another world. Not through speculation, but through a higher perception, spiritual science comes upon what it now calls the life body or ether body, similar to the speculated life force. This is what brings the inanimate substances, the mere chemical-physical processes, to life and what man has in common with the plant and animal world. The third link in the human being is the so-called astral body. It is the carrier of all that we call pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, affects, passions, drives and so on. Plants do not yet have this astral body, only animals and humans. The being that has it relates to the outside world differently. Today, even scholars often blur the difference between plants and animals by saying that plants also have certain sensations, and [they] refer to the fact that certain plants contract their leaves when a stimulus is applied. This is amateurish talk compared to spiritual science. If it only mattered that a being responds with a movement from within when it is stimulated, one could also claim that blotting paper, which absorbs ink, is a sentient being. These are things that, because they occur, are highly dangerous because they confuse the senses of man when they are put forward by authorities, as they are today. What is true is only that what belongs to feeling is a reflection of the external stimulus, not what only moves and gives an answer. Not only must the being do something under the influence of a stimulus, but a reflection of the stimulus must take place in the innermost being. Not only must the tip of a needle touch us and we must defend ourselves against it, but the pricking must be linked to an inner process - pain or pleasure; that is part of it. A being that has such inner processes has an astral body. Man has this in common with the animal. Man has become the pride of creation by being able to say “I” to himself. The “I”, that power that enables him to do so - let us say the “ego body” - is the fourth link in the human being, so that we initially recognize four links in the human being. We can disregard the higher links. We will understand the conditions that arise in the course of a human life, as well as illness and death, if we get to know the relationships between these four members a little better. Both today's lecture and tomorrow's are based on a correct presentation of the different members of the human being. We can do this by following human development. This can only be done sketchily here; it is intended as a suggestion. We start from the physical birth of the human being and realize what this represents. Before this birth, the human germ is closed off from the outside world. It rests in the mother's body; the physical human body is surrounded on all sides by another physical matter, and birth means that this enveloping matter is pushed back and that which has developed as organs in the human body is directly exposed to the external physical world. Thus, physical birth is a pushing back of the physical shell and a free emergence of the human body into the physical environment. Spiritual science does not just speak of this birth of man, but also of others; and this must be understood. Until this physical birth, the physical human body is surrounded by an outer physical shell that nourishes and protects it, sending its juices into it. What happens to the physical human body until physical birth happens to the etheric body until a certain point in human development. Even after the human being has been physically born, the etheric body is still enveloped by a protective motherly shell of etheric matter for the initiate. When the human being is physically born, he is not yet born eterally. The birth of the etheric body does not take place as quickly as the physical birth; it happens gradually; little by little [the etheric body pushes the etheric covers away from itself, little by little] it emerges, at the time when the young person is undergoing the so-called change of teeth, towards the seventh year. Just as the physical body is surrounded by the physical sheath until physical birth, so the etheric body is surrounded by the protective etheric sheath until the birth of the etheric body. For spiritual science, the change of teeth is something very similar to the physical birth as seen from the outside. And when the etheric body is born, the astral body has not yet lost its protective shell; and a third birth takes place. The third birth of the protective shell takes place in a similar way to the reining back of the etheric shell with the maturing of the human being in a sexual way, with sexual maturity. This is a third birth. Just as the physical body is exposed on all sides to physical impressions, so the etheric body in its nature and the astral body in its nature are exposed to their external world. We have to take these facts of [spiritual science] as a basis if we want to understand human development. Therefore, we will recognize that the time from birth to the seventh year is a particularly important one for the development of the physical body. Not because the physical body does not develop afterwards. But the physical body develops in a very specific direction up to the seventh year, to a very specific point. [And] something happens in terms of physical human development that is characteristic: this is the hardening, [the] consolidation of the physical body. The human physical body is characterized by undergoing a process of hardening. The solid parts that serve as its support are bones. And from the softest parts to the solid bone system, there is a process of solidification, and this process of solidification goes through its main characteristics up to the seventh year; and the change of teeth, the acquisition of one's own teeth, is the conclusion of the solidification. There the power of solidification has reached its conclusion, has put out what it can work into the physical body in terms of solidification. This is important. One must realize that this working into the solid structure happens more and more, and with the pushing out of one's own teeth, it reaches a kind of conclusion. The power that gives us teeth works within us. The previous teeth are inherited; what lies within us, in our own personality, in terms of creative power, is expressed [in the end] in our own teeth. When this point has been reached, the life force at work in the human being no longer has the constraint that it would have to have. Now the etheric body pushes back the protective etheric covering, becomes free and works differently. Now it mainly does the things in the body alone that are its task: growth, enlargement of the body and so on, whereas before it was busy creating forms. Now what is predisposed is increased. Now, in fact, until sexual maturity, the etheric body is the dominant factor in human development, the etheric body that has become free. It again puts a full stop, it pushes the power of forming, of growing, to the point where growth transcends itself. Just as the power of solidification has been fulfilled in the teeth, so the power of the etheric body, in the maturing individual, reaches its potential in the moment of sexual reproduction. And at that moment the astral body is born. It is now free, no longer constrained. Human development is indeed so complicated when we look at the four elements that compose it. We must now realize how these limbs, [whether they are more or less bound as] before the individual births; [or whether] they are free, [how they actually work in man]. First, let us look at the etheric body. We see that the etheric body is that which works in the human being, the power of growth, nutrition, reproduction; the etheric body is the carrier of this. But that which brings the human being into a relationship with his surroundings, [which] enables him to enter into an interaction, that is his astral body. While the etheric body of the human being works mainly within, enlarging the organs, working from [within] outwards in reproduction, the astral body is what is there to make the outside accessible to the inside and connect it to it. This happens all the time. Every ray of light, every piece of nourishment that a person takes in, is an interaction between the person's inner being and the outside world. The regulator is the astral body, and essentially the relationship is regulated by needs, by pleasure and pain, by desire. What a person desires, he appropriates, and the faculty of desire is the expression of the astral body. [This is what man demands of his environment.] You see, then, that man fulfills various tasks through his limbs. This now requires a significant distinction to be made with regard to the limbs in the whole of human life. This distinction will become clear to us when we consider the nature of sleep. When a person sleeps, all desire and suffering, all interaction with the outside world, everything that the astral body conveys, has sunk down. No sensible person will say that a person decays in the evening and is reborn in the morning. His astral body is there, but not as it is during the day. While during the day this astral body dwells in the physical body and allows the things of the outside world to flow out through the organs of the physical body and processes them, at night it is separated from the physical body, it does not touch the physical body. This is not the case with the etheric body. What it has to do continues during sleep. When a person sleeps, the physical body and the etheric body lie in bed. The astral body with the ego has stepped out. What does this astral body do at night? If we look at this, it sheds light on the nature of the entire human activity in the world. The spiritual scientist knows that the astral body, if it remains within the physical body, could never remove that which finds its expression in fatigue. Call it an accumulation of fatigue substances or something else, it is there and must be removed. Where does the fatigue come from? How is it removed? Fatigue is a by-product of what the astral body does in the physical body. As long as the astral body is in the physical body and uses the physical organs, the physical body will tire; and as long as the astral body is in the physical body, it cannot get rid of the fatigue. It must go out and work on the physical body from the outside, and this work takes place at night when the person is asleep. Then the seer sees the astral body working on the physical body and removing the fatigue. This is the source of the refreshing effect of healthy sleep. There is something healing about sleep. What is worn out in the physical body – the physical body is used by the astral body like a machine – all this is removed. An astral body that works on the physical body from the outside works to repair it; an astral body in the physical body consumes it; even destroys it within certain limits. This is related to another phenomenon about which a man who is little known today said a great deal: Paracelsus. He knew the essence of sleep, but he knew something else as well. He realized that something special happens to this astral body when it emerges. It will become clear to us through a comparison. Imagine a vessel of water; there is water inside. Take a small sponge that can hold a drop and throw this sponge into the water, and it soaks up a drop. It used to be in all the water; now it is outside. This is how it is in fact with the relationship between the astral body and the physical body. The astral body is not something that is original and separate from something greater. There is a mighty astral body, which is the astral body of our entire planet, and this astral body is like the mass of water in the vessel. The physical body is like the little sponge. When we are awake, the physical body has the astral body within it, and then it has separated a drop for itself from the astral sea, and this drop of the earth spirit works separately from the rest of the earth's astral body; and that is why it has an eroding effect during the day, it has to erode. Imagine a finger, separate it, and in a short time it will wither. Why? Because this finger must be connected to the whole life process, to the whole astral process, if it is to exist, and because the drop of astral mass that remains in the finger cannot lead its own life as a detached drop. The human being's astral body can do this to a certain extent, but it needs to return from time to time to draw strength from the entire astral body; this happens at night. Thus, every human astral body connects with the entire astral body of the earth at night. This is why Paracelsus says: At night, man rests in the whole womb of spiritual nature and absorbs that harmony which has been destroyed during the day. — Thus we see that when a part is rejected from the spiritual world, it must return to gather strength there. In the state of separation, the astral body consumes the physical body. Let us look at the ether body in relation to this. It is in the same position, it is also a piece of the general ether mass. But it does not return at night, and remains united with the physical body until death; it has a wearing effect on the physical body. The latter has drawn it out and made it independent, like the sponge and the drop of water. But now independent, the etheric body wears away the physical body, and this process of wear and tear is the life process of an individual being. Now we can say: From the moment when this etheric body is born, when it emerges as an independent entity, it is completely independent and draws on the physical body. It draws in the way you can make clear by means of a comparison. Imagine a piece of wood that is burning; there is never a flame without a piece of wood. Just as the flame is released from the wood, so the etheric body is released from the physical body at the end of the seventh year; it shines like a flame. Just as the flame consumes the wood, just as it consumes its nourishment, so the etheric body consumes the physical body. Until the etheric body has brought its own power to the final point at sexual maturity, until that time it replaces in some way what it has consumed. But at the end, it has nothing more to add, so it draws on the physical body. And a being that could not replace from any other side [what the ether body consumes, which in turn could not supply the ether body with new strength] would have to die when it reaches sexual maturity. In the animal world, there are such beings. How is it then that in the case of human beings the etheric body [after sexual maturity] receives further strength to grow? Because with sexual maturity the astral body is born, and this is now in a period of free growth. What is this astral body? It is the forces accumulated by the person from a previous incarnation. The more capital a person has accumulated, the more they have to invest; and the more strength they have for their astral body, the longer their ascending line of life will last. The astral body rises; the time that expresses itself externally in the life of a person, morally, begins with sexual maturity. The human being is full of ideals, his longing goes beyond the measure of his reflection. All a sign that there is excess power in him. That is the excess power of his astral body. Just as the physical body grows until the second dentition changes, and the etheric body until sexual maturity, so the astral body grows until mid-life. If you, as a clairvoyant, could measure the power that the astral body contains and distribute it over the years, you would be able to calculate mid-life. Because at that moment, when the astral body has given back everything that was put into it, has developed, then the middle of life has arrived. At that point, the astral body begins to consume. It consumes itself. Now the time comes when ideals fade, when man is no longer full of hope, when prudence sets in, when the astral body looks more to its surroundings, to experiences, whereas before it drew from within in the ascending current. The ideals of the young man, born from within, often do not correspond to the external. Then the time comes when harmony is established, and now he has the descending line. What the astral body has produced earlier is gradually used up, and then, when the astral body has used up itself, it begins to draw on the ether body, then it takes the strength from the ether body. You may know that the etheric body is not only the seat of growth and so on, but also of memory, habits and temperaments. You see, just as the astral body begins to consume the forces of the etheric body from a certain point in life, so it later uses up the qualities we have just described. Memory begins to weaken and so on, and when the powers of the etheric body are consumed, what then? Then it goes to the physical body. This is then no longer able to work on itself, it ceases to stir up the life process within itself. As long as the physical body can still enjoy the powers of the ether body, it processes what comes from outside to strengthen itself. When the ether body can no longer do this, substances are still absorbed from the outside, but are no longer integrated organically. Now the opposite of what happened earlier takes place. Whereas the substances that were taken in were integrated organically, now they are merely deposited like physical ballast substances in the tendons, in the soft parts of the human being, so that these harden; the bones become harder and harder. The physical body is actually consumed in the descending life. Just as the astral body can be born through the etheric body like a flame from wood, so the astral body first consumes itself like a flame from wood, then the etheric body, and then the physical body. What life has brought forth, what life has brought out, is at the same time what consumes this life. Just as the flame would not be without the wood, so the life of the astral body would not be, nor would consciousness, nor pleasure and pain, without the etheric and physical bodies. But just as the flame consumes the wood, so the independent life consumes its basis, the physical body. Therefore, death is not a process that takes place outside of life; rather, it is produced by life itself. This is the main thing we must realize: we could not have life at all if this life did not give birth to death. Another thing is that the astral body is the mediator of everything that can come in from outside. If this is to happen, it must be appropriated by the physical body through the process of life. What does that mean? Light approaches us; if it were not for light, we would have no eyes. It is the same with everything that arises from the interaction of the physical body with the environment. The physical body appropriates the external environment and transforms it into organs. We transform the elements into organs when the life process is ascending. We have to consider the following fact. A certain tribe in Africa that hunts needs certain dogs for hunting. Now there lives a poisonous fly there, the tsetse fly; it stings the hunting dogs, and they perish. Now, as so often, the “savages” have come up with something extraordinarily clever – spiritual science is familiar with the processes. This “savage” tribe now takes its hunting dog to the areas where the poisonous fly is found, just at the time when the dog can give birth to her puppies before she dies from the bite. The puppies are now immune; they can be stung and yet not die. This is an example of the adoption of an external aspect of the internal life process in the ascending line of life. Where life rekindles, where it passes through to the point of inner illumination, where the life process is re-established, it takes the poison within itself, integrates it and makes the organism strong against the poison. This is basically how our organs came into being in the body. In ancient times, when there was no eye, a ray of sunlight fell on the skin; something like a small pain could be felt. The light had to integrate and the life process digested the light, appropriated it, transformed it into an eye, so that man had an eye to face the light. This is how man interacts with his environment. This is to suggest that through external influences, which occur by means of the astral body, the physical body of man is organized as a receptive being that integrates the outside world; and the extent to which one can integrate the outside world gives pleasure, joy, desire. Where joy and desire are healthy, they are nothing more than the expression of a need, and that is the most reliable indicator of the life process. This can be seen in children. If their original instincts for nourishment are corrupted, they have no instinct for what is good for them. For example, if you overfeed a child with eggs from an early age, you will notice that this child loses the security of the food instinct. If not, the child is always ready to reject what is harmful to it and to want exactly what is beneficial to it. Such a child is much less exposed to damage to the organism. Too much protein is harmful. So you see how desire is the measure for the life process itself. The life process is entirely under the influence of desire. But this also enables the human being to go beyond the measure of enjoyment and need. In order for life to be maintained, need must arise. Without hunger, life could not be maintained. Enjoyment is the concomitant of satiety. This is always the case where the external world is appropriated. Because enjoyment is the concomitant of the life process, it can go beyond in terms of the appropriation of external substances. And so what it appropriates becomes a destroyer because it goes beyond measure; and there you have what predisposes the disease process through the activity of the astral body. Of course, we must not believe that this simply happens because it is expressed in the life between birth and death. Certainly, every excess has a destructive effect on this one life, and all moderation has a beneficial effect; but this happens to a greater extent beyond death. Here we must again consider the idea of reincarnation. The destructive forces, which are not yet harmful in life, are taken along into the next life, so that debauchery in one life means a disposition to illness in the next. These are the most important foundations of illness. From this you can see how things are connected, but you can also see that what are actually internal causes of illness are necessarily linked to the life process, that they really arise from it. And now you will understand that we make our body stronger when we bring it into such interaction with the outside world in the ascending life process that it acquires something. This makes it strong against disease. We do not need to investigate other causes of disease. These are the ones that have less significance for life. You know that today the bacillus plague does not only consist of being infected by it, but also of looking for the bacilli everywhere. This bacillus plague actually comes into consideration only in the second place in relation to spiritual science. Being invaded by bacilli is no different than being shot through with a bullet. In this case, the organism is so badly destroyed that the ether organism can no longer compensate for the destruction. As long as it is not destroyed, this ether organism also has the ability to compensate. The more it is connected with the ether, the more it has the power of compensation. You can cut up a polyp, and a new polyp will arise from each piece, because the etheric body of the polyp is still connected to the whole - [from which it can draw power, because in every drop of the etheric body there is the same power as in the whole] - and the connection still exists. Insofar as the etheric body becomes independent, it must lose this power. If, therefore, independence is at the same time a growth in relation to the impossibility of overcoming disturbances of the organism, then you have the Pauline sentence in a modern form: selfishness is the cause of destruction and death, and death is the wages of sin (Rom. 6:23). It is to be understood only in this sense. But someone may say: Yes, but is it compatible with the wise process of the world? Yes, if there were no possibility of illness, the great incentive for the etheric organism to become strong in order to grow by overcoming the illness would be missing. The etheric body emerges strengthened from every illness it has overcome. When germs attack us, it is important that we have a strong etheric body to overcome them. And does not the etheric body, precisely because it is forced to become an overcomer in the illness, give rise to higher forms of the etheric body? Yes, it develops itself upwards through this. Therefore, it can be said that illness is like the pearl oyster and the pearl; the noble pearl emerges from an illness of the oyster. Many things in the world have emerged as higher forms by building themselves on the basis of a process of destruction. All this makes us understand, in a certain forceful way, illness and death. We can understand that we could not have life as we have it; if this life did not itself provoke death; as one could not have the flame if the fuel were not destroyed. Certain increases, intensifications are not possible without the possibility of illness. Sometimes strong health is the result of illness. Perhaps you will say: nature is healthy in all its parts, and even if it gives disease, it gives it to have much and strong life. In any case, it is clear that nature is everywhere, and it has, that is true, invented death in order to have much life, to have strong life, to have life. Because this can only exist if it creates death as its opposite pole. |
| 83. The Tension Between East and West: The Problem (Asia-Europe)
09 Jun 1922, Vienna Translated by B. A. Rowley |
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| When, some years ago, I was often called upon to lecture to audiences of working men, I saw a good deal of evidence that there did exist in men's souls this problem of articulating the ego into the general social order. Men are unable to find the way from a highly developed sense of self into the social order. |
| This shows the kind of bewilderment that ensues when the question arises: How is the ego, strengthened within spiritual life, to articulate itself into a social order? In another working men's association (I am giving one or two examples, which could be multiplied indefinitely), someone said: “Oh, we don't really want to be foremen; we don't want to manage the factory; we want to remain what we are, simple workmen; but as such we want all our rights.” |
| 83. The Tension Between East and West: The Problem (Asia-Europe)
09 Jun 1922, Vienna Translated by B. A. Rowley |
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When the conversation turns to what is lacking in society today, there is scarcely anyone who does not have something really significant to contribute, from his own particular position in life. My purpose here, however, is not to draw up a list of all the various deficiencies that a survey would reveal. It is rather to direct attention to some of the antecedents of a phenomenon that has, quite justifiably, attracted comment on many sides and has led a large part of mankind into a mood of extraordinary pessimism and hopelessness. One of the most extreme expressions of this hopelessness came from a man of whom it might perhaps have been least expected—a man, moreover, who belonged to a period for which such an opinion cannot help striking us as something out of the ordinary. In one of his last books, the influential art-historian Herman Grimm, who did not live to experience the most fearful war in history, but died at the turn of the century, makes this surprising statement: “When we survey the international situation today, and observe, with the `mind's eye' I would say, how the various nations of the civilized world behave to one another, how they attack one another, and how they hold within them the seeds of further conflicts, then we feel ready to set a date for mass suicide, since we cannot envisage where all these things that bring men and nations into conflict, strife and combat, are to lead, if not to the utter collapse of civilization.” I regard this statement as striking precisely because it comes from Herman Grimm—since his philosophy of life was in itself a joyous one; throughout his life, he kept his eyes fixed on all the things that can elevate mankind and that exist in man as creative and productive forces. It is striking, moreover, that he did not make this statement under the influence of the sense of gloom that was to be experienced in the years just before the outbreak of the Great War, or during it. His observation sprang entirely from the spirit of the nineteenth century, at the end of which it was made. Nothing that has happened since then seems likely in any way to cushion the impact on us of such a statement. Yet at the same time it can never be the business of mankind to get bogged down in mere hopelessness; we must rather be on the look-out for anything that can lead to revival, to reconstruction, to a new dawn. This being so, it is necessary for us to look more deeply into the causes of the extraordinarily difficult situation that has gradually developed inside European civilization. Even if we believe that these causes can only be economic ones, we shall still have to look to the spiritual life of modern civilization for the main reason underlying this economic decline. In my lectures here, I have pointed out more than once how our present temper of soul—together with all the soul-powers we can acquire at present—is affected by historical forces, and to understand these we have to go back a long way in human development. Specifically, I pointed out yesterday how at the threshold of the spiritual life of the West, looked at historically, there stands a figure who still has one eye on Asia, whilst the other is already directed at the perspectives of Europe. I mean Plato. When we examine Plato's social theories, they appear to our modern consciousness extraordinarily alien in many respects. We find that he sees the ideal social system in the creation of a community even at the expense of the development of individual human beings who have been born into this earthly life. Plato thinks it quite feasible that children who appear unfit for life should simply be abandoned, so that they may not occupy a place in the community and thus disturb the social organism. He also manages to regard as an ideal social organism one in which only members of a certain caste enjoy the full privileges of citizenship. Apart from the fact that slavery appears quite natural to him, he would also grant those responsible for trade and commerce only a precarious position within his social system. All those who are not fixed within this system by virtue of having been born—by right, as he sees it—into its fabric, are not in fact completely accepted into the organization. Much else might be said, too, on the question: How does Plato's ideal relate to the individual human being? And here, from the standpoint of modern consciousness, we must conclude that there is present as yet little understanding of this human individuality. Attention is still directed entirely to the community, which is seen as primary. The man who is to live in it is regarded as secondary. His life is accepted as justified only in so far as he can match the social ideal that exists outside his own personality. To discover what led Plato to this concept of community, we must look once more at Oriental civilization. And when we do so, we realize how, in the last analysis, the historical development of Europe's spiritual life is like a small peninsula jutting out from a great continent. When we look at Asia, we find that there the idea of community is the primary one, and that Plato simply took it over from the East. To what has been said already about this idea, one thing must be added, if the social situation throughout the world is to be illuminated. When we come to examine the basic character of spiritual life in the Orient, we find that it embraced a humanity quite different in type from the Europeans of later civilization. In many psychic and spiritual matters, indeed, we can say that there prevailed in Asia a high level of civilization, one to which many Europeans, even, long to return. I have already mentioned the often-quoted expression: Light comes from the East. What is most striking of all, however, is that these men of different type did not have the feature that has been typical of Europeans since they first began to play a civilized part in the world's development. What we observe there in Asia is a subdued sense of self, a sense of personality that is still quiescent in the depths of the soul. The European's awareness of personality is not as yet found in Asia. If on the other hand this high level of Asian civilization is adopted by an individual who still lacks this sense of personality—and it is a civilization suited for adoption by a human community—then he experiences it as in a dream, without sense of personality. Obviously, in an age when human individuality had not yet attained its full development, communities were more receptive to and capable of a high level of culture than were individuals. In communal life, human capacities for absorbing this civilization increased not simply in an arithmetical but in a geometrical progression. Meanwhile, the particular ideal that Oriental civilization had set before itself, as it gradually passed over into Europe, was minted by European spirits in a simple formula—the Apolline dictum: “Know thyself!” We can, in a sense, regard the entire Ancient East as developing towards the realization in Greece, as the ultimate intention of Oriental self-less civilization, of that sentence: “Know thyself!”—a sentence which has since survived as a spiritual and cultural motto to direct mankind. Yet we can also see, there in the East, that it is regarded as desirable, for the attainment of a higher stage of development in mankind, to penetrate to the self after all. On the spiritual side, I have already indicated this in characterizing yoga. On the social side, it reveals itself when we look at the theories current in the East with regard to leadership of the masses. Everywhere we find that the man who was the teacher and the leader was at the same time, in the spiritual sphere, the priest, but also at the same time the healer. We find in the East an intimate connection between all that mankind sought as knowledge and as higher spiritual life, on the one hand, and healing, on the other. For early Oriental civilization, the doctor cannot be separated from the teacher and the priest. This is, of course, connected with the fact that Oriental civilization was dominated by a feeling of universal human guilt. This feeling introduces something pathological into human development, so that the cognitive process itself, and indeed every effort to reach a higher spirituality, is regarded as having the function of healing man as nature made him. Education to a higher spirituality was also healing, because man in his natural state and thus uneducated was regarded as a being who stood in need of healing. Connected with this were the early Oriental mysteries. The cult of mysteries sought to achieve, in institutions that were, I would say, church and school and source of social impulses combined, the development of the individual to a higher spiritual life. They did this in such a way that, as I have already indicated in my previous lectures, religion, art and science were combined: in performing the ritual actions, men were religious beings; and here what mattered was not the articles of faith, still less the dogmas, that occupied the soul, but the fact that the individual was participating in a socially organized rite, so that man's approach to the divine was made principally through sacrifice and ritual act. Yet the ritual act and its foundations in turn involved an aesthetic element. And this combination of aesthetic and religious elements gave to knowledge its original form. The man who was to attain this unified triad of religion, art and science, however, had not merely to accept something that represented a step forward in his development; he had also to undergo a complete transformation as a man, a kind of rebirth. The description of the preparations that such a student of the higher spiritual life had to undertake makes it clear that he had consciously to undergo a kind of death. He experienced, that is, something that set him apart from life in the ordinary world, as death sets men apart from this life. Then, when he had left behind everything in his inner experience that appertained to earthly life, he would, after passing through death, experience the spiritual world in a complete rebirth. This is the old religious form of catharsis, the purification of man. A new man was to be born inside the old. Things that man can so experience in the world as to arouse in him passions and emotions, desires and appetites, notions that are of this world—all these he was to experience within the mysteries in such a manner that they were left behind and he emerged as one purified of these experiences. Only then, as a man reborn, was he credited with being capable of exerting any social influence on his fellow-men. Even the academic scholarship of our time has quite correctly observed that the surviving remnants of this cult have been of enormous importance for social life, and that the impulses aroused in those who have experienced such a catharsis in these very secret places have exerted the greatest conceivable influence on social life outside. As I say, this is not merely a pronouncement of spiritual science, it is something that even academic scholarship has arrived at. You can see this by looking at Wilamowitz. What we find is that, in Oriental civilization, the aim was to cure man by knowledge and by all the efforts to achieve a spiritual education. What existed in the East passed over in another form to Greece and thus to Europe, and it has continued to affect Europe to the extent that Greek culture itself has influenced European spiritual life and civilization. Let me mention a point that is not usually emphasized. In his study of Greek tragedy, from which the West has derived so much of artistic importance for its spiritual life, Aristotle produced a description that is usually taken far too much at its face value. People are always quoting the familiar sentence in which Aristotle says that the aim of tragedy is to arouse fear and pity, so that the excitation of these and other emotions shall bring about a purification, or catharsis, of them. In other words, Aristotle is pointing to something in the aesthetic sphere—the effect that tragedy should produce. Armed for the interpretation of Aristotle's dictum, not with academic philology, but with an understanding of Oriental spiritual life—with a knowledge, that is, of its roots in the past—we can interpret what Aristotle means by pity and fear more extensively than it is usually interpreted. He means in fact, as we come to perceive, that the spectator is brought by tragedy to mental participation in the sorrow, pain and joy of others, and that in this way the spectator in his mental life escapes from the narrow confines that he naturally occupies. Through the contemplation of the suffering of others, there is aroused in the spectator—for here man goes outside his physical existence, if only vicariously—that fear which always arises when a human being is confronted with something that takes him outside himself, and creates in him a transport of faintness and breathlessness. We can say, therefore: Aristotle really means that, in looking at tragedy, man enters a world of feeling that takes him out of himself; that he is overcome by fear; and that a purification or catharsis ensues. In this way he learns to bear what in the natural state he cannot bear; through purification he is strengthened for the sympathetic experience of alien sorrow and alien joy; he is no longer overcome by fear when he has to go outside himself and into social life. In ascribing a function of this kind to tragedy, Aristotle, we perceive quite clearly, is really demonstrating that tragedy also educates man towards a strengthening of his sense of self and his inner security of soul. I am well aware that to introduce the aesthetic element into social life in this way strikes many people today as a devaluation of art, as if one were trying to attribute some kind of extrinsic purpose to it. Objections of this kind, however, often really betray a certain philistinism, resting as they do on the belief that any attempt to assimilate art into human life as a whole, into all that the human soul can experience, implies its subordination to a merely utilitarian existence. This is not what it meant for the Greeks; it meant rather the inclusion of art in the life that carries man above himself, not just beneath himself into mere utility. If we can look beyond the mere utility that typifies our time, we shall be able to understand the precise significance of the Greek view of art: that the Greeks saw in tragedy, side by side with its purely artistic aspect, something that brought man face to face with himself, drawing him away from a dream, a half-conscious perception of the world, nearer and nearer to a complete awareness of himself. We may say: in the social sphere, tragedy was certainly intended to make its contribution to the all-important precept: “Man, know thyself!” If, moreover, from this extension of art into the social sphere we pass on to a consideration of the position of the individual vis-à-vis society, and from this perspective look back at the Orient, we find that, in the mysteries too, what was sought through therapeutic treatment—the rebirth of man as a higher being—represented a strengthening of the sense of self. From an awareness that the soul was not then attuned to a sense of self, and that such a sense still remained to be developed, the mysteries attempted a rebirth in which man emerged to individuality. For this ancient society, therefore, experience of self was really something that had still to be attained. It was seen as a social duty to foster the birth of this sense of self in individuals who could become leaders in the social sphere. Only when we comprehend this can we gain an understanding of the strong sense of community persisting in Plato's ideal state, and of his belief that man is entitled to develop his individuality fully only if he does so through the rebirth that was accessible to the wisdom of the time. This shows that humanity at that time had no awareness of the claims of individuality in the fullest sense. What grew out of this kind of society in Asia then established itself in Europe, combined with Christianity, passed over into the Middle Ages and even survived here for a long period. The manner of its survival, however, was determined by the fact that the hordes which, mainly from Northern and Central Europe, streamed into this civilization—South European now, but inherited from Asia—were endowed by nature with a strong sense of self. These tribes acquired the important historical task of carrying over what Oriental man had achieved with a still subdued sense of self, into complete self-consciousness and a full sense of self. For the brilliant civilization of the Greeks, “Know thyself!” was still an ideal of human cognition and society. The peoples who descended from the North during the Middle Ages brought with them, as the central feature of their being, this sense of self. It was theirs by nature. Though they lived in groups, they none the less strove to incorporate into their own personality what they absorbed in the cognitive and social sphere. It was in this way, then, that there came to be established the contrast between community life and individual life. The latter only appeared in the course of history, and did so, I would say, with the assistance of man-made institutions. In thus making its appearance in human development, the sense of self was bound to link up with something else, with which it certainly has an organic connection. Looking back once more at the features of Oriental-Greek civilization even as it appeared to Plato, we are nowadays very much aware that this whole civilization was in fact built on slavery, on the subjugation of large numbers of people. A great deal has been said from various standpoints about the significance of slavery in earlier times, and if we are willing to sift this properly, we shall naturally find a great deal that is significant in it. But the point that above all others is still relevant for our life today is precisely the one that I said has actually received little attention. For community life—and also for the social life which sprang from the mysteries, and for the development of which the Greek regarded his art as providing an impetus—the full significance of human labour within the social order was quite unrealized. In consequence, they had to exclude human labour from their discussion of the ideal image of man. When we describe Oriental-Greek man, with the dignity that gave him his authority, we are describing something that was in fact constructed over the heads of the masses, who were actually doing the work. The masses merely formed an appendage to the social system, which developed within a society that had not absorbed labour into its being, since it regarded labour and those who performed it as a natural datum. Human society really only began where labour left off. At a higher level, in a higher psychic sense, man experienced something that also finds expression in the world of animals. In their world, the food supply, which with us forms part of the social organization, is provided by nature. The animal does not calculate; it does what it does out of its inmost being; and specialization is unnecessary for animals. Where apparent exceptions occur, they must be regarded as proving the rule. We can therefore say: in transplanting itself to Europe and entering further and further into the demands of individuality, Oriental civilization also took on the task of integrating human labour into the social system. When man's awareness of self is fully wakened, it is quite impossible to exclude labour from that system. This problem—which did not exist as yet in Greece—became the great social question round which countless battles were fought in Rome. It was felt instinctively that only by integrating labour into the social system can man experience to the full his personality. In this way, however, the entire social organization of humanity took on a different aspect. It has a different appearance in civilized Europe from what it had in civilized Asia. Only by looking back at the development of individuality in Europe shall we understand something of what has repeatedly, and rightly, been emphasized as significant when we come to describe the source of the deficiencies of our time. It is rightly pointed out here that the specific shape of the social order in our time was actually only decided with the emergence of modern technology and division of labour. It is also pointed out that modern capitalism, for instance, is merely a result of the division of labour. What the traditional teaching of modern Western civilization has to say in this respect, in characterizing division of labour and its consequences in the social deficiencies of our time, is extraordinarily significant. But when something like this is said, and from one point of view rightly said, the unprejudiced observer cannot help looking at, say, ancient Egypt or Ancient Babylon, and observing that these states contained cities of an enormous size, and that these achievements too were only made possible by a division of labour. I was able yesterday to show that, as early as the eleventh century, a kind of Socialism existed in China, yet that similarity of surface features is not what really matters. In the same way, I must point out that division of labour, too, which in modern times has rightly been seen as the central social problem, was also found in earlier epochs of human development; it was in fact what made the Oriental social systems possible, and these in turn have since affected Europe. In Europe, division of labour, after being less common at first, gradually evolved. I would say: division of labour in itself is a repetition of something that also occurred in earlier times; but in the Oriental civilizations it bore the stamp of a society in which individuality was still dormant. The modern division of labour, which makes its appearance along with technology, on the other hand, impinges on a society of men who are now seeking to expand their individuality to the full. Once again, then, the same phenomenon turns out to have a quite different significance in different ages. For the Oriental social order, the first consideration was thus to allow man to grow clear of social restrictions and of communal life. If he was to move up to a higher spiritual life, man really had to find his individuality. The European of a later age already had this sense of self, and needed to integrate it into the social order. He had to follow precisely the opposite path from that followed in the East. Everywhere in Europe we find evidence of the difficulty men experience in accommodating their individuality to the social order, whereas at one time the social system had been such that men sought to rescue their individuality from it. This difficulty still faces us on every side today as an underlying social evil. When, some years ago, I was often called upon to lecture to audiences of working men, I saw a good deal of evidence that there did exist in men's souls this problem of articulating the ego into the general social order. Men are unable to find the way from a highly developed sense of self into the social order. And in attempting repeatedly to show proletarian audiences, for instance, what this way would need to be like—how it would have to be different from the ways that Socialist or Communist agitators commonly offer nowadays—one came across very curious views in the ensuing discussions. They might appear trivial; but a thing is trivial no longer when it provides the motive power for innumerable people in life. Thus, I once attempted to talk about social problems in a working men's club. A man came forward and introduced himself straight away as a cobbler. Naturally, it can be extremely pleasant to hear what such a man thinks; in this case, however, what he was unable to think was much more revealing than what he did think. First of all he set forth, in marked opposition to my own views, his conception of the social order; and then he reiterated that he was a simple cobbler: in the social order that he had outlined, therefore, he could never rise to be a registrar of births, marriages and deaths. Underlying his outlook, however, was the quite definite assumption that he might perfectly well be a Cabinet Minister! This shows the kind of bewilderment that ensues when the question arises: How is the ego, strengthened within spiritual life, to articulate itself into a social order? In another working men's association (I am giving one or two examples, which could be multiplied indefinitely), someone said: “Oh, we don't really want to be foremen; we don't want to manage the factory; we want to remain what we are, simple workmen; but as such we want all our rights.” Justified as such a statement may be from one point of view, it displays, in the last analysis, no interest in social organization, only an interest in the strongly developed self. I am well aware that many people today will not consciously admit that this particular discrepancy between the experience of self and the social order lies at the root of many, indeed almost all of our social deficiencies and shortcomings. But anyone who looks at life with unclouded vision cannot escape the conclusion: We have certainly managed to develop the feeling of self, but we cannot connect it with a real insight into man. We say the word “I;” but we do not know how to relate this “I” to a human personality that is fully comprehended and fully self-determining. We can experience this once again when we come across views that are very much of the present, as opposed to what, on the basis of spiritual science, we regard as necessary for the health of humanity. A leading figure in present-day educational circles once said something very curious to me during a visit to the Waldorf School. I showed our visitor round personally, and explained to him our educational methods and their social significance. I pointed out that, with a sound educational method of this kind, education of the spirit and the soul must be linked with that of the body. Anyone wishing to teach and educate must first of all know the effect of this or that action on the forces of recovery or decline in the human organism, the human body; he must know how the exercise or neglect of memory expresses itself later in life in physical symptoms, and how, simply by treating the life of the soul, we can gradually bring about an improvement in physical ailments. The teacher, I concluded, must certainly understand the body's association with the soul and the spirit in health and sickness. And the reply I got was that, to do this, the teacher would have to be a doctor! Well, up to a certain point it would indeed be desirable if this were the case. For when we look at our social system, with the difficulty of integrating the self into it, we are reminded once more of what I have touched on today in connection with the civilization of two regions: the Orient, where the doctor was also the teacher and leader of the people; and Greece, where, as I have shown, art had an educative influence. The art of medicine was associated with every aspiration of the spirit, because at that time man was regarded, if only instinctively, as a physical, mental and spiritual whole; in the treatment that was then applied to the soul, forces were brought into play which yielded knowledge for a general therapy of man. The leaders at that time told themselves: I must attempt to cure man by leading him to true spirituality. To do this, I must bring healing forces to bear on a fairly normal life. Once I understand these forces thoroughly and can follow out their effects, this knowledge will tell me what to do when a man is ill. From observation of the healthy man, I learn what forces to employ when confronted by the sick man. The sick man is simply one whose organism has deviated further in one direction or the other than it does in everyday life. Knowing how to bestow health on man in his normal state, I also know how to cure him when sick. Knowing which drink, which cordial affords me this or that insight into connections between man and nature—knowing, that is, the effect of a natural product in the sphere of knowledge—I shall also know what effect it has on a sick man, if used in greater strength. The intimate association of medical art with education and development towards spirituality in general, which was the goal of the Ancient Orient and had an important rôle there, appears once more as a spiritual residuum in the Greek experience of art. Here, the aim is that the soul should be healed through art. Armed with this knowledge, we can still perceive in the use of the word “catharsis” in connection with tragedy how—because the same word was used in connection with the early mysteries, for the complete purification of man on entry to a new life—something of this sense is taken over. We are, however, also reminded that, for Greek doctors in the early period, knowledge and medicine still went together, and that in education, but also in popular culture in general, people saw something on a more spiritual level that was related to medicine, something that in a sense sprang from medicine. We need to examine these phenomena of a bygone age, if we are to gain a strength of soul such that, when we contemplate the social systems in our own age, we can keep in view the whole man, and also such that, when we meet our fellow-men, we not only unfold a strong sense of self, but also connect this with a perception of the whole man in body, soul and spirit. If by an advance in spiritual science we can do this, there will become available, simply through the temper of soul that ensues, ways and means of integrating this whole man, but also all men, into the social order, thus annexing labour for society in the way that historical evolution in any case makes necessary. For this is what we are still suffering from today: the need to fit labour properly into the social order. It is true that people often regard labour as something that goes into the article produced, being crystallized in it, so to speak, and giving it its value. Those who look more closely, however, will observe that what matters is not simply that a man should work, devoting to society his physical strength. The important factor in determining price and value is rather how the work fits into social life as a whole. We can certainly conceive of a man doing a job of work that is fundamentally uneconomic in the social order. The man may work hard and may believe that he is entitled to payment for his work; but when his work exists in the context of an inadequate social system, it often does more harm than good. And one ought to examine in this light a great deal of labour within society which, though exhausting, is really worthless. Consider how our literature is constantly accumulating; it has to be printed; a tremendous amount of work is involved in the manufacture of paper, the printing, etc., and then, apart from the tiny proportion that survives, it all has to be pulped once more: work is being done here which, I would say, disappears into thin air. And if you consider how much work has disappeared into thin air during the butchery of the recent war, you will gradually come to see that labour as such cannot lay claim to any absolute value, but derives its value from its contribution to the life of society. The disease that most affects our age, however, is precisely the lack of this basic capacity to integrate labour into the social organism, taking account of the fact that everything men do, they really do for others. We need to win through to this by learning to integrate our own individual selves into the community. Only by achieving a true understanding between man and man, so that what the other man needs becomes part of our own experience and we can transpose our self into the selves of others, shall we win through to those new social groupings that are not given us by nature, but must be derived from the personality of man. All our social needs certainly spring from the self. People sense what is lacking in the social order. What we need to find, however, is a new understanding of what human fellowship in body, soul and spirit really means. This is what a social order ought really to be able to bring forth out of the self. The great battle that is being fought over the division of labour—fought quite differently from the way such battles have ever previously been fought under the influence of human individuality—is what underlies all our social shortcomings. Nowadays, we found associations for production; we participate in them, concerned not with their rôle in the social organism, but with our own personal position—and this is understandable. It is not my aim here to complain, pedantically or otherwise, about human egotism. My aim is to understand something for which there is considerable justification. Without this sense of self, we should not have advanced to human freedom and dignity. The great spiritual advances have been possible only because we have attained this sense of self. But this in turn must also find a way to imaginative identification with others. There is a great deal of talk nowadays about the necessity of conquering individualism. This is not what matters. The important thing is to find society in man himself. The Oriental had to discover man in society. We have to discover society in man. We can do so only by extending on every side the life of the soul. That is why I tried, at the close of one of my mystery-plays, to present a scene showing how a man wins through to an inner experience of the different forms of mankind. These differences exist outside us. In society, differentiation is necessary; we must each have our profession. If we find the right bridge between man and man, however, we can experience within us all that is separate in the social world outside—each individual profession. Once this social system comes into being within us, once we can experience the reality of society inside ourselves, we shall be able to follow that opposite way of which I have spoken: the way from the self to the social order. This will also mean, however, that everything connected with the individual—today we can point to labour; in the next two days we shall be looking at capital—is capable of finding its place in human society. In co-operatives, in the formation of trusts and combines, in the trade union movement, everywhere we feel a need to find a way out of the self into association with others. But here precisely is the great struggle of the present day: to enable what exists around us really to take root within us. As already indicated, there was a time, not so very far behind us—we need only go back to the thirteenth century—when man had a bond with the product of his labour, and the making of every key and every lock gave pleasure, because the maker poured into it something of his own substance. The legacy of an earlier social order still made its mark upon the product. With their individuality as yet not fully awakened, people still accepted society. Since then, individuality has reached its zenith with the advance of technology. In the last analysis, the man of today is often extraordinarily remote from the product of his labour, even when his work lies in the spiritual sphere. What we perform in the outside world needs to take root in us and to link up with our individuality. This, however, will only happen if we develop the life of the soul on every side in the way I have described in the last few days. For if we do develop the life of the soul, our interest in all that has its being around us will be fired once more. You encounter many people in this purely intellectual age who find their own profession uninteresting. It may have become so, perhaps. There must come a time, once more, when every detail of life becomes of interest. Whereas formerly what was interesting was the nature of objects, in the future the interest will lie in our knowing how our every activity is articulated into the social organization of mankind. Whereas formerly we looked at the product, we shall now look at the man who requires the product. Whereas formerly the product was loved, the love of man and the brotherhood of man will now be able to make their appearance in the soul that has developed, so that men will know the reason for their duties. All this, however, needs to take hold of the soul before people try to reach an understanding about the particular social deficiencies of our time. From this standpoint, too, we must consider that Europe is still engaged in its battle for human individuality against the forces in its spiritual tradition that continue to flow from Asia—from foundations quite unlike those that exist today, foundations that took root in the souls of men, but at a time when full individuality had not yet been attained. Thus the present time occupies a position not only between abstract concepts of individuality and community, but also in the centre of something that pervades man's soul and brings every individual human being today into action in defence of his individuality. We are only at the beginning of the road that leads to the discovery of the right relationship between self and community. It is from this fact that the shortcomings of the time, which for this reason I do not need to enumerate, derive. Perceiving this psychological basis, this spiritual foundation, we shall be able to view in their proper light many of the needs, deficiencies and miseries that confront us in society today. To win our way through to this light, we need courage. Only then shall we know whether the pessimism that Herman Grimm expressed in so extreme a form is justified, and whether people are justified in saying: There remain only forces of decline in European civilization, one can only be pessimistic, even: The date for mass suicide ought to be fixed. That is, indeed, the question: whether all the Asiatic features that Europe had to conquer have in fact been conquered, so that after finding itself Europe can now, from the centre of the world's development, also reach an understanding with the East. It is from a standpoint such as this that we must consider whether what we ought to see is the kind of thing Herman Grimm had in mind, or whether we are not justified in thinking that mankind can still, through the development of what lies dormant in its soul, prove capable of choosing a time when understanding shall be achieved, and that what faces us is not the death of this European civilization, but its rebirth. Whether and how far this is possible will be examined, at least in outline, in the remaining lectures. |
| 235. Karma: The Karma Question and the Hierarchies
17 Feb 1924, Dornach Translated by Henry B. Monges |
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| Now, what comes to manifestation there lives in our real ego, in our ego organism, and extends its life from a previous earth existence into a later one. Archai, Archangeloi, Angeloi: First Constituent of Karma—Comfort, Discomfort. |
| 235. Karma: The Karma Question and the Hierarchies
17 Feb 1924, Dornach Translated by Henry B. Monges |
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When we advance from the study the aim of which was to prepare us for the explanation of human destiny, of karma, when we advance from abstractions, from the intellectual, to life itself, this advance then brings us, first of all, to the point of placing before our minds the various spheres of life into which the human being is inserted, in order to gain from these constituents of life a basis for a characterization of karma, of human destiny. Indeed, the human being belongs to the whole cosmos in a much more comprehensive sense than is usually thought. He is, indeed, a member of the cosmos, and without the cosmos he is nothing. I have often employed the comparison of some human bodily member, for example, a finger: A finger is a finger by virtue of its being a part of the human organism. The moment it is severed from the human organism it is no longer a finger. Outwardly, physically, as finger it is the same as previously, but after it has been severed from the human organism it is, indeed, no longer a finger. In like manner is the human being no longer a human being when he is lifted out of the general cosmic existence. He belongs to the general cosmic existence, and without it he cannot at all be looked upon, not at all be comprehended as a human being. As we have already seen from yesterday's lecture, the world surroundings of mankind consist of various domains. To begin with, we have the lifeless domain of the world which, in ordinary language, we call the domain of the mineral world. We become similar to this domain of the mineral world as the lifeless element only after we have laid aside our body, when we, as far as this body is concerned, have passed through the portal of death. In our real being we never become similar to this lifeless element. The discarded bodily form alone becomes similar to this element. Thus, we have on the one hand what the human being leaves behind as a physical corpse in the realm of the lifeless, and, on the other, what exists as the widespread lifeless, crystalline and non-crystalline mineral nature and world. As human beings we are entirely dissimilar to this mineral world as long as we live upon the earth. To this I have already drawn attention. In regard to our form, we are immediately destroyed when we are consigned to the mineral world as a corpse. We disintegrate into the mineral; that is, the element which holds our form together has nothing in common with mineral nature. From this it follows that the human being as he lives in the physical world cannot be actually influenced at all by the mineral nature itself. The chief and most comprehensive influences which act upon the human being from the mineral kingdom come in a roundabout way through the senses. We see the mineral kingdom, we hear it, we perceive its warmth, briefly, we perceive it by means of the senses. Our other relationships to the mineral nature are extremely slight. Just consider how very little of a mineral nature enters into relationship with us during earth life. The salt with which we flavor our food is mineral, and a few other things which we take in with our food are of a mineral nature, but by far the largest part of the food stuff which the human being consumes comes from the plant and animal kingdoms. And what we receive from the mineral kingdom relates itself in a very peculiar way to what we receive from the mineral world through our senses simply as soul impressions, as sense perceptions. And I beg you to consider seriously in this connection something very important. I have, indeed, frequently described this: The human brain weighs on the average about 1500 grams. This is quite a weight. The blood vessels at the base of this brain would be completely crushed by it if they were so heavily pressed upon by such a weight as this. But the brain does not press so heavily, for it is subject to a certain law. This law, which I have described here recently, says that an object immersed in a liquid loses some of its weight. This can be shown by experiment, by taking a pair of scales—first disregarding the liquid-filled vessel—weighing this object and noting its weight. Then place the vessel containing the water underneath one of the scale pans so that the object in the scale pan sinks into the water. Immediately the scale pans are no longer in balance. The pan containing the weight drops lower, because the object in the other pan becomes lighter. If you then investigate how much lighter the object in question becomes, you will find that it is lighter by an amount equal to the weight of the fluid which the object displaces. If thus you take water as a fluid, then will the weight of the body immersed be reduced by an amount equal to the weight of the displaced water. This is the so-called principle of Archimedes. He discovered this—as I have told you on another occasion—when taking a bath. By simply sitting in the bath he found that his leg became lighter or heavier, according as he inserted it in the water or lifted it out again. And he then cried: I have found it! Eureka! Indeed, my dear friends, what has just been said is an extremely important fact; important facts, however, are often forgotten. Had the engineering art not forgotten this Archimedean principle, then in Italy perhaps one of the greatest disasters of recent times would not have occurred. These are just the things which occur also in outer life from inability to survey clearly present-day knowledge. In any case, the body loses in weight an amount equal to the weight of the displaced water. Now, the brain is completely immersed in the cerebral fluid. It swims within this brain water. Once in a while, at the present time, the human being comes to realize that in so far as he is solid, he is actually a fish. In reality he is, indeed, a fish, for 90% of his body consists of water and the solid element swims within it like the fish in water. Thus, the brain by swimming in the cerebral fluid becomes so much lighter than formerly that it weighs only 20 grams. The brain which out of its fluid weighs some 1500 grams, in its fluid presses upon its base with a weight of only 20 grams. Now just consider how strong in us is the tendency in such an important organ—on account of this swimming of our brain in the cerebral fluid—the tendency to become free from the earth. We do not at all think with an organ which is subject to the influence of gravity, but rather we think in opposition to this force of gravity. The brain organ has first been relieved of the force of gravity. If you consider the wide significance of the impressions which you receive through the senses, and which you confront with your free will, and compare this with the minute influences which come from salt and similar substances absorbed as food or seasoning, then the following will result from your observation: So great is the predominance of our mere sense impressions, which render us independent of the stimuli from the mineral kingdom, that what we receive into ourselves as direct influence from the mineral world is related to our sense perceptions in the ratio of 20 to 1500 grams. What we take into ourselves through the sense perceptions does not tear us apart, and the elements in us which actually are subject to the earth's gravity—such as the mineral seasonings in our food are, for the most part, things that conserve us inwardly; for salt has at the same time a conserving, a maintaining, a refreshing force. The human being is thus, on the whole, independent of what exists in the surrounding mineral kingdom. He takes into himself from the mineral kingdom only that which has no direct influence on his inner nature. He moves about freely and independently in the mineral world. My dear friends, if this freedom and independence of movement in the mineral world did not exist, what we call human freedom would not exist at all. And it is very important that we must acknowledge that the mineral kingdom actually exists as the necessary counterpart of human freedom. Indeed, were there no mineral kingdom, we would not be free beings. For the moment we ascend into the plant kingdom, we are no longer independent of that kingdom. It only seems as if we directed our eyes toward the plant kingdom in just the same way we direct them toward the crystal, toward the widespread mineral kingdom. That is, however, not the case. Here, on the earth, the plant kingdom lies outspread. And we human beings are born into the world as breathing, living beings, as beings having a certain metabolism. All this is, indeed, much more dependent on the environment than our eyes, our ears, than everything that is a transmitter of sense impressions. What exists as plant world, the outspread plant world, draws its life out of the strength-giving ether pouring from all sides downward into the earth. The human being also is subject to this ether. When we are born as a little child and begin to grow, when the forces of growth are evident in us, these are the ether forces. The same forces which cause the plants to grow live in us as ether forces. We carry within us the ether body. The physical body harbors our eyes, harbors our ears. As I have just explained, this body has nothing in common with the rest of the physical world, and what shows this to be true is the fact that, as a corpse, it decays in the physical world. In the case of the ether body we have at once a different condition. Through this ether body we are related to the plant kingdom. But by our growing—just consider this, my dear friends—by virtue of our growing, something forms itself within us which has a deep connection, in a certain sense, with our destiny. To employ some rather grotesque, radical illustrations, we may grow and yet remain small and fat, or become tall and slim; we may grow and have this or that shape of nose. In brief, the way we grow has most decidedly a certain influence upon our external appearance. This, again, is connected—although in the first place only loosely—with our destiny. Growth does not express itself, however, only in these coarser things. Were the instruments we possess for purposes of research fine enough, we should discover that actually every human being has a different liver composition, a different spleen composition, a different brain composition. Liver is not merely liver. In every individual—naturally, in a very delicate way—it is something different. All this is connected with the same forces which cause the plants to grow. And in beholding the plant cover of the earth we must become conscious of the fact that what pours in out of the reaches of the ether, causing the plants to grow, works and acts also in us; it produces in us the original human potentiality which has a great deal to do with our destiny. For whether a person has received this or that liver, lung, or brain composition from the etheric universe is a matter profoundly connected with his destiny. We see only the outer side, to be sure, of all these things. Certainly, if we look upon the mineral kingdom, we see about all that exists in that world. Human beings are so fond, scientifically, of this mineral world—if it is at all possible to speak of a “scientific fondness” at the present time—because it contains everything that people wish to find. This is certainly not the case with what sustains, as forces, the plant kingdom. For the moment we attain imaginative knowledge—I have already spoken of this on other occasions—we begin immediately to see that the minerals are of such a nature that they are enclosed in the mineral kingdom. What sustains the plant kingdom does not appear externally at all to ordinary consciousness. Here we must penetrate deeper into the world. Suppose we ask the question: What is it really that acts in the plant kingdom? What acts there so that there can come from the distant ether reaches the forces which make the plants sprout and spring forth from the earth, which also cause our growth, however, and the finer composition of our whole body,—what acts there? This question then brings us to the beings of the so-called third Hierarchy, the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai. These beings are the realm of the invisible; but without them there would be no up and down surging of the ether forces which cause the plants to grow, and which act in us through our having within us the same forces that cause growth in plants. We can no longer stop at the mere visible—unless we wish to remain dull in regard to knowledge—if we approach the plant world and its forces. And we must, indeed, become conscious of the fact that in the body-free existence between death and a new birth we develop our relationships, our connections with these beings, the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai. And according to the way we develop these connections and relationships with these beings of the third Hierarchy, does the karma of our inner nature—if I may designate it thus—fashion itself, that very karma which depends upon the way our ether body combines the bodily fluids, how it causes us to be tall or short, and so forth. But here the beings of the third Hierarchy have only limited power. The ability of plants to grow does not originate from their power alone, for in this respect, these beings of the third Hierarchy—the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai—stand in the service of yet higher beings. What we live through, however, before we descend out of the spiritual world into our physical body, what is connected with our more delicate bodily structure, and all that I have just described, all this is caused by our conscious encounter with these beings of the third Hierarchy. And under this instruction which we can receive from them, in accordance with our preparation in our previous earth life, that is, as a result of the instruction we receive for fashioning our ether body out of the forces of the ether reaches, all this occurs during the last pre-birth period, just before we descend from the super-physical into physical existence. From the foregoing it is evident that our glance must first fall upon what works into our destiny, into our karma out of our inner constitution. For this aspect of karma, I should like to employ the expressions “comfort and discomfort in life.” Well-being, comfort, and discomfort in life are connected with what is our inner quality by virtue of our ether body. A second element which lives in our karma depends upon the fact that the earth is not only covered by the plant kingdom but is inhabited by the animal kingdom. Now just consider, my dear friends, that the different regions of the earth have the most varied animals. The animal atmosphere in the different regions of the earth varies greatly. You will, however, admit that the human being also lives in this atmosphere in which the animals live. That sounds grotesque at the present time, because human beings are not accustomed to consider such matters. There are, for example, regions where the elephant lives. Indeed, in the regions where the elephant lives the cosmos affects the earth in such a way as to make it possible for the elephant to come into being. Indeed, do you believe, my dear friends, that, if there is a portion of the earth upon which the elephant lives, with the elephant-forming forces working down upon it from the cosmos, the same forces are not working, if right at this same spot a human being is present? Of course, these forces are there also when a human being is present. And this is likewise just as true for the whole animal kingdom. In exactly the same way that the plant-forming forces from the ether reaches are present right here where we live—the walls of wood, stone, and even concrete do not hold them back; here in Dornach, we live more or less in the midst of the very forces that fashion the plants in the Jura Alps—so likewise, if a human being lives on the very soil where the elephant can exist according to the earth's constitution, does he live under the elephant-forming forces. [IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW] I can, indeed, quite well imagine that you now have before your mind's eye many a large and small animal which inhabits the earth, and you now learn that the human being, indeed, lives in the same atmosphere as these animals. All this actually works upon the human being. Naturally, it acts upon the human being differently from the way it acts upon the animals, because the human being has yet other qualities, yet other members of his being than the animals. It acts differently upon the human being; otherwise he would also become an elephant in the elephant sphere. He does not, however, become an elephant. Moreover, the human being lifts himself continually out of what works upon him there. Yet he lives in this atmosphere. You see, everything that exists in the astral body of the human being is dependent upon this atmosphere in which he lives. And, if we may say that his well-being or discomfort is dependent upon the plant nature of the earth, so may we again say that the sympathies and antipathies which we, as man, develop within our earth existence, and which we bring with us from pre-earthly existence, depend on what constitutes, so to speak, the animal atmosphere. The elephant has a trunk and thick, column-shaped legs. The stag has antlers, and so on. In these members live the animal-forming, the animal-shaping forces. In the human being these forces are manifest only in their effect upon his astral body. And in this effect upon his astral body they produce the sympathies and antipathies which the human individuality brings with him out of the spiritual world. Just observe, my dear friends, these sympathies and antipathies. Observe what a strong dominant power these sympathies and antipathies have throughout the whole of life. Certainly, we human beings are taught, with justification in a certain respect, to rise above these strong sympathies and antipathies. Nevertheless, to begin with they still exist—these sympathies and antipathies; we still go through our lives living in sympathies and antipathies. One has sympathy for this and another for that. One has sympathy for sculpture, another for music; one has sympathy for blondes, another for brunettes. These are strong, radical sympathies. But our entire life is interwoven by such sympathies and antipathies. We live in dependence upon those forces which produce the manifold animal configurations. And now, just ask yourselves, my dear friends, what then do we as human beings bear within us which corresponds within our own innermost being to the manifold animal shapes existing in outer nature? A hundredfold, a thousandfold are the animal shapes. A hundredfold, a thousandfold are the configurations of our sympathies and antipathies; only, most of them remain in the unconscious or in the subconscious. This is an additional, a third, world. The first world was the world upon which we really feel no dependence—the mineral world. The second world is the one in which Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai live, the one which causes the plant kingdom to sprout forth, which gives us our inner quality by means of which we carry well-being and discomfort into life, by means of which we feel desperately unhappy through ourselves or feel happy through ourselves. That which signifies our destiny through our inner composition, through our entire etheric humanness, is taken out of this second world. We now come to what further profoundly conditions our destiny,—that is, our sympathies and antipathies. And these sympathies and antipathies bring us, finally, what belongs to our destiny in a far wider scope than do merely these sympathies and antipathies themselves. The one human being is carried by his sympathies and antipathies into far distances. He lives here and there, because his sympathies have borne him thither, and in these distant reaches the details of his destiny develop. Deeply linked to our whole human destiny are these sympathies and antipathies. They live in the world in which lives not the third Hierarchy, but the second Hierarchy—the Exusiai, the Dynamis, the Kyriotetes. That which is an earthly reflection of the sublime, glorious forms of this second Hierarchy lives in the animal kingdom. That, however, which these beings transplant into us during our intercourse with them between death and a new birth we bring with us out of the spiritual into the physical world as our inborn sympathies and antipathies. If we fathom these matters, then such concepts as those of ordinary heredity become childish, really childish. For in order that I may possess some inherited trait from my father or mother, I must first develop the sympathy or antipathy for this trait of my father or mother. Thus, it does not depend merely upon the fact that I have inherited these qualities through some sort of lifeless nature-cause, but it depends upon whether I have had any sympathy for these qualities. The reason why I have had such sympathies for these qualities will be discussed in the subsequent lectures. Our discussions about karma will, indeed, occupy us for many hours to come. It is, however, really childish to speak about heredity in the way this usually occurs today in those scientific circles which consider themselves especially clever. It is even asserted today that specifically soul-spirit characteristics are inherited. Genius is said to be inherited from the forebears, and when a genius appears in the world, we seek out the individual traits in the forebears which, when united in some personality, are supposed to produce this genius. Indeed, that is a strange kind of demonstration of the truth. A reasonable proof would be that, if a genius exists he would then, through heredity, again produce another genius. But, if we were to look for these proofs—well, Goethe also had a son, and other geniuses have had sons we would come upon curious things. That would be a proof! But the fact that a genius exists and that certain characteristics of his forebears are found in this genius has no more significance than that I am wet if I fall into the water and am pulled out. Through this event, I have very little to do in my own nature with the water which then drips from me. Naturally, since I am born into a certain hereditary stream, because of my sympathies with the qualities in question, I am vested with these inherited qualities just as, when I have fallen into the water, I carry some of this water on my body after having been pulled out of it. Grotesquely childish, however, are the ideas which people have in this regard. For the sympathies and antipathies have already appeared in the pre-earthly existence of the human being, and these give him his innermost structure. With these he enters into earth existence: with these he frames his destiny for himself out of his pre-earthly existence. And we can now easily imagine the following: In a previous earth life, we were associated with a human being. Much has resulted from this association, which continues on in the life between death and a new birth. Under the influence of the forces of the higher Hierarchies, there is fashioned within the living thoughts, within the living cosmic impulses, all that which is then to pass over into the next earth life out of the experience of the previous one, in order to be lived further. For that purpose, we employ sympathies and antipathies, cultivating the impulses through which we find each other in life. And these sympathies and antipathies are shaped under the influence of the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes in the life between death and a new birth. These sympathies and antipathies enable us then to find the human beings in life with whom we must continue to live, in accordance with the previous earth lives. This is fashioned out of our inner human structure. Naturally, in this acquiring of sympathies and antipathies the most manifold errors occur. These, however, are equalized again in the course of destiny throughout many earth lives. Thus, we have here a second constituent of karma: the sympathies and antipathies. We may say: First constituent of karma—inner comfort, or discomfort; second constituent—sympathies and antipathies (see tabulation pages 26, 27). By virtue of our having reached the sympathies and antipathies in human destiny we have ascended into the sphere in which lie the forces for the formation of the animal kingdom. Now we ascend into the real kingdom of man. We live not only in association with the plant kingdom, with the animal kingdom, but we live quite determinatively for our fate in association with other human beings in the world. That is quite a different association from the association with plants and animals. It is an association through which the chief element of our destiny is fashioned. The impulses which cause the peopling of the earth also with human beings act only upon mankind. And now the question arises: Which are the impulses that act only upon mankind? Here we can permit a purely external consideration to speak which I have already frequently presented. Our life is, indeed, directed from its yonder side—if I may so express myself—with a much greater wisdom than we direct it here from this side. We often meet in our later years someone who is extraordinarily important for our life. If we think back and see how we have lived up to the time when we met this human being, our whole life then appears to us to be the path we have taken in order to encounter him. It is as if we had ordered every step so as to find this individual exactly at the right point of time, or at least to find him at a certain point of time. We need only, for once, ponder upon the following: Just think what, with full human awareness, it signifies, to find in some year of one's life a certain person and henceforward to experience something in common with him, to work and collaborate with him. Just consider what this means. Let us consider in full awareness what it is that offers itself as the impulse which has led us to meet this person. If we ponder upon the matter and ask ourselves how it is that we have found this person, perhaps it will then occur to us that an event had first to be experienced by us which was connected with many other people; otherwise there would not have* been the least possibility of finding this human being during life. And in order that this event might occur, another had in turn to be experienced. We arrive at complicated relationships all of which had to take place and into which we had to enter in order to have some decisive experience. And then we ponder, perhaps, upon the following: If at a certain age—I will not say at the age of one, but of fourteen—we had been put to the task of solving consciously the problem how we should, in the fiftieth year of our life, bring about a decisive meeting with some person, if we imagine that at a certain age we should have had to solve this problem consciously like a problem in arithmetic, I beg you just to consider what all of that would require! We human beings are, indeed, consciously extremely stupid, and what happens with us in the world is, if we consider such things, extremely clever and wise! If we consider such a thing, our attention is directed to the extreme intricacy and significance of our destiny's working, of the action of our karma. And all this occurs in the realm of the human being. Now, I beg you to consider that what takes place here with us is actually living in the unconscious. Right up to the moment when a critical event confronts us, it lies in the unconscious. Everything takes place as though subject to the laws of nature. But where would the laws of nature ever have the power to effect such a thing? What occurs in this region can, indeed, contradict all nature laws and everything that we construct in accordance with the outer laws of nature. I have repeatedly drawn your attention also to this fact. The externalities of human life may even be stretched into the frame of calculated laws. Let us take, for example, the business of life insurance. It can only prosper through our being able to calculate the probable life duration of any—let us say—nineteen or twenty-year-old individual. When someone wishes to insure his life, the policy is based upon the probable length of life. That is, as a person, nineteen years old today, we are expected to live according to these calculations a certain number of years. That can be determined. But just suppose that this period has elapsed. You would not feel in duty bound to die because of this fact. According to this probable life duration, two human beings should have been dead for a long time. But, after they have long been “dead,” according to this probable duration of life, they meet each other for the first time in the way I have described! All this occurs beyond what we calculate for human life out of the external facts of nature. And nevertheless, it occurs with as much inner necessity as do the laws of nature. It is not possible to say anything but the following: With the same necessity with which any natural phenomenon takes place, an earthquake, or a volcanic eruption, or whatever it may be, a minor or a major event in nature, with the same necessity two human beings meet each other during earth life according to the rules of life which they have made for themselves. Thus, we see actually here within the physical realm a new realm established, and within this realm we live not only in comfort or discomfort, in sympathies and antipathies, but we live within it as in our own occurrences, our own experiences. We are entirely molded into the realm of events, of experiences which determine our life in accordance with destiny. In this realm the beings of the first Hierarchy are active, the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones. For, in order that every human step, every movement of the soul, everything in us may be guided in the world in such a way that the destiny of man may grow from it, a greater power is needed than that which acts in the plant kingdom, than that possessed by the Hierarchy of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, than that possessed by the Hierarchy of the Exusiai, Kyriotetes, Dynamis. To achieve this a power is needed which is inherent in the first Hierarchy, Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones—the most exalted beings of the universe. Now, what comes to manifestation there lives in our real ego, in our ego organism, and extends its life from a previous earth existence into a later one. Archai, Archangeloi, Angeloi: First Constituent of Karma—Comfort, Discomfort. Dynamis, Exusiai, Kyriotetes: Second Constituent of Karma—Sympathies, Antipathies. Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones: Third Constituent of Karma—Events, Experiences. And now consider the following: You live a life on earth, causing this or that, out of instincts, passions, inclinations, let us say, or out of clever or foolish thoughts. All this is actually present within you as impulses. Consider that, when you live a life on earth, what you do through instincts leads to this or to that; it leads to the happiness or injury of another human being. Then you pass through the life between death and a new birth. In this life you have the strong consciousness: “If I have injured another human being, I am less perfect than I should have been had I not thus injured him. I must atone for it.” You feel in yourself the urge and the impulse to expiate this injury. If you have done something to a human being which advances him, then you behold what is advancing him in such a way that you say: “This must serve as the basis for general world advancement, this must lead to further results in the world.” All this you are able to develop inwardly; all this may give well-being, ease, or discomfort, according to the way you fashion the inner nature of your body during life between death and a new birth. All this may lead you to sympathies and antipathies, in that you construct your astral body in the corresponding way with the help of the beings of the second Hierarchy, the Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kyriotetes. But all of this does not yet give you the power to cause what in a past life were mere human deeds to become a cosmic act. You advanced or injured a human being. The effect of this must be that this human being will encounter you in the next life and that you will find through this encounter the impulse to expiate the effect. What has a merely moral significance must become an outer fact, must become an outer world event. For this purpose, the beings are needed who transform, metamorphose, moral acts into world deeds. These are the beings of the first Hierarchy, Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones. These beings transform what proceeds from us in one earth life into our experiences of the next earth lives. They act in what constitutes event and experience in human life. We have there the three basic elements in our karma; that which composes our inner constitution, our inner human existence, is under the control of the third Hierarchy; that which exists as our sympathies and antipathies, that which in a certain way becomes our environment, is the concern of the second Hierarchy; finally, that which confronts us as our outer life is the concern of the first, the most exalted Hierarchy of beings ranging above men. Thus, we look into the relationship in which the human being stands to the universe, and come now to the important question: How do all the details of our destiny develop from these three elements of the human being? The human being is born into a parental home. He is born on a certain spot of the earth. He is born within a folk. He is born into a certain complex of facts. Everything, however, that appears by virtue of his being born into a parental home, of his being entrusted to educators, of his being born into a folk, of his being placed upon a certain spot on the earth at his birth,—all of this which, in spite of all human freedom, intervenes so profoundly, so fatefully in the life of the human being, all of this is finally, in some way, dependent upon these three elements which compose human destiny. All individual questions will disclose themselves to us in corresponding answers, if we focus our attention upon these fundamentals in the right way. If we ask why someone in his twenty-fifth year has small pox, thus passing through the most extreme danger of life, if we ask why some other sickness or event may intervene in his life, why his life may be benefited by this or that older person, by this or that nation, or why advancement occurs to him through this or that outer event,—in every case we shall have to return to that which, in a threefold manner, composes human destiny and places the human being in the totality of the cosmic Hierarchies. In the mineral kingdom alone does the human being move about freely. There lies the realm of his freedom. By paying attention to this, the human being learns also to pose in the right way the question of freedom. Read in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity how much I have stressed the importance of not asking about the freedom of the will. The will resides deep down in the unconscious, and it is nonsense to ask about the freedom of the will; on the contrary, it is possible to speak only of the freedom of thinking, of thought. In my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I have clearly made this distinction. Free thoughts must activate the will, then is the human being free. But with his thoughts the human being lives in the mineral kingdom. With everything else, with his life in the world of the plant, of the animal, in the purely human world, he is subject to destiny. And freedom is something of which one may say the following: The human being steps out of the realms which are ruled by the higher Hierarchies into the realm which, in a certain way, is independent of the higher Hierarchies, into the mineral kingdom, in order to be free as far as he is concerned. This mineral kingdom is, indeed, the realm to which the human being becomes similar only as a corpse, when he has laid his body aside after having passed through the portal of death. The human being is independent in his earth life of that kingdom which can only act for his destruction. It is not to be wondered at that he is free in this kingdom, since this kingdom has no other part in him but to destroy him when it receives him. He must first die in order that he be, as a corpse, in the realm in which he is free also as a phenomenon of nature. Thus, things are related. We grow older and older. If the other incidents do not occur which we shall also learn about in connection with karma, if the human being dies at an advanced age, he becomes similar, as a corpse, to the mineral kingdom. He enters the sphere of the lifeless by growing older. Then he detaches his corpse from himself. That is no longer human; naturally, it is no longer human. Let us contemplate the mineral kingdom: that is no longer God. Just as the corpse is no longer human, is the mineral kingdom no longer God. What is it, then? The Godhead is in the plant, animal, and human kingdoms; we have found it there in its three Hierarchies. The Godhead is in the mineral kingdom just as little as the human corpse is the human being. The mineral kingdom is the divine corpse. To be sure, we shall encounter in due course the peculiar fact, upon which today I desire only to touch, that the human being grows older in order to become a corpse and the Gods grow younger in order to become a corpse. That is to say, the Gods travel on that other path on which we travel after our death. The mineral kingdom is, therefore, the youngest kingdom. It is, nevertheless, the one that the Gods detach from themselves. And because it is detached from the Gods, the human being can live within it as in the realm of his freedom. Thus, are these things interrelated. And the human being learns actually to feel more and more at home in the world by his learning in this way to place his sensations, his thoughts, his feelings, his will impulses in the right relationship to the world. But only thus do we see also how, in accordance with the laws of destiny, we are placed in the world and in relationship to other human beings. |
| 197. Polarities in the Evolution of Mankind: Lecture III
09 Mar 1920, Stuttgart Translator Unknown |
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| People felt that if they spoke to someone who had been properly trained in this respect it was not the ordinary ego that spoke to them: i.e. an ego born in some place or another, bearing the imprint of some social background or other. |
| 197. Polarities in the Evolution of Mankind: Lecture III
09 Mar 1920, Stuttgart Translator Unknown |
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There are a few things I want to add to the points we have been considering. They may help to make some of the ideas on which we must base our actions more real. I am looking for ideas that are less abstract than the vast majority of ideas by which people allow themselves to be governed today. We really need such concrete ideas, for they are the only ones that enter into the realm of feeling for human beings, and therefore into real life. They are the only ideas to fire the human will and human actions. Looking at the world today we should really consider the most striking characteristic of social life in the civilized world to be that the smaller communities of past times have given way to quite large human communities. We need not go far back in human evolution to find that social communities extended only over limited territories. The civic communities of towns formed a relative whole, and fundamentally speaking it is only now, in quite recent times, that large empires have arisen, that the empire of English-speaking peoples has come about—I have characterized this a number of times. None of us should have any illusions concerning the consequences, particularly in Central Europe. It needs the point of view of spiritual science, however, to get the right ideas about these things, ideas that fully relate to reality. The spiritual-scientific point of view makes us go back to earlier stages of human development to see that then, too, people formed certain kinds of communities, though these should not be called ‘states’—as I have said on a number of occasions—for that would cause tremendous confusion. Instead, let us find some other, more neutral term. Let us say that ‘realms’ arose. Such realms were ruled by individuals, or by particular groups. Subsequently states developed out of this, and today states are taken so much for granted that no one would think of going against them—at least in certain areas no one would go against them. What is worse, they are so much taken for granted that people are not even inclined to think about them. Behind this, however, lies something that unites human beings in their inner soul life with the spiritual, the divine principle, as it came to be called during different stages of earth evolution. If we go back to prehistoric times, times that only partly extend into historical times, we find that in those prehistoric times the idea of a ruler of the realm, as we may call it—whatever words we use do not really fit those earlier ideas—was quite different from what we take it to mean today. The idea of the ruler of an earthly realm came very close to what people knew to be their idea of a god. These things inevitably must seem highly paradoxical to modern minds, though that is only because modern minds are little inclined to take serious consideration of things that existed during the past in human evolution and do not fit in with the way of thinking that has become customary in Western Europe and in its appendage, America, over the last three or four hundred years. Of course the way a ruler of the realm was introduced to his office, at least in many empires, was very different in those early partly prehistoric times. We need only go back as far as ancient Egypt, meaning the earlier, partly prehistoric times of ancient Egypt, or as far as Chaldea, and we shall find that it was considered a matter of course that regents were prepared for their office by the forerunners of our present-day priests. People had quite concrete ideas as to how a ruler should be prepared for office by the priesthood and its institutions. They felt that with this kind of preparation the person called to be regent truly became what the Chinese, still having a faint notion of this, called the Son of Heaven. There was an awareness that someone called to rule over some region had to be made a kind of Son of Heaven. What was in people's minds was however something quite different from the one and only idea we have today when we speak of training a person or preparing them for something. You can go to great lengths to explain that one should not train people for some office or other in this world by merely implanting intellectual knowledge into their souls, but that the whole person needs to be developed; practically all our ideas today on development, education and so on tend to be abstract to an extreme degree. People have the idea that only some aspect or other of the human being should be changed or transformed to advance him in his training, his preparation for some office. No one thinks that development should be such that the individual undergoes a complete change. Above all no one thinks that something objective should enter into the soul of that individual, something that was not there before. No one has that idea. I could characterize this more or less as follows: I am talking to someone who is the product of the natural and social life of the present day. He tells me this and that, I tell him this or that. The person who speaks to me bears a name: he is the product of the usual natural and social background that people have today. The same applies to me. That is really almost the only way in which we behave towards each other nowadays, the way in which we look at each other. In the times of which I have been speaking that would have been a very alien notion. It was above all alien to people called to hold important offices, to be leaders within the human community. The external natural background—family origins, father, mother, grandfather, grandmother and so on—was of no real concern if the people concerned had been properly prepared for their office. The things we look for and find in present-day individuals who have been raised to the highest spheres were then of no account. People felt that if they spoke to someone who had been properly trained in this respect it was not the ordinary ego that spoke to them: i.e. an ego born in some place or another, bearing the imprint of some social background or other. Instead they felt that something was speaking to them that had been made to come down from spiritual heights to take up its abode in a human individual thanks to the preparation and training given in the mystery cult. This must of course sound incredibly strange to present-day people. It is however necessary to stop harbouring confused notions about these things and to form ideas that have their basis in truth. The idea was that education—not all training but the training of people called to high office—should enable spirits from the higher hierarchies to speak through these individuals, using them as their instruments. Those instruments were prepared by training, so that spirits of the higher hierarchies would be able to speak through them. There was general awareness of this, particularly when the population at large came to form an opinion about the identity of their ruler. Remnants of this still survive, for instance in the title Son of Heaven for the ruler of China. That was the level of human awareness in earliest Egyptian and Chaldean times. Spiritual science has established this. To the people at large their ruler was God. Basically they had no other concept of divinity. The preparation of the ruler had been such that the outer physical form was nothing, it merely made it possible for a god to move among human beings. The earliest inhabitants of what was later to become the kingdom of Egypt quite naturally accepted the fact that they were ruled by gods who walked on earth in human form. In this respect the earliest social awareness of human beings was entirely realistic. There was no recognition of a separate world beyond, of a separate spiritual world. The spiritual world existed in the same place as the world within which people moved on earth. In this world, where human beings walked the earth, not only ordinary human individuals were walking about in physical form but also gods. The divine world was right among them, made absolute and visible under the conditions regularly created through the mystery cult. When such a ruler wanted something, decreed something, it was a god who wanted it. To the minds of earliest humankind during that partly prehistoric period it would have been pointless to question whether something decreed by their ruler should or should not happen; it was after all a ‘god’ who wanted it. Earliest humanity thus connected the spiritual hierarchies with everything that happened on earth. Those hierarchies were there in their midst; they were not something to which one first has to ascend by some kind of spiritual, inner means. No, they were present in the mysteries as the training given to physical bodies found suitable for preparation as dwelling places for spirits of the higher hierarchies, so that these might walk among human beings and be their rulers. This may seem strange to modern minds, but modern minds will finally have to leave behind the narrow-minded views they hold today, ideas only three or four hundred years old as we know them today, and take a wider view. We cannot develop and think ahead to the future unless we broaden the tunnel vision which has evolved in almost every sphere of life. We must expand the time horizons we survey and consider larger evolutionary time spans than present-day history normally covers. The things of the past, things that existed in historical and prehistoric evolution, do of course give way to other things as time progresses, but in certain areas they are retained. They are often retained by becoming external, continuing in an outer form and losing their inner meaning. The awareness of the godlike nature of the ruler that was a feature of earliest imperialism still comes up here or there in the present age, except that it no longer has any meaning, since mankind progresses and does not stand still. Not long ago a Roman Catholic bishop addressed a pastoral to his diocese13 in which he stated nothing more and nothing less than that a Roman Catholic priest conducting an act of worship was more powerful than Christ Jesus himself. Acting as the celebrant, the priest coerced Christ Jesus, the god of Christianity, to enter into the physical world as the priest performed the act of transubstantiation. The god might be willing or not, the act of transubstantiation forced him to take the route prescribed by the priest. It is really true that very recently a pastoral referred to the sublime power of the earth-born ‘priest god’ over the ‘inferior god’ who descended from cosmic heights and walked on the earth in the flesh of Jesus. Things like this have their origin in older times and have lost their meaning in the present age. Some people representing certain confessions know very well, of course, why they keep throwing such things into human minds. They have become just as meaningless as the words modern rulers write in albums: The king's wishes are the supreme law.14 These things have happened in our times. Humanity, fast asleep, has said nothing at all about it and still says nothing now to things going on that bode ill for humankind, things one gets used to, things one does not want to see. Today we are altogether little prepared to take note of major events in human evolution. That was a first stage in the evolution of human empires: when the ruler was the god. This way of looking at it was still very much alive in Roman times. Whichever way you may look at Nero, as a fool or a bloodhound, for the large majority of the Roman people Nero's dreadful tyranny merely made them marvel that a god could walk on earth in such a guise. Many of the citizens of imperial Rome never doubted that the figure of Nero was that of a god. A second stage in the evolution of empires came with the transition from a ruler who was a god to one who ruled by the grace of God. During the earliest times of human evolution on the civilized earth the ruler was God. At the second stage the ruler stood for God; he was not indwelt by the god himself but inspired by God, given special grace. Everything he did would succeed because divine power—now no longer within him but in a realm close to the earthly realm—flowed into him, inspired him, filled him, and guided him in all he did. To describe the essential nature of such a second stage ruler we have to say that the ruler was a symbol. At the first stage the ruler was a divine spirit walking on earth. At the second stage he represented what that spirit signified; he was the sign, the symbol in which the spirit came to expression. The ruler became the image of God. The principles governing those external social relationships also came to expression in the institutions which became established. In earliest times empires were so constituted that a number of people were governed by a divine spirit. This god would be similar to them in external appearance but utterly different inside. At the second stage we find empires where the leader or leaders represent the god or gods and are symbols for them. At the early stage of human empires discussion as the whether the ruler, the god, was acting rightly or wrongly was beside the point. At the second stage it began to be possible to think whether something he had done was right or wrong. At the early stage everything the ruler did, thought or said was right, for he was the god. Then, at the second stage, some other spiritual sphere was felt to exist side by side with the earthly realm, one that has the god, the ruler given the grace of God, within it. The power streaming into the earthly realm, giving direction and orientation, was felt to come from that other realm. The institutions and human individuals in the earthly realm were the reflection of something streaming in from the realm of the higher hierarchies. It is interesting to find out, for example, that Dionysius the Areopagite,15 also called the pseudo-Dionysius, who was much more genuine than orthodox science imagines, presented the right theory concerning the way human empires were ruled by divine empires so that the conditions and institutions created among humans were a symbol of what existed in the divine realm. Dionysius the Areopagite wrote that there were heavenly hierarchies behind the human hierarchies on this earth. He stated very clearly that the social structure of the priestly hierarchy here on earth, from deacons and archdeacons all the way up to bishops, ought to show that the relationship of deacon to archdeacon is the same as that of angel to archangel, and so on. The earthly hierarchy should truly reflect the heavenly hierarchy. This refers to the second stage of empires. Something was able to evolve that was to govern human ideas until quite recent times. After all there existed in Central Europe until 1806 an institution that in its title gave expression to the way the heavenly and the earthly principle were seen to be one: the Holy Roman Empire, an empire seen to be based on the power of heaven. The words ‘of German nationality’ were added [to the German title] to show that the empire was also of earthly origin. The way the title evolved it is evident that a whole empire was formed in such a way that it should be seen to be the image of a heavenly institution. Such were also the ideas behind St Augustine's City of God and Dante's work On Monarchy.16 If only people were not so limited in their ideas they could take a wider view when reading something like Dante's work and realize that Dante, who after all must be considered a great thinker, still had ideas in the 13th and 14th centuries that are radically different from our modern ideas. If we were to take such things in historical evolution seriously we would give up those narrow ideas that do not even go back as far as Dante but are just a few hundred years old. The ideas used by people nowadays to fill their heads with illusions, wanting to understand history by merely going back as far as ancient Greece, are limited ideas. Yet it is only possible to understand the whole structure of ancient Egypt, for instance, if we know that the ancient gods still walked on earth. In the times that followed gods no longer walked on the earth, but the institutions created on earth had to be an image, a symbol, of the divine world order. Then something arose for example like the possibility to reflect on the lawfulness of things, to reflect on such things as the fact that the human intellect can arrive at a judgement as to what is lawful and what is not—all this only became possible during the second stage of imperial development. During the earliest stage it was pointless to reflect on what was lawful and what was not. People had to look to what the ruler said, for the god lived in him, he was the god. In the second stage, human judgement could be used to determine that there is something in a spiritual realm next to our own realm that we cannot reach as physical human beings but only as human beings of soul and spirit. Then people no longer believed, as they had believed in earlier times, that the divine could unite with the whole physical human being, that a human being could indeed become a god. At most—using mystical language to define the living truth about public institutions—people believed that the human soul element could unite with the god. Basically it is true to say that no one nowadays is able to understand the way things were said in works written and published as late as the 13th and 14th centuries unless one knows that the people of that time had quite a different awareness, a feeling that some degree of divine inspiration was alive in those who were called and trained to hold special office. Oddly enough things referring to something rather serious will often become derisory expressions at a later point in time when the evolution of humankind has progressed. Someone saying ‘God shapes the back for the burthen’ nowadays would say this more or less as a joke. Yet though it may be said today partly as a joke, in the times when empires were at their second stage of development it certainly held true and was to the forefront of people's minds. It applied not only to people but within certain limits also to what was being done. Rituals were made to be such that the actions performed in them reflected what went on in the spiritual realms. The rituals performed were spiritual events reaching across into what went on in the physical world. People very much believed the spiritual realm to be adjoining the physical realm, but they also thought that it extended across into the earthly realm and that the symbol or sign of the spiritual realm was to be found in the earthly realm. Very gradually people ceased to believe in the validity of this. An age was to follow where this awareness of the connection between earthly and spiritual things was to fade. In the days of Wycliffe, of Huss,17 people began to dispute things which it would have been unthinkable to dispute before. They were in disagreement on the significance of transubstantiation: whether this ritual act had anything to do with what went on in spiritual worlds. When people begin to disagree about such things, old ideas are coming to an end. People no longer know what to think; yet for centuries, indeed millennia, they had known exactly what to think. It always happens that certain things normal to a particular age continue to play a role in later ages. They are then out of place, anachronistic, luciferic. That is what has happened to the great, far-reaching symbols relating to a particular age when they showed how ritual acts and the like performed on earth Were connected with divine and spiritual happenings in the world. Those symbols persisted during later ages and certain secret societies preserved them in a luciferic way. Western secret societies in particular have been preserving such ancient symbols. They are traditional in those societies, though they have lost their real content. On the one hand, then, we see certain secret societies—Freemasons, Jesuit organizations and denominational groups have arisen from these—preserving, in a way, those symbols which only had meaning in an earlier age. On the other hand we see how words preserve ideas that belonged to an earlier age in a basically luciferic way. Words used In everyday life have also lost their original substance, lost the context of a way of thinking when those words were symbols of spiritual things. For the spiritual content is gradually lost and words become empty symbols, signs without meaning. During a third period, at a third level of empire development, there was no longer any awareness of individuals being given the grace of God, of divine elements entering into earthly events, earthly speech. The spiritual realm was now entirely in the beyond. The opposite of what had existed at the first stage of empire development now held true. During the first stage the god lived on earth, went about in human form. During the third stage one can only think of the god being present in an invisible world that is not perceptible to the senses. Everything people were able to use to express their relationship with the realm of divine spirits lost its meaning. The word ‘god’ continues to be used. When the word ‘god’ was spoken in the distant past people were looking for something that appeared in human form, walking among human beings. It is not that human beings in those very early times were materialists. Materialists only became possible once the spiritual realm had been banished beyond the sense-perceptible world. During the earliest period of human evolution the spiritual world was right there among human beings. There would have been no need for someone living in ancient Egypt during its earliest times to say: The kingdom of the divine is at hand. He would take that to be self-evident. At the time when Christ Jesus appeared among men people first had to be told: ‘The Kingdom of the gods cometh not with observation… for, behold, it is within you.18 We are now living in an age when it would be a nonsense to look to a person for anything but a straightforward development of what he was as a child, a development based on cause and effect. We live in an age when it would be sheer madness for someone to consider himself more than the straightforward further development of what was also there in his childhood. Eight thousand years ago, let us say, something was taken as a matter of course, was the general way of thinking; yet if anyone were to say the same thing today this would merely indicate that they are mad. The realities of those distant times have been reinterpreted in the modern way of thinking into that fictitious tale we call ‘history’. This spreads a veil over the radical metamorphosis we are able to discover when we consider human evolution in the light of truth. The things we often say today, things we reveal in our external life, exist because they once had relevance and were considered to be the truth. We still say things like ‘by the grace of God’—people have more or less tried to get out of the habit in recent years, but they have not succeeded very well with this—but we do not know, or pay no attention to the fact, that there was a time when this was a reality to human minds, when it was taken as a matter of course. Here I am drawing your attention to things that give our public life its meaningless, conventional character. Things we put forward in the words we use, in our customs and indeed the way we judge issues in public life, relate to times when those words, even if they only became part of the vocabulary at a later date—they were modelled on the original language—were formed and used on quite a different basis. The words we use in public life today have been squeezed dry. With some it is immediately apparent, with others it was not apparent for a long time. In the distant past a token was hung upon a human body in magical body in magical rites, transforming it into an important magical aspect of the god walking on earth. This has become something trivial in the decorations given to people today. That is the kind of history humankind is unlikely to pursue. Not only words can become empty phrases and lose all meaning, as is the case with the most important words used in public life today; the objects hung around people's necks or pinned to their chests can show similar character in their relation to reality, like a word that is meaningless today but once had sacred meaning and substance to it. We must realize that initially our evolution was such that an older awareness lost its substance and became empty and conventional. There can be no real new growth in our devastated public life of today unless we do so. We must look for new well-springs that will give real substance again to public life. We have no awareness of gods walking the earth in human form. We must therefore acquire the ability to recognise the spirit not in human form but in the form it has when we rise to spiritual vision. For us the gods no longer descend to sit on physical thrones. We must acquire the spiritual faculties that enable us to ascend in our vision to the thrones where gods are to be found who can only be alive to us in the spirit. We must learn to fill the abstract formulas we use with spiritual contents of our own experience. We must become able to face truths that are deeply disturbing to those who grasp them rightly. We must become able to see things as they are. Sometimes we fail to do so for periods extending over decades. As Central Europeans we believe ourselves to be part of European civilization. What we should ask ourselves is what it is that has made our inner life, the life of our soul, so full of discord over the last fifty years or even longer. Let me say just one thing. When you look to the West you see in the first instance—we'll leave aside the rest—a nation falling into decadence, the French nation. One thing is important, however, among the French. When a member of this nation said: I am a Frenchman—this is what they have said to themselves for centuries—he said something that was in accord with the external facts; a permissible, truthful declaration made with reference to external life. Any of us who have ever talked to people who were young and German in the first half of the 19th century will be able to confirm the following. Herman Grimm19 for instance has repeatedly described what it meant, to people who were young when he was young in Germany, for someone to profess himself to be German in public life, not as an empty phrase but in reality. It would have been treason. People were Bavarians, Württembergians, Prussians, but to say ‘I am German’ would make them criminals. In the West there was a point to saying ‘I am a Frenchman’, people were permitted to be that in external life. It would have meant going to prison or being put beyond the pale in some other way if one had taken it into one's mind to say one was German, i.e. belonged to a united nation. People have forgotten about this now, but those are facts. And it is important to face up to these things. We shall not develop the right enthusiasm for such things, however, unless we fertilize our inner life by considering the great events of world history, seeing them in the right light—not that fabricated tale written in our handbooks and taught in our schools today, but the true history of the world that can be found by looking at things in the light of the spirit. It is quite unthinkable for a present-day protestant Christian to consider that people once felt it to be true to say ‘the god walked on the earth and the ruler was the god’ and ‘there is no kingdom on this earth where gods are still to be found, for the ways in which one is made a god are in the realm where the supersensible dwells, within the Mystery’. In the early times of Egyptian history, which in part was still prehistoric, the Mystery was indeed something supersensible. It was only when the mysteries were made into churches that the church became the symbol for the supersensible. Present-day humanity has no wish to look to the points of origin of its historical development. It lives like someone who has reached the age of forty-five and has forgotten what life was like as a boy or a girl, at most remembering back as far as his or her twenty-fifth year. Try and visualize what it would mean for the inner soul life of someone of forty-five to remember nothing that happened before the age of twenty-five. Yet that is the state of mind humankind is in now, it is the state of mind in which the people arise who are to be the leaders of humanity. Out of this state of mind something is attempted that is to give the orientation for a social system. The most important thing is that human beings come to see humanity as a living organism with a memory that should not be trodden to death, a memory reaching back to things that still have their effect in the present day, and because of the way they do take effect, literally ask for something new to be poured into them. We merely need to strike this note a few times and we shall see that there is need for something in the present time that makes all the empty words that are flashing up all around come to nothing. It would be good if a sufficiently large number of of people were to realize how serious the present situation is, and out of this realization were to arrive at something that is really new. The sad thing is that People today have been given great tasks and yet would most of all like to sleep through those tasks. The particular task given to the anthroposophical movement for decades now has basically been to shake humanity out of its sleep, to point out that humanity needs to be given something today that truly changes the present state of soul to the same extent as the dreamer's state of soul changes to being fully awake and alive for the day, when he wakes in the morning. This I intend to be the conclusion to the two aspects of history seen in the light of spiritual science I discussed during my present stay in this city. If only something could emerge from our anthroposophical movement that would truly fire our social ideas, filling them with warmth and energy. Social impulses are needed in the present age, that is so obvious when we look at events that we really should not fail to see it. These social impulses can only come to fruition if a new spirit is poured into human evolution. This should be realized particularly by the people who from one side or another come to join the anthroposophical movement. On the soil of this anthroposophical movement truthfulness and alertness are necessary, real alertness. Modern civilized society has got into the habit of being asleep in public life. Today people are so much asleep one might fall into severe doubt on seeing the external course followed by people in the pursuit of their affairs—were it not for the fact that one stands within spiritual life and perceives the course taken by spiritual affairs behind the Physical world. The external course people pursue in their events clearly spells it out that people fight shy of having any part in the search for truth in the phenomenal world. They are so glad they do not have to look at the events that are happening. You can see that when people are told of something happening somewhere today, they stand there on their two feet and give no indication of having heard something that is of profound significance for the way events will go. People hear of deeply significant things that must inevitably lead to ruin, to decline and fall, and they do not even feel indignation. Things are going on in the world, intentions are alive in German lands that should horrify people—yet they do not. Anyone incapable of being horrified at these things also lacks the power to develop a sense of truth. It has to be pointed out that healthy indignation over things that are not healthy should be the source and origin of enthusiasm, of the new truths that are needed. It is actually less important to convey truths to people than it is to bring fiery energy into their lethargic nervous systems. Fiery energy is needed today, not mystical sleep. Longing for mystical peace and quiet is not of the essence today but rather dedication to the spirit. Union with the divine has to be actively sought today and not in mystical indolence and comfort. This has to be pointed out. We must find a way of making it possible again for our minds to connect a divine principle with our outer reality. We shall only be able to do this if we consider without bias how people found their gods walking the earth in the earliest empires. We must find a way in which our human souls can walk in the spirit in spiritual worlds, that we may find gods again.
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| 199. Spiritual Science as a Foundation for Social Forms: Lecture VII
21 Aug 1920, Dornach Translated by Maria St. Goar |
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| To be consistent one would have to eliminate everything to do with the ego and astral body, inwardly referring only to a mere thought mechanism, something that a great number of people do, in fact, speak of. |
| Imagine where it must lead if all the actual inner flexible aspects of the ego are eliminated, if the human being is emptied of the very element that can enlighten him in the sense world concerning the spirit. |
| 199. Spiritual Science as a Foundation for Social Forms: Lecture VII
21 Aug 1920, Dornach Translated by Maria St. Goar |
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Genuine knowledge of the impulses holding sway in humanity, knowledge that must be acquired if we wish to take a Position in life in any direction, is possible only if we attempt to go deeply into the differences of soul conditions existing between the members of the human race. In respect to the right progress for all mankind, it is certainly necessary that human beings understand one another, that an element common to all men is present. This common element, however, can only develop when we focus on the varieties of soul dispositions and developments that exist among the different members of humanity. In an age of abstract thinking and mere intellectualism such as the one in which we find ourselves, people are only too prone to look only for the abstract common denominators. Because of this they fail to arrive at the actual concrete unity, for it is precisely by grasping the differences that one comprehends the former. From any number of viewpoints, I have referred in particular to the mutual relationships resulting out of these differences between the world's population of the West and East. Today, I should like to point to such differentiations from yet another standpoint. When we look at the obvious features of present general culture, what do we actually find? The form taken by the thoughts of most people in the civilized world really shows an essentially Western coloring, something originating in the characteristic tendencies of the West. Look at newspapers today that are published in America or England, in France, Germany, Austria or Russia. Although you will definitely sense certain differences in the mode of thinking, and so on, you will also notice one thing they have in common. If this is the Western region here (see sketch), this the middle one and that the Eastern, this common element, which comes to light everywhere, say, in newspapers as well as in ordinary popular literary and scientific publications, does not derive its impulse from the depths of the national characteristics. In a St. Petersburg paper, for instance, you do not find what arises from the heritage of the Russian people. You do not discover the heritage of Central European peoples by reading a Viennese paper or one from Berlin. The element determining the basic configuration and character (of all publications) has basically arisen in the West, and then poured itself into the individual regions. The fundamental coloring of what has come to the fore from among the peoples of the West has, therefore, essentially spread out over the civilized world. [IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW] When things are viewed superficially, one might doubt this; but if you go more deeply into the matters under discussion here, you can no longer doubt them. Consider the attitude, the basic sentiment, the conceptual form, expressed in a newspaper from Vienna or Berlin, or a literary or scientific work from either city. Compare this with a publication from London—quite aside from the language—and you will discover that there is a greater similarity between the publication from London and the book from Vienna, Paris, or even New York or Chicago than there is between the present thoughts and ideas in literary and scientific works from Vienna and Berlin, and the special nuance which Fichte53 for example, poured into his thoughts as an enlivening element. I shall demonstrate this to you by citing just one example. There is a saying by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the great philosopher who was born at the turn of the nineteenth century, that is so characteristic of him that no one today understands it. It goes, “The external world is the substance of duty become visible.” The sentence means nothing less than this. When we look out into the world of mountains, clouds, woods and rivers, of animals, plants and minerals, all this is in itself something devoid of meaning, without reality, it is merely a phenomenon. It is only there to enable the human being in his evolution to fulfill his duty. For I could not carry out my obligations in a world in which I would not be surrounded by things that I could touch. There must be wood, there must be a hammer. In itself, it has no significance and no materiality. It is only the substance of my duty which has become sense-perceptible. Everything outside exists primarily for the purpose of bringing duty to light. This saying was coined by a man a century ago out of the innermost sentiments of his soul and character as well as his folk spirit. It did not become generally known. When people talk about Johann Gottlieb Fichte today, when they write books about him and mention him in newspaper articles, they only perceive the external form of his words. No one really understands anything about Fichte. You may take everything you find on him today, either literary or scientific, but it has nothing whatever to do with Johann Gottlieb Fichte. It does, however, have a great deal to do with what arose out of the Western folk spirit, and has spread over the rest of the civilized world. These more delicate relationships are not discerned. That is the reason why nobody even thinks of characterizing in a deep and exhaustive manner the essential feature of what arises from the spirit of the various nationalities. For it is all inundated today by what arises from the West. In Central Europe, in the East, people imagine that they are thinking along their own ethnic lines. This is not the case, they think in accordance with what they have adopted from the West. In what I am now saying lies the key to much of what is really the riddle of the present age. This riddle can be solved only when we become aware of the specific qualities arising from the various regions of the world. There is, first of all, the East that today certainly offers us no true picture of itself. If untruthfulness were not the underlying characteristic of all public life in our time, the world would not be so ignorant of the fact that what we call Bolshevism is spreading rapidly throughout the East and into Asia; that it has gone far already. People have a great desire to sleep through the actual events, and are glad to be kept in ignorance. It is therefore easy to withhold from them what is really taking place. Thus, people will live to see the East and the whole of Asia inundated by the most extreme, radical product of Western thought, namely Bolshevism, an element utterly foreign to these people. If we wish to look into what it is that the world of the East brings forth out of the depths of its folk character, it becomes obvious that it is possible to discover the fundamental nuance of feeling in the East only by going back into earlier times and learning through them. For, in regard to its original character, the East has become completely decadent. Forgetting its very nature, the East has allowed itself to be inundated by what I have described as the most extreme, radical offshoots of Western thought. Certainly, it is true that what was once there is still living within Eastern humanity, but today it is all covered up. What once lived in the East, what once vibrated through Eastern souls, survives in its final results where it is no longer understood, where it has turned into a superstitious ritual, where it has become the hypocritical murmurings of the popes of the Orthodox Russian ritual, incomprehensible even to those who believe they understand it. A direct line runs from ancient India to these formulas of the Russian church ritual, which are now only rattled off to the multitudes in the form of lip service. For this whole inclination which thus expressed itself, which bestowed on the Eastern soul its imprint and also does so today in a suppressed form, is the potential for developing a spiritual state of mind that guides the human being towards the prenatal, to what exists in our life before birth, before conception. In the very beginning, the nature of what permeated the East as a world conception and religious attitude was connected with the fact that this East possessed a concept which has been completely lost to the West. As I have said here before, the West has the concept of immortality, not that of “not having been born,” of “unbornness.” We have the word immortality, we do not have the term “unbornness.” This implies that in our thinking we continue life after death, but not into the time before birth. On the other hand, the East possessed that special soul inclination it had that still included Imagination and Inspiration in its thoughts and concepts. By means of this particular manner of expressing the conceptual content of its soul world, the East was far less predisposed to pay heed to the life after death than to that before birth. In regard to the human being it viewed life here in the sense world as something that comes to man after he has received his tasks prior to birth, as something that he has to absolve here in the sense of the task given him. He was disposed to regard this life as a duty set human beings by the gods before they descended into this earthly body of flesh. It goes without saying that such a world conception encompasses both repeated earth lives and the lives between death and birth; for one can quite well speak of a single life after death, but not of only one before birth. That would be an impossible teaching. After all, one who refers at all to pre-existence would then not speak of one earth life only, which is something that should be obvious to you upon reflection. It was the way they had of looking up into the supersensory world, which was brought about by the whole predisposition of these Eastern souls, but it was one that focused their attention on the life we lead between death and a new birth prior to being drawn down to earthly life. Everything else, everything in the way of political, social, historical and economical ideas was only the consequence of what dwelt in the soul due to the orientation towards the life between birth and conception. This life, this mood of soul, is particularly fitted to turn the human soul's gaze to the spiritual, to fill man with the super-sensible world. For even here on earth, man considers himself entirely a creation of the spiritual world, indeed, as a being who, in the world of the senses, is merely pursuing his super-sensible life. Everything that became decadent in later ages, the establishment of kingdoms, the social structure of the ancient Orient and its very constitution, developed from this special underlying mood of soul. This soul condition might be said today to be overpowered, because it became weak and crippled, because it was only promulgated as if out of what I would like to call “rachitic” soul members, as for example, in the works of Rabindranath Tagore,54 which are like something that is poured into vague, nebulous formulas. In actual practice, we are today inundated by what expresses itself in Bolshevism as the most extreme, radical wing of Western thinking. The West will have to experience that something it did not wish to have for itself is moving over into the East, that in a not very distant future, what the West pushed off on the East will surge back upon it from there. This will result in a strange kind of self-knowledge. What has this remarkable development in the East led to? It has led the people of the East to employ the holy inner zeal they once utilized to foster the impulse for the supersensory world and to apprehend the spiritual in all its purity, to accept the most materialistic view of outer life with religious fervor. Even though Bolshevism is the most extreme consequence of the most materialistic view of the world and social life, it will, as it moves further into Asia, increasingly transform itself into something that is received there with the same religious zeal as was the spiritual world in former times. In the East, people will speak of the economic life in the same terminology once used to speak of the sacred Brahma. The fundamental disposition of the soul does not change; it endures, for it is not the content (of the soul) that matters here. The most materialistic views can be approached with the same fervor formerly used to grasp the most spiritual. Let us now turn and look at the West. The West has given rise to the human soul's most recent development. It must be of special interest to us because it has brought forth the view which, rising like a mist, has since spread over the whole civilized world. It is the manner of conception that already found, its most significant expression in Francis Bacon and Hobbes; in minds of more recent times, in the economist Adam Smith, for example; among philosophers, in John Stuart Mill, and among historians, in Buckle, and so on.55 It is a form of thinking that no longer contains any Imagination and Inspiration in its conceptions and ideas, where the human being is dependent on directing his conceptual life entirely outwards to the sense world, absorbing the impressions of the latter according to the associations of thoughts resulting from that same world. This came to its most brilliant philosophical expression in David Hume, also in other such as Locke.56 There is something very strange here that must, however, be mentioned. When we focus on the West, we must pay heed to how minds like John Stuart Mill, for example, speak of human thought associations. The term “association of ideas” is in fact a completely Western thought form, but in Central Europe, for instance, it has been in such common use for more than half a century that people speak of it as if it had originated there. When psychology is taught in John Stuart Mill's sense, one says, for instance, that in the human soul, thoughts first connect themselves by means of one thought embracing another, or by one thought attaching itself to another, or by one permeating another. This implies that people look upon the thought world and view the individual thoughts as they would little spheres that relate themselves to each other (see drawing). To be consistent one would have to eliminate everything to do with the ego and astral body, inwardly referring only to a mere thought mechanism, something that a great number of people do, in fact, speak of. The soul of man is disemboweled, as it were. When you read a book by John Stuart Mill with its deductive and inductive logic, you feel as if you were mentally placed in a dissecting room where a number of animals hang that are having their innards taken out. Likewise, in the way Mill proceeds, one feels as if man's soul-spiritual being were disemboweled. He first empties the human being of everything within, leaving only the outer sheath. Then, thoughts do, indeed, appear only like so many associated atomistic formations that coalesce when we form an opinion. The tree is green. Here “green” is the one thought, “tree” is the other, and the two flow together. The inner being is no longer alive; it has been disemboweled and only the thought mechanism remains. [IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW] This manner of conceiving of things is not derived from the sense world; it is imposed upon it. In my book, The Riddles of Philosophy,57 I have drawn attention to how a mind such as John Stuart Mill's is in no way related to the inner world; it is simply given to behaving like a mere onlooker in whom the external world is reflected. Our concern here is that this method of thinking brings about what I have often described as the tragedy of materialism, which is that it no longer comprehends matter. For how can materialism fathom the nature of matter—and we have seen that, by going deeply into the human being, one penetrates into the true material element of the earth—if it first eliminates in thought what actually represents matter? In this regard, an extreme consequence already has been reached. This extreme consequence could easily be traced today if it were not for the fact that people never look at the whole context of things, only at the details. Imagine where it must lead if all the actual inner flexible aspects of the ego are eliminated, if the human being is emptied of the very element that can enlighten him in the sense world concerning the spirit. Just think, where must this finally lead? It must result in the human being feeling that he no longer has anything of the actual content of the world. He looks outside at the sense world without realizing the truth of what we said yesterday, namely, that behind the external world of the senses there are spiritual beings. When he gives himself up to illusions, he assumes that atoms and molecules exist outside. He dreams of atoms and molecules. If man has no illusion concerning the external world, he can say nothing but that the whole outer world contains no truth, that it really is nothing. Inwardly, on the other hand, he has found nothing; he is empty. He must talk himself into believing that there is something inside him. He has no grasp of the spirit; therefore, he suggests spirit to himself, developing the suggestion of spirit. He is not capable of maintaining this suggestion without rigorously denying the reality of matter. This implies that he accommodates himself to a world view which does not perceive the spirit but only suggests it, merely persuading itself into the belief of spirit, while denying matter. You find the most extreme Western exponent of this in Mrs. Eddy's Christian Science58 as the counterpart of what I described just now for the East. This was bound to arise as the final outcome of such conceptions as those of Locke, David Hume or John Stuart Mill. Christian Science as a concept is, however, also the final consequence of what has been brought about in recent times by the unfortunate division of man's soul life into knowledge and faith. Once people start restricting themselves to knowledge on one side and faith on the other, a faith that no longer even tries to be knowledge, this leads in the end to their not having the spirit at all. Faith finally ceases to have a content. Then, people must suggest a content to themselves. They make no attempt to reach the genuine spirit through a spiritual science. In their search for the spirit, they arrive at Mrs. Eddy's Christian Science, this spirit which has come to expression there as the final consequence. The politics of the West have for some time been breathing this spirit. It does not sustain itself on realities; it lives on self-made suggestions. Naturally, when it is not a matter of an in-depth cure, one can even effect cures with Christian Science, as has been reported, and accounts are given of its marvelous cures. Likewise, all kinds of edifying results can be achieved with the West's politics of suggestion. Yet, this Western concept possesses certain qualities, qualities of significance. We can best understand them when we contrast them with those of the East. On looking back to the ages when the Eastern qualities came especially to the fore, we find that they were those which, first of all, were capable of focusing the soul's eye on the prenatal life. They were therefore preeminently fitted to constitute what can represent the spiritual part, the spiritual world, in a social organism. Fundamentally speaking, all that we have created in Central Europe and the West is in a certain sense the legacy of the East. I have already mentioned this on another occasion. The East was particularly predisposed to cultivate the spiritual life. The West, on the other hand, is especially talented at developing thought forms. I have just described them in a somewhat unfavorable light. They can, however, be depicted in a favorable light as well, namely, if we consider all that has originated with Bacon of Verulam, Buckle, Mill, Thomas Reid, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Spencer, and others of like mind, for example, Bentham.59 On the one hand, we admit that these thought forms are certainly not suited to penetrate into a spiritual world by means of Imagination and Inspiration, to comprehend the life before birth. Yet, on the other hand, we are obliged to say, particularly when one studies how this manner of thinking has pervaded and lives in our Western science, that all this is especially appropriate for economic thinking; and one day, when the economic life of the social organism will have to be developed, we shall have to become students of Western thought, of Thomas Reid, John Stuart Mill, Buckle, Adam Smith, and the rest. They have only made the mistake of applying their form of thinking to science, to epistemology, and the spiritual life. This thinking is in order when we train ourselves by means of it and reflect on how to form associations, how best to manage the economy. Mill should not have written a book on logic; the spiritual capacity he applied to doing this should have been used for describing in detail the configuration of a given industrial association. We must realize that when anyone today wishes to produce a book such as my Towards Social Renewal, it is necessary for him to have learned to understand in what manner one attains to the spiritual sphere in the Oriental sense, and in what manner—although following a much more erratic path—one arrives at economic thinking in the West. For both directions belong together and are necessary to one another. As far as a view of life is concerned, this Western thinking then does lead to pseudo-sciences like the one by Mrs. Eddy, her Christian Science. We must not, however, look at matters according to what they cannot be, but consider what they can be. For unity must come about through the cooperation of all human beings on earth, not by some abstract, theoretical structure of ideas that is simply laid down, and then viewed as a unity. At this point, one may ask from where in the human organization this particular thinking of Mill, Buckle, and Adam Smith originates. We find that Oriental thinking has basically arisen from a contact with the world, especially when looking back to the more ancient forms of Oriental philosophy. It is a thinking, a feeling, which gives the impression that, out of the earth itself, the roots of a tree grow and produce leaves. In just this way, the ancient Indian, for example, seems to us to be united with the whole earth; his thoughts appear to us to have grown out of earthly existence in a spiritual manner, just as a tree's leaves and blossoms appear to have grown out of it by means of all the forces of the earth. It is precisely this attachment to the external world in the Oriental person, the absorption of the spirituality, that I have referred to as lying beyond the sense world. In the West, everything is brought out of the instincts, the depth of the personality—I might say, from man's metabolic system, not the external world. For the Oriental, the world works upon both his senses and Spirit, kindling within him what he calls his holy Brahma. In the West, we have what arises from the body's metabolism and leads to associations of ideas; it is something that is particularly suited to characterize the economic life, something that does not apply until the next earth incarnation. For, with the exception of the head, what we bear as our physical organism is something that does not find its true expression, as we have outlined, until the following life on earth. We have been given our head from our previous earth life; our limbs and our metabolic system are Borne by us into the next earthly incarnation. This is a metamorphosis from one life on earth to the next. Hence, in the West, people think with something that only becomes mature in the following earth life. For this reason, Western thinking is particularly predisposed to focus on the life after death, to speak of immortality, not of eternity, not to know the term, “unbornness,” but only the word, “immortality.” It is the West which represents life after death as something that the human being should above all else be concerned about. Yet, even now, something I might call radical, but in a radical sense something noble, is preparing itself in the West out of the totally materialistic culture. One with the faculty to look a little more deeply into what is thus trying to evolve makes a strange discovery. Although people strive in the most intimate way for life after death, for some kind of immortality, hence, for an egotistic life after death, they strive in such a manner that, out of this effort, something special will develop. While a large part of humanity still harbors an illusion in this regard, something quite remarkable is, oddly enough, developing in the West. Since individual elements of the ideas concerning life after death being developed by the West are reflected to a certain extent in a great majority of Europeans, they, too, have especially perfected this preoccupation with the postmortem life. The European, however, would prefer to say, “Well, my religion promises me a life after death, but in this transitory, unsatisfactory, merely material earth life I need make no effort to secure the immortality of my soul. Christ died to make me immortal; I need not strive for immortality. It is mine once and for all; Christ makes me immortal.”—or something to that effect. In the West, particularly in America, something different is preparing itself. Out of the most diverse, occasionally the most bizarre and trivial religious world conceptions, we see something trying to arise which, although it has quite materialistic forms, is nevertheless connected with. something that will be a part of life in the future, particularly in regard to this world-view of immortality. Among certain sects in America, the belief is prevalent that one cannot survive at all after death if one has made no effort in this earthly life, if one has not accomplished something whereby one acquires this life after death. A judgment concerning good and evil is envisioned after death that does not merely follow the pattern of earthly truth. He who makes no effort here on earth to bear through the portals of death what he has developed in his soul will be diffused and scattered in the cosmic all. What a person wishes to carry with him through death must be developed here. A man dies the second death of the soul—to use the saying of Paul—who does not provide here for his soul to become immortal. This is something that is definitely developing in the West as a world concept in place of the leisurely, passive, awaiting what will happen after death. It is something that is emerging in certain American sects. Perhaps today it is still little noticed, but there is a great deal of feeling in favor of viewing life here in a moral sense, and to arrange the conduct of life in such a manner that by means of what one does here, something is carried through the gate of death. As I said, in the East, the particular attention to the life before birth developed long ago. This made it possible for life on earth to be viewed as a continuation of this prenatal, supersensory life in the spirit. Earthly life thus received its content, not out of itself, but out of the spiritual life. In the West, an attitude is developing today for the future that will have nothing to do with a passive, indifferent life of waiting here for death because the life beyond is guaranteed; instead, the knowledge is growing that man carries nothing through the portal of death unless care is taken on earth to make something out of what one already has here. Thus, Western thinking is adapted, on the one hand, to organizing economic matters within the social organism; on the other hand, it is suited to develop further the one-sided doctrine of life after death. This is why spiritualism has had a special opportunity for developing in the West, and from there, could invade the rest of the world. After all, spiritualism was only devised to give a sort of guarantee of immortality to those who could no longer attain to any conviction concerning immortality by means of any kind of inner development. For, in most instances, a person actually becomes a spiritualist in order to receive by some means or the other the certain guarantee that he is immortal ,after death. Between these two worlds lies something that is implied in Fichte's words, “The external world is the substance of my duty become visible.” As I said before, people really have no understanding for this mode of thinking, and what is written today about Fichte could well be compared to what a blind man might say about color. Particularly in the last few years, a tremendous amount of talking and lecturing has been done about this saying by Fichte, but it was all accomplished in such a way that one is disposed to say that Fichte, that out-and-out Central European mind, has really been americanized by the German newspapers and writers of literature. One is confronted with americanized versions of Fichte. There, we find the nuance of human soul life which, in a special way, is supposed to develop the middle member of the social organism, the one that arises from the relationship of man to man. It would be of benefit if some of you would for once make an in-depth study—it isn't easy—of one of Fichte's writings where he speaks as though nature did not exist at all. Duty, for example, and everything else is deduced by first proving that external human beings actually exist in whom the materialized substance of duty can become reality. Here, all the raw material is contained, so to speak, from which the rights and state organism of the threefold social order have to be put together. What, then, is the actual cause of the catastrophic events in the past few years? The basic reason is that there was no living perception, no feeling, for such matters. Berlin's policies are American. This is fine for America, but it is not suitable for Berlin. This is why Berlin's politics amount to nothing. For, just imagine, since American policies were constantly carried out in Berlin or Vienna, we could just as well have called Berlin, New York, apart from the difference in language, and Vienna, Chicago for all the difference there would have been otherwise. When, in Central Europe, something is done that is completely foreign to it, something originating in the West where it has its rightful place, then the primal essence of the folk spirit is aroused and gives it the lie without the people being aware of it. This was basically the case in recent decades. This was the underlying phenomenon of what happened, the phenomenon that consists, for instance, in the fact that people have trampled Goethe's thinking underfoot, and as another example, have read Ralph Waldo Trine60 out of a sort of instinct. Actually, all our aristocratic dandies in politics have shown an interest in Trine, and received their special inner stimulus or whatever from that direction. When affairs came to the boiling point, they even turned to Woodrow Wilson;61 and he62 who would now again like to be President of the German Republic still has that frame of mind that allows his brain automatically to roll out Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points. Thus, in recent times, in the Grand Duchy of Baden, we experienced how a formerly truly representative German personality spouted forth americanisms. This is the best and most immediate example of how matters really stand at present. Indeed, we must be able to see through these archetypal phenomena if we wish to understand what is actually happening today. If we merely pick up a newspaper and read Prince Max von Baden's speeches, simply studying them out of context, then this is something absolutely worthless today. It is a mere kaleidoscope of words. Only when we are able to place such things into the whole context of the world can we hope to understand anything about the world. No progress can be made until people realize how necessary it is today that world understanding be acquired if one wishes to have a say. The most characteristic sign of the time is the belief that when a group of individuals have set up some trashy proposition as a general program—such as the unity of all men regardless of race, nation or color, and so forth—something has been accomplished. Nothing has been accomplished except to throw sand into people's eyes. Something real is attained only when we note the differences and realize what world conditions are. Formerly, human beings could live in accordance with their instincts. This is no longer possible; they must learn to live consciously. This can be done only by looking deeply into what is actually happening. The East was supreme in regard to life before birth and repeated earthly lives that are connected with it. The greatness of the West consisted in its disposition in regard to life after death. Here, in the middle (see drawing an next page), the actual science of history has originated, although today it is as yet misunderstood. Take Hegel63 as an example. In Hegel's works, we have neither preexistence nor postexistence; there is neither life before birth nor after death, but there is a spirited grasp of history. Hegel begins with logic, goes from there to a philosophy of nature, develops his doctrine of the soul, then that of the state, and ends with the triad of art, religion and science. They are his world content. There is no mention of preexistence or an immortal soul, only of the spirit that lives here in this world. Preexistence, postexistence—this is really life in the present state of mankind, the permeation of history. Read what has been drawn up particularly by Hegel as a philosophy of history. In libraries, one generally finds the pages of his books still uncut! Not many editions have appeared of Hegel's works. In the eighties of the last century, Eduard von Hartmann64 wrote that in all of Germany, where twenty universities exist that have faculties of philosophy, no more than two of the instructors had read Hegel! What he said could not be refuted; it was true. Nonetheless, it hardly needs to be said that all the students were ready to swear to what they had been told about Hegel by professors who had never read him. Do familiarize yourselves with his work and you will find that here, in fact, historical conception has come about, the experience of what goes on between human beings. There you also find the material from which the state, the rights sphere of the threefold social organism, has to be created. We can learn about the constitution of the spiritual organism from the Orient; the constitution of the economic sphere is to be learned from the West. [IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW] In this way, we have to look into the differentiations of humanity all over the whole earth, and can gain an understanding of the matter from one side or the other. If the goal is approached directly, namely, if the social life is studied, one arrives at the threefold order as developed in my book, Towards Social Renewal. By thus studying the life of mankind throughout the earth, we come to the realization that there is one part with a special disposition for the economy; there is another with a special aptitude for organizing the state; and yet another with a specific inclination towards the spiritual life. A threefold structure can then be created by taking the actual economy from the West, the state from the Middle, and from the East—naturally in a renewed form, as I have often said—the spiritual life. Here you have the state, here the economic life and here the spiritual life (see above sketch); the two others have to be taken across from here. In this way, all humanity has to work together, for the origins of these three members of the social organism are found in different regions of the earth, and therefore must be kept properly apart everywhere. If, in the old manner, human beings wish to mix up in a unified state what is striving to be threefold, nothing will result from it except that in the West the state will be a unity where the economic life overwhelms the whole, and everything else is only submerged into it. If the theorists then take hold of and study the matter, meaning, if Karl Marx moves from Germany to London, he then concludes that everything depends on the economic life. If Marx's insanity triumphs, the three spheres are reduced to one, the one being of a purely economic character. If one limits oneself to what wishes to be merely the state or rights configuration, one apes the economic life of the West, which for decades has been fashioning an illusory structure, which then naturally collapses when a catastrophe occurs—something that has indeed happened! The Orient, which possesses the spiritual life in a weakened state in the first place, simply has adopted the economic life from the West and has inoculated itself with something that is completely alien to it. When these matters are studied, we shall see particularly that blessings can only fall upon the earth when, everywhere, one gathers together into the threefold social organism through human activity what by its very nature develops in the various regions.
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