| 218. Spiritual Relation in the Configuration of the Human Organism: Lecture III
23 Oct 1922, Dornach Tr. Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
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| if someone is pale, that he is ill—in the same way one formed an opinion about his state of health by his ether body, by the color, if it became red, or blue or green. On what did one base one's knowledge of the human being in those times? On the light, on that which was Light in man. |
| 218. Spiritual Relation in the Configuration of the Human Organism: Lecture III
23 Oct 1922, Dornach Tr. Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
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You will have seen from several earlier contemplations, that I do not like the phrase: “We live in a time of transition”, because every age is a time of transition—a transition from the earlier time to the later one. It is only a question of in how far a time is the time of transition—and just what is changing? For the person who can see into the spiritual world, ours is indeed the time of an important transition.The wisdom of oldest time has always pointed to this important transition. During the epochs in which a spiritual world was still spoken of truthfully—if only out of dreamlike knowing—it was always said: after a certain time had passed, the so-called Dark Age will come to an end and a light-filled age would begin. If one now examines the words of the old wise men and takes them seriously, one indeed comes to realize that they meant that the transition from the Dark to the Light Age would occur around the turn of the 19th and 20th century—the time in which we now live. But we do not have to go through Anthroposophy to a renewal of the old dreamlike wisdom. I often have said that this is not the case, that with Anthroposophy it is the question of what one can acquire as knowledge in our time through spiritual research. Anthroposophy shall therefore not be the renewal of any kind of old wisdom, but a present-day mode of cognition. But as regards the transition from the Dark Age into the Light Age, present cognition has to completely concur with the old wisdom. Although one can hardly say that we as mankind, especially as civilized European mankind, enter from worse conditions into better ones, what the old wisdom had in mind regarding the passing over into the light age, and what we also must think today, is nevertheless true. Only we must understand matters in the right way. I would like to make clear, with the help of an example, what the difference is between a Light Age—meant in this way—and a Dark Age. Those people who once—in about the 5th pre-Christian millennium—spoke about such Dark and Light Ages, looked at this dark age as at the continuation of an earlier Light Age, and they expressed the opinion that, after the Dark Age had lasted for some time, a Light Age would come again. It would be instructive to look back and see how—mainly in human affairs—the Light Age, which once existed (approximately in the 7th or 8th millennium) was different from the later Dark Age, out of which we as mankind shall now emerge. I would like to make that clear by an example—as I said—through the example of healing. The example of healing is very suitable in this respect, because one can see much by it. Namely, during that Light, or illuminated age, we did not look to the physical human body. One did not think of that at all. Altogether, one did not speak during that old Light Age of illness in the manner that one still speaks today of illness, but will speak no longer in the future. Of course one had in those olden times also the phenomenon that a person experienced the decay of his organs in this or that direction, that he simple was not healthy. However, one did not speak of illness, but said right out: Death exists and He takes hold of man. One saw something like a struggle between life and death in the situation where we would say today: this person is ill. So in those olden times one did not speak of illness and health when a person had become ill in the sense we understand, but one spoke about it in this way: in him death is fighting. And making well one regarded as combating, as driving out death in this way. Illness was only a special case of death, one might say, "a little dying", and health was life. Why did one speak that way? One spoke that way because healing was then done entirely from the etheric body of man. One did not pay attention to the physical body; instead one was healing altogether in relation to the etheric body. How was this done? Let us assume now, that a human being had become ill of something we would call pneumonia today. The form of illness in case of pneumonia was of a somewhat different type at that time, but one can nevertheless speak of this type of illness. One then said to oneself: this person has become too dependent on the region of the earth where he lives. This took place in times when migrations of people, when the moving away from places, was more unusual than today. People—at least the majority of people--mostly spent all their life at the same place. Nevertheless in such a case one said: this person has become too dependent upon the earthly spot where he was born. In those olden times one knew very specifically: man has already had a pre-earthly existence; through the survey, so to speak,through his destiny, he had decided about the place on earth himself. Therefore one said to oneself if a person has been taken ill before his 40th year or earlier by pneumonia, then he simply has not chosen his place on earth in quite the right way. He does not quite fit on this place on earth. In short, one derived the illness from the relation his human organization had to the spot on earth on which he was.
If I would sketch this, it would be this way: (diagram 1). If one imagined the earth this way, one said to oneself: if the person lives there, then he is too strongly dependent upon this particular spot on earth. One has to heal him by freeing him inwardly from the outer dependence on this earthly spot. One can do this by bringing him into connection with the surrounding cosmos to the outer heavenly cosmos. Heaven is that which had been man's home before he came down to earth. He does not quite fit into the earthly surroundings. One has to heal him in bringing him into the right relationship to the cosmos. One did this in such a way that one said: since this person has too many effects of the earth in himself—because there is too much gravity, and what is connected with gravity, in him, one has to give him relief—one has to bring super-earthly forces into him. One said to oneself: In these or other plant-blossoms, super-earthly forces are working. Therefore one prepared these or other plants by extracting their juice. One said to oneself: this plant is blossoming at a certain season, it is blossoming at this season through the influence of the cosmos. One investigated now, how far this person is influenced by this season in particular. In olden times the dependence of a person upon the cosmic forces was investigated through a kind of horoscope. One gave then as medication something that brought his ether-body into a general vibration. One expressed it to oneself in the following way: If this is a man (diagram 2, red), then this will be his ether body. He became ill of pneumonia because his ether body in the region of the lung is too much inclined towards the earth (blue) and because the forces of the earth have too great an influence on him. Mow one simply imparts to him juices from plant blossoms, which will work in him and help him to overcome these forces (Yellow). In this way one imparted forces to him which brought him into connection with the cosmos. One was striving through this treatment to place the whole ether body into the right vibration to balance the different single incorrect vibrations. So one always was asking: what does one have to do regarding the ether body?
Altogether, how could one proceed in such a way? One could do that, because one had a distinct picture of the human ether body. One did not only see the physical human body in those old times, but one saw the physical human body luminous, one saw the ether body. Man was a being of light, and as one judges today by a person's complexion, e.g., if someone is pale, that he is ill—in the same way one formed an opinion about his state of health by his ether body, by the color, if it became red, or blue or green. On what did one base one's knowledge of the human being in those times? On the light, on that which was Light in man. One has to take it quite literally: it was the Light Age, it was the age in which one really saw what was living in man as Light. If you look at man from today's point of view in regard to health and illness, you will find that today, also, it must be said: light has a tremendous strong influence on human health. People have to take care that they receive the right quantity of light into their organism. We know that children who at a delicate age suffer from lack of light, will contract rickets or other illnesses ,which are throughout related to a lack of light. Of course these are related to other factors, too—an illness can never be derived from only one cause—but such cases as rickets, can connected throughout with lack of light. One can relate with certainty how frequently rickets occurs among children who live in city apartments, where little light enters, and how little children are inclined to rickets—approximately, of course—who can be exposed to light in the proper way. So we can rightly say today as well that the human being takes light into himself. But the light that man receives today is—if I may express myself that way—mineral light. Man takes up that light which is radiated onto the earth, onto the minerals, and is radiated back to him, or else the light which he receives directly from the sun. It is mineral light. The light that falls on the meadows and on the trees is also conveyed to us in a mineral way. It is dead light that we absorb through our skin, throughout our whole human being. During that old light-filled age, which preceded our dark age, men were conscious that this dead light was of no meaning to them. The research historian of today, as well as the cultural historian know absolutely nothing about such things. The light that we appreciate so much today was not considered worthy of appreciation by men of olden times. They differentiated between the light they appreciated and the light that is so much esteemed today. For example—we sit down at the table and have plates and forks and knives, and on the plate some kind of cake or something else that is edible. We then eat the cake; naturally, we also appreciate knives and forks, but we don't eat them, they are just there. What we value as light stood in relation to what the ancients valued as light much as the utensils stand in relation to the cake. But what they regarded as light comes from the plant kingdom. This we do not take up at all any more, as it was taken up in the old light ages. We enjoy ourselves today when we can walk in the sun. The man of old enjoyed himself when he walked over a meadow, or through the woods, because he absorbed into himself—through his skin—the light that the woods had first absorbed, which had been enlivened in the woods, enlivened on the meadow. The other, the dead light—that was an addition, “trimmings,” as it were. For us, the trimmings have become the main thing. The man of old lived in the light, which the flowers, the trees of the woods gave to him. For him that was a source of being quickened inwardly with light, with inner living light and not with dead light. With our abstract joy of the woods, with our abstract joy about flowers, with all that, we have, basically, what I might call philistinism, in the cosmic sense. It may still be very beautiful, but it is philistine in contrast to what was existing in the old people as inner jubilation of the soul in face of the wood, of the meadow, in face of all that was living outside. The man of old felt himself related with his trees, with all that was for him precisely the suitable plant. He felt sympathy and antipathy in the most animated way with this or that plant. We, for example, walk across such meadows as those around the Goetheanum in autumn. We judge in a philistine way: the meadow saffron, the colchium autumnale might perhaps be beautiful. The man of old passed by these plants and became sad, so that even his skin seemed to become somewhat dry. He even sensed something like his hair becoming limp. While, when he passed—let us say, by red blooming plants, they might be such plants as the poppy is today, his hair became downy, soft. Thus he experienced the light of the plants in an absolute way. It was the light-filled age, and his whole cultural life was directed accordingly. Accordingly it was also directed that he could heal—that is, could combat death—through observation and treatment of the ether body. This remained effective for a long time and we still see, when we go back to the older Greek medicine, to Hippocrates, how one spoke then of the “humors” of man, of a black or light bile, of blood and of phlegm. This was really thought about as remembrances of the old light age. Phlegm was essentially taken to mean the ether body and blood, those vibrations which the astral body effects in the ether body, and so on, So these after-effects were still there, and basically only at the time of Galen did one start to rely on the mere physical world, including the remaining human cultural life. The conception of man, in as far as it should be the foundation for processes of healing, received a physical character. One looked at the physical body. But it was in fact only at the great turn in the first half of the 15th century that one did not know anything at all any more of the human ether body, not even how it expresses itself in the temperaments; that one began to look more and more only at the physical body of man. The older physical medicine was still something else than it was to become later, mainly in the 18 and 19th centuries. The old physical medicine always had traditions, at least, of the earlier healing through the ether body. One really has the impression that in this older European medicine, one had retained old principles and had only carried them over into the physical. In a certain way the physical human organism still continued to be seen as under the influence of the etheric organism. Only in more recent times—in the time of Copernicus and Galileo—did one begin to observe more and more merely the physical human body and cease to know something the earlier times had known in an exact way. Today one thinks: if man eats this or that substance, which one finds out there in nature, it will stay basically the same inside the human organism. But that is not true. Only the salts remain approximately the same. But all that is there in the animal and plant kingdom becomes something entirely different in the human organism. The human organism changes it completely. One knew that the human physical organism “is not from this world” in its inner consistency and one knew fundamentally that becoming ill is nothing else than a continuation of what happens through eating. In fact there was a time, especially among the Arabian physicians, when one regarded every digestion as a partial process of illness, where one looked at digestion in a way that.was not really wrong; when man has eaten, he has brought something foreign into himself and that he really is “sick”. He must first, through his inner organism, through inner organic functions, overcome the illness. So that one continuously lives in a state of being “a little bit sick,” and “a little bit overcoming the illness.” One eats oneself sick and one digests oneself well again. This was in fact for some time, especially among Arabian physicians, a point of view which is altogether—if I may express myself that way—something quite healthy, because there exists no real borderline between what one calls today “eating oneself well” and “eating oneself ill.” Just think how easy it is to get one's stomach in disorder, something that—as one says—could normally still be overcome, quickly goes over into something one cannot overcome any more. Then one is simply sick. But the borderline is really not to be drawn at all. It is just as difficult to draw a borderline regarding confusions between something that still can be evened out in a completely natural way and something where one has to come and give help through a process of healing. So once one correctly saw illness as a continuation of eating—eating that was not done correctly. One studied the daily process of digestion, that is: digesting oneself into health; this one studied. In this respect it is quite a good practice if one person or another who cannot tolerate this or that food unsalted, adds more salt for himself. Somebody else even has to add pepper, others add paprika—isn't that so? Because he cannot digest the things just as they are, he adjusts them to his needs. There again is no borderline, if somebody needs pepper or paprika as a healing factor; there again is no borderline, if one gives more pepper or paprika, so one can digest oneself well, or if, when things get worse, one takes something out of the mineral kingdom. It does not matter if one then gives that as addition to the food, or as medicine. There again things flow into each other, there is again no borderline. What was therefore known in a precise way was that if man takes something completely from the outer world, this will injure his inner organism and he must by all means overcome it. If finally I push a rusty nail into myself and my organism has to fester it out, or if I bring something into my stomach, which must not be allowed to stay that way, and my organism has to go through all these processes so it can assimilate this—these are only gradations of difference. But the knowledge that the human organism is not of this earth, and that it can sustain itself on this earth only if it is continuously stimulated to overcome the forces of this earth—this knowledge did exist. Namely, we do not eat to get this or that food into oneself, but we eat so that we can develop the forces inwardly which can overcome this food. We eat to bring forth resistance to this earth, and we live on this earth in order to bring forth resistance. But this was gradually forgotten. One just took the whole matter in a materialistic way and finally one only still tried to see if this or that substance in these or other plants might give help. Yes, you see that is what was once meant, and what we again must have in mind regarding the dark age. Everything has simply become dark. In earlier times one looked at the light ether-body, and regarded this as man. Now one does not see anything of this light any more. One perceives only where there is matter, and one holds on to the dead light. But this dead light gives man only abstract conceptions, it has brought forth only intellectualism. But today we stand in a transition to the necessity to recognize the light again in a new way. Before, man knew within himself: he had this light ether body. Now we must increasingly develop such knowledge, and recognize the etheric in the outer world, especially in the plant kingdom. Goethe made a beginning with this in his theory of metamorphosis, although he still put the whole into abstract conceptions. This must develop more and more into Imaginations. And we must be clear that we simply must reach the point of perceiving the being of the plant in luminous pictures. While man himself was luminous in the earlier light age, in the future nature around us, as far as it is plant-world, has to become aglow in the most manifold Imaginations of plant forms. And just with the help of these plant forms, luminously shining forth, will we be able to find new remedies in the plants. This necessity confronts us. While man in the earlier light age saw an inner light, people of the present age have the obligation of “seeing” in the outer world, to behold again a light, this light in the outer world. This light can be kindled, if one deepens more and more the study of spiritual science. You may say: spiritual science, Anthroposophy—there also I read only concepts, and finally, if I read Occult Science, I also find only concepts there; that does not give me an occasion to really “perceive.” Yet, my dear friends, this Occult Science does have a twofold goal. The first is that one learns to know what is related there; but that is not the whole. If you have read my Occult Science like another book, then you will know only the match. But if you want to have fire, you must not say: this match is no fire! It is nonsense to say, if he gives me a match, that he gives me fire, it does not look like fire! Occult Science does not look like clairvoyance; that is like saying the match does not look like fire. Yet it will look like fire if you will but strike the match. And if it does not work the first time, you will strike another time, and so on. That is how it is with Occult Science. If you have read it like another book, then it is simply only “the match,” but if you have rubbed it in the right way in your whole human being, then you will see, it kindles! It has kindled only a little! But it does kindle, my dear friends. And the person who says: this remains far away from what one is striving for, namely clairvoyance, he will only look at the match and not strike it. But the fact is, one must first know the match, otherwise one will give oneself up to the illusion that one could kindle it with a pin. Of course, you cannot kindle it with a pin—that is, with modern science—you can do it only with a real match. The human race is confronted precisely by this necessity and it may be especially shown in something such as medical knowledge and medical ability. If one will find the transition from a mere looking at the darkness in substances—in the way that one somehow looks at a plant blossom, as it is done today—to an imaginative way of looking, by “striking the match”—then one acquires the knowledge of how this or the other substance will affect the human being. And if one now thinks over the matter a little, one has to say to oneself: today's mankind is confronted with that: out of the darkness it should enter again into the light, it should learn to judge in a light-filled way.
I want to make this clear once more by an example. Let us assume that a physician of today is making a diagnosis of, let us say, an enlargement of the heart. He does it the way it is done today. One cannot do much with such a diagnosis. Perhaps one has tried if this or that can help here. But the fact is that one does not have any comprehensive connections. One does not have anything comprehensive because one does not look through the whole matter. A real penetration of the whole would result in the following: Assume once that the human being, as I have, presented him quite often, renews his organism after seven years. But I also mentioned last time how this renewal comes about. There are always unfinished substances in a way sent upwards or also forwards or downwards by the kidneys' system. From the head the rounding off is done (diagram 3) so that continuously such waves (blue) are coming from the head-system, which give form, and that through the kidney-system such effects take place—four times faster—which are broken off and formed by the waves (red) as I described. Take an organ such as the heart (orange). There too such an exchange takes place in every human after 7 or 8 years. The heart is being renewed. It is made anew. What you see at the fingernails, that they grow outwards and always grow again after one cuts them off, that is also the case with the whole human being: he renews the material substance from the center. Now assume once that the rhythmic man might not be in order, that it might be so for his organization, that the rays from the kidney system burst forth much too rapidly, so that the right relation of 4 to 2 is not there. That varies for the individual—every person is an individuality in this respect—but it is the case in regard to his whole construction as a human being. Assume then, that this is not in order, that the radiation from the kidney-system is pushing too fast. What will happen thereby?
The following can happen. The process of renewal is indeed happening continuously; let us then imagine that the new heart moved in (red) before the old heart is completely ejected (diagram 4, light). Then it goes too fast. If the renewal goes on too fast, such phenomena as an enlargement of the heart occurs. First and foremost you can detect in the beginning of an enlargement of the heart that something is not in order in the activity of the kidney. Just where you take this matter of a renewal of the human being in 7-8 years seriously you will see: if that which will come as renewed substance is already there after 6 years, that which is there as the old heart has not yet been removed sufficiently and the organ expands, or tries at least to expand itself. That is how one must learn to look at things; one must learn to see things in living movement. That is what confronts us. One must see most of all what one always has seen in fixed limits. How does the physician today make a diagnosis? The physician of today comes to a diagnosis in such a way that he likes best to trace down the contours of the heart to what it is as a finished organ. It is not so much the question of looking at what the finished organ is, since it simply is an organ that is always floating away and getting pushed back again. In this going away and pushing back there is something inwardly mobile. If I lay hold of it, it is essentially as if I were to lay hold of lightning—it is constantly in movement, Therefore if I want to comprehend man, I have to grasp him in his liveliness. This liveliness I understand and find today only if I understand the whole world, and man out of the world and cosmos. This is what we are confronted with: every thing has to pass over into knowledge that is flexible. It is something dreadful if we keep the children in school immobile. For example, it is always quite grievous for me to see the children use any kind of finished triangle, with which they make all sorts of things. This fixed object is really nothing. One should really have a kind in which the triangle can be shifted. This is the point: that the children get the conception in the right way that everything should be grasped in movement. (diagram 5).
It is, of course, dreadfully difficult to get an understanding in regard to these things with such people who want their peace and quiet, who are already angry, when children are making a row—and now the tools for instruction are making a row! It is, of course, something dreadful: but it is so, we have to change over to liveliness. All this taken together results in the challenge to move upward into the light, luminous And because people can not do it—that is, they imagine that they cannot do it—because people do not want it, because people cling to the old, and don't want to step into the new, and because the old does not fit any more—it is because of this that we experience the terrible catastrophes in our present time. And we will experience them still more if people don't want to take the trouble to enter into the new. What occurs as catastrophe is the reaction of the dark age, which does not belong in our time. But it is, of course, terribly difficult to come to an understanding. At best something like an inkling appears in the contrasting attitude between the old people and youth today, like an inkling of the new light: filled age. Young people say as a rule: oh, the old people are philistines. This also has its forerunners. The great German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte had something of an inkling beforehand of this in making the classical declaration, that one really should kill all people at the age of thirty because man is only a decent human being up to his 30th year. This is a famous sentence of Fichte and since Goethe at the time that Fichte made this sentence was already considerably older, he was terribly annoyed and has ridiculed this whole theory in the second part of his Faust. It was really provoking for Goethe, of course! So one finds that youth agrees that the old people are philistines, but up to now no serious results have come about in this matter, because young people declare this up to a certain age and then become even greater philistines than the old ones have been. Even this side must be looked upon from an inner vantage point. What I mean is the question that we already know: either Spenglerism—that is, the decline of the West—or taking the trouble to adjust ourselves to the new appearance of the light age in contrast to darkness, during which men were “earthworms” in regard to the cosmos. It cannot be different. But for a while in the course of history man had to he an earthworm because otherwise he would have been taken up completely by the light. He could strive to gain his freedom only during the dark age, and most of all during the termination of the dark age, in the more recent times. He could acquire his freedom only because the light left him unmolested so that he could lead an earthworm existence. But now I tell you: men of the light ages preferred to receive the light of the plant world. The plants were, so to speak, drinking the cosmos light and man in turn drank the light out of the cup the plants presented to him. Today we have only the dead light. But on the rays of the dead light Christ has come and has achieved the Mystery of Golgotha. That is the great cosmic Mystery of the newer time. Though we have the dead light—the dead light that cannot make us blessed—yet on this dead light's rays has Christ entered the earth and achieved the Mystery of Golgotha. And though outwardly we have around us the dead light we can bring the Christ in us to life. And with Christ in us in the right way we will enliven all of the light on earth around us—we will carry life into the dead light, we ourselves will have a reviving effect on the light. This means we must enter the new age with the right Christ impulse. The denial of the Christ-impulse is the basis of all that keeps men away from seeing rightfully how a dark age transits into the light age.
It is really so. Where the plant grows out of the earth (diagram 6) it develops the seed bud—as I have shown you already—still through the forces of the previous year; only the petals grow out of this year's light. What pulls the plant out of the earth really comes from the previous year. So it was actually conserved light which the plants once gave to man during the old light age. We have to find the possibility to comprehend the dead light with the mind and heart that is engendered in us if we receive the strength of Christ in the living perception of the Mystery of Golgotha. Then we will revive the light as I have indicated. But we can do that only if we learn to try to look at all things in the way I have tried to describe to you in these lectures. |
| 270. Esoteric Instructions: Twelfth Lesson
11 May 1924, Dornach Tr. John Riedel Rudolf Steiner |
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| Yes, this ego, when we say “I” [it was drawn, a circle with the word “I” in gold], we look back on this ego [red arrows], in articulating the word “I”. But for a being from the ranks of the Exusiai [green line], for such a being this ego is a thought, but a thought with more reality, with more actuality. |
| 270. Esoteric Instructions: Twelfth Lesson
11 May 1924, Dornach Tr. John Riedel Rudolf Steiner |
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My dear friends! First, we will speak the verse that comes to us as an adjuration out of the world-all itself, summoning us to self-awareness.
It is most certainly insight into oneself, my dear brothers and sisters, that can lead us in a spiritual sense to insight into the world. And it has often been said, how appreciation must be there for the streaming forth of a true spiritual knowledge out of the spiritual world itself, how a person must have an appreciation of this, that of those who can impart such knowledge of the spiritual world, that they will certainly have approached the Threshold, at the Threshold where the Guardian of the Threshold stands, the Guardian that there protects a person in ordinary consciousness from entering the spiritual world unprepared. But as soon as one gets to know this Guardian, initially through a healthy human mental appreciation, and later by really getting to know, after one’s healthy human mental appreciation leads the way to an appreciation of the true constitution, the reality in being of the Guardian, then this Guardian places there what we confront as an admonition, when we first seek to enter the spiritual world in the proper manner, and then in the proper manner when we seek to remain within the experience of the spiritual world. Now as it has also often been said, remaining in the spiritual world for the most part proceeds improperly, due to one’s wanting something else to take place instead of the reality of being in the spiritual world. Such a person wants it to be similar to the sensory world. But this is not being in the spiritual world. It is suddenly supersensory, and it cannot simply lead to the sort of gazing about that is like gazing about with the senses. This sort of imagination of supersensory gazing is only a picture. It must lead to real experiencing of the spiritual world. And quite a few of you have this experience of the spiritual world, my dear brothers and sisters, many more than you might think. They just don’t quite notice it, they pay it no attention, how it actually maintains dominion within their soul experiencing. It actually rules, and part of its action there is to bring into intimate presence of mind the true realization of this ruling actuality. Toward this end knowledge should flow ever and again, immediately out of the spiritual world into these Class lessons knowledge should be flowing to you, my brothers and sisters, and it should become ever more and more your actual point of departure in making tangible your human soul in the spiritual world. And the following can be such a declamation of wisdom. Take any one of the mantras, or any other meditative verse, and recite all that lies within such a mantra. It certainly does not come down to which one it is, but rather to one specific mantra, one specific mantra, however, that is quite well known by you. For your meditation take the mantra and say it to yourself in the most beautiful manner in which you can say it, bringing it forth for yourself, into your presence. Make it, say it to yourself, not right away in a loud tone, but rather in a soft peaceful tone, and so bring forth the specific mantra.
And then, when you yourself have brought forth such a mantra, try to sense how it works in you, how it is. In this manner try to reach it, so that you sense the speech, you sense what sort of difference there is in your body between the condition of your being at peace, and the condition of your speaking. And so try to sense the speech in your organs, in its coursing. You ought to feel it in its forceful coursing and reverberating entrainment even in the organ of speech. And when you have caught the aroma of its sense and feeling, then each of you must ask the following of yourself. “If I am thinking about something so as to bring my attention to bear on it, perhaps something someone said to me and I am thinking about, an otherwise external experience that has made an impression on me, in order to make it clear, when I think about something in this way, as it were, can I also sense its aroma, its feeling? Well, when you have learned to sense speech, then it will be easy for you in addition to become able to sense thinking, made immediate when presented in this way. So in this way you can also sense thinking. It is lighter and quieter in sensing than is speech, but it may be sensed. By sensing speech, you can learn to sense the aroma of thinking, to perceive thinking. It is good to undertake such an exercise, for such an exercise generally eases the way to intimate self-observation. And then you proceed, my dear brothers and sisters, so that you now make a thought active in yourself, a memory-thought, perhaps something that you thought about a few days ago, or weeks, or months, some thought, however, that you can make really active within yourself. Then try to sense this memory-thought, try to perceive it, and you will have the feeling that in perceiving it you localize it underneath speech, you perceive it therefore below, below the localization of speech [yellow]. And you will say to yourself something like, “When I speak, I experience it in the region of my organ of speech, when I think, I experience it over this in my head, but when I remember, I experience it underneath the thinking.”  For this to be intimate experiential knowledge for you, if you really feel it to be so, then you will have already engaged in the spirit to some extent, which can generally be the beginning of a further progressive spiritual engagement. A great disconnectedness from the other experiences of the day is necessary, however, in order to sense it inwardly in this way. And it is not good to say to yourself, “Well of course, to attain such disconnectedness, I must take a couple of weeks off sometime to go where there are no other people, where nothing will disturb me, where I will have absolute peace and quiet, away all by myself, possibly to a cottage on Mont Blanc, in order to bring it about.” It is not good to think like this, for what is best is rather to remain in the middle of all the strife of life, to be exposed to all that life brings from morning until evening, and through all this, through one’s own power of soul, to find a certain time, be it ever so brief, to be totally outside the strife of the world, remaining within yet totally outside, purely through the power of one’s inner nature totally outside. That is best. In the solitude of going away by oneself, in order to find peace and quiet, that is certainly not the thing that is most effective, but rather through one’s own power to engender the solitude, that is the very thing that absolutely and certainly can lead to the goal. And in this manner a good foundation will be established, concerning specifically the ability to practice meditating, which most certainly is needed. You have become acquainted with mantras, my dear brothers and sisters, to be effectively spoken out of stillness of soul. The first mantras in the Class lessons have certainly been of this sort. But we have forged ahead by means of such mantras, which in part ring forth from the soul, and which also in part must be envisioned as intonations coming to us from the breadth of the world, so that in meditating we not only speak them inwardly, but also in meditating we hear them inwardly, so that we shift our position in thinking, and so hear them coming to us, being spoken to us, out of the depths of space, out of spirit-being. And directly out of this reorientation of ourselves into other entities speaking to us, directly out of this reorientation of ourselves in such a way, we may become able to really consummate this soul-reorientation inwardly, thereby feeling ourselves within the spiritual world. Please note that today’s mantra ought to be given over to this goal. The human soul must now imagine itself to be entirely silent, utterly silent. But it should imagine that it is already on the other side of the Threshold, already in the spiritual world before which the Guardian stands, and there the soul hears three different intonations. While it remains entirely silent itself, it hears three different intonations. The first intonation resounds out of the breadth of the world-all. The second comes from the Guardian. And the third comes from the various beings that become identified by the mantra. So should it be thought, that which comes forth to your souls today as the mantra. So, out of the breadth of the world sounding forth and arriving from all sides,
Just so we take up, we focus our attention on becoming clear about the true nature of thinking by means of a spiritual, soulful experience of the world. Then the Guardian speaks. And as the sounding forth unto us out of the breadth of the world fades away, the spirit of which we must dwell within, then the Guardian speaks.
That is the Guardian’s speech. Then the Angelic being speaks, who accompanies us from earth-existence to earth-existence.
That is also the being, that as an Angelic being, as an Angel, conducts us from incarnation to incarnation. So is this line spoken. We hear it living, inwardly in contemplation. The Guardian speaks again.
Then the next line sounds, spoken by a caring being watching over us from the hierarchy of the Archangels.
That comes down from where the Archangels are. First it was “Look to your senses’ radiant nature.” In reality, it really is this way, similar to the sun’s glowing in sensory life. In sensory life, our senses do not seem to glow, but in actuality, they also really glow. Nevertheless, even though our senses are actually glowing, we do not take note of it. So the being admonishes us, the being belonging to us from the ranks of the Angels, “Look to your senses’ radiant nature.” As we go about thinking in customary awareness, we generally don’t really examine the thinking, we don’t really sense it as such. We don’t actually perceive it. The being that belongs to us from the realm of the Archangels admonishes, “Look to your thinking’s forceful impact.” Now it progresses to where the Archai are. The Guardian admonishes in three lines, and we ought to hear this being’s admonition as coming from the ranks of the Archai. The next three lines are the lines of the Guardian.
I could also say “the throne of existence-awareness,” but “the grounds of existence-awareness” is better, for it will give you a sort of spiritual floor, much as here in the sensory world you have a physical floor. After the Guardian of the Threshold has spoken this, then the being from the ranks of the Archai speaks.
That is the third. First, we are to look to the radiant nature of our senses, then to thinking’s forceful affect working in us, then to that which lies deep underneath, to what lies underneath speech, to what lies in the constituting of memory, “Look to memory’s picture-forming.” And so we ourselves have managed in this disparate fashion to bring the three-part speech to our ears, first the speech from the cosmos in the very first line, “Examine the field of thinking,” then the Guardian’s respective three lines lying between directives from the cosmos and the specific hierarchies, and finally the lines of the being belonging to us out of the actual realms of the hierarchies, always speaking the specific paradigm-line, in certainty to the most profound part of our being. It is all brought together in the following manner, which I will then write down.
[The mantra was now written on the board and at the same time in the first line “thinking was underlined, and in each case the last lines of parts 1,2, and 3 were underlined.]
With this we have it, which as an admonition for our self-awareness sounds forth out of the three lower hierarchies, experienced inwardly in soul: the first from the hierarchy of the angels, the second from the hierarchy of the archangels, the third from the hierarchy of the Archai. [“Angels” was written next to the first part, “Archangels” next to the second part, and “Archai” next to the third part.] Before the exercise is utilized, soul-concentration can be engendered by means of a person’s bringing up before the soul a certain well-defined picture: picture an eye gazing overhead [an eye was drawn] beholding the sphere of the higher hierarchies [a curving arc] which the forces of the world allow to stream down upon the eye [upper rays], and that then beholds the sphere of the lower hierarchies [a wavy line] that intertwines itself with the higher hierarchies and sends the rays further on to human beings [lower rays].  This picture may be called up before the soul and held there in mind, the outward-looking eye, the two lines, one curved and one wavy, and the rays that come down. And you imagine yourself actually there while practicing the exercise, but without thinking further about the picture, so that while practicing the exercise, the picture remains before the soul, the picture of this outward-looking eye. Then a person again takes up, attends to, hearkens to the sounding forth from all sides of the cosmos:
Spoken then by the Guardian, the next three lines are:
It is already a higher speech, a speech that rings forth from higher hierarchies. Here [in the first mantra], we are always merely made to take note of what is already in us, whereas we are spoken to here in this mantra, by the Guardian, so that we are not merely called to observe our senses, our thinking, and our remembering, but rather so that we are called to taking note of how we ourselves are called out into the world, into world existence-awareness. That sounds forth from the hierarchy of the Exusiai.4 Spoken forth then by the being who belongs to us from the hierarchy of the Exusiai:
Spoken again by the Guardian, the next three lines are:
Then the being speaks from the hierarchy of the Dynamis:5
Here we must think steadfastly on the interwoven fabric of the world, feeling it actually, within the vibrant activity of our blood. And the Guardian speaks again, now admonishing us, that we should hearken unto what is spoken by the being from the ranks of the Kyriotetes:6
Then the being from the ranks of the Kyriotetes speaks:
Only when a person feels this mighty counter striving of earth-forces can a person properly remain within the purely spiritual world. So now experience this mantra sounding as a unity:
In ascending into the ranks of the second hierarchy, self-awareness will be quickened in us, as an entity belonging to us from the ranks of the Exusiai admonishes us. At first the Guardian will direct us, then such a being will speak to us. Now, my dear brothers and sisters, we think in life on earth, but our thoughts are quite in vain. When, however, a being from the ranks of the Exusiai thinks, it thinks us as such. Our ego is being thought. And it is brought into being as the thought of a being from the ranks of the Exusiai. If on the earth we say “I” to ourselves, just what are we gazing upon? Yes, this ego, when we say “I” [it was drawn, a circle with the word “I” in gold], we look back on this ego [red arrows], in articulating the word “I”. But for a being from the ranks of the Exusiai [green line], for such a being this ego is a thought, but a thought with more reality, with more actuality. We exist in that we are thought by a being from the ranks of the Exusiai. And when we say “I” to ourselves, we are certainly stating in this way, that we have been thought into being by a heavenly being. And in this thought-becoming by a heavenly entity is contained our higher being.  Then, an entity from the ranks of the Dynamis admonishes us, that we are endowed by him with spirit-presence-in-being, which he abstracts out of life-forces from the stars and bestows on us. And a being out of the ranks of the Kyriotetes admonishes us, that what lives in us specifically as will upon the earth, will be drawn out into the heights of heaven, and in the transmutation that takes place there, our will of earth again will be given to us, so that we can then utilize it in spirit-willing. Earth-willing is merely a transmutation of spirit-willing. Earth-willing of course will be trundled out down below and also above. On high it is heavenly-willing; below it is earth-willing. Of this we are admonished in closing, first by the Guardian, then by the being from the ranks of the Kyriotetes, who says, “Feel earth’s mighty counter striving.” [Mantra II was now written on the board and at the same time in the first line “feeling” and correspondingly the last lines of parts 1,2, and 3 were underlined.]
And so therefore the second mantra runs as follows:
The first is intoned from the ranks of the Exusiai, [Exusiai was written next to part 1, and correspondingly Dynamis and Kyriotetes next to parts 2 and 3.] Once again in ending, so that we may remember what we have fashioned before ourselves as a picture, after all of it has run through us, so that we may have a clear experience of it all, let us place before ourselves once again the picture, which we were to have envisioned as ever standing before our souls during the entire exercise, let us pointedly place it once again before our souls. [This picture, already drawn on the board before the writing of the mantra “Examine the field of thinking”, was now again drawn on the board, the eye, the curving arc, the upper rays, the curvy line, and the lower rays.]  The further ascent into the ranks of the Seraphim, the Cherubim, and the Thrones will properly become appended to all this in the next Class lesson. However just now it may be possible to make somewhat more comprehensible and intelligible what the sense of the whole is. My dear brothers and sisters, coming to us at the beginning of today’s Class lesson was the formulation, coming out of universal existence-awareness, coming forth out of the essential true nature of the world, admonishing us to self-awareness. Self-experience, it was alleged, leads to true knowledge of the world, although only if and when we can place the self in unity with the world. But the self does not stand in fanciful relationship to any external entity or process of nature, but rather solely to what is in the spiritual world. That is where the beings of the hierarchies are. If we really wish to penetrate into our self, into the part of our being from which we can say “I”, then we must not coexist with external nature, but rather we must coexist with the beings of the hierarchies. For whatever emerges from external nature that can be spoken of as our inner nature, all that is certainly merely the empty external reflection of our true inner nature. What we truly refer to when we say “I” stands in the same realm within which also stand the higher hierarchies. As soon as a person enters into true self-awareness, he must enter into the ranks of the higher hierarchies. He must then take into account the language of the higher hierarchies. So that one might do this with full force, not merely making it into a theory drained of blood, but rather doing it with full force, for this reason the admonitions of the Guardian of the Threshold are forever emplaced right there. So that the whole meditation approaches us with due greatness and majesty, for this reason placed there are the two powerful admonitions from the cosmos, “Examine the field of thinking,” and “Examine the field of feeling,” and subsequently the third, which we will hear next time. If and only if we hold this three-part declamation within our hearts and minds full of life and force, if and when we experience ourselves in this mantric manner in the spiritual world, then we can really bring things forward. For only then have we grasped things in the appropriately correct spirited mood. We must seek this spirited mood in all things. For the actual inner sanctity which must be present, and meditation ought to be conducive, ought to lead to sanctity, this actual inner sanctity comes to one most certainly only through a spirited demeanor, through a specific spirited mood, one in which we are enraptured by the external world for a while, but one in which alone and solely within oneself the content and matter of the meditation is lived. When we entirely full of life attune our inner demeanor in this manner, then self-awareness is not just a sort of brooding within our inner nature, but it is rather a seed-awakening conversation with the world in the widest sense, with the Guardian, and with the Hierarchies. And then we find ourselves in the depths of true self-awareness. This ought to be taken up by us quite broadly, so that we take it as a ground-rule, to avoid thinking on such things, unless at the same time we can bring this spirited mood to bear on it. And so we should henceforth only think about such things, such as were brought forward today, if and when we can really bring forth within the soul this demeanor, this fundamental accompaniment to our perception, as the majesty of world-wide cosmic distances presses in upon us with a universal thunderclap, as within this in a soft, admonishing voice is intoned all that comes from the Guardian of the Threshold, and as then in compelling fashion a certain being of the Hierarchies itself speaks to our souls. And only then, when we keep this in memory, and when we bring up the feeling accompanying this memory, specifically only then should we think on this mantra, only then setting ourselves inwardly in relationship with this mantra, so that in this way we should not inwardly desecrate it, thereby desecrating its power, that we may well do by thinking about it with the type of customary, dry, philistine thinking with which we usually think, rather than placing ourselves first in the appropriate mood and demeanor of soul. And in this regard, we should also make sure that we obtain this mood of soul in order to feel that human self-awareness is something special, serious, and holy, and that in fact, these things should only be spoken inwardly by the soul, silently then externally, so that they come into perception as serious, special, and sacred. A great hindrance in progressing along an esoteric path is just this, that these things are spoken about so frequently in cliques, in which this serious, special, sacred, spirited nature is not developed at the same time, but rather, even in flights of fancy, these things are gossiped about. In doing this one forgets that in esoteric life all depends on the dominion of truth, proper full truth. Progress cannot be made in esoteric life by one who does not have this knowledge, that in esoteric life truth, full truth, must have dominion, that a person therefore cannot simply speak about the truth and then nevertheless approach such things merely in the way external profane things are approached, in the manner of making these things the subject matter of customary chitter-chatter. And this, which happens so frequently, this customary chitter-chatter, this is what so very often places hindrances and constraints along the esoteric path. And so we must absolutely bring a serious, special, sacred, spirited tenor of soul along in focusing on all that belongs to self-awareness. Then we will also be able to allow the word to work on our soul in the proper manner, the word which in conclusion shall now be spoken again, just as it was spoken at the beginning of today’s Class lesson:
Yes indeed, that is a directive to self-awareness.
Fundamentally, it is a question. The answer is given in such as this. [The mantras on the board were indicated.]  
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| 270. Esoteric Instructions: Fourteenth Lesson
31 May 1924, Dornach Tr. John Riedel Rudolf Steiner |
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| A person lives in his lower pole where oxygen combines with carbonic acid, and in his upper pole, in the domain of his nerve-sense system, where oxygen combines with silicon, with silica, and forms refined silicic acid [green]. A human being lives in such a way, that when the breath forms up in the blood, he produces carbonic acid, and when the breath forms up in the senses, he produces silicic acid [yellow arrows], below and outwardly through the breath carbonic acid, in the senses and returning from the senses within the breathing-process silicic acid in a totally more refined dose. |
| 270. Esoteric Instructions: Fourteenth Lesson
31 May 1924, Dornach Tr. John Riedel Rudolf Steiner |
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My dear friends! We have been studying the position of the human being in relation to the Guardian of the Threshold, and have led the soul in progressive steps into an understanding of the relationship a person has with the Guardian of the Threshold along the path of knowledge. Today we will initially focus our attention on the situation before Guardian of the Threshold, bringing it once again fully alive before our souls, in order to progress a bit forward by means of this esoteric consideration. A person must forsake, and here I repeat what is appropriate for today and has been covered in prior lessons, a person must forsake the physical world, in which his customary awareness is in force. He comes to know that the sensory-physical world can be grand and joyful, but also full of sorrow and pain, that it can in fact be majestic, and that he has every reason in the world to remain within it, in his awareness. But he also comes to know that he cannot ever get to know himself if he only directs his contemplative eye and sensitive soul out upon this physical world. And he must say to himself, that it is quite grand, arrayed color upon color and arranged form on form, but that just what he himself springs from and is patterned after cannot be found in the encircling wide reaches around. Yet even at this moment there rings forth from all sides unto a person, as the most noteworthy challenge in one’s life, the word of self-awareness: O man, know yourself! And in this way, a person will become clearly aware that in customary life he is certainly safeguarded from entering unprepared into what in certainty is the world of his own essential being. Moreover, the Guardian of the Threshold is the same high being who shelters a person as he enters the spiritual world every night in sleep, who shelters the person from consciously experiencing what in sleep is all around him, for otherwise he would be terribly upset in experiencing all this in sleep, if he experienced it unprepared, so much so that he would not be able to continue on in waking life as a human being with strength intact. But at the same time, the Guardian of the Threshold makes it clear to a person that he, the Guardian himself, is the only portal to true, to authentic knowledge. At this point, a person notices that he comes to an abyss, before entering the realm of knowledge, an abyss displayed as a bottomless chasm. The supporting pillars, that one stands on in the physical world, are gone. One cannot simply march over it. One can only carry himself across when freed of the physical, expressed symbolically, when one “grows wings”, so that one journeys over the abyss as a being of spirit and soul. But first the Guardian of the Threshold calls out for you to be mindful in regard to the abyss, particularly in regard to the beasts that emerge as spirit-formations from the abyss, for these beasts are the external reflections of impure willing, feeling, and thinking, and these beasts must first be overcome. And in vivid pictures displayed before one’s eyes, willing, feeling, and thinking are revealed in the three beasts, one shown as spectral, one ghoulish, and so forth. Then the Guardian of the Threshold shows us in greater depth how, in and of themselves, thinking, feeling, and willing can be strengthened, according to whether one has resolved in full awareness to overcome the beasts. And then, before someone actually enters the spiritual world, it is necessary to engage in situational meditations in perceiving the spiritual world, within which to discover how the cosmos speaks to a person, how the hierarchies speak to him, how at first all the things are proclaimed that await him there in the spiritual world. And we will become progressively more aware, through what is played out before our souls in the mantras, that a person must become something else, if he would stride over the abyss, if he would live within what is on the other side of the abyss. Ever more and more, we will become aware that here on the earth, we are in the company of the beings of the three realms of nature and in the company of people, but over there we are in the company of disembodied souls and in the company of the spirits of the higher hierarchies. A different sort of acquaintanceship is present there. Quite a different constitution of soul is required there for this quite different acquaintanceship. Once again, it is the business of the Guardian of the Threshold there to forcefully advise a person about how to comport himself, specifically about how to comport himself when striding across the Threshold and actually confronting the things of the spiritual world in their reality, about how in arriving there he must come to possess a wholly different soul-constitution. There, a person will be aware that within himself two conditions of soul can become a reality, the soul-condition of customary awareness on this side of the abyss, and the soul-condition outside of the physical and etheric bodies on the other side of the abyss, which is the soul-condition of the purely spiritual world. There, where the difference in these soul-conditions appear, great dangers await a person, dangers however, that initially present themselves in such a way that we have to characterize them as minor departures from normal conditions of soul, but that remain always within the soul when we characterize them properly, for they involve an extreme sickly soul-deformation. It must of course always be said, that when one’s path in the higher worlds is undertaken in the way so painstakingly delineated in the book How to Know Higher Worlds, in many smaller published anthroposophical works, and in the second part of my Outline of Occult Science, then straying from a normal soul-constitution should not happen, at least not easily. A person passing over into the spiritual world through healthy human understanding should be as fully aware of knowledge, initially, as one is through initiation. But a person must know that he may emerge in two different ways from the daily condition of soul-life that he is immersed in, if he does not pay attention to the proper sign-posts along the spiritual world’s pathway. Here on this side of the Threshold we stand upon the earth, upon the fixed elements of earth. The ground is under our feet. The ground supports us. The watery element is around us, that also takes part in the formation of our own body. This watery element cannot support us in normal life, but infuses throughout us, attaching itself to our blood. It is contained within our forces of growth, within our forces of nourishment. The air is what we breathe. The aeriform, the gaseous element is all around us. Warmth is also all around us, the warmth-ether, the fourth element. They are disconnected from one another in normal life. Where there is solid earth, there is no water. Where there is water, there is no air. Where there is air, there is no water. Only the fiery warmth presses into and throughout it all, for it is the only one that begins to press itself into everything. But the moment we take leave, even the first time, my dear friends, the moment we take leave of our physical body, these differentiations cease. The different elements cease to have individual borders. We ourselves enlarge, we extend ourselves out, and we are simultaneously in earth, water, fire, and air. We can no longer differentiate one from another. The attributes held individually by the four elements cease. The earth no longer supports us, for its fixed solidity ceases. Water no longer forms us, for its formative forces cease. In other words, when we plunge into water, it is not as in swimming, where we are separated from the water, but rather it is as if we dissolve into it, as ice dissolves into warm water, as if in becoming one with the water, then we no longer carry, when we pass over into the spiritual world, we no longer carry our blood as a separate element in our vascular circulation, but rather our blood becomes one with the ever-moving watery element of the universe. And just so, air ceases to be a formative breathing-force in us. And warmth ceases to engender our ego-force, ceases to inflame us in warmth to the feeling of individuality. It all ceases. This must be confronted, it must be confronted in the proper manner, this cessation of the differentiation of earth, water, air, and fire. To do this we may engage, in thought, in having already flown over the abyss. We have arrived on the other side, my dear brothers and sisters. There the Guardian of the Threshold calls out to us, that we should turn, lift our gaze, and face him. Now think, my dear brothers and sisters, have a lively imagination, imagine a person’s arrival there on the other side, where in certainty the knowledge of the spiritual world is revealed to him. He is there. The Guardian of the Threshold prompts him to look about, to take up the admonitions that he now needs, that in a certain fashion he has now become accustomed to, in the soul-condition that is present there, on the other side of the Threshold, within the spiritual world, there where he lives pressed into the four elements themselves, into earth, water, air, and fire. Just there a great danger appears, and please forgive the seeming triviality of the expression, my dear brothers and sisters, but if the person has possibly fallen in love with the illusion of disconnectedness of the solid earth, from the formative forces of water, from the creative forces of air, from the ego-awakening forces of warmth, then he may feel delighted merely in spiritual bliss, in giving himself over to the wonder of the spirit, and so he might remain within this spirit-bliss. A person may be overwhelmed, as the alluring power of Lucifer musters up against him. It depends on his karma, whether a person is more or less susceptible to the alluring power of Lucifer. If he is susceptible, so that he simply totally and completely falls in love with dissolving into earth, water, air, and fire, then the Luciferic attaches itself to him, and he will no longer be able to emerge from this demeanor of soul. He runs the risk, when he once again returns to daily life, of remaining within this soul-demeanor. And so the Guardian of the Threshold must and does call out to him, “You may not do it. You may not fall under the sway of Lucifer. In the dissolution in earth, water, fire, and air you may not simply feel the solitary wonder of bliss. You must take yourself firmly in hand, or else, when you again return to the physical world, as a person in the physical world, when you take up the soul-condition of customary awareness of the physical world, then from then on you will be a person quite confused.” That is the Luciferic danger, that on the return from the spiritual world, from the other side of the Threshold, a person may be bewildered and no longer have his senses about him, but would be an enthusiastic dreamer, an enthusiastic adherent of idealism, disdainful of customary awareness. That one may not do. And the Guardian of the Threshold admonishes, insistently, that one should be resolutely determined to live in the way corresponding to whatever world one is in, be it earthly or transcendental. But the Guardian of the Threshold sets down a second admonition. The second admonition is this, that one should take care, when one has arrived on the other side with his thinking, feeling, and willing split apart, one should take care of how much of his thinking, feeling, and willing at hand is still connected to the earthly, is still inclined to the earthly. There a person can once again be predisposed to remain in what has given him the experiences on this side in the fixed support of earth, to hold on tightly and cross over to the other side of the Threshold with a materialistic soul-constitution, to cross over with the formative forces of water frozen, solidified. Then he can become afflicted with an overweening earthly pride, and can say to himself, “In life on earth I have breathed in, have drawn into myself the very breath, out of which in times past the Father-God has formed human souls, human lives, which I can do also, when freed from earthly life’s confines.” But if a person carries over into the spiritual world what he perceives in his breath as the creative force of God, then he falls under the sway of the Ahrimanic alluring power. In this condition he cannot return, because before he would return, there in the spiritual world he is enfolded in powerlessness. He would be non-sentient, more or less. His awareness would be disabled, crippled. In this manner, his awareness having been stunted, he would more or less be a sort of tool or implement of the Ahrimanic powers there in the spiritual world. It is certainly so today since the beginning of the age of Michael, that the spiritual life of human beings, which today is crass and crude, frozen in materialism, is for the most part carried over as such into the spiritual world. And what this means, what it entails, is that the Ahrimanic powers enfold the human being in their grasp whenever his awareness has been stunted into something other than the condition of full wakefulness, and yes, my friends, this has been in evidence everywhere energetically ever since the outbreak of the great World War. As I have most certainly said many times since the outbreak of the World War, the history of this war cannot be written about from the physical plane’s standpoint alone. Documents by themselves do not reveal the truth, that of the thirty or forty people who were most certainly engaged in the production of the war, a great number at various times were in a state of clouded awareness, and were therefore implements of the Ahrimanic powers. In this way much of what transpired in the World War was a legacy of Ahrimanic powers. This World War can only be written about in an occult manner. Whatever one has seen after a fashion, in his wanderings on this side of the Threshold, of various leading personalities immediately before the outbreak of the World War, all that can be taken truly to be indicative of the habits of soul that are carried over to the other side of the Threshold, and over there then become stunted, become stunted in awareness, and become, therefore, a working force of the Ahrimanic powers. A person must be clear and fully self-possessed about this, that he may not carry back to this side, the soul-constitution of the other side of the Threshold. He may not carry the soul-constitution of this side of the Threshold to the other side, but rather, for every domain, this side and the other side of the abyss, a strongly stark human inner awareness must be developed. It arises in this manner for all four elements in the admonition of the Guardian of the Threshold. And again, we should delve into this admonition meditatively. Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, imagine that you are standing there on the other side of the Threshold. The Guardian has beckoned. You look straight at him. First, he calls out to you, admonishing.
One no longer has it. But your heart moves, deep within, and would give an answer. But the heart can be moved inwardly in a three-fold manner, an answer emerging by means of and from the cosmos. It can be moved, this heart, by Christ and his force. Then it answers:
meaning, the earth’s firmness,
That is the right demeanor of soul. I relinquish the pillars of earth, as long as the spirit carries me within the spirit-domain, as long as I am outside of the body. But the heart can also be moved by Lucifer. Then it answers:
So speaks the person in his lofty pride, in his self-satisfaction, as if he also would not need the support, when he traverses back into the physical world. Or the heart can be moved by Ahriman. Then it answers:
The support is referred to here, and carrying the hammered support out and over. No one should shrink back in fear from meditative soul-consideration of all three answers again and again, in order in this way to be able to choose and align with the first answer in freedom. For one must feel the inherent inward vacillation, the alignment with Lucifer, then with Ahriman. One must place this in meditation firmly within one’s vision. The meditation in this manner must embody the earthen element. [The first part of the mantra was now written on the board.] First the Guardian speaks:
The human heart must give answer. When moved by Christ, it answers:
If the soul has been moved by Lucifer, it answers in this way:
The phrase “as long as” [The words “as long as” were underlined.] emerges from the heart, draws the eternal into temporality, and so transforms the sentence. If the heart has been moved by Ahriman, it answers in this way:
And then, progressing further, so that the soul can fully devote itself to what stands there before it, the second admonition of the Guardian of the Threshold appears, pointing to the formative force of water. This formative force of water is what builds the fixed organs in us, drawing them out of the fluid elements. All that we take in as nourishment must first become fluid, and then the organs are formed out of it. All of a person’s sharply contoured organs have been cast out of fluid elements. This formative force ceases as soon as a person enters the domain on the other side of the Threshold. The Guardian warns, that this is the case. He calls out to us, when we stand there on the other side of the Threshold, our gaze directed onto his stern face. [The second part of the mantra was now written on the board.]
The person answers, if he has been moved in his heart by Christ, “My life extinguishes it, quenches it, as long as the spirit forms me.” The spirit begins to work on you over there, half out of your body.
in the sense of quenching it, putting it out, and by “it” is meant the forming force,
Again appears “as long as”, again unobtrusively. [The words “as long as” were underlined.] If the soul has been moved by Lucifer, however, then the phrase “as long as” is left out, and the sentence emerges with haughty arrogance:
Well, what has been extinguished can be rekindled, but what has been melted away, expunged, remains expunged. “My life expunges it”
If the soul has been moved by Ahriman, then it answers:
Please take note, my dear brothers and sisters, how everything in mantric verse is fashioned inwardly, meaningfully, and with confident certainty. Here [The first verse was indicated.] we see, “I leave”, “I feel”, “I will.” The ego speaks in the answer. In the second verse the ego speaks, but not so egocentrically, but rather says, “My life”, as in “My life extinguishes it”, “My life expunges it”, “My life affixes it.” Any entry into all reality is only spoken about properly, if it is spoken about accurately in every aspect. Lassitude in the formation of sentences, which is appropriate for people in the physical domain, may not be carried forward into the spirit-domain. In the spirit-domain speaking must be exact and accurate. You should also most certainly keep in mind, my dear friends, that it all corresponds to a reality, that this esoteric school has not been constituted out of human intentions, but rather out of those of the spiritual world, as was said at the outset, that all that comes to the fore here in the esoteric school of the Goetheanum, even though it is said through my mouth, is nevertheless a dictum of the spiritual world. This must be so in every rightfully constituted esoteric school, certainly in the present and in times to come, just as it was in the ancient holy mysteries. And this esoteric school is the true Michael School, the institution of those high spiritual beings partaking immediately of the inspiration of the cosmic will of Michael. Concerning the domain of air, the Guardian of the Threshold once again speaks in admonition,
waking you into existence. As Jehovah, by means of his infusion of the breath of life into humans, transformed simple living beings, by means of the stimulus inherent in his breath, into beings that can perceive, so a person, through sensing, through the stimulus that the external world brings to bear on the senses, becomes a being who perceives. But what exactly are the senses? My dear brothers and sisters, the senses are most certainly just refined organs of breathing. The breath broadens itself out into all the senses. As it lives in the lungs, so it lives in the eyes. Only that in the lungs it is bound up with carbon, but in the eyes with the more refined silica. In one’s organism carbonic acid is produced. [It was drawn in red and the word carbonic acid4 was written down.] In the senses silicic acid is produced in a much more refined state. [Drawn in yellow, silicic acid5 was written down.] A person lives in his lower pole where oxygen combines with carbonic acid, and in his upper pole, in the domain of his nerve-sense system, where oxygen combines with silicon, with silica, and forms refined silicic acid [green]. A human being lives in such a way, that when the breath forms up in the blood, he produces carbonic acid, and when the breath forms up in the senses, he produces silicic acid [yellow arrows], below and outwardly through the breath carbonic acid, in the senses and returning from the senses within the breathing-process silicic acid in a totally more refined dose. The Guardian of the Threshold calls out to us concerning what is in the air:
He who is moved by Christ in his heart answers:
no longer earth’s air, but heaven’s air,
The heart moved by Lucifer answers:
The heart moved by Ahriman answers:
As Jehovah once created with his breath, so those swayed by Ahriman absorb the air, in order to carry it along while crossing over into the spiritual world. The Guardian speaks to the man: [The third part of the mantra was now written on the board and at the same time in the Christ-line the words “as long as” were underlined.]
The heart moved by Christ speaks:
The heart moved by Lucifer speaks:
The air’s power to stimulate is not noticed at all. The heart moved by Ahriman speaks:
Concerning the fiery or warmth elements, the Guardian now speaks his last elementary word, admonishing that a person should not lose himself in the element of warmth, but also not carry over into the spiritual world the warmth-element as it is in physical existence, as displayed on earth. Just before I do this, however, my dear brothers and sisters, I would like to call your attention to this progression along the ascent:
Now the Guardian speaks in warning concerning the fiery elements: [The fourth part of the mantra was written on the board, and at the same time in the Christ-line “as long as” was underlined.]
Our ego lives in warmth, in what presses into and throughout us as warmth. I have often, my dear brothers and sisters, remarked on this in the esoteric school, that the fixed elements remain unconscious within, and also the fluid elements, even though in one’s feeling of satisfaction, one already feels the perfusion of the fluid elements. In satiety or in hunger one experiences the essential nature of the fluid element. The aeriform element is experienced soulfully. A person becomes breathless when not connecting properly with air, and fear comes with breathlessness. This already enters the realm of soul. Warmth is something in which one feels wholly at home. He participates in his condition of warmth or of cold with the whole of his ego. Fire inflames his ego. The heart moved by Christ answers:
A person does not need the material warmth of earth when the spirit supplies the spark and ignites his ego. For the ego blazes there not in earthly warmth, not in earthly fire, but within the fire of God. But the heart moved by Lucifer answers:
The heart moved by Ahriman answers, as if the fire begun upon the earth is taken as his own and carried over into the spiritual world, to master the spiritual world with the ego-fire of the physical world.
The ego will not blaze up except by deploying its own fire. Once again, the progression arising in the formulation first appears in the person speaking “I”.
It then becomes more objective, in that the person addresses the things pertaining to himself as “Mine”.
It then goes more inwardly, so inner nature becomes objective.
Now he climbs somewhat further into himself. And take note of the difference, my dear brothers and sisters. Early on is said merely “I”. Then “I” becomes objective, “my I”, as if it were another’s, as one would speak of another’s property. One is externalized even more, one is externalized out of the physical body, even to the extent initially of allowing one to speak fully egoistically of the ego, and one says:
as if it were an object. That is the proper way to render it here. One becomes acquainted with this rendering, my dear brothers and sisters, in all its depth and intensity, when one speaks with souls who have gone through the portal of death and have been in the spiritual world awhile. They do not say “I”, but rather they always say “my I”. I have not yet heard of one departed after death who has said “I”, except at most for a very brief time after death. So some time after death, the dead one says “my I”, because he gazes upon the ego with the eyes of the gods. It becomes objective for him, characteristically objective. Therefore, an account, from someone who has been dead for a somewhat longer time, cannot be accurate if the departed says “I”, if he does not say “my I”. So here in the fourth progressive section, before the Guardian of the Threshold, the soul says “my I”. And that, my dear friends, is the wonderful spoken exchange at the Threshold, between the Guardian of the Threshold and the human personality, that actually takes place when one stands there before the Guardian of the Threshold, as illustrated here, which must be attended to, in order to catch the feeling in its essential actuality when deploying and immersing oneself in this dialogue properly in meditation. So you form the words up in meditation properly, my dear brothers and sisters, the mantric words coming to you here today, when in a certain sense you hear the words that you yourself are speaking, but only in the course of the Guardian having been heard to be speaking before us first in a manner of soul. Therefore this is how one meditates, as if hearing four times over the Guardian of the Threshold at the start of each section, concerning earth, water, air, and fire, and then allowing one’s own true soul to answer, but in such a manner that one immediately hears the first answer as if inwardly ensouled by Christ, the second answer in the voice of the tempter, and the third answer in the voice of the pompous materialistic Ahriman-Spirit, who approaches a person with the desire to carry over into the spirit the manner of being of the mineralized human. Now, in closing today’s esoteric lesson, we will allow the characteristic way this is to be meditated to sound forth with firm effect.
 
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| 350. Learning to See in the Spiritual World: The Uses of What Seems Boring: The Spiritual World as the Inverse of the Physical
30 Jun 1923, Dornach Tr. Walter Stuber, Mark Gardner Rudolf Steiner |
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| Let's say I were to come to you and make other obvious remarks like the meadow is green, the rose is red, these things have colors, and yesterday there was a trial in court and the judge passed judgment, the judgment had no color. |
| 350. Learning to See in the Spiritual World: The Uses of What Seems Boring: The Spiritual World as the Inverse of the Physical
30 Jun 1923, Dornach Tr. Walter Stuber, Mark Gardner Rudolf Steiner |
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[ 1 ] We will now continue to answer the questions we took up last time. You must be quite clear that the answers to these questions are among the most difficult. I will try to make them as easy as possible. I have already mentioned that, to find a way to spiritual vision, first one must become accustomed to completely independent thinking. Second, one must have the ability to think backward. You must therefore attempt to think backward those things that normally occur in daily life in a 1, 2, 3, sequence. For instance, as I told you last time, when I give a lecture, you should try to think it through backward, from the end to the beginning. These two aspects constitute the absolute first steps. [ 2 ] In connection with the second question I want to explain something else. As you know, a human being can live only within a specific temperature range. When it becomes very hot in the summer, one sweats but can still tolerate it. However, were it to become progressively hotter, a point would be reached when one would no longer be able to live. Similarly, a human being can tolerate a given degree of cold, and if it gets colder than that, one freezes. The fact is that one cannot see spiritual beings between the two extremes within which the human body lives: i.e., between the cold at which one freezes and the heat that is still barely tolerable. Within these extremes, where human life is possible, we cannot see spiritual beings. It is not surprising therefore that one cannot perceive spiritual beings when one is in the body. As I told you last time, when we begin to think backward and approach the point of consciously seeing spiritual beings, we often fall asleep. Unless they have trained themselves to stay awake, most people go to sleep. One can also perceive spiritual beings at temperatures higher than those normally tolerable. One could see spiritual beings at such higher temperatures, but of course one cannot tolerate them. At lower temperatures likewise one could perceive spiritual beings if one could transform oneself into a snow-being, but of course one would freeze in the process. Thus, what seems so unlikely to people is actually a fact: spiritual beings withdraw themselves from the temperatures that are tolerable to humanity in its physical body. [ 3 ] A human being cannot tolerate those temperatures in his body, but he can tolerate them in his soul; but of course the soul goes to sleep. The soul does not freeze, the soul does not burn, the soul goes to sleep. [ 4 ] There are two ways to gain an idea of what it would be like to experience the extreme temperatures outside those one ordinarily lives in. I will give you an example. When one has a fever, one reaches inwardly a temperature that one cannot bear. One does not immediately reach so high a temperature that one dies because the warmth is created from within, one is able to bear it. However, when one's fever enters these higher temperatures one may speak in a way that is not normal on the earth. What people babble in their fever has no relation to what we are used to on earth. Now, the materialist may say: Yes, but there are nevertheless untrue thoughts produced that are cooked up in the heat of fever. [ 5 ] A person, when he enters into a state of high temperature, first of all feels feverish, then speaks nonsense. The soul cannot speak nonsense. Even when the soul is living in a high fever, it cannot speak nonsense. It seems or appears to speak nonsense at higher bodily temperatures because the body is not in order. You can verify the truth of this by the following example. Let us think about our experience with those glass spheres one sometimes finds in flower gardens—a sphere that is actually a kind of mirror in which the environment is reflected. If you look at yourself in one of these, you will find yourself with a face that you would rather not have n reality. (He sketched this.) You would hate to have that kind of face. You will not say, however, "Oh no! What kind of a thing did I turn into?" You would not believe that this is really your own face, just because it looks changed in the sphere. Similarly, if your soul talks nonsense when you have a fever, you will not say that your soul is talking nonsense; but rather you will assume that whatever is said by your soul seems nonsensical because it is spoken out of a sick brain—just as your face looks distorted and flattened out because it is reflected by a false mirror. So you must say to yourself: When I have a fever and speak nonsense, it is my soul that is speaking through a sick brain. When I see myself reflected in a glass sphere, it is not that I have another face, but that my face appears distorted. In the same way the speech of one sick with a fever appears distorted because it is spoken out of a sick body and a brain that is not working properly. Now, we might ask why the brain does not work properly? It is because the whole blood circulation is too fast. You can verify this by feeling your pulse when you have a fever. The blood circulation produces warmth which rises to the head—you feel a fever—and your soul now appears reflected as by a distorted mirror. [ 6 ] The opposite can also happen, but this will not happen as a result of lying in the snow and letting oneself freeze, because then one would actually die of freezing. This opposite experience can happen, but only as the result of something spiritual. We come now to a strange subject. Carefully consider the following: Let's assume one begins to concentrate, to think powerfully about the smallest things (it is better to think about the small things that most people wouldn't even want to give time to)—for example, a triangle. Let us say we have a triangle, and we divide it into four equal parts so that we have four equal triangles. (He draws on the blackboard). You can see that the whole triangle is greater than the four smaller triangles. From this I can make a general statement and say: The whole is greater than the parts. (He writes the sentence on the blackboard.) But now let's assume that a well-fed stockbroker comes by and I tell him: Hey, just think, the whole is greater than its parts. He will say, No, that is too boring for me. He would say it again if I continued to speak to him and said: the blackboard is a physical body with a given size and extension, the table is also a body with a given size and extension, and I then constructed the general statement: All bodies have extension—are extended in space. (He writes the sentence on the blackboard.) If a whole conference were given to you, if a lecture was given consisting in the single statement "all bodies have extension," you would walk away, saying, Gosh, that was boring! Let's say I were to come to you and make other obvious remarks like the meadow is green, the rose is red, these things have colors, and yesterday there was a trial in court and the judge passed judgment, the judgment had no color. Then I went to another place and there also was a trial and a judgment, and it had no color either. And therefore I said: judgments have no color. (He writes the sentence on the blackboard.)  [ 7 ] Let's assume someone stood in front of you for an hour and told you: judgments have no color. You would think to yourself: I have spent a whole hour listening to someone bore me. This is the ultimate boredom. But why are these statements so boring? I should not be telling them to you humorously; I should be standing before you stiff and severe like a professor, announcing: Gentlemen, today we will consider the statement, "Judgments have no color," and then of course I would have to lecture for a whole hour to prove that judgments have no color; all bodies have extension etc. I could also give you another instance: draw a line from one point to another; this is a straight line. All others are curved, and when you look at it you would immediately say the straight line is the shortest way; all others are longer. Here again I could write down a general statement: The straight line is the shortest distance between two points. Again, if I were to speak for a whole hour on the subject, you would find it exceedingly boring.
[ 8 ] There is a German professor who said that it is quite possible to perceive things of the spiritual world, but that the only things that we can perceive of the spiritual world are what reside in such statements as: the whole is greater than its parts, judgments have no color, bodies are extended, and the straight line is the shortest distance between two points. This, he says, is all one can know of the spiritual world. Of course, most students are extremely bored by his lectures. It is also the case that people today have come to believe that science has to be boring, and therefore many of the students are actually excited by this professor! This, of course, is just an aside. [ 9 ] The real story is the following. Taken by themselves, sentences such as "the whole is greater than its parts" and "the straight line is the shortest distance between two points" cause the back of our head to become cold. This is what usually happens: the temperature drops and the area at the back of one's head becomes cold. When the temperature drops you begin to freeze and you want to get away from such statements—they are so boring. It is a fact—boredom causes a drop in temperature at the back of the head—not the whole body, but just at the back of the head. What cools it down is not snow or ice but something of a spiritual nature, insofar as there are subjects that hold no interest for the human being. [ 10 ] It is of course possible to make fun of these sentences, but the fact remains, that patiently to think such thoughts over and over again means to put oneself, again and again, deliberately into a state of dreadful boredom, and this is a good way to reach in the direction of a true spiritual perception. It is remarkable that the very things men do not want in general are the things they must practice if they wish to have a real look into the spiritual world. Mathematics for many is boring; it causes a drop in temperature at the back of the head; and precisely because it is a cold subject for most, and precisely because they have to work at it, those people who do, have the least trouble reaching into the spiritual world. Those who overcome this resistance and experience again and again the truth of these statements are those who can create artificially a state of boredom in themselves. They have the easiest way into the spiritual world. [ 11 ] I have told you already, when one has a fever one's pulse speeds up. One warms up, and this warmth reaches into one's head and into one's brain, and in this way the warmth causes one to talk nonsense. If, on the other hand, one struggles with such statements as we have mentioned, this causes one's blood to slow down, and there is an accumulation of salts deposited in the back of the brain. Most people react in one of two ways to this. Some get a stomachache and they notice this right away, as soon as they start to think of these statements, and so they stop. One can go on thinking, as for example Nietzsche did. He always tortured himself with such statements when he was a young man, and the salts accumulated in his head, and in his case he suffered dreadful migraines. The objective is to be able to think such thoughts without causing a migraine or a stomachache. One must find a way to be completely healthy while at the same time artificially producing in oneself a state of boredom. Thus, if someone were to tell you quite honestly how to reach into the spiritual world, he would have to tell you first of all to learn how to create boredom artificially in yourself. Short of this you have no hope of reaching the spiritual world. But look now at our contemporary world. What is it that people want at this time? People today are constantly trying to drive away boredom. Just look at all the things and all the places people run to in order not to be bored. They always want to be amused; but what does that mean, to want to be amused all the time? It means that they really want to run away from the spirit! It has no other meaning; and people today always want to be amused, which makes it clear that wherever anything spiritual might be present people of our time always run away from it immediately. People are not conscious of this, they do it unconsciously, but the fact remains that they want amusement and to run away from the spirit. Well, gentlemen, only those can reach into the spirit who are not afraid of renouncing amusements and of living in such sentences. When one can manage to live artificially in those sentences without getting a stomachache or a migraine, but can actually tolerate living in such sentences for many hours at a time, then it becomes possible to contemplate the spiritual world. [ 12 ] An additional change must take place in this act of holding oneself consciously in these sentences. One notices, if one has been living with these sentences for a while, that they start to turn around. If I think about the sentence "the large triangle is greater than its parts" for a long time, if I think about it for a very long time, there comes a point when the sentence somehow turns around. It even starts to become interesting, for I start to have the following perception: If I have a triangle here, and I consider one quarter of that triangle and take it out, it somehow begins to grow with me and it no longer remains true that the whole is greater than the parts. Suddenly that quarter part is larger for me, I see that it has grown, so that I now must say: The whole is smaller than the parts! (The sentence is written on the blackboard.) [ 13 ] By doing this, I have worked myself into a position where I can see how things work in the spiritual world. Things there are the opposite of the way they are in the physical world. In the physical world, the whole is always greater than its parts. In the spiritual world, the part is greater than the whole. It is impossible to know a human being without knowing that the part is greater than the whole. Contemporary science always wants to look at the smallest parts, the components of things. If, for example, we study the liver of a person, we find that it is smaller than the person in the physical realm. But if we start looking at it from a spiritual point of view, we find that it grows and grows to gigantic proportions; it actually becomes a whole world in itself. If one cannot see this, then it is impossible to perceive the liver at all in a spiritual way. Therefore you must first honestly arrive at the statement: the whole is smaller than the part, or the part is greater than the whole. [ 14 ] In the same way, if you think for a long time—long enough—about the statement: All bodies have surfaces, or are extended, then there is a danger that the back of your brain will freeze. If you think upon this sentence in this way, all the bodies shrivel into one; they stop having surfaces—external surfaces—and in the end you arrive at the statement: Bodies do not have surfaces, they are not extended. (The sentence is written on the blackboard.) [ 15 ] Now I will take a funny example, funny for the physical world, but of the highest seriousness in the spiritual world. It could seem that there is nothing more foolish than to say: in Buxtehude there was a trial, and judgment was passed—it has no color. In Trippstrill, judgment was passed in the course of a trial—and this also had no color. But if you think about judgments for a long time, they in fact acquire color. Just as you can say the rose is red, so you can say the judgment in Buxtehude was a kind of dirty yellow, and the judgment in Trippstrill was red. There can even be some judgments that are a beautiful red, although this is rarely the case. As you begin to understand this, you begin to grow into the sentence: All judgments made by human beings have color. (The sentence is written on the blackboard) Only now does one reach the point of being at all capable of thinking about the spiritual world, because it has the opposite characteristics of the physical world. [ 16 ] The straight line is the shortest path between two points. This is true to such an extent that all geometry is built upon it. It is one of the first statements in geometry. It is as true in the physical world as anything ever can be true in the physical world. But if one thinks about it long enough—if some being goes from village A to village B, and that being is not a physical but a spiritual being, the way will seem very short if he walks in a half circle. The sentence then changes to: The straight line is the longest way between two points.(The sentence is written on the blackboard.)
[ 17 ] You must admit there is something here that astonishes you, but the world as a whole does not like these kinds of things, and people will say: If someone says that judgments have color, he must have a fever or he is mad! Of course, the whole point is that one reaches these things in full consciousness without the use of one's body. The spiritual world has characteristics that are the opposite of the physical world and one may come to this realization through the simplest statements, for the simplest statements are the hardest to believe. As you know, if someone starts telling you interesting things about the spiritual world, everybody starts listening; for instance, if someone starts talking about ghosts. But if someone tells you first that you must get used to creating boredom in yourself artificially—it has to be artificially—this doesn't seem so interesting. If you are just naturally bored by external science, nothing comes of it; it has to be done artificially, through an inner effort that enables you to reach the state of boredom without getting a migraine or a stomachache. The body must not participate in that state of boredom. The moment your body is involved, it is clear that you will get a migraine or a stomachache. Don't listen when people tell you, Do not let professor so and so bore you. Such advice will be of no help, it will not make you see into the spiritual world. What you must do is gradually overcome both migraines and stomachaches. You see, the student is sitting here—the professor bores him to death—he should be getting a migraine or a stomachache, but he doesn't. What happens in this case is that other organs come into play which do not hurt. People, in fact, do get sick when the physical body is involved in the boredom. If you induce the boredom in the way contemporary science does, it only makes people sick. If one teaches people in the right way, one gives them the ability to produce, through their own powers, in total freedom, the boredom which, when penetrated, will gradually allow entrance to the spiritual world. One must take hold of absolutely basic judgments in the physical world and see how they are turned upside-down in the spiritual world. There is one extremely good way in which it is possible to work on oneself. For example: let us say you have experienced something very boring, so boring that you walked away from it because it was so boring, so boring that you could not stand it anymore, (you were so happy when it was over!) In such a case it is important that you start very, very slowly thinking it through again. [ 18 ] Let me tell you that I have learned a great deal from this kind of exercise in my life. When I was young, I listened to many dreadfully boring lectures; but before it even started, I would look forward to a boring lecture, because it brought about the kind of result sleep normally does in life. I was very happy. I would tell myself: You are going to listen to a few hours of boring lectures. When the lecture started and the professor started to speak, I often had the feeling: He is talking too much, he is disturbing me in my boredom. But afterward I would think very deeply about every single thing he had said, not that it interested me—it didn't interest me at all—but I relived every single hour. I relived it from the very beginning exactly the way it had been presented. Sometimes I went over it so thoroughly that it would actually take two hours. I would have two hours of artificial boredom. In this process, one can make an extraordinary discovery. This kind of discovery is one that could be made at the end of the nineteenth century. Imagine that you have come out of a lecture by a giant rhinoceros—this can happen!—and that you have been bored to death. Now you can meditate, as the saying goes, on this boring lecture, bringing everything that was boring back into yourself, into your soul. Then suddenly, behind that giant rhinoceros of a man who was presenting you with all this boring stuff, a higher man, something like a completely spiritual human being, will emerge. The whole lecture hall is thereby transformed for you. I am putting this in a way you can understand rationally. The lecture hall becomes transformed in such a way that behind the professor the spiritual—a truly and deeply intelligent man—appears. I knew many professors of the nineteenth century with whom this was the case; but of course I don't want you to talk about this, because people would think it a terrible thing. [ 19 ] For the truth is that humans are not inwardly as unconscious or as stupid as they pretend to be. Often they are quite smart. The dumbest are often quite smart, and the opposite is also true. But they don't know their own intelligence. It is a very deep secret: behind a person there often stands the true nature of his soul and spirit, which he cannot perceive in himself. [ 20 ] This is already a way of reaching into the spiritual world. As you know, at the end of the nineteenth century there existed a materialistic natural science, and people today still adore this materialist science. I must admit however, that this science was tremendously useful to me. What it did, from start to finish, was bring up the most boring statements. It is as if the modern scientist licks his fingers with enjoyment when he thinks he has discovered that all humans descended from apes. But if one thinks about this statement again and again, with complete energy, it changes! It changes into another statement that is spiritually correct. That is to say, humans do not descend from apes but from a spiritual being. [ 21 ] There are different points of view here. A child was once sent to school. There he heard for the first time from his teacher that humanity is descended from apes—too early as it turned out. When he returned home, he said to his father, "Hey, I heard today that humanity is descended from apes. Just think of that!" "Well," said his father indignantly, "You're certainly a stupid fellow. That may be the case for you, if you like, but not for me!" You see, for the father—he took it with reference to the soul—the story was quite unbelievable. [ 22 ] From all that I have told you you will see that one can find one's way into natural scientific thinking in two ways. If you have not studied natural science, as many did in the nineteenth century and indeed still do, instead of simply parroting the conclusions, you can think about them—but think about them in a meditative way. Think them over for hours and hours, and you will find that what is true in the spiritual world comes forward. If you think for a long time about plants and minerals, and you have thought all the things about them that people tell you these days in such a dreadfully materialistic way, then you finally come to the meaning of things like the meaning of the zodiac, the meaning of the stars, all the secrets of the stars. The surest way to this goal is to start with those simple statements that are taken for granted, and proceed forward from there. The part is greater than the whole, bodies have no extension, judgments have color, the straight line is the longest path between two points. In saying these kinds of sentences you tear yourself away from your physical body. When you have experienced all this, you come to the point where you can use your etheric body instead of your physical body. You can then start thinking with your etheric body—your etheric body thinks everything upside-down, or in the reverse of the way it appears in the physical world. It is the etheric body that gradually brings one into the spiritual world. At precisely this point, however, very often one gets stuck: one must still accustom oneself to one thing more. You may know that one can read very strange things these days. I was in a small southern Austrian town (which is no longer in Austria) and I found an evening paper. It had a so-called editorial; it was a very interesting story, in all detail—every particular—a political story. There were three columns—it was all very interesting. Then at the end—still on the same page, there was a small disclaimer that said: We are sorry to notify our readers that everything in today's editorial article is based on false information and therefore not a word of it is true! This is the kind of thing that can happen to you today. This of course is rather an extreme case, but whenever you read newspapers it can happen that on every single page there is something that is not true at all. At some later point what one is now reading will be exposed as untrue. My feeling is that most people have become dreadfully insensitive in such matters, and they take in, quite evenhandedly, both truth and lies. The mind has become blunted in this way, so that truth and lies are both taken in the same way. This makes it impossible to reach into the spiritual world. [ 23 ] I told you last time that when someone becomes crazy, only his body is sick; the soul is not sick, it remains healthy. I told you that when someone hallucinates in a fever, it is only his thoughts that become caricatures—for the soul itself is intact. One must get used to these things, if one wants to penetrate the spiritual world. One must get used to feeling pain in one's soul when something is not right, and to finding that something that is correct gives one a spiritual joy. One must rejoice about the truth the way one would if one were to receive a million dollars. One must be happy when one is told some truth. The opposite case is that when something is discovered to be a lie, a suffering is felt in the soul—not in the body—suffering as if one had a dreadful illness. The suffering need not be so severe that the soul has to become sick, but it must be possible for the soul to experience pain and joy just as, when the body is disturbed in a physical way, one feels pain and joy. This means that one must come to the point where one feels the truth in the same way that one experiences happiness, cheerfulness, and general pleasure in the physical world. One must eventually come to the point where one suffers such pain in the face of untruth that one's soul becomes sick—as one can be in a bodily way. If someone heaps lies upon you, you must be able to say inwardly: Damn it, this person has just sold me deadly nightshade. This must be true in an inner way. Now of course, if you look at the current world—for instance, at the newspapers—one eats that deadly nightshade all the time. You must constantly nourish yourself spiritually, for the soul has to remain healthy. You must continually be spitting out what is bad, spiritually, if your spirit is to remain healthy. One has to get used to this fact, because one cannot be without newspapers. Once you come to the spiritual world, you will have to be used to the bad taste of newspapers; and to feeling joy when you read something exceptionally good—the same kind of joy, in my opinion, that you would have when you eat something that tastes very good. Truth, and the striving for truth, must taste good to you; and lies, once you are conscious of them, must taste bitter and poisonous. You must not only know that judgments have color, but also that printer's ink nowadays is mostly wild cherry juice. You must be able to experience this in all honesty and rectitude, and once you can do so you will be in a state of spiritual transformation. [ 24 ] People read these days about alchemy, and believe it in an external way. They believe that they can change copper to gold, and there are charlatans who will tell you all kinds of superstitious variations of this. Of course, in the spiritual world these things are possible; but one must believe in the truth of the spirit. One must be able to tell oneself that the printer's ink used is the same everywhere, materially, whether it has printed a true book or a lying newspaper. In the second case, the printer's ink is really the wild cherry juice, and in the other it is like liquid gold. Things that in the physical world are exactly the same are quite different in the spirit. [ 25 ] Of course, if intelligent people today hear the statement "printer's ink can be liquid gold or wild cherry juice" they will tell you that you are only speaking 'metaphorically'. It is only a metaphor! But the metaphorical must become spiritual reality and one needs to understand how metaphors become spiritual. [ 26 ] I will give you an example—it actually comes out of the history of the Social Democratic party. You probably did not experience this as much in this country. At one point the party split; on one side were those led by Bernstein—happily making all kinds of compromises with the middle class—and on the other side, led by Bebel, were the radicals.5 I am sure you have heard about Bebel in books. At one point in Dresden there was a party convention, and Bebel got angry about the others and said he was going to put some order into social democracy. He gave a big angry speech. In the course of it he said: Well, if this or that happens on the other side, it feels like a louse running across my liver. Now everybody would say this is only meant metaphorically. Of course there is no such thing as a louse on his liver! But then one can ask: Why use such an expression? Why is it possible to speak in terms that suggest a louse walked on your liver? For the most part it is extremely unpleasant when people have lice, it is extremely unpleasant; it is actually a distressing feeling. [ 27 ] Not everyone is as lucky as a certain sorry fellow who was always picking lice from his head. Someone asked him once, "How is it that you are so skillful and always manage to find a louse?" He answered, "Its easy. If I miss the one I'm aiming for, I get the one beside it." It does not happen to all of us to aim for a louse and miss and still get one! Generally, when people have lice, it's terribly unpleasant—a horrible feeling. I remember a case when I was a tutor and one of the boys entrusted to me came home after being out. He had been sitting on all kinds of benches in a big city and he started to have dreadful pains in his eyes. Everyone was wondering which specialist to take him to for his terrible pains but I said, "Why don't we first try a lice-killing cream on his eyebrows?" Indeed, it was then noticed that he was full of lice, and once the cream went to work, his eyes stopped tearing. Now, you should have seen how upset people—the mother and the aunt—looked when they suddenly discovered that he had lice. Their feelings were so intense that they had repercussions in their livers; they had pains in their bellies. They said, "My God, our child has lice, what a terrible thing!" When this happened, the sensation was really as though they had lice running across their livers. In the case of the Social Democratic party, it was not a matter of people getting lice, but rather of some people doing things that seemed so awful, so repugnant to the others, that the sensation was the same—the same as would have been experienced in earlier times, or would still be experienced in some classes of society, at the thought of having lice on one's liver. So you can see, in the way the expression was formed, it did correspond to a reality. Latterly, however, these expressions have been used in a way that only refers to spiritual matters or matters of the soul. But again, one has consciously, deliberately, to make those connections. One must really be able to experience, not just the sound of the phrase, but the actual sensation that it came from. [ 28 ] Let us say I have a newspaper in front of me: most of the things that are printed in it must be felt by me as if the printer's ink was a somewhat toxic deadly nightshade juice. I wonder what people would do if they truly experienced that these days? Think for a moment how much deadly nightshade juice is used when, for instance, people talk about war guilt—Germany's war guilt in the first World War, or Germany's innocence in the war—and the fact that people, just by reason of belonging to this or that nation, feel comfortable when they claim innocence, using all manner of untruthful statements. They feel good doing this, but not because what they say is actually true. So, how in today's world can one reach the spirit? One must, first of all, make a firm decision, a very intense commitment, to be very different from these contemporaries—and yet get along with them. For of course it is not going to be very helpful to just stand on a stage and insult people. One way or another, one has to find an avenue for truth. This is extremely difficult, as I have shown you today. [ 29 ] Today I had to present difficult things so that you would see that it is not easy to enter the spiritual world. You will see that it is good to work with difficult things. Later on we will come to things that are easier, less strenuous. Next time, I will show you the whole way into the spiritual world.
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| 349. The Life of Man on Earth and the Essence of Christianity: Christ's Death, Resurrection and Ascension
09 May 1923, Dornach Tr. Automated Rudolf Steiner |
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| Now you may have already seen that when plants that are beautifully green and full of energy on the earth are below ground in the cellar, they turn completely whitish and appear paralyzed. |
| 349. The Life of Man on Earth and the Essence of Christianity: Christ's Death, Resurrection and Ascension
09 May 1923, Dornach Tr. Automated Rudolf Steiner |
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Question: Is it possible to hear more about the personality of Jesus Christ? Dr. Steiner: You see, gentlemen, that the question that is being asked is timely, and so we will discuss it today. I must say from the outset that what I am going to say will only be fully understandable to those who have been here for a long time, while those gentlemen who have only come today will slowly find their way into what we are discussing. So the question that has been put to me and that we will discuss is about the personality of Christ, who was thirty-three years old when he died. “On the third day he rose from the grave, resurrected. How did that happen, and where did this personality acquire the strength and power? And then you would be so kind as to talk about his ascension after forty days.” Since time is just right, I will discuss this as it really happened, after we have already discussed the other thing; but, as I said, it can only be fully understood by those who have been here longer. The others will also understand it once we are together here more often. Well, you see, at first the whole thing about Christ's personality and his destinies was actually quite unknown in the very early days after it happened. You don't have to look at it the way we look at it today, because today we have the feeling that the events in Palestine that are linked to the personality of Jesus became known throughout the world in one fell swoop. This is not the case. Rather, the situation is that in the time when the fate of Christ Jesus was unfolding, the so-called Roman Empire was widespread, a mighty world empire, and Palestine also belonged to this mighty Roman world empire. You know that we still have a rather unfortunate legacy from this Roman Empire, the so-called Roman law. Perhaps you know that students at universities of so-called legal scholarship have to study for a very long time the so-called Roman law. Now, Roman law was conceived at a time when social conditions were quite different, so that Roman law has naturally become something highly unsuitable for today. But justice is still being done according to Roman law today. So we have just this one inheritance from this Romanism. We have many other things as well; but this one inheritance, the so-called Roman law, is something that can be noticed by all of you.  Now, this Roman rule was extraordinarily widespread. I will just give you a small idea of how widespread Roman rule was. You just have to imagine the south of Europe: here we have Spain (it is being drawn), here we have Italy; then we have Greece, then we have the Black Sea. Then we have a lot of small islands. There Asia Minor comes over, and over there, in the area I want to mark, there was the small country of Palestine with Jerusalem, Nazareth and so on. Roman rule now extended over all these lands. The Romans had occupied all these lands with their rule. So it was a very extensive Roman rule! Rome is located there. Of course, everything that was government-related and so on took place in Rome, so it was very far away from Palestine. And what happened in Palestine was very little known in Rome at that time. And those writers who wrote in Rome did not write about it for about a hundred years after the fact that had occurred with Christ Jesus in Palestine! It was only about a hundred years later that people in Rome understood the significance of what had happened in Palestine. And they did not treat it much differently in Rome at the time, except to say: Well, an unknown person has been crucified over there in Palestine. At that time, being crucified meant something like being hanged later. So it didn't cause any particular sensation. It was only after a hundred years had passed, and Roman rule had become more and more tyrannical and luxurious, that it became apparent that, while the people in Rome were enjoying their luxurious lives, Christianity had slowly spread here, and it was only then that they first noticed the Christians. And the Christians in Rome were initially not tolerated at all. Whoever was a Christian was something very much persecuted in Rome. And now I have to tell you why Christians were persecuted in Rome, because otherwise you would not be able to understand at all what the idea is behind the view that arose at the time: that a god died in Palestine, in Jerusalem. You have to realize what the views in the world actually were at that time. You see, for a Roman in this first Christian century, that is, for a Roman at the time when it was written - they didn't write it back then, they calculated according to the Roman calendar, but if it had been our calendar, they would have written 1 or 10 or 50 for all I care - so if you had asked a Roman back then: Who is God? — he would have said: Emperor Augustus, or: Emperor Tiberius. — Just as today [1923] a Chinese, when you ask him: Who is God? — points to the Chinese emperor. So you must be clear about the fact that in those days for the Romans the ruler, the one in power, was at the same time their god. And that was the first thing the Romans noticed about the Christians: that they were not aware that a human being on earth could be a universal god. The Romans only knew that some human being sitting on the throne, who had powerful rule, was the god, was the highest thing, that had to be worshipped. And so the Romans did honor their emperor in a way that amounted to worship. Yes, it was the same all over the world in those days. Over there in the Orient, where the great empires once were, the Persian Empire, the Assyrian, the Babylonian Empire and so on in the old days, it was also the case that the ruler was the god. “God” meant nothing more than the one to whom one turned when one needed something. He was the supreme one. He was seen as a helper. He was not always a helper, but he was seen as a helper. I would like to point out that you are likely to know the word “God” in your language. When children are baptized, people have to be godparents. Now there are areas, I believe also here in Switzerland, where the man is called the Lord and the woman is called Gottel. This means that the godparents have to provide help. This is the same “God”. And the god was only the one who was the general god of the world. If you want to understand the things of the earlier times, you must always go back to the earlier times. So the god was the general god of the world. The name Goethe, the name of the German poet Goethe, also comes from the same word. And that was the first thing one heard about the Christians: that the Christians did not believe that a human being on earth could be a universal god. For the Romans, this was something they could not grasp at all. Such terrible people, who do not accept the emperor as god, yes, they are very dangerous people. And the Christians, on the other hand, referred to the saying: Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's. — So, they referred to Jesus' saying, where the matter of Caesar and God is cut apart. God is the invisible. God is that which does not dwell in a visible man on earth. That is what the Christians claimed. And that was the big difference between the Romans and the Christians. And the consequence of that was that the Romans considered the Christians to be the most dangerous people of all, undermining the authority of the state because they did not offer sacrifice to the emperor in the temple. The sacrifices in the temples were offered to the emperor by the people. Now, the Christians sacrificed to a God who died in Palestine and who cannot be seen anywhere. That was something the Romans could not understand. And so the first Christians had to perform their sacrifices underground, under the earth. And these underground passages that they dug out there, in which they buried their dead and performed their sacrifices, are called catacombs. There are such extensive catacombs under the earth in Rome, in Italy in general, like small cities. The first Christians performed their sacrificial services there in the first centuries, while above, the Romans had large circuses, huge circuses. And there they had, for example, in such circuses, made a point of somehow tying a person they despised to a stake, to a pillar, and, after smearing him with pitch, setting him on fire and burning him alive. And they watched it in the circuses, just as people watch bullfights today. It was something that was quite common. Just imagine this picture: above, the wild Romans in the circuses, who tied the pitch-coated man to the column and burned him alive. That amused them very much. And below, the Christians who performed their religious services in the catacombs. That was the difference, gentlemen, between below ground and above ground, which could not be more sharply defined. One must only consider that. It is true that things were also quite terrible in the Middle Ages with the Inquisition. But as bad as the Romans behaved in the heyday of their imperial era, the Christians did not behave as badly as that later on. You just have to hold on to that. That is just true. So the first thing one heard in Rome was that the Christians do not want to recognize a visible God. Now, of course, more and more has become known about what was actually meant by this Christ Jesus, and I have already told you some of it. For example, I have pointed out to you that there were actually two Jesus boys – the name Jesus was just as common a name in Palestine as Sepperl or Michel are today – one of whom died very young, and they were, one might say, playmates, extraordinarily capable, talented children. Now, this story, which you all know from the Bible, about how the twelve-year-old Jesus taught the scribes in the temple, is something that is based on a truth. Of course, you don't have to tell yourselves: if a twelve-year-old boy goes to university today, the professorial council would not have much respect for him. Today's teachings cannot be compared with those of that time. You should not think that I am conservative or even reactionary, but I have to tell you the facts as they are. Nowadays we take it for granted that we have to send our children to school. Gifted children in particular learn an enormous amount of material that is not suited to them. We have to prepare things in such a way that they suit the children, as we do in the Waldorf school. But in general, children learn an extraordinary amount of material that does not suit them. Of course, adults are better at doing the things that do not suit them than children are. But what is driven out of children when they learn our present-day reading and writing, well, gentlemen, people today pay no attention to that. Children, if you know how to listen to them properly, will say extraordinarily clever things. They have brought this with them from the spiritual life before they descended to earth. And this one Jesus boy, he brought an extraordinary amount with him. And because the two Jesus boys were playmates, they actually always knew the same things. Now one of them has died. And so now the Gospels tell only of one Jesus boy, because people liked that better. But that doesn't help us understand the Gospels. If you read the Gospels of Matthew and Luke today, they contradict each other. The whole genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew is described differently than in the Gospel of Luke. Why? Yes, because the things really refer to two Jesus boys. I have told you that I have really been dealing with this question from a spiritual-scientific point of view for years, and I have come to the conclusion that there are two Jesus boys, and that the Gospel of Matthew is about a different Jesus boy than the Gospel of Luke. Now one of them died in his twelfth year, while the other remained. So when it says in the Gospel: “Jesus increased in wisdom, spirit and power,” this is only true of the one. You see, I found that long before I told you that there were two such Jesus children. It was not known that somewhere in history it is reported that there are two Jesus children until we came across a picture in northern Italy. There this story is depicted of Jesus in the temple, where he teaches the scribes. And there, strangely enough, is this second Jesus child. He is leaving. The one who is teaching and the other who is leaving – that is not the usual Jesus child, we know him! So there are two Jesus children in it, so you can say that in certain centuries people still knew: a second Jesus child existed. He walks away. Only after I had found that out could I know that this second Jesus child is depicted. So you see, gentlemen, for centuries people have known this. But the church has never actually allowed such things, which correspond to the real truth, to come up. Now, as I have already told you, there are simply certain things in the life of man where one says, there is an enlightenment. Of course, people don't accept that. But you see, there are such revelations, and I will give you an example that was given to me only yesterday by a member of this group. I could give you hundreds of examples, but I will give you this latest example. Mr. Pfeiffer, you don't mind if I do, do you? There is a very important chemist, Kekulé, an impeccable scholar, simply a real chemist who has written many books on chemistry. Now there are two important scientific views that come from Kekulé. I don't need to explain these views to you in more detail; that would take us hours, it's not important now. These two important chemical views relate to the structure of substances, such as benzene, in their smallest parts. And these views, which Kekulé established, play an extraordinarily important role in chemistry. Anyone who knows chemistry knows that today everyone is talking about Kekule's theories. But what did Kekulé himself experience? Kekulé recounts that he was once in London, where he lived quite a distance out of town – before he had formulated any of his theories – and had to take one bus after another to get to the other end of the city at night. He had an acquaintance there whom he visited in the evening. He always had to take one bus after another because he spent the night there. Once he was driving home after spending a long time talking about chemistry with an acquaintance who was also a chemist. He was driving home and sitting on the top of the bus. He dozed off and began to fall asleep. And as he began to fall asleep on top of the omnibus, he dreamt: There is an atom, there is another, there is a third atom; and there are then small atoms that are held together by the large ones (it is drawn). He dreamt of the substance, the matter, how it is made. He dreamt all this on the top of the omnibus. As soon as he comes home, he writes it down carefully. That was the one theory. You see, it was a dream to him. It was given to him, a completely materialistic theory. The second is the so-called benzene theory. He dreamt that at another time, though not in London, but when he had dozed off at another place.  Yes, gentlemen, you see, a completely materialistic chemist had to confess that he could not have come up with his ideas and inventions through thinking, but that he was enlightened about these two things through a dream. It was all a real inspiration. Now I would like to know why people object when it is said that the Jesus who was left behind became something completely different in his thirtieth year. Of course, Kekule did not immediately become a completely different person because the inspiration was only a small one. But the knowledge of the whole world entered into Jesus when he was thirty years old. In those ancient times, this was something that was entirely possible, and similar things are still possible today. So you just have to imagine that the Jesus of Nazareth, who had been left behind, was enlightened in his thirtieth year with all that is called the Christ. It entered into him, just as Kekulé's benzene theory entered into him. As a result, he had become a completely different person. And those who now understood something of the matter said: the Romans have a god on the throne. The god on the throne, they said, came into being through the ordinary powers of the earth. Such gods on the throne do not usually have revelations; at least not usually, do they; they do not have such revelations at the age of thirty. Now, the Christians said: Our God is not appointed by men, He is appointed by the world powers themselves. But now they had to say something else. You see, what was said about Jesus in those days was not as vague as what I am telling you now. I have to tell you slowly and gradually, which is why the matter is only vague at first. But it was more specific in the following way. You see, today, in order for individual people to become wise according to the view of our time, we have universities. After being made clever for a long time in the so-called grammar school or in secondary school, one comes to the university. There one is now given the finishing touches of cleverness. But you will not always find that the people who come out of the university have become different people in the university, but rather they have learned something externally. This was certainly not the case in older times. In older times there was no distinction between churches and theaters and schools, but it was all one, and that was called mysteries. That is where people were educated back then. And the most important thing that people were taught in the mysteries was the so-called knowledge of the sun. You see, when we were talking about natural science, I always told you what influence the sun has on everything that happens on earth. Plants do not grow merely because they are driven out of the ground below, but because the sun drives them out. The power of the sun is in all of us, as is the power of the earth. And I have drawn your attention to the fact that this solar power is not just a dead force, but a wise, living force. I have given you many examples. You have seen that what happens among animals happens wisely, intelligently, judiciously. Yes, when you look up at the sun, the learned imagine it is a ball of gas. Yes, gentlemen, that is about as clever as if we could all get on a big airplane and fly to the moon, as Jules Verne described. We could sit on the moon and look for our work and I would say to you: There, gentlemen, down there, you see, there is the earth. The Earth is a single body, there is nothing else on it. — You would not believe me, gentlemen, because you came up with me. You would believe that there are people on it after all. People who have souls are on Earth. But that is exactly what the scholars are doing with the sun today. You sit there on the earth, look up at the sun and say: There is nothing up there but burning gas. — But that is real nonsense. The sun is inhabited, even if not by such people as can be seen with the eyes, but it is inhabited. And this knowledge of the sun was the main thing taught to students in the ancient mysteries. And that is why these students were called sun disciples. It was said: Up there on the sun, there are the forces, the spring forces, the sun forces, there is that which draws everything out of the earth. And so someone who had learned in ancient times the secrets of the sun was called a sun disciple, and later, when he was fully trained, a sun master. And what Jesus of Nazareth suddenly knew at the age of thirty was this solar wisdom. This solar wisdom had come over him. Now you may have already seen that when plants that are beautifully green and full of energy on the earth are below ground in the cellar, they turn completely whitish and appear paralyzed. This is because the solar power does not enter them. This solar power in the mystical, spiritual sense is drawn into Jesus. And those who understood this said: Now the Christ is drawn into Jesus. You see, now this remarkable thing happened. The Jews, who mainly lived here in Palestine (please refer to the board), had long since heard from their prophets that something must happen so that the earth can be taught from outer space itself. But you can be quite sure that if someone were to write a “Wilhelm Tell” today, as Schiller wrote it, and it were to be performed in the theater, people would say: That's nonsense, it's something very bad. They would not recognize it. And 'Wilhelm Tell' was first recognized by the few people who knew Schiller; then it spread. It is always the case in our social order, it has always been the case, that the majority of people let themselves be led by the hair. So the Jews also let themselves be led by their hair and, when that happened, and they were no longer led by the mysteries, but when someone appeared who had this solar knowledge, they said: But there is someone who claims that everything he says is true! You know, of course, what is done to people who speak a truth that is not yet known among the people. It was a great truth and wisdom that Jesus of Nazareth, in whom the Christ now lived, had to proclaim. Well, and then they crucified him. And he actually went through death. And now I come to the question as it was put to me directly. You see, gentlemen, today's enlightened theologians are often even worse than their unenlightened counterparts. The unenlightened theologians say: Well, they laid Christ in the grave, and after three days he rose again with flesh and blood, just as he was. Well, of course, the enlightened people said: We don't believe that because no one comes out of the grave. But, I would like to say, it is at least something to profess. It may be debatable, but it is something to profess. But what do enlightened theologians say? You see, one of the most enlightened theologians, who is well known and named, is Harnack. What does he say about the resurrection? You see, Harnack says: What happened on the third day in the garden of Gethsemane – that is where the grave was – you can't know. So the enlightened theologian says: What happened there on the third day in the garden of Gethsemane, that cannot be known. But many people have gradually come to believe that Christ was resurrected there. So that is the Easter belief, and we assume that we should hold to this Easter belief. You see, I once raised this question - it was a long time ago - in the Berlin Giordano Bruno Association. The chairman was an academic who thought he knew a great deal about these matters, and he said: Harnack could not have asserted that, because what would that mean if Harnack asserted that one should not believe what really happened, but only in what people believe about it! That would be just like the Holy Robe of Trier, where people also say: Well, whether the Holy Robe of Trier is really the one that Christ wore, nobody knows, but so and so many believed in it, so we believe in it too! — Thus said the Protestant about the Catholic belief in the Holy Shroud of Trier. Or another example is that of the bones of St. Anthony. When they were examined closely, they were found to be veal bones. So the people who believed in them did not make much of it either, but said that it did not matter whether it was reality or not, but whether people believed it. But it does not depend on that at all; what matters is what happened! Now the Bible actually tells the story in a wonderful way, only people do not pay attention to how it is told. The Bible does not say that such and such happened, but everywhere it says: such and such people have seen, really seen. That is what is told. So it is related that the women came out, and what they saw at the grave – take that as sophistry if you want! It is related that the Christ met the disciples at Emmaus, and so on; that the Christ was seen, that is related. Now, remember that I told you that a person does not consist only of this material body that is laid in the grave, but that a person also consists of the etheric body, the astral body, and the I. I have described this to you in detail. Now the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth has indeed been laid in the grave. I have studied this question a great deal, and it is extraordinarily significant that it is stated in the Gospel itself that an earthquake occurred. There was such an earthquake. It made a split and the body was taken up by the earth, so it was really no longer there. And the disciples did not see this physical body, but the etheric body, the supersensible body. The women and the disciples saw Christ in the etheric body, no longer Jesus of Nazareth, but Christ, that which was now the transformed inner man. Of course, you have to imagine that what happened there was something extraordinarily magnificent for the disciples. You just have to consider that if there is someone among you with whom you have grown so close as friends, who is snatched from you by crucifixion, or as we would say today, by the gallows, you are intimately connected with him – that must have created a state of mind. This state of mind made the disciples almost clairvoyant for these things. And they really saw Christ again and again in the early days, more often than is mentioned in the Gospels. But it was the supersensible Christ. And you see, when you read the letters of Paul, you read about the famous event of Damascus that Paul experienced. Near Damascus he came into a kind of sleeping state, and there the Christ appeared to him in the clouds. And pay attention to how Paul tells it. He once said: You can't take away my faith in the Christ, because I, like the other apostles, have seen the Christ. So Paul is not saying that the other apostles saw Christ in the physical body; otherwise he would have to claim that he too saw Christ in the physical body. He explicitly claims that he saw the Christ in the clouds, thus the supersensible Christ, and by saying that he and the other apostles saw the Christ, he is already indicating that the other apostles, like him, saw the Christ in his supersensible body. And isn't it true that people believe that the unbelieving Thomas had to place his hands in the wounds as an objection to this? That just wants to say: the presence of the Christ, that he was there, this experience was so strong that Thomas himself could have the strong faith to touch him. So everything was related to the supersensible Christ. The wounds were something that touched the hearts of the disciples, especially the apostles. It would be much less vivid if it were not mentioned that the wounds could be touched. Why the wounds in particular? Why not lay his hands on the face or something like that? He would have sensed that something was there. He laid his finger on the wounds because the wounds made a special impression, and what the disciple really became aware of in the Christ actually depended on the higher vision. So that one can say: For forty days in a row, the disciples were clear about one thing: the Christ is still there. And from this the Christian teaching arose – which is the original Christian teaching, and which ties in with what I told you last Monday. The Christian teaching arose from this: When Christ is buried, there is only the body in the grave, which of course disappears; Christ showed us the immortal in Himself; He walked around in His immortality for forty days. We have seen him. And he appeared to Paul even much later. So he is always there. And so we can say today: He is always there. Only the disciples, because this power of vision has disappeared in them, have not seen him after forty days. That's when they said, “Now he has left us: Ascension.” This is an event that naturally filled the disciples with great sadness. They said: Even though he died, even though his enemies crucified him, he was still with us for forty days. Now he is no longer with us. Now he has returned to the vastness of the world. And then they became truly sad. Not in an ordinary sadness, but in a very deep sadness. And the ten days that are now being talked about, these ten days were for the disciples and apostles something where they went very deeply into their hearts, where they reflected with inner strength on everything the Christ had ever said to them. These ten days were enough for them to say to themselves afterward: Yes, we can know all of this ourselves; this wisdom – they said to themselves, impressed by the strong impression – this wisdom itself resides in us. And now, after ten days, they felt the strength to teach this wisdom as well. The fiery tongues – that is the image of it – came upon their heads. That is Pentecost, the Pentecostal idea, the fiery tongues. Through their great sorrow, when they had lost sight of everything except the Christ, they had reflected so deeply that they were able to teach themselves. And it is beautifully told that they now began to “speak in all languages”. But here we must realize something about the way people spoke in those ancient times. Of course we must not suppose that it is claimed that the apostles began to speak Chinese or Japanese or even German, but rather that it is meant that, through the way they spoke in those ancient times, they had now become tolerant through all that they had thought in the ten days between Ascension Day and Pentecost. Now, for them, there was no longer any difference between religions, but they proclaimed one religion for all people. That is what is meant by being able to speak in all languages; they proclaimed one religion for all people. And that is the most beautiful thought of Pentecost; one religion for all people. You see, the thing that has done the most harm to people is always fanaticism in religion, the exclusiveness in religion, that you have Christianity and Buddhism and Judaism and all sorts of things. Why is it that you have so many religions? That you have so many religions comes from the fact that these religions are earth religions, real earth religions. What do I mean by that when I say: earth religions? Now, you see, there is a time when we go back, let's say – it's 1923 today – to the time when I told you that Christ Jesus lived in Palestine, so at the turn of the age. Now we go further back, let's say, to the year 3500 before Christ Jesus, so back to ancient times, there are people down there in Egypt who also spoke of their God about 3000 or 3500 years before Christ, only in old words. They called him Ra, for example. They spoke of their god, but they said: the god is in the city of Thebes, for example, and in the city of Thebes there was a kind of building with a special artistic, tomb-like structure. The god lived in there. That was the oldest form of worship, that he was in a certain place. Yes, gentlemen, if someone lived where we live today, he probably did not say: the god is in Thebes; because that was something that not only could not be reached in ancient times, but of which nothing was known at all. They knew nothing of Thebes. So those who were down here, in Egypt, where the Nile flows, said: the god who lives in Thebes. And those who were here, in our area, they also had such local deities. For example, there was a local deity in what is now Alsace, or in Münster. So people worshiped God in a particular place. Yes, that is the reason why there are different religions: the Theban religion, the religion of Münster, the religion of Alsace. There the religions split. And later, when people wandered more on earth, they could no longer accept any place for God, because then they would have contradicted themselves. They had migrated, and there they no longer accepted the place as God, but the man who led them. And so, gradually, the dignity of God passed to the emperor and the princes. For the people, the prince was emperor. Many princes arose. You see, in Rome there was still something of this religion, in that the Romans still worshiped their emperor as a god. But what was Christianity? Christianity said nothing of the sort. What is to be worshipped is not bound to a place on earth, not to a person on earth, but to the power of the sun, the sun's vitality, which the Christ has taken up in himself. And the sun is precisely universal. For no one in Europe can say that when the sun shines on his head it is a different sun from that of the Egyptians, the Chinese or the Australians. Those who truly recognize that the power of Christ comes from the sun must recognize the universal religion for all people. It was the universal religion for all people, even if people did not always understand it. And it dawned on the disciples that the religion of the sun is there. This is expressed by the fact that they were able to speak in all languages. They were able to bring a religion of reconciliation and tolerance for all people. That is the idea of Pentecost. But as you know, the idea of Pentecost has not yet been fulfilled today. And it must be fulfilled. It must still become quite clear that what the Christ brought to Earth does not depend on a doctrine at all, but on a fact. When today European missionaries come to an Indian or a Chinese, they demand of them that they believe in what is said about the Christ in Rome. The Indians or Chinese cannot bring themselves to do that, because it has been developed from European conditions. You cannot get people to do that. But if it were said as I have told you today, it could be understood all over the world. Because what applies to all people is the idea of Pentecost. I have now tried to explain to you the idea of Ascension Day and the idea of Pentecost, which is what the Lord, who recorded the question, wanted to know. I also find it very fitting because today is the day before Ascension Day and in ten days the Pentecost follows. I was very happy to be able to tell you this. Now I have to go to Norway. I will let you know when the next lecture will be. Goodbye. |