An Esoteric Cosmology: Foreword
Translated by René M. Querido Edouard Schuré |
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I myself had never seen him and did not then even know of his existence, but I had entered into correspondence on the subject of one of my dramas (Les Enfants de Lucifer) with his friend Mademoiselle von Sivers, who later on became his wife and his most understanding colleague. It was she who brought her teacher to my house one happy morning. I shall never forget the extraordinary impression made upon me by this man when he entered the room. |
In spite of many gaps and ultimate digressions, this theoretical system of oriental thought which originated in India and derived its name Theosophy from Alexandrian tradition, served to recall to the uninitiated West, the two fundamental tenets of all esoteric tradition: (1) The plurality of the progressive lives of the human soul under the law of karma, and (2) The ascending evolution of man under the influence of spiritual Powers. |
Rudolf Steiner sees the constitution of the Earth in the form of nine layers—or rather nine layers embedded one within the other. The eight interior layers under the crust of the Earth represent, as it were, the physiological organs of our planet from which its life emanates and upon which this life depends. |
An Esoteric Cosmology: Foreword
Translated by René M. Querido Edouard Schuré |
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In the month of May, 1906, Rudolf Steiner came to Paris with a number of students to give a series of private lectures to a small circle of friends. I myself had never seen him and did not then even know of his existence, but I had entered into correspondence on the subject of one of my dramas (Les Enfants de Lucifer) with his friend Mademoiselle von Sivers, who later on became his wife and his most understanding colleague. It was she who brought her teacher to my house one happy morning. I shall never forget the extraordinary impression made upon me by this man when he entered the room. As I looked at that thin, powerful face, at the black mysterious eyes flashing light as if from unfathomable depths, it was borne in upon me that for the first time in my life I was face to face with one of those supreme seers who have direct vision of the great Beyond. Intuitively and poetically, I had described such seers in The Great Initiates, but I had never hoped to meet one in this world. The impression was instantaneous, irresistible—of the unexpected as well as of the already known. Even before he opened his lips, an inner voice said to me: Here is a true master, one who will play an all-important part in your life. Our subsequent relations were to prove that this first impression was not an illusion. The programme of the daily lectures, which was told me in advance by the speaker, aroused my keenest interest. The lectures were to cover the whole field of his philosophy although it was only possible to develop certain outstanding points. One would have said that the teacher's aim was to give a vista of the general plan from its own heights. His fervent, convincing eloquence, irradiated by invariable clarity of thought, struck me at once as possessing two outstanding and unusual qualities. First, its artistic power,—When Rudolf Steiner spoke of the phenomena and beings of the invisible world he seemed to be living in his own home. With striking details and in familiar terms he told of events in these unknown realms just as if he were speaking of the most ordinary things. He did not describe, he actually saw and made others see the objects, scenes and cosmic vistas in clear-cut reality. Listening to him, one could not doubt the power of his astral vision; it was as limpid as physical vision, only much more penetrating. Again, another characteristic, no less remarkable,—This philosopher-mystic, this thinker-seer related all experiences of soul to the immutable laws of physical Nature. These laws were used to explain and classify the super-physical phenomena which, to begin with, appear before the seer in overwhelming variety and almost bewildering abundance. Then, by a wonderful counterstroke, these subtle, fluidic phenomena, proceeding from cosmic Powers grouped in a mighty hierarchy, began to illumine the edifice of material Nature. The diverse parts of Nature were linked together, related to these cosmic Powers from the heights to the depths, from the depths to the heights, and a vista of the mighty architecture of the universe opened up from the inner world where the visible is ever coming to birth from the womb of the invisible. I took no notes of the first lecture, but it made such a vivid impression upon me that when I reached home I felt impelled to write it down without forgetting a single link in the chain of these illuminating thoughts. I had absorbed the lecture so completely that I found no difficulty at all. By a process of involuntary and instantaneous transmutation, the German words, which had ingrained themselves in my memory, changed into French. The same thing, repeated after each of the eighteen lectures, gradually grew into a dossier which I keep as a rich and rare store of treasure. These lectures, never having been steno-graphed or revised by Rudolf Steiner, do not exist in the archives of his public lectures or in the collection of lectures duplicated for members of the Anthroposophical Society. They are, therefore, entirely unedited. A number of members of the French Group of the Society have expressed the desire to publish them in book form and Mademoiselle Rihouet, the editor of La Science Spirituelle, has kindly offered the pages of this magazine. I respond all the more readily to this desire because these priceless lectures mark a significant phase of Rudolf Steiner's thought—that of the spontaneous burst of his genius and its first crystallisation. And, furthermore, it gives me joy to pay this new tribute to the teacher to whom I owe one of the great revelations of my life. 1. The Origin of Esoteric ChristianityThese lectures give a kind of summary of what Rudolf Steiner calls Anthroposophy. In this Foreword I do not pretend to give anything like a resume of this vast and all-embracing philosophy. Its principles are contained in a theogony, cosmogony and psychology complete in themselves. It lays down the basis of a moral philosophy, an art of education, a science of aesthetics. The teaching of this thinker-seer extends into all and every domain of life. His sweeping vision embraces the whole history of mankind and imbues modern science with spiritual conceptions without by one hair's breadth distorting it from its exactitude and pristine clarity. My only aim here is to draw my reader's attention to the most strikingly new chapters, for they lead us again to the very roots of this sublime thought. At the time when he was delivering these lectures, Rudolf Steiner was still the General Secretary for Germany of the Theosophical Society, which has its Headquarters at Madras. The Theosophical Society, originally founded by H. P. Blavatsky, has as its present President, Mrs. Annie Besant. In spite of many gaps and ultimate digressions, this theoretical system of oriental thought which originated in India and derived its name Theosophy from Alexandrian tradition, served to recall to the uninitiated West, the two fundamental tenets of all esoteric tradition: (1) The plurality of the progressive lives of the human soul under the law of karma, and (2) The ascending evolution of man under the influence of spiritual Powers. At the time when Rudolf Steiner entered the Theosophical Society—which he had chosen as his first field of action—he was already fully master of the doctrine he owed to his own Initiation. These lectures, given in the year 1906, are proof of this. The essential difference between Indian Theosophy and Anthroposophy lies in the supreme rôle attributed by Anthroposophy to the Christ in human evolution and also in its connection with Rosicrucian tradition. This appears clearly in the first two lectures, entitled: The Birth of the Human Intellect and The Mission of Manicheism. More clearly than any other occultist, Rudolf Steiner has seen the profound change which has come about in the course of ages in man's constitution of body and soul and in his way of perceiving truth. In ancient, pre-Christian times, man was universally endowed with a faculty of atavistic clairvoyance. In the Atlantean period, he lived more in the ‘world beyond’ than in this world. Clairvoyance was his outstanding faculty and his chief mode of cognition, but his perception of higher worlds was confused and chaotic. This faculty weakened and gradually faded away in the course of subsequent evolution; reason and the mere observation of Nature came to the fore. The Yoga of the Indian Rishis—the source of Aryan mythology and religion—represents an effective endeavour to regain the lost power of clairvoyance and at the same time to regulate it according to cosmic laws. But shortly before the coming of Christ, humanity had reached the last stage of descent into matter and passed through a perilous crisis. The passions emanating from the animal stage, beyond which he had now passed, threatened to engulf man. Civilisation itself was in peril. The human Psyche—having freed herself from primitive darkness by dint of long struggle—threatened to be lost in the decadence of Greece and the orgies of Rome. 2. Jesus the Christ as the Axis of Human Evolution. |
An Esoteric Cosmology: Preafce
Translated by René M. Querido René M. Querido |
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1 In 1907 Schuré's Sacred Drama of Eleusis was produced under the direction of Rudolf Steiner at the great Munich Congress of the Theosophical Society. It was on this occasion that Rudolf Steiner said that from this time on, art and occultism should always remain connected. |
An Esoteric Cosmology: Preafce
Translated by René M. Querido René M. Querido |
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The present cycle of lectures was given in 1906 in Paris and the report of it by Edouard Schuré now published in English in its entirety for the first time marks the beginning of a new phase in the life of Rudolf Steiner. Accompanied by Marie von Sievers (later Marie Steiner), Rudolf Steiner had been invited, by the famous French author and dramatist Edouard Schuré, to address a group consisting mainly of Russians in a small villa on the outskirts of Paris. Among them were writers of note such as Dimitri Merejkowski, his wife Zinaida Hippius, a poetess in her own right, and S. Minski. Originally it had been planned that the course be held on Russian soil but the revolution of 1905 had made that impossible. At this time Edouard Schuré (1841–1929), a man of 65, stood at the height of his career. He had written more than a dozen major works including The Great Initiates (1889), A History of the German Lied, A Collection of Celtic Legends, two important works on Richard Wagner, and a number of dramas striving to recapture the lost ritualistic element of the ancient mysteries on the stage. He felt powerfully drawn not only to Richard Wagner the composer, but also to the man. He had met the maestro on three occasions and was present in Munich at the dramatic opening of Tristan and Isolde. Schuré's interest in the occult was profound. He had written The Great Initiates (1889) as a result of his deep connection over a period of many years with Margherita Albana-Mignaty, who continued to inspire him even after her death. Rudolf Steiner often referred to the importance of this book and although it was written ten years before the end of Kali-Yuga (the Age of Darkness), he spoke of this work as a herald of the new Age of Light, when human beings would again seek for their spiritual connection with the great initiates of the past. For some time before their first meeting in Paris, Marie von Sievers and Schuré had corresponded. An unusual set of circumstances led to the fact that indirectly it was Schuré who had brought about the meeting between Marie von Sievers and Rudolf Steiner which was to prove so fruitful for the growth of the Anthroposophical movement. Unable to reply to a specific question related to the occult, Schuré advised the young Marie von Sievers to turn to Rudolf Steiner in Berlin. A little later Marie von Sievers wrote so enthusiastically to Schuré (in excellent French) of her meeting that he, too, wished to become acquainted with Steiner personally. This was to happen six years later in Paris on the occasion of these lectures. The recognition must have been immediate. Schuré, twenty years Steiner's senior, never tired of recounting this significant meeting: for the first time, he felt himself to be in the presence of an initiate. “Here is a genuine Master who will play a crucial part in your life.” Schuré recognized Steiner as one who stood fully in the world of today and yet could also behold in clear consciousness the boundless vistas of the super-sensible. A warm friendship quickly developed between the two men: vacations spent together in Barr (1906–1907) in Schuré's summer house in the Alsace; long walks over the Odilienberg, and an active correspondence (mostly on the part of Marie Steiner, who translated several of Schuré's dramas into German). The substance of a number of intimate conversations has been recorded by Rudolf Steiner in the “Document of Barr.”1 In 1907 Schuré's Sacred Drama of Eleusis was produced under the direction of Rudolf Steiner at the great Munich Congress of the Theosophical Society. It was on this occasion that Rudolf Steiner said that from this time on, art and occultism should always remain connected. In 1909 the first performance of Schuré's drama, The Children of Lucifer, was given using a German translation of the French text by Marie Steiner. The deeper connection now becomes obvious: Schuré the poet, a Celtic-Greek soul, devoted to the renewal of the ancient mysteries, and one of the first Frenchmen to recognize Richard Wagner's impulse towards the “Gesamtkunstwerk” (a total ritualistic experience embracing all the art forms), now whole-heartedly supported Rudolf Steiner in the great Munich endeavors (1907–1913). This period saw the birth of the mystery dramas and the first performances of Eurythmy. It was also in Munich that plans had been made for the building of the First Goetheanum (the House of The Word) which was later erected on the Dornach hill near Basel in Switzerland. The war years (1914–1918) brought an unfortunate clouding over of their friendship due to Schuré's stubborn chauvinism which nevertheless did not interfere with his continued championing of Richard Wagner. But with Rudolf Steiner, he broke his connection. A few years after the war the friendship was renewed and it must have been an amazing sight to have seen the old, still robust, white-haired Schuré in animated conversation with Steiner as they walked up and down on the terrace of the First Goetheanum in Dornach. Years later, Schuré would still speak of his profound indebtedness to Rudolf Steiner both for the personal help he had received from him and for his having brought the new mysteries clearly to expression in an age of materialism. These lectures were given on the fringe of the International Theosophical Congress held in Paris and attended by delegates from many countries. Rudolf Steiner himself attached a distinct importance to this course in Paris where he formulated a basic view of Esoteric Christianity which a few years later was to separate him radically from the Theosophical Society. In the 37th chapter of Rudolf Steiner, The Story of My Life (written in 1924–25 shortly before his death) we find the following passage:2
It is perhaps not without significance that it was in Paris, where Thomas Aquinas had elaborated some seven centuries earlier his Christ-oriented Scholasticism, that Rudolf Steiner gave his first course on an Esoteric Christian Cosmology appropriate to the dawn of the new Age of Light. Schuré's notes in French of the 18 lectures, published in French in 1928, constitute the only record of this course. They now appear for the first time in English translation in their entirety in book form, readily available to the modern student of the Science of the Spirit. R. M. Querido
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94. Popular Occultism: Twelfth Lecture
09 Jul 1906, Leipzig Rudolf Steiner |
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Every person must be absolutely free to begin the occult development of the soul's powers. But anyone who wants to undergo higher spiritual development must also observe the necessary conditions and submit to them. Sleep is the starting point for the consideration of the development of the spiritual senses. |
94. Popular Occultism: Twelfth Lecture
09 Jul 1906, Leipzig Rudolf Steiner |
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Every person must be absolutely free to begin the occult development of the soul's powers. But anyone who wants to undergo higher spiritual development must also observe the necessary conditions and submit to them. Sleep is the starting point for the consideration of the development of the spiritual senses. In sleep, the physical and etheric bodies are in the realm of consciousness, while the astral body and I are outside of them. When a person begins to develop clairvoyance during sleep, the body is deprived of the forces that previously restored the physical and etheric bodies for a certain period of time. These forces must be replaced in some other way if the physical and etheric bodies are not to be seriously endangered. If this does not happen, they will lose a great deal of their strength and amoral entities will take possession of them. Therefore it may happen that people develop astral clairvoyance but become immoral beings. How long the preliminary exercises take depends entirely on the individual. It depends entirely on the level of development the person has already reached by the time he begins his training. Therefore the teacher must first see through the inner state of soul of the pupil. The preparation time is therefore often very different. The following sentence is important: The more rhythm one has introduced, the more one can leave an entity and a thing to its own devices. Thus, the secret disciple must also develop a certain regularity, a rhythm, into his world of thoughts. To do this, it is necessary: Firstly, control of thoughts, that is, the disciple may only allow those thoughts to enter into himself that he himself wants. These exercises require a lot of patience and perseverance. But if you do them for only five minutes a day, they are already of importance for the inner life. Secondly: initiative in actions. These should be things that originally come from one's own soul. Thirdly: inner composure. This helps one to develop a much finer sense of compassion. Fourthly: to look for and find the positive side in all things and processes. I recall the beautiful legend of Christ and the dead dog. Fifthly: to be impartial and unprejudiced. One should always keep the possibility open to recognize new facts. Sixthly: inner balance and inner harmony. When a person has developed all these qualities within himself, a rhythm comes into his inner life that the astral body no longer needs to perform regeneration during sleep. Because of these exercises, such an equilibrium comes into the etheric body that it can protect and restore itself. Those who begin occult training without developing these six qualities run the risk of being exposed to the worst entities at night. But once you have practised these six qualities for a while, you may begin to develop your astral senses and then you start to sleep consciously. Your dreams are no longer random, but they gain regularity; the astral world rises before you. Now you have the ability to perceive everything of a soul nature in your surroundings in pictures. You develop a relationship to the reality of the soul. This pictorial consciousness is called imagination. At first the pupil acquires imagination in sleep, but later on he must be able to evoke this state at any time of the day. He learns to transfer the experiences of sleep into the waking consciousness. But this ability is only valuable for the occultist when he can see the auras of living beings fully consciously. The first step is therefore imagination. The development of the so-called lotuses, the sacred wheels or chakrams, which lie at very specific points on the body, is connected with this. There are seven such astral organs. The first, the two-petalled lotus flower, is in the region of the root of the nose; the second, the sixteen-petalled, is at the level of the larynx; the third, the twelve-petalled, is at the level of the heart; the fourth, the eight- to ten-leaved, near the navel; the fifth, the six-leaved, somewhat lower down; the sixth, the four-leaved, which is connected with everything that is fertilization, is even further down; the seventh cannot be spoken of without further ado. These six organs have the same significance for the spiritual world as the physical senses for the perception of the sensory world. An image for this is the so-called swastika. Through the above-mentioned exercises, they first become brighter, then they begin to move. In today's human beings they are immobile, in the Atlanteans they were still mobile, and in the Lemurians they were still moving very actively. But in those days they turned in the opposite direction to that of those who have occult development today, where they turn in a clockwise direction. An analogy to the dream-like clairvoyant state of the Lemurians is the fact that even today, with atavistic clairvoyance, the lotus flowers still turn in the same direction as they once did in Atlantean and Lemurian times, namely in an anticlockwise direction. The clairvoyance of mediums is unconscious, without thought control, but that of the genuine clairvoyant is conscious and precisely monitored by the thoughts. Mediumship is very dangerous, but the healthy secret training is completely harmless. (See appendix.) |
94. Popular Occultism: Thirteenth Lecture
10 Jul 1906, Leipzig Rudolf Steiner |
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When a person has come so far as to create an inner calm within himself, then by delving into such sentences new forces come to life in him. But he must not merely understand these sentences, a love for them must awaken in him. The same applies to magical figures such as pentagrams and so on. |
The oriental secret disciple must unconditionally submit to the strict discipline of the guru if he wants to undergo the secret training. He must organize his life accordingly and do many things that he only learns to understand later. |
94. Popular Occultism: Thirteenth Lecture
10 Jul 1906, Leipzig Rudolf Steiner |
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You will remember that I explained to you how much depended on man's beginning to breathe through the lungs in the course of his development. His higher schooling is now also connected with a breathing process. In the training in yoga the pupil brings a certain rhythm into his breathing by bringing inhaling, holding the breath and exhaling into a certain number of seconds. But the way in which these breathing exercises are done can only be indicated to the pupil by the teacher. Through the exercises for consciously regulating the breathing process, nothing less is done than the beginning of alchemy; this is called “seeking the philosopher's stone”. At the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, the Rosicrucians still knew something about it, and some of it could still be read in public. The occultist knows that man continually pollutes the air through his carbonic acid exhalations and kills life, even more than is killed through eating meat. And the more material the ages became, the worse the exhaled air became, and the more fresh air man needs. The Indian yogi exhaled less bad air. The bad air exhaled by people is restored by plants, which release oxygen and absorb carbon. Thus, animals and humans owe their lives to plants. In the anthracite coal, the plants then release the carbon back to humans. The plant, in turn, is designed to be built with the help of carbon. This process forms a complete and wonderful unity. Just as man was once a plant, so in the distant future he will also become a plant again in a certain sense, namely with full self-awareness. Then man will produce within himself what plants still do for him today, and he will consciously build his etheric body out of carbon. This is the goal of regulating the breathing process. Carbon is the philosopher's stone. The more a person breathes in accordance with wisdom, the purer and more useful the air around him becomes. Chemistry will soon address this issue. Those who have been breathing rhythmically for a while gain control over their astral senses. Europeans must be very careful with breathing exercises and only begin them after receiving appropriate instruction. The second stage of Oriental training consists of shutting out external impressions for a time, concentrating and allowing one's soul to be filled with the eternal. There are certain eternal images and sentences for these exercises. Such wisdom sentences can be found in the Bhagavad Gita, in Egyptian wisdom books and in Christian scriptures, especially in the Gospel of John. When a person has come so far as to create an inner calm within himself, then by delving into such sentences new forces come to life in him. But he must not merely understand these sentences, a love for them must awaken in him. The same applies to magical figures such as pentagrams and so on. One can meditate on them. At a certain high level of development, the student reaches the point where the experience arises: the function of thinking without thought content remains present in the complete emptiness of consciousness. The student learns to be conscious in meditation and to exercise this function in such a way that he does not give himself any content for his thinking. This is a beginning, and the spiritual world can then begin to flow into him. The inspiration process begins. This is followed by the stage of intuition, but this can only be achieved after a correspondingly long occult training. Finally, the disciple consciously lives in the higher worlds. The oriental secret disciple must unconditionally submit to the strict discipline of the guru if he wants to undergo the secret training. He must organize his life accordingly and do many things that he only learns to understand later. When he has thus attached himself to the guru, the astral body begins to change; the astral sense organs, the lotuses, develop. Michelangelo depicted the two-petalled lotus flower as two horns on his Moses. At first, two rays of light become noticeable, which become wider and wider and then begin to move. The sixteen-petalled lotus flower is like a wheel with sixteen spokes; it is located at the larynx and turns to the right. The two-petalled lotus enables us to develop willpower; the sixteen-petalled lotus, to penetrate into other people's thoughts; the twelve-petalled lotus, to recognize the emotional life; the four-petalled lotus is related to the regenerative and productive power of the human being. (See appendix.) The situation is different with the Christian form of initiation. Here one speaks of seven very specific stages: first, foot washing; second, flagellation; third, crowning with thorns; fourth, crucifixion; fifth, mystical death; sixth, entombment; seventh, resurrection. The thoughts and images, the devoted meditation of which brings about Christian initiation, are contained in the Gospel of John. Those who experience the first fourteen verses of the Gospel of John in their soul over many months experience them as having a magical effect. Finally, the disciple experiences something very strange: everything in the Gospel of John appears as astral images. For it is written to be meditated upon. The third form of training, but the most suitable for present-day humanity, because it is most suited to science, is the Rosicrucian. It is based on Christian Rosenkreutz, that great individuality who has been incarnated again and again since his initiation. Its training is the freest of all, and I have already described it in various places. In this way the teacher is only the inspirer, he gives only advice. But in this training there is the greatest danger that the disciple, through his complete freedom, may too easily lose the devotional mood and thereby place obstacles in his own way. Here the teacher is the servant of the disciple, and the disciple's devotion must be a free gift. In the present time, Rosicrucian training requires of the disciple especially a developed thinking, above all, a thinking free from sensuality. For this purpose, “The Philosophy of Freedom” and “Truth and Science” have been written. These books do not yet contain any actual Theosophy. But they can serve as a support and guide for the European disciple. |
94. Popular Occultism: Fourteenth Lecture
11 Jul 1906, Leipzig Rudolf Steiner |
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It should be borne in mind that Christian initiation was undergone by all those who were to teach Christianity from an occult depth, for example, by the priests of the first Christian centuries. These initiations have been preserved for a long time, but they have gradually been somewhat modified, and only in certain narrow circles were these strict exercises still undergone. One should not think that the severity of these exercises can be expected of everyone, but those who submit to them will also attain a high level of knowledge by the Christian path. |
It is precisely through Christian initiation that one can gain a true understanding of the earth's inner states. From the occult point of view, there is a connection between human life, layers of the earth, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and so on. |
94. Popular Occultism: Fourteenth Lecture
11 Jul 1906, Leipzig Rudolf Steiner |
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Today I would like to talk about Christian initiation and the interior of the Earth. It should be borne in mind that Christian initiation was undergone by all those who were to teach Christianity from an occult depth, for example, by the priests of the first Christian centuries. These initiations have been preserved for a long time, but they have gradually been somewhat modified, and only in certain narrow circles were these strict exercises still undergone. One should not think that the severity of these exercises can be expected of everyone, but those who submit to them will also attain a high level of knowledge by the Christian path. In this respect, Christ is, as it were, the original guru for all Christian disciples on this path. Angelus Silesius once said:
Something like this comes from inner experiences. Similarly, in the Gospel of John, where it says: “But Jesus went out of the temple.” This is an astral experience and means that the astral body steps out of the physical body. In the Christian initiation, the demand for Christian humility is a substitute for the strict guru of the Orient, the submission not to a single human being, but to Christ Jesus. The first step is the washing of the feet. One arrives at this step by having for months tried to live with the following ideas in mind: The plant cannot live without the mineral kingdom, which is beneath it. If it could speak, it would have to say: You mineral kingdom, you are admittedly lower than I, but I owe my higher existence to you. And when man looks around at life, he must admit to himself: If I have come far in the spiritual, then others must work for me. We must therefore bow down in humility and gratitude to those who stand below us. “Whoever wants to be first will be last in the kingdom of heaven,” is a word of the gospel. This practice eventually leads to the inner image of the washing of feet. Christ washes the feet of the apostles to offer them the tribute of his thanks. He who lives in these conceptions of humility will realize that the image of the washing of feet appears to him in the form of an astral dream. Thereby what is described in the Gospel of John becomes one's own experience. Then one can proceed to the second step. The disciple must learn to bear all sufferings and obstacles in life uprightly and to remain calm even when everything rushes in on him. And again, in the dream, an image appears on the astral plane, that of the scourging. Not only does the disciple see the image, but he feels burning pain in his whole body, even in his nails and hair. When this has been established, one proceeds to the third stage. Here the student must not only endure pain, but must be able to calmly endure mockery and ridicule. The crowning with thorns as a dream experience manifests itself as a peculiar, temporary headache. It is very difficult to reach the fourth stage. The disciple must develop a feeling that his own body has exactly the same value for him as the things around him; he must learn to regard it as something alien, he must come to feel: Not I go there, but I carry my body there. The disciple then no longer lives in his body, but carries it like an object, like the wood of the cross. These exercises lead to the vision that the disciple sees himself crucified. And outwardly, this stage of initiation even manifests itself in the appearance of so-called stigmata. The disciple then receives, corresponding to the stigmata of the crucifixion, real stigmata at the respective places on his body, which may appear temporarily. These inner and outer experiences occur after appropriate contemplation. The fifth step is mystical death. Now the disciple becomes truly clairvoyant on the astral plane. The other symptoms were at the beginning. The disciple experiences a moment when everything disappears, when he is faced with nothingness. This darkness is the opposite of the general darkness that fell over the whole country at the death of Christ. Then the darkness splits; this is the tearing of the curtain in the temple and Christ's descent into hell. This is also experienced at this level. Those who do not reach this point do not yet really know what evil is. The student of the fifth level descends into the depths of existence. This is the descent into hell. In the sixth stage, the Entombment, he feels the entire earth as his body, and his own body as a part of it. He becomes one with the whole planet. The disciple is then as if laid into the whole earth, covered and buried in it, he himself now becomes one with the planetary spirit. The seventh stage, the resurrection, cannot be described further, because no soul whose thinking is still bound to the brain can grasp all that it means in terms of grandeur and sublimity. When the secret disciple goes through these seven stages, Christianity comes to life in him. He experiences the Gospel of John as reality. Finally, the formation of the earth's interior will be discussed. This exploration of the earth's interior is connected with the Christian stages of initiation. It is precisely through Christian initiation that one can gain a true understanding of the earth's inner states. From the occult point of view, there is a connection between human life, layers of the earth, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and so on. There are still tremendous changes to come in this direction. The view of science that the earth's interior is molten is not correct. The definite substance that you know from the outer view because you step on it, that is the outermost, physical-substantial layer of the earth. It is called the mineral earth. Natural science does not even reach the middle of this layer. Each experience of Christian initiation now leads to penetration into a certain layer of the earth's interior. The third degree of initiation, for example, allows penetration into the third layer, the seventh into the seventh layer, and so on. What is in the second layer cannot be compared with any chemical substance in the uppermost layer; it is a completely different matter. The physical warmth increases only in the first layer. The substance of the second layer has properties that cause any living thing brought into contact with it to be killed immediately within that substance. Any plant would immediately become mineral in it; life would be driven out of it. This layer is also called the life-destroying layer. The third layer is a substance that transforms the soul's perception into its opposite. It transforms joy into pain, and pain into pleasure. It reacts to the feelings of living beings, it has this property as matter and is called the layer of perception. The fourth layer corresponds in some sense to the first region of Devachan, for there too physical things appear in their negative. In Devachan, instead of the physical thing, there is a kind of aura, a negative, a hollow light image in which nothing can be seen, and which emits a certain sound from within. The fourth layer of the earth's interior, on the other hand, is substantially what gives the earth's things form. There are, as it were, the inverted forms; it can be compared to a seal and its imprint. This fourth layer is therefore called the form layer. The fifth layer is full of rampant life. Here life is not restricted to form. The sixth layer, the water layer, is substantially impressionable and consists entirely of will and sensation. It responds to impulses of will, it cries out, as it were, when it is pressed. Because this inner life can be compared to fire, this layer is called the fire earth. The seventh layer of the earth is then reached in the seventh stage of initiation. Just as the eye produces counter-effects within itself in response to certain influences, so it is also in the seventh layer. Its substance transforms all properties into their opposite by reversing them. This is why this layer is called “the earth reflector”. The eighth layer, which also becomes perceptible at the seventh stage of initiation, does not only have physical properties, but also moral ones; it transforms all the moral qualities that people develop into their opposite. Everything that is connected on earth is separated and scattered there. All moral feelings, such as love and compassion, are transformed into their opposite there, into harshness, brutality, and so on. This layer is called the Shatterer. The ninth layer is the Earth Brain. There, evil works magically. Black magic is connected with it. The white path turns black there. It is much more difficult to explore the interior of the Earth than the astral and devachan planes. This exploration is truly one of the most difficult of all. What Sinnett says about the interior of the earth in his book “Esoteric Buddhism” is not correct. Instead of doing his own research as a clairvoyant, he used a medium. Only in the actual Rosicrucian school can one speak of the interior of the earth. And in the best times of Christianity, the interior of the earth was viewed similarly. The Nordic mysteries, the Trotten and Druid mysteries also spoke about it quite extensively. In a poetic way, Dante also speaks of the nine-part interior of the earth in his “Divine Comedy”. There you will find the eighth layer as the layer of Cain, because through Cain, evil and fragmentation came into the world. In fact, occult facts are described in the great poems, such as the Odyssey, Parzival and so on. In the story of Poor Henry, for example, reference is made to the influence of the decaying astral substances of the decadent peoples of the early Middle Ages. The Secret Doctrine has always influenced great poets, both consciously and unconsciously. In the light of Theosophy, not only does the whole world become tremendously deep to us, but also the great poetry of humanity. There one can truly seek out and recognize the divine. It was a characteristic of the Lemurian Age that the upper layers of the earth were only sporadically developed at that time, so to speak only as islands, so that much of the fiery layer penetrated to the outside. The fire layer is the foundation of the other layers. The will of the Lemurian people, which was still very strong at that time, was still able to magically influence this fire layer. The surging movements of the earth were still connected with the will of man. This is why the Lemurian continent was destroyed by the fire layer. People had sunk too low, especially in Late Lemuria. Fearful aberrations had spread. And so these destructive impulses of will affected the fire layer: Lemuria, like Sodom and Gomorrah, perished in a fire catastrophe, combined with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The will has an effect on the fire layer. Thus there is a connection between the inner being of man and the inner being of the earth. The layer of Cain, the layer of the earth shattering, will be transformed through a continuous moral development of man. Whatever man does on earth gradually transforms the entire planet. And when white magic has progressed to a high degree, the core of the earth will change as well. The black magicians will be ejected onto a moon when our planet perishes. When very definite evil volitions combine today, they affect the layer of fire, and it may be that the shock from the layer of fire is transmitted to the layer of water and through the other layers to the uppermost one. This causes earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, seaquakes and so forth. When humanity ensures that things improve morally on earth, things will slowly improve in relation to natural disasters. The progress of the planet earth is connected with the progress of humanity; what the earth's interior shows us is just one example of this. The relationship between the karma of the individual and the karma of the whole has been studied, and research has been conducted into how their future destiny might unfold. It has been found that such people [who die in an earthquake] usually appear in their next incarnation as particularly spiritual personalities, or at least bring with them a predisposition for spiritual life. They have experienced the vanity of material things forcefully and quickly; it was the last jolt they needed to turn to the spirit. Similarly, the fiery death of the martyrs results in particular idealism in the next incarnation. The connections between births and earthquakes are also interesting. In most cases, people born immediately after an earthquake occur, prove to be particularly materialistic people. The force by which man descends again from Devachan has something to do with the fire layer. Man sets the fire layer in motion in that his will, which leads him to embodiment, is particularly sensual at his birth. In the beginning of its development, the Earth was a being capable of transformation, and accordingly, it is humanity. Man has bound the Earth's fate to his own. You can imagine how, in view of this, the occultist's sense of responsibility grows in relation to the spiritual currents that are brought into humanity. The Theosophical movement is connected with a definite goal of the evolution of the Earth. It has to bring about the general fraternization of men. Its goal should therefore be to improve the Earth fragmenter, the eighth layer; it strives to save what can be saved from the center of the Earth. Here, constant dripping hollows out the stone. Even the smallest effect is not lost. The person who strives to transform his soul so that the power that comes from occultism becomes effective, is working on this work and will then also take everyday life quite differently. The true study of occultism consists in the fact that the spiritual student penetrates into ordinary, natural life. Occultism can bear fruit in all areas and have a beneficial effect. Every soul must and will eventually attain the truth. And so occultism relies on the response it will receive in the souls. |
94. Theosophy Based on the Gospel of John: First Lecture
27 Oct 1906, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
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What is really understandable to people today is sensory and intellectual knowledge. In the past, however, people still knew that there is another kind of knowledge. |
The Bible believer and the natural scientist do not understand each other at all. They have sought a kind of compromise, trying to understand the whole story of creation allegorically, saying that it is only meant symbolically. |
For John, the Christ hidden in Jesus is an outstandingly high personality that can only be understood by soaring to a higher level of knowledge. To understand what is alive in the Gospel of John, it is necessary to recognize the deepest secrets of existence. |
94. Theosophy Based on the Gospel of John: First Lecture
27 Oct 1906, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
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In a series of lectures, we want to take in a general picture of the theosophical attitude and world view and that which can be considered the basis for our spiritual scientific work. And in doing so, we want to base these theosophical considerations on the Gospel of John. It will come about quite naturally that after a few lectures, light will be shed on the most remarkable piece of writing in the world. Because that is this Gospel of John. Today, let me point out what the Gospel of John actually is. First, we need to create a basis for understanding the profound first chapter. When you read the gospel, you can be edified by the grandeur of the images, but as a person of the present, you can no longer really grasp what this gospel actually means. In the past, it was considered a record of how the real Christ Jesus lived on earth and what actually happened in Palestine. In more Protestant and modern research, it was later believed that John's gospel seems to contradict the other three gospels. The first three, the Synoptics, were therefore summarized. The fourth gospel is not considered to be of equal value because it was written much later. It contains nothing historical, but is a kind of poetic rendering, a poem in which the writer has set down what he thought of the life of Christ Jesus. This is the point of view of the so-called believer of the present day. With a certain amount of justification, the famous theologian Bunsen said: “If the Gospel of John is nothing more than the poetic outpouring of an individual, then with it the whole of Christianity falls.” All this research is based on the inability of the last four to five centuries to even understand what is meant by the Gospel of John. Man and his views have changed, and today's man cannot imagine that the world can be viewed from a different point of view. What is really understandable to people today is sensory and intellectual knowledge. In the past, however, people still knew that there is another kind of knowledge. They knew that there are other senses and other sources of knowledge. Today's materialistic research is in stark contrast to the orthodox biblical believer with regard to this knowledge. This also applies to the Mosaic creation story. The believers take it literally, and modern research says: This can never be taken literally; we are dealing with long, long periods of time. The Bible believer and the natural scientist do not understand each other at all. They have sought a kind of compromise, trying to understand the whole story of creation allegorically, saying that it is only meant symbolically. How was the story of creation understood in church circles five hundred years ago? No one in the church originally said: this is what happened materially and visibly before our very eyes. To the medieval theologian, that would have seemed grotesque. The idea that the seven days of creation were to be taken literally only came in through materialism. As a kind of lawful necessity, the materialistic world view swept over our earth, and the first thing this wave took hold of was religion. At first, it was not science that was grasped by the materialistic view, but the church. What used to be understood spiritually was now imbued with the materialistic attitude. Now science is fighting something that the materialistic world view has brought about. One example of this is the concept of the Lord's Supper. In the 12th century, the church was shocked when people began to understand the Lord's Supper as if wine could actually turn into blood and bread into the actual body. The spiritual teaching of transubstantiation was forgotten. nn So the spiritual meaning was lost bit by bit. The theologian of the 6th and 7th century still knew what was meant by the story of creation. When it says, “Adam fell into a deep sleep,” it refers to a dream vision through which Adam experienced the seven-day work as an astral process. What happened in the distant past could no longer be grasped by the senses. But those who saw with their soul could grasp it in a higher spiritual state. But it then appears to them in images. So it was astral images that Adam saw in his dream during the seven days of creation; he looked back at the original world from which he came. Thus, the religious documents were attributed to higher sources of knowledge. The fight against the Bible is based on misunderstandings. To take the Gospel of John literally in a materialistic sense is to misunderstand it. This is not to say that it should be taken symbolically. What is written in the Gospel of John cannot be experienced in this physical-sensual world any more than the work of the seven days, the story of creation, but only in a different state of consciousness. The author of the fourth Gospel describes what he perceived not within but outside of the physical body, in a different state of consciousness. The other three Gospels can still be taken literally, but the Gospel of John cannot. It is more true than true; it contains the deepest truth of Christianity. It sees the center of world evolution in Christ Jesus. For John, the Christ hidden in Jesus is an outstandingly high personality that can only be understood by soaring to a higher level of knowledge. To understand what is alive in the Gospel of John, it is necessary to recognize the deepest secrets of existence. To understand the human being and the leader of humanity, one must grasp the essence of the cosmos. The Gospel of John begins with words that are based on the whole secret of the world. The most peculiar thing about these words is that they not only appeal to our understanding, but also have a magical mental effect. They give us a picture of how the human being and the cosmos are connected. The Gospel of John must be experienced. You have to take the first words as material for meditation, let them live within you. This is spiritual food for life. You have to say to yourself: This is material for me to live with for five minutes a day. These words will open your spiritual eyes and ears; you will experience the magical power of these words, which are forces, and you will experience them in astral images. Let me bring you closer to the soul of what the writer of the Gospel of John felt as an impulse, what he wanted to say. At first he was one who was a newborn according to his soul, one who had been awakened by the power of the insights that lie in the sentences: |
That is the first part of the meditation. And this is the second part:
If you take the values of these words, not just their literal meaning, then they have infinite value. For example, it should read: “It came to the I-people” - instead of: “He came into his own.” If you read these words, you have a brief outline of the theosophy of John and that which we also teach. So let us try to understand the very first words. To do this, a brief overview of the basic concepts of theosophy is necessary. There are entities that are above human beings and no longer need a physical body. These are: the angels, the archangels, the first causes or causes, authorities, powers, dominions, thrones, cherubim, seraphim. Verse 1: “In the first causes was the Word, and the Word was made life, and because it was creative, it was a god.” Everything, absolutely everything is the crystallized Divine Word, the spoken Word. Now man has the Word; later he will bring forth his own through the Word. The Primordial Beginnings are the entities that were already at the stage at the beginning of the evolution of the earth at which man will arrive at the end of the evolution of the earth. Because John was able to feel this impulse, he had experienced in great astral visions what is contained in these sentences. But that was only the second thing in his soul, the first was the awakening of these powers. The third was now the following. We will try to understand it with an example. For example, you have a dream one night; it shows you a person you have never seen before. The dream gives you the certainty that you are not indifferent to this person; after a short time you will meet him. — This is how John felt about the experience of Christ. He had had astral visions in a dream state of what became history in Palestine. What his experiences were in higher worlds, his visions, then became experience in earthly life. The meditation would be done in such a way that one morning a person begins to let the first words of the Gospel of John run through his soul every day. After months, after years, after decades he will experience something in his soul of what is contained in these words. The translation of these words is important: “It came as far as the ‘I’ people, but the ‘I’ people did not accept it.” If you go through these words, you will have a brief outline of theosophy in the Gospel of John: the theosophy that we teach. Hence its tremendous effect. Only those who first awaken these soul-spiritual powers within themselves will experience this. Try to understand the very first words of the Gospel of John. To do this, a brief overview of the most elementary concepts of Theosophy is necessary. Let us try it by starting from the bottom. If we look at the human being as he stands before us today, we can say that what we know something about today is the physical body, one limb only of the human being. Even the physical human body is permeated by other higher aspects of our being; that is why it looks as it appears to us now. If it were not permeated by other aspects of our being, it would be just a physical apparatus, with nothing moving it from within and nothing hurting it. Only the physical eye is like a physical apparatus. You must vividly keep in mind the possibility that man grows and that something hurts him, then you will recognize how the physical body is permeated with two other entities: one makes man grow, reproduce and nourish himself; this is done through his etheric body. The other is that he feels, that he has urges, desires and passions that come from his astral body. In order for the physical body to grow, it needs the etheric body. In order for it to feel, it needs the astral body. | Hydrogen alone cannot represent water; it needs oxygen to do so. If hydrogen and oxygen separate again, we no longer have water; the connection is necessary here as well as there. If the human being is separated from his two other bodies, the physical body will immediately decay. The sentient body, etheric body and physical body, these three elements of being go down to the animal. Man shares his physical body with the earth, the mineral; his ether body with the plants, and his astral body with the animals. We can also say: everything that requires growth and reproduction resides in the ether body; instincts, desire and pain sensations reside in the astral body. At death, the physical body remains behind, the etheric and astral bodies initially remain together, and soon the etheric body also separates from the astral body. In sleep, the human being is literally a plant in the fullest sense: his body is still kept going only by the vegetative life, the etheric body. Normally, a person is unconscious and without will or desires when asleep. The few who retain their consciousness during sleep are the exceptions among humanity; they already represent a state that all people will reach in the future: they are the predisposed, predestined leaders and prophets of humanity. How are dreams possible? How do they come about? There is a hidden potential in the astral body. When this ability is fully developed, consciousness arises. To the physical body, to the etheric and astral bodies, one more is added. There is a word that differs from all others because it can only be said to oneself. It is the word “I”. This fact is of the utmost importance. Jean Paul's story gives us a beautiful example of the significance of this word. He describes how, as a very young boy, he stood under the door of his parents' house when suddenly the realization flashed through him: I am a self! It is a process in the hidden sanctum of the soul that pure natures feel particularly strongly as a mystery. The scope of this mystery was felt by the priests and sages of all times. It also underlies what the ancient Hebrews called the unspeakable name of God. The high priest would say the word “Joph” once a year to express the sound of the unspeakable. Joph is the “I”. Together with the bodies mentioned above, the “I” forms what is known as the Pythagorean tetrad. The clairvoyant can see the higher bodies while fully conscious. It is a different matter with hypnosis. In this state, the hypnotized person sees what the hypnotist wants. The hypnotized person is subject to positive or negative suggestion, depending on whether they are led to believe that something is really there, that they feel something, for example, the sweet taste of a pear while biting into a potato, or that something is not there, for example, no people, no objects in the room, and so on. This last state can be consciously brought about to make the etheric body visible. It is a higher kind of attention. Through a strong volitional act, you suggest the physical body away and then convince yourself that the space previously occupied by the physical body is not empty, but filled with a magnificent light substance, not comparable to anything earthly. In the heart and lung area, you can see wonderful movements of this light substance. This is the etheric body of the human being. The consciously clairvoyant person sees the etheric body protruding a little above the human body. In the case of horses, it protrudes much further. The third thing that the clairvoyant can see, even if the etheric body is suggested away, is the astral body, which then appears as an elliptical cloud. There you can see the instincts and desires in the form of colored light formations, the bright yellow of developed intelligence and clear thinking, and the beautiful blue of piety and selfless sacrifice. In addition to these three phenomena visible to the clairvoyant, there is a fourth one that is formed very differently in all people. In the space behind the bridge of the nose, one sees in the astral body a kind of hollow sphere of bluish color, similar to the core of a flame of light that appears blue through the yellow light envelope. In the undeveloped human being it is a small bluish oval; in the developed human being it appears as a blue glow. Friendship, love, and religious feeling appear in green, blue, and blue-red; everything is in constant and intense motion while the etheric body is rotating. If we now ask ourselves under what influences these four components of the human being have formed, the answer is that the physical body, which only reflects the life of the earth, is composed of the forces of the earth. The earth has an influence on it. The etheric body, like plants, depends not only on the earth but also on the sun; it strives towards the sun. Our astral body, however, depends on the forces of the stellar world, hence its name. Paracelsus is quite right when he says: “There is nothing in heaven and on earth that is not also in man, and God, who is in heaven and on earth, is also in man.” During the night, man lives in the stars, in the forces from which he was built. During sleep, his astral body experiences the paths in which the stars move and hold. From this astral body, the body born of the stars, the ego is now born. What can be heard as the keynote of the movement of the stars in the universe is called the Pythagorean music of the spheres. This fundamental chord of the starry orbits and the universe, this tone is what the writer of the Gospel of John means when he speaks of the Word of the world. Thus, a first understanding of the deep mystical meaning of these words will begin to dawn on our consciousness. It will lead us ever deeper and deeper into the true occult meaning of this wonderful document. |
94. Theosophy Based on the Gospel of John: Second Lecture
28 Oct 1906, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
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He had no external vision at that time, but a different way of perceiving, in images. To understand this state of consciousness, imagine a very vivid dream that reflects something of your surroundings. |
Today's human being has only a very imperfect command of all these. To understand the task of the chela, compare yourself as you are now with yourself when you were ten years old. |
There is something that is even more difficult to bring under the control of free will than our habits and emotional stirrings: the physical body in its animal and vegetative, mechanical or reflexive dependency. |
94. Theosophy Based on the Gospel of John: Second Lecture
28 Oct 1906, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
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We saw yesterday that the Gospel of John contains something that can only be experienced on higher levels of consciousness. Before such experiences are possible, the human being must first develop higher. The human being is a developing creature. We can observe this from subordinate to ever higher states. This is already shown by the difference between a savage and a civilized European, or between an ordinary person and a genius like Schiller, Goethe or Francis of Assisi. An unlimited potential for development is open to every human being. To understand this, let us take up yesterday's lecture and use a diagram to clarify the theosophical basic teachings on the development of the human being: During the following explanations, the diagram below will be drawn on the “board, starting from the bottom left.
We have thus seen that man has his physical body in common with all inanimate beings, the etheric body with all plants in our physical world, and the astral body with all animal creatures in his environment. We then saw that man, in terms of his development, differs from all other beings in that he can say “I” to himself. The “I” is by no means a simple entity. On closer inspection, it is also something that is structured. The animal feels, has desire and passion, the plant does not; the animal because it already possesses an astral body. In this, the I develops in man. But this I has been at work long before man became clearly aware of it. A look at the development of humanity teaches us more about this. The earth has not always been as it is today. Its face has repeatedly changed; the present continents have not always been there. During the penultimate earth period, a continent called Atlantis was located where the Atlantic Ocean now rages. Traces of it and the story of its downfall have been preserved in ancient legends. In the Bible, the Flood is meant by this. The ancient fathers of a different nature, whose descendants we are, experienced this. In this old Atlantis, the air and water conditions were quite different from what they are now. The whole thing was shrouded in a dense fog. In the words Nebelheim, Niflheim, we still have a hint of this. There was no rain and no sunshine; instead of rain, only fog currents; instead of sun, only diffuse illumination. Only after long periods did the fog condense as water. The sun only penetrated a little, like a faint premonition, through the constant fog. In such an environment, people also lived a completely different mental and spiritual life than today. It was only towards the end of the Atlantic period, roughly in the area of present-day Ireland, that people began to show self-awareness for the first time, and to think clearly and logically. In the mists there was no possibility of distinguishing objects as we do today. Man only develops a consciousness like ours in relation to his surroundings. As the objects emerged from the mists, so did the physical eye; and in the same measure the consciousness soul developed, and within it the self-aware ego. Even then, man could speak. If we go back even further to the earliest times of Atlantis, we find that man looked significantly different. He had no external vision at that time, but a different way of perceiving, in images. To understand this state of consciousness, imagine a very vivid dream that reflects something of your surroundings. The following “dream” may serve as an example. A student dreams that he is standing at the door of the lecture hall, and another student deliberately brushes against him, which is a serious offense that can only be atoned for by a duel. He challenges him, they drive into the forest, the duel begins, the first shot rings out. Then our student wakes up – he has pushed over the chair next to his bed. Had he been awake, he would have noticed that a chair had fallen over. But because his consciousness soul had descended into sleep, he perceived with a deeper, less developed soul power. The dramatic action of the dream is a pictorial transformation of an external process. The processes of consciousness in the ancient Atlanteans were similar. Although the images were more regulated and ordered, they did not have a clear perception of their surroundings. The life of feeling expressed itself quite characteristically in fine perceptions of touch and color. If the early Atlantean perceived a warm mist that symbolized itself to him in red, he knew that something pleasant was approaching him. Or if he encountered another person who was unpleasant to him, this was also indicated to him by a very specific sensation that became an image, an ugly color tone. But warmth, for example, was symbolized to him in a beautiful red cloud. This happened in many degrees and variations. The early Atlanteans thus had visual perceptions. We only have such perceptions in the case of pain, which is obviously only within us, however much it is caused by the outside world and can become loud. Our pain is also experienced inwardly, spiritually, and is thus truer than the external facts. The Atlanteans, however, already developed ordered ideas. Not so the Lemurians. The Atlantean period was preceded by the Lemurian period. Man was not yet able to express language. He was merely able to internalize what the animal also feels. Thus, what we call the sentient soul developed in him. The continent of Lemuria, which was destroyed by the forces of fire, we have to imagine between Africa, Australia and Asia. But now back to our scheme: IIIa sentient soul, IIIb intellectual soul, IIIc consciousness soul are all three transformations, ennobled transformations from the astral body. It is only towards the end of the Atlantean period that man becomes capable of consciously working on himself. What does he do now? Up to now, cosmic forces have lifted man up in his development. Now man begins to consciously take his development into his own hands, to work on himself, to educate himself. On which body does he now begin his work? It is important to pay strict attention to the sequence here. First, man was and is able to work on and in his astral body. And on this level of ability, the human being of the present day is still standing today. In general, we can say of today's human being: He uses his experiences and experiences to transform his astral body. Later we will see that a higher level of development consists of working into the lower bodies. Let us first stay with the first: with the ability to transform the astral body. To do this, let us compare the civilized man with the savage. The savage first follows his instincts, desires and passions, every craving, without restraint. But then he can begin to work on his self. To certain instincts he says: remain; to others: leave. Thus, for example, the man-eater ceases his habit of eating his own kind; in so doing, he leaves a certain stage of civilization and becomes another. Or he learns to act logically, learns, for example, to plow. Thus his astral body becomes more and more structured. Formerly external powers determined man, now he does it himself. The astral body of a Hottentot circles in wild dark red vortices, in a person like Schiller in bright green and yellow, in Franz of Assisi in wonderful blue. This is how the astral body is worked on. That which is consciously worked into the astral body from the I is called the spirit self or manas. With the conscious working in of the I, something very special begins. Before that, however, before one comes to the formation of this manas, that part which the animal also has remains completely unchanged in the astral body. Despite the growth of intellect, the astral body can remain essentially unchanged, full of animal desires. But there are influences that do transform the sentient body: conscious religiosity and art. From these we draw strength to overcome and ennoble ourselves, which is a much stronger power than mere morality. Man has as much of the spirit or Manas as he has worked into his astral body. This is not something external, it is a transformation product of what used to be the sentient soul. As long as I am merely working on my sentient body, I use my achievements to transform this my astral body. All the morality in the world cannot achieve more, nor can all intellectuality. But if true religiousness is at work in me, this stronger power expresses itself through the astral body and works its way into the next lower one, the etheric body. This is naturally a much greater achievement than when the ego merely works with the astral, because the raw material of the etheric body is much coarser and more resistant than the finer astral body. We call the result of this transformation the spirit of life or Budhi. The spirit of life is thus the spiritualized life body. In the Orient, someone who had brought it to the highest level was called a Buddha. This tremendous moral power proceeds from consciousness when the three souls are governed by a strong ego. These are preparatory steps for humanity in general. Only the chela works consciously in his etheric body. The chela aims to spiritualize everything, even into his etheric body. The chelaship is concluded when he has allowed Budhi to stream completely into his life body, so that the life body, which he ennobles from the I, has become a life spirit. In the third stage, man reaches the highest principle that is currently accessible to us. He is able to work down to his physical body. In doing so, he rises above the level of the chela and becomes a “master”. When, on the second step, Budhi glows through his etheric body, the human being gains control not only of moral principles but also of his character. He can change his temperament, his memory, and his habits. Today's human being has only a very imperfect command of all these. To understand the task of the chela, compare yourself as you are now with yourself when you were ten years old. How much knowledge have you gained since then, and how little your character has changed! The content of the soul has changed quite radically, but the habits and inclinations only very slightly. Those who were hot-tempered, forgetful, envious, inattentive as a child are often still so as adults. How much our ideas and thoughts have changed, how little our habits! This gives you a clue to estimate how much tougher, firmer, more difficult to shape the etheric body is compared to the astral body. Conversely, how much more fruitful and consequential an improvement achieved in the etheric body! The following sentence can be used as an example of the different speeds at which transformation is possible: What you have learned and experienced has changed like the minute hand of the clock, your habits like the hour hand. Learning is easy, unlearning is difficult. You can still recognize yourself from the writing of yesteryear, because that is also a habit. It is easy to change views and insights, but difficult to change habits. Changing this tenacious thing, habit, little by little, is the task of the chela. This means becoming a different person by creating a different etheric body, thus transforming the life body into the life spirit. This puts the forces of growth in your hands. Habits are among the manifest growth forces. If I destroy them, the vis vitalis, the power of growth, is released and placed at my disposal, to direct my consciousness. Christ says: “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Christ is the personification of the power that changes the life body. Now to the third stage. There is something that is even more difficult to bring under the control of free will than our habits and emotional stirrings: the physical body in its animal and vegetative, mechanical or reflexive dependency. There is a stage of human development in which no nerve is activated, no blood corpuscle rolls without the human being's conscious will. This self-transformation reaches into conditions and states that were fixed long, long before Atlantis and Lemuria, and are therefore the hardest to reverse: into cosmic primeval states. In this work, man develops Atman, the spiritual man. The potential for this is present in every human being today. This whole cycle depends on the attainment of fully clear self-awareness. The most powerful and potent laws are those of the breathing process. The entire spiritual being depends on lung breathing, because it is the outer expression of the gradual drawing in of the I. In ancient Atlantis, this potential emerged through the saying of the I. In Lemuria, man did not breathe through lungs, but through gill-like organs. Nor did he walk as we do today, but floated or swam in a more fluid element, where water and air were not yet separated. To maintain his balance, he had an organ analogous to the swim bladder of a fish. As the air gradually separated, the swim bladder was transformed into our present lungs. The development of the sense of self runs parallel to the development of the lungs. This is still expressed in the words: “And God breathed into the man his breath of life, and he became a living soul.” Atman means nothing other than “breath”. The regulation of the breath is therefore one of the most powerful tools in the work of yoga, which teaches the control of all bodily functions. Here we look into a future in which human beings will have transformed themselves from within. Conscious work in the etheric body is therefore a mastery. Conscious work in the physical body: mastery. The human being perceives the growth into these two stages as an opening up of new worlds, new environments, comparable only to the feelings of the child when it emerges from the dark, warm womb into the cold, light world at birth. The moment of generating Budhi is called second birth, rebirth, awakening in all mysteries. As man formerly left an inner world, of which only echoes remain in dreams, so he enters a new world as one awakened to the same world on a higher level. In those ancient times, man perceived the world with the help of his own inner images. On the future level of higher clairvoyance, man steps out of himself and sees behind the essence of things; he sees their souls. It is a kind of clairvoyance that is directed outwards and highlights the 'inherent essence' of things. The seer penetrates, for example, below the surface of the plant or stone. This outward-directed clairvoyance, with full mental alertness, not only illuminates the very basis of his own soul, but also that of the beings and things outside of himself. This is how development takes place. Modern man lives in the manasical state, that is, he is able to change something in his astral body, but not yet in his etheric body, and least of all in his physical body. Therefore, man takes in from another only as much as corresponds to his stage of development. “You are like the spirit you understand, not like me!” This saying also applies here. According to Christian terminology, the designations correspond:
Why is Budhi called the “Word”? This brings us to the edge of one of the great mysteries, and we will see the great significance of the term “Word”. We have seen that man spiritualizes his life body through the Budhi. What does the life body do in man? Growth and reproduction, everything that distinguishes the living being from the mineral. What is the highest expression of the life body? Reproduction, growth beyond itself. What becomes of this last expression of the life body when man consciously covers the path back to spiritualization? How is this reproductive power transformed, what becomes of it when it is purified, spiritualized? — In the human larynx you have the purification, the transformation of the reproductive power, and in the articulated vowel sound, in the human word, you have the transformed reproductive capacity. Analogous to the law “All is below as above”, we find the corresponding process in the physical: the breaking of the voice, the mutation at the time of sexual maturity. All that becomes spirit emanates from the word or the content of the word. This is the very first glimpse of Budhi, when the first articulated sound emerges from the human soul. A mantram has such a significant effect because it is a spiritually articulated word. A mantram is therefore the means for the chela to work down into the depths of his soul. Thus, in the physical, we have the power of reproduction, through which life is generated and passed on beyond the physical body, becoming something permanent. And just as the physical generative organs transmit bodily life, so the organs of speech — tongue, larynx and breath — transmit spiritual life like an ignition device. In the physiological, the close connection between voice and procreation is obvious. We encounter it in the song of the nightingale, in courtship display, voice change, vocal magic, in singing, cooing, crowing, roaring. We can truly call the larynx the higher sexual organ. The word is the power of procreation for new human spirits; in the word, man achieves a spiritualized creative power. Today, man rules the air with the word, by shaping it rhythmically and organically, by stirring it and enlivening it. On a higher level, he is able to do this in the liquid and finally in the solid element. Then you have transformed the word into the creator's word, for man will achieve this in his development because it was originally so. The life body, emanated from the word of the primal spirit, - this is to be taken literally. That is why Budhi is called the “word”, which means nothing other than: I am.
Thus we see with geometrical clarity the words of the miracle in St. John's Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” The astral body, which is radiant as the stars, becomes the Word-light; the Primordial God, the Life and the Light, these are the three fundamental concepts of the Gospel of John. John had to develop to the point of Budhi in order to grasp what was revealed in Christ Jesus. The other three Evangelists were not so highly developed. John gives the highest, he was an awakened one. John is the name given to all who are awakened. This is a generic name, and the resurrection of Lazarus in the Gospel of John is nothing more than a description of this awakening. The writer of the Gospel of John, whose name we will hear later, never calls himself by any other name than “the disciple whom the Lord loves”. This is the term for the most intimate disciples, for those in whom the teacher and master has succeeded in awakening the disciple. The description of such an awakening is given by the author of the Gospel of John in the resurrection of Lazarus: “the Lord loved him,” he could awaken him. Only if we approach such religious documents as the Gospel of John with the deepest humility can we hope to arrive at a literal understanding and to grasp at least a small part of its sacred content. |
94. Theosophy Based on the Gospel of John: Third Lecture
31 Oct 1906, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
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Once we have learned the meaning of human development, we will better understand the main idea of John's gospel. This developmental process of humanity is the theme of the opening chapters. It wants to say, firstly, that it is this Christ Jesus that I want to make you understand. Secondly, the developmental process of all humanity is influenced by this Christ in a very specific way. |
At that time, it was of a different nature and served clairvoyance. Under the influence of the sentient soul, the spinal cord was incorporated, which then became the brain under the influence of the mind soul, with the two cords of the spinal cord puffing up and widening at their ends, as it were. |
94. Theosophy Based on the Gospel of John: Third Lecture
31 Oct 1906, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
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In the previous lecture, we took a look at the essence of human nature. Today, we will continue this consideration. Once we have learned the meaning of human development, we will better understand the main idea of John's gospel. This developmental process of humanity is the theme of the opening chapters. It wants to say, firstly, that it is this Christ Jesus that I want to make you understand. Secondly, the developmental process of all humanity is influenced by this Christ in a very specific way. From Christ onwards, the developmental process of the individual human being also became quite different. We must clearly understand the parallel between the developmental process of all humanity and that of the individual human being. In the human being, the three highest elements of being are still undeveloped today. The higher these elements are in nature, the later they are worked through by the human being. Let us take a look at the evolution of humanity on earth through the different races. The main races of prehistoric times are the polaric, the hyperborean and the lemuric. In the first main race, the physical body is developed, in the second main race the etheric body, in the third the astral body, the body of feeling. So far man has progressed in the Lemurian period. During the Atlantean period, the fourth main race, the sentient soul is formed out of the sentient body, followed by the rational soul and finally, towards the end of Atlantis, the consciousness soul with the ego, with which the fifth main race began, our present race. Before the awakening of the consciousness soul, the main abilities of man were language and memory. He could not yet combine, reason logically or calculate. It is only with the dawning of consciousness that the fifth main race begins, whose mission is to integrate Manas, the spirit self, into the human being and to educate it. With the awakening of Manas, the first sub-race of our root race develops. It is the Indian pre-Vedic culture. It is followed by the Persian, then the Chaldean-Egyptian-Hebrew, and fourthly the Greek-Latin. We ourselves belong to the fifth sub-race. We are going through the fifth stage of the development of Manas. We will be followed by the sixth sub-race with still other, higher tasks of human development. The task of expressing the principle of manas is common to all of them. Each of the races does this in a special way. In detail, it happens something like this: In the first sub-race, the sentient body or astral body had to accomplish the general manasic work of empathy. Our present physical body comprises a manifold, complicated sum of organ systems. In the age in which we live, it includes the bone and muscle system. The entire sensory apparatus is formed by the forces of the physical body. The etheric body causes all vegetative functions, all organs that serve nutrition, digestion, and reproduction. The astral body builds the nervous system into this bodily complex. All unconscious movements, all reflexes depend on the sympathetic nervous system, which extends symmetrically on both sides of the spinal cord. We call the part that extends into the abdominal cavity the solar plexus. In the Lemurian period, the sympathetic nervous system was the actual astral organ of perception. At that time, it was of a different nature and served clairvoyance. Under the influence of the sentient soul, the spinal cord was incorporated, which then became the brain under the influence of the mind soul, with the two cords of the spinal cord puffing up and widening at their ends, as it were. The forebrain did not develop until the end of the Atlantean epoch. Parallel to this development was another, namely the higher development of breathing and blood circulation, the processes of nutrition and growth. At the beginning of the fifth root race, the human being was strongest in the sentient body, so that in the first sub-race, the Indian, Manas is sunk into the sentient body. The leaders of this epoch sought to awaken the old power of clairvoyance within themselves. The higher powers of the intellect, which were not yet strong enough, were excluded. Thus, with the help of the sympathetic nervous system, a dream-like clairvoyance was developed. Manas descended into the sympathetic nervous system and thus into the sentient body. In this way the whole wonderful dream world of ancient India becomes understandable, the great and wide, but dim and dull grasping of Brahman, the being beside oneself of the ancient yoga system. In the second sub-race, the manas rises higher, into the sentient soul. The ancient Persians represent this to us. For them, the spirit self or manas lives in the sentient soul. The first expression of this is the confrontation between world and soul, between world and ego. This is expressed in the contrast between the spirit figures of Ormuzd and Ahriiman. Man seeks to overcome the resulting conflict through labor. Chaos, the disorderly matter, is to be overcome by the good God, who leads to the spiritual. The third sub-race lives in the Egyptian, Assyrian and Israelite peoples. The Manas or spiritual self rises up into the mind soul. Manas in it now seeks to understand the world around it rationally. Or in other words: man seeks to find Manas in the cosmos. From this the wisdom-filled systems of Chaldean astrology arise, the combinations between the eternal laws that guide and move the cosmos and human destinies. The Chaldean priest-sage looks up to the stars, and the wonderful knowledge of planetary motion arises. But the rule of manas applies to a particular extent in the case of the one people, the chosen people. The Israelites apply the manasic principle in such a way that the people themselves are organized according to reason, as a unified national community. The legislation of Moses is a reflection of the star wisdom of the Chaldean priests. In the fourth sub-race, the Greco-Latin, the spirit self penetrates as far as the consciousness soul. It is the awakening of consciousness when it takes itself by the scruff of the neck, as it were. The fully awakened consciousness now not only puts its intellect and its mind into the world, as in Jehovah's law, but in Hellas it puts its whole ego into its gods, into pure images of man. But Rome recreates its idealized ego in its state. The Greek gods and the Roman state are thus the image of what the ego has within itself and now seeks to make objective. The fifth sub-race is our Anglo-Germanic race, which is to express the spirit-self in the spirit-self, Manas in Manas. That is, man will learn to comprehend what the spirit-self actually is; man will stand within Manas. Manas will finally work within itself. Today, only a few people really understand the manas. To grasp thinking with thinking, to catch thinking in thinking, to completely round off the snake of eternity, that is the task of the fifth sub-race. Thinking is the organ where the human being first grasps himself at one point. To stimulate this in man is the purpose of my book 'The Philosophy of Freedom'. The sixth sub-race is the future one. The spiritual self rises up to the level of the Budhi; there, as in Manas, a light from above, Budhi shines into man. But at first Budhi is still a gift from above. This illumination by Budhi corresponds to the Christian concept of Grace. The beginning of this inflow goes back to the fourth sub-race. We have to describe this point in time as the beginning of Christianity. And the one who brought Budhi into the earthly human world is the Christ Jesus. And the Christ Jesus appeared as the bringer of that power, which had been completely foreign until then. To sum up: What man has acquired during the five races is Manas - Manas, the spiritual self. It is met, as a gift from above, by Budhi, which corresponds to the Christian basic idea of grace. This, then, is the theme of the Gospel of John. But how was the approach made to this? Two things must, had to come together in order for Budhi to really take effect: first, as the bearers of the previous development, people now had to have an organ for Budhi formed from Manas. They had to be thirsty for Budhi, thirsty to go beyond the intellect. Brain development, without connection to the higher limbs, always ends in a dead end; it does not go beyond manasic development, beyond astral things. There were such people who, out of the manas, brought a highly developed soul organ to the Budhi. It must be so. No matter how much light there is, if there is no eye, it will not be perceived. It is the same with Budhi. There was a name for all those people who had developed such an organ, who were thirsty for Budhi, a generic name: John. It can also be applied to the Baptist. Christ and Budhi are the same spiritual current. We must now also consider the other: Manas also transforms the physical man. Gradually, the organs grew stronger, the strengthening spinal cord gradually integrated itself, and new centers of power were constantly forming. As always, these spiritual processes had to be matched by physical ones. The task of the fifth main race was the establishment of Manas, and in the body, the formation of the brain. The sixth main race will see the establishment of Budhi; the perfection of the heart as a completely voluntary muscle. In the seventh main race: the establishment of Atman; the perfection of breathing. We saw how the heart and respiratory organs formed. In the circulatory system, the development of the budhi is modeled on the heart. The heart is actually only at the beginning of its development. Anatomy is faced with a mystery, because it creates a hole in its theory. The heart is a striated muscle, like all voluntary muscles, but the heart is also an involuntary muscle. Thus it is now the case that it is destined to become an arbitrary muscle, and that is in the future, when Budhi is developed. The heart is organized for the future; it will then be an extremely important organ. Just as manas is nourished in man through the blood circulation, so manas will then work in the heart and from the heart. Let us consider the historical development before and after the illumination of Budhi. Let us first turn our attention to the blood. The blood is influenced by the nervous system. It is only when the manasic development advances that the relationship to the blood changes. In the primeval times of all peoples we have the very special phenomenon of the so-called Nahehe. We have the small ethnic groups that all marry within their blood relationship. But in every people we find a transition to distant marriage, so that an intensive blood mixture occurs. Earlier groups of peoples were therefore related by descent; they had a common ancestor who was particularly revered, for example, among the Germanic tribes, the progenitor Tuisto. The legends faithfully preserve the conflicts that arose from the breaking of the blood ties. The blood of such neighboring communities was influenced by the lower parts of the nervous system. This gave man clairvoyance and the intuitive distinction between good and evil; he had a sure moral instinct. The moment man steps out of nearness, it becomes impossible for him to delve into clairvoyance from within, from the sympathetic nervous system. With remoteness, instinctive guidance ceases and the external law begins. The original moral instinct disappeared with remoteness; the external law had to enter. Out of the night of the old instinct there dawned a moral guiding star. Then came the Mosaic Law religion as the custodian of morality. This will finally be replaced by a new light, the Christ-light, the spiritual guidance. What the moral instinct was for the individual tribe, that is Budhi or the Christ Principle for all mankind. In Christ, this process has become flesh. Christ came when the tribal blood ties had loosened sufficiently for the tribal god to change into a god of all men, for blood brotherhood to become a duty towards every fellow human being, and for tribal loyalty to be extended to self- and god-loyalty. What sunlight is to matter, what intelligible truth to intellect, that is the Christ-light to the Budhi, the grace coming from above. Through the Budhi, the earlier is no longer decisive, neither the moral instinct given by blood ties nor the law of the priests, neither Moses nor tribal authorities at all, the last of which was Jehovah. Now the sentence applies: “Whoever does not leave father and mother and brother for my sake cannot be my disciple.” That is to say, anyone who does not forget the old tribal principles and does not extend blood love to all people cannot follow Christ. The old tribal gods had entered into indissoluble marriages with their peoples, and with their peoples they had to pass away. The Christ represents a completely new spirit in the world, which entered into humanity, and this spirit united with the human soul, which passes through the whole evolution. Those who bore the name John, the leading people of that time, were so far as to feel with the greatest strength the burning yearning for something that lies above mere legality and justice, that is, they thirsted for the new Son of Man. And the One Who satisfied this longing was the Christ, the Bridegroom of the soul of humanity in general, humanity itself being the Bride. Thus Christ or Budhi is indeed the only begotten Son of God: “He must increase, but I must decrease,” was the saying of John the Baptist. One of the greatest symbols of this wedding feast is the wedding at Cana in Galilee, a place where all kinds of peoples flocked together in a colorful, international mix. We see how a wedding feast is celebrated there. “And the mother of Jesus was also there,” it says. In the Gospel of John, the mother of Jesus is never called “Mary”, just as the author of the Gospel of John, the disciple whom the Lord loved, is never called “John”. The mother of Jesus is the human soul, and this must first mature before Christ can work in it. Hence the words: “Woman, what do I have to do with you? My hour has not yet come.” Never would such a high individuality as Christ have spoken thus to his mother. The fourth chapter of the Gospel of John shows Jesus with the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well. Here you have Jacob, the representative of the tribal deity; the well: the old tradition from which one must draw and which does not satisfy. “Then the Samaritan woman said to him, ‘How is it that you, being a Jew, ask a drink of me, since I am a Samaritan woman?’ (For the Jews had no dealings with the Samaritans).” Here you have the old law. But in place of what flowed through the tribal blood, a new principle of life was to come: the Budhi. “But whoever drinks the water that I give him will never thirst. The water that I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” The man-God married the human soul, the Budhi descended into the Manas, and henceforth humanity could draw the consciousness of good and evil from another source, the source of the “living waters”, and no longer from the well of Father Jacob, the Mosaic legislation. For it is in this sense, and in no other, that the conversation of Christ Jesus at the well with the Samaritan woman is to be understood. Who was Christ? And what did he do for evolution? These are the big questions, and we will gradually approach their answers. Some of it may still be difficult to grasp, so we must first gradually strike notes that will resonate even more strongly.
So far Budhi radiates into it. For the next, the sixth round, Budhi would have to do everything that Manas did in the fifth; on it the world pointer stopped at the end of the fifth main race and the fourth sub-race. In the seventh round, Atman would then have to be developed.
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94. Theosophy Based on the Gospel of John: Fourth Lecture
02 Nov 1906, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
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It is only through self-awareness that he rises above the other three realms. Without a thorough understanding of this development, and without understanding what an initiation or awakening is, we cannot penetrate the depths of the Gospel of John. |
Jesus answered and said to him: Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you. Being under the tree is the occult expression for initiation, the secret of multiplying and expanding consciousness. |
The image that this level of initiation expresses is sitting under the tree. You will find this expression everywhere in the occult language. For example, Buddha sits under the Bodhi tree. |
94. Theosophy Based on the Gospel of John: Fourth Lecture
02 Nov 1906, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
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In our consideration the day before yesterday, we arrived at the conclusion that the Gospel of John contains many great aspects. Today we want to talk about the relationship between man and the world that surrounds us here on this earth. Man usually sees himself as a much too simple being. In reality, however, he is a very complicated entity. One of the characteristics of the modern human being is their laziness, which extends to our way of thinking. The truth is simple only for those who have first made their way through the complexity. It is like a thread with many, many pearls strung on it. From the public lectures, we have already seen how man is related to the cosmos that surrounds him, to the earthly nature that surrounds him. Through his physical body, he is related to the mineral, so-called inanimate world; through his etheric body, to the whole world of plants, to vegetation; and through his astral body, to all animal beings. It is only through self-awareness that he rises above the other three realms. Without a thorough understanding of this development, and without understanding what an initiation or awakening is, we cannot penetrate the depths of the Gospel of John. Consider the three kingdoms of nature around us. The crystal has no self-consciousness, no ego in the physical world. This assertion is based on clear insights that come from occult research. But only here on this earth do the stone, the plant, and the animal have no self-consciousness. The question arises: are they not conscious? How this is to be understood can only become clear to us through occult study. Let us start with the consciousness of the human being. The nature of the human being in his fourfold nature is based on the fact that he has his consciousness in this physical world, that he has his four members in this world. Let us make this clear with a diagram:
The animal has its three bodies here, its I in the astral world; therefore the animal has no individual soul, but a group soul. If you look at a person's ten fingers, they are all animated, but not independent - they are only one part of the whole body. Just as we have to search for the ego of the fingers within us, so we have to go up into the astral world to find the common soul of the animals. The individual lions are members of the Lion-I, the Lion-Soul. All lions are connected in the astral, a thread goes from each of them into the astral world, where the ego is. ![]() For the materialist this is incredible; but the spiritual researcher must say: it is true! One can ascribe exactly the same evolution to the group soul of animals as to the human ego in the physical world. When we follow groups of animals on the astral plane, we see their development taking place there in the same way as that of human beings on the physical plane as individuals. The plant has its astral body in the astral world, its physical and etheric body in the physical world and its I in the lower devachan. But what is the entity of such a group of plants? Similar plants have their I, their group soul in the devachan. A human being in dreamless sleep is in exactly the same situation as a plant throughout its entire life. The entire plant world on earth is a sleeping being; the plant leads a dream life. Let us consider the sleeping human being: the physical and etheric bodies lie in the bed, the astral body is on the astral plane and the I in dreamless sleep in Devachan. Let us now turn to the mineral. Its physical body is in the physical world, its etheric body in the astral world, its astral body in Rupa-Devachan, and the I at the very top in Arupa-Devachan.
The mineral thinks, feels and wills like a human being, not on the physical plane, but in Devachan. It extends only its inanimate parts into the physical world. The mineral's relationship to its soul is the same as a human being's relationship to its nails and bones to its self. An insect crawling over a finger nail and mistaking it for inanimate because it does not see the whole individual, would be comparable to a person mistaking a crystal for inanimate. The crystal is therefore an object that belongs to a being that reaches up into the spiritual world; so is the connection of its physical appearance with the spiritual world. Man has his four essential elements on the physical plane. What is physical in man remains a physical body, but in Devachan it has a consciousness of its own, of which man knows nothing, though it haunts his limbs. The etheric body has a different consciousness, which is realized in the lower devachan. Finally, the astral body also has its own consciousness on the astral plane. So man is a very complicated being. The following scheme may serve as an explanation:
His ego is at home in the physical world; no one can dispute that. Furthermore, that part of his astral body lives in man and belongs to him, which has an unconscious consciousness and is at home on the astral plane. Furthermore, an unconscious consciousness of the etheric body exists on the lower devachan plan, and one of the ego in the upper devachan plan. The most important thing now is that the human being works from the ego into the other bodies, and that only through this does he become aware of the different consciousnesses. There is a peculiar connection between man and the different worlds, which is a most important mystery. If one learns to recognize this, then one gradually knows what an initiation is. When man works from his I into his astral body, then he rises up to the astral plane and becomes a companion of all astral beings. Everything that has an astral consciousness is around him. When he works with his I into his etheric body, then he rises at the same time into the lower parts of Devachan; then etheric beings emerge around him. This is a great and powerful moment: he sees light not only as light, but as the bearer of light-filled entities; with the physical rays of the sun, angelic beings approach that have light as their body. This is one result of initiation. When a person ascends or descends even higher, let us remember the words of Goethe: “Sink away! I could also say: rise!“”It is all one..." - then the moment has come when he first becomes one with the world's forefather. Then he can say: ‘I and the Father are one.’ Then entities emerge that are even higher than those described. Now imagine a personality who is so highly initiated that he consciously bears the nature of the higher beings in his own body, as John experienced with Christ Jesus. In the one Christ Jesus, the author of the Gospel of John sees the beings of the three worlds. And he has Philip say to Nathanael (John 1:45-51): "We have found him of whom Moses in the law and the prophets wrote, Jesus, the son of Joseph from Nazareth. And Nathanael said to him, ‘Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?’ Philip said to him, ‘Come and see.’ Jesus saw Nathanael coming to him and said of him: Behold, a true Israelite (that is, an initiate of the fifth degree), in whom there is no guile. Nathanael said to him: How do you know me? Jesus answered and said to him: Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you. Being under the tree is the occult expression for initiation, the secret of multiplying and expanding consciousness. Only now does Nathanael reply: “Master, You are the Son of God” - thus an even higher initiate - “and a king in Israel. Jesus answered and said to him, “You believe because I told you I saw you under the fig tree. You shall see greater things than that. And He said to him, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, from now on you shall see the sky open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.’ That means: to see that which permeates his four consciousnesses. Man becomes a ladder on which one can see the angels of God ascending and descending. In this physical world, too, there are higher beings than man. Man used to have a group soul on the astral plane before he descended to the physical plane, at the time when the “blood Rubicon” had not yet been crossed. The entire tribe lived in this group soul. Likewise, the animal group souls will later descend and individualize. Here we touch on a great mystery, which belongs to the seven secrets that are called the unspeakable. One of these secrets is the secret of numbers. It is true that whole groups of people had one soul. The secret is: From the One it flows and becomes a number: numerous like the grains of an ear of corn. When such a group soul descends, the same thing happens as with a seed: a grain is placed in the earth, and from it arises the ear of corn with many grains. But everything in the world exists only once in a certain way. So this humanity, as it is now, is also only here once. Nothing in the world repeats itself in the same way. In the group souls of animals, we see some that will later become individual souls, but under very different circumstances than humans, in a very different nature. Are there also souls that have already been individual souls and then ascended to the astral plane again and became group souls? Yes, there are such souls. They arise when a number of people come together cosmically around an initiate and become like the members of a common body. Initiates thus become folk souls. Thus the Jewish people, the chosen people, had a common soul that united the individuals, which was once human and had ascended again and become the folk soul. In the bosom of Father Abraham it could rest. Now imagine that a person undergoing initiation goes through his development more quickly. He then goes the same way as that folk soul as an individual soul: He becomes a group soul. The individual is absorbed in such an expanded consciousness. In truth, as an initiate, he has the cosmic value of an entire folk soul. You can still see this in the old terms. This stage of development was called by the name of the whole people, for example, Israelites. In the Persian Mithras initiation, seven levels were distinguished. The initiate of the first degree bore the name of the raven. He is the messenger between the physical and the astral world. The symbol of the raven has been attributed significance since the most ancient times. In the Old Testament, the prophet Elijah was provided for by the ravens. Ravens are the messengers of Wotan, who fly over the world every day and report to him what they have perceived. The Kyffhäuser mountain, where Barbarossa slumbers, is also circled by ravens, which are supposed to give him news when the hour of awakening has come. The second degree is that of the Occult. This may already live in the inner sanctuary. The initiate of the third degree, the warrior, may represent the occult wisdom he has absorbed in the world. Such a warrior is Lohengrin. This degree is alluded to in Mabel Collins' book “Light on the Path”. The fourth degree is that of the Lion. This is the designation for an initiate who has ascended with his consciousness to the tribal soul. Hence the expression: Lion of the tribe of Judah. In the initiate of the fifth degree, the consciousness of the people itself has awakened. He bears the name of his people; in the Mithras initiation, he is called the Persian. The initiate of the sixth degree is the solar hero. He can deviate from his path no more than the sun itself. The seventh degree is that of the Father. It is the union with the original spirit. Thus the “Persian” bears the name of the entire nation; his individual soul becomes a national soul. The image that this level of initiation expresses is sitting under the tree. You will find this expression everywhere in the occult language. For example, Buddha sits under the Bodhi tree. The tree comes from the one seed and has become many. Such is the process with the initiate; he has gained the ability to empathize with every single soul. So how would such a person have been called by the Israelites? “Israelite,” of course. As we have seen, Jesus recognizes Nathanael as an initiate of the fifth degree, as one who has attained a national consciousness. Nathaniel recognizes in Christ the higher initiate: “Rabbi, you are the Son of God.” Christ is an initiate of the seventh degree, who has expanded his consciousness to include the Father: “I (or the I-Am) and the Father (or the Divine) are one.” He is the life and light of men, for he has brought his high consciousness into the physical body. Some will think that such an interpretation is being spun into the gospel. Many, and mostly today's theologians, believe that the Bible should be interpreted “simply,” which actually means conveniently. But the gospel is not written in the usual way and for people who are accustomed to reading a book only once and then putting it down again. The Gospel was written for a time when the content was a book of life that was read again and again. It must be read and received in this way, because only then will one learn to recognize that each of these great truths contains an even greater truth, and that even the wisest never stop learning in the knowledge of the religious scriptures and in their full understanding. In the past, these writings were approached by learning a sentence; afterwards, one allowed it to live in the soul over and over again, and if one then had the good fortune, the rare opportunity to meet an initiate, one allowed him to explain it. For religious documents, and especially the Gospel of John, are written from the depth of wisdom, and therefore cannot be grasped deeply enough. But wisdom is not there for the comfortable. Wisdom is there for those who seek and search. The person to be initiated undergoes the first five stages of initiation while ascending or descending the astral plane. This is completely irrelevant, because the Hermetic saying applies here: “Everything above is as below.” Everything in the spiritual has its counterpart in the physical. If you ascend to the astral plane, you will find yourself in a national soul, for this lives on the astral plane. The sixth stage means as much as the other five combined: here the human being ascends in his etheric body and brings about its development. One nation always arises out of another through the astral body becoming different; astral entities are always to be found behind the national soul. But the etheric body of humanity and that of the individual remains unchanged from nation to nation; a new etheric body only arises with the ascent from race to race. Even the physical body is subject to change. The ancient Atlanteans had a very different physical body, and the first Lemurians had no real physical body at all. The solar hero encompasses in his consciousness an entire human race like individual atoms. He grasps the whole race with his consciousness. The seventh stage, the Father Initiation, leads beyond the race to all mankind on earth, to all peoples and races of the whole planet. Christ Jesus is the representative of this; he carries all mankind within himself. That is why in the Gospel of John humanity is called the bride, and the initiated Son of Man is called the bridegroom. Christ Jesus is the one who, in the essence, encompasses the consciousness of all humanity. This brings us to where we left off from the previous lecture when we were considering the wedding at Cana. |
94. Theosophy Based on the Gospel of John: Fifth Lecture
03 Nov 1906, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
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But God, who is formless, wanted to be the formless God for them. If we want to understand this process even more precisely, we must now point out another. The I has a long history of development in humanity. |
The task of the Jewish people was to carry pure manas into the future. To understand this better, we must step to the edge of a mystery, the fourth of the seven unspeakable mysteries. |
When Manas has absorbed the blood and so has Budhi, then we understand the passage in the Gospel of John: “He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.” |
94. Theosophy Based on the Gospel of John: Fifth Lecture
03 Nov 1906, Berlin Rudolf Steiner |
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You know the passage in the Gospel of John: “For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” Consider further how Jesus Christ contrasts his mission with the events in the wilderness: “Your fathers ate manna in the wilderness and died. I give you another bread, I am the bread of life. Let us recall once more how the four members of the human being developed at different times. The I only emerges as consciousness towards the end of the Atlantean period. The manasic abilities only arise in our fifth root race, and more specifically, manas arises inwardly in the sentient body in the primeval Indian epoch. In a higher form, Manas enters the sentient soul in the case of the ancient Persians. In the case of the Chaldeans and Egyptians, Manas enters the intellectual or mind soul. Let us be clear about what this means. Unlike today's astronomers, the Chaldean-Babylonian priests viewed the stars differently. They saw in them living, spirit-filled worlds. When they spoke of the planet Mercury, they did not just mean a material thing, but the Mercury spirit – just as we do when we name a person. The movement of the stars, their starry writing, was an expression of something spiritual for them. This is manasic knowledge, a penetration of space with thoughts. What their Chaldean predecessors limited to heavenly connections, the Egyptian sages drew into the service of more and more earthly matters and animal needs; they placed the manasic entity at the service of matter. Please note this. An example of this is the construction of the artificial Lake Moris. The Egyptians created a reservoir to regulate the Nile flood. The development of all of Egypt was based on manasic knowledge. Manasic means purely spiritual. Manasic beings were placed in the service of the highest human needs. It is the very nature of the mind soul to use manasic wisdom to satisfy external needs and desires. Today, this development, “Egyptian darkness,” the darkness of Manas, has progressed much further. But is it so crucial whether a person grinds his grain between two stones or orders it by cable in New York? Kama Manas is the name given in Theosophy to such a connection of higher consciousness with animal, earthly, material purposes. The ancient religions would have looked down on the achievements of all our technology, our communication and trade with very mixed feelings. They saw it as a defilement of sacred things when man put his higher mental capacity at the service of the lower natural needs. This was worse than when an animal uses its instincts, which are good for nothing better, to satisfy its needs. It was felt as a defection, an abuse of the manas called to higher tasks, a defection of the spirit from itself. This defection is expressed in a strange name: “Egypt”. This refers not only to the country, but the name is also the symbol for such apostasy; for it was in Egypt that it first happened on a large scale. The word Egypt is therefore not only meant as the name of the country here, but of the particular state of mind, the delusion of Manas, where the higher nature is placed in the service of the lower. This is not meant as a criticism, but as a description of the facts of spiritual-historical evolution. This stage had to be passed through; Manas had to be submerged in lower forces during three sub-races in order to then arise from its own nature. Within Egypt, however, there arose the people who were called to purify Manas, so to speak, to raise it to a higher consciousness. The Israelite people were called upon to fulfill the task of working Manas out of their own people. And the great missionary for this is Moses. The Israelites were transplanted to Egypt, where they received the inspiration for Manas. The exodus from Egypt is at the same time the exodus from Manas into the higher reality. To achieve this, something had to happen that would have a transforming effect on the ego. Moses first became the lawgiver of Israel. The Ten Commandments had to begin with the conscious I being worked towards. God must announce himself as the expression of the ego in man. In the third chapter of the second book of Moses, it is related how Moses, while tending Jethro's sheep, sees a burning bush from which the voice of Yahweh resounds: “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” This is the birth of Manas in self-awareness. Moses says to God: “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?” God replies to him: “I will be with you. And this shall be the sign to you that I have sent you: When you have brought my people out of Egypt, you will sacrifice to God on this mountain.” Moses asks further: “If I come to the children of Israel and say to them: The God of your fathers has sent me to you, and they will say, What is his name? what shall I say to them?” And God replies to him, ‘I am that I am. So you shall say to the children of Israel, I-Am has sent me to you.’ This is the birth of clear self-awareness, which was previously vague. Now it will be a matter of grasping God in his spirituality; to keep the God who announces himself within, truly holy. The law applies namely already to something higher. Jehovah God says to the people: “I am the Lord thy God, who brought you out of Egypt. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” But the people made an image for themselves and worshipped the golden calf, although they were commanded not to make an image or to take the name in vain. But God, who is formless, wanted to be the formless God for them. If we want to understand this process even more precisely, we must now point out another. The I has a long history of development in humanity. In order for the I to arise, the human body, which developed towards it, had to be transformed in many ways. In the ancient Atlanteans, part of the etheric head was still outside the physical head. This part corresponds to our forebrain. The head had to grow towards the etheric body, it had to mature towards spirituality. This was the prerequisite for self-awareness. Independence emerged at that moment in physical evolution when a bone system first developed in humans. The stability that humans thus acquired is connected to their predisposition for spirituality. And when we look at the future of humanity, it becomes all the more clear to us how important the formation of this bone system was. How will the human race change – in its body, not in its soul? It will become more and more solid. Just as the oyster masters its shell, man will master his body, his tool, from the outside. To understand this, you only need to start from the state of sleep, in which the soul masters the physical organism from the outside. In the times to come the soul will consciously control the body as its instrument from without. The formation of the bones is therefore the potential for something great and glorious. Hence the old religious injunctions: Keep your bone system. Do not break your bones. The symbolic expression of this was the sacrifice in Egypt in remembrance of the deliverance that took place there when the first-born of the Egyptians were strangled. As an outward sign, a lamb is to be enjoyed, and the words are therefore significant: “And you shall not break a bone in him!” Thus, at the point where Manas' liberation begins, this importance of bone formation is emphatically indicated in the ritual prescription for the Passover lamb. And with the great Lamb, the representative of humanity, with Christ Jesus, what was otherwise usual with all crucified people, the legs were not broken. “That the scripture might be fulfilled, A bone of him shall not be broken.” So the Jews were led out of Egypt. Let us see if our view is confirmed more precisely in the Bible. Yes, literally! It is one of the great achievements of spiritual science to be able to read the details of religious documents about ancient symbolic acts in their literal sense. The people of Israel go into the wilderness. What is the wilderness? When the self is absorbed in itself in order to seek the God within, then it must go into the wilderness, into solitude, and this wilderness man must then revive in himself after the awakening of the Manas in himself. When the children of Israel murmured because they were close to starvation, the Lord promised them that the next morning they would have plenty of bread. The next morning “it lay in the desert, round and small like the hoarfrost on the ground.” Then the Israelites asked each other, “Man hu - what is this?” That is the question that man asks himself when he is supposed to recognize something. They called the food that came from the shimmer manna. It is the same word as manas. Of course, philologists will object to this explanation, but that is how it is. The task of the Jewish people was to carry pure manas into the future. To understand this better, we must step to the edge of a mystery, the fourth of the seven unspeakable mysteries. Yesterday we spoke of the mystery of numbers, today we will touch on the fourth, that of birth and death. Birth and death, what are they in the occult sense? One must realize this. Are they always necessarily linked to life? Let us think back to pre-Lemurian times, before man descended into gross physical matter. He had a kind of light and fire body and was embodied in etheric matter. His contemporaries on earth are beings who are slightly higher than animals in physical bodies. In the animal body, a kind of cavity is formed. The etheric man descends into the cavity and fills the physical body. The man of light had condensed himself into an air man, who now moved into the physical body. This is the moment depicted in the history of creation with the words: “And God breathed into him the living breath, and he became a living soul.” With the breath we actually draw in our etheric body. The etheric man had condensed to the air when his connection with the earthly body could be made, and he entered the lungs. With each breath we actually draw our etheric body into us. The entire way of life was different for early man than it was for later man. Parts were constantly being released from his etheric body, and new etheric substance was constantly being drawn into it: renewal and excretion were taking place. There were also constant intensive changes within it, corresponding to the higher subtlety of the etheric body; this happened continuously without the abrupt change of birth and death. So there was no birth and death, only a transformation occurred. Dying and being born could only take place after the etheric body had entered into matter. Strictly speaking, birth and death are changes in the state of consciousness. Death can and must only occur where a soul dwells in a body that is actually foreign to it and uses foreign organs. The soul's previous purpose in life dissolves when the physical body is discarded. These two bodies are subject to two completely different laws and worlds, since the body belongs to the earth and the soul to the astral. The spiritual man who dwells in the body receives it when he enters the world, and the earth takes it away from him again. It is as if I live in the earth as a tenant: the tenement house is subject to the property laws and regulations - so is the earthly body. Through it, man can see outward. This looking outwards is a condition for knowledge; therefore birth and death are inseparable from the arising of knowledge. The Bible says this with the words: “Your eyes will be opened and you will know what is good and what is evil.” Thus, since Lemuria, Manas has been prepared, organized in opposition to what was formed in the lower realms. Manas enters the physical body through the senses; death is conditioned by manas, without manas there would be no death. This is the passage in the Gospel of John: “Your fathers ate manna and died.” One cannot die from the bread of life. It is Christ who brings the etheric evolution again. The Christ impulse is the penetration of Budhi. Manas is therefore a point of transition that took place when the etheric body entered the physical body in Lemuria. Budhi is brought into the etheric body from within through Christ, but from within. This principle of inward vitalization is brought by Christianity. “I am the bread of life.” As long as the world was bound to the physical body, the principle of heredity, man had no possibility of looking beyond death. But this happens at the moment when his life body, his ether body, can be enlivened from within through Budhi, when Manas receives Budhi. Moses is therefore the messenger for Manas, Christ the bringer for Budhi. At this stage, the initiate can be outside his body. Now we ask ourselves one more question: a people is made the bearer of the development of Manas, the whole national consciousness is condensed in the one initiate. When the Jewish people were about to forfeit their mission, the Lord said: I will destroy them, but I will make you, Moses, a great nation. This passage is to be taken literally; it is a higher initiation of Moses. In this way, Moses is given his mission in such a way that he is made an initiate with a national consciousness. Another deeply significant fact is the part played by blood in the process of Manas, for the higher process must naturally be reflected in the blood. Moses takes the sacrificial blood and sprinkles it over the people. This is the sign of the truth of the covenant through blood relationship. When Manas has absorbed the blood and so has Budhi, then we understand the passage in the Gospel of John: “He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.” If Christ is to be able to work on humanity, He must make a covenant with it through His blood. Man must receive Christ's blood in the Lord's Supper if Christ is to implant Budhi in him. Now we must consider some cosmic-human truths – the world is really very complicated. The entities that are stones, plants and animals today are closely related to human beings. Man is not the latest creature in creation, but the earliest. Today, let us disregard earlier earth embodiments and deal with man. When the Earth emerged from the Pralaya and condensed to the etheric Earth, it actually consisted of nothing but etheric human bodies and can be compared figuratively to the shape of a giant blackberry. Man at that time was a completely spiritualized being, endowed only with an etheric body. The next stage is that the etheric human beings divide into two currents, one ascending and one descending. From the descending current the animals emerge. Just as when we have two brothers, one of whom becomes more and the other less like the father, so men divide into two groups, men and degenerate men, the animals. Later, these two groups became three: the plants were added. Then a fourth group separates: the mineral. Whenever a new element is added, the human being develops a different, new nature. At the moment when the animal separates, the human being develops an astral sense; at the moment when the plant separates, etheric growth. At the moment when the stones branch off, the microcosm forms bones. Every time a new nature develops, a corresponding correlate arises in man, so that one can say of every animal, every plant, every mineral what corresponds to them in man. The lion is also in man, but overcome. Hence the correspondences and analogies between bodily organs and earthly objects, be it a lion, deadly nightshade or asbestos. Paracelsus says: Outside in the earthly world there are nothing but letters; man is their coherent inner meaning, their word. All of nature is only man laid out; in man the word is formed. Those driven away from the stream of human development have not remained without any development at all; on the contrary, they have even reached certain developmental goals earlier than the non-specialized human being. For example, the future hardness of the human body is being prepared; the woody plant has long since achieved this in its inferior nature. Certain poisons also represent a developmental advantage over humans. Poison that is found in a plant was once also in man. If man had developed in the same sense as these substances, then he could, for example, excrete arsenic from himself. If he contracts cholera, the same symptoms occur as if he had taken arsenic. That is why Paracelsus called the cholera patient an arsenicicum. Just as with wood and poisons, so too with the plant sap, the wine, which is a substance that has rushed ahead of human development. This can be examined in more detail. The wine, the sap that flows through the grapevine, is a one-sided development of the blood. What the blood breathes gives carbonic acid, alcohol. Alcohol is, so to speak, future blood. The plant sap breathing out carbonic acid is related to the present blood as the blood of the future is to the blood of the present. From the cosmic knowledge we experience the relationship between wine and blood. Christ may say of the wine: This is my blood. For Christ is the representative of the future humanity. His teaching itself is a living source to which humanity develops. Let us think of the parable of the vine and the branches, of the transformation of water into wine. The vine is only a developmental anticipation, analogous to the anticipated hardening of the wood. Just as the plant today transforms its watery juices into wine, so man cannot do it today, but he will transform his blood later. From this point of view, light is thrown on the mystery of the transformation of water into wine at the marriage at Cana. Why at Cana in Galilee? Galilee (el gojim) is the land of the mixed race, of the non-Aryans. There racial mixing had always been very strong, thus the removal of the barriers between peoples; there the marriage of different bloods took place. The mother of Jesus is also present, as she is later at the cross. She is never called “Mary” in the Gospel of John. On the contrary, the two other women at the cross are explicitly named “Mary”, and one of them is referred to as the sister of the mother of Jesus. Jesus' mother is not Mary. |