| 157. The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations: Lecture VIII
02 Mar 1915, Berlin Translated by Anna R. Meuss Rudolf Steiner |
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| You see, speaking of the physical world people speak of monist philosophy, of there being only one ultimate substance or principle, frequently saying to themselves: ‘I can only understand the world if I see the whole of it as a unity.’ We have had some strange experiences particularly in this respect. |
| Nothing else is required if we wish to gain these experiences but to persist in meditation using the prescribed method. Above all, it must be clearly understood that certain feelings with which we approach the threshold of the spiritual world will have to be put aside beforehand. |
| It is not possible, for instance, to see objects illumined by light in the spiritual world. It must be understood that in the spiritual world we ourselves shine forth with the light. When light falls on an object in the physical world the object becomes visible to us. |
| 157. The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations: Lecture VIII
02 Mar 1915, Berlin Translated by Anna R. Meuss Rudolf Steiner |
|---|
Dear friends, once again let us first of all remember those are out there at the front, in the great arena of present-day events:
And for those who because of those events have already gone through the gate of death:
May the spirit we are seeking as we work towards spiritual knowledge, the spirit who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha for the good of the earth, for the freedom and progress of man, be with you and the hard duties you have to perform! Last week we gave some detailed consideration to souls who, if we want to look for them now, have to be looked for in the spiritual worlds. And we considered souls who are close to us, letting them tell us one thing or another that can illumine for us the time a soul entity spends in the spiritual world. Today I want to consider more the path the human soul may take to enter into the spiritual worlds While dwelling in a body here on earth, there to find the spiritual realms we spoke of last week, where what are called ‘dead’ souls may be found. It has to be stressed over and over again that the path into the spiritual worlds appropriate to the soul of modern man in the light of the whole evolution of mankind is a path with many preparatory stages, some of them difficult indeed, stages that have to be won through. Today I intend to speak of some aspects of the path to insight and I shall do so from a point of view that may be called imaginative perception. Dear friends, you know very well already that in the spiritual world the human soul is really and truly able to learn and observe only in a Way that does not make use of the body as an instrument. Everything We are able to gain by using the body as our instrument can only provide knowledge and experience relating to the physical world. To experience the spiritual worlds we must find a way of doing so outside the physical body. That way is indeed open to modern man, though it is not easy to achieve observation of the spiritual world by going outside the body. Another point is that anyone not able to make such observations himself will be able to evaluate observations achieved in the spiritual world, once they have been achieved, on the basis of a genuinely sound common sense, that is not just the common sense generally called sound, but a genuinely sound common sense. Today, however, our subject will be the path as such, the way the human soul on the one hand comes out of the physical body, as we might put it, and on the other enters into the spiritual world. As I said, I want to use the approach of imaginative perception today. Last week we took another approach. Many things will have to be presented in the form of images and it will be up to you to pursue these further In meditation. In doing so you will find that this path is one of very special significance. It is possible to enter into the spiritual world through three doors, as it were. The first may be called the Door of Death, the second the Door of the Elements and the third the Door of the Sun. Anyone Wishing to follow the path to knowledge in its entirety will have to take the road to knowledge through all three doors. The Door of Death has always been very fully considered wherever the mysteries were taught. This Door of Death cannot be reached unless we seek to reach it through meditation, a term by now thoroughly familiar, which means by giving ourselves up to certain thoughts or feelings that are exactly the right ones at the time for our individual personality. We make them the absolute centre of our conscious minds, identifying with them completely. It is very easy for human effort to flag when this path is taken, for lack of ease and the overcoming of obstacles are part of this and are essential. So it will be necessary again and again to make those quiet, deeply personal efforts, endeavouring to give ourselves up to those thought contents, those feelings, in such a way that we forget the whole world and live only in those thoughts, those feelings. When we learn to achieve this over and over again we shall finally be in a position where we perceive something that is like a kind of independent life within the thought on which our conscious mind is focused. We shall get the feeling that until then we had merely been thinking that thought, making it the focus of our conscious mind; now, however, this thought will be felt to be developing a life of its own, an inner activity of its own. It is as though we found ourselves in a position where we are truly able to produce a distinct entity within us. The thought begins to take shape as an inner structure. That is an important moment, for we realize that this thought, this feeling, has a life of its own and we feel ourselves to be the enveloping form holding this thought, this feeling. We are then able to say to ourselves that our efforts have made us the arena where something has been able to develop that is now achieving a life of its own through us. It is an important moment in the life of a person practising meditation when he awakens to himself and the thought held in meditation comes to life. He will then realize that spiritual objectivity has come to him, that the spiritual world is paying attention to him, that it has drawn close. Of course, it is not easy to reach this level of experience, for before it is reached we have to live through feelings and sensations for which the human being has a natural aversion. A certain feeling of isolation has to be experienced for example; a feeling of loneliness, an experience of being abandoned by the physical world as it were, the feeling that this physical world does many things that wear us down, threatening to crush us. It is through this feeling of isolation that we finally reach the point where we are able to bear the strong inner life to which our thought awakens, into which it is born, as I should like to put it. There is much indeed that goes against the grain. There is much in man that goes against him and this can lead to a real experience of thought coming to life within him. There is One particular feeling that comes up, an inner experience that comes up, which is one we really do not want to have. At the same time we will not admit to ourselves that we do not want to have it, saying instead: ‘Oh, I'll never do it! I'll go to sleep in the process. My ability to think will go, for this goes beyond my inner strength.’ In short, We will automatically come up with all kinds of excuses, for the experience to be gone through is that thought, in thus becoming enlivened, really becomes a distinct entity. It assumes reality, taking on a form of identity. Then the vision arises, and not merely the feeling, that the thought is like a small seed to begin with, a round seed one might say, and that it then grows and develops into something that has definite form, extending into the head from outside. Then a challenge is presented: ‘You have identified with the thought and now you are inside the thought and growing into your own head with the thought. Essentially, however, you are still outside.’ The thought assumes the form of a winged human head that continues into indefiniteness and then extends into one's own body through the head. The thought thus develops into something like a winged angel's head. That is what we must actually achieve. It is difficult to have this experience, and you will really believe you are losing all ability to think at the moment when the thought grows to assume that form. One feels one will be taken from oneself at that moment. And what so far has been the body we have known, into which the thought is now reaching, will feel like an automaton that has been left behind. There are also a great many obstacles in the objective spiritual world to prevent this becoming visible to us. The winged angel's head truly becomes an inner vision but there are all kinds of obstacles against it becoming visible. Above all, the point reached is the actual threshold of the spiritual world. If we succeed in standing firm within ourselves the way I have described, we are then on the threshold of the spiritual world, truly on the threshold of the spiritual world. There, however, You see, speaking of the physical world people speak of monist philosophy, of there being only one ultimate substance or principle, frequently saying to themselves: ‘I can only understand the world if I see the whole of it as a unity.’ We have had some strange experiences particularly in this respect. When we started our spiritual movement here in Berlin with just a few members—that is quite a few years ago now—people found their way to us who then discovered that after all they could not feel they belonged to us in every fibre of their being. There was a lady, for instance, who after a few months came and told us that what spiritual science had to offer was not really the right thing for her, for it meant one had to do a great deal of thinking and thinking wiped out exactly the things that were important to her. She said she always sort of went to sleep when thinking. She also felt that really there was only thing that counted, and that was unity! It became evident that in her case the unity of the world which monists look for in all kinds of spheres—and not only the materialists among monists—had become a fixed idea: Unity, unity, unity! She wanted to look only for unity. In the intellectual life of Germany, one particular philosopher, Leibniz, was very much a monadologist. He sought not unity, but the many monads45 which for him were ensouled entities. He therefore knew quite clearly that as soon as one enters into the spiritual world it can be a matter only of plurality, not of unity. And so there are monists and pluralists. These views are considered philosophies. The monists fight the pluralists who are speaking in terms of plurality; they themselves only speak of unity. For you see, it is like this: Unity and plurality are concepts that only apply to the physical world. And now people are thinking these things must also apply to the spiritual world. But there they do not apply. There we have to be prepared to see a unity at one moment and then having to overcome this unity the next moment, and that it will show itself to to be a plurality. It is unity and plurality at one and the same time. Nor is it possible to transfer ordinary arithmetic, physical mathematics, to the spiritual world. It is one of the most powerful, and at the same time also most profound, Ahrimanic Prejudices—wanting to apply concepts we have acquired in the physical world just as they are to the spiritual world. We really must arrive on its threshold without bag and baggage, unencumbered with all we have learned in the physical world. We have to be prepared to leave things behind on the threshold. All concepts and ideas, and, indeed, especially the concepts we have made great effort to achieve, have to be left behind. We have to be prepared to accept that in the spiritual world something quite new is given. Man has an enormous tendency to cling to what is given in the physical world. He wants to take his achievements from the physical world into the spiritual world. Yet it must be possible for him to face a clean slate, face utter emptiness, where his only guide will be the thought that is beginning to assume life. This entry into the spiritual world has been called the Door of Death because it is really much more of a death even than Physical death. In physical death people are convinced they put aside their physical body. On entry into the spiritual world we must resolve really to put aside our concepts and ideas and to allow our essential nature to be rebuilt. Now we come to stand before the winged thought entity that I have spoken of. We shall come to stand before it if we really make every effort to live within a thought. All we need to know then is that when the moment that lies ahead makes-different demands on us from those we have envisaged we must truly stand fast, we must not turn back as it were. The turning back tends to be an unconscious reaction. We flag, but our flagging merely indicates that we are not willing to leave behind bag and baggage. We are not prepared to do this because it means that the soul has to die in a way, with all it has acquired on the physical plane, before it can enter into the spiritual world. This door therefore has to be called the Door of Death, such being its nature. Then we shall be able to use the winged thought as a spiritual eye we have acquired, or also a spiritual ear, for it is exactly through this thought entity that we hear, sense, perceive what is there in the spiritual world. Dear friends, it is possible to speak of specific experiences we may gain that allow us the enter into the spiritual world. Nothing else is required if we wish to gain these experiences but to persist in meditation using the prescribed method. Above all, it must be clearly understood that certain feelings with which we approach the threshold of the spiritual world will have to be put aside beforehand. These feelings arise because we usually want the spiritual world to be different from the way it presents itself to us. This, then, is the first door, the Door of Death. The second door is the Door of the Elements. It is the second door to be gone through by all who practise meditation with true devotion. It is, of course, also possible for people to have the benefit of a constitution that lets them reach the second door without having gone through the first. This is not a good thing from the point of view of true insight, but it is possible to get to that point without having gone through the first door. Full and proper insight will be gained only by going through the first door and then approaching the second in conscious awareness. This second door comes about in the following way. You see, having gone through the Door of Death one first of all finds oneself in specific conditions which one can see are really similar to sleep if looked at externally, considering their effect en man and the way they are apparent in the life of man. Inwardly, however, they are quite different. Externally, man is as though in a sleep state when in these conditions. It is exactly at the point when his thought has begun to live, when it begins to stir, to grow, that external man is in a sleep-like state. He need not be lying down—he may be sitting on a chair—but he is in a kind of sleep state. Outwardly this state cannot really be distinguished from the ordinary sleep state; inwardly, however, it is very different. Returning to the normal state we have in life we then realize that we were not asleep but within the life of thought, just as we are now in a condition where we have woken to the physical world, as usual, and are looking through our own eyes at things which are luminous. Yet we also know that now when we are awake we are thinking, producing thoughts, putting them together. Just before, however, when we were in that other state, the thoughts were producing themselves out of themselves. One thought approached another; they illumined one another; one thought moved away from another—and what we usually do ourselves when thinking has there been doing itself. We know that whilst we are normally an ego that attaches one thought to another, we float first to the one thought and then to another, when in this other state we are united with them; then we are off and within a third thought and afterwards Come floating back again. We get the feeling that space has ceased to exist. I think you will agree that in physical space the position is that if we feel drawn to a point and look back on it, then move away from it and finally want to approach it again, we would first have to make our way back again; we would have to make our way there and back. This does not apply in the other state. Space is not like the space we know then, and we jump through space, as it were. One moment we are at one point, the next we have gone. We do not pass through space. The laws of space have ceased to exist. Here we are alive and active within thought itself. We know that the ego has not died. It is active within the life of thought, but we are not immediately masters of the thoughts within which we now live. The thoughts produce themselves—we are drawn along. We are not actively swimming in the currents of thoughts; instead the thoughts are taking us on their shoulders as it were, carrying us along. This state has to come to an end. It does so when we go through the Door of the Elements. Then We gain control of it all and are able to create a particular line of thought quite deliberately. Then our will is alive within the whole of thought life. This again is a tremendously important moment. I have even spoken of it exoterically in my public lectures.46 The second goal is reached by identifying with our own destiny. This will enable us to bring the will into the world of living thought. When we have first gone through the Door of Death we come to a point where various things are done with us in the spiritual world. We come to do things ourselves in the spiritual world by identifYing with our destiny. This is only achieved gradually. Then our thoughts assume a character identical with our own essential character- The deeds of our essential nature enter into the spiritual world. To do this properly it will be necessary to go through the second door. when we begin to use the power we derive from identifying with our destiny to take active control in our thoughts—not merely going along With a thought as though it were a dream picture but able to erase one thought or another as occasion arises and call up another—when we come to a point where we begin to be able to use our will in handling things, then we shall indeed have to go through an experience that may be referred to as going through the second door. It will be found that the will-power we shall now require presents itself to us as a fearsome beast. In the mystical tradition this has for many thousands of years been known as 'meeting the lion' . This encounter with the lion has to be gone through. It consists in a feeling of abject terror concerning what has to be done in the thought world, great fear of entering into a living union with the thought world. This terror must be overcome, just as the sense of isolation has to be overcome at the gate of death. We feel terror. This terror may present itself in all kinds i of ways, as a sensation that is not at all like fear or terror, yet it s essentially fear of what one is getting into there. It is important that we genuinely find a way of controlling the lion. The Imagination paints a very vivid picture of the beast opening its huge jaws ready to devour us. The will-power we want to use in the spiritual world is threatening to devour us. All the time the overriding sensation is that we must use our will, we must do something, we need to take hold of one thing or another, and at the same time another feeling arises in connection with all these elements of will activity into which we are entering. It is the feeling that they will devour us if we take hold of them, extinguish us in the world. That is the lion devouring us. What we literally must do—if we are to stay with the metaphor—is not to give in to fears that the will elements may take hold of us there in the spiritual world, devour us and strangle us; no, we must mount the lion and take hold of those will elements, using them to effect our deeds. That is the crux of the matter. Your can see, of course, what this is all about. Having first of all gone through the gate of death we are then outside the body, and out there we can only use the forces of the wilt. We must fit into the cosmic harmonies. The forces to be used out there are also within us, it is only that they function at an unconscious level—the forces that make the blood move, make our hearts beat, derive from spiritual entities. And we become immersed in these when we immerse ourselves in the element of will. These forces are within us. If someone is taken hold of by the element of will without having followed the regular esoteric path, without having gone through the gate of death, he is taken hold of by the forces that normally circulate in his blood, beat to his heart. He is then not using the forces that exist outside his body but the forces present within his body. This would be ‘grey magic’. It would induce a person to intervene in the spiritual world of his Own accord with forces we should not use to intervene in the spiritual world. So it is important that we see the lion at this point, that we truly have this beast before us and know: That is what it looks like, that is how the forces of will want to take hold of us, and we must lay hold of it out there outside the body. If we do not go up to the second door we shall not see the lion and shall then be in permanent danger of wanting to rule the world out of human egotism. The right Path to knowledge is the one that leads first of all out of the physical body and existence as a human being, after which we approach the relationship we will need to form with the entities of the spiritual world. Now, of course, most people are inclined to look for an easier way to the spiritual world than through genuine meditation. It is possible, for instance, to avoid the Door of Death and approach the second door if one's inner constitution permits this. This is achieved by giving oneself up to specific mental pictures, particularly of the fervent type, that are supposed to suggest general surrender to the whole universe. Mental pictures suggested by some mystic or other with only partial knowledge, suggested in good faith. But they mean we pass over thought effort as though in a dream, with feelings being stimulated directly. Feeling are whipped up, the emotions are enthusiastified. It will indeed be possible to reach the second door by this method, and one will also be given over to the will forces, but instead of controlling the lion the person is devoured by it and the lion will do as it likes with him. This means that things will occur that fundamentally speaking are occult, but in the main are egotistical. Despite a certain inherent risk it is therefore necessary from the point of view of the true esoteric teaching of today again and again not to draw attention to any kind of mysticism that merely whips up feelings and emotions. Such an appeal to elements that whip up the inner life of man, cracking the whip to drive him out of his physical body whilst keeping him in the context of his blood and heart forces, the physical forces active in the blood and the heart, will lead him to perceive the spiritual world iii a way; this cannot be denied and may indeed have much to be said for it that is good. But it makes man feel his way about in uncertainty in the spiritual world, so that he is not the least able to differentiate between egotism and altruism. One finds oneself in a difficult situation having to stress this, for present-day minds are still very apt to got to sleep during proper meditation and anything relating to it. They prefer not to tighten uP their thinking to the point where it is possible to identify oneself with the thinking process. They much prefer to be told: Give yourself up to all-loving devotion, to the universal spirit, or something like that. The result is that thinking is avoided and the emotions are whipped up. People are indeed guided to spiritual perception in that way; but they are not in full conscious awareness and are unable to tell if the things they experience there, things they experience for themselves, arise from egotism or do not arise from egotism. Yes, parallel to selfless meditation there has to be enthusiasm brought into all our feelings, but the point is that this must run parallel to thought. Thought must not be excluded. Certain mystics are, however, seeking to achieve something exactly by the method of suppressing thought and giving themselves up entirely to the glow of whipped-up emotions. This is a difficult point, for it does work and people who whip UP their feelings like that do progress much faster. They do enter the spiritual world and they have all kinds of experiences there, and that is what most people want. For most people it is not a question of entering the spiritual world in the right way but rather of getting there altogether. The uncertainty arises because if we do not first go through the Door of Death and instead approach the Door of the Elements directly, Lucifer will prevent us from actually perceiving the lion. We are then devoured by it before we see it, as it were. The problem is that we are no longer able to tell what relates to us and what is Part of the world out there. We come to know spiritual entities, elemental spirits. It is possible to get to know quite an extensive spiritual world without going through the Door of Death, but on the whole these are spiritual entities whose function it is to maintain the human circulation and human heart action. Such entities are of course always present in the spiritual, the elemental, world around us. These are spirits whose sphere of life is the air, the warmth flowing around us, and also light. Their sphere of life also lies in the music of the spheres our physical organs are unable to hear. They are spiritual entities active and present in all that lives. That is the world we would then enter. It all gets very seductive because it really is possible to make the most marvellous spiritual discoveries in this world. You know, when someone who has not gone through the Door of Death but has marched straight up to the lion gate, failing to see the lion, perceives an elemental spirit whose function it is to maintain heart activity, such an elemental spirit—which also has to maintain the hearts of other people—may on occasion give news of other people, even of people from the past; or it may offer prophetic tidings relating to the future. So the business may bring great successes but it still is not the right path, for it does not give us free mobility in the spiritual world. The third door to be passed is the Door of Sun. Again there will be a specific experience as we approach this door. At the Door of Death we must perceive a winged angel's head, at the Door of the Elements a lion. At the Door of the Sun we must perceive a dragon, a wild dragon. And we must take a proper look at this wild dragon. But now Lucifer and Ahriman will together make every effort to make the dragon invisible, to hide it from our spiritual vision. If we do perceive it we shall find that, fundamentally speaking, this wild dragon has above all to do with ourselves. It is the tissue of the instincts and feelings fundamentally relating to what in ordinary life we call our lowest nature. The dragon has within it all the forces we need for the process of digestion and many other things—if you'll forgive my reference to such base functions. The principle within us that enables us to digest food and perform a number of other functions linked to what strictly speaking is our lowest nature appears to us in the t-07. of a dragon. We must look at it as it emerges from us coil upon coil. It is far from beautiful, that dragon, and this makes it easy for Lucifer and Ahriman to influence our unconscious soul life and get us to a point where unconsciously we do not want to know about seeing the dragon. It is a tissue also of all our idiocies, all our vanities, our pride and self-seeking and also of our basest instincts. The Door of the Sun is given that name because it is the forces dwelling in the sun that also weave the very tissue of which the dragon is composed. Sun forces make it possible for us to digest our food and perform those other organic functions. This truly comes about through living with the sun. If we do not perceive the dragon at the Door of the Sun the dragon will devour us and we shall become one with it in the spiritual world. We shall then no longer be different from the dragon; we shall actually be the dragon going through experiences in the spiritual world. And the dragon can experience things of great significance, it can learn magnificent things as it were. Those are experiences more enticing, I'd say, then those made at the Door of Death or after passing the Door of Death. The experiences made at the Door of Death are colourless to begin with, shadowy and subtle, so slight and subtle that they easily escape us and we are not much inclined to develop the degree of attention needed to take hold of them. And again a certain pitch must be reached in order that something so delicately coming to life in our thought may be able to expand. In the end it will expand into a world. But it calls for long term active effort and endeavour to reach the point where it shows itself as a reality full of colour, sound and life. We must let those forms that are without sound or colour take on life from all corners of infinity, as it were. If for example we want to use what may be called ‘head clairvoyance’—meaning the type of clairvoyance that arises when thought is enlivened—to detect the simplest spirit of the air or of water, this spirit of the air or the water will initially be something so slight and shadowy as it flits across the horizon that it will not catch our interest. If it is to assume colour or to sound forth, colour has to come to it from the whole periphery of the cosmos. That however will only happen after a long period of inner effort. It will only happen if we watt for this to be given to us. Just think, if you have such a small spirit of the air, metaphorically speaking. and it is to come out in colour, to appear in colour, then the colour has to radiate in from a mighty part of the cosmos. It will be necessary to have the strength to make it radiate in. Such strength however can only be achieved through devotion. The radiant forces have to come in from out there through devotion. If we are all of a kind with the dragon, if we are One with it, and we see a spirit of the air or the water, the inclination will be to let the powers radiate out that are within us, specifically in the organs which in ordinary life are called lower organs. That Is much more easily done. The head is in itself a perfect organ, but the astral body and the ether body of the head do not have much colour to them. The colours have been used to form the brain, for instance, and particularly the cranium, the bony skull cap. If therefore you used head clairvoyance on the threshold of the spiritual world to lift your astral body and ether body out of the physical body, there would not be much colour to it. Colours are used to form the perfect organ, the brain. If on the other hand you use, shall we say belly clairvoyance, to lift the astral body and ether body out of the stomach. the liver, the gallbladder and other organs, the colours have not been used in the same way to form perfect organs. These organs are only on the way to perfection. What comes from the astral body and ether body of the belly is beautifully coloured; it glitters and glistens in all kinds of sun colours. Lifting your astral body and ether body out of that region you will bestow the most marvellous colours and hues upon the forms you are seeing. It is therefore possible for someone to see marvellous colours and paint pictures in gorgeous colours. It is of course interesting to study the spleen, the liver and the gut. Anatomists find this interesting and for science it is indeed necessary. Yet if someone with knowledge goes into this, the beautiful and colourful pictures which appear represent what lies at the back of the digestive process two hours after a meal. There can be no objection to this being investigated. Today anatomists find it necessary to study these organs; one day science will gain a great deal from investigating them and knowing what the ether body is doing when the stomach is digesting food. One thing has to be clearly understood however—if we do not have conscious awareness as we go through the Door of the Sun, we will not know that we are offloading everything mere is in the ether and astral bodies of our bellies onto the dragon, separating it out. Letting this radiate out into the forms seen clairvoyantly we do indeed perceive a marvellous world. The beautiful result is also the one most easily achieved, but it does not in the first place arise through higher powers, out of head clairvoyance' but through belly clairvoyance. It is very important that we know this. For the cosmos nothing is low in the absolute sense, only relatively speaking. The cosmos needs to work with tremendously significant forces to bring about what is needed for the digestive system. The point, however, is that we must not fall into error, not deceive ourselves, but know things as they are. To know that something presenting itself from a truly marvellous aspect is nothing but the digestive process, that is something really important. If on the other hand we believe, say, that a special angelic sphere is revealing itself to us in such a picture, then we are indeed in error. A reasonable man will therefore not be against a science being nurtured on the basis of such knowledge but merely against such things being put in a false light. That is the real point. It may happen, for instance, that some process in the course of digestion results in someone always lifting out a specific part of his ether body at a specific stage in the digestive process; he may then be a natural clairvoyant. It is however important to know what is going on there. Man will find it difficult therefore to use head clairvoyance—i.e. a sphere where all colour present in the ether and astral bodies has been used to bring about the marvellous structure of the brain—and make forms that are without colour or sound assume full colour and to resound. With ‘belly clairvoyance’ on the other hand he will find it relatively easy to see the most marvellous things in the world. This belly clairvoyance does of course also involve powers which man must learn to use. The powers used there for the digestive process are after all merely transformed power. We will experience them in their right form if we get better and better at identifying with our destiny. In this field, too, it will teach us to draw up not just the winged angel s head that came up first but the other part that follows, and it is important to draw up not just the powers that serve digestion but also those of a higher kind. Those are the powers that lie in our karma, in our destiny. Identifying ourselves with these we shall be able to send forth the spiritual entities we see around us, entities whose tendency is such that sounds and colours flow inward from the universe. Then, of course, the spiritual world will have its full content, it will be concrete, so real and concrete that we find ourselves within it the same way we find ourselves in the physical world. A particular problem arises at the Door of Death. We really have the feeling—and this, too, has to be overcome—that we will lose ourselves there. Having made a real effort, however, to identify with the thought element we can also be aware that we may have lost ourselves but will find ourselves again. That is an experience one has there. We lose ourselves on entering into the spiritual world, but we also know that we shall find ourselves again. The step has to taken of reaching the abyss, losing ourselves in the abyss, but trust that we shall find ourselves again over there. That is an experience to be gone through. Everything I have described refers to inner experiences that have to be gone through. It is important to know what really happens to the soul there. It is just the same when we are supposed to see something; it is easier if a friend points it out than if we try and work it out for ourselves. But everything I have described can be achieved if you practise true devotion in giving yourself up again and again to your inner work and to inner overcoming through meditation. This has been described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and in the second part of Occult Science. This is especially important—that such different kinds of experience are met with beyond the threshold of the spiritual world. If we desire—and this is only natural—to see a continuation of the physical world in the spiritual world, a duplicate of it; if we think everything is bound to look the same in the spiritual world as it does here in the physical world, we cannot enter that world. It will indeed be necessary to go through something that feels like a reversal of everything we have known here in the physical world. Here in the Physical world we are used to open our eyes, for example, and see light, to gain the impression of light. If we expect to be able to open a spiritual eye in the spiritual world and gain an impression of light, we cannot enter that world for we will have the wrong expectations. Something like a mist will be woven which veils the spiritual senses, hiding the spiritual world from us the way a sea of mist hides the mountains from view. It is not possible, for instance, to see objects illumined by light in the spiritual world. It must be understood that in the spiritual world we ourselves shine forth with the light. When light falls on an object in the physical world the object becomes visible to us. In the spiritual world we ourselves are inside the ray of light, touching the object with the light. One therefore knows one is swimming with the ray of light in the spiritual world; one knows oneself to be within the radiant light. This serves to indicate how we can acquire ideas that can help us get on in the spiritual world. It is extremely useful, for instance, to visualize the following: What would it be like if you were inside the sun now? Not being inside the sun you are seeing objects when they are illumined by the sun s rays, because they reflect the light. Imagine now you are inside the sun's rays and touching the objects with them. This contact is an experience we have in the spiritual world; in fact, experience in the spiritual world consists of our knowing ourselves to be alive within it. We know ourselves to be alive within the weaving of thoughts. It is just when this state begins, where we consciously know ourselves to be within the weaving of the thoughts, that there is an immediate transition to the state of knowing oneself to be within the bright radiance of light. For thought arises from light. Thought weaves in the light. But it will only be at that point that we experience ourselves as becoming immersed in light when we are within the weaving of thoughts. Mankind is now at a stage where such concepts have to be acquired. Otherwise men will find themselves in completely unfamiliar worlds when they go through the gate of death and enter the spiritual world. The capital resources men were given by the gods at the very beginning of earth evolution have gradually been used up. Men now no longer take with them through the gate of death the remnants of past inheritance. They now need to acquire ideas bit by bit here in the physical world that will enable them to pass through the gate of death and see the entities that come to meet them there offering the dangers of temptation and seduction. It is because of these great cosmic schemes that spiritual science has to be made known to man now, that spiritual science must come among men. And today in particular, in these fateful days, we can observe transitions really being made. People are presently going through the gate of death at a young age, as the great destiny of the age demands. They may be said to have consciously allowed death to approach them whilst still young. I am not so much speaking of the moment just before death occurs, say on the battlefield. In that situation many elements of enthusiasm and so on may be present and these make the moment of death far less elevated or far less a moment of utter concentration than we are Inclined to think. But when death has occurred it leaves an ether body that has not yet been used up, leaves an unspent ether body in our time. The dead individual can look at this and he will perceive this Phenomenon, this fact of death, with much greater clarity than he would see it when death has ensued due to illness or old age. Death on the field of battle is an event of much greater intensity and has much powerful effects than death occurring in another way. It therefore has an effect on the soul that has gone through the gate of death, for it is instructive. Death is terrible—or at least can be terrible—to man whilst he is within his body! However, once he has gone through the gate of death and looks back to his death, death will be the most wonderful experience ever possible in the human cosmos. Looking back to his entry into the spiritual world through death is the most marvellous, the most glorious, magnificent and beautiful event on which the dead individual can ever look back during the time between death and rebirth. Birth has left little real trace in our physical awareness, for no one equipped with ordinary, undeveloped faculties will recall his physical birth. But death is certainly always there for a soul which has gone through the gate of death, from the moment consciousness develops. Death will always be present and present as the most beautiful, the one who brings resurrection into the spiritual world.47 And death is the most marvellous kind of teacher, a teacher truly able to prove to a receptive soul that there is a spiritual world, because by its very own nature death destroys the physical and only lets the spiritual come forth. This resurrection of the spiritual element, with the physical completely cast aside, is an event that is always present between death and new birth. It lends strength, a marvellous, great event, and the soul gradually grows into understanding of this. It grows into this in a completely unique way if the event is to some degree one we have chosen, one might say; not a death we lave sought, of course, but nevertheless found of one's own free will by joining the ranks of one's own free will. This again brings greater clarity to that moment. Someone who otherwise has not thought much about death, who has concerned himself little or only to some extent with the spiritual world, can now find death a marvellous teacher once he has died, particularly in our time. This particular war can reveal something of tremendous significance for the relationship between the physical and the spiritual world. I have already drawn attention to this in a number of lectures given in these difficult times: what we are able to do by teaching merely by the word is not enough; but in future people will receive tremendous instructions because so many deaths have occurred. These deaths have an effect on the dead, and the dead in turn intervene in the process of the future civilization of mankind. I am able to give you the words of one who has gone through the gate of death as a young man now in the present time. His words have come through to me and they really come as a surprise, one might say, because they show how this dead individual who is experiencing death with great clarity as something he went through on the field of battle is now finding his way into the different kind of experience one has after death. They show him working his way out of earthly ideas and into spiritual ideas. Let me communicate these words to you. They were picked up, if I may call it this, when one of those who died on the field of battle tried to let them reach those he left behind.
That, as it were, is what the dead individual learned by looking on the death he went through, as if his essential nature was taking In all it must learn to live after death; and it also wants to make this known, wants to reveal it.
He feels that he is more alive now where his comprehension of the spiritual world is concerned than he was before his death. He experiences death as one who awakens us, as a teacher:
And he feels that he will be one who does things in the spiritual world. But he feels the it is the radiant powers within him that do the doing, he feels light coming to life within him:
It really is possible to see everywhere, and to see rightly, that anything perceived in the spiritual world will again and again provide absolute confirmation of the things that can also become generally known out of the spiritual world through what is called imaginative perception. And it is this one so much wants to see come to life through our spiritual movement: that we do not merely have knowledge of the spiritual world but that this knowledge really comes to life in us so strongly that we learn new ways of feeling with the world, share In the experience of the world as the ideas of spiritual science come to life within us. As I have said so often, fundamentally we are asked to bring inward life into the thoughts of spiritual science; this is the contribution we are asked to make to the further development of the world, that the spiritual thoughts born out of spiritual science may stream together and soar up into the spiritual world as powers of Illumination that are given back to the radiant universe; that the universe may unite with the element which those who have gone through the gate of death in these fateful times are making part of the movement of spiritual culture for mankind. Then the words will come true which again shall conclude our talk today:
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| 157. The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations: Lecture IX
09 Mar 1915, Berlin Translated by Anna R. Meuss Rudolf Steiner |
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| It really happened that with the transition from the OW Moon to the earth state 'hands' were brought under control up here. They are still held fast by the solid skull and because of this the etheric and astral elements are free. |
| These hands cannot remain as they are when we develop to the Jupiter state—they will undergo a physical change, just as our brain underwent the change that made it an organ of reflection. This is a process we may consider one of natural evolution. |
| That is how the state of alternation between sleep and waking undergoes its evolution. It is, however, quite a general state which may be found in all kinds of different areas. |
| 157. The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations: Lecture IX
09 Mar 1915, Berlin Translated by Anna R. Meuss Rudolf Steiner |
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Dear friends, once again, let us first of all remember those who are out there at the front, in the great arena of present-day events:
And for those who because of those events have already gone through the gate of death:
May the spirit we are seeking as we work towards spiritual knowledge, the spirit who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha for the good of the earth, for the freedom and progress of man, be With you and the hard duties you have to perform. A week ago we gave some consideration to imaginative meditation. We found as a result of our considerations that all insight or perception which is genuine perception of the supersensible worlds has to be won by considering the world in a way that is independent of the body. Our ordinary everyday perception has to make itself independent of the conditions imposed by the body, the senses, the nervous system, etc. Ordinary daytime consciousness is achieved when man's spirit and soul elements use the physical body as a tool. Spiritual perception consists in certain more subtle processes which involve man. Some discussion of these processes will form the first part of today's talk. I said: ‘More subtle processes’. They are finer, more subtle, than the ordinary processes used for everyday perception, observation, apprehension, because man is only able to base himself on what is familiar to him in everyday life, and can only gradually rise to finer, more subtle processes. We should all be able to achieve the most satisfying, the greatest, knowledge of the spiritual world if there was an easy way of being in full conscious awareness for at least a fraction—just a small fraction, a minute if you lik—of the part of our life we spend between going to sleep and waking up again. (I am speaking of no mere dream-like consciousness but full conscious awareness.) Any form of initiation always consists in making conscious the part of us which during the night, when we are asleep, is unconscious and outside the body. The process of attaining to genuine higher knowledge always consists in making conscious what otherwise remains in a state of sleep and unconsciousness between going to sleep and waking up again' There is one part of the human being—and this may surprise you—one part of the physical human being that basically is always asleep. These are things one need not necessarily go into at the very beginning-of one's anthroposophical life—the finer points of spiritual science can only come to our attention gradually. When it is said that man is awake in the daytime and asleep at night we naturally assume his ego and astral body to be fully united with the physical and ether bodies during the day whilst having a separate existence outside the physical and ether bodies at night. It is only gradually that we progress from a rough outline of the facts established through spiritual science to more specific truths. Very generally speaking, it is correct that during sleep man's ego and astral body are outside his ether and physical bodies. There is however a part of the body that is asleep also between waking up and going to sleep, at least essentially so. Oddly enough this is the part of the human body we call the ‘head’. This is asleep when we are awake. You might well think the head to be the part that is most awake. In reality, however, it is the least awake part of us. In his thinking activity, and in head work altogether, man is awake. This is only possible, however, because even when we are awake the relationship of the ego and astral body to the head organs is such that they—that is the ego part of the head, the astral part of the head—cannot unite completely with the physical and ether part of the head. They always experience a life of their own outside the physical and ether part of the head. They always experience a life of their own outside the physical and ether parts of the head, as it were. A close union between the astral and the physical parts of the head occurs only when we have a headache. If we have a powerful headache, the astral, physical and ether parts of the head are very much united. We are least able to think when we have a headache. The reason is that the bond between the astral, physical and ether parts of the head is too strong. Our thinking, in which we are awake, and all other waking soul life bases on the fact that the ego and astral body of the head are in a way outside the head and therefore reflected, mirrored, in the physical and ether body of the head. Similarly we are only able to see ourselves in a mirror because we are outside it. It is this mirroring effect that provides the images for everyday consciousness. Those are mirror images we experience and take note of in everyday life. Living thus outside the head, with the head asleep and ego and astral activity reflected back by the hard skull, we are able to feel the inner ego and the inner astral body to be our own. In the other parts of the body ego and astral activity are still influencing the activity of the physical and ether bodies to a much greater extent. If the same held true for the head we would be conscious of the activity of digestive organs, and perhaps also rhythmical activity like that of the heart, In our heads—or perhaps not be conscious of them—and there could be no question of thinking activity. Thinking depends on activity being reflected, thrown back, and absorbed. The heart and other organs with the ability to absorb take in ego and astral body activity. The organs of the head do not absorb it but rather reflect it; the result is that it can be experienced in the inner soul. During the night, between going to sleep and waking up, the whole ego and the whole astral body—again this is not entirely accurate but merely an approximation—but by far the greater part of the ego and astral body is outside the physical and ether bodies. Between going to sleep and waking up man is able to relate to a far greater part of his ego and astral body the way he relates to his head when awake. But the rest of the organism has not yet progressed as far as the head, it has not yet reached a point where it reflects the way the is able to reflect. Because of this, there can be no conscious awareness during sleep. Considering the way we move our hands we have to say to ourselves: ‘These hands, in so far as we are able to move them, have of course four elements to them—ego, astral body, ether body and physical body. All of these are present and active when we move our hands.’ Now imagine someone found himself in a position where his hands were tied to his body, tied in such a way that he could never move them, for they would be firmly attached to his body. Let us also assume this person had the gift of moving the ether body, or at least the astral body, of his hands independently whilst his physical hands remained immovable. This would have a highly significant result. He would be extending his astral or ether hands beyond his physical hands which are tied and immovable. We'll never go to the effort of actually executing this manoeuvre; when we move any of the astral or etheric parts of our hands we simply move our physical hands as well. This is something we would find difficult to do in a natural way whilst on earth, yet in the course of evolution it will be achieved, though in a less crude fashion than just described. It will be achieved as mankind develops further in the course of earth evolution and grows towards Jupiter. Then his hands, his physical hands, will in fact become immovable. On Jupiter human beings will no longer have physical hands that are mobile organs, for they will be fixed. On the other hand their astral and ether hands will in part be able to move outside those physical hands. Only a trace of the physical hands will be left on Jupiter and they will be immobile; the astral or ether hands on the other hand will be able to move freely, like wings. As a result, Jupiter man will not merely think with his brain, for his fixed hands will enable him to reflect into the elements now united with his physical hands. His thinking will be much more alive, much more all-embracing. When a physical organ comes to rest, the spirit or soul element belonging to it will be liberated and able to develop spiritual and soul activity. You see, it is the same with the brain. When we were still living on the Old Moon we had organs up here [the cranium] that moved like hands. These organs have become fixed. On the Old Moon we did not yet have a solid cranium; the organs now folded up to form the brain were then able to move like hands. Because of this, men living on the Old Moon were not yet able to think the way men do on earth. A clairvoyant assessing thought activity clearly perceives that in a human being who is awake the sleeping organs in his brain do indeed move like wings, the way I have described that astral and ether hands would move if our physical hands could be immobilized. It really happened that with the transition from the OW Moon to the earth state 'hands' were brought under control up here. They are still held fast by the solid skull and because of this the etheric and astral elements are free. Our organs need to be developed further. These hands cannot remain as they are when we develop to the Jupiter state—they will undergo a physical change, just as our brain underwent the change that made it an organ of reflection. This is a process we may consider one of natural evolution. The initiation process is a different one. Here, we take some mantric meditation or other and make it the centre of our thoughts, entering into it completely. When we do this it is really important that we do not make use of our physical organs in forming and holding the thought. We must withdraw from the physical body, the sphere of our physical senses, with this thought. We must hold on to this thought and have no help from the physical world as we meditate. In our ordinary everyday thinking activity we have the help of the physical body, of the physical world. We think when impressions reach us through the senses. This makes thinking a comfortable process—the world makes both a physical and an etheric impression on us and this provides support for our thinking. When we meditate we must go apart from all that is physical, and that includes all ideas or concepts. Entirely of our own free will we have to make a thought the centre of our conscious mind. As a result something very specific occurs, a process more subtle than the process of perception. We have to reach a point where we forget the rest of the world—as though the rest of the world were not there and nothing really existed in space and time except for the one thought. When we have reached the point where we are indifferent to the whole world, living only in that meditative thought, something occurs which physical science will never be able to demonstrate. This subtle process of meditation causes heat consumption—a very small amount of heat is used, is taken away. It is a process we cannot demonstrate by physical methods but consumption does take place. We may return to the subject on some other occasion.48 We shall see then that it is possible to prove too to ordinary scientists, on the basis of processes everyone will be able to observe, that the process of meditation involves a subtle heat process and also a subtle light process. We use up some of the light we have taken in; we consume light. There is something else we consume, but let us for the moment just consider the fact that we use up heat and light. These things we take in make happen what I spoke of a week ago, that something evolves which is very delicate and alive. When we are thinking in the ordinary everday way, something lives within us that leaves its imprint on the organism, triggering a process that also has to do with heat; it leaves its imprint and the process which takes place causes us to have memory. This, however, must not happen when we meditate. When we live in a pure thought or feeling content, separate from everything else, the heat, light, etc., we consume does not leave its imprint on the body, it leaves its imprint in the general ether. It triggers a process outside us. Dear friends, if you are seriously, genuinely meditating, you are impressing your thought form into the general ether; it will be there within it. And if you then look back on a meditation this will not be the usual way of remembering; You are looking back to something which has left its imprint in the cosmic ether. It is important to take note of this. It is a subtle process and we perform it in such a way that it establishes a link between us and the etheric and astral world surrounding us. A person wjo develops only the ordinary everyday kind of perception and thinking is only involved with himself; it is a process that takes place entirely within us. On the other hand, someone taking up real, genuine meditation lives in a process that at the same time is also a cosmic process. Something goes on there, though it is exceedingly subtle. What happens is that a small amount of heat is used up during meditation. When heat is used up coolness develops; the general cosmic ether is cooled down when we meditate. Light is used up as well so that it is subdued; darkness arises, subdued light. The result is that when someone meditates in some place in the world and then goes away, he leaves behind in that place a very slight coolness and a very slight reduction in light. The general light state is subdued, has grown darker. A clairvoyant is always able to detect where someone has been meditating, genuinely going through the process of meditation. When the person leaves, a shadow image of him remains and this is also cooler than the surrounding area. A cool dark spectre is thus left in that place; we have engraved it there. In a very delicate and subtle way, something has been done in that place which we may very roughly compare with what happens on a photographic plate. A kind of spectre is produced. This is a process which takes place not only within man but as a cosmic reality; man makes himself part of the cosmos through this. There is one thought human beings meditate on even if they are of not to meditation, if they know nothing whatsoever of any kind of nonphysical science. There is one thought human beings do meditate of on. It is seemjingly small, but of infinite importance in life: the thought of the I or ego. When we think of the I or ego we always think independently of the body. In so far as we have a relationship to the cosmos through our ego, certain things connected with the ego—even if people are not aware of this in life—are thought in such a way that they are like the branches of a tree, if I may put it like this. Certain thoughts, feelings, will impulses become like branches, or else like feelers mobile feelers. These will be grouped around the ego. All is life, therefore, the human being has trailing behind him what he is thinking as an ego, and this stretches out mobile feelers or tentacles in all directions. Man is always leaving a spectre-like jellyfish behind him, all through his life. This is a very real thing, for at one and the the same it contains everything a person has lived through—in so far he has thought and felt it with his ego. This remains. And when the human being has gone through the gate of death he will gradually learn to look back on what he has left behind. This makes it possible for a link to exist between what a human being experiences after death and what he has left behind. Being in the earth state we must first of all reach the point in meditation where our organs are held fast through the will; the ability to meditate properly depends on really freeing our thinking, feeling and emotions as we meditate, so that the body is not involved. The result is that we are capable of such powerful inner concentration that we are able to choose what does and does not become engraved, leaving a photographic impression as it were, in the cosmic ether. Something we need to stress again and again is that real, genuine meditation is a very real process, an absolutely genuine process. If we consider that the human being leaves this behind—that, fundamentally speaking, all his experiences are contained in what he leaves behind and that it remains—we will, of course, realize that when the human being has gone through the time between death and new birth and comes down to earth again he will still find in the cosmic ether what he previously left there. Here we see in real terms how karma comes about. For the spectre of himself which man has produced will now influence him and in conjunction with his later life give rise to what will be his karma. Such insights can only be gained slowly and gradually. A real process is taking place, one that goes beyond us, having an effect on the cosmos, and because of this the person meditating gets the feeling that meditating is something different from the usual kind of thinking activity. With the latter we have the feeling that it is we ourselves who put the thoughts together, taking one with the other; it is we ourselves who make the decisions. Meditating, we gradually get the feeling: It is not just you yourself who is meditating, for something is going on of which you are indeed part, but it also takes place outside you, as something that has happened and remains. That is the feeling which should arise. If I throw a fragile object across the room I have the feeling that what happens is not only what went on before it flew through the air but also something that followed, once the object has become separate from me. In the same way meditation gives rise to the feeling: It is not just you who is thinking. You fan thoughts into flame but they then whirl away, they whirl and exist in their own right. You are then no longer their master for they enter into a life and identity of their own. When we thus feel ourselves to be within the atmosphere in which our thoughts are active and have a life of their own as if those thoughts actually moved through our brain in waves—when we begin to feel this we come to feel certain and sure that we are within a spiritual world, that we are merely one element weaving within all that is weaving there. It is important that we really achieve such stillness, such inner calm, in our meditation that we achieve the significant feeling: ‘It is not you alone who is doing this; it is being done. You have started to set these waves in motion but now they spread around you. They have a life of their own in which you are merely the centre.’ So you see, my friends, that it is an experience which actually leads to recognition of the spiritual world. It is an experience we have to wait for, possessing our souls in patience. It is extraordinarily important, yet it needs patience, persistence and self-denial to wait for it. This one experience will be enough to make us fully convinced that the spiritual world does objectively exist. You will be able to see from what has been said here that a state of alternation between waking and sleeping really is a general necessity. We are asleep and awake here in the way that is familiar to us. We sleep and awake so that our brain, which is active throughout the day, shall also be able to immerse itself in that part of us which by day takes care of the organs and at night is outside us, always remaining unconscious. This rhythm between sleeping and waking has to take place; we have seen that it also takes place in the great process of cosmic evolution. Now our brain is really asleep, to enable us to think, and our hands are awake—that is our whole relationship to our hands is free, awake, whereas we do not move them in sleep. On the Old Moon we were quite awake as far as the brain is concerned but we have since learned to sleep; we have been able to evolve into thinkers on earth because we have learned to let the brain sleep. On the Old Moon the brain was still awake, but here it has achieved the ability to sleep. Because of this man is able to think. The mid-body will learn to sleep on Jupiter and thinking will then become a wider experience. That is how the state of alternation between sleep and waking undergoes its evolution. It is, however, quite a general state which may be found in all kinds of different areas. We may say that wherever we look it is apparent that a state of alternation between waking and sleeping is essential. Let me give you a rather peculiar example, one that is peculiar yet may have special meaning for us at the present time. If you want to find out what went on in the cultural and literary life of the early 19th century you will of course look up a history of literature. This will tell you which poet was important and which was not; and the record will only go a certain way, for poets who were of no importance at all will not be mentioned. And so a person who knows anything at all will know which poets were important at the beginning or in the middle of the 19th century and which were not. They'll know that. Undoubtedly, there must also have been people who wrote poetry during the 19th century and yet are totally unknown to most if not all people today. I think you will agree that there must have been people of whom nothing at all is known today. But a time will come when the picture people have, say of literary life in the 19th century, will be different, completely different. Then a poet given many pages today will be given just half a page whilst another, who is not even mentioned today, will be given ten or twenty pages. Things are going to change. And, indeed, it will be necessary for thing to change quite profoundly. It is particularly when we consider that spiritual science is an element that now has to enter into the process of civilization, taking hold of human knowledge and entering into it everywhere, that we become aware of how men and women will have to change their approach and learn to think. Let me give you an instance. I think you will agree that something new has to develop in place of present-day cognition, the process in which knowledge is on the whole obtained by giving validity only to whatever man gains by making use of his physical organisation. The new thing which must develop will give validity also to what may be gained by taking the path of spiritual initiation. Today the situation is such that a genuine scientist only considers valid, considers scientifically proven, what has been gained through a path of knowledge based on the instruments of the physical body. Everything else is considered a figment of the imagination. It may just be accepted as hypothesis, but even this is not allowed to go far or else the hypothesis will be called utter fantasy. So that is the situation today. But a time will have to come when validity attaches to insights gained on the path to spiritual knowledge, and, what is more, insights gained in the physical world are fully illumined and truly fathomed only through spiritual insights. That is how it will have to be. Well, we are not merely speaking metaphorically but in completely real terms if we say we are now living in an age when men are asleep as far as the gaining of insight is concerned—or at least the majority of people are. Courtesy comes easy here, for we can exclude anyone with an interest in spiritual science—they are of course awake when it comes to the gaining of spiritual knowledge. The rest of mankind, then, is asleep when it comes to spiritual insight; they are sleepyheads. And our most highly esteemed science arises because they are really asleep. We are in an age when this genuine reality is being missed by a human race that is utterly and completely asleep. This has been in preparation for a long time and we might say that just as there is the going-to-sleep stage before we sleep so we are able to observe a kind of dream-state and a struggle against sleep when it comes to gaining spiritual insight. It slumbers sweetly. But it has not been easy to achieve this full sleep-state and a struggle against sleep is apparent in certain major events in the first half of the 19th century when some individuals still has a certain intuition, an inner experience dawning, of spiritual truths, of conditions in the spiritual world. As it progressed the 19th century really could do no other, in its desire to achieve those sweet slumbers, but forget poets who still had special knowledge of the spiritual world. They do not fit into this state of spiritual slumber. I have once before spoken of the poet Julius Mosen whose Ritter Wahn (Sir Illusion) and also Ahasver clearly showed that Julius Mosen had a living relationship with the spiritual world.49 This knight called Ritter Wahn—taken from an earlier legend but given qualities by Julius Mosen which reveal his connection with the spiritual world—this Ritter Wahn is looking for the man on this earth who could tell him about conquering death. The main theme of Julius Mosen's poetic work Ritter Wahn is that Sir Illusion, that is a man in the ordinary state of knowledge, knowledge based on illusion, is looking for someone who is able to tell him how to get beyond the state of illusion connected with physical life. He holds the man able to give him that information in very high regard. Julius Mosen then described the way his knight intended to find the man who will tell him how to gain knowledge that does not depend on the physical body:
Sir Illusion thus wants to learn how knowledge can be attained that is not overcome by the body but itself overcomes the body, continuing through eternities. The longing for this was already there. And the knight then first of all fought the old man Ird, as Julius Mosen called him. This is something people did not understand, this word Ird. But if they could have read it in the original they would not have interpreted Ird as ‘death’, they way Rudolf von Gottschall did who was a professor of literature at Leipzig [1823–1909]. It should have been interpreted as ‘earth’ or ‘world’. So Sir Illusion first of all fought the old man Ird. He overcame him. We spoke of the spirit overcoming the earthly on the last occasion, of the spirit vanquishing earth, time and space. After this the knight overcame the old man Space and arrived at the gates of heaven, that is the spiritual world. He then developed a longing to return to earth because he had not lived life to the full. The whole of this beautiful poetic work tells us that there has been a man once before who wrestled with the problem of initiation, who knew something of the existence of such a problem of initiation. And in his Ahasver Julius Mosen presented a similar theme. Another German poet who is quite frequently mentioned is Wilhelm Jordan [1819–1904]. Very little mention is made however of the work in which he presented himself at his most spiritual: Demiurgos. This appeared in the 1850s. It is quite a significant work, for in Demiurgos it is really shown how spiritual entities, spiritual powers that may be good or evil, approach man, enter into his soul and manifest here on earth with the help of human beings. So if we see a human being before us we have to remember: 'This person does of course consist of everything we know about, but something acts into him that comes from higher spiritual entities.' Demiurgos basically consists in a description of how man is connected with the spiritual world. In three handsome volumes Jordan shows how spiritual entities are influencing the soul of man. That was the struggle against sleep, and after this, sleep took over completely. Those were people who still found in their dreams what mankind now has to strive for in spiritual science, emerging from the sweet slumber of purely external, positivist cognition. We must really see this as a process, the way human beings enter into spiritual dreams to end up in a state of idleness, in the sleep of idleness. We may ask ourselves why there still was such a person as Julius Mosen, a man able to describe spiritual progress and depicting something of an initiation process in the travels of his knight. Where did such things come from? The answer is very strange. Julius Mosen fell ill and for much his life was almost totally paralyzed. What is the significance of such a paralysis? It means that the physical body dried up as it were, separating from the astral and ether bodies. Because of the paralysis the astral and the ether bodies were more free. In this case a disease process had brought about what we have to struggle for in the process of initiation. Such a disease process should not, of course, be seen as one of genuine cognition nor as something desirable to be brought on deliberately. Yet in an age that may be said to have been entering into a state of idleness, the cosmic order caused a man to be born on earth who had been given that particular relationship between his physical and his soul and spirit elements. So there he lay, paralyzed and unable to move his limbs but with a soul and spirit that were alive and active. It was his paralysis that made them free and able to enter into the spiritual world. Something initiation seeks to achieve in a healthy way was here brought about through illness. A man had to spend much of his life Paralyzed and unable to leave his bed, but his soul and spirit triumphed over his physical paralysis and rose in freedom. This is why that man was actually able to write works that strike us as being spiritual by nature. The same could also be achieved in a healthier way than in the case of Julius Mosen, though perhaps it would not have the same depth. It was possible to achieve it in a healthier way. During the first half of the 19th century it was still possible for a poet to reveal the process of the culture and civilization of man in the course of history by letting shine through everywhere into the figures he describes the connection which exists between the spiritual worlds and man as he walks about on this earth. In the 1830s a beautiful poetic work appeared, Auffenberg's Alhambra.50 Auffenberg is a spiritual poet and his Alhambra is a significant work. Thus we have three works—four if we count Ahasver—Ritter Wahn, Ahasver, Demiurgos and Alhambra. There is much more still to be said about such works which are not easy to get hold of nowadays. They show us that in this age everything to do with man's relationship to the spiritual world is fading away like a dream, as it were, in the face of the general materialistic slumber state. Before, mankind was open to things spiritual, though, of course, the people who are now describing the intellectual life of that time fail to mention the men who did have full awareness of the spiritual world. When someone writes a history of philosophy today he will also fail to mention anyone having awareness of the spiritual world, or no mention is made of the way the most outstanding figures were working in•; concord with the spiritual world. It is interesting to compare Ritter Wahn, a work pulsing With genuine spiritual life, and Jordan's Demiurgos which also contains something of spiritual life. Jordan was probably a healthy man; the spirit and soul element did not separate from the physical and ether bodies the way it did in the case of Mosen whose body was paralyzed. The consequence was that Jordan was only capable of producing a work such as his Demiurgos in his young years, when he was still more flexible, with an inner energy, elasticity and logic capable of grasping things relating to soul and spirit. Later he fell into the crude Darwinism which had come into intellectual life, and this found reflection in his Nibelungen and other works. This man therefore had to join the rest in succumbing to the lullaby of materialism. It is important for us to realize that it is the mission of our age to bring an insight into the intellectual process, the process of human evolution, which arises out of genuinely spiritual perception—an insight the universal spirit may be said to be pointing to in the tragic fate of Julius Mosen: Man is no longer able to reach the spiritual world simply without his own volition'. There have been times in the past when this was Possible, where the purely natural constitution of man was such that spirit and soul elements, astral body and ether body, were freer and more independent of the physical body. That time has passed, however. In our present materialistic age—and for the rest of earth existence, in the course of which it will grow more and more intensive—man in his normal state will need a compact union between spirit-soul element and physical body. This, however, does not permit man to achieve some form of awareness of the spiritual world simply through natural circumstances. The reason why this has to be so is that the will must be given opportunity to be active. Imbued with the Power of spiritual science, man must be able to use inner will impulses, acting out of freedom, to separate the spirit-soul element from the Physical body during meditation, through concentration. To achieve spiritual insight the way people did in the past we would have to be sick, paralyzed, have our limbs paralyzed in the second half of our life. Our present organization would make this necessary. In the past it was not necessary. Then, man did not have to be paralyzed, for the union between astral body, ether body and physical body was such that people had clairvoyant vision. Today it could only be acieved through illness. What happened in the case of Julius Mosen has been put there more or less as visible evidence. We really must use spiritual science to bring before our mind's eye the profound spiritual background to what shows itself in the world. At the same time we must come to see how the necessity which now exists for mankind gradually to accept spiritual science is intimately bound up with profound impulses in the history of the spirit. The necessity arises not from arbitrary choice of some individual but from the great cosmic spiritual evolution which has to take its course throughout the period of earth evolution. Man's mission and task is to enter more and more into genuinely spiritual experience as he moves towards the future, so that mankind does not dry up the way the whole of earthly civilization is drying up, and the spirit will truly be able to continue to live on this earth. One of of many things capable of bringing such insight home to man is something I have spoken of a number of times: the fact that numerous people are now, within a relatively short span of time, bearing their soul principle upwards when they still have unused ether bodies which contain powers that could have gone on to provide for physical life for many years. Because they are now going through the gate of death due to the terrible historical events of our time they are taking their unused ether bodies up into the spiritual world. And these will be the people who in future will make a major contribution to spiritualizing human civilization. Apart from all else, these major events of our time are profoundly significant in human evolution because the creation of unused ether bodies can yield forces that stream out into earth evolution, forces that will be able to prove that the spiritual world is real. We know, however, that it would not help, dear friends, to have any number of suns in this world if men were unable to receive the light of the sun through their eyes. It is true, as Goethe has said, that if the eye were not of like kind with the sun it could never see the sun.51 Just as the sun would be shining in vain if there were no eyes to take in its light, so organs will have to come to life out of the souls of men which will really be able to take in the spiritual life which is streaming down from the cosmos and the world where men live between death and new birth, a world which also contains those unused ether bodies. Thus the great sacrifice brought in war must join into the spiritual cosmic sphere; it has to be taken up by human souls receptive for things of the spirit. And it would be a dreadful thing if the only science to survive were to be the one that now considers itself to be the one and only one, a science which does nothing but record the facts perceptible to the outer senses, using them to make intellectual judgements. If science merely repeats what is also there without science, it cannot form a link with divine and spiritual reality. This is something only possible for elements awakening in the human soul that truly go beyond sensory perception. These will be able to unite with the spiritual reality so that the process of earth evolution itself will remain spiritual, alive in the spirit. Any progress for mankind depends on the spiritual entering into the process of human soul development, and the decision as to whether something is true or false can only be made out of the spirit. Today, people think they can decide one thing or another, prove one thing or another, without the spirit; yet the final authority when it comes to making decisions relating also to sense-perceptible truths is living spiritual experience. When the old experience of the spirit vanished during the first half of the 19th century, evidence was again given, one might say, of what the spirit could bring about in certain people, to demonstrate the non-nature of scientific argumentation concerned only with external, sense-perceptible things. A man who wrote under the name of Dr Mises' did a great deal at that time to show that everything, but everything, can be proved, and that the opposite can also be proved, so that the final authority still lies in the relationship to spiritual life. This man had seen many things happen in science, in medical science—he was a member of the medical profession—he saw new drugs coming up all the time for one disease or another. He lived at a time, for instance, when people started to prescribe iodine for the treatment of goitre. It was a time when this remedy was much celebrated, when people wanted to demonstrate—this was in the 1820s—what a valuable remedy iodine was. So one day Dr. Mises sat down and demonstrated that one could easily prove, using all the scientific principles, that Iodine was an excellent thing. the reason being that the moon consisted of iodine, as could be clearly proven.52 And he provided irrefutable evidence in support of this. His intention was to show that it is possible to prove anything we want to prove. And we certainly can. The intellect, which is bound to the brain, really is able to prove yes or no with regard to simply everything. It is almost always the case that some scientific view or other comes to the fore and the opposite comes up at another time; people are able to prove something just as well as the other side is able to disprove it. Anything where we do not have the yes-no wave surging up and down in such Ahrimanic fashion, anything which is real progress in a human evolution which is good and divine, bases on the spiritual. We must be clear in our minds that the present age has produced its own characteristic cultural features on the basis of being the age when nonphysical science is asleep, and because slumber of the mind has spread to an extraordinary degree over all the things that tend to be regarded as science. This slumber of the mind is necessary. I am not being critical, but merely stating a fact. With all due regard it has to be said, to be emphasized, that it was necessary for the whole of science to go to sleep for a time as far as the spiritual world Was concerned. Now, however, the time has come when there must be an awakening, new vitality, in spiritual life, and we can sense the longing for this which exists everywhere. This, dear friends, will provide the foundation for the feeling that must bring us to life now, in these pain-racked times. We may only be able to have a faint notion that it is possible for man to find the way to the spiritual world, but because we have the feeling we must look for this way. We must seek a way in which our spiritual thoughts can meet with what is streaming down from those unused ether bodies. And a time will come when we shall really be able to look back on these days which are so full of pain and laden with destiny and do so from a certain spiritual elevation. This spiritual elevation will come when more and more people find impulses for spiritual science out of the genuine content of life awareness within them. I have always from the depths of my soul given you a final thought here in this place in recent times, and this is something which will then come true. Let us make it our hope, a hope anyone who is connected with spiritual science can and indeed should cherish in days like these which are laden with fate.
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| 157. The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations: Lecture X
16 Mar 1915, Berlin Translated by Anna R. Meuss Rudolf Steiner |
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| This is also why it is so tremendously difficult to understand the Germans. They can only be understood if we are able to admit that it is possible to have a people whose folk spirit only comes in sporadically to intervene in their evolution. |
| We are, however, living in an age when we must try and really understand the origins of the enmity which shows itself so clearly now during these fateful days within Europe. |
| Today he is so much more closely bound up with his body that he must see to it that he gains understanding of the spiritual world independent of his body. We may say that man had a hereditary trait that gradually grew weaker and weaker and disappeared altogether in the present age. |
| 157. The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations: Lecture X
16 Mar 1915, Berlin Translated by Anna R. Meuss Rudolf Steiner |
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Dear friends, once again let us first of all remember those who are out there at the front, in the great arena of present-day events:
And for those who because of those events have already gone through the gate of death:
May the spirit we are seeking as we work towards spiritual knowledge, the spirit who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha for the good of the earth, for the freedom and progress of man, be with you and the hard duties you have to perform. Dear friends, the points we shall consider today will once again be aphoristic. They may serve to round off one or another of the things I have spoken of before. The first point I want to refer to is the way we find the facts, the real nature, of the spiritual worlds when we ascend to those spiritual worlds and have taken the first steps Within them. Let me start by considering the problems we meet in our efforts to attain to the spiritual worlds. They are indeed considerable, and although it is certain that the path we take when we meditate, With all the work we do in the inner soul, must lead to the spiritual world—certain as this may be—it is also very easy to fail to recognize the particular kind of soul experience that takes the soul up into the spiritual worlds. First of all there is the problem that we are in the habit of judging everything our soul comes upon on the basis of experiences we have gained in the world accessible to the outer senses. We could say that we really know nothing but what we have made our own out of the sense-perceptible world. Now we enter the spiritual world and find that everything is entirely different from the sense-perceptible world. Everything being different, the main problem is to extend the range of our attention to the things we are supposed to be seeing. The situation is that the whole of the spiritual world might lie spread out before us but we would see nothing. The reason is that whilst we are awake and in our earth bodies we are not in a position to withdraw our spiritual organs from this earth body, to draw them away from their union with the earth body. Let me use a comparison I have used on a number of occasions to present an image of the soul element separating from the body. I have often said that it is just as impossible to recognize the immortal part of man from what he is here in ordinary life as it is to recognize the properties of hydrogen and oxygen by looking at water. Hydrogen is present in water, forming a compound with oxygen, the way our immortal part is present in the body. It will reveal nothing of its qualities until it is separated out of the water. It hides all those qualities. In the same way the soul hides its qualities when it is united with the body. Our ordinary life between birth and death trains us to relate to the sense-perceptible world in such a way that whilst we are awake the organs of the mind and spirit are always tied up with the body in the same way as hydrogen is tied up with oxygen in water. The soul is therefore unable to depart from the body during the time between birth and death, except for the time between going to sleep and waking up again when it is in the spiritual worlds. During the time between going to sleep and waking up the soul really enters the spiritual worlds. It is there in those worlds. It gains new strength for the daily round out of the spiritual worlds. It retains the habit, however, of perceiving lily with the physical organs, and the moment it reaches the point where it has gained the strength that would enable it to achieve perception within the spiritual sphere it wakes up. The soul is joined to the body through the powers within it; because of it ability to feel desire the soul is connected with the body. The moment its powers have been recharged and it is again able to be active it desires to return to the body as long as the body is still capable of life. In the first place it will therefore be necessary for us gradually to get our bearings after death. In one of my public lectures I referred to the ability to remember as the ultimate soul activity53 Let us compare this with what happens when man learns to look into the spiritual world. It is something which to some extent does make us free of the bodily element. Modern science, as it continues to develop, will actually show that looking back to an earlier experience is a process occurring in mind and spirit. This process is however given enormous assistance, assistance provided by the body. It happens like this. When our soul dwells in the body, anything we entrust to our power of memory has the nature of an image to begin with; it is very similar to what we call imaginative perception. In ordinary life, however, we proceed to imprint everything that is to be memory into the bodily element. When we have an experience we first of all encounter the experience with our senses; we form an image of it. This image first of all imprints itself in the body; an imprint is left in the body, an imprint we could compare with the imprint left by a seal. It is important to understand that such an imprint is left. Conventional science takes rather a naive view of this. According to some authors, one idea is recorded in one part of the brain, another idea in another, and so on. That is not how it happens. The imprint a memory leaves in our physical body is really very dissimilar to what may later come up as a memory. To the clairvoyant eye it is a kind of image taking the form of the human head and a bit more, continuing on into the rest of the human being. Irrespective of the nature of the experience, the imprint will be of that kind; such an imprint is made into the ether body. If we were able to take this imprint out we would indeed have a thin, shadowy spectre of the head and its continuation. Another memory would also take the form of a shadow image of a head and its continuation. These images are certainly quite different from what we experience as a memory. There is such a shadowy spectre within us for every single memory we have. They all merge into each other, they interpenetrate. What remains would from the outside appear as such a shadow picture and all one could say would be that one of them looks like this, another like that. If memory is to arise the soul of man must first of all focus on the imprint left in the body and decipher it the way we decipher the peculiar symbols on a page when we are reading—symbols entirely different from what the soul experiences after reading them. The soul has to apply a subconscious reading process in order to convert those imprints into the actual memory we experience. Let us assume you are today recalling an event you experienced in your eighth year. The actual process consists in something making you focus your soul on this little head with its continuation that was imprinted at the time; your soul will now decipher it. As to the experience, as little remains of it in the body as the book you have read retains of what you experienced in the reading. When you read the book again you need to recreate the whole thing in your soul. All this happens without our noticing it. But someone who has not learned to read will be unable to tell from the symbols what they represent. The same applies to the memory process; it is an inner reading process. There is much that goes on below the threshold of consciousness in the human soul and is never considered by man. When we give ourselves up to memory, an infinitely complex process takes place in the human being. All the time, etheric seal imprints rise up from the dim twilight where all else in life is darkness and the inner process man experiences as memory consists in these imprints arising and being deciphered. I am not telling you something I have thought up but a genuine fact discovered through occult investigation. When we begin to strengthen the inner powers of the soul through meditation and concentration the process I have already mentioned will come about. The process which develops is not the one we have to call memory. We develop inner powers but an imprint also forms and is left upon the ether that is alive and present everywhere in the world outside us, it is objectively imprinted into the world. As we meditate, as we concentrate, we leave an imprint in the objective cosmic process. Basically the same thing happens when we devote our studies to what spiritual science has to give, for spiritual science has to do with supersensible, nonphysical, things. When we really take hold of the thougts coming to us from spiritual science we are already coming away from ourselves to such an extent that our mental effort has us working with the cosmic ether: when we think ordinary thoughts we merely imprint them within ourselves. You realize, of course, that it is important for anyone wishing to make progress in soul development to put enormous emphasis on what we must call repetition of the same thought process. If we concentrate just once on some thought or other, it will merely leave a fleeting impression within the world ether. If however we nurture the same thought in our soul day after day, over and over again, the impression will also be made over and over again. Here we must ask ourselves the following question. If we repeatedly make an impression in the world ether, repeating a meditation over and over again, what actually happens? Where is the impression made? To answer this question, something else has to be considered first. If someone is genuinely looking for the way to the spiritual world and begins to be clairvoyant, he will find that his clairvoyant experiences take a very strange form. He will be very much aware that what he finds there is something which is experienced but, fundamentally speaking, there is something lacking in those experiences. I am presupposing that the person has reached the point where he has clairvoyant experiences. Afterwards, when we are no longer in those clairvoyant experiences but remember those clairvoyant experiences, we say to ourselves: It may be that I have nothing whatsoever to do with all those things. The impression is that the things experienced in clairvoyance are quite separate from us. Above all, it is impossible to find out how far we ourselves have anything to do with those experiences. That is the important point. Because of this it is easy to consider such experiences mere dreams. We only realize that we have something to do with it when we come to see that our own self has been confronting us there in another form. We come to realize that what we have experienced there is really very similar to our personal experiences and we could not have experienced what we did in clairvoyance if we did not exist. To make it even clearer let me put it like this. Let us assume you have a dream which brings back something you experienced when very young. When you wake from the dream you only realize that those were dream experiences because among the mass of images you encountered there was also that childhood experience. Then you knew that the dream must have something to do with you. That is how it is with our first clairvoyant experiences. You gradually come to realize that really it is someone else who is dreaming there and yet at the same time it is also you yourself. We come to recognize ourselves within the mass of clairvoyant experiences. It is indeed an experience of some significance to learn that we have been within a great body of experiences yet it was we ourselves who were within it. One must first of all discover oneself within those clairvoyant experiences. We then come to realize that we are not only inside our bodies but also in the world outside. It is an experience of tremendous significance which shows us that we have something which the spirits of the higher hierarchies hold and support, nurture and cherish. Here I am, we say to ourselves, in my body. I inhabit the enveloping form of the body and I am at the same time also in the spiritual world, held and supported by the spirits of the higher hierarchies. We must not allow ourselves to be distracted by the law which says that a particular entity cannot be in two places at one and the same time, for laws of this kind no longer apply in the spiritual world. I am inside me and at the same time I am also someone Who lets experiences arise within him in the spiritual world. We find ourselves held secure within the higher hierarchies. We know we have this kind of dual nature and we gradually come to realize that what we are in essence in the spirit does not really lie within the sense-perceptible world at all. It lies in the spiritual world and what exists in the sense-perceptible world is a shadow cast from the spiritual world. We slip into a spiritual ‘body’ existence and with this are outside ourselves, looking at ourselves from outside. Anyone not prepared to make himself familiar with such apparent contradictions will never arrive at concepts that can make the spiritual world explicable to him. The important thing is that in as far as we are part of the world of the senses we discover that we are beyond ourselves. We have now reached the point where we can consider the question as to where our meditations are inscribed. Our ordinary memories are imprinted in ourselves. A seal imprint is always made which represents the upper part of the human being, the head and a few appendages. When we meditate or consider in our mind the ideas presented in spiritual science, we also produce imprints but these go to the other one I have just described, the one who is another self. These ideas go to the other one. We may experience something in Berlin or in Nuremberg; the imprint of this will be made in the same body. Everything we experience in the spirit, however, goes to the one who is another self. Everything is imprinted there. If our attitude is truly in accord with what is thought or felt or experienced in spiritual science, we are working on the supersensible human being whom we also are, just as we work on the physical human being we are when facing everyday experiences. You will now understand that it needs great inner strength to work on the supersensible human being. It clearly is easier to recall things that had an external effect on us through their colour, sound and so on, because we are in that case supported by the body. When a colour makes an impression on us this triggers a physical process within us. When it is our aim to enter into a purely spiritual idea we have to do without all those physcial props; inner effort has to be made in the soul and the soul must gain greater and greater powers, growing so strong in itself that it really can make an impression on the cosmic ether outside. If we look for union in this way with the human being we really are, the human being who is always there, we establish a relationship with our individual human identity, with what we really are as human beings. And what we really are as human beings, this lives among the forms of being that are the higher hierarchies the way our body lives among sense-perceptible processes in nature. We are part of earthly existence and in the same way we also partake of existence in the spirit, within all that takes place in the world of the higher hierarchies. There is something else I want to mention. Being thus related to the spiritual world, we are related to many different spirits in the higher hierarchies. Among them are the spirits we only relate to as human individuals—they are not destined to have any kind of cosmic function. On the other hand we also belong to spirits that do have a cosmic function. We all belong to a folk spirit for instance. In the processes that belong entirely to the world of the senses we are connected with sense-perceptible nature. Reaching upwards we are connected with all those spirits which in a supersensible way reach down into the world of the physical senses. Here, we relate to things outside us and have thoughts and ideas about them. In the same way the different spirits in the higher hierarchies develop thoughts and ideas on the basis of the fact the we are objects to them. We are objects to the spirits in the higher hierarchies, we are the realm they have thoughts about. These thoughts are more will-like by nature. The spiritual entities are different in kind because of the way the hierarchies relate to us. An important distinction will clearly emerge if we note how the evolution of such spirits in the higher hierarchies progresses, for instance in the case of the folk spirits. We also progress between birth and death here on earth, for our ego grows more and more mature, gaining experiences about the world. A young Person cannot have learned as much as someone who is older. The same applies to the spirits of the higher hierarchies, except that their evolution proceeds somewhat differently from our own. We are referring to a spirit belonging to the higher hierarchies when we speak of the Italian folk spirit. This Italian folk spirit goes through its evolution and we are actually able to pinpoint a particular time when this folk spirit passed a major stage in evolution. We know the relationship between the Italian folk spirit and individual Italians to be such that the Italian folk spirit acts through the sentient soul of individual Italians. The way this happens is that to begin with the folk spirit is, as it were, only acting on the soul element. It is only later, in the course of its further development, that the folk spirit, using its will, intervenes more and more in the way the soul comes to expres- sion through the element of the physical body. If you consider Italian history you come to a very important year, around 1530. That is the year when the Italian folk spirit grew so powerful that it was then able to begin to work also on the physical body. From that time it started to develop very specific national characteristics. In occult terms this means that the folk spirit developed a much more powerful will; it began to engrave itself also into the physical element, developing national characteristics even at the physical level. Whilst our ego is becoming more and more independent of the body the folk spirit is evolving in the opposite direction. Having influenced the soul element for a time it is now beginning to influence the physical. We find the same thing happened with the French folk spirit around the year 1600, and about 1650 for the English folk spirit. Before, the folk spirit had more or less only taken hold of the soul element but from then on it also intervened in the physical. Its will grew more powerful and the soul was less able to put up resistance against being given a configuration that had national characteristics. It was therefore at this time that national characteristics began to emerge more clearly. This happened because the folk spirit descended. It is higher up when it acts more on the soul sphere; it descends to act more on the physical aspect. The folk spirit of the Italian peninsula therefore descended around the year 1530. In France this happened at the beginning of the 17th century and in England in the middle of the 17th century. Shakespeare wrote his works before the folk spirit had passed this stage. This is what is so significant. It is the reason for the strange rupture which occurred in the way the English regard Shakespeare, with the result that Shakespeare is actually more appreciated in Germany than in England. We are speaking of the way the folk spirit descends more and more into individual human beings. If we now come to consider the evolution of the German folk spirit we can see something similar happening during the period between about 1750 and 1850. Yet oddly enough we have to say that in this case the folk spirit descended but then ascended again. This is what is so significant. We are able to observe a process in which the folk spirits of Western European peoples descended and took hold of those peoples. In the case of the German people we can also observe the folk spirit descending around the middle of the 18th century, but we then find it ascending again around the middle of the 19th century. The situation is therefore quite a different one. A beginning was made to develop the German character into an eminently national one, but it was only done for a while. When some of this had been done the folk spirit ascended again, once again to act only on the soul element. German cultural life had its flowering period at the time when the folk spirit had descended to the lowest level. The folk spirit will of course always remain with these people, but it is now again in spiritual heights. That is the peculiar thing about the German folk spiny It did descend at an earlier time but it then stopped before the people became too strongly national. The Western European peoples have become very much crystallized in their national characteristics, but in the case of the German people this cannot happen because of the peculiar nature of the German folk spirit. The result is that German attitudes will always have to remain more universal than those of other peoples. These things relate to profound realities in the spiritual world. If we had been looking for the German folk spirit in Goethe's time we would have found it at about the same level as the English, French or Italian folk spirit. If we want to look for it today we have to go higher up. There will be times when it descends again and others when it ascends again. It is this to-and-fro movement which is so characteristic of the German folk spirit. The Russian folk spirit does not descend at all to achieve full crystallization of the people. It always remains something like a cloud hovering above the national character. We shall always have to 10°k for it up above, and the Russian people will only enter into spiritual development when they make the effort to combine the fruits of the work done in the West of Europe with their own essential nature. They must develop their culture in conjunction with the West for they will never develop a culture out of their own resources. All this has to be understood in this way. The flexibility in German attitudes is due to the fact that the German has not united with his folk spirit the way this has happened in the West of Europe. This is also why it is so tremendously difficult to understand the Germans. They can only be understood if we are able to admit that it is possible to have a people whose folk spirit only comes in sporadically to intervene in their evolution. This is one of the most difficult chapters in historical development and you should not despair if it seems to be full of contradictions. We are, however, living in an age when we must try and really understand the origins of the enmity which shows itself so clearly now during these fateful days within Europe. With anything we experience, if you look more closely you'll always find that there is something coming in which might indeed be called incomprehensible and only becomes clear when we look more closely. Yes, of course, the Germans will be aware that fundamentally there is a tremendous hatred felt towards them. Looking at it more closely we shall find that this hatred is directed towards what in fact are the best qualities of the Germans. No particular hatred is directed towards their less desirable qualities. Anyone wishing to penetrate these mysteries will have to consider these things more in their context. You might say that it is a case of German chauvinism if someone says such things now in Germany. Why should a German speak with appreciation and in praise of the German character? Yet if that were the case, these lectures would not be given and I would not speak in this way about the German people. It really does not need German chauvinism to characterize the nature of the German people in such a way that it is evident that it differs from the nature of other European peoples, and not to its disadvantage. To demonstrate this let me read to you a characterization of the nature of the German people given in a letter Ernest Renan wrote to David Friedrich Strauss.
So that is what Ernest Renan wrote to David Friedrich Strauss in 1870. I am not going to go into the details of their correspondence, but let me just mention that Renan also wrote that there were only two alternatives. The first would be to take away French territory-The outcome would be revenge unto death against all that is German and alliance with all kinds of confederates. The other alternative would be to leave France untouched, and then the Peace Party would gain the upper hand and say: 'We have been extremely foolish, we want to make good where we have gone wrong, and the good of mankind will be preserved.’ I mention this in order to show you that when Renan wrote the letter, part of which I have just read to you, his mood was not exactly a conciliatory one with regard to the German character which had evolved in the course of human evolution. On the other hand he was prepared to represent the qualities mankind had gained through the German character in relation to everything else as being like higher mathematics in comparison to elementary arithmetic. There is no question, then, of being a chauvinist; one merely has to repeat what Renan wrote in 1870. In thus speaking of man's relationship to the higher worlds we must realize that in concrete terms, in reality, man is able to have these relations because he bears this other one within him, because this other one is alive in him who has the same relationship to the higher world of the spirit as we have to the sense-perceptible world here in our body•; The supersensible, intangible part of us gives us a certain relationship to all that is supersensible. And it is a truly living development we undergo—nothing theoretical—when our heart and mind enters into the experience I have described as the process of meditation. The soul is really inscribing something into the spiritual worlds. It inscribes it into what fundamentally speaking is we ourselves. If we really think about this, the idea of 'being within the living stream of spiritual science" links up with the idea of ‘human responsibilty’. This idea of 'human responsibility' really must arise in the soul of anyone pursuing spiritual science. We know that mankind is going through things in the course of historical development, that it undergoes change. Clairvoyance has been gradually disappearing and today we know that it will be necessary to regain the connection with the spiritual world that existed in the past. and that spiritual science is the path by which it can be regained. In the past, man's natural relationship to his body was such that part of him was always within the spiritual worlds. Today he is so much more closely bound up with his body that he must see to it that he gains understanding of the spiritual world independent of his body. We may say that man had a hereditary trait that gradually grew weaker and weaker and disappeared altogether in the present age. It is in our time, therefore, that work has to start that will take the soul up into the spiritual world. Can you envisage the way the German folk spirit is again and again coming down to the German peoples and then going up again into the higher world? Why does it do this with just one particular people? It is because it is intended to evoke in this particular culture the powers that will lead to spiritual science in the truest sense of the word. When the folk spirit descends it firmly establishes the folk characteristics. When it recedes again, leaving the national characteristics in a state of fluidity, the people will have to go through that upsurge and regression of the folk spirit again and again in their own bodies, and they will learn how all 'beingness' is a state of flux between the sense-perceptible and the supersensible world. You will recall my saying a week ago that the whole history of literature for recent decades will have to be rewritten. This is because certain individuals with spiritual insight have been forgotten, though they are of much greater significance than literary figures known to us today. That relates to the period when the folk spirit was once again ascending. It will now be necessary for us to unite ourselves in the greatest possible degree with spiritual science so that we may find the folk spirit in its ascent. In other words, Germans must come to understand their essential nature not just in the physical world but also in the supersensible world. It is to be found in both these worlds. This is another reason why I have said—even in public lectures—that there is a certain inner relationship between the culture of the German spirit and the striving for spiritual science. Fichte55 could only develop his views at a time when the folk spirit had descended. Because of this his philosophy can only be imperfectly understood and must indeed be misunderstood. All that busy activity in concepts and ideas where egoic nature had entered the way it had in Fichte's philosophy was possible only at a time when the folk spirit had descended to a lower level. Today we have to look for it at a higher level and we can only find it with the aid of spiritual science. This is due to the relationship of the folk spirit to the German people. It is entirely part of the nature of German cultural development that there is a profound relationship between German cultural life and the path which leads to spiritual science. It is much to be hoped that these things will gradually come to be understood more and more clearly. It really has to be said that if you consider the events of the present time, the enormous sacrifices that have to be made, all the difficulties people have to live through because of present events, it should be obvious that what is coming to expression here is something far, far beyond anything we are able to comprehend by taking an external view. And we might paraphrase the words written by St Paul: ‘And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain and your faith is also vain.’56 Paul found affirmation for what he had to give to the world in the reality of the Resurrection. His words have been much misunderstood. With regard to what is happening now, we have to say: ‘These deaths give expression to the belief, to the firm avowal, that man relates to more than merely the things existing in the world accessible to the senses.’ It is not only that religious feeling is growing more profound, but it is possible to see that in these very times we live in souls are forcefully protesting against the whole of materialism, and they do this by the way in which they enter into death. We have to say that whatever else these events represent they also contribute to the overcoming of materialistic ways of thinking and the materialistic way of life which has gradually evolved. Out of a profound awareness of current developments, the human soul has to say to itself: ‘If it were to happen that materialistic attitudes, materialistic ways of thinking were to prevail on earth once the sun of peace is shining again, would we not have to say that all these deaths must have been in vain—unless a spiritual way of thinking develops on the plane that lies open to the gaze of the dead?’ We might therefore paraphrase the words of St Paul as follows: ‘All the infinite suffering would be in vain, and all the many individuals would have gone through death in vain at such a young physical age if a materialistic way of thinking and a materialistic way of life were to spread in the fields of peace.’ These days will have to be like a great warning beacon for those who live through them, a light entering deeply into human hearts and minds and souls, that man shall develop a genuine desire to live in the sphere of the spirit. We cannot concern ourselves deeply enough with the events of our time. And this is also why one hopes that vision will broaden among those who profess themselves anthroposophists to extend beyond the narrow horizon that tends to limit it, towards an ever-expanding horizon. We really must come to understand the way everything happening here on earth is connected with events taking place in the spiritual world. This will give us a feeling for the tasks set for us in the difficult times of the present. Some people have a facile way of saying that present events need not have anything to do with the spiritual development individual nations are undergoing. To anyone able to see through these things and discern their true course, everything happening in the external world is an expression of something spiritual. Let us hold on to this more and more, let us try more and more to use the very experiences that can come to us through spiritual science to take our self out of those narrower confines and to unite this self, a self freed by spiritual science, with the great events now taking place. Let us forget purely personal concerns and grow together with the profoundly disturbing events mankind as a whole must now experience. This is the note I wanted to strike in your hearts with the things put forward in these lectures. I very much hope that they will be pondered before we meet again in April. An element put through the test of the great events of our time is now ascending into the spiritual world and bringing an influence to bear from up there. It must be met with the kind of understanding that can be won through spiritual insight, for only then will it be possible to achieve what these events are challenging us to achieve. It is true that:
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| 157. The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations: Lecture XI
20 Apr 1915, Berlin Translated by Anna R. Meuss Rudolf Steiner |
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| We would be able to see through it to the effect that we could under certain circumstances foresee our immediate future. But the will irrupts into the karmic stream and this obscures the prospect, say, of what will happen to us tomorrow. |
| Then man's whole inner perception will move in the right direction. It has to be clearly understood that the path to the spiritual world cannot be achieved all at once. It gradually leads out of the world so that we ascend to the point I have just referred to, where what used to be the world for us loses its deadness and itself becomes a living entity. |
| This is the one thing of which we must say again and again that as many people as possible must come to understand it, particularlY in the present time. All we come to understand of the spiritual world whilst here in the physical world in our physical bodies shall be as a flame to illumine the life of the spirit. |
| 157. The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations: Lecture XI
20 Apr 1915, Berlin Translated by Anna R. Meuss Rudolf Steiner |
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Dear friends, once again let us first of all remember those who are out there at the front, in the great arena of present-day events:
And for those who because of those events have already gone through the gate of death:
May the spirit we are seeking as we work towards spiritual knowledge, the spirit who has gone through the Mystery of Golgatha for the good of the earth, for the freedom and progress of man, be with you and the hard duties you have to perform. Dear friends, I want to begin today by reminding you of something I have told most of you, I think, on previous occasions. If the soul of man develops in the way I have clearly enough described in my public and other lectures, we arrive at a different image of the world. The essential point is that the soul takes the path, as it were, from the sense-perceptible into the spiritual world. As the development of the soul progresses the physical world will gradually change in our eyes into the spiritual world. We might say that the peculiar features of the physical, sense-perceptible, world gradually disappear and the forms, entities and realities of the spiritual world makes their appearance within the horizons of our conscious awareness. Something important comes to conscious awareness in this way, something I might describe as follows: We ourselves become different—as far as our vision is concerned, of course—we ourselves become different, and the world which is around us to be beheld With our senses then also becomes different. Let us stay with what is nearest to us to begin with: the world that is our earth. Basically spealung, people know really very little of the world beyond this earth during their life on this planet, at least if we persist in the way in which W have grown together with our earthly life. As we advance into the spiritual world—in which case we are outside our bodies—we shall find, as we look back on the body, or the whole of our physical life, or the whole human being, that basically it is growing richer and richer. This human being is all the time gaining in content, is expanding into a world. Man is actually growing and becoming a whole world as we look back on him. That is the reality of words we often hear stressed—in that through spiritual development man grows identical with the world. He sees a new world, a world he normally Is within, and sees it as though arising out of himself. He expands into a world. As far as the earth is concerned, on the other hand, all that is solid in it, all we are used to seeing as its mountains, rivers and so on, disappears. It vanishes and we gradually come to feel ourselves within the earth—please note I am saying within the earth—as though within a great organism. We have left our own world and this inner world, this inner reality, becomes a wide world, whilst the earthly world that was spread out around us now becomes an entity, a being, we must imagine ourselves to be within. As we grow out of ourselves our human world expands into a wide world; at the same time we grow into the earth organism and feel ourselves to be within it just as our finger, say, would feel itself to be part of the organism if it were to have conscious awareness. That is the experience human beings will have, an experience quite frequently brought to expression by more poetic natures. It is very common for instance for people to compare their awakening in the morning with the awakening of nature around them, their life in the course of the day with the ascent of the sun, and dusk with the need for sleep that develops as we get tired. Such comparisons arise with the feeling men have of being part of earthly nature. They are not worth much, however, for they do not touch on what really matters. As I have said on a number of previous occasions, if we want to choose a comparison that is really in accord with the facts we cannot compare what goes on when we go to sleep and wake up with the processes occurring in nature outside. Instead, we must compare 24 hours in our life with the seasonal cycle of the year. We must take the whole cycle of the seasons to make a fair comparison with what happens in us in a single waking-and-sleeping cycle of 24 hours.57 It is quite wrong to compare the period during which a person is awake—between waking up and going to sleep—to summer for instance. This waking state has to be compared to winter in ouside nature whilst summer has to be compared to the sleeping state in man. Making the comparison we would therefore say: The human being goes to sleep and this means he enters into the summer of his personal existence, and in waking up he progresses into the winter of his personal existence. The waking state would approximately correspond to late autumn, winter and early spring. Why would this be in accord with the facts? Because, in evolving into part of the whole earth organism in the way I have indicated, we would indeed have to note that the spirit of the earth is asleep in summer. The earth is then truly asleep; the great conscious awareness of the earth's spirit is dimming. As spring comes the earth's spirit begins to go to sleep. It wakes up again in autumn when the first frosts come. Then it is thinking, it is awake and thinking. That is how a day for the earth's spirit corresponds to the cycle of a year. Looking back upon a sleeping person we can indeed see how his going to sleep means that ego and astral body are leaving the body. A kind of plant-type activity does actually develop in the organism when astral body and ego have departed from it. Their departure initiates a particular activity in the inner man. We really experience the first stages of sleep as the onset of a vegetative process, and sleep progresses in such a way that to the clairvoyant eye the body is pervaded with vegetative growth processes that are genuinely apparent to imaginative perception. This vegetation has a different way of growing from that of the earth's vegetation, however. These things can be told and they can be much meditated on and in this way we continue to make progress. The plants of the earth grow upwards from the soil. It is different when we observe this ‘plant growth’ in man. The plants have their roots outside and grow into the human being. This means that we have to look for the flowers inside the human being. The human betng is very beautiful when seen asleep by someone who has grown Clairvoyant. He is like a whole earth shooting and sprouting, with vegetation growing into it. The picture is to some extent marred, however, for we get the impression at the same time that the astral body is gnawing away at the roots. That is how the progress of sleep presents itself. The animal world consumes, eats up, the plants that grow in summer. And we find that our astral body acts like the animal world except that it gnaws at the roots. If this did not happen we would not able to develop that core which we take through the gate of death. what the astral body makes its own in this way is the harvest of life which we do, in truth, take with us through the gate of death. I am describing things the way they appear to clairvoyant awareness. And just as winter comes upon the fruits of the earth and its frosts kill those fruits of the earth, so the entry of our astral body and ego into the etheric and physical body is like a frost coming to kill the vegetation, the spiritual plant growth, that has come up in the organism during the night. The entity I have called the earth's spirit is indeed an individual entity, just as we are, except that it has a different form of existences with a year being a day for it. Within the earth's spirit we are able to perceive everything I have said of the impulse of Golgotha,58 for within it we find the life-giving energy that was not in the earth prior to Golgotha. In it we find ourselves secure, accepted by the spirit which has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha. We become aware of this when we are able to enter fully into the state where the earth has become a being, an entity, of which we are part of the way a finger is part of our organism. It is inevitable therefore that when modern man enters deeply into the world in an occult way there is also a touch to this of religious immersion in the divine element that streams through the world, filling it with spirit. It is a fact that genuine perception of the spiritual world will never deprive man of religious feeling but rather make such feeling more profound. I wanted to give an indication of what it really looks like when we enter into the world of images of spiritual reality. What we seem to be to ourselves in our ordinary everyday physical awareness is mere semblance, is only an inner core. Yet at the same time it has to be said that this is not correct, for it is not easy to find the words for these significant truths. What we seem to be to ourselves is always at our periphery when we are outside the body with our soul element. It is therefore not correct to say it is a core, for a fruit has its shell or peel on the outside and its valuable part inside. But many things are the other way round when it comes to the spirit, and the valuable Part of man is outside and the shell or peel equivalent is inside. The inner part is shell-like by nature and the spiritual part is what may be called the shell-like part in terms of space. We come to see when we take the path into the spiritual world that the human being is far from simple and indeed very complex. Something we have already made our own to quite an extent is the knowledge that man bears within him something through which he takes part in all the worlds that are accessible to him. Through our physical body we are part of the physical world, through the soul element within us we are part of the soul world, and, through our spirit, of the spiritual world. We extend into these three worlds. We know that when a human being takes the path into the spiritual world he will in fact experience himself in a kind of multiple reproduction. This is what causes enxiety. Our comfortable feeling of being of one piece is broken up and one does indeed get the feeling of belonging to several worlds. This may be presented from many different points of view. Today I shall take one particular point of view, drawing your attention again to what has been the basis of my recent lectures. Considering the life of man in its inner aspects we must think of it as based on a number of principles, and when we step outside the body man will indeed be found to be divided into four principles. First of all there is the power on which our memory is based. Through memory we raise into consciousness the things we experienced earlier on in life. Memory creates a context for our life, making this life between birth and death a whole. A second principle is the one we call thinking, the forming of ideas. I cannot define it in detail here, for that is not the point, but the activity of forming ideas takes place in the present. And moving further ahead we come to feeling and yet further on to will activity. Looking into ourselves, our own inner life apppears in the activities of remembering, thinking, feeling and exerting our will. Now we may ask: ‘What is the essential difference between these four functions of the soul?’ Psychologists will merely list these functions as a rule, making no further distinction between them. We shall arrive at the truth only by going into the essential nature of these four functions of the soul. We shall then find that will activity is more or less the baby among our soul functions; feeling activity is older, thinking still older, and the activity performed in remembering is th‘old man’, the oldest of our soul functions. You will understand this more clearly if I present the matter to you from the following point of view. It has been said on a number of occasions that man's development has not been on this earth only but that his present evolution was preceded by evolution on the Old Moon, the Old Sun and on Old Saturn. Man did not just come into being on this earth. To become what he is now he needed to go through evolution on Saturn, Sun and Moon. Now, you see, any will activity we develop is a product of man's earth life. Will evolution is not yet complete, in fact, and it is entirely a product of earth evolution. During Moon evolution man was not yet endowed with an independent will. Angels willed for him. Will activity may be said to have radiated in only with earth evolution. Feeling on the other hand was already acquired during Moon evolution, thinking during Sun evolution and remembering during Saturn evolution. If you now take this together with the thoughts expressed in my Cosmic Memory and Occult Science,59 you will discover an important connection. During Saturn evolution the first beginnings of man's physical body arose; during Sun evolution those of man's ether body; during Moon evolution those of man's astral body; and now, during earth evolution, the human ego is evolving. Let us now take a separate look at the process we call remembering. What is this? The soul retains something of the image of an event we have experienced just as a book we are reading has within it something of the thoughts of the person who wrote it. When you have a book before you, you are able to read and to think—not always perhaps, but I'll ignore that—everything thought by the person who wrote the book. Remembering is a subconscious reading process; the record consists in signs the ether body has engraved into the physical body. If something happened to you years ago, you went through the experiences to be gained from that event. What remains of this are impressions made by the ether body in the physical body. When you recall the event now, the act of remembering is a subconscious reading process. The hidden processes in the organism which enable the ether body to engrave the signs on which memory depends were in-formed into it during Old Saturn evolution. It is a fact that our organism holds within it this hidden Saturn organism. This may be perceived as a genuine entity into which the ether body is able to enter the signs which record the experiences that come from outside, to recall them again in the process of remembering. Essentially, man owes this subconscious recording faculty to the fact that his body, and specifically the element within the physical body which is to receive those imprints, is still pliable during the first seven years of life. It is therefore important not to subject children to forced memory training. I have drawn attention to this in The Education of the Child.60 During the first seven years the still pliable organism should be left to its own elementary powers and we should not use coercion. We should tell children as much as we can but not attach too much value to artificial memory development, rather leaving the child to itself where memory development is concerned. This is a point where spiritual science is of tremendous importance in educational life. The ability to remember is thus one of the oldest elements in human nature. The activity on which thinking is based is part of what may be said to have evolved on the Sun. It, too, is relatively ancient. The Sun-forces contain a principle which organizes man's ether body in such a way that it is able to perform this specific function of thinking, of forming ideas. So you see that it is necessary to go far, far back in the cosmos in order to answer the question: Why is man able to remember, and why is he able to think? It is necessary to go back as far as the Saturn and the Sun stages of evolution. To consider man's ability to feel we need only go back as far as the Moon, and for will activity to earth evolution. This will make many things clear to you. Certain individuals bear a particularly strong imprint of earlier incarnations; they are not pliable but clear cut. Much will imprint itself upon their organism. These are people with an almost automatic memory who however cannot be very creative in their thinking. The faculty of remembering thus relates predominantly to the physical body; the ability to think to the ether body; man's feelings and emotions to the astral body; and his will activity above all to the ego. Man is only able to refer to himself as T because he is a creature of will. If he were only able to think, life would proceed as in a dream. All this means that we are an organic complex of soul functions which were imprinted into our soul life in the course of evolution. I have said that our will activity only evolved during earth evolution and that spiritually higher hierarchies, the Angeloi, willed for man on the Moon. The result was that during Moon evolution all will activity in man was such that if we recall it to clairvoyant consciousness we will indeed see it to have been at a higher level, yet it was involuntary will activity in man, as we see it in animal evolution on earth today. Animals will of necessity follow whatever seethes and boils up within them for they live within the common will of the species. During Moon evolution, therefore, spiritual entities of a higher kind, the Angeloi, did our willing for us. Now, the spiritual entities of a higher kind are active in determining our karma from one incarnation to the next. The Angeloi are no longer active in our will but in the ongoing stream of our karma. During Moon evolution man did not feel his will to be his own; in the same way we do not, living on earth, believe that we make our own karma. It is controlled by spirits from the higher hierarchies. Only at times when our will is for once able to be still, as it were, will it be possible to have a glimmer of the progress of karma even for nonclairvoyant consciousness, a progress that normally stays hidden. Please hold on to the fact I have stated—that a core forms in man which enters into the spiritual realm through the gate of death. This core is the vehicle for our karma. Karma has today already determined what each of us will be doing tomorrow. We would be able to see through our karma if it were not our mission on earth to develop the will. We would be able to see through it to the effect that we could under certain circumstances foresee our immediate future. But the will irrupts into the karmic stream and this obscures the prospect, say, of what will happen to us tomorrow. The will has to be completely silent; only then will it be possible for something to come through of what will happen not through us but to us. As an example, let me give you a story told of Erasmus Francisci.61 This is based on the truth. As a young man Erasmus Francisci lived with his aunt. On one occasion he dreamed that a man whose name was shouted out to him in his dream was going to take a shot at him, but that he would not be killed, for his aunt would save his life. That was his dream. The next day, before anything had actually happened, he told the dream to his aunt. She got rather worried, telling him that someone had been shot dead quite recently in the neighbourhood. She strongly advised her nephew to stay at home so that nothing might happen to him. She gave him the key to the apple loft so that he might go up at any time and get himself some apples. The young man went up to his room and sat at his desk to read something. Yet what he had been reading was of less interest to him at the moment than the key to the apple loft which his aunt had given and which was in his pocket. He decided to go up there. Hardly had he got up from his chair when a shot rang out and the bullet went exactly to the place where his head had been. If he had not got up the bullet would have gone straight through him. A servant in the house next door—whose name was indeed the one called out to Erasmus Francisci in his dream, a name not known to him before—this servant had not known that the two guns he was supposed to clean were loaded and the gun went off as he started to handle it. If Francisci had not got up to go the the apple loft at that very moment, his aunt having given him the key, he would without doubt have lost his life. His dream therefore had shown exactly what was to happen the following day. An event occurred of which we are able to say that the will was in no way involved, for Francisci would not achieve anything with his will. He could in no way protect himself; something irrupted into the karma of this individual to the effect that this life was to continue. The spirit controlling his karma had already had the idea that would save his life. The dream represented the pre-vision of the spirit guiding the young man's karma, perceiving what was to happen the next day. Francisci's state of soul was such that a certain depth had already been achieved through natural meditation as it were, and as a result something occurred which I might also compare with something in external life. I think you will agree that man's gift of prophesy with regard to external life on earth is rather limited. In a certain sense we are all prophets for we all know that dawn will come at a certain time tomorrow and so on, or someone walking across a field today will be able to say what that field is going to look like tomorrow. He will not be able to foretell whether rain is going to fall on that field the next day and so on. It is the same with regard to the inner life. Man lives according to his will, and his karma lies within that will. It is possible to develop a certain sense for what is coming next, and in the same way there are certain people whose inner soul has been deepened and for whom an inner point of light may arise for events where the will has to fall silent. It is important in the pursuit of spiritual science to consider such things on occasion, for we then see that there certainly is something alive within man that points to the future, something man is not able to encompass in his ordinary state of consciousness. Karma emerges through a will that has fallen silent. All the things brought before our soul in this way through spiritual research are able to show us that what we call the great illusion consists predominantly in man being unable to perceive the full picture, in his ordinary consciousness, of what he is—that man is part of the whole world whilst his ordinary consciousness really only shows him the shell, as though he were enclosed within his skin, and so on. Yet what he is shown within this enclosedness is merely a fraction of what man really is, for he is as big as the whole world. We really only look back on man from the outside in ordinary life. In becoming fully aware of these things we can gradually develop a feeling for the presence in man of what is known as his ether body. It is indeed possible to make observations in ordinary life that show at least this second human being, the etheric man, within the physical human being. Imagine you are having a nice lazy lie-in one morning, not feeling inclined to get up as yet; you'd like to stay in bed and it is difficult to find the resolution to get up. If you depend entirely on what is within you it will be difficult to reach the point of getting up. But now imagine there is something in the next room which you have been waiting for during the last few days. The thought occurs of something out there and you will find that this thought can bring about a minor miracle. You will find that once you enter into this thought for a bit you will actually leap from your bed! What has happened? As you woke up, entering again into the physical body, you felt whatever the physical body made you feel and this was not likely to give rise to the thought of getting up. Your ether body then came to act independently, because you engaged it in something outside yourself. There you can see how you have been opposing your ether body to the physical body and how the ether body took hold of you and lifted you out of bed. You arrive at a very specific feeling regarding yourself, the feeling of being an onlooker and making distinction between two kinds of human actions which we perform. There are the actions we perform in the ordinary run of life and those where one is aware of inner activity coming to the fore. These are rather subtle observations and it is, of course, always possible to deny them. We have to attune our observations to life and really see through life and the way it presents itself. Then man's whole inner perception will move in the right direction. It has to be clearly understood that the path to the spiritual world cannot be achieved all at once. It gradually leads out of the world so that we ascend to the point I have just referred to, where what used to be the world for us loses its deadness and itself becomes a living entity. Gaining in insight, man thus grows together with the spiritual world. He grows together with what we may call his portion which remains when he has put away from him everything gained through the instrument of the physical body, everything which essentially made up his life between birth and death. In going through the gate of death we grow into a world very similar to the one I have just spoken of as the one revealed to higher perception. And then we shall discover something that is very important. In the world we enter on passing through the gate of death, if we want to make ourselves at home in it in the right way, we shall just as we need a light to illumine a dark room—need whatever we have been able to develop within our innermost souls whilst here on earth. Earth life is not something to be regarded merely as a dungeon, a prison cell. It is certainly Part of the natural progress of evolution that man has to go through the gate of death. And he can of course live the life between death and rebirth. But life as a whole exists in order that every part of us adds something that is necessary, something new. As we go through the present cycle, life here is to give us something that ignites like a torch, so that we are not merely alive in this life of the spirit but gain insight and live so as to illumine the whole of this life. The light which illumines us is the one thing we gain between birth and and death that shall remain for our life between death and rebirth. This is the one thing of which we must say again and again that as many people as possible must come to understand it, particularlY in the present time. All we come to understand of the spiritual world whilst here in the physical world in our physical bodies shall be as a flame to illumine the life of the spirit. In a certain sense all the difficult things the most developed part of mankind has to go through in the present time serve as a reminder that we need to deepen the life of the soul, and it will have to come about that from the depths of the human soul a longing is brought forth for the worlds of which man is part because of his soul. Let us hope that the present time will cause a longing to arise in which every soul says to itself: Man is something quite different again from what he appears to be in so far as he wears the garment of a body. May the events we are experiencing serve to remind us of the need to deepen our soul life, to let the soul become immersed in spiritual perceptiveness, spiritual vision. Out of our awareness for this need to enter deeply into spiritual science in the present time, and the awareness that the difficulties of the present time are intended as a warning, let us again conclude the way we have always concluded these meetings. I hope it will be possible to continue in the not too distant future. For today let us conclude with the words:
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| 157. The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations: Lecture XII
10 Jun 1915, Berlin Translated by Anna R. Meuss Rudolf Steiner |
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| The wood sculpture we will be placing in an important position in our building will also give expression to the fact that the view held of Christ until now cannot continue on into the future, because the relationship between Christ, Lucifer and Ahriman has not been rightly understood until now. We cannot understand the Christ unless we also have the right relationship to the powers seen as Lucifer on the one hand and as Ahriman on the other, for these ar genuine cosmic powers. |
| Faust himself says later: he was ‘…a worm, cringing with fear’.66 Then he understands himself. The earth's spirit has called out to him: ‘You are like the spirit you understand and not like me!’67 And now comes the spirit he understands—Wagner. And so, one might say, it goes on. The earth's spirit has not been grasped and the figure which appears next is really only the earth's spirit in another form: Mephistopheles. |
| 157. The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations: Lecture XII
10 Jun 1915, Berlin Translated by Anna R. Meuss Rudolf Steiner |
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Dear friends, once again let us first of all remember those who are out there at the front, in the great arena of present-day events:
And for those who because of those events have already gone through the gate of death:
May the spirit we are seeking as we work towards spiritual knowledge, the spirit who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha for the good of the earth, for the freedom and progress of man, be with you and the hard duties you have to perform. Dear friends, it is to be hoped that the karma of the age, the karma of our movement, will one day permit the completion of the building at Dornach which is to further our movement. A group carved in wood will be given an important place in that building, in the part of it which goes to the east. The aim is to bring to artistic expression, artistic in terms of spiritual science, and to put there before our physical eyes in that building the substance and content of our spiritual movement, and, above all, to represent what our movement is intended to signify for the present age and for the further cultural and spiritual development of mankind. Every detail is to be arranged in such a way that it may be seen as part not only of a spiritual scientific whole but also of artistic forms and indeed artistic installations and furnishings. That is for example how we are trying to solved the problem of acoustics in the building. I am sure these problems cannot be solved at a first attempt, but orientation will be given by showing that calculations based on geometry and the usual rules applied in the external art of architecture cannot solve the acoustics problem. The solution will only be found by applying spiritual science. The roof structure will be a double cupola functioning like the resonance board of a violin. This will partly bring to expression the acoustic concept of the interior space. Many details would have to be taken into account in elucidating the design specifically with regard to the way words and sounds are to be given their proper value, quite distinct from the way they are commonly treated in the present time. One does not normally design circular buildings specifically for their acoustics. Most buildings are designed in such a way that an individual note cannot be given proper value distinct from those that come before and after it, for at certain points one note will always flow over into another. We are going to try and achieve a space where each musical sound can be appreciated in all its fullness from all corners of the interior space and where clearly spoken words, too, can be given full value. But I only want to mention this briefly. My main topic will be the carved group which will be occupying an important position in the building. It is primarily a group of three. More may be added, and this can perhaps be discussed at some later date. These things are not done in accord with a pre-set fixed idea but on the basis of Intuitions of the spiritual world that arise in the course of the work. Three distinct figures are of primary concern. One stands erect, expressing the true essential being of man—not in symbolic form, the way attempts have been made to interpret it even among us, but in a genuinely artistic way. Of course, it will be apparent in the figure that earthly humanity found expression in its most concentrated form in the figure in which the Christ dwelt for three years. It will be possible to see the figure as an expression of the Christ. But the issue should not be forced. We must not approach the group with the thought: ‘I am now going to look upon the Christ.’ If someone arrives at the idea out of their own feelings and out of artistic Intuition, that will be good—hut it would be wrong to approach the group with the preconceived idea that that is the Christ. The point is not immediately to introduce symbolism again, saying ‘That is the Christ’. The figure stands by a small rock slope; behind it the rock rises up high. Its feet stand upon a projection of the rock and within this there is a deep cave. Another figure is sitting in the cave. I would say it is crouching there. This figure is intended to give expression to something that relates to the figure standing above it. This appears to be letting some kind of forces radiate, stream forth, from its hands: We see how those forces radiate into the cave in the rock. The hand is within the cave; forces radiate from it, creating the impression of a hand in the rock. We see the hand, yet it is not a hand; the forces are present, creating the imprint of a hand. Only the head of this figure really has a form reminiscent of man, resembling man. Apart from this it has huge bat-like wings and the body is that of a dragon or worm. Something may be seen to be winding itself around this figure, with the figure itself writhing beneath it. And you will see that this has to do with the erect figure, that it is connected with the outstretched hand of that figure. Forces radiate in, from this hand, and these cause the winding and binding. If we allow the picture to act on our soul for a while we may come to feet that this is the gold flowing within the clefts of the earth and that the figure in the cave is held fast in the clefts of the earth by the gold. The other hand points upwards. And up there on the rock is Yet another figure. Again the head appears human; the wings are not those of a bat but hang down to the ground. The form of the body is such that we may get an inkling...—well, what does this body represent? This body gives the impression that the whole person has become a face, as though a face has been stretched, drawn out like elastic, and body contours have arisen from this. This figure is on the highest pinnacle of rock and it is falling down. As it falls the wings are broken. We see the hand reaching up from the main figure leaving its imprint in the wing. And so we have three figures: Man in his essence; beneath him—no doubt you have an inkling who it is—Ahriman banned to the clefts of the earth by the power emanating from the outstretched hand of the principal figure, held fast by the gold in those clefts because be makes his own fetters of this. The other hand reaches upwards, breaking the wings of Lucifer and causing him to fall to the depths. The point is that in the present time no one can produce such a work by simply applying the rules of the art of sculpture. (There has actually been some sort of an attempt at this when the idea had been put forward in a lecture.) It is not a question of expressing the idea in symbols; for every single trait in those three entities, down to the smallest detail, has to be created out of insight gained through spiritual science. The countenances of Ahriman and Lucifer, both resembling the human countenance, will have to be given a form that reveals the contrast between them. In the case of Lucifer this will involve the Peculiar way the upper part of the head is shaped so that it is merely reminiscent of the human. All is movement here within the spirit, nothing can force us to keep the various elements that make up the brow in the confines prescribed for the human brow. Every single element of the upper head is as mobile as the hands and fingers on our arms are mobile. It can of course only be represented like this if those movements are the genuine movements found in Lucifer. Something else to be noted is that this figure also contains an element which has remained with Lucifer from the Moon. This projects above a deeply receding countenance. It will be evident to you from my description that we are dealing with something very different from the ordinary human countenance. It is as though the skull had an existence of its own, with the part which in man is the countenance pushed in beneath it. Another thing is that particularly in Lucifer there is a certain connection between ear and larynx. These two organs have only been cut apart in man since he started to live on earth. On the Moon they were a single organ. The small wing-like structures on the larynx were tremendously expanded at that time and then formed the lower part of the auricle (external ear). Huge auricles developed more or less in that region, with the upper ear, which now extends outwards, developing out o the brow. Today these organs are separate, and when we speak or sing those activities are directed outwards and it is only the ear which listens. On the Moon they went in an inward direction and from there into the music of the spheres. Man was one great ear. The reason for this is that the wings were the ear. And so you have the ear, the larynx and the wing-like structures moving in melody and in harmony with the sound waves of the cosmic ether and these give rise to the peculiar appearance of Lucifer. They introduce something that is macrocosmic, for Lucifer merely shows in localized form something that in reality is entirely cosmic. You will realize that concessions have to be made so that people do not get a shock on seeing a face that does not have human form. You will also realize that it has to be an elongated face. Lucifer has to look like an elongated face, for he is all ear; the wings are all ear' a long drawn-out auricle. Ahriman is the exact opposite, and it comes naturally to merely hint at things in Ahriman that in Lucifer are fully modelled out and enormously expanded. In Lucifer the wing-like brow is greatly developed, in Ahriman the lower jaw. The whole of the world's materialistic attitude comes to expression in the development of the masticatory organs and teeth. Of course, none of this can be done on the basis of such a description—instead, the description had to be made afterwards-Special importance, dear friends, attaches to the following. It proved necessary in modelling the principal figure to deviate from what would seem natural to everybody, which is to make the human countenance symmetrical. A countenance usually appears symmetrical. There are of course minor asymmetries but these are scarcely noticeable. In the case of the principal figure it is a question of the whole of the left side being orientated upwards, towards Lucifer, with the left brow formed differently from the right, the latter tending towards Ahriman, The left side of the face follows the upward moving hand, the right half the downward moving hand. And so it comes to expression that the principal figure had to be given greater inner mobility than one would find in a human being. Above this sculptured figure the whole theme will be shown in painting so that the two may be seen in juxtaposition to demonstrate how the arts differ. Painting cannot convey the same thing in the same way. Everything has to be presented in a different way. I want to stress the following. It will be very important for us to sculpt the movement of the hands in the principal figure—the way the left hand moves upwards and movement of the other hand is downwards. We must make sure no one immediately feels that the principle figure is reaching up for Lucifer with the left hand, breaking Lucifer's wings with its emanations, and wrapping veins of gold around Ahriman. This must be avoided for the specific reason that at the present time in particular we are still in the process of really grasping the Christ through spiritual science. The Christ neither hates nor does he love unjustly. He does not stretch out his hand to break Lucifer's wings. The Christ is the one who stretches out his hand because it is his innermost nature to do so. He does not break Lucifer's Wings, but Lucifer up there cannot tolerate the emanations coming from that hand and breaks his wings himself. It has to be brought to expression in the figure of Lucifer that his wings are not broken by the Christ but that he breaks them himself. It is something one sees quite often in life that people living close to good people cannot tolerate this, for the influence of those good people makes them feel ill at ease. Lucifer feels something in his heart of hearts that causes him to break his own wings. Here Lucifer comes to recognize himself, to experience himself. The same holds true for Ahriman. Christ does not do anything to those two, neither his left nor his right hand is stretched out to harm either Lucifer of Ahriman. He does not do anything to them but they bring everything upon themselves. This is the basis on which spiritual science intervenes in the present age to present Christ in his true light. Understanding this, we have to say: These things are put forward in all humility, for the building at Dornach is only a beginning—as yet feeble and imperfect—intended merely to show where the path leads, a path we can in no way claim to be perfect. I therefore ask you to take what I am going to say as being in no way presumptuous but very matter of fact. There have been many portrayals of the Christ in the course of history. One of the greatest among them is Michelangelo's Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel. Consider the Christ shown in the Last Judgement. His stature Napoleonic, poised in the ether, he shows tremendous power as he directs the good to one side and the sinner to the other. That is a Christ who cannot be the Christ of the future, for he rewards the good and condemns the evildoers. Future Christians will reward and condemn themselves because of what has come into the world through Christ. Michelangelo lived at a time when the most profound truths relating to the Christ could not yet be given expression. The figure presented by Michelangelo in fact has Luciferic traits on the one hand and Ahrimanic traits on the other. Those are painful words to have to say today. But the civilization of mankind only progresses when we show that past ideals cannot be our ideals for the future. The ideals of the future will be such that the Christ principle is taken to be what it is and not merely what it does or will do when earth evolution has reached its end. It will be a principle which will cause to happen whatever has to happen within souls, just because it is there. The wood sculpture we will be placing in an important position in our building will also give expression to the fact that the view held of Christ until now cannot continue on into the future, because the relationship between Christ, Lucifer and Ahriman has not been rightly understood until now. We cannot understand the Christ unless we also have the right relationship to the powers seen as Lucifer on the one hand and as Ahriman on the other, for these ar genuine cosmic powers. The issue can be made clear by referring again and again to a pendulum. The pendulum swings to the left and to the right. Moving to one of the extremes it is not in a state of balance, and the same holds true for the other extreme. Yet it would be idle, inert, lazy if it were always to stay in a state of balance, if it were not to swing either way. It is in the right position when at the centre, but it cannot stop at the centre, it has to swing to the left and to the right. Human life is like that. We are not in a position to say: ‘I'll get away from Lucifer or get away from Ahriman’. If we were to say that we would not be living. It would be like a pendulum that does not swing. Human life does indeed go through pendulum swings, swinging towards Lucifer on the one hand and Ahriman on the other. We must not be afraid of this; that is important. If we were to run away from Lucifer there would be no art; if we were to run away from Ahriman there would be no science. All art not fully penetrated by spiritual science is Luciferic and all science that is not spiritual science is Ahrimanic. That is how man swings to and fro between extremes. The important point is to realize that he wants to be in balance, not at rest. There was a time when people said it was necessary to avoid the Luciferic element, to free oneself from it by being an ascetic. But it is important not to run away from the Luciferic element but truly to face up to Lucifer; we must really swing towards Lucifer on the one hand and Ahriman on the other. The point is that they are opposing forces, like other forces in nature such as positive and negative electricity, magnetism and so on. What matters, then, will be to recognize the triad of the Luciferic element, the Ahrimanic element and that which is the Christ principle. There has to be inner recognition of the inherent greatness of the Christ, a greatness not yet to be found in Michelangelo's Christ. That, dear friends, is what has to be achieved by working with spiritual science. At present we only have the beginnings of an insight that will have to become commonplace. You see, I have also said here during these last weeks that from certain points of view Goethe's Faust has to be considered the greatest poetic work there is.63 It is one of the greatest works ever produced by man because Goethe was able to give such tremendous depth to the human element. Goethe attempted to make Faust a genuine representative of mankind. As I have said on a number of occasions, Mephistopheles is basically a mixture of Lucifer and Ahriman.64 What was the situation where Goethe was concerned? The situation was that he was not aware of there being two principles, Lucifer and Ahriman, and his Mephistopheles is hodgepodge of Ahriman and Lucifer. They are both contained in his Mephistopheles and that is the reason why the whole great work of Goethe's Faust65 did not turn out to be what it might have been if Goethe had been in a position to show Lucifer to on side of Faust and Ahriman to the other. Then the threefold nature always present in mankind would have been apparent. That indeed was the problem Goethe had with his Faust4 You see, when he started to write the work he could only take it as far as he himself had got by the 1770s. He was aware that the four disciplines representing science—philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine and, as he put it, ‘theology, too, alas’—were inadequate. These Ahrimanic disciplines could not satisfy Faust. They merely gave him an Ahrimanic, intellectual relationship to the workings of the universe. He wanted access to the reality of the universe, to go to the sources of life and experience; something living, not thought up. Something living—the earth's spirit—appears on the scene. Yet Faust cannot endure his presence. And then—this is in Goethe's very first draft—the door opens and in comes Wagner. So many people keep talking about Faust today and one has the feeling that one hears Wagner talking about Wagner. People generally talk ‘Wagner-style’ about Faust as he appears on the stage. What exactly does Wagner represent? And what is coming in with the earth's spirit? We know that all knowledge gained of the universe is knowledge gained of oneself. It is a part of Faust himself that enters with the earth's spirit, though it is part of the expanded soul that identifies with the cosmos. Faust, however, is as yet unable to understand it. He cannot yet reach out to that element which is also part of himself. It is shown in the play how far he has developed. If we were to stage Faust properly today—more properly perhaps than even Goethe did—we would have to let Wagner appear as a slightly caricatured second Faust wearing the same costume and makeup; for it is another aspect, another part of Faust, that enters with Wagner. Faust himself says later: he was ‘…a worm, cringing with fear’.66 Then he understands himself. The earth's spirit has called out to him: ‘You are like the spirit you understand and not like me!’67 And now comes the spirit he understands—Wagner. And so, one might say, it goes on. The earth's spirit has not been grasped and the figure which appears next is really only the earth's spirit in another form: Mephistopheles. He appears as Lucifer guiding Faust through everything the human being is capable of experiencing by following only his passions—lower passions in Auerbach's Cellar, and also more noble passions, though these are taken as far as witchcraft and black magic. In Part 2 Ahriman should really be taking Lucifer's place. All this is apparent if one reads Faust with real understanding, and there is also plenty of external evidence. I have already said on an earlier occasion that among the material later cut out by Goethe was a passage where Mephistopheles was referred to as Lucifer.68 Goethe always felt uncomfortable in presenting this figure which really is two figures. The Luciferic element emerges particularly when Faust's religious feelings come to the fore, made to sound peculiarly high-flown in his conversations with Wagner. Catechized by Margaret in their conversation about God, Faust says:
And this is considered the highest form of presenting the divine, as the highest form of presenting the religious element. No need to think—‘Feeling is all that matters’; this suggests that all we are able to have by way of a religious element is whatever the Margarets of this world are able to grasp, forgetting that Faust is giving instruction to a girl of 16, giving her only as much as she is able to understand. What he says about ‘smoke to obscure the warming glow of heaven’ is not intended for philosophers, and it shows lack of understanding when knowledge at the ‘Margaret level’ is over and over again seen in professorial array. It is evident from all this that Goethe initially gave expression to the Luciferic principle in its double aspect. In Part 2 it is more the Ahrimanic principle, with Mephistopheles causing the Homunculus to be created, Helena to be conjured up and all the things that give Faust a knowledge of the world that is entirely different from everything he had ‘studied assiduously, in zealous toil.’70 It has to be said that even today there is much misunderstanding where many of the details are concerned. There is the passage where it is expressly said that Homunculus intends that something within man shall be developed to fully human status: ‘...and you'll have time until humanity is attained’,71 for the path first leads through lower regions. The words are: ‘But do not strive for higher accolades’ (in German, nach Orden).72 Very curious explanations have been given for this. In reality the words should of course be—Goethe was once again using the Frankfurt dialect—‘But do not strive for higher places’ (in German, nach Orten). It does not mean to say that Homunculus and others like him are awarded decorations the way people are. Then there is the scene where Homunculus is created and Wagner describes something stirring in the retort:
The word super-creation is a compound of creation just as superman is a compound of man. People have only been talking of the existence of superman since Nietzsche wrote of ‘superman’.74 Yet Goethe spoke of superman long before that. As it is, people read the word to be UeberZEUGUNG (conviction) when in fact it is a compound of Zeugung (procreation, creation) and therefore UEBERzeugung (super-creation), just as we speak of man and superman. These things have to be understood in detail before we can perceive what Goethe intended to say. But we also need to achieve a grand and independent vision. We really have to realize the mission of our age where spiritual science is concerned, and that a mind like that of Goethe was seeking to prepare his age for this mission. In 1797 when Schiller pointed out that he ought to complete his Faust, Goethe said he had dug the old tragelaph up again—a tragelaph being a creature half-animal and half-human.75 Goethe called it an old tragelaph, and at the end of the 18th century he called it a barbaric composition. This is something we must take very seriously for Goethe knew well how good and how bad his Faust was. All these are things spiritual science should bring out so that we achieve independent vision where these things are concerned. Goethe wanted to show the spiritual self, the immortal part of man, working to attain to higher things. This is evident from an outline he wrote around the turn of the 18th century as to what he intended his Faust to be. First he wrote: ‘Pleasures of life for the individual, seen from outside’ then: ‘Pleasure of creation, seen from within’. Finally, when he had followed Faust's path all the way, he wrote: ‘Epilogue in the chaos on the road to hell’.76 Oh! the discussions I have had to listen to on the subject! They are enough to cause the deepest surprise, for people were reflecting: Did Goethe really still believe at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century that his Faust would have to go to hell? The answer is simply that it is not Faust who is speaking the epilogue but Mephistopheles, taking his departure when Faust has taken the path to his immortal self. We therefore see something in Faust that is on the way, though only on the way, to what the dominant sculptured group in our building is intended to convey—the figure of man in truly concrete terms. On the one side appears the one tendency followed by the pendulum of the soul, on the other the opposite principle. It is not possible to truly understand the nature of man as long as one is merely holding everything together or looking for a duality. That is the essential point. We must hold on to the fact that it is indeed German culture out of which this idea will take form. Two civilizations on this earth represents opposite poles and in making reference to them one is showing their justification rather than otherwise. On the one hand there is purely Oriental culture. What does it consist in? The Oriental nature of this culture consists in purely inward deepening being sought, casting off all that is merely external process in this life. We observe how in the culture which represents the highest flowering of Oriental culture, in the Indian culture, all instruction, all knowledge, is designed to influence the soul to the effect that it becomes free of the physical body. It is a purely Luciferic culture, an entirely Luciferic culture. The further east we go the more we find the Luciferic element. And when we consider the West, what do we find there? Let us go straight away to the extreme West. It is natural for us, particularly if we have learned something of spiritual science, and I want to illustrate this with an example—when we see someone who comes to accept a more spiritual philosophy where previously he followed a more materialistic one—it is natural for us to ask ourselves: ‘What goes on in the soul of such a person?’ It is particularly when we see such a major change in the soul of a person that we have to enter into the heart and mind of this person to share in the experience his soul has gone through. Nothing appears more significant to us than to share such an experience with another human being. You see, in America people have also been seen to go through what is known as ‘conversion’, that is a change from a materialistic to a spiritual point of view. And what does one do? One sits down—I am presenting rather a radical picture, but it does happen like this—one sits down and writes to these people, asking them to give the reasons why they underwent such a change of heart. And then—well, one then makes a table, establishing categories, like this for instance: Category 1 Fear of death and of hell (making a pile of those letters)—14% Category 2 Altruistic reasons, selflessness Category 3 Egocentric motives—6% (categories 2 and 3) Category 4 Striving for a moral idea—7% Category 5 Bad conscience and awareness of sinfulness—8% Category 6 Obedience to teaching (1, 2, 3 letters) Category 7 People have reached a certain age (1, 2, 3 letters), And then Category 8 Imitation (1, 2, 3 letters).—13% (Categories 6-8) Again a category of people who have seen others believing in God and have imitated them. Then Category 9 Getting a hiding—19% And so you have ‘conversion’. This, then, is the opposite. In Indian culture there is no regard for what goes on externally. It would seem quite wrong to an Indian, he would call it ‘mad’, to work out the percentages of the converted in such a way, classifying the motives that led to their conversion. In the West no heed is paid to the inner life, all trace of the inner aspect is wiped out. The most external aspect of all that is external is here compiled in tables, purely Ahrimanic. If we go to the East: innermost inwardness, purely Luciferic. Thus the globe may be said to show us the contrast between Ahrimanic and Luciferic trends. And between those two we are not at rest but in balance. It is not a question of simply rejecting the one or the other of them. We have to be aware that a culture that really extends into the future consists in finding the right measure for both, knowing how to give each it proper due. The whole of earth destiny is brought to expression, I feel, in the sculptured group. It is the mission of Europe to establish the balance between East and West. In the East the pendulum swings to one side, in the West to the other. It is not for us Europeans merely to ape the East or to ape the West. It is our mission to stand our own ground quite independently and give full recognition to the rightful existence of the one as well as the other. That comes to expression in the sculptured group. The work put in a particular position within our building therefore also relates geographically to our mission. It is placed to the east, but with its back to the east, facing west. It is in a state of balance, holding within it the fruits of a long sojourn in the East; and it will not be satisfied with the purely Ahrimanic culture which is what the West has to offer mankind. Dear friends, if our age can come to understand these things, doing so in a thinking way, with feeling, and bringing perceptiveness into it—there is no reason here for pride—it will become clear to our age that even the very painful and profoundly saddening events happening now only serve to make mankind aware of the mission it will have to fulfil in the immediate future. It is only to be hoped that the tremendous and painful experiences mankind now has to go through will truly serve to deepen human hearts and minds. Unfortunately it is true that nothing of the great seriousness the present age demands of us is to be found in what is currently brought to expression in the spoken word and also in literature. Much will still have to come upon human hearts and minds before they are really filled with the great seriousness of purpose—and it is a comforting seriousness—that man will be supported in the tasks set before him. Seriousness is demanded of us, but on the other hand it is a comforting seriousness, a bringer of hope and confidence. We merely have to realize that we are living in an age when great things are asked of us, but that we are also capable of doing these great things. Nor can we come to a pessimistic view of things in the present time. On Tuesday 22 June I shall go into these things in more detail, throwing additional light on certain points. I also intend to speak of man's immediate task for the future and the way spiritual science will help to achieve this. 77
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| 157. The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations: Lecture XIII
22 Jun 1915, Berlin Translated by Anna R. Meuss Rudolf Steiner |
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| But if he reflects carefully he may well find that the past event has undergone a complete change. It will still, however, remind him of something he experienced in the past. |
| In the case of Emerson it is always possible to detect subtle undertones of his Moon being, of the dreamer, wherever he became completely involved in a person or an object. |
| There will have to be many of them before the full meaning of Christ's words can be understood, for they are words of guidance, words given out of the spirit, yet it will only be in the course of time that they can be understood out of what human beings are able to summon up out of the science of the spirit. |
| 157. The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations: Lecture XIII
22 Jun 1915, Berlin Translated by Anna R. Meuss Rudolf Steiner |
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Dear friends, once again let us first of all remember those who are out there at the front, in the great arena of present-day events:
And for those who because of those events have already gone through the gate of death:
May the spirit we are seeking as we work towards spiritual knowledge, the spirit who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha for the good of the earth, for the freedom and progress of man, be With you and the hard duties you have to perform. Today it will be my task to sum up some of the things we may know already, though it is good to review them again and again, for they may serve as guide-lines for our work in spiritual science. Above all we must every now and again return to the thought that our present life on earth, between birth and death, really is an interlude between our many past earth lives and the many lives we have already lived between death and rebirth on the one hand and the many earth lives and lives between death and rebirth that lie ahead in the future on the other. An interlude is what I have called this life of ours. We may therefore expect to find something in our present life that may, as it were, be considered to have arisen out of what has gone before, and also something that may be seen to point us towards the future. Some of the things we shall discuss today will relate particularly to the latter. A person could easily believe, in considering his life, that there is really nothing in this life to indicate that the germs, the seeds of our future life are already within us. Yet that is the case. It really is the case that what is to happen with us in the future is already in preparation. We merely have to interpret our lives correctly and we shall find out that something already lies hidden within us just as the plant now before us holds within it the hidden seed of the future plant' for a plant that is still to come into being. One element in our present life which often tends to be incomprehensible is our dream life, a subject only too well known to us all. Our dream life does of course have aspects that we may consider to be to some extent comprehensible. We dream about things which remind us of something or other we have gone through in life. It does, of course, often happen that things we have gone through the day before or some time ago appear changed in our dreams, that they have undergone some kind of transformation. But still, it will often be fairly obvious that part of the life we have behind us comes up in what we are dreaming, even if it has changed. On the other hand I think no one who pays at least some attention to himself and the world of his dreams can deny that there are dreams which show us such strange things that we really cannot say they derive from something or other we have gone through in our lives. It really is a fact that a person only needs to reflect a little on his dreams and he will be perfectly aware that things come up in his dreams which he could never have thought up, could never have had an idea of, at least as far as he is aware from what he remembers. We shall understand how all this fits together if we take a closer look at what really happens when we dream. As you know, when we are asleep we are outside the physical and ether bodies with our astral body and ego. The physical and ether bodies are lying on the couch; with our astral body and ego we are outside them. Under present conditions on earth it is not possible for any one to have conscious awareness of what the astral body and the ego go through whilst they are asleep—unless they somehow acquire special faculties. These things are at a subconscious level. However, clairvoyant perception shows that what the astral body and ego live through outside the physical body is just as rich and varied, just as clearly defined, as what the physical body experiences. It is just as rich and varied, showing just as great a variety of form as many of the things we experience here on the physical plane. Our consciousness cannot take it in, but it is there and it is experienced. The astral body and the ego are normally so far away from the physical and ether bodies during sleep that these are not aware of anything that goes on in the astral body and the ego. Dreams arise when the astral body and the ego come so close to the physical and ether bodies that the ether body is able to receive impressions of what goes on in the astral body and the ego. When you wake up knowing that you have been dreaming, it strictly speaking means that the contents of your dream have become conscious because the astral body and the ego were re-entering. And before the physical body was able to become conscious of having the astral body and the ego within itself again, the ether body became conscious of this. The ether body rapidly took in what the astral body and the ego had experienced and this gave rise to the dream. A dream therefore arises through interaction between astral body and ether body. As a result the dream is given a particular colouring. It is given a kind of coating, one might say. As you know, at death the human being departs with his astral body, ego and ether body and the ether body then immediately sees the past life in retrospect. This vision of the past life is in fact attached to the ether body and the review comes to an end when this dissolves. The ether body therefore has the capacity for carrying the imprint of all the events in one's life. The ether body really bears the imprint of everything we have gone through in life. This ether body has a very complex structure. If we were able to dissect it out in such a way that it retained its form, it would be a mirror of our present life, a picture of our life going back to the moment, the point in time, to which our memory extends. As we enter into the ether body with our astral body and ego and the ether body comes to meet the incoming astral body, it carries things—memories of things it has experienced—towards that which is coming in with the astral body and it uses its own images for what in the astral body is something real. I want to put it more precisely. Let us assume someone is asleep and with his astral body and ego out there encounters, let us say, another individual. The person will know nothing about this. He experiences the encounter; he experiences a certain friendly feeling towards the other and knows that he is about to do something together with this other individual. Let us assume he experiences this outside his ether body. This is possible. Yet he'll know nothing about it. Then the moment of waking comes. The astral body and the ego return to the ether body, bringing towards the ether body whatever has been experienced. The ether body meets the astral body with all that is inherent within it, with its world of images, and the sleeper dreams. He dreams of something he undertook maybe ten, twenty years ago. And the person will say to himself: ‘Ah yes, I have been dreaming about something I experienced ten, twenty years ago.’ But if he reflects carefully he may well find that the past event has undergone a complete change. It will still, however, remind him of something he experienced in the past. Now what did really happen in this case? If we follow the process carefully, using clairvoyant perception, we find that the ego and astral body have experienced something that in fact Will only take place during the person's next incarnation: an encounter with an individual, something or other which has to do with the individual. But the person is not yet able to take this in with his ether body, for this only contains, is only able to hold, the images of his present life. When the astral body enters, the ether body expresses what really is part of a future life in images belonging to the present life. This peculiarly complicated process actually takes place all the time in the human being when he is dreaming. Considering everything you have already heard in spiritual science, this will not seem strange to you. We must be aware that in the principles which depart from our physical and ether bodies, in the astral body and the ego, we have that which tends towards our next incarnation, which is preparing in us for our next incarnation. As we gradually learn to separate our dreams from the images deriving from our present life, we come to know the prophetic nature of dreams. The prophetic nature of dreams can indeed be revealed to us; we merely have to learn to strip our dreams of the images in which they are clothed. We need to consider the nature of the experiences in our dreams rather than the actual experience. We might say to ourselves for instance: The fact that I dream of an individual is due to the nature of my ether body, the way in which my ether body goes out to meet the experiences gained by the astral body with images relating to the present. To identify the things which have already been prepared for our next life, we have to focus our attention more on the manner or essential nature of the dream, separating it from the image belonging to the ether body. Through our dreams we really have prophecies in us of things that will happen in the future. It is really most important to pay serious attention to this. Human life will be more and more revealed the more we take account of its complex nature. We'd like to have it simpler, that would be easier, but the fact is that it is complicated. You see, someone who is in the outer, physical world does not realize that there are all kinds of things within him. We have just come to see that there is a foreteller of future lives within us. But there are many other things in us, and in gaining self-knowledge we come to see more and more of what there is in us, what is at work within us, making us happy or unhappy—for all the things that are in us make us happy or unhappy. People do not usually realize that prior to this earth life they went through life on Moon—not they themselves but that which has made them human beings on earth. We know something of life on Moon and also of earlier life stages on Sun and on Saturn. Let us first of all consider life on Moon. At present we are of course living earth lives, but life on Moon was essential if earth life was to come about. Life on Moon was preparatory, producing the causes of life on earth, and in a certain way this Moon life is still in us. On Moon man had a dream-like clairvoyance. He perceived reality through dream images. Today we still have in us what we once have been on Moon; it is still in us. Yes, I know Moon man has become earth man, but this effect still holds its original cause within it, we still have Moon man in us. Looking upon this Moon man we are able to say: ‘He is what we call the dreamer in us.’ Yes, indeed, We all carry a dreamer in us, a dreamer who actually thinks and feels and uses his will in a less dense, in a thinner, way, but who is really also wiser than we earth individuals are. We have a dreamer in us. We all carry another subtle human being within us. The way we walk about on earth, thinking, feeling and using our will, is something we have been given in the course of earth evolution. What Moon evolution has left in us is a dreaming human being. We are however given more in this dreamer than we are able to have in our thoughts, feelings and will impulses, and this dreamer is not entirely inactive. We do not take him into account, but we do many, many things that we are really only half aware of, things the dreamer in us is directing and guiding. We arrange things, but the dreamer in us also does his part, guiding our thoughts in this or that direction. We may think up a sentence, for example. The dreamer will make us say that sentence in a specific way, giving it a point, a particular nuance of feeling. The dreamer is what is left in us of Moon. Let us refer to an outstanding individual and show how the dreamer can be found in him. When people get to know people in life, or get to know outstanding individuals through their writings, they usually consider the other as a human being on this earth and not as a dreamer, a poet. Yet it is there that he expresses himself more profoundly. Emerson was a great writer.78 He had the peculiarity that he always became so engrossed in whatever subject he was dealing with that it is easy to show up the occasional contradiction in his work. The reason is that he was always completely taken up with the subject he was dealing with at the time, failing to take into account that what he was characterizing at the moment was contradictory to the characterization he had given when involved in another subject. In the case of Emerson it is always possible to detect subtle undertones of his Moon being, of the dreamer, wherever he became completely involved in a person or an object. Emerson wrote two excellent essays—one on Shakespeare as the typical poet and one on Goethe as the typical writer. Now what happens is that people read this and that in Emerson's essay on Shakespeare and read this and that in the essay on Goethe and this satisfies them, they are content. But we can also take things further and say to ourselves: 'Surely there is some subtle touch of something unusual in these works of Emerson?' And We shall discover something very strange indeed, for Emerson's intention was not to characterize Shakespeare as Shakespeare, but to make him the representative, the example, of poets. It is very strange to see what has come about through Emerson's becoming engrossed in Shakespeare—if we perceive the subtle undertones that are present in this work. You know I would not say anything derogatory about Shakespeare out of chauvinism, for nationalistic reasons. Of course I consider Shakespeare a great poet, certainly one of the greatest poets of all time. But let me bring out those subtle undertones that are there in Emerson's characterization of Shakespeare. He wrote that it was not originality which made a great man. Characterizing a great poet one should not demand such a great person to be original in everything he did. And you'll find that in his characterization of Shakespeare Emerson makes it clear that the poet went to all kinds of sources, taking anything he liked and using it in his own poetic works. Emerson was making an effort, as it were, to excuse Shakespeare for not being original, for collecting his material from all kinds of sources—Italian, Spanish, French and German—and of course also from English history. Oddly enough, Emerson, a man giving such loving concern to the work of Shakespeare, characterized Shakespeare in the following words:
He excused Shakespeare's lack of originality, the fact that he collected his material from many sources. Indeed, he went so far as to say that one had to consider the nature of English audiences at the time, for Shakespeare sought to be to their taste. Emerson wrote some strange things about Shakespeare:
And the strangest thing Emerson said about Shakespeare in his loving characterization, the strangest thing—please listen to this:
Emerson was therefore trying to demonstrate Shakespeare's world renown exactly by showing that great men plagiarize on each other's works and that the themes he used in his numerous works were actually taken from the work of others. That is the subtle undertone to be found initially in Emerson's Shakespeare characterization. Let us now consider his loving appreciation of Goethe. Emerson characterized Goethe as representative of writers. Yet he said with reference to Goethe that nature depended on her wonders being put in words. Every stone, every plant, every creature in nature was waiting to be uttered in words by the soul of man. The writer, Emerson said, would be in immediate contact with nature. It was as though the creator himself has first made provision for the idea and then one day the writer would appear. It was strange, Emerson said with regard to Goethe, how this man owed none of his gifts to his people, his country, his environment, for everything bubbled up out of him. Truth and error, too, was determined by Goethe himself, everything was his own. In his characterization of Goethe, Emerson sought to find his concepts from all kinds of sources. Characterizing Shakespeare as a splendid robber he presented Goethe as someone working out of the centre of the world, as nature herself. Here are some passages from Emerson's description of Goethe:
Elsewhere he said:
He characterized Shakespeare as being the way his audiences wanted him, Goethe as a man who had been envisaged from the very beginning of the world.
And again:
Those words were used to characterize Goethe. In his characterization of Shakespeare, Emerson said that he could never do enough to collect material from all kinds of sources, particularly written sources. I would say that in his characterizations of Shakespeare and of Goethe Emerson succeeded marvellously well in bringing out the difference between Shakespeare and Goethe. Out of what we feel about this we are then able to discover what the dreamer has contributed in either case, that is how Emerson came to characterize Shakespeare as a great robber and Goethe as the great ally of the truth. This is extremely interesting, for there was no conscious intention; yet there is this particular tinge to both essays. You see, there is another way of reading than just picking up a book and going through it. In fact we do not find out the most important aspects of things if we just take them by themselves, but only by comparing them, by letting one thing act on us side by side with another. It has been possible for me to give this example because in the case of Emerson it is often the dreamer who is speaking. It is absolutely possible to be aware of two persons speaking in his voice. Emerson was of course aware of the contradictions which your run-of-the-mill reader finds in his works. After all, some of the contradictions In Emerson are so glaringly obvious you really cannot miss them. On the one hand he calls the English the greatest nation on earth, on the other he puts the Germans above them. One thing is said out of surface consciousness, the other out of the dreamer. It is particularly interesting to read the two conclusions to the essays on Shakespeare and Goethe one after the other, taking them simply as conclusions. In the essay on Shakespeare, Emerson wrote that none has as yet attained to what the poet represented in the world: 'The world still awaits the poet-priest.' Something of a feeling of resignation is apparent in the conclusion of the Shakespeare essay. At the end of the Goethe essay we find the exact opposite: that we are spurred by him to revere all truth by not merely giving it recognition but also making it the guide-line for our actions. The Shakespeare essay ends in words of resignation, the Goethe essay in words of confidence and hope. We are living in an age when it is important to consider these things to some extent, to realize them to some extent. We shall find that in all human beings there is a dreamer who makes himself known through their actions. Clairvoyant awareness is able to perceive him directly; in ordinary life we can recognize him by studying people. That is something we can do in the case of Emerson. Studying Emerson is of definite interest. The dreamer is the principle in us which is influenced by everything that is supposed to influence us from the spiritual world without our being aware of it. In the experiences we gain as human beings on earth we form thoughts and will impulses. The things we know In the ordinary way are the things we discover in the course of life. Into our dreams however come the Inspirations of the angels, of the entities known as the Angeloi. These in turn are inspired by entities from higher hierarchies. Into our dreams enter things—more so in some and less in others—that are more sensible than anything we have gained from everyday life, anything we encompass in everyday life as we think, feel and use our will. The element that guides us, the element which is more than earth-dwelling man is or ever was, enters into the dreamer in us. You see, this dreamer is capable of evoking many things that at present are unconscious in us. Oh yes, everything influencing us from the higher world by way of the entities belonging to the hierarchy of the Angeloi influences the dreamer; but all Ahrimanic, all Luciferic influences also influence the dreamer, they really act on the dreamer. A great deal of what people put forward—not entirely from their consciousness, I'd say, but at an instinctive level—is due to influence brought to bear on the dreamer from the spiritual world. Again I would like to give you an example. I would like to take this example from contemporary history on a somewhat wider scale. I have told you on several occasions that we come to know the European peoples by understanding the way the folk soul speaks through the sentient soul to the Italian, through the intellectual or mind soul to the French, through the spiritual soul to the English, through the ego to the Germans, through the spirit self to the Russians. This communication through the spirit self in the case of the Russians takes the form of instincts today that will only develop further in the future. What the Russian folk soul has to say will only become apparent in the distant future, once the human soul has developed as far as the spirit self. This is why everything that emerges to the east of us is still only germinal. Those peoples to the east of us are, however, instinctively aware that they belong to a different cultural stream. They feel that they must wait. Yet no one likes to wait in reflecting on his awareness of the present. The point is that they are supposed to wait and consciously absorb European culture. Yet there is an instinct in them that they ought to lead and to guide, that they cannot put Europe to death quickly enough. The natural course of events, however, is that in Central Europe there develops whatever can develop in the dialogue between the folk soul and the ego. As for the Russian folk soul, it must learn its lessons from Central Europe. Once it has worked through what is already being worked through in advance in Central Europe, it will be able to make its own Contribution to European culture. Instead, wild, chaotic instincts are giving rise to something very strange so that we are able to see that these instincts are brought to life in the dreamer out of all kinds of Ahrimanic and Luciferic impulses. It is due to these Ahrimanic and Luciferic impulses that the East of Europe has now turned against Germany in such a horrific way. One mind in whose utterances the dreamer is apparent is that of Yushakov79 He gave his views in 1885 on the relationship between Russian and English culture. I suggest you consider his ideas, for it seems most desirable that as many people as possible today ideas like those which not all that long ago arose in the mind of a Russian who then wrote them down. We should consider these ideas not so much for their content but rather as symptoms of something to be found in all Russian peoples. develop Yushakov said that the West had grown decadent and was ripe for decline—everything in the West had outlived its time and had to disintegrate. Russia would have to come in at this point. But Russia should not merely cultivate the West, redeem the West from its barbarism; Russian would have to redeem the whole world and Particularly Asia. The way Yushakov envisaged this redemption of Asia for the sake of the soul is as follows. Let us consider Asia. Asiatic culture really originated from Iran. Iranian culture based on Ormazd.80 The Iranians had realized that there was conflict between Ormazd and Ahriman and it has always been possible to see how the Iranians did everything in their power to spread the beneficial influence of Ormazd in Iran. Then, however, the Turanian peoples appeared on the scene. They were independent of Ahriman and constantly harried, fought and overcame the Ormazd culture. First Ormazd was in conflict with Ahriman in Iran. But If we look at the way the peoples of Europe behaved towards this Ormazd culture we find that this lovely culture had spread in the areas which were then predominantly colonized by the English. The English were absolute barbarians when it came to the Ormazd culture. Russia will have to make up for many crimes committed by the English in Asia. The English went there, took possession of large parts of Asia and exploited the Ormazd culture, sucking it dry. What did the English have in mind? Those Englishmen believed the Ormazd culture to exist for their benefit; those Englishmen said that all those parts of Asia existed only to wear English fabrics, fight among themselves with English weapons, work with English tools, eat from English dishes and play with English trinkets. Asian culture, they felt, existed for no other purpose. The whole of Asia was to their mind booty won by England. Yushakov put it very precisely:
That was written in Russian by Yushakov in 1885. And what did the Russians do? Yushakov asked. They had not been able to emulate the Western European nations, the English, and without legal justification attack and arrogate for themselves the Ormazd culture which existed in Asia. They only went to the places where the Ahriman culture had spread, holding back the peoples in whom Ahriman was at work, so that they could do no further harm to all that Ormazd had achieved for Asia. Once the Russians had liberated the peoples of Asia from the evil of Ahriman they would have to liberate them from the evils due to the sins the English had committed against the Ormazd culture in those areas. To prepare for their future mission in Asia, following the liberation of Asia from Ahriman, they would also have to make good the harm European peoples, and above all the English, had done to the Ormazd culture. Asked why those peoples were unable to carry on with the Ormazd culture, Yushakov's reply was that they had become slaves to industrialism and individualism, that they always thought of themselves first whilst the Russians always thought of themselves last. Such people were of no use. Having blended industrialism into their individualism they had become bloodsuckers in Asia. Russia, he said, would forge different links; a link between the Cossacks, with their brilliant military skills, and the country people who were working with nature. Out of this would come the people who were to liberate the people of Asia. The individual who was to liberate human evolution would come from Asia. That was Yushakov's ideal—that the one to liberate the world would come out of the union between the Cossacks and the country people tilling the soil. Dear friends, you see an ideal set up here that surely makes it clear beyond doubt that something of the Ahrimanic spirit entered into Yushakov's own mind, into the dreamer. This influence on the dreamer has gradually created a mood in a whole nation—the mood we now perceive in the people who are to the east of us. We are dealing here with a popular mood, a mood brought to expression in Yushakov's words. You see, I also wanted to show how spiritual science lets us enter more and more closely, giving us deeper insights, into what people say and dream. We all have the dreamer in us, the dreamer is in all of us. Both good and evil powers influence the dreamer. We have the dreamer in us who has brought Moon nature into us, and we also have a Sun man in us from Sun evolution. This Sun man, however, is no longer able to dream. His conscious awareness if of the same kind as that of the plants. We have within us a plant or Sun man, who is asleep. And then we have in us a Saturn man who is completely dead, as dead as a stone. We have the Sun man in us who is asleep and also Saturn man who is at an even lower level of consciousness, below the level of consciousness we have in sleep. Saturn man I'd say, is our oldest cause, the innermost core in us. All the knowledge man gains at the present time in external life or in science is gained because the external world influences the Saturn man in us. We are not aware of being influenced in this way, but we are nevertheless influenced. Everything we think, feel and will penetrates to Saturn man. And Saturn man is what finally remains of us on this earth, irrespective of whether we are cremated as far as our physical body is concerned or whether we decompose. The principle we call the dreamer does not endure; the Sun man does not endure. Saturn man becomes part of the elemental realm of the earth in form of very, very fine dust particles. This endures. The earth will always contain a trace of what there has been in us. If you investigate the elemental world today you can find in it the remains of Abraham, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, though in the form of very very fine dust particles. You can find the part of them that was their Saturn man. The part of man that was his Saturn man is given to the earth, remains with the earth, remains in the earth with our permanent essential character. It was not like this in earlier times. It has been like this since the 15th and 16th centuries. Previously, the whole of the human being dissolved; only those who had been well ahead of their time, like Abraham, Plato and Socrates, left their remains to the earth. By now, or course, it has gradually come to be like this for all people. For this is what is so strange: everything presently achieved by following the path of external science is imprinted in this Saturn man and becomes part of the earth when he does. Everything else there is to man will be lost, dissolving into the universe once the earth has reached its goal. The minerals, plants and animals around us will pass away. Only the Saturn man you have been remains, in the form of fine dust particles. It will go over from earth to Jupiter existence, forming the solid skeleton of Jupiter. Those are real atoms for Jupiter. People studying external science today, people thinking in an external way, influence their Saturn man to the effect that they produce atoms for Jupiter in their Saturn man. That is how Jupiter get its atoms. If that, however, were the only thing to happen, the whole of Jupiter would be merely a mineral or mineral-like sphere. Jupiter would merely be a mineral-like sphere without plant growth. What we are able to take across to Jupiter through the Saturn man in us merely causes Jupiter to be a mineral sphere. Plants could not grow on it. If plants are to grow on Jupiter the Sun man in us must also be given something. This Sun man in us only receives something from now on and into the future if men and women absorb concepts developed in spiritual science; for the concepts we absorb outside, from external science, enter into Saturn man. What we absorb by way of thoughts engendered through spiritual science enters into the Sun man. This is why spiritual science calls for greater activity. Its thoughts differ from those of external science in that they are active. They have to be grasped in a living way and it is impossible to remain passive towards thinking activity the way we do in the external world. In spiritual science everything has to be actively thought out, we have to be inwardly active. This has an effect on the Sun man in us. And if there were no Sun principle in man, the Jupiter of the future would be entirely mineral, with no plant world. People going through spiritual development take something across that will give rise to a plant world on Jupiter. Through the Sun principle in us we take across the future plant world. All we have to do to make Jupiter barren is reject spiritual science. We can establish spiritual science now in order that there shall be vegetation on Jupiter. Unlike others, we spiritual scientists do not talk of the marvellous progress we have made. Just listen to a modern physician, one who is very much taking the present-day point of view, or to a modern philosopher and so on. They say: ‘We need not go far back to find people who amounted to nothing at all. Someone like Paracelsus really was in idiot, and a grammar school teacher today is cleverer than Plato every was.’ Plato's philosophy was thoroughly picked to pieces by Hebbel. The latter put down in his diary, as an idea for a play, that a grammar school teacher had a reincarnated Plato in his class.81 He intended to make a dramatic figure of him, showing the schoolmaster to be dealing with his reincarnated Plato who was quite incapable of grasping anything his teacher was saying about Plato. Hebbel intended to make a play of this. It really is a pity he did not do so, for it really is a very good idea. But we do not consider ourselves to have made marvellous progress. We hold a different point of view. What people consider philosophy today holds the ego-boosting view that anything going back ten years is already out of date. We know that we have to present spiritual science today the way we do. We also know, however, that a time must come when everything we now present as spiritual science will be a nonsense in a future where quite different work will have to be done within mankind. What we have to present as spiritual science today has the form appropriate for the moment, seeking out from eternity what will be for the benefit of the present age. A time will come, however, when it will be necessary for us to try and influence the dreamer in us just as we influence the Sun man, and the whole of our external science influences Saturn man. Jupiter as mineral mass will be based on what external science makes of Saturn man. Its vegetation will be based on what spiritual science makes of Sun man. Animal life on Jupiter will arise from something that is going to follow on after spiritual science. It will be based on the spiritual science of the future. Then something else will follow which will influence man on Jupiter, something which is still to come. It will provide the basis for Jupiter culture in the real sense. At present, therefore, we are in a period in life where we prepare the mineral nucleus of Jupiter through external science and where spiritual science influences its plant life, providing the basis for vegetation on Jupiter. The future will bring the principle that influences the dreamer, and this will provide the basis for animal life on Jupiter. Only after this will come the principle which corresponds to what man is today producing in his thinking, feeling and will activity. This is guided by higher wisdom to the effect that when earth evolution has come to an end man will be able to take himself, as man, across to Jupiter. This is how we are involved in the evolution of the earth, and we perceive, out of our very own human nature, that we are part of the great world, of the macrocosm. We know that everything we do is of account. We know that in joining in the pursuit of spiritual science we contribute to vegetative life for Jupiter and that through the things we put in words we create what will be given to the future at the Jupiter stage of the world. Just think, dear friends, as I have told you, everything belonging to the mineral kingdom will disperse in the world; everything belonging to the plant kingdom will disperse; everything belonging to the animal kingdom will disperse. Nothing will continue on from the earth except for the mineral atoms coming from man, from the Saturn parts of human beings. Nothing of the mineral, plant and animal worlds passes across to Jupiter. The only thing which will continue is the Saturn man now within us. This will be the mineral kingdom on Jupiter. I do not know if some of our friends still remember how we first started many years ago in Berlin. We were a small band in those days—some who shared in the experience are still with us—and we started to consider these things. Let us imagine ourselves on the Jupiter of the future. What are the atoms of Jupiter? They are the Saturn parts of present-day man. It is a nonsense to talk of atoms of the kind modern physicists speak of. Everything man gains from the whole of the earth enters into Saturn man and later becomes Jupiter atoms. It is pure nonsense to say that our minerals, animals and plants contain what physicists are looking for in them. Our present earth atoms were prepared during Moon existence and are what will prepare us to be Sun men, just as we are now preparing the Saturn man in us. I have previously spoken of the way the atom is prepared our of the whole cosmos. You'll find this in the lectures given at the very beginning of our work in Berlin.82 Today I'll have to be brief, also taking into account what we have gone through in the meantime. Our stars, too—the external physical stars, the physical sun, the physical moon we see out there in the universe—that, too, is not the way physicists see it. Physicists would be most surprised if they managed to get up to the sun, for they would find nothing at all of what they have construed. They'd be most surprised at what they saw there. What we would find if we ever could travel up there—in accord with the times it would have to be in a balloon that is still to be invented, in an ether balloon—we'd find the unexpected. We would not find what the physicists have construed; we'd find nothing at all by way of a physical body. It merely looks like that. The sun, moon and stars are part of a whole that arose at some point after Moon evolution. After Moon evolution it was not only the Moon which perished but everything that is part of the visible universe entered into night. And everything there is in the universe today really belongs to the earth, so that the end of the earth will not only mean the plant and animal kingdoms perishing with it but everything out there in the cosmos perishing as well. The stars in their present form will perish into night. And then the future Jupiter world will emerge. Its atoms will be the Saturn parts of present man. Its environment will look very different from our earth environment. A person considering all this today might ask: 'What will remain of the present world when earth evolution has come to an end?' Mineral, plant and animal kingdoms—all that disperses and passes away. What man gains today by virtue of being man, the external power of discernment he is acquiring, will pass over into the mineral kingdom of Jupiter. The spiritual science he gains will pass over as Sun man and establish the vegetation. What we say—the words we speak—will pass over. Anything moral that happens will pass over. Was not the One who was to give meaning and direction to the whole of earth evolution able to say some very special words? Was he not able to say: ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away’?83 Are we not now beginning to grasp the utter profundity of the words Christ spoke: ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away’? Is that not literally true? Words coming from external science influence Saturn man and become the atoms of Jupiter. Words coming from spiritual science and influencing Sun man pass across to form the vegetation on Jupiter. That which acts on the dreamer passes across to form the animal kingdom on Jupiter. The moral progress made by man and what he gains through words of the spiritual science of the future—that will be man on Jupiter. It will be words, wisdom of thoughts. This shall endure. Everything all around us in the cosmos will perish. ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.’ So we gradually come to see words of profound wisdom flowing from this central place of activity we call Golgotha. They flow from that point. As I once said, the whole earth evolution to follow exists so that gradually men shall come to understand the words spoken by the One who went through the Mystery of Golgotha. Today I have tried to explain to you, out of the whole of spiritual science as we know it so far, Christ's words: ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.’ Again and again in the future there will be people who know how to explain other words spoken by Christ out of spiritual science. There will have to be many of them before the full meaning of Christ's words can be understood, for they are words of guidance, words given out of the spirit, yet it will only be in the course of time that they can be understood out of what human beings are able to summon up out of the science of the spirit. We need to enter into this with our feelings if we are to get a feeling for the utter uniqueness of the Mystery of Golgotha. Through perception directed upwards to the infinite we shall gain the marvellous insight into the one thing that has given the earth meaning from the world's beginning to its very end—the Mystery of Golgotha. Dear friends, it will be another few weeks until we can talk again. And so it has been my task today to speak of something we are able to take into our hearts and minds and meditate on a great deal in the weeks to come. I wanted to put some ideas into your hearts and minds which you could then develop further. It always has been our summer task in spiritual science to develop further what has entered into our hearts and minds so that our souls shall grow more alive and mature. We do not progress in spiritual science by absorbing it as something theoretical, by merely absorbing ideas, but rather by transforming those thoughts into our whole inner life, letting them become living experience. If we let this thought of how man is part of the whole macrocosm act on our souls, we will come to feel part of it all as human beings. Faintheartedness, hesitation, lack of hope will have to vanish before the magnitude of this thought. We must then at last come to feel ourselves human beings in all humility. And all we have been able to absorb of spiritual science, all that can and shall come alive in us out of spiritual science—as has always been our principle until now—needs to be given emphasis in the present day. Again and again we have to remember, as we consider things today, that the great events happening in our time are a warning. We must remember those who are leaving their ether bodies behind for us while still young, ether bodies that will be a great help to us in letting the spirit enter into the culture of the future. If the spirit is to come in there must be souls that understand something of these spiritual things, souls that look up into that world and know that up there is not only what, in abstract terms, is called attraction, but up there are the living dead, up there is what they have given to mankind on earth of their own life—their unused ether bodies. Souls that have some understanding of these things will have to work together, souls whose thoughts reach upwards to meet what is streaming down from the unused ether bodies of those who have died before their time. We must fill our souls with this image of the spiritual streaming down to join the earthly. Above all, we must look up to the spiritual realm with all our thoughts, with the part of us that is already spiritual. This I have always summed up in conclusion in the words that shall also be our conclusion today:
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| 157. The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations: Lecture XIV
06 Jul 1915, Berlin Translated by Anna R. Meuss Rudolf Steiner |
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| It really seems that modern man should have a fair degree of understanding and should, with some good will, be able to accept these things. Occasionally we come across evidence of someone being aware that there is a small human being—the conscious human being—and a big human being who is the cosmic reality. |
| That, too, is what people say, only they say it by inventing philosophies and so forth. It has to be clearly understood that in the world it really makes no difference if we decide to put a limit on what is to happen, a limit to suit our reluctance to be personally involved. |
| Let us use all we have been able to absorb out of the work we have been doing these last years and try to understand clearly that there is a certain measure of spiritual power that is given to human nature. Mystical spirituality has to be thrust out of human consciousness in order that mankind can grow free in taking hold of the physical body. |
| 157. The Destinies of Individuals and of Nations: Lecture XIV
06 Jul 1915, Berlin Translated by Anna R. Meuss Rudolf Steiner |
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Dear friends, once again let us first of all remember those who are out there at the front, in the great arena of present-day events:
And for those who because of those events have already gone through the gate of death:
May the spirit we are seeking as we work towards spiritual knowledge, the spirit who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha for the good of the earth, for the freedom and progress of man, be with you and the hard duties you have to perform. There are a number of things I want to recall in this extra session today, themes spoken of in different lectures which we shall bring together and consider from a particular point of view today. The rays of light which arise will then be directed at subjects we have previously considered from one angle or another. There is a particular prejudice, a feeling people have, which stops them from accepting spiritual science in the present age. People have so little idea of how small a proportion of whatever a human being accomplishes at any hour, any moment, basically is within his ordinary awareness of being a human individual in the physical world. Just consider how little we would be able to function as human beings if we were fully conscious of everything we needed in order to live as human beings. It is often stressed, and quite rightly so, that modern man knows very little—taking first of all the purely physical functions in life—how his brain, liver, heart and so on really work in order to accomplish what man has to accomplish to enable him to live on this earth as a physical entity. All the things man has to accomplish merely to let his external physical life progress—all those things he simply has to accomplish. But consider how little man is able to follow this with his conscious mind. Just consider some quite minor thing happening in everyday life and you'll immediately see that man as an entity in this world, an entity on earth, is one thing, and what may be called ‘conscious man’ is something quite different. In relation to what man is within his whole compass, this conscious man is small, very small indeed. It should therefore not come as a surprise that man feels a natural urge to extend this small conscious man more and more into the region that opens up when we consider man as part of the cosmos. We shall do this today by returning to aspects considered in earlier lectures and considering them in a different context. Our conscious existence as a human being starts, in a way, with sensory perception, with everything our senses perceive of the world outside us. Sensory perception—the fact that impressions are made on our senses, with those impressions arising on the basis of certain processes, is something quite different from our being aware of this. Imagine you are sleeping with your eyes open, not closed. Hares are capable of this. Unless it were pitch dark the environment would constantly leave impressions on the eye, only you would not be aware of those impressions. Our ears are of course always open, and every sound, all the things we are constantly aware of during the day when we are awake, are of course also processed in the ear when we are asleep. Our sense organs may always be engaged in the whole process of earth life; yet any significance they may hold for us depends on our following this process in the sense organs in conscious awareness' Only the things we take into conscious awareness are actually ours in this life on earth. Do these sensory perceptions as we call them, the ability of our eyes, ears and so on to perceive, have significance only for us as human beings living on earth, or do they also hold a wider, cosmic significance? To answer this question we need to use clairvoyant insight to fain an opinion as to what it is that we actually see of the stars in the universe. I think we may say that people taking the point of view of materialistic physics would say: ‘Well, when we see a planet, the light of the sun has fallen on it and been reflected, and that is how we see the planet.’ That is, in fact, the way objects on earth are seen. Physicists therefore concluded, on the basis of mere analogy, that planets are seen in the same way. There is no reason at all why something applicable on earth—the conclusion that light falls on objects and these objects become visible through that light being reflected—should also apply to heavenly bodies. There is absolutely no reason to say that this conclusion also applies to the universe. As to the fixed stars, well, the physicists say these give off their own light. I remember how, as quite a young fellow, I asked a former schoolmate from our village school: ‘What are they teaching you about light?’ Even in those days I had listened with a certain youthful scepticism to what was said of the 'real' origin of light, of all the tiny dancing particles of ether and of light-waves. The other boy, who had had his further education at a seminary, had heard nothing of this as yet. He told me: ‘Whenever the question came up as to the nature of light we were simply told: “Light is what makes bodies luminous”.’ Well, you see that really is saying something quite brilliant about light, to say that light is what makes bodies luminous. Yet modern materialistic physicists are not really saying much more than that when they say that we see heavenly bodies because they radiate light. It is very much the same in principle. I did mention on another occasion that materialistic physicists might get quite a surprise if they were able to travel to the sun to look and see what the sun really is like. I said that because in fact there is nothing at all there in the place where the sun is. What we would find would be a composite of purely spiritual entities and energies. There is nothing material there at all. If we use clairvoyant awareness to investigate the stars and inquire into the reason for their luminosity we find that what is actually there, what we call their luminosity, really consists in the ability to perceive, an ability which is rather crude in man and more highly developed in other entities. If some entity were to look down on the earth from Venus or Mars and find the earth luminous, it would have to say to itself: ‘This earth is luminous not because it reflects the rays of the sun, but because there are men on earth who perceive with their eyes.’ The process of visual perception holds significance not only for our own conscious awareness but radiates out into the whole of outer space. The light of this particular heavenly body consists in what men do in order to see. We do not merely see in order to become aware of the results of visual perception, we also see in order that because of this process the earth becomes radiant to outer space. And it is a fact that every one of our sense organs has the function not only to be what it is for us but also has a function within the universe. Through sensory perception man is an entity within the cosmos. He is not merely the entity his conscious mind presents to him as a human being on earth, he is also a cosmic entity. Considering the inner configuration of the soul at a deeper level, we come to our thinking activity. We are even more inclined to consider our thoughts our own. Not only are ‘thoughts free from toll’, as the saying goes, indicating that thoughts really hold significance only for the individual person, but it is widely thought that people merely go through an inner process when they think and that this thinking activity more or less holds only personal significance for them. The truth is very different. Thinking activity is, in fact, a process occurring in the ether body. And people know extremely little of what really goes on when they are thinking. Extremely little of what goes on when he is thinking enters into man's conscious awareness. As he thinks, he is aware of part of what he is thinking. Yet infinitely more thinking activity is associated with this even when we think in the daytime. What is more, we continue to think during the night, when we are asleep. It is not true that we stop thinking when we go to sleep and start again on waking. Thinking activity is continuous. There are many different dream processes, processes in our dream-life, and part of all this is that man's ego and astral body enter into his ether body and physical body on waking. He comes in with these two principles and finds himself in the surging billows of something very active and alive. Giving just a little consideration to this he will realize that these are weaving thoughts and that he is becoming immersed in an ocean consisting entirely of weaving thoughts. People often say to themselves on waking: ‘If only I could remember what I was thinking just now. Those were very sensible ideas, something that could help me enormously if only I could remember!’ And they are not mistaken. There really is something like a billowing ocean down there. It is the billowing, weaving, etheric world, and this is not simply a more subtle form of matter, the way English theosophists like to present it,84 but the world of weaving thoughts, something genuinely spiritual. We become immersed in a world of weaving thoughts. As human beings we are really much more sensible and intelligent than we are just as conscious human beings. This is something that has to be admitted. It would indeed be most regrettable if we were no more sensible at the unconscious level than we are at the conscious level. For we could do nothing else in that case but repeat ourselves at the same level of intelligence life after life. In fact, we already have within us during our present life the potential for our next life; this will be the fruit. If we were always able to catch hold of this element we become immersed in, we would catch hold of much of what we will be in our next life. So there is billowing, weaving life down there. It is the germ of our next incarnation and this is what we take into ourselves. Hence the prophetic nature of our dream life. Thinking is an immensely complicated process and man only takes a small proportion of what it involves into his consciousness. A thought involves something which is a process in time. Our sensory perceptions made in conscious awareness also make us part of the cosmos. The activity of seeing causes the earth to grow luminous and this makes us part of cosmic space. The processes involved in thinking activity make us part of cosmic time; all that happened before we were born and all that is going to happen after death plays its part in this. Through our thinking, then, we take part in the whole cosmic process of time, through our sensory perception in the whole cosmic process of space. Only the earth-based process of sensory perception is for ourselves. Let us move on to feeling. We are even less aware of feeling activity than we are of sensory perception and of thinking activity. Feeling is a very profound process. You see, to discover the true significance of thinking, to find the real truth—that thinking has cosmic significance—it is necessary to progress to imaginative perception, as described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.85 Stripping our thinking of the abstract nature we consciously associate with it, and entering into that ocean of weaving thoughts, we encounter the necessity to have not only the abstract thoughts in there that we have as citizens of the earth but to conceive images in it. For everything is created from images. Images are the true or origins of things; images are behind everything around us; and it is into these images we enter when we immerse ourselves in the ocean of weaving thoughts. Those are the images Plato spoke of; they are the images all who have spoken of spiritual primary causes had in mind, the images Goethe had in mind with his archetypal plant. These images are to be found in imaginative thinking. This imaginative thinking is a reality and we become immersed in it when we enter the billowing world of thoughts that move with the stream of time. We only enter into the depths of feeling when we attain to what is called Inspiration. This is a higher form of perception compared to Imagination. Everything that lies at the root of feeling in us really is a surging sea of Inspirations. Just as the image reflected in the mirror is merely an image of the object which exists in the world outside, so our feelings are merely reflections mirrored in our own organism of Inspirations that come to us from the universe. They are a mirror image which relates to the flowing movement in the universe the way a dead mirror image relates to the living creature it is reflecting. Each of those images reflects the attributes of entities belonging to higher hierarchies who express themselves in the world through Inspiration. If we do not stop at feeling activity but progress to clairaudient perception we perceive the world as the united activity of a great multitude of entities within hierarchies. The world is this entity arising out of the united actions of entities from the hierarchies. The deeds of the higher hierarchies are happening in the world. And we are involved. We are in the mirror. And the deeds of the higher hierarchies are reflected in our mirror. We then perceive what has been reflected—through conscious awareness. As human beings active in feeling, we live in the womb of the attributes of the hierarchies, perceiving those attributes because we have consciousness. When it comes to being conscious of his feelings, man is even smaller compared to what he really is in his ability to feel than he is compared to his sensory perceptions and his thinking activity. As feeling human beings we are also part of the hierarchies, are also working in the sphere where the hierarchies are at work. We are active in creating the fabric. We perform deeds that are not for ourselves alone, deeds through which we share in the great work of building the world. Through our feelings we are the servants of the higher entities that are the world builders. We may think, as we stand before the Sistine Madonna for example, that this merely meets certain emotional needs in us. The fact however is that when a human being stands before the Sistine Madonna and responds to the painting emotionally this is an entirely real process. If there were no emotional element, no element of feeling, the entities which one day are to share in the work of building Venus as a heavenly body would lack the powers they need to do this work. Our feelings are needed for the world the gods are building, the way bricks are needed in building a house. Again we have only partial knowledge of our feelings. We know the joy we experience as we stand before the Sistine Madonna, yet what is happening there is one element within the universal whole, irrespective of whether we have conscious awareness of this or not. As to our will activity, this, too, is but a mirror, though in this case the essential nature of individual members of the hierarchies is reflected. We are also an entity within the hierarchies but at a different level. Our reality lies in our will. We give substance to the world by somehow or other letting our will live in reality. Again it holds true that, in so far as we follow our will activity in conscious awareness, this has significance only for us as human beings. But apart from this, our will activity is a reality which is the material the gods used to build the world. So you see how our sensory perceptions, our thinking, feeling and will activity, have cosmic significance; how they are an integral part of the whole of cosmic life. It really seems that modern man should have a fair degree of understanding and should, with some good will, be able to accept these things. Occasionally we come across evidence of someone being aware that there is a small human being—the conscious human being—and a big human being who is the cosmic reality. Friedrich Nietzsche spoke of this in his Zarathustra, for he had some idea of it. The same holds true for many other people, except that they do not make the effort to follow the paths that will show how we progress from being a small human being to being the greater one. It is really necessary, however, that a fair number of people come to realize that the times have passed when it was possible to manage without such insight. In the past, something still remained of the old clairvoyance that enabled people to see into the spiritual world. In those days they really were able to see the way man does today when he is outside his .physical and ether bodies with his astral body and ego and out there in the cosmos. Man would never have achieved complete freedom as an individual and dependence would have been his lot if the old clairvoyance had persisted. It was necessary for man to take possession, as it were, of his physical ego. The form of thinking he would develop if he perceived the surging ocean of thinking, feeling and will activity that exists below consciousness would be a heavenly form of thinking but not independent thinking. How does man achieve independent thinking? Well, imagine it is night-time and you are lying asleep in your bed. It is the physical body and the ether body which are lying in your bed. As you wake up the ego and the astral body enter from outside. Thinking activity continues in the ether body. And now the ego and the astral body enter, first of all taking hold of the ether body. This does not take long, however, for at that very moment the thought may flash up: ‘What have I been thinking? Those were sensible thoughts.’ However, the human being has a strong desire to take hold of the physical body as well, and the moment he does so everything vanishes. Now the human being is wholly within the sphere of earth life. It is because man immediately takes hold of his physical body that he is unable to gain awareness of the subtle swell of etheric thinking. To have the awareness 'It is I who am thinking' man simply has to take hold of his physical body and make it his instrument; otherwise he would not feel 'It is I who am thinking' but ‘It is the angel guarding me who is thinking’. The conscious thought ‘I am thinking’ is possible only if the physical body is taken hold of. Man therefore must be able to use his physical body. In the time that lies ahead he will have to make use of what the earth is giving him and take hold of his physical body more and more. His justifiable egoism will grow and grow. This will have to be counteracted by taking hold of the insights provided through spiritual science. We are now at the beginning of this era. People might say:
That, too, is what people say, only they say it by inventing philosophies and so forth. It has to be clearly understood that in the world it really makes no difference if we decide to put a limit on what is to happen, a limit to suit our reluctance to be personally involved. It is quite impossible for the measure meted out to man to be reduced. If man is intended to develop certain powers within a particular era and only develops part of them, the rest will nevertheless emerge. It is not true to say that they do not emerge. When you heat up an engine the excess heat supplied does not disappear; it radiates from the engine. In the same way nothing that exists in human life can disappear. It is not true, therefore, that mystical powers—so much despised by modern man—do not exist. Man is able to deny them, yet they continue to exist as part of this world. You can deny them, you can be a great materialist in your conscious mind, but you cannot be a materialist with the whole of your being. What happens is that those powers will, unknown to man, develop in such a way that he will offer to Lucifer and Ahriman what he would otherwise have offered to the legitimate gods. Everything you suppress in your conscious mind, everything you will not allow to unfold, you offer to Ahriman and Lucifer. No culture in the present age, dear friends, can have been more intensely materialistic down to the last fibre of the soul than the Italian culture. Present-day Italian culture, the culture of the Italian nation, has developed through the influence of the folk soul on the sentient soul. It is the current mission of English culture to develop materialism. Materialism will be on the surface there, but it will be the way it ought to be. The earth does need a certain materialism and this is developing there. It is the mission of the British to bring materialism into earth evolution. With them it cannot take root in the soul as deeply as it does with the Italians. An Italian feels everything deeply and in him materialism takes root at the very deepest level. This is why present-day Italian culture goes into positive frenzies of nationalistic materialism and does so with all its soul, when in fact materialism cannot be accepted with the whole of one's soul. We may be its protagonists in the world but we cannot really develop an enthusiasm for it—unless we are part of the Italian folk soul. It is true that the present age is the most materialistic ever. It is equally true that among the people living in the south of Europe the most materialistic attitudes of all arise from the sentient soul. Fichte said: `Anyone who believes in freedom within the life of the spirit is really one of us.’86 His conception of nationalism was one entirely determined by the spirit. There is nothing of this in the Italian concept of nationalism. In their case it is entirely a matter of blood substance—their nationalism is entirely naturalistic. One man's idea of what constitutes a nation is quite different from that of another. An utterly nationalistic materialism is alive among the Italian people. This, of course, only relates to the present day. You must realize that when the soul is so determinedly aiming for naturalistic materialism in what a nation is intending, the sense for the mystical cannot be lost on account of this. It persists. It is merely thrust out from consciousness and comes to rest elsewhere. It is not thrust out from man's true and innermost being. It now serves the powers we refer to by the technical terms of Lucifer and Ahriman. Those human faculties are then not directed along the path of the progressive deities but into the path,. of Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers. One would assume that something will have to emerge in those nations when powers of a mystical nature are thrust out into public life. Can we find something of this kind in the South, a stream of mystical will that has been thrust out? It was in May 1347, on Whitsunday, that Cola di Rienzi87 walked up to the Capitol in Rome at the head of a great procession. He was wearing ancient Roman armour, which was in accord with the sentiments of that time, and had four standards. The Capitol is the place from which speeches concerning Rome civilization were traditionally addressed to the Romans. Rienzi proclaimed that he had come to speak in the name of Jesus Christ, as a man compelled to speak to the Romans in the name of freedom for the whole world. Rhetoric was very much the order of the day at the time. It did have a certain significance then—in 1347—but no reality. The whole was something like a puff of smoke. But that is not really my point. I want to draw your attention to the fact that this happened on a Whitsunday—on 20 May 1347. It was then that the man representing this whole stream called himself an ambassador of Christ. Later, when he had further elaborated his message, he also called himself a man inspired by the Holy Spirit. It was also a Whitsunday that war was declared against Austria. Immediately before that a man who did not call himself an ambassador of Christ but nevertheless let it appear in what he said that he was filled with the Holy Spirit, had walked at the head of a large procession and made speeches in Rome. There certainly was no vestige in the soul of this man of the mysticism out of which Rienzi had formerly spoken. Yet—and here we get an element of mysticism that has been thrust out—the words were again spoken on a Whitsunday. Yet they were spoken in the service of those other powers. The Christ impulse had been thrust out from consciousness. And that it was very much the Ahrimanic element—an element we must of course expect in the present age—is evident from just a few words that were said at the time. A 20th century orator could not, of course, arrive in Roman armour and with four standards and so he came in a car. That is the kind of sacrifice one has to make in this materialistic age. But somehow he had to bring to expression—perhaps unconsciously—that an element of mystical power thrust out by man had been ceded to another power and was now on the move in the outside world, having been turned into its opposite. This man who calls himself d'Annuncio—in reality he is called something else89—spoke in such a way that people might have believed all the great flaming speeches of Rienzi were coming to life again—it is easy to do this in Italian—deliberately making every sentence reminiscent of him. After his oration, which to the Central European mind consists of nothing but empty words, he picked up a ceremonial sword and he kissed this sword to indicate that the power of his oratory should pass into this sword. The sword was the property of the editor of a magazine one commonly sees around when one goes to Italy. The editor of a magazine had presented the sword to the Mayor of Rome as a sacred relic on this occasion. The sword belonged to the editor of the cosmic paper Asino. In time to come a world judging these things on a different basis from that prevailing today will realize that many of the things happening at the present time have to be judged from the point of view I have presented—that much of what is present in man by way of mystical powers is thrust out, handed over to the world process, but does not get lost. It becomes the spoil of Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers. Rarely is the irony inherent in world history as obvious to the eye as in the case I have just presented. Let us use all we have been able to absorb out of the work we have been doing these last years and try to understand clearly that there is a certain measure of spiritual power that is given to human nature. Mystical spirituality has to be thrust out of human consciousness in order that mankind can grow free in taking hold of the physical body. Yet on the other hand this mystical spirituality must be made part of our conscious life, otherwise Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers will take hold of what has been thrust out from conscious awareness. Again and again I want to remind you, dear friends, that having made such efforts for many years to absorb this into our conscious mind, we also have the feeling arise in us that something will have to emerge from the bloodshed of the present time that will lead mankind towards spirituality, towards recognition of the spirit. This means, as I have often said, that there will have to be souls who have grown able, through spiritual science, to look up into the spiritual world where all the ether bodies that have come from young people are present. These have reached the spiritual world and will continue to be present because on that plane, too, powers are not lost. We must look up towards them. They will unite with the powers shining down for us from the spiritual world and what the dead have to say will form the impulses of the future—if souls are present who understand their language. It it in this spirit that once again we say these simple words:
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| 157. The Etheric Being in the Physical Human Being
20 Apr 1915, Berlin Translator Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
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| An important thing which now rises up in our consciousness with everything that appears before us, might be described as follows: We ourselves undergo a change—in our own sight, of course, we ourselves change, and even the surrounding world which exists in our physical-sensory perception undergoes a change. |
| If we consider man's feeling life, we only have to go back as far as the Moon evolution, and for his volitional life as far as the evolution of the Earth. This will enable you to understand many things. In the case of people who were strongly moulded by their preceding incarnation, who are not elastic, but have a sharply moulded form, many things will be pressed into their organism; they will be people endowed with an almost automatic memory, but with their thinking power they will not be able to unfold much in a productive way. |
| If the will had not to be unfolded here on earth, we might be able to see through our Karma. We could see through it to the extent that under certain conditions it might be possible to foresee the near future. But the will which penetrates into the stream of Karma darkens our outlook into the events which may happen to us, for example tomorrow. |
| 157. The Etheric Being in the Physical Human Being
20 Apr 1915, Berlin Translator Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
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To begin with, let me remind you of something which most of you already know from previous lectures. When the human soul unfolds in the way which I have so often described even in public lectures, we arrive at a different picture of the world. The essential thing is that our soul follows, as it were, the path leading from the physical into the spiritual world. When the soul progresses in its development, the physical world gradually transforms itself and assumes the aspect of a spiritual world. We might say: Little by little, the characteristics of the physical-sensory world vanish and on the horizon of our consciousness appear forms, beings, and events pertaining to the spiritual world. An important thing which now rises up in our consciousness with everything that appears before us, might be described as follows: We ourselves undergo a change—in our own sight, of course, we ourselves change, and even the surrounding world which exists in our physical-sensory perception undergoes a change. Let us first consider what lies nearest to us, the earthly plane. Man really knows very little of the world which transcends the earth, if during his earthly existence he does not abandon his habitual attitude, if he remains within this whole way of looking at the world, which makes him grow together with his earthly life. When we penetrate into the spiritual world (we are then outside the physical body) and look back upon our body, upon our whole physical life, or in general upon our whole being, it is evident that we grow richer and richer; our content grows, our whole being expands and becomes a world. Man himself actually grows to the size of a whole world, when we thus look back upon him. This is the true significance of something which we have often emphasized: Through spiritual development we identify ourselves with the world. We perceive a new world which seems to come out of our own being. We expand into a world. The earth instead loses is solid substance, or what we are accustomed to see physically—mountains, rivers, etc. This vanishes and we gradually begin to experience ourselves within the earth—I purposely say within the earth—we feel as if we lived within a great organism. We are outside our own world, and our inner world, this inner reality, now becomes an immense world, whereas the physical world which surrounded us becomes a Being and we live within it. This is what we should be able to conceive. When we transcend our own self, the human world expands into an immense world, and we ourselves grow into the organism of the earth; within it we experience ourselves in the same way in which our finger would, for example, feel that it belongs to our organism—if the finger were endowed with consciousness. Man passes through this experience and this has often been expressed by more poetical natures, by people with a deeper capacity of feeling. The moment of waking up in the morning has often been compared with the awakening of Nature outside; the daily course of human life, with the sun's ascent to the zenith, and sunset with the need to sleep which appears in the form of fatigue. These similes are born out of the feeling that man stands within the life of Nature. Nevertheless they are not worth much, for they do not touch the essential. I have therefore told you many times that a comparison really in keeping with the facts must differ from the one in which Nature's course of events is compared with the processes of sleeping and waking. The course of human life during the space of 24 hours should instead be compared with the course of events upon the earth during a whole year. The simile will agree if we take the whole year and compare its events with the processes of waking up and falling asleep which take place within us in the course of 24 hours. It is quite wrong to compare man's waking life from the moment of waking up to the moment of falling asleep with the summer season, for man's waking condition corresponds to winter, when Nature outside is awake, and summer should be compared with man's sleeping condition. If comparisons are drawn in, we should therefore say: Man falls asleep; i.e., he passes over into the summer season of his personal existence; whereas his waking condition would more or less correspond to autumn, winter, and early spring. Why is this in keeping with the actual facts? Because when we develop in the manner described and become part of the whole earthly organism, we should indeed consider that in the summer the Spirit of the Earth is asleep; summer is the earth's real sleeping condition and the great consciousness of the Spirit of the Earth then withdraws. In the spring the Spirit of the Earth begins to slumber and it wakes up again in the autumn, when the first frost falls; it then begins to think and lives through its thinking, waking condition. This is daytime for the Spirit of the Earth, in the course of the year. When we look back upon the sleeping human being, we see that when he falls asleep and goes out with his Ego and astral body, there arises a kind of vegetable activity in the organism abandoned by the astral body and Ego. There is activity in man's inner being and we feel that the first moments of sleep are like the beginning of a vegetative process; to the clairvoyant, sleep appears as if the body were pervaded by the growing life of plants. Imaginative knowledge enables us to perceive this. This vegetation, however, does not grow in the same way as that upon the earth. It is possible to describe this, to meditate over such things, for then we progress further and further. Upon the earth, the plants grow out of the soil. But it is otherwise when we observe the “vegetable growth” in man. There the plants grow in such a way that their roots are outside and grow into man; their flowers should therefore be sought in man. Sleeping man is indeed a beautiful sight—I mean, to the clairvoyant. He is like the earth with its budding, greening life, but with a whole vegetation growing into it. What disturbs the view is that at the same time we have the impression that the astral body is gnawing at the roots. This appears in the course of sleep. The animals consume, eat up what summer produces upon the surface of the earth, and we perceive that our astral body behaves like the animal world, except that it gnaws at the roots. If this were not so, we could not unfold the nucleus, the kernel, which we take with us through the portal of death. What the astral body thus appropriates, is what we really take with us through the portal of death, as harvest of our life. I am describing to you facts which rise up before the clairvoyant consciousness. And even as winter comes over the fruits of the earth and covers them with frost, I might say, so the astral body and the Ego, when diving down into the etheric and physical body cover with frost, freeze up the vegetation or spiritual plant growth which arises in our organism during the night. What I described to you as the Spirit of the Earth, is really a personality, like man—except that the Spirit of the Earth leads a different kind of life. One year is one of his days, and in the Spirit of the Earth we gradually learn to recognize the Impulse which I described to you when speaking of the Impulse of Golgotha. We find in it that vivifying power which did not live in the earth before the Mystery of Golgotha, and within it we feel in the safekeeping of the Spirit who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. We grow aware of this when we really penetrate into that condition in which the earth becomes for us a Being to whom we belong in the same way in which a finger belongs to our organism. In the present time, occult immersion in the world cannot help taking on the character of religious immersion in the divine essence that streams through the world and spiritualizes it. Real knowledge of the spiritual world cannot therefore take away religious feeling; on the contrary, it deepens it. I wished to speak of the true aspect of things when one enters the image world of spiritual reality; for what we appear to our own sight, in our ordinary physical consciousness, is merely a reflexion, only an inner kernel—but I must immediately add that this expression is not quite appropriate, for it is difficult to coin words for such significant facts; what we appear to be in our own sight always remains connected with us when we are outside the body with our soul being. It is therefore not correct to say that this is a kernel, for a fruit has its peel outside and its best substance inside—in man, on the other hand (in the spiritual, things are frequently reversed) his best part is outside and his peel inside; what exists inside is only his peel, whereas the spiritual is something which may spatially be described as peel. When we follow the path leading into the spiritual world we learn that man is not a simple, but a very complicated being. We gathered that man and everything that lives in him participates in all the worlds which are accessible to him. With his physical body he belongs to the physical world; with his soul he belongs to the soul world; with his spirit he belongs to the spiritual world. We reach into these three worlds. We know that when we enter the spiritual world we really experience ourselves in a multiplied form. What is so alarming is that the oneness, the unity is then split up, so that we feel as if we belonged to many worlds. It is possible to bring forward different points of view, but I will now draw attention to one aspect and refer to explanations repeatedly given in recent lectures. When studying human life from the inner aspect, we should look upon it as a structured life; but when we leave the body, the human being immediately appears structured, subdivided into four parts. We have, to begin with, the force which lies at the foundation of memory. Through memory, things experienced in the past rise up in our consciousness. Memory brings a connected sequence into life, so that our existence from birth to death becomes a whole, a unity.—A second element is what we call thinking, our representing power—I cannot go into further details, this is not the essential point just now, but our thinking activity is something that lives in the present. And if we proceed further, we come to feeling, and still further to the will. When we look into ourselves, our own inner being takes on the aspect of memory, thinking, feeling and will. We may now ask: What is the essential difference between these four soul activities? Ordinary psychology enumerates, but does not differentiate them. Truth can only be reached if we are able to penetrate into the essence of these four soul activities, and there we discover that the will is, as it were, the infant among them; feeling is older, thinking still older, and the activity that lives in memory is the oldest, the old man among our soul activities. You will grasp this more clearly from the following standpoint: We have often explained that man did not begin his development upon the earth, for the evolution of the earth was preceded by the old Moon evolution, the old Sun evolution, and the old Saturn evolution. Man did not first come into being upon the earth, but in order to become man he had to pass through the evolutions of Saturn, Sun and Moon. You see, what we unfold in our will, the will as it exists today, arose upon the earth; its development is not complete and it is altogether a product of the evolution of the earth. During the Moon evolution man was not an independent volitional being; the Angels willed for him. The will rayed in, as it were, when the evolution of the earth began. During the Moon evolution, man was already endowed with feeling; he was endowed with thinking during the Sun evolution, and with memory during the Saturn evolution. If you now connect these things with other facts described in my “Akasha Chronicle” and in “Occult Science” you will discover an important connection. The first foundation of man's physical body arose during the Saturn stage of evolution; the first basis of man's etheric body arose during the Sun stage of evolution; during the Moon stage of development arose the first foundation of the astral body, and the Ego began to unfold during the earthly stage of development. Let us now consider separately the activity which we designate as memory. What is memory? The picture of an event which we experienced remains behind in the soul, in the same way in which something of the thoughts of a book's author remain in the book we read. When you read a book, you may think through (not always, but this does not count now) everything thought out by the author of the book. Memory is a subconscious reading activity. In memory remain the signs which the etheric body engraved upon the physical body. You may have lived through something years ago and gathered from it the necessary experience; what remains behind is the impression which the etheric body engraved upon the physical body, and when you remember this past experience your memory process is a subconscious act of reading. The mysterious processes which take place in the human organism, in order that the etheric body may engrave upon it the signs which lie at the foundation of memory, began to form part of man's structure during the ancient Saturn evolution. We have in fact within us this secret Saturn-organism and its existence reveals a life and being of its own. Upon it the etheric body writes down the signs connected with man's experiences in the external world, so that these signs may be drawn up again from memory. That man carries out this subconscious writing activity is essentially dependent on the fact that during his first seven years of life, the body, or that part of his physical body which receives these impressions or signs, is still elastic. Consequently we should not—as explained in my book “The Education of the Child”—maltreat a child by developing its power of memory. During the first seven years, the essential thing is to leave the child's elastic organism to its own elemental forces, without maltreating it. We should therefore tell a child as much as possible, but without stressing the point that it should unfold its memory power artificially. In regard to the unfolding of memory, the child should instead be left to its own resources. Spiritual science may thus be of immense importance in pedagogical life. Even as the power of memory is one of human nature's oldest components, so the activity which lies at the foundation of thinking is part of something which we may designate as having been formed upon the Sun. This too is relatively old. The Sun forces organized man's etheric body so as to enable it to exercise this peculiar activity of thought, or representation. This will show you that we must go far back into cosmic evolution in order to give an answer to the question: Why is man able to remember things, and why is he able to think?—We must go back to the evolutions of Saturn and of the Sun. If we consider man's feeling life, we only have to go back as far as the Moon evolution, and for his volitional life as far as the evolution of the Earth. This will enable you to understand many things. In the case of people who were strongly moulded by their preceding incarnation, who are not elastic, but have a sharply moulded form, many things will be pressed into their organism; they will be people endowed with an almost automatic memory, but with their thinking power they will not be able to unfold much in a productive way. Whereas the power of memory should be connected chiefly with the etheric body, and man's feeling life with the astral body, his volitional life should be connected chiefly with the Ego. Man says “I” to himself only because he is a being endowed with will. If he had merely the power of thinking, his life would only be like a dream. We thus have, I might say, an organic connection of inner soul activities which were impressed on our soul's being in the course of development. In regard to the will, I have already explained that it only arose during the development of the Earth. Upon the Moon, higher spiritual hierarchies, the Angeloi, still willed for man. During the Moon evolution, man's whole will was still of such a kind that when the clairvoyant consciousness tried to recall this state of existence, it perceives that although the will then existed upon a higher stage, it lived in man instinctively, in the form in which it now exists in the animals of the earth. The animal necessarily follows its hot and whirling instincts and it lives in the common will of its species. Even as higher spiritual beings, the Angeloi, willed for us during the Moon evolution, so higher spiritual beings are now at work in determining our Karma from one incarnation to the other. The Angeloi do not work in our will, but in the uninterrupted stream of our Karma. Even as during the Moon evolution man felt that his will was not his own, but that of an Angel, so here on earth we do not think that it is we who shape our Karma; this is ruled by the spiritual beings of higher hierarchies. Only if our will can be silenced, as it were, a gleam of the course of Karma, which ordinarily remains concealed, may shine through and reveal itself even to a non-clairvoyant consciousness. Bear clearly in mind what I have explained to you: That in man a nucleus unfolds which passes through the portal of death and enters the spiritual realm; this nucleus is the bearer of our Karma. What each one of us will do tomorrow is determined by Karma and already lives in us today. If the will had not to be unfolded here on earth, we might be able to see through our Karma. We could see through it to the extent that under certain conditions it might be possible to foresee the near future. But the will which penetrates into the stream of Karma darkens our outlook into the events which may happen to us, for example tomorrow. Only if the will is completely silenced, something of what will happen—not through us, but to us—may gleam through. Let me give you an example, related by Erasmus Franceschi and based on truth. In his youth, Erasmus Franceschi lived with an aunt. Once he dreamed that a man whose name he also heard in his dream would fire at him, but that he would not be killed, because his aunt would save his life. This is what he dreamed. On the following day, before anything had happened, he told his aunt what he had dreamed. She was greatly alarmed and said that quite recently a man had been shot in the neighbourhood, and she entreated her nephew to remain at home, so that nothing might happen to him. She gave him the key to the apple pantry, so that he might always go up and fetch himself some apples. He went to his room and sat down at his desk to read. But at that moment the book did not interest him as much as the pantry key in his pocket which his aunt had given him. He decided to go upstairs to the apple room. No sooner had he moved, than a shot was fired, aimed in such a way that the bullet would have struck his head, if he had still been reading. If he had not got up, the bullet would have gone through his head. In the neighbour's house, the manservant, whose name was the one which Franceschi had heard in his dream and whom he did not know, was cleaning two guns and was not aware that they were loaded. A gun went off, and if Franceschi had not risen from his chair at that very moment, in order to go to the apple pantry to which his aunt had given him the key, he would unfailingly have been killed. The dream therefore faithfully rendered what would have taken place on the following day. You see, of this event we may say that the will had nothing to do with it, for Franceschi could not influence the events with his own will; he could not protect himself, yet something entered his Karma so that he could live on. In his case, the spiritual being that moulded his Karma had already had the rescuing idea. The dream was foresight of the spirit controlling Karma, who saw what would have occurred on the following day, and because that young man's soul had, almost through natural meditation, passed through a certain deepening, something arose which may be compared with certain things in external life. In regard to external life man can prophesy only in a very limited measure. But in a certain sense we are all prophets. For example, we all know that tomorrow at a certain moment the light will dawn, or a man crossing a field will be able to foretell what it will look like tomorrow ... yet he will not be able to foresee whether rain will fall upon it tomorrow. The same applies to inner life. Man lives in accordance with his will, and Karma is contained in his will. Through feeling, we may learn to know the things which lie closest to us, and in the same way a light may be kindled in the souls of certain people who have passed through an inner deepening, so that they can see events in which the will must remain silent. In the study of spiritual science it is important to bear in mind such things, because they show us that in man's inner being lives something which he is unable to survey through his ordinary consciousness and which points to the future. Karma then penetrates through the silenced will. Everything which thus rises up before our soul in spiritual-scientific research, shows us that what we call the great illusion chiefly consists therein that with his ordinary consciousness man cannot survey his own being; he belongs to the whole universe, although his ordinary consciousness only enables him to see the shell, enclosed, as it were, by the skin, etc. But what he thus sees in an enclosed state is only an extract of what he really is, for man is as great as the universe. Even in ordinary life we look back upon ourselves from outside. When we clearly realize these things, we gradually begin to feel that within us lives something which we may designate as man's etheric body. Indeed, even in our ordinary life it is possible at least to observe this second man—the etheric being in man's physical being, but for this it is necessary to observe life in a far more delicate way than is usually the case. Think, for example, that you are lying lazily in bed in the morning and would much rather remain in bed than get up; indeed it costs you an effort to get up. You will find it difficult to get up if you only rely on what lives in you. But imagine that you are suddenly struck by the thought that in the room next to yours there is an object which you were expecting for some days. A thought connected with something outside rises up in you, and this will work almost like a miracle. For you will see that it is even capable of driving you out of bed! What has happened? When you awoke and dived down into your physical body, you felt what the physical body can make you feel; but this cannot inspire you with the thought of getting up. The etheric body acts independently, when you draw its attention to something which is outside. This example will show you how you may confront your physical body with the etheric body, and how the etheric body literally takes hold of you and pushes you out of bed. A definite sensation may be reached in regard to our own being: that of looking at ourselves and distinguishing between two kinds of human activities: the things we do in the ordinary hubbub of life, and those in which we feel that an inner activity asserts itself. These are, of course, finer observations, and if we want to, we may always deny them. But our observation should be adapted to life and we should really gain insight into life as it reveals itself to us. This will push our feeling in the right direction. We should realize that the path leading into the spiritual world cannot be discovered all at once; it leads out of the world little by little, so that we ascend to what I have described before, when that which used to be our world loses its lifeless character and becomes a living being. We thus grow together cognisantly with the spiritual world. We grow together with something of which we may say that it forms part of us when we discard what is given to us with the instrument of the physical body and what essentially constitutes our life from birth to death. When passing through the portal of death we grow into a world which very much resembles the one described just now, which reveals itself to higher knowledge. And then we notice an infinitely important thing: If we wish to penetrate in the right way into the world we enter through the portal of death, we need—in the same way in which a light is needed in a dark room—something which we unfold here on earth in the innermost depths of our soul. Life on earth should not be looked upon as a prison. In the natural course of development man must, of course, pass through the portal of death and he must pass through the life between death and a new birth, but the whole of life exists in order that each part of our being may add to us something we need, something new, and in the present cycle of evolution, life on earth should give us something that flames like a torch, so that we do not simply live through our spiritual existence, but recognize it; our life in the spiritual world will then be flooded with light. The light which illumines us is the imperishable element which we gain from birth to death for our life between death and a new birth. In connection with these things, we should always say that particularly in the present time it is important that as many people as possible should grasp that the truths connected with the spiritual world which we learn to know in the physical world, within the physical body, become a flaming light, when we live in the spiritual realms. All the difficulties which more developed human beings must encounter in the present time, admonish us in a certain way to deepen our soul and immerse it in spiritual feelings, in spiritual vision. Consciousness of the fact that a spiritual-scientific deepening is needed in the present time and that the difficulties of our age are a warning, induce us to conclude with words which we always pronounce before parting. I hope that we shall be able to continue these lectures in a not too distant future. Let us now close with the words: Aus dem Mut der Kämpfer, (From the courage of the fighters, |
| 157a. The Forming of Destiny and Life after Death: Spiritual Life in the Physical World and Life Between Death and Rebirth
16 Nov 1915, Berlin Translated by Harry Collison Rudolf Steiner |
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| But even a very little penetration into spiritual science—not enough to be termed knowledge but enough to throw light upon life's riddles—will make us realise that, if we are to understand the human being, we must apply ourselves to something very different from the little external science that we can acquire between birth and death through the external means of the body, through the external senses and the understanding bound to the brain. |
| Till then, his soul-life was extinguished as regards memory. The understanding may be in order, although the memory is extinguished. The Ego is wrenched away and the man suffers from a severe psychic illness. |
| That is an important connection, and from this you will grasp many things which perhaps could not be understood otherwise. Just consider, especially in our present time, how many relatively young men pass through the gates of death. |
| 157a. The Forming of Destiny and Life after Death: Spiritual Life in the Physical World and Life Between Death and Rebirth
16 Nov 1915, Berlin Translated by Harry Collison Rudolf Steiner |
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My dear Friends, This evening, when to my deep satisfaction I can be with you again after long absence, let our first thoughts be once more directed to the fields where the great events of our time are taking place, where so many of our dear brothers in humanity have to enter with their own life and soul for what the tasks of this time are requiring of them:
And for those who in consequence of these events have already passed thro' the gate of death: Spirits ever watchful, Guardians of their souls! And that Spirit whom we are seeking thro' the deepening of Spiritual Science—the Spirit with whom we desire to unite, who descended on to the Earth and passed thro' earthly Death for the salvation of mankind, for the healing, progress and freedom of the Earth—may He be at your side in all your difficult duties. N.B.—These Meditations were repeated at the beginning of each Lecture of this Course. After a long absence I am able to be again in your midst, and I should like especially to devote the three lectures of this week to directing our gaze to a knowledge of the spiritual world, which stands more or less in close connection with those significant and deeply incisive events of our time which touch us so deeply. Our attention should not be turned immediately to the events themselves, but to what perhaps in everyone, in the feeling of us all, is connected with these events, like riddles, like uneasy questions concerning the destiny of man and the Cosmos. Our attention must be turned to this: to that wider destiny of the human soul, to which it is subject in that region of Cosmic existence to which the gaze of Spiritual Science is also directed, and which is not limited to earthly material existence. We are very much tempted at this time to knock at the door through which the human being passes when he forsakes this earthly body. We are urged towards that to which the human being can look up when he needs higher consolation, a deeper source of strength than can be obtained from material life. In how many ways does the voice of the spiritual world cry in these times to our hearts, even to those who do not wish to penetrate into the spiritual world, but whose hearts are nevertheless the windows into the spiritual world. How clearly and in how manifold a way does the spiritual world knock at these windows in our days. It is therefore fitting that we should once again bring together, from a special point of view, many things which we are able to know concerning this spiritual world. One thing must be admitted by anyone who transcends the narrow prejudices of materialism (those prejudices which altogether deny the existence of a spiritual world). The view of those who do not deny the existence of a spiritual world but merely maintain that man can learn nothing of it by human means, goes somewhat further. If one does not stand at the standpoint of the absolute materialist, but has been so ripened by life as to admit at least the existence of a spiritual world—and this stage may soon be reached—even if such an one denied the possibility of knowing anything of it, he is not far from the thought that the knowledge which can be assimilated and the results which can be acquired through the ordinary material world, must indeed be trivial compared with that which spreads out as a wider kingdom in the spiritual world lying behind the physical-sensible. Certainly there are in our days narrow-minded materialistic souls who would enclose the entire human being in such narrow limits that man would have to be regarded as little higher than the animal, and belonging entirely to the animal-evolution. Certainly, there are such men. But they will become ever fewer; and, as we have often seen even Natural Science does not now admit these prejudices. And if one only begins by admitting that in the human being there is something which transcends external nature, very soon knowledge will arise of how trivial and limited is that which the physical-sensible world embraces, when compared with the greatness and might of the whole universe. And if we then study man himself, and become conscious of that which lives and can live in him, we cannot do otherwise than say: “No matter how far the spiritual world may extend, however great its kingdom, man is a kind of microcosm in himself.” However much a man may hold it as unproven; yet, he in his being, extends to the whole kingdom of the spiritual world. Although to sense-perception, those depths of the soul into which the deeper parts of the spiritual world extend may be concealed, they do extend into the human being. Man does not only consist of physical body, of a combination of external physical forces and substances, he is also a product of the entire Cosmos, a veritable microcosm. And much that we have striven and sought after, was intended to show, in detail, how far man is a product of the spiritual world, and how far in him are really to be sought, not only the forces of this earth, but we might also say those of all the heavens. If this thought is once grasped, it will be clear that by means of ordinary knowledge, we can really know but very little of man. Through ordinary science we know certain things concerning the laws of nature—which knowledge we acquire between birth and death. But even a very little penetration into spiritual science—not enough to be termed knowledge but enough to throw light upon life's riddles—will make us realise that, if we are to understand the human being, we must apply ourselves to something very different from the little external science that we can acquire between birth and death through the external means of the body, through the external senses and the understanding bound to the brain. Now, let us unite this thought with another, with the thought which goes as a main thread through all our considerations: the thought of repeated earth-lives. That which probably most astonishes those who have busied themselves a little with our views, is this thought of repeated earth-lives, and that the time which we pass here between birth and death is relatively so short, compared with the time which we pass in the spiritual world between death and rebirth. From many different points of view we have stated that as a rule the time which man has to pass between death and rebirth is much, much longer than the relatively short time between birth and death here in physical life. There is a connection between the two thoughts which I have just expressed: that the little which we here acquire between birth and death, in the way of knowledge and fruits of life, stands to the spiritual wealth of the cosmos with which man is connected, in about the same ratio as the short time between birth and death stands to the longer time between death and rebirth. For in reality, it will occur to you from the many considerations which we have developed, that it is the task of the human soul between death and rebirth to assimilate quite other knowledge and forces from those we acquire here in our physical life. Really, one can say, my dear friends, that when we enter physical earth-life, when we descend from the spiritual world and incarnate in the body given us by our ancestors through heredity, it is then our duty to have ready all the forces and all the fine ramifications of those forces which we require for the purpose of organising this body of ours. You know that our body, as we receive it, is born of our parents. But with this body our psychic-spiritual being unites, and this being has previously passed a long time in the spiritual world between death and rebirth. Could one see—if one were for a moment justified in making the hypothesis—what this external human being can become merely through the forces of heredity, through the forces peculiar to the substance bestowed on us by our parents, we should see that with these forces alone man cannot become what he is. Through these forces which represent our external physical existence, and into these substances and groups or organs, we must pour that which we as souls bring, into the form which we receive from our parents; and out of the abstract soul-substance we form the individual person we are. As I have said: it is a foolish hypothesis, but we may make use of it, to make things clear: let us think for once what might have arisen if you all were merely born of your parents. Let us leave Karma out of consideration, and leave out of account the fact that we are, of course, born into definite families; and let us only regard physical heredity. Then you would all be alike as human beings. You would only have the general human physical character. That you are quite definite individuals, that so many individual beings sit here before us, rests on the fact that the general human form, even in its finest principles, is fashioned by the spiritual individuality which descends from the spiritual world and enters into that which is given by father and mother. To that end, just as we must have fingers to grip an object in the physical world, just as we must perceive an object in order to grasp it—even as we must have the necessary organs and also must have learnt to grasp a thing—so must we have learnt to attach ourselves to all the different organs which form our body physically. We have all got ears, but we each hear in our own way. We all have eyes, but we see individually. For the external organs this is least perceptible; in the inner behaviour of man it is more striking. Thus we must insert our psychic-spiritual essence into all these quite general organs, and fashion them individually. We must learn to know the forces, the inner psychic-spiritual formations, so that what we receive through inheritance as ears, nose, eyes, brain, etc., we can fashion individually. That means that when at birth we enter the physical world we must have knowledge, and not only knowledge but practical possibilities of using it. This wonderful structure of man, how little do we really know of it through external science? We must inwardly learn the whole subtle structure of the brain, because we have to organise it inwardly. And all these spiritual-psychic processes, everything which makes it at all possible for us to be men in a human body between birth and death, all this we have to acquire for ourselves. Just as we have to acquire abilities for ourselves in life, so we must also acquire between death and rebirth the power of being men in physical life. We must keep this in view. It must be quite clear to us, and then we shall be able to form an idea of what we do not know of man through mere physical knowledge, but which we must realise through that other knowledge which we have to assimilate in a practical form between death and rebirth. But we know that what we shall assimilate between death and rebirth is built on to all that we have assimilated in earlier earth-lives. And so, just as in a certain sense our physical life here is regulated between birth and death, so too is our life between death and rebirth regulated. We enter physical life as one might say, half sleeping, dreaming, as small children. We cannot at once develop memory, this development we have first to learn. If, however, we examine things more closely, we find that during the time before we develop memory, certain relations to the outer world are acquired. The child first gropes and then learns to grasp. Thus certain things are acquired systematically. The child learns much during this time, much more than is usually supposed. Then again each single epoch of life so runs its course that the later epochs are based on the earlier ones. Not only is the structural formation of man built up here between birth and death—but his life also. And his life between death and rebirth is similarly ruled and regulated. In this respect—to become aware how regulated this life of ours is—we need only bring to mind one thing that we have long known. We have often emphasised the fact that for our soul-life here in physical existence we need a conception of our Ego, which once acquired—in the second, third and fourth year of life, that time to which we can go back in memory—should never leave us. In a man with whom to a certain extent this Ego-thread is broken, a disturbance of the soul's equilibrium takes place. There are such people, as I have often mentioned, but they are really suffering from a severe psychic illness. It may happen that a man is suddenly torn away from the connection with his Ego. He does not remember his earlier life. He may, for instance, go to the station, and buy a ticket for some place or another. His reason functions quite normally. At the intervening stations he does everything necessary, in quite a reasonable way. But he does not remember anything that previously took place. His inner life only extends to the point when he resolved to buy a ticket and make the journey. He travels all over the world with his mind and reason quite in order. Then comes a moment when he knows: he is he. Till then, his soul-life was extinguished as regards memory. The understanding may be in order, although the memory is extinguished. The Ego is wrenched away and the man suffers from a severe psychic illness. I myself had an acquaintance who while occupying a relatively high post was suddenly seized by such an illness. He suddenly had the impulse to travel, after having forgotten everything about himself and who he was. He traveled, as one might say, blindly through the world from one place to the other, and found himself again in his native city, in an asylum for the homeless. Then it suddenly came back to him who he was. The interval was passed quite rationally, but was not connected with the rest of his life. The illness befell him a second time—but this time he committed suicide while still in that state of consciousness in which the memory was dissociated from the Ego. Now, you see, just as in the life between birth and death the Ego must be a continuous thread, which may not at any time during daily life lose the possibility of remembering what has happened since that point in childhood to which one can go back, so must it be also in the life between death and rebirth. There, too, we must always have the possibility of preserving our Ego. Now this possibility is given us, and it is given us through the fact that the first days after death are passed in the manner we have often described. Immediately after death a man has before him, as in a mighty picture, the life which has just run its course. For several days he goes back over his whole past life, but always so that the whole life is there before him. It lies before him as in a great panorama. Now, of course, if observed more closely, it turns out that these days in their review of the past life, are as it were endowed with a certain power of observation. In a sense we regard the life during these days from the standpoint of the Ego. We see in particular everything in which our Ego was interested. We see the relations which we have with a person, but we see them in a connection with the results we ourselves obtained from them. Thus we do not regard things quite objectively, but see all that has borne fruit for ourselves. Man sees himself everywhere as the centre. And that is extremely necessary. For from these days when he thus sees everything which has been fruitful for him, arises that inner strength and force which he needs in the whole of his life between death and rebirth, in order there to be able firmly to retain the thought of the Ego. For we owe the power of being able to retain the Ego between death and rebirth to this vision of the last life; the power to do so really proceeds from this. And I must again specially emphasise this, even if I have said it before—the moment of death is of extraordinary significance. Death is something which most distinctly has two totally different aspects. Regarded here from the physical world it certainly has many sad aspects, many painful sides. But we really only see death here from the one side; after our death we see it from the other. It is then the most satisfying and most perfect occurrence that we can possibly experience, for there it is a living fact. Whereas here death is a proof of how frail and transitory the physical life of man is—when seen from the spiritual world it is actually a proof that the spirit continually wins the victory over everything non-spiritual, that the spirit is ever the life, the eternal, ever-unconquerable life. Death is precisely the proof that in reality there is no death, that Death is a Maya, an illusion. Herein lies the great difference between the life from death to rebirth and our life here from birth to death. For as you know, no man can with ordinary physical means of cognition remember his own birth. No one can prove his own birth by personal experience, for he has not seen it himself. One's birth is something which cannot be seen by the human eye here in physical life. It lies before the time which we can remember. Birth is never included in our recollection. Death, however—and it is thereby distinguished from birth as regards its significance after death—death stands before our spiritual vision as the greatest, most significant, living and perfect event in our life between death and rebirth. For death is precisely the means by which we retain our Ego-consciousness after death. And just as little as it is possible in physical life to remember our birth, is it necessary and self-evident in the life between death and rebirth, that the great moment, when the spirit separates from the body should, during the whole time we pass in the spiritual world, always stand before our psychic-spiritual gaze. For from this death flows to us, in connection with what we have experienced here, the force we need to feel ourselves as ‘I.’ We might say: “If we were unable to die we could never experience a spiritual Ego. For we owe the possibility of experiencing a spiritual Ego to the fact that we can die physically.” Thus lie the facts for our Ego. The Ego is strengthened and invigorated through our experiencing those first days after death, in which we are still within our etheric body. Then the etheric body is laid aside and we experience—retrospectively—the preceding life; this we call the passage of the human soul through the soul-world; a life lasting longer than that shorter life which lasts only a few days, and which immediately follows physical death. Now, the opinion is very prevalent that a person who can look into the spiritual world immediately beholds everything. I have often corrected this. Nothing produces such humility as true insight into the spiritual world. For one may look for a very long time, and the investigation of the single facts of the spiritual world is really a long, long labour, and is accomplished by means of forces of the spiritual world. It is mere prejudice to believe that anyone who looks into the spiritual world can immediately give information about everything. Just as here in the physical world things are investigated gradually, in the course of time, so is it in the spiritual life; things have to be investigated little by little. And now I should like to touch on a point which must appear important to some of those here present: that is, the absolute agreement of the different spiritual facts as they gradually come to light, as they continually arise in new forms. Even to those who do not yet see into the spiritual world, this may be a proof of the truth of that for which a true and genuine investigation is striving. In my Occult Science I have given, from different standpoints, a definite time to the periods of the life between death and rebirth. I should now like to bring forward yet another standpoint which I did not quote in my Occult Science for a simple reason, which I will not conceal from you, so that you may see that Spiritual Science is striven for here in an honourable and upright manner: for the simple reason that at that time I did not yet know these facts myself, but was only able to discover them later. There is a certain connection between the spiritual life which can be developed here on the physical plane, and the spiritual life between death and rebirth. You already know that we pass our physical life here in waking and sleeping. On the one hand we have a full consciousness in the waking state, and then for the normal man an unconscious condition sets in, in the time between sleeping and waking. Now you know also from what has been set forth in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment that this sleep-life may be lit up by consciousness, that it is possible to look into that which happens between falling asleep and waking up. If we can attain to this, and learn more and more of the life which man passes here in sleep, we really learn to know an amazing kingdom of Life. In this unconscious condition between falling asleep and waking up a vast and amazing kingdom of human life flows by unperceived by the normal human existence. A great deal goes on then. And that which very soon strikes us, in this sleep-life, is that it is much more active than the life between waking and sleeping. During sleep we are within our Ego and astral body, and have as it were, our physical body and etheric body outside us. Now, even this external life is an active one, with many people a very active life indeed. It appears so active to us because we do not take all the inactivities which exist in this outer life much into consideration. Really, if everything in this external life had to proceed from our own initiative, we should be greatly astonished how differently everything would take place. Just consider—you get up every morning, you hardly form the resolution to get up, you do it from habit; and you do not really come to a closer knowledge of what it signifies to be so connected with the whole Cosmic-ordering, that you pass your life at definite times in one or other of these two conditions of waking and sleeping, and have to regulate your life accordingly. How many people think of this? It all goes on as a matter of course. And now try for once, to consider how much goes on in this way, so that in a sense, we go through life like automata. You will then come to recognise that there is a great deal more inactivity in the life between waking and falling asleep, but great activity in the life between sleeping and waking. There a complete and tremendous activity takes place. It is an interesting fact that people who are relatively indolent in external life between waking and sleeping are just the busiest between sleeping and waking. Man is then extremely active, only he knows nothing of this in ordinary life. If we examine more closely into that which drives the soul, that is, the Ego and astral body, we find that this activity is really intimately connected with the whole existence of man, though in our journey through life we consciously take but very little of it with us. We do not work upon all our life as it approaches us externally. I should like to give an apt instance of this. Just consider, you are now hearing this lecture, which lasts perhaps one hour. Really, without wishing to offend any of the dear friends sitting here, I may say: it would be possible to hear infinitely more in the words of this lecture than the different friends sitting here, are hearing. Indeed, it would be possible to gather much more from all I am saying, than I know myself. But what I mean is this—and I am only saying this in illustration of the above—you will go home presently, go to bed and sleep, and wake up tomorrow morning. And in the time between your sleeping and waking—quite unconsciously, of course, as regards the normal consciousness—you will work upon much of what you are now in a position to hear. You will work upon it a great deal in your next sleep and perhaps also during the following nights. One sees souls labouring between sleeping and waking in quite a different fashion at what they have absorbed. And even if it occurred that someone had listened very inattentively, and had merely been somewhat receptive, yet through that receptivity he would draw into his soul the spiritual powers and impulse in the lecture. And that would be worked upon during sleep, and transformed into what we require not only for the rest of life up till death, but beyond death. Thus we work over our whole life as it transpires by day between our waking and sleeping. Everything we experience by day we work upon during the night. Thus as it were, we learn lessons which we need for all the rest of our life here, and beyond death into the next incarnation. When we are asleep, we are our own prophetic transmuters of our life. This sleep-life is full of tremendously deep riddles, for it is much more deeply connected with what we experience, than is the external consciousness, and we work at it all from the standpoint of its fruitfulness for the following life. What we can make of ourselves through what we have experienced, is the object of our labour in the time between sleeping and waking. Whether we become stronger and more powerful in our soul, or perhaps have to reproach ourselves, we labour at all our experiences so that they become life-fruit. You see from this, that the life between sleeping and waking is really enormously significant, and that it goes deeply into the whole riddle of man. Now, perhaps one day the spiritual investigator forms the intention—we may even say the purpose—of comparing this life of sleep with another, a super-sensible life, and he decides to compare it with those days which take their course during the life of Kamaloka. And note here, though this can only be seen by clairvoyance, that whereas here in life we can recollect all that we have experienced in our day-life, after death—after the time of the life-tableau is past—we obtain a memory of all our nights. This is an important secret which is revealed to us. We remember all our night-life. This review so presents itself that we really live backwards starting from the last night passed here in life, passing to the preceding one, and so on. In this way we experience the whole life again backwards, but as seen from the night-aspect. One experiences again in this retrospective recollection, what one has unconsciously thought and investigated. One really goes back through one's life, but not from the day-aspect. How long does that last approximately? Now remember that we sleep away about one-third of our life. As you know, there are people who naturally sleep much more. But on an average we sleep away a third of our life. Therefore this retrospect also lasts about one-third of our earth-life, because we experience the nights. Just think how wonderfully that agrees with the other points of view which have been elucidated. We have always said that the life in Kamaloka lasts about one-third of one's life. And when we take the above into consideration, we again see that it must be a third. Thus do these things harmonise. The details always fit in. That is the wonderful thing in spiritual investigation—one learns to know a fact, and when that is settled, one presently learns it again from another aspect. It is always like the case of a man who climbs a hill from which he sees something first from one side and then from another side, yet the essential points are always the same. So that one can say: Here in earth-life between birth and death our life is so experienced that it is always torn away from us, it is always broken off by the night-life; and we only remember the day-life, the things we have experienced by day. But in the night-life we do more than remember them; we work upon them and transform them, as stated above. And what we cannot remember now, we remember during the Kamaloka life. That is an important connection, and from this you will grasp many things which perhaps could not be understood otherwise. Just consider, especially in our present time, how many relatively young men pass through the gates of death. I have already stated from many points of view the significance this has for the collective life of humanity. But let us first look at the two divisions which we have just characterised. (We will come on to other things in the course of these lectures.) Let us first consider the life in the etheric body which lasts only a few days, during which a man has his life tableau before him, and then we shall consider the life of the soul in the soul-world. In going through the previous life from the night-side we shall easily be able to see why the spiritual investigator must say that even these two periods of life between death and rebirth are different for a man who has gone relatively early through the gates of death; one who dies at a later age has different experiences. This concerns us very closely because so many now are dying at a relatively early age. You see it is really the case that the separate sections which I have distinguished are of great significance for our life here in the physical world. I have given these divisions of life thus: the first extends to the seventh year, to the change in dentition; the next to the fourteenth year, the time of puberty; another extends to the twenty-first year and so on; in periods of seven years. And if you earnestly consider what lies in these phases of life you will see that the thirty-fifth year becomes an important epoch. Till then we are, as it were, in a state of preparation, whereas later we have ended the preparatory stage and built up our life on the basis of what has been prepared up to the thirty-fifth year. This thirty-fifth year of life is of very great significance. Till then, not merely the bodily growth continues, but also the growth of the soul; for the soul of a man really grows. Now, it must decidedly be emphasised that much of the ripened condition of life can only be attained after the thirty-fifth year. And if we consider this thirty-fifth year of life from another point of view, it will appear still more significant to us. You see, if we place these seven-year epochs of life before the soul, we first have the building up of the physical body to the age of seven, and the building up of the etheric body to the age of fourteen. From the fourteenth to the twenty-first year there is fashioned and organised what we call the astral body; then the sentient soul to the age of twenty-eight, the rational or intellectual soul to the age of thirty-five, and the self-conscious or spiritual soul to the age of forty-two. And then we come to spirit-self, which is a kind of evolving back again to the astral body, and so on. The further epochs of life do not progress in periods of seven years, but irregularly, for they will only evolve to regularity in the future. Thus, unless thwarted by the errors of education, a certain regularity is followed up to the thirty-fifth year. Now, we may be especially struck by the deeper significance of the entire development of life, when we observe people who die at these different epochs of life. Suppose—merely as an instance—that we follow the soul of an eleven, twelve, or thirteen-year old boy or girl, who goes through the gate of death at that early age. In accordance with what I have already described, it follows in such a case that the etheric body—which would theoretically have been able to care for the full life of the child—has these unused forces still within it. In general it happens, that man during the whole life between birth and death really prepares himself for death: he really makes himself ready for death. In reality our whole life is a preparation for death, in so far that we continually labour at the destruction of the body. If we could not destroy it we could never attain to perfection. For we purchase the perfection, as it were, with the destruction of the outer physical body. Now, when a boy of thirteen goes through the gate of death, he does not accomplish the long work of destruction, which he might have been able to do. He does not fulfil everything he might have done. This expresses itself in a noteworthy manner. If we follow such a soul, we find it in the spiritual world, after a certain time, a relatively short time, between death and rebirth, in what I might call a most noteworthy society. We find it among those souls who are so preparing themselves for their next life that they will soon have again to descend to the earth. These are the souls who will soon incarnate. Among these then, live such souls as pass through the gate of death at the age of eleven, twelve, or thirteen. They are placed among them. And if we look more closely into these connections it turns out, strange to say, that these souls who are soon to enter their earth-life, require that which these other souls can bring up to them from the earth to give them the strength they on their part require to enter a physical body. Thus the souls of the young form a strong help to those others who must soon descend to the earth. Young children who are quite normal, who have no prominent spiritual life, but are merely intelligent, are normally able to give certain assistance, which can no longer be given by one who dies in later years. He, too, has his task, each one must accommodate himself to his own Karma, and we should not on this account wish to die at this or that age, for we all die at the age permitted by our Karma. Thus the help a soul can offer to the souls awaiting incarnation cannot be given by one who dies in later years. That rests in the fact that during the first half of life a soul stands nearer to the entire spiritual world, in one sense, than in the second half of life. Yet in another sense this is not the case. But in a certain sense we do stand nearer to the spiritual world in the first half of our life. In fact the whole life so runs its course that the longer we live in the physical body the further we are from the spiritual world. A child of one year still stands very close to the spiritual world. When it forsakes the physical plane it is soon in the spiritual world. This is the case up to the fourteenth year; till then a child so lives in the physical body that it can easily enter the world of souls who are seeking an early incarnation. This is connected with the fact that even in the tableau, one who dies very young has different experiences from those of one who dies in later life. Thus the thirty-fifth year of life is an important boundary. If a man dies before the thirty-fifth year, he first experiences the life-tableau, and then goes backwards through the night-life. But during this entire experience of the spiritual world, he sees—as it were ‘through a glass darkly,’ as if he were seeing it through the life-pictures—that spiritual world which he forsook on being born. His perspective still extends to the spiritual world. But if he has passed this thirty-fifth year then it is quite different. He no longer beholds that wherein he himself was before birth. That is one of those things which particularly strikes one now, when so many die young. For this looking back at the spiritual world still retains a certain significance up to the thirty-fifth year. Of course after the fourteenth, fifteenth, or sixteenth year it is no longer such a direct vision, but even from then to the thirty-fifth year, if death occurs, it is as if the spiritual life was everywhere reflected in the retrospective life-picture. If one dies quite in infancy, there is naturally not much experience of life to go back over—one can almost immediately look into the spiritual world. If a child dies at the age of thirteen, he has a retrospective tableau, but immediately behind that lies the spiritual world. He can still see the spiritual world clearly. If death takes place later, the spiritual world is not perceived so distinctly, but it is contained in what one sees as one's own life. Up to the thirty-fifth year we are still connected with that spiritual world from which we descended. One who dies before the age of thirty-five, experiences even in the first period of the life in which he sees the life-picture, and then in the retrospective journey through the soul-world, that he really is in a kind of homeland which he forsook at birth. He has the direct feeling of coming back home into the world from which he descended. This is of tremendous importance. For each one who dies thus is, in one sense, as you see, immediately placed more easily into the spiritual world than one who dies later. Out of his post-mortem survey he carries far more spirituality into his next life between birth and death. And those young men who die in such numbers in our present age, will from this standpoint become important bearers of spiritual truths and spiritual knowledge when they descend to earth again in their next incarnation. Thus we see that the terrible suffering which is poured over the world is nevertheless necessary for the course of existence as a whole. For the blood which now flows will be the symbol of a certain refreshing of spiritual life at a particular time in the future, and this is necessary for the whole evolution of humanity. Then will the souls, who now go through the gate of death so early, descend again; but most of them will descend different from what they would have been had they reached the limits of life in material existence, and then died. It is Cosmic Wisdom which now calls away a number of souls, that they may be allowed to perceive even in their retrospective tableau and experiences, deep spiritual secrets connected with the earth. That, too, is Cosmic Wisdom, for these souls are thus filled with that which they will behold in stronger form when they come to see it again; they will have been strengthened by the shorter earth life which they have undergone. That is the true Wisdom of the Cosmos. And so we must say that much of what rightly gives us pain when we are only able to regard it from the standpoint of earthly existence, shows us its redeeming side when we observe it from the standpoint of spiritual vision. Thus it is with the whole of life. Certainly, my dear friends, earthly pain cannot be at present avoided through such a consideration. It must be experienced. For that is the very condition for its compensation. If we did not experience it in the physical world it could never be compensated. But although we must suffer many things in the physical world, there are nevertheless moments in which we can place ourselves at the standpoint of the spiritual. Then we shall recognise that much of that which must appear to us as painful from a lower point of view is a tribute which must be offered to the higher spiritual worlds and the wise beings therein, in order that the evolution of the whole Cosmos and of human existence may go forward not in a one sided manner, but in every direction. The expiation for much suffering must be achieved, and to this end the suffering itself must first be endured. Spiritual science cannot indeed spare us that, but it can teach us to lay it on the altar of existence, to seek the compensation, and to recognise the Wisdom of the Cosmos, in spite of all the pain which for higher ends it must cause. This is what spiritual science can give us as a precious unction for the whole human existence. Thus from this standpoint also and right from the feelings which spiritual science can arouse in us, let us regard the powerful events of our time, and say again that which we have often repeated here:—
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| 157a. The Forming of Destiny and Life after Death: On the forming of Destiny
18 Nov 1915, Berlin Translated by Harry Collison Rudolf Steiner |
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| We see this Empire with the people who in a sense formed the upper classes. And there below, truly more underneath than our ‘under’ signifies to-day—literally underneath, in the catacombs under the earth, we see the first small handful of Christians, possessing something quite foreign to the world-culture up above, but which they carried so deeply in their hearts that its force became truly cosmically creative. |
| That which was above is swept away, and that which was venerated underground in secret has found its way to the surface! Certainly, the times and the forms in which such doings occur change; but the essential remains. |
| Now, while we are undergoing these effects, the experience is transformed in us into forces, and it happens in the following manner: Suppose I have offended a man, who has thereby suffered bitterly. |
| 157a. The Forming of Destiny and Life after Death: On the forming of Destiny
18 Nov 1915, Berlin Translated by Harry Collison Rudolf Steiner |
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My first sad and heavy duty is to acquaint you with the fact that our dear friend, the leader of the Munich Lodge, Fraulein Stinde, now belongs to those whom we have to reckon to-day as the ‘Sphere-Beings.’ She left this physical plane yesterday evening. It is not possible just now to speak about this extremely severe and significant loss to our society. As a beginning to our consideration for to-day I will merely say these few words concerning this event, which is so painful and important to us. Fraulein Stinde belongs to those who are certainly known to the greater number of our friends. She belongs to those who have grasped our matters in the deepest depths of their hearts and have completely identified themselves with them. In her house (and that of her friend the Grafin Kalckreuth) I was able as early as 1903 to give the first intimate lectures in our sphere, which I had to give in Munich. And one may say that from this first occasion when Fraulein Stinde approached us, she united with our aims not only her whole personality but the whole power of her work, so valuable, so excellent and influential. She forsook the artistic calling which was previously so dear to her, in order to put herself and her powers entirely at the service of our work, and since then she has worked intensely for this, in a rare, objective, quite impersonal manner, both in narrower and wider circles. She was the soul of our whole work in Munich. And she was one of those souls, of whom one could say, that through the inner qualities of her being she gave the very best guarantee that in Munich itself, our aims would be able to develop in the best possible manner. You know what an immense task was laid on all those persons helping in Munich in those early years, through the performances of the Mystery Plays and everything connected with them. Fraulein Stinde and her friend Grafin Kalckreuth gave themselves up absolutely to this work, and above all, it may be said, with the understanding created by the profound nature of their studies, and by the will which may itself be born of this. I may perhaps point out that the intense labour which Fraulein Stinde accomplished, really very considerably exhausted her life-strength in later years. It must be admitted that the valuable life-force which was perhaps too rapidly used up of late, was devoted to our cause in the most beautiful and deeply satisfactory manner. Probably no one among those who knew her most intimately, could help feeling that this personality was one of our very best workers. It is true many of the activities of Fraulein Stinde have been misunderstood, and it is to be hoped that the sun-like force that proceeded from her personality will presently be recognised, even by those of our friends and followers who through prejudice have misunderstood her work. And those of our wider circle who could observe all she did for our cause, will, in common with those more closely connected with her, preserve the most faithful recollection of her. We are sure that in her case we may quite specially emphasise the mantram which must often be uttered during these days in connection with the departure of many of our friends from the physical plane. It may be especially emphasised with reference to Fraulein Stinde, that amidst the many attacks and oppositions which our cause encounters in the world, we reckon on the help of those in the spiritual-world—we reckon on those who have only changed the form of their existence, and who, in spite of their passage through the gate of death, are still truly united with us in soul, and are most significant and important co-workers. The many veils which surround those still incarnate in the physical body, gradually fall away, and the souls of these dear departed friends—of this we are sure—work in our midst, and we specially need their help. We need the help of those no longer assailed from the physical plane, those who have no longer to consider the limits of the physical plane. If we have the deep and earnest belief in the success of our cause in the civilisation of the world, it is because we have the full consciousness that those who formerly belonged to us, are still our best forces, that they work among us from the spiritual world with spiritual means. The trust in our cause that we require, will often be strengthened by the knowledge that we must thank our departed friends for being in our midst in order that, by uniting our forces with theirs, we can accomplish the labour which is laid upon us for the spiritual civilisation of the world. I should now like to continue the considerations which we began to develop in our last lecture. Such times as our own, in which the enigma of death approaches the human soul in so many different forms—and on this we laid stress in our last lecture—urges us quite specially to investigate what man is certainly able to acquire regarding the spiritual world. Times like our own, in which humanity is exposed to such severe trials, are destined for the very purpose of leading the human soul to inquire as to the beings of the spiritual world. For who does not see at each step in what is happening to-day—and is happening in the greater part of the civilised world—who does not see at almost every stage the great riddle of Life confronting him? And who does not feel that great connections lie concealed behind such events as those occurring around us to-day and which, as they occur, convulse the souls and hearts of men with pain and sorrow, though fill them also with hope and confidence? Certainly, he who beholds the events of the world with but a short-sighted vision, will judge such far-reaching events by those which immediately precede and follow them. But one who externally, without entering into esoteric considerations, regards the course of cosmic events and compares earlier times with the present, will become conscious of how very much may be connected first with that, let us say, which in quite a different manner, runs its course later on in the Cosmos, as effect. Consider there are now many people who say: “The present events of the war are merely the results of external political opposition among the various nations and peoples.” Certainly, that is true, and there is no question of bringing forward anything in objection to the truth of such a conception in a limited sense; but, if we consider, for example, the wars which were waged in the beginning of the Middle Ages between the Central European peoples and those of South Europe and above all the peoples belonging to the Roman Empire, we must say that the wars which took place then in political strife also proceeded from the opposition, the political opposition which then existed; they had their causes in those oppositions in their immediate vicinity. These battles have now run their course. They have evoked certain configurations in the entire life of Europe. If we investigate but a little into history and consider what happened at that time through the battles of the Central European peoples with, let us say, the peoples of the Roman Empire, we shall come to the conclusion that out of the earlier configuration of the European World there has arisen a later one. But if we wish to estimate correctly the real point at issue, we must consider all the historical results. For these historical results which have occurred in Europe could not have arisen as they have, if those battles had ended the other way. And what was the consequence of this European History? The whole manner in which Christianity spread and grew in Europe is the result of it! And if we consider these deep connections we can say: In all that happened in the following centuries, the facts lie thus: the events of these centuries are karmically connected with their causes, the battles of those times. That means that the events to which we have alluded, are connected with the whole later configuration of the European World even in its spiritual relations. Just consider that in all its gravity, and you will admit that Christianity then spread in Europe and so fashioned itself, that through the youthful Germanic peoples opposing the Roman peoples who had now grown old, and through the uniting of their youthful forces with that which flowed into humanity as the announcement of Christianity, a certain European atmosphere was thereby created, into which the souls descending later were born. Thus the souls lived and developed in the following centuries, in accordance with these events. Thus we may say: If a man at that time had asserted: ‘How does that affect things? It is merely a political opposition between the nations of South and Central Europe,’ he would be right. But if another had said: ‘Just look, the configuration of the spiritual civilisation of all the following centuries will result from what is happening’—he also would be right, and in a much deeper sense. If we seek the immediate causes of anything by pointing to the opposing forces nearest at hand, we do not therewith touch on the entire gravity of the occurrence. The affairs of this world are all very intimately connected. And if we require inner strengthening in order, as it were, to find the right forces for the support of our work, we need only remind ourselves that in a still smaller circle than our present one, were once seated together those who, when Christianity was first announced represented its great Cosmic Truths. I have already often used this comparison. But we shall apply it yet again to-day. There was a time which we can describe as follows: We see the old Roman Empire. We see it with its old philosophy. We see it living entirely in the atmosphere of the old heathen philosophy. We see this Empire with the people who in a sense formed the upper classes. And there below, truly more underneath than our ‘under’ signifies to-day—literally underneath, in the catacombs under the earth, we see the first small handful of Christians, possessing something quite foreign to the world-culture up above, but which they carried so deeply in their hearts that its force became truly cosmically creative. Let us picture to ourselves these catacombs. There, underneath in the catacombs, with their thoughts directed to the Christ-impulse, were the first Christians—and above, over their heads, the Romans, who behaved quite differently from the first Christians. You know all that, I need not relate it further. But if you picture two centuries later, how different everything appears! That which was above is swept away, and that which was venerated underground in secret has found its way to the surface! Certainly, the times and the forms in which such doings occur change; but the essential remains. Concerning those who to-day advocate the external scientific and spiritual culture it may be said—though this is not to be taken literally—they feel themselves above, and call that which is striven for in our circles, the philosophy of a few sectarians, derived from a few abnormal minds. But he who really penetrates the nature of these conceptions of ours and who above all permeates himself with them, may have the assurance that here too some day what is kept under will be on the top. Here then our thoughts may dwell on the transformed world which will arise out of these difficult times of ours, on the spiritual which mankind must learn to grasp. For there hardly exists a greater similarity in historical evolution, than that between our own times and that which played its part in the epoch when the old Roman culture was still above, and Christianity, tended by a few faithful souls, was still below. I should like to point out—if I may do so without seeming narrow-minded through a too exact and pedantic reference to these things, for in these days we should be very broad indeed—that it is especially good to hold before the soul as imaginative pictures our own epoch and that of the Rome at the first appearance of Christianity. Now, many who to-day oppose what we call Spiritual Science, cannot fail to feel the entirely different nature of that which Spiritual Science must advocate, in contradistinction to that which is otherwise upheld among the so-called ‘normal’ people of to-day. And here we need only observe, if we wish to understand this correctly, how the first announcement of Christianity was completely opposed to that which was upheld among the Romans, the normal men of those times: with such a thought we must make ourselves acquainted, for it is again and again leveled against us that with the accepted means of cognition man cannot reach worlds such as those with which we are concerned. We must really so grasp the more intimate work in our groups as to be able to say: This life in our groups is not useless. It is not without significance to this cause of ours, that we should meet together in such groups, and again and again renew, not only acquaintance with the theoretical results of our doctrine, which is not of importance, but also renew our warm feelings and sensations for the actual things and beings of the spiritual world. Thereby we accustom ourselves to that manner of psychic sensing and feeling which above all makes it possible for us to take up spiritual truths in a different way from those who are unprepared. In our group meetings there must occasionally be imparted to you something from the higher and later parts of spiritual knowledge. We cannot always start afresh from the beginning. But this intimacy within the life of the groups must make it possible for a number of our friends to take into themselves, into their souls, such things as I pointed out in the last lecture, namely, the special manner of verifying our spiritual knowledge, and of taking it into oneself. We cannot verify these things in the same manner as man does in the external world when he contacts things with his eyes: but he who has a feeling for such facts as I pointed out last time, will, even if he does not himself see into the spiritual world, feel that through the mutual support of spiritual truths the value of these truths is intensified. Therefore I shall yet again draw attention to the very significant fact that on the one side, through many years of study, the definite point of view is reached, that a third of our life between birth and death—in time—is again lived through after death; while now on the other side a quite different point of view is discovered—namely, that in reality we experience our sleep life in a special form during the time we call Kamaloka, and that this time also occupies a third of the life on the physical plane. These two points of view are quite independent of each other and have been discovered from different starting points. We have also shown on other occasions how, from three or four different points of view, one always comes to the same conclusion. Thus do the truths support each other. But for this, we must ourselves acquire the right feeling. This will produce something like a natural elemental feeling for the truth of this spiritual knowledge. I must often appeal to this, otherwise I could not give out the later and higher truths in the various group-meetings. Last time we drew attention to the fact that the right connection of our Ego-consciousness between death and rebirth is, as it were, kindled through that panoramic review of our last earth-life which takes place after death. We go over our life again in a kind of tableau. You must quite clearly understand what a man there really beholds. We are here accustomed to stand on the physical plane, forming, in a sense, a kind of central point of our cosmic horizon, and we see the world around us which makes an impression on our senses. In normal life on the physical plane, we do not look into ourselves, we turn our gaze outwards. Now, if we want to form an idea of the life immediately following death, it is important to keep in mind that this gaze on the panorama of life is absolutely different from the perception we are accustomed to use on the physical plane. On the physical plane we look out of ourselves and regard the world as our environment. ‘We are here, we look outwards, and not into ourselves.’ Immediately after death we have a few days in which our field of vision is filled with that which we have undergone between birth and death. We then look within from the circumference to the centre. We regard our own life in its chronological course. Whereas we usually say: ‘Here are we and everything else is outside us’ ... immediately after death we have the consciousness that this distinction between us and the world does not exist. For we look from the circumference on to our own life, which for these few days is our world. In ordinary perception on the physical plane we behold hills, houses, rivers, trees, etc., so, in the same way, we see that which we have undergone in life from a certain personal standpoint, as our own immediate world. And because we see it, that gives the starting point for the maintenance of the Ego through the entire life between death and rebirth. It is that which strengthens and invigorates the soul, so that between death and rebirth it always knows: ‘I am an Ego!’ Here in physical life we realise our Ego through the fact—which I have often pointed out—that we stand in a certain relation to our body. Consider: if you reflect closely on a dream you will say: In the dream you have no clear feeling of the Ego, but often a feeling of separation. That is because man here on the physical plane only really feels his Ego through contact with his body. You can represent it very crudely thus: If you move your finger through the air—there is nothing there! Move it further—there is still nothing. When you touch something, however, in coming against something, you know of yourself, you become aware of yourself. We are thereby made aware of our Ego. Not the Ego itself is aroused—the Ego is a Being—but the consciousness of the Ego. The opposition makes us aware of our Self. Thus we are Ego-conscious in the physical body because of our living in it. For this reason we have received the physical body. In the life between death and rebirth we have an Ego-consciousness, because we have received the forces which proceed from the vision of the previous life. We come to a certain extent in contact with that which the world of space gives us and thereby win our Ego-consciousness for the life between birth and death. We come in contact with that which we ourselves have experienced between birth and death in the last life, and thereby have our Ego-consciousness for the life between death and rebirth. There now follows the quite different life which occupies a third of the time of the life between birth and death, and which is usually called the Kamaloka life. This life follows. It is of such a nature that we may say a widening of our vision appears. While during the first few days our vision is really directed only to our self, to our past life, not to the personality—this, as time goes on, becomes quite different. Certainly the power of knowing oneself as an Ego remains. But there now appears, and you can gather for yourselves, from the lectures and books, what I am about to say—there now appears something quite peculiar, to which man has first to accustom himself, because the whole method of perceiving in that world is quite different from what it is here on the physical plane. A great part of that which man has to undergo after death consists in inwardly accommodating himself to a different mode of perception. Here we have nature around us. What we here regard in the physical world as nature is absolutely nonexistent in that world which is ours between death and rebirth. To see nature here we have our physical eyes, ears, and the whole physical apparatus of perception. And this nature as it exists with its fullness of colour and other characteristics could not be perceived by other, different organs of perception. Therefore we are endowed with a physical body, that we may be able to perceive nature. After death, in the place of what is here around us as nature, we have around us the spiritual world which we describe as the world of the hierarchies and world of pure being, of pure soul. Not matter or substance or objects which have colour, but pure being. That is the essential point. Therefore naturally the astonishment is greatest for those souls who denied the spirit while here in physical life. For those, who deny the spirit and believe nothing of the spiritual, are placed in a world which they have denied, and which is completely unknown to them. They have compulsorily to live in a world whose existence they actually refused to admit. Thus we are encompassed by a spiritual environment of pure being, of pure soul. And now gradually emerge souls, fashioning themselves out of this universal soul-world, for at first there are souls everywhere—souls whom we do not recognise. We know they are all souls, but we do not recognise them individually; and gradually the individual souls appear more distinctly and concretely. And especially at this time appear those souls with whom we have lived here on the physical plane, the souls of men with whom we have lived here. While we face this fullness of souls we learn to know among whom we are: this soul is so and so, that soul is someone else, and so on. We make acquaintance with these souls. First of all we must recognise the fact that the whole relation in which we stand to the world then, between death and rebirth, is essentially different, in yet other respects to the relation in which we stand here on the physical plane. Here we say that the world is outside us; after death we have really the consciousness that the world is within us. Just imagine that for a moment here, on the earth, you were to dissolve entirely, that you were to vanish into vapour. The vaporous cloud which is you spreads out more and more and only ceases to spread further when it reaches the firmament. It expands, but it can get no further. Let us consider for a moment the firmament as a being. You then feel yourself as this firmament and now see everything within it; thus you stand outside with your consciousness and see the world inside. You feel yourself in such a way that everything that appears is within you. Just as here a pain is inside us, in like manner after death beings appear in us as inner experience. That brings about the infinite intimacy of the experiences between death and rebirth, the fact of being so bound together with them that we actually have them as our own inner experiences. And here there is a certain distinction. Consider such a soul as I have instanced, which one begins to recognise and of which all one can know at first is: ‘Yes, it is there, but it has no form. It is not yet perceptible, but it is there.’ To make it perceptible one has to accomplish an inner activity, an activity somewhat like the following: Let us suppose ourselves placed in the spiritual. If I feel behind me something which I do not see, the following idea arises in me: It is there, but I must accomplish an activity in order to get some conception of it. I may say it is comparable to touching a thing so as to get an idea of it. This inner activity is necessary if the imagination is to appear. I know the being is there, but I have first to create the imagination by uniting myself inwardly with the being. That is the one way in which man can perceive souls. The other manner is this: that one does not oneself accomplish this inner activity with such intensity, but it arises of its own accord. It appears without one's having very much to do with it. It is somewhat like our perception of something here, only of course it is transferred into the spiritual. And this distinction can exist between two souls. Of the one, man receives a perception through being very active himself; of the other, through an imagination arising out of itself. You only need be attentive to recognise this distinction. For if you become acquainted with a soul that requires more activity to be perceived; that is the soul of one who has died. But a soul that appears more of its own accord is a soul which is incarnate here on the earth in a physical body. These distinctions are really there. Man stands—with a few exceptions, which we can mention at the proper time—man stands in union after death both with the souls who have died and those who are still here on earth. And the distinction lies in a man's knowing which kind of soul he has to deal with; he knows he must be active or passive, according to the way in which there arises the imagination of the soul which he faces. Now, there is one idea, one characteristic, which has indeed been expressed many times already, but which we will once more bring forward in connection with the life which occupies a third of the earth-life just elapsed, and which we are accustomed to call the life in Kamaloka. If you are living here on the earth and somebody strikes you, you are aware of it. You perceive it, and say: he has struck me. And as a rule it makes a difference whether somebody hits you, or whether you hit him, and if you hear something said by someone, you have not the same experience as when you yourself say something. All this is quite reversed in Kamaloka life, in which we live our life backwards between death and rebirth. To use this rough illustration it is then as follows. If you have given anybody a blow in life, you feel what the other person felt through the blow. If you have injured another through a word, you experience the feeling you caused him. Thus you feel the experience of the other soul. In other words, you experience the results brought about by your own deeds. We experience in this journey backwards everything which other people have experienced through us during our life here, between birth and death. If you have lived here between birth and death with many hundreds of men, these men have experienced something through you. But here in physical life you cannot feel that which those others felt and experienced through you, you only experience what they make you go through. After death this is reversed, and it is essential that we should experience everything in this review which others have suffered through us. Thus we undergo the effects of the last earth existence, and the task of these years really lies in our experiencing them. Now, while we are undergoing these effects, the experience is transformed in us into forces, and it happens in the following manner: Suppose I have offended a man, who has thereby suffered bitterly. During Kamaloka I now experience this bitterness myself. I go through it as my own experience. And while I now experience it, it makes good in me the force which must work as opposition; that is, while I undergo this bitterness, I create in myself the force to wipe away from the world this bitterness. I thus realise all the effects of my deeds and thereby absorb the force to wipe them away. And during this time in Kamaloka—which lasts a third of the earth-life—I absorb all the forces which may be expressed as an intense longing in the now disembodied soul, to remove everything which destroys perfection by retarding the soul's evolution. If you ponder over this you will see that man himself makes his own Karma, that is, that he has in himself the wish to become such that everything undesirable may be wiped out. Thus is Karma prepared, during this particular time. We incorporate into our souls the force which we must take up between death and rebirth, in order to bring about in the next incarnation that configuration of our life which we are able to regard as the right one. This is how Karma is created. In order to understand these things aright—not only theoretically but so to grasp them that they may penetrate deeply into our forces of feeling and willing—we must be clear that the whole mode of feeling common to the dead is absolutely different from that of the living. The living may very easily say, ‘I pity this or that dead man because he has to suffer something from which he cannot escape!’ But suppose he has terribly wronged another and can do nothing to put it right, you may perhaps feel sorry for the dead man, but that is quite uncalled for; for he desires nothing more than to be able to evolve the forces whereby he can balance the wrong. That is the very thing which he regards as precious. You would thus be wishing that he should not reach what he himself most longs for. To attain this he must undergo all the aforesaid suffering, for the positive develops out of the negative. Through insight into that which we have done, we develop the power of making compensation. Thus we may say that at the end of this Kamaloka period a man has already determined, in accordance with his last life and its recapitulation, how he will enter the next incarnation in his existence; and in what relation he will stand to this or that person in order to compensate this or that. There we actually determine our Karma for the life we are to enter. The first part of our time is spent in assimilating from the spiritual world the forces through which we can build up humanity in general, and through which we can form for ourselves a body suitable for our own individuality. First we have the plan of our Karma. Then we must fashion the human body to this end. That requires a much longer time, and takes place later on. Now, you can see from this that the essential of the time in Kamaloka lies in the fact that it gives us the possibility of ethically preparing our next incarnation in the right manner. We must be quite clear that each following incarnation depends on the earlier ones. We see how our following incarnations are prepared. And we see that the entire mode of a man's life depends on the way in which he went through his former life. The objection is raised by persons who have not yet fully considered the matter, that this contradicts a man's freedom. I will return to this later—it does not contradict freedom. If we thus observe individual persons in life we find that they are very, very different; no matter how many men there are on the earth, they are all different. Yet one may distinguish categories. There are, for instance, men who so behave that from their earliest youth we can see that as individuals they are specially suited for this, or that. As you know, there are such people. Even in childhood we can predict that they will accomplish some definite purpose. They thrust themselves into it, as it were. They possess activity. They have a special task, because they develop force for this end. Others we find who are interested in many things but have no definite inclination to any one thing. They take up many things. Perhaps later in life they may come to a definite task which is not specially suited to them; they might perhaps have been able to do something else quite as well. In short, people are quite different one from another in reference to the way in which they act in life. And this really makes life possible. There are men, for example, who enter life, and who do not seem to have much to do, externally. But they need only speak a word or two to have an influence on people. Such men work more through their inner being. Others work more externally. That is intimately connected with the manner in which they have lived through their previous incarnation. There are persons who die in early youth—before the age of thirty-five—in order to have these very limitations. Such men with regard to their death in this incarnation are in a quite different position from those who die after the age of thirty-five. One who dies before the age of thirty-five still stands nearer to the world from which he descended at birth. This thirty-fifth year is an important boundary. One then crosses a bridge, as it were. The world out of which a man has descended then withdraws, and he produces a new spiritual world from his inner being. It is important that we should distinguish this. And now suppose a man dies before the age of thirty-five. On reincarnating, those forces develop in him which he did not use in the years which would have followed his thirty-fifth year. Such men, who before the thirty-fifth year go through death in this way in one incarnation, thereby economise for the next incarnation certain forces, which would have been exhausted if they had lived till fifty, sixty or seventy years of age. The forces which they thus saved are added to those with which they incarnate in the next life. Thereby such souls are born into bodies through which they are in a position, especially in their youth, to confront life with strong impressions. In other words: when such souls, who in their last incarnation died before the thirty-fifth year, reincarnate again, everything makes a strong impression on them. They are deeply stirred by things, they enjoy things deeply, they have living feelings and are easily urged to impulses of will. They are those who take a strong position in life, and who receive a mission. A man does not die without cause before his thirty-fifth year; he will thereby receive a quite definite mission in his next life. These things are complex, and death before the age of thirty-five may also bring about other things—it is not absolute law, for these are only examples. But when a man dies after thirty-five it happens that in his next life he does not receive such strong impressions from the things in his surroundings. He cannot easily be stirred or roused. He becomes acquainted more slowly but more intimately with things, and he thus prepares himself for a life in his next incarnation in which he will work more through his inner nature, without being so definitely guided to a special task in life. He will so stand in life, that he would perhaps have preferred some other task, and is diverted from it in order to accomplish something perhaps absolutely against his will. Because through the previous earth incarnation he had accustomed himself to work more delicately, he can now be used in a wider sphere. And if a man—I have already mentioned this case earlier—if a man is led in very early youth through the gate of death, let us say in his eleventh, twelfth, or thirteenth year of life, he then has but a short time in Kamaloka. But he remains very, very near the world which he forsook at physical birth. Everything appears different. After a life ending with the twelfth year, there follows the usual retrospect during the first days after death, but it takes place in such a manner that it appears more from outside. Whereas if a man dies at the age of fifty, sixty or seventy, he himself must do much more to bring about this retrospect. It must be brought about by his own activity. And because they have to experience this life after death in so many various ways, men are thereby differently prepared for their next life. It may be that in one life a man is especially active. Now, if an especially active man is summoned from life at an early age, it would then occur that in his next life his Karma would appoint him to a quite definite task in life, which he would certainly accomplish. He would be as if predestined. If, however, a man is especially active in one life and lives to a good old age, these forces are then intensified inwardly. He has then in his next life a more complicated task. Outer activity withdraws, and there appears in the soul the necessity to evolve inner activity. Thus the life of man is complex as it develops from incarnation to incarnation. We shall continue these considerations in the next lecture. Now, I should like to conclude by saying one thing: When you face a whole epoch such as ours, in which in a relatively short time an exceptional number of men are led in abnormal fashion through the gates of death, then through this something quite exceptional is being prepared. And it was necessary that this should be prepared. You see each year how the time of blossoming comes to the world in intervals. If you look back in history you can also say that even there the blossoms appear at intervals. A great time of blossoming was the epoch of Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Fichte, Goethe. It is as if there was then a gathering of geniuses for a time, and it then ceased. And thus the world progresses in leaps. Such intervals of genius are recorded, and then these things change again. In the spiritual realms too, we have a blossoming, a special sprouting, at intervals. Now, in our days we have an interval of decay in the physical realm. Here you have again two things which you can place as pictures, side by side, and which as pictures are tremendously significant. Great physical decay—which is the seed for a later significant spiritual blossoming. Things have always two sides. From this standpoint, ever seeking again and again force and consolation—but also gaining confidence in our hopes—let us once more repeat in reference to our times, and from the consciousness of our spiritual science:
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