Anthroposophical Guidelines

On the preceding Guidelines about the image-nature of man

It is of great importance that through Anthroposophy it should be made clear that the ideas which one obtains by the observance of nature are inadequate for the contemplation of man. The way of thinking which has taken possession of human sentiment during the last centuries of spiritual evolution sins against this challenge. One becomes used to thinking about natural laws; and by means of these laws the natural phenomena observed by the senses are explained. One then looks at the human organism and thinks that it can also be explained by applying natural laws to it.

This is like considering a picture which a painter created to be the same as the substance of the colors used, as the strength used to apply the colors to the canvas, or the method with which the colors are painted on the canvas, and similar viewpoints. But all that does not reveal what the picture manifests. Completely different principles live in what the picture manifests than can be obtained by those methods.

One must be quite clear about the fact that in the human being something also manifests itself which is not comprehensible from the point of view of natural laws. If one is able to make this idea his own in the right way, then one will be able to understand the human being as image. In this sense, a mineral is not image. It only manifests what the senses can directly perceive.

With images, sense observation is directed through what is perceived to the content, which is grasped in the spirit. This is also the case when contemplating the human being. If one contemplates man according to natural laws in the right way, one does not approach what man truly is, but only what is manifested through these laws.

One must realize that when the natural laws are applied to man it is as if one were standing before a picture and only knows - that’s blue, that’s red - and is incapable, though inner soul activity, of associating the blue and the red to what these colors manifest.

One must perceive something quite different when applying natural laws to a mineral substance and to a human being. From a spiritual viewpoint, in the case of the mineral it is as though one were directly touching what one sees; when applying natural laws to man it is as though one stands as apart from him as one stands apart from a picture which one does not see with the eye of the soul, but merely brushes with the fingertips.

Once one understands in contemplating man, that he is the image of something, then one is in the right soul-disposition to advance to what this image represents.

And the image nature of man does not manifest itself in one explicit way. A sense organ is essentially least of all an image, at most a kind of manifestation of itself like a mineral. One can come closest to the sense organs through natural laws. Just look at the wonderful organization of the human eye. One roughly grasps this organization by means of natural laws. And it is similar with the other sense organs, although it is not so clearly the case as with the eye. It is because the sense organs demonstrate a kind of self-containment in their forms. They are included in the organism as completed formations, and as such they impart perception of the outer world.

This is not the case with the rhythmic functions in the organism. They do not manifest themselves as something complete. A continual generation and degeneration of the organism takes place in them. If the sense organs were like the rhythmic system, man would perceive the outer world as being in a state of continuous becoming.

The sense organs manifest themselves like a picture that hangs on a wall. The rhythmic system appears before us like what happens when we contemplate the canvas and the painter in the process of creating a picture. The picture does not yet exist, but it is in the process of coming into existence. What has come into being remains, at first, existent. This contemplation has to do only with a process of becoming. In contemplating the human rhythmic system, the expiring, the deconstruction, immediately connects to the coming into being, to the construction. The rhythmic system manifests a becoming image.

The soul’s act of dedicating itself to the observation of an object which is a finished image may be called Imagination. The experience which must unfold in order to grasp an image in the state of becoming is, on the other hand, Inspiration.

It is a different story when one contemplates the metabolism and movement system of the human organism. It is as though one were standing before an empty canvas, paint-pots and an artist who has not yet begun to paint. If one wishes to grasp the metabolic and limbs system, one must develop a capacity for observance which has as little to do with what the senses see when observing the paint pots and empty canvas as these have to do with the artist’s finished picture. And the activity which the person experiences in his soul spiritually from the metabolism and [limb] movements is comparable to when observing the painter, empty canvas and paint-pots, he experiences the subsequently painted picture. Intuition must be at work in the soul in order to grasp the metabolic and limbs system.

It is necessary that the active members of the Anthroposophical Society concentrate in this way on the Being which is the basis of anthroposophical considerations. For not only should what is gained from anthroposophical cognition be recognized, but also how one is able to experience this knowledge.

What has been explained here will lead into the following Guidelines.

38. If one has been able to contemplate man in his image-nature and in his revealed spirituality in accordance with the indications given in the previous Guidelines, one stands in the spiritual world where one sees man as an active spiritual being, and also sees the psychic-moral laws in their reality. For the moral world-order appears now as the earthly likeness of an order belonging to the spiritual world. And the physical and moral world-orders bond themselves in unity.
39. The will comes from within man. It is completely foreign to the natural laws gained from the outer world. The sense organs’ similarity to external natural objects is discernible. The will cannot yet manifest itself in their activities. The essence which is revealed in the rhythmic system is less similar to everything external. The will can intervene in this system to a certain extent. But this system is still involved with becoming and dying. The will is still bound by this.
40. The nature of the metabolism and limbs system manifests itself through matter and their processes, but the matter and the processes have nothing more to do with it than the painter and his tools have to do with the finished picture. The will can therefore directly intervene. If one grasps the spiritual human being behind the one who lives and acts according to natural laws, one finds in him a field in which one can become aware of the will’s working. Conversely, in the field of the senses will remains a meaningless word; and whoever seeks to understand it in this field fails to recognize the true nature of the will and replaces it with something else.
41. In the previous Guideline the nature of the human will was described. Only by becoming aware of this nature is one in a cosmic sphere in which destiny (karma) works. As long as one only sees the laws which dominate in connection with natural things and natural facts, he remains far from the laws which apply to destiny.
42. By grasping the laws of destiny in this way, it is also apparent that this destiny cannot be realized through a single physical earthly life. As long as man lives in the same physical body, he can only carry out the moral content of his will to the extent the physical body within the physical world allows. Only when he passes through the gates of death into the spiritual world is the spiritual nature of the will able to achieve its true effect. There the good and the bad will achieve spiritual fulfillment in their corresponding results for the first time.
43. By means of this spiritual fulfillment, man configures himself between death and a new birth; in his essence he becomes an image of what he did during his life on earth. Through this, his essence, he configures his physical life upon his return to earth. The spiritual, which affects destiny, can only carry out its task in the physical when its corresponding causation has previously withdrawn into the spiritual world. For what is experienced in life as destiny is not built upon the results of physical occurrences, but proceeds from the spiritual.
44. A transition to the spiritual-scientific consideration of the question of destiny should be made using examples from the life of individual persons: how the path of destiny affected the course of his life. For example, how a youthful experience, surely not carried out in full freedom by the person involved, can influence his entire later life.
45. The meaning of the fact that during the course of physical life between birth and death the good can seem unhappy and evil at least apparently happy, should be depicted. Examples in pictures are more important in discussing these things than theoretical explanations, because they better prepare for spiritual scientific considerations.
46. In cases of destiny which occur in a person’s life in a way that cannot be explained by his particular present earth-life, it should be shown that such occurrences quite obviously point directly to previous lives. It should of course be clear that in expounding such things nothing obligatory is meant; rather that something is said which orients thinking towards spiritual-scientific considerations of the question of destiny.
47. Only the smallest part of the formation of man’s destiny enters into ordinary consciousness; it works mostly in the unconscious. But it is just by the unveiling of the threads of destiny that it becomes clear how unconscious content can become conscious. Those who claim that the temporarily unconscious must remain in the area of the unknown, and create therewith a limit to knowledge, are completely mistaken. For every element of his destiny that a person unveils, he lifts a previously unconscious content into the realm of consciousness.
48. By such unveiling, one becomes aware that destiny is not arranged during life between birth and death; rather is one impelled, just by this question of destiny, to consider the life between death and a new birth.
49. By directing the consideration of human experience beyond one’s self and towards the question of destiny, one achieves a true feeling for the relationship between the material and the spiritual worlds. By observing destiny’s interplay, one is already standing in the spiritual world. For the interconnections of destiny are not at all related to materiality.
50. It is extremely important to point out how the consideration of the history of humanity is vitalized when one shows that by passing from epoch to epoch in their repeated earth lives, it is the human souls themselves which carry over the results of one historical epoch into the other.
51. One may easily object that viewing history in this way takes from it its elementary and naive elements. But this is unjust. On the contrary, it deepens the view of history because it follows it within man’s innermost being. History thus becomes richer and more concrete, not poorer and abstracter. In the depiction one must only develop heart and appreciation for the living human soul, into which one thereby achieves profound insight.
52. The epochs in life between death and a new life should be considered in relation to the forming of karma. The “how” of this consideration shall be the subject of the following guidelines.
53. The unfolding of human life between death and a new birth occurs in successive stages. During several days after passing through the portals of death, the forgoing life is perceived in images. At the same time, this perception shows the detachment of the bearer [physical body] of this life from the human psychic-spiritual being.
54. In the time which comprises approximately one-third of the forgoing earthly life, the soul experiences the effect that life must have in the sense of an ethically just world order. During this experience, the intention is born to form the next earthly life as compensation for the forgoing one.
55. A purely spiritual, long enduring epoch follows, during which the human soul prepares its coming earth-life in the sense of karma, together with other karmically conjoined human souls and with beings of the higher hierarchies.
56. The epoch between death and a new birth, during which the person’s karma is prepared, can only be described based of the results of spiritual research. But it must always be borne in mind that reason is enlightened by this description. Reason only needs to objectively consider the essence of the reality of sense perception to realize that it also points to the spiritual, as a cadaver’s form points to the life [once] inherent in it.
57. The results of spiritual science show that between death and birth man belongs to spiritual realms, just as he belongs to the three realms of nature - mineral, vegetable and animal - between birth and death.
58. The mineral kingdom is recognizable in the present form of the human being; the vegetable - etheric body - is the foundation of his becoming and growing; the animal - astral body - the impulse for the unfolding of his feeling and will. The crowning of conscious feeling and will in the self-conscious spirit immediately makes the relation of man to the spiritual world apparent.
59. An objective consideration of thinking shows that normal consciousness’s thoughts have no existence of their own, that they only appear as mirror-images of something. But the individual feels himself alive in thoughts. The thoughts do not live; rather he lives in the thoughts. This life originates in the spiritual beings of the third hierarchy, a spiritual realm (in the sense of my Outline of Esoteric Science).
60. Extending this objective consideration to feelings shows that although they arise from the physical organism, they cannot originate there, and that their life includes an essence which is independent of the physical organism. Man can feel himself to be in the natural world with his physical organism. But it is just then, when he does this with self-knowledge, that he experiences himself to be in a spiritual realm through his feelings. It is the realm of the second hierarchy.
61. As a being of will, man does not turn to his physical organism, but to the outer world. He doesn’t ask when he wants to walk: “What do I feel in my feet? but what is out there as a goal I want to reach.” He forgets his organism when he wills. In his will he doesn’t belong to his nature. He belongs to the spirit-realm of the first hierarchy.