Anthroposophical Guidelines

Aphorisms

from a lecture for members given on

August 24, 1924 in London:

At the present stage of its development human consciousness develops three forms, the waking, the dreaming and the dreamless sleeping consciousness.

Waking consciousness experiences the sensory outer world, forms ideas about it and can create from these ideas those which depict a purely spiritual world. Dreaming consciousness develops images which transform the outer world - for example, the sun shining on a bed can become a great fire with many details. Or it presents one’s inner world in symbolic pictures to the soul - for example a strongly beating heart in the image of an overheated oven. Memories also appear transformed in dream consciousness. The content of such images, which do not derive from the sensory but from the spiritual world, nevertheless do not provide the possibility to knowingly penetrate into the spiritual world because their dimness does not allow them to be completely raised to waking consciousness, and because what does get through cannot be readily grasped.

It is possible, however, directly upon waking from the dream world, to grasp enough to recognize that it is the imperfect impression of a spiritual experience that pervades sleep, but which for the most part evades waking consciousness. In order to see this clearly it is only necessary to shape the moment of waking so that it doesn’t invoke the outer world to the mind in one beat, but so that the mind, without looking outward, concentrates on the inner experience.

Dreamless sleep consciousness lets the soul pass through experiences which in memory appear as only undifferentiated events in time. One will speak of these experiences as being non-existent as long as one does not access them through spiritual-scientific investigation. If this is done however, one develops imaginative and inspired consciousness, as described in anthroposophical literature, for the pictures and the inspirations of experiences from previous earth lives rise to the surface. And then one can comprehend the content of dream consciousness. It is a content which is incomprehensible to waking consciousness, for it applies to the world in which man sojourns as a disembodied soul between two earth lives.

If one learns what is hidden in dream and sleeping consciousness during the contemporary stage of world evolution, then the way will be opened to knowledge of the evolutionary forms of human consciousness during previous stages. On cannot, however, achieve this by means of external research. For the evidence thus obtained only indicates the aftereffects of human consciousness’s prehistoric experiences. Anthroposophical literature provides information on how to achieve a vision of such experiences through spiritual research.

This research finds that in ancient Egyptian times dream-consciousness was much closer to waking consciousness than is the case today. Memories of the dream experiences streamed into waking consciousness, which presented not merely the sensory impressions in clearly contoured thoughts, but also, united with these thoughts, the spirit which acts in the sensory world. In this way man and his consciousness existed instinctively in the [spiritual] world which he had abandoned during his earthly incarnation and which he would again enter upon passing through the portal of death.

Objective study of the writing in monuments and elsewhere clearly indicates the existence of such a consciousness, which belonged to a time when external records did not exist.

Sleep-consciousness in ancient Egyptian times contained dreams of the spiritual world in a way similar to the present-day dreams which contain elements derived from the physical world.

One finds, however, still another consciousness in other peoples. Sleep streamed its experiences into wakefulness in such a way that a vision of previous earth lives was instinctively present. Ancient people’s traditional knowledge of repeated earth lives originated from this form of consciousness.

One finds again in developed imaginative cognition what in ancient times was a dimly instinctive dream-consciousness. But now it is a fully waking consciousness.

And one is also aware through inspired cognition of the ancient instinctive insight which still saw something of repeated earth lives. Present day historical scholarship does not take note of this development of human forms of consciousness. It prefers to believe that contemporary consciousness forms were present as long as earthly humanity existed.

And evidence of such different consciousness forms as is contained in myths and fairy tales they take to be the result of an outflow of ancient man’s poetic fantasy.

88. In the waking consciousness of present times man experiences himself as standing within the physical world. This experience hides from him the fact that within his own being the effects of a life between death and birth are active.
89. In dreaming consciousness man experiences his own being unharmoniously united with the spiritual being of the universe in a chaotic way. Waking consciousness cannot grasp the essential content of this dreaming consciousness. Imaginative and inspired consciousness reveals that the spiritual world, through which man lives between death and birth, participates in the formation of his inner being.
90. In the consciousness of dreamless sleep man experiences his own being - without conscious knowledge - as infused with the results of previous earth-lives. Inspired and intuitive consciousness progress towards the revelation of these results and see the activity of previous lives in the pattern of destiny (karma) in the present life.
91. The will enters normal consciousness only through thoughts in the present era. This normal consciousness can only relate to what is sensibly perceptible however. It grasps only what is perceptible through the senses about its own nature. In this consciousness man knows about his impulses of will only by the thinking observation of himself, as he knows of the outer world only by observing it.
92. Karma, which is active in the will, is an inherent attribute in it from previous earth lives. It cannot, therefore, be grasped by ideas derived from sensory existence, which are only oriented towards contemporary earth life.
93. Because these ideas cannot grasp karma, they relegate what is unintelligible about human will impulses to the mystical obscurity of the bodily constitution, whereas in reality it is the effect of past earth lives.
94. Man stands in the physical world with ordinary conceptualization which is imparted through the senses. In order to incorporate this physical world into his consciousness, karma must be silent. In a manner of speaking man, as a thinker, forgets his karma.
95. Karma acts in manifestations of will. But its activity remains unconscious. By advancing to Imagination that which is unconsciously active in the will, karma is grasped. One feels his destiny internally.
96. Once Inspiration and Intuition join Imagination, in addition to the impulses of the present, the effect of former earth lives is also perceptible in the activity of the will. Past life actively manifests itself in the present one.
97. A cruder description might say: thinking, feeling and willing live in the human soul. A subtler one must say: thinking always contains an undercoating of feeling and willing; feeling of thinking and willing; willing of thinking and feeling. It is just that the thinking aspect predominates in thought, as do feeling and willing in their respective domains.
98. The feeling and willing of thought contain the karmic results of past earth lives. The thinking and willing of feeling determine character in a karmic way. The thinking and feeling of willing wrench the current earth-life from its karmic connections.
99. In the feeling and willing of thinking man lives out the karma of the past; in the thinking and feeling of the will he prepares the karma of the future.
100. Thoughts have their actual seat in the human etheric body. But there they are living essential forces. They impress themselves on the physical body. And as such “impressed thoughts” they have the shadowy quality through which normal consciousness knows them.
101. What lives in thoughts as feeling comes from the astral body, what lives as willing comes from the “I”. In sleep the human etheric body radiates with one’s thoughts; only the person does not participate, for he has extracted - from the etheric and physical bodies - the feeling of thoughts with the astral body, and the willing of same with the “I”.
102. At the moment during sleep in which the astral body and the I sever their relation to the etheric body’s thoughts, they enter into relation with “karma” - to envisioning the events throughout repeated earth-lives. This envisioning is not open to normal consciousness - [unless] a super-sensible consciousness enters it.