MOST
of Rudolf Steiner's lectures were not addressed to the general
public, but to groups of people already familiar with his basic
writings. He was concerned with the particular needs and interests of
those to whom he was speaking; and he was hardly ever able to revise
the notes taken at the time. The lecture of which a translation is
printed in this issue is of this kind: but, read subject to this
caution, it will be found widely comprehensible.
CONSCIENCE
AND ASTONISHMENT AS INDICATIONS OF SPIRITUAL VISION IN PAST AND
FUTURE
A lecture given by RUDOLF STEINER in Breslau, 3rd February
1912
From
notes unrevised by the lecturer. Published by kind permission of the
Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Switzerland, and
in agreement with the Rudolf Steiner Publishing Company.
SINCE
we can meet so
seldom, it will perhaps be good to touch upon some questions today,
through which anthroposophy is directly concerned with life.
Anthroposophists will often be asked: what does anthroposophy mean
for someone not yet able to see into the spiritual worlds by means of
clairvoyant consciousness? For the content of spiritual science is in
the main received, derived and imparted through research undertaken
through clairvoyant consciousness. It must be emphasised again and
again that everything, all the facts and relationships, investigated
and imparted from clairvoyant consciousness, must be comprehended by
healthy human understanding. Once the things found by clairvoyant
consciousness are there, they can be grasped and understood by the
logic inherent in every ordinary human being, if only his judgment is
unprejudiced enough.
Further, it can be
asked: are there not facts experienced in normal human life which
give direct support to the assertion by spiritual research, that our
physical world and all its phenomena have underlying them a spiritual
world? There are indeed many facts in ordinary life of which we could
say that man would never comprehend them, although he has to accept
their existence, without the recognition of a spiritual world.
We can look to begin
with at two facts in ordinary human consciousness which cannot be
explained without taking the presence of a spiritual world into
consideration. Man knows these indeed as everyday facts, but does not
usually regard them in the right light; if he did, there would be no
necessity for a materialistic conception of the world. The first of
these facts can be regarded in connection with very familiar events
in ordinary life.
When a man faces a
fact which he cannot explain with the conceptions that he has
acquired up to that moment, he is astonished. Someone for example who
saw for the first time a car or a train in movement (though such
things will soon not be unusual even in the interior of Africa) would
be very astonished, because he would think something like this:
According to my experience up to now it seems impossible to me that a
thing can move along quickly, without having something harnessed to
it in front, that can pull it. But I can see that this is moving
along quickly without being pulled! That is astonishing. What a man
does not yet know causes him astonishment; something he has already
seen, no longer astonishes him. Only the things which cannot be
connected with previous experiences cause astonishment; let us keep
this fact of ordinary life clearly before us. And we can bring it now
into connection with another fact, which is very remarkable. Human
beings are faced in ordinary life with many things that they have
never seen before and which they nevertheless accept without
astonishment. There are many such events. What are they?
It would be very
astonishing, for example, if someone was to find in the ordinary way
that after sitting quietly on his chair he suddenly began to fly up
through the chimney into the air. It would indeed be astonishing; but
when this happens in a dream he would do it all without being in any
way amazed. We experience in dreams much more fantastic things than
this, but are not astonished although we cannot relate them to daily
events. In waking life we are even astonished if somebody leaps high
into the air; but in a dream we can fly without being surprised at
all. So we are faced with the fact that while in waking life we are
astonished about things we had not experienced previously, in dreams
we are not at all amazed.
As a second fact
from which we shall begin, we have the question of conscience. When a
man does something, and with a sensitive nature even when he thinks,
something stirs in him that we call conscience. This conscience is
entirely independent of the external significance of events. We could
for example have done something very advantageous to us, and yet this
act might be condemned by our conscience. Everyone feels that when
conscience goes into action something influences the judgment of an
act that has nothing to do with its utility. It is like a voice that
says within us: Truly, you should have done this, or you should not
have done this — this is the fact of conscience, and we know
how strong its warning power can be, and how it can pursue us through
life. We know that the presence of conscience cannot be denied.
Now
we can consider again the life of dreams. Here we may do the
strangest things which would cause us the most terrible pangs of
conscience if we did them in waking life. Anyone can confirm this
from his own experience, that he does things in dreams without his
conscience stirring at all; while if he were to do them awake the
voice of conscience would speak.
Thus
these two facts, amazement and conscience, are excluded in a
remarkable way from the life of dreams. Ordinarily man does not
notice such things; nevertheless they throw their light upon the
depths of our existence.
There is something
else that throws light on this, concerned less with conscience than
with astonishment. In ancient Greece the saying appears that all
philosophy begins with astonishment, with wonder. The feeling
expressed in this saying — the feeling of the Greeks themselves
— cannot be found in the earlier periods of Greek history; only
from a certain point in the development of philosophy is it to be
found. Earlier periods did not have this feeling. Why was it that
from a certain point onwards in ancient Greece this observation about
astonishment was made? We have seen that we are astonished about
something that does not fit in with our previous life; but if we
have only this kind of astonishment this is nothing specially
remarkable. Someone who is astonished about a car or train is
simply unaccustomed to see such things. It is much more remarkable
that a man can begin to be astonished about accustomed things. For
example there is the fact that the sun rises every morning. Those
people who are accustomed to this fact with their ordinary
consciousness are not surprised about it. But when there is
astonishment about the everyday things, which one is accustomed to
see, philosophy and knowledge arise. Those men are the richer in
knowledge, who are able to be astonished about things which the
ordinary man simply accepts. Only then does a man strive for
knowledge. For this reason, it was said in ancient Greece: All
philosophy begins in wonder.
How is it with the
conscience? Once more it is interesting, that the word ‘conscience’
— and therefore the concept too, for only when we have a
conception of something does the word appear — is also only to
be found in ancient Greece from a certain time onwards. It is
impossible to find in earlier Greek literature, about up to the time
of Aeschylus, a word that should be translated ‘conscience’.
But we find one in the later Greek writers, for example Euripides.
Thus it can be pointed out precisely that conscience is something,
just as is amazement about familiar things, known to man only from a
certain period of ancient Greece onwards. What sprang up at this time
as the activity of conscience was something quite different among the
earlier Greeks. It did not then happen that the pangs of conscience
appeared when a man had done something wrong. Men had then an
original, elemental clairvoyance; going back only a short time before
the Christian era we would find that all human beings still had this
original clairvoyance. If a man then did something wrong, it was not
followed by the stirring of conscience, but a demonic form appeared
before the old clairvoyance, and a man was tormented by it. Such
forms were called Erinys or Furies. Only when men had lost the
capacity to see these demonic forms did they become able to feel,
when they had done something wrong, the power of conscience as an
inner experience.
What do such facts
show? What really happens in the everyday fact of astonishment —
when for example a tribesman from the depths of Africa, suddenly
transported to Europe, sees here the trains and cars for the first
time? He is astonished because his astonishment presupposes that
something new is entering his life, something that he before saw
differently.
If now a developed
man has a particular need to find explanations for many things,
including everyday things, because he is able to be astonished about
everyday things — this too presupposes that he had seen the
thing differently before. No-one would be able to reach another
explanation of the sunrise, distinct from the mere appearance of its
rising, if he had not seen it differently before. But it might be
objected that we see the sunrise happening in just the same way from
our earliest youth; would it not be nonsensical to be astonished
about it? There is no other explanation of this than that if we are
amazed about it after all, we must have experienced it earlier in
another condition, in a way different from our present experience in
this life. For if spiritual science says that man exists between
birth and a previous life in another condition, we have in the fact
of astonishment about something so everyday as a sunrise an
indication of this earlier condition, in which man also perceived the
sunrise, but in another way, without bodily organs. He perceived all
this then with spiritual eyes and spiritual ears. In the moment where
dim feelings lead him to say: ‘You face the rising sun, the
roaring sea, the growing plant, and are filled with wonder!’ —
there is in this wonder the knowledge, that all this has once been
perceived in another way, not with bodily eyes. He has looked at all
these with his spiritual eyes before he entered the physical world.
He feels dimly: ‘Yet this is all different, from the form in
which you saw it earlier.’ This was, and could only be, before
birth. These facts compel us to recognise that knowledge would not be
possible at all if man did not enter this life from a preceding
super-sensible existence. Otherwise there would be no explanation for
amazement and the knowledge that follows from it. Naturally man does
not remember in clear pictures what he experienced in a different way
before birth; but though it is not in the form of clear thought, it
is present in feeling. It can only be brought as a clear memory
through initiation.
Now we can go deeper
into the fact that we are not amazed in dreams. First the question
must be answered, what a dream really is. Dreams are an ancient
heritage from earlier incarnations. Men passed in earlier
incarnations through other conditions of consciousness which were
similar to clairvoyance. In the further course of evolution man lost
the capacity to look clairvoyantly into the world of soul and spirit.
It was a shadowy clairvoyance; evolution proceeded gradually, from
the earlier, shadowy clairvoyance into our present clear, waking
consciousness, which could develop in the physical world — in
order, when it is fully developed, to ascend again into the worlds of
soul and spirit with the capacities which man has acquired with his
‘I’ in waking consciousness. But what did men acquire
then in the old clairvoyance? Something has remained; the life of
dreams. But the life of dreams is distinguished from the old
clairvoyance by the fact that it is an experience of present-day
man, and present-day man has developed a consciousness which
contains the impulse to acquire knowledge. Dreams, as a remnant of an
earlier consciousness, do not contain the impulse to acquire
knowledge and for this reason man feels the distinction between
waking consciousness and the consciousness of dreams.
Astonishment, which
did not exist in the ancient shadowy clairvoyance, cannot enter even
today the consciousness of dreams. Astonishment and wonder cannot
enter the life of dreams. We have them in the waking consciousness,
which is directed to the external world. In his dreams, man is not in
the external world; he is placed into the spiritual world, and does
not experience physical things. But it was in facing the physical
world that man learned amazement. In dreams he accepts everything as
it comes, as he did in the old clairvoyance. He could do this then
because the spiritual powers came and showed him the good and evil
that he had done; man did not then need wonder. Dreams thus show us
by their own character that they are inherited from ancient times,
when there was not yet any astonishment about everyday things, and
not yet a conscience.
Why was it necessary
that man, having once been clairvoyant, could not remain so? Why has
he descended? Did the gods perhaps drive him down unnecessarily? It
is really so, that man could never have acquired what lies in his
capacity of wonder and what lies in his conscience, if he had not
descended. Man descended in order to acquire knowledge and
conscience; he could only do so through being separated for a time
from these spiritual worlds. And he has achieved knowledge and
conscience here, in order to ascend once more with them.
Spiritual science
shows us that man spends each time a period between death and a new
birth in a purely spiritual world. We experience to begin with after
death the time of Kamaloca, the condition in the soul world where
desires are purified, where man is only half in the spiritual world,
so to speak, because he still looks back upon his impulses and
attachments and is thus still drawn by what bound him to the physical
world. Only when this Kamaloca period has been wiped out does he
experience purely spiritual life in its fulness, in the realm of
spirit.
When a man enters
this purely spiritual world, what is his experience? How is it
experienced by every human being? Consideration even by the quite
ordinary understanding leads to the conclusion that our environment
between death and a new birth must appear entirely different from
what we have in physical life. Here we see colours because we have
eyes; here we hear sounds because we have ears. But when in spiritual
existence after death we have no eyes and no ears, we cannot perceive
these colours, and sounds. Even here we see and hear badly or not at
all, if we have not got good eyes and ears. It is self-evident
that we have to conceive the spiritual world as entirely different
from the world in which we here live between birth and death. We can
form a picture of the way in which this world must alter when we pass
through the gate of death with the help of a comparison. A man sees a
lamb and a wolf. By means of the organs of perception available to
him in physical life man perceives the lamb and the wolf; he sees
them as material lamb, as material wolf. Other lambs and wolves too
he recognises, and calls them lamb and wolf. He has a conceptual
picture of a lamb, and another of a wolf. It could now be said, and
is in fact said: the conceptual picture of the animal is not visible,
it lives within the animal; one does not really see materially the
essential being of lamb and wolf. One forms mental pictures of the
essential being of the animal, but this essential being is in itself
invisible.
There are theorists
who hold that the concepts of wolf and lamb which we form for
ourselves live only within us, and that they have nothing to do with
the wolf and the lamb themselves. A man who holds this view should be
asked to feed a wolf with lambs until all material parts of the wolf
body have been renewed, according to scientific research — then
the wolf would be built entirely of matter from lambs. And then this
man should see whether the wolf has turned into a lamb! But if the
result is nevertheless that the wolf has not become a lamb, it has
been proved that ‘wolf’, as a fact, is something distinct
from the material wolf and that the wolf's objective existence is
something more than a material thing.
This invisible
reality, which in ordinary life one only forms as a concept, one
actually sees after death. One does not see there the lamb's white
colour, or hear the sounds which it makes but one beholds the
invisible power which works in the lamb. For the one who lives in the
spiritual world this is just as real, this is actually there. Where a
lamb is standing, there stands too a spiritual reality, which becomes
visible for man after death. And it is the same with all phenomena of
the physical environment. One sees the sun differently, the moon
differently, everything differently; and one brings something of this
with one, while entering through birth into a new existence. And if
through this there arises the feeling that one has once seen
something quite differently, then there descends with one's
astonishment and wonder the power of knowledge.
It is something
different, if one observes a human action. Then the element of
conscience is added. If we wish to know what this is we must turn our
attention to a fact of life which can be confirmed without the
development of clairvoyance. The moment of falling asleep must be
carefully observed. One can learn to do this without any
clairvoyance; this experience is open to anyone. Just before one
falls asleep, things first lose their sharp outlines, colours grow
faint, sounds not only grow weaker, but it is as if they go away from
us into the distance; they reach us only from far away, they grow
weaker just as if they were going into the distance. The way in which
the whole visible world grows less distinct is a transformation like
the oncoming of mist. And the limbs grow heavier. One feels in them
something which one has not felt before in waking life; it is as if
they acquired their own weight, their own heaviness. In waking life
if one were to consider it one should really feel that a leg, when
one is walking, or a hand, which one raises, have for us no weight.
We raise our hand, carrying a hundredweight — why is the
hundredweight heavy? We raise our hand and it carries itself —
why do we feel no weight? The hand belongs to me, and so its
heaviness is not felt; the hundredweight is outside me, and since it
does not belong to me, it is heavy. Let us imagine a being from Mars
descending to the earth, knowing nothing about earthly things; and
the first thing he sees is a man holding a weight in each hand. To
begin with he would have to suppose that both these weights belong to
the man as if they were part of his hands, part of his whole being.
If he then later had to accept the idea that the man feels a
difference between the hundredweight and his hand, he would find it
astonishing. We really only feel something as a weight if it is
outside us. So that if man feels his limbs beginning to become heavy
as he falls asleep, this is a sign that man goes out of his body, out
of his physical being.
Much now depends
upon a delicate observation, which can be made at the moment when the
limbs grow heavy. A remarkable feeling appears. It tells us: ‘You
have done this — you have left this undone!’ Like a
living conscience the deeds of the previous day stand out. And if
something is there that we cannot approve of we toss on our bed and
cannot fall asleep. If we can be content with our action there comes
a happy moment as we fall asleep, when a man says to himself: ‘Could
it always be so!’ Then there comes a jolt — that is when
man leaves his physical and ethereal body, and then a man is in the
spiritual world.
Let us observe the
moment of this phenomenon, which is like a living conscience, more
exactly. A man has not really any power to do something reasonable,
and tosses about on his bed. This is an unhealthy condition which
prevents him from getting to sleep. It happens at the moment when we
are about to leave the physical plane through falling asleep, in
order to ascend into another world; but this is not willing to accept
what we call our ‘bad conscience’. A man cannot fall
asleep because he is cast back by the world into which he should
enter in sleep. Thus if we say that we will listen to our conscience
about some action, this means that we have a presentiment of what the
human being will need to be in future in order to enter the spiritual
world.
Thus we have in
astonishment an expression of what we have seen at an earlier time,
and conscience is an expression of a future vision in the spiritual
world. Conscience reveals whether we shall be horrified or happy,
when we are able to behold our actions in the realm of spirit.
Conscience is a presentiment that reveals prophetically how we shall
experience our deeds after death.
Astonishment and the
impulse towards knowledge on the one hand, and the conscience on the
other — these are living signs of the spiritual world. These
phenomena cannot be explained without bringing in the spiritual
worlds. A man will be more inclined to become an anthroposophist if
he feels reverence and wonder before the facts of the world. The most
developed souls are those which are able to feel wonder more and
more. The less one can feel wonder, the less advanced is the soul.
Human beings bring to the everyday things of life far less wonder
than they bring for example to the starry sky in its majesty. But the
real higher development of the soul only begins when one can feel as
much wonder about the smallest flower and petal, about the most
inconspicuous beetle or worm, as about the greatest cosmic events.
These things are very remarkable; a man will generally be moved very
easily to ask for the explanation of something which strikes him as
sensational. People who live near a volcano for example will ask for
the explanation of volcanic eruptions, because people in such regions
have to be alert about such things and give them more attention than
everyday affairs. Even people who live far away from volcanoes ask
for an explanation of them, because these events are startling and
sensational for them too. But when a man enters life with such a
soul, that he is astonished about everything, because he feels
something of the spiritual through all his surroundings, then he is
not very much more astonished about a volcano than about the little
bubbles and craters which he notices in a cup of milk or coffee on
his breakfast table. He is just as interested in small things as in
great things.
To be able to bring
wonder everywhere — that is a memory of the vision before
birth. To bring conscience everywhere into our deeds is to have a
living presentiment that every deed which we fulfil will appear to us
in the future in another form. Human beings who feel this are more
predestined than others to find their way to spiritual science.
We live in a time in
which certain things are being revealed which can only be explained
through spiritual science. Some things defy every other explanation.
People behave very differently towards such things. We have certainly
in our time many human characters to observe, and yet within the
great variety of shades of character we encounter two main qualities.
We can describe one
group as meditative natures, inclined towards contemplation, able
everywhere to feel astonishment, feeling everywhere their conscience
stirred. Many sorrows, many heavy melancholic moods can pile up in
the soul if the longing for explanations remains unsatisfied. A
delicate conscience can make life very difficult. Another kind of
human being is present today. They have no wish for such an
explanation of the world. All the things that are brought forward as
explanations derived from spiritual research appear to them terribly
dull, and they prefer to live actively and unheedingly, rather than
asking for explanations. If you even begin to speak about
explanations, they yawn at once. And certainly with people of this
kind, conscience is less active than with the others. What is the
source of such polarities in character? Spiritual science is ready to
examine the reasons for the one quality of character, remarkable for
its tendency towards meditation, its thirst for knowledge —
while the other is prepared to enjoy life simply without seeking any
explanation.
If the compass of
the human soul is examined by means of spiritual research — one
can only indicate these things, many hours would be needed to give a
more thorough description — it can be found that many of those
whose lives have a meditative quality, who need to seek explanations
for what is around them, can be followed back to previous lives in
which they had an immediate knowledge in their souls about the fact
of reincarnation. Even today there are many human beings on earth who
know it, for whom repeated earthly lives are an absolute fact. We
need only think of those in Asia. Thus those men who in the present
time lead a meditative life, are in the present connected with a
previous incarnation in which they knew something about repeated
earthly lives.
But the other, more
insensitive natures come over from previous lives in which nothing
was known about reincarnation. They have no impulse to burden
themselves much with what conscience says about the deeds of their
lives, or to be concerned much with seeking explanations. Very many
people with us in the Occident have this quality; it is indeed the
mark of occidental civilisation, that men have forgotten, so to
speak, their earlier lives on earth. Indeed, they have forgotten
them; but civilisation is standing at a turning point where a memory
for former lives on earth will revive. Men who are living today are
going to meet a future which will have as its characteristic the
renewal of connection with the spiritual world.
This is still the
case only with very few human beings; but certainly in the course of
the twentieth century it will become widespread. It will take this
form; let us assume that a man has done something, and is troubled
afterwards by a bad conscience. It is like this at the present time.
But later, when the connection with the spiritual world has been
restored, a man will feel impelled, after he has done this or that,
to draw back from his action as if with blindfolded eyes. And then
something like a dream picture, but one that is entirely living for
him will arise; a future event, which will happen because of his
deed. And men experiencing such a picture will say something like
this to themselves: ‘Yes, it is I who am experiencing this, but
what I am seeing is no part of my past!’
For all those who
have heard nothing of spiritual science this will be a terrible
thing. But those who have prepared for what all will experience will
say to themselves: ‘This is indeed no part of my past, but I
will experience it in the future as the karmic result of what I have
just done.’
Today we are in the
anteroom of that time, when the karmic compensation will appear to
men in a prophetic dream-picture. And when you think of this
experience in the course of time developing further and further, you
can conceive the man of the future who will behold the karmic
judgment upon his deeds.
How does something
like this happen — that human beings become capable of seeing
this karmic compensation? This is connected with the fact that human
beings once had no conscience but were tormented after evil deeds by
the Furies. This was an ancient clairvoyance which has passed away.
Then came the middle period when they no longer saw the Furies, but
what was brought about by the Furies previously now arose inwardly as
conscience. A time is now gradually approaching in which we shall
again see something — and this is the karmic compensation. That
man has now developed conscience begins to enable him to behold the
spiritual world consciously.
Just as some human
beings in the present have become meditative natures because they
acquired powers in earlier incarnations which reveal themselves —
like a memory of these lives — in the power of wonder, —
in the same way the men of today will bring over powers into their
next incarnation if they now acquire knowledge of the spiritual
worlds. But it will go badly in the future world for those who today
reject any explanation of the law of reincarnation. This will be a
terrible fact for these souls. We are still living in a time in which
men can manage their lives without any explanation of them which
relates them to the spiritual worlds. But this period, in which this
has been permitted by the cosmic powers, is coming to an end. Those
men who have no connection with the spiritual world will awaken in
the next life in such a way that the world into which they are born
once more is incomprehensible to them. And when they leave once more
the physical existence which has been incomprehensible to them, they
will have no understanding either after death for the spiritual world
into which they are growing. Of course they enter the spiritual
world; but they will not grasp it. They will find themselves in an
environment which they do not comprehend, which appears not to belong
to them, and torments them as a bad conscience does. Returning once
more into a new incarnation, it is just as bad; they will have all
kinds of impulses and passions and will live in these, because they
are not able to develop any wonder, as in illusions and
hallucinations. The materialists of the present time are those who
are going towards a future in which they will be terribly tormented
by hallucinations and illusions; for what a man thinks in the present
life, he experiences then as illusion and hallucination.
This can be
conceived as an absolute reality. We can picture for example two men
walking in a street together at the present time. One is a
materialist, the other a non-materialist. The latter says
something about the spiritual world; and the other says, or thinks:
‘What nonsense! That is all illusion!’ Indeed, for him,
this is illusion, but for the other, who made the remark about the
spiritual world, it is no illusion. The consequences for the
materialist will begin to appear already after death, and then very
definitely in the next earthly life. He will then feel the spiritual
worlds as something that torments him like a living rebuke. In the
period of Kamaloca between death and a new birth he will not feel the
distinction between Kamaloca and the spiritual realm. And when he is
born again, and the spiritual world approaches him in the way that
has been described, then it appears to him as something unreal, as an
illusion, as a hallucination.
Spiritual science is
not something intended simply to satisfy our inquisitiveness. We are
not sitting here simply because we are more inquisitive than other
people about the spiritual world, but because we have some feeling
for the fact that human beings in the future will not be able to live
without spiritual science. All efforts which do not take this fact
into account will become decadent. But life is arranged in such a way
that those who resist spiritual knowledge at the present time will
have the opportunity to approach it in later incarnations. But there
must be outposts. Human beings who through their karma have a longing
for spiritual knowledge already in the present can become outposts
through this. You have this opportunity because there must be
outposts, and you can be among them. Other human beings who cannot
yet come to spiritual knowledge according to their karma, even though
they do not reject it, will find later the longing for spiritual
knowledge arising within them, more from the general karma of
mankind.
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