THE ORIGIN OF SUFFERING
Berlin, 8th November, 1906.
The
next three lectures of this winter's cycle will have more of an inner
connection than the others, that is: Today's upon the origin of
suffering, the next upon the origin of evil, and the following:
Illness and Death. Yet each of these three lectures will be complete
and comprehensible in itself.
When man looks at the
life around him, when he examines himself and tries to investigate
the meaning and significance of life, he finds before life's door a
remarkable figure in part a warning figure, in part a
completely enigmatic one: Suffering.
Suffering, so closely
bound up with what we shall consider in the next lectures on evil,
illness and death, seems to man sometimes to grip so deeply into life
as to be connected with its very greatest problems. Hence the problem
of suffering has occupied the human race since earliest times, and
whenever there is an endeavour to estimate the value of life and to
find its meaning, people have above all tried to recognize the role
played by suffering and pain.
In the midst of a happy
life suffering appears as a destroyer of peace, as a damper-down of
the pleasure and hope of life. Those who see the value of life in
pleasure and happiness are those who feel the most this
peace-destroyer, suffering. How else would it be explicable that in a
people so full of joy and happiness of life as the Greeks, such a
dark spot in the starry heavens of the beauty of Greece could arise
as the saying of the wise Silenus? Silenus in the train of Dionysos
asks: What is the best for man? The best for man is not to be born,
and if he is once born, then the second best is to die soon after
birth. Perhaps you know that Friedrich Nietzsche in seeking to grasp
the birth of tragedy out of the spirit of ancient Greece linked on to
this saying in order to show how, on the basis of Greek wisdom and
art, suffering and man's sadness over suffering and all connected
with it play a role full of significance.
But now we find
another, hardly much later, saying from ancient Greece. It is a short
phrase which shows how a glimmering arises that the pain and sorrow
of the world do not play merely an unhappy role. It is the expression
which we find in one of the earliest Greek tragedians, Aeschylos,
that out of suffering grows knowledge. Here are two things brought
together, one of which no doubt a great part of mankind would like to
blot out, whereas it looks on the other, knowledge, as one of the
highest possessions of life.
People at all times
have believed that they must recognise that life and suffering are
deeply entwined at least the life of modern man and of the
higher creatures on our globe. Thus at the beginning of the Biblical
story of Creation the knowledge of good and evil and suffering are
intimately bound up with one another. Yet we also see on the other
hand, in the midst of the Old Testament conception how, out of a
dark view of sorrow, a bright light-filled one dawns. When we look
around us in the Old Testament and study the Creation story in regard
to this question it is clear that suffering and sin were brought
together, that suffering was looked on as the consequence of sin. In
the modern mode of thinking, where the materialistic concept of the
world penetrates everywhere, it is no longer easy to grasp how the
cause of suffering can be sought for in sin. But through spiritual
research and the power to look back into earlier ages, it will be
found to be not so meaningless to believe in such a connection. The
next lecture will show us that it is possible to see a connection
between evil and suffering. But for ancient Jewry it was impossible
to explain the cause of suffering. We see in the centre of this view
that brings suffering and sin into connection the remarkable figure
of Job. It is a figure which shows us, or is meant to show us, how
suffering and unspeakable pain can be connected with a completely
guiltless life, how there can be unearned pain and suffering. We see
dawning in the consciousness of this unique tragic personality, Job,
yet another connection of pain and suffering, a connection with the
ennobling of man. Suffering appears to us then as a testing, as the
root of a climbing upwards, of a higher development. Suffering in the
sense of this Job-tragedy need in no way have its origin in evil, it
can itself be first cause, so that what proceeds from it represents a
more perfect phase of human life. All of that lies somewhat remote
from our modern thinking, and the generality of our modern educated
public can find but little connection with it. You need only think
back in your life, however, and you will see how perfection and
suffering very often appeared together and how mankind has always
been aware of this connection. Such a consciousness will form a
bridge to what we are to consider today in the light of spiritual
investigation, namely, the connection between suffering and
spirituality.
Remember
how in some tragedy the tragic hero has stood before your eyes. The
poet leads the hero again and again through suffering and conflicts
full of suffering until he comes to the point where pain reaches its
climax and finds relief in the end of the physical body. Then there
lives in the soul of the spectator not alone sympathy with the tragic
hero and sadness that such sufferings are possible, but it appears
that from the sight of suffering man was exalted and built up, that
he has seen the suffering submerged in death and that out of death
has come the assurance that victory exists over pain. Yes, even over
death. Through nothing in art can this highest victory of man, this
victory of his highest forces and impulses, victory of the noblest
impulses of his nature be brought so sublimely before the eyes as by
a tragedy. When the experience of pain and suffering has preceded the
consciousness of this victory, and, from the deeds that can again and
again take place before the eyes of the spectator in the theatre, we
look up to what is still felt by a great part of modern humanity as
the highest fact of all historical evolution; when we look up to the
Event which divides our chronology into two parts to the
Redemption through Christ Jesus then it can strike us that
one of the greatest upliftings, one of the greatest upbuildings and
hopes of victory which has ever taken root in the heart of man has
sprung from the world historic sight of suffering. The greatly
significant feelings, cutting deep into the human heart, of the
Christian world-conception, these feelings which for so many are the
hope and strength of life, give the assurance that there is an
eternity, a victory over death. All these supporting and uplifting
feelings spring from the sight of a universal suffering, a
suffering that befalls innocence, a suffering occasioned through no
personal sin.
So
we see here too that a highest element in the consciousness of
humanity is linked to suffering. And when we see how these things,
small and great, ever again rise to the surface, how they actually
form the elemental part of the whole of human nature and
consciousness, then it must indeed seem to us as if in some way
suffering is connected with the highest in man.
This
was only meant to point to a basic impulse of the human soul which
continually asserts itself and which stands as a great consolation
for the fact that there is suffering. If we now enter more intimately
into human life we shall find phenomena which show us the
significance of suffering. We shall have to point here
symptomatically to a phenomenon which perhaps seems hardly connected;
but, if we nevertheless examine human nature more closely, we shall
see that this phenomenon too points to the significance of certain
aspects of suffering.
Think
once more of a work of art, a tragedy. It can only arise if the
poet's soul opens wide, goes out of itself and learns to feel
another's pain, to lay the burden of a stranger's suffering upon his
own soul. And now compare this feeling not perhaps just with a comedy
for then we should get no good comparison but with
something which in a certain way also belongs to art, with the mood
which gives rise to caricature. This mood, perhaps with ridicule and
derision, draws in caricature what goes on in the soul of the other
and appears in external action. Let us try to put before us two men
of whom the one conceives an event or a human being tragically, while
the other grasps it as caricature. It is not a mere comparison, not a
mere picture when we say that the soul of the tragic poet and artist
appears as if it went out of itself and became wider and wider. What,
however, is revealed to the soul through this expansion? The
understanding of the other person. One understands the life of
another through nothing so much as by taking upon one's own soul the
burden of his pain. But what must one do if one wants to caricature?
One must not go into what the other feels, one must set oneself above
it, drive it away, and this driving from oneself is the basis of the
caricature. No-one will deny that just as through tragic compassion
the other personality becomes deeply comprehensible, what appears in
the caricature is what lives in the personality of the caricaturist.
We learn to know the superiority, the wit, the power of observation,
the phantasy of the one caricaturing rather than the one caricatured.
If we have shown in
some way that suffering is nevertheless connected with something deep
in human nature then we may hope that through a grasp of the actual
nature of man the origin of pain and suffering can also become clear
to us.
The spiritual science
which we represent here takes its starting point from the fact that
all existence has its origin in the Spirit. A more materialistic view
sees Spirit only as a crowning of perceptible creation, above all as
a fruit of physical nature from which it proceeds.
In the last two
lectures (11 and 25th October 1906. The former is not translated. The
latter is The Occult Significance of Blood.) it was
shown how in the light of spiritual research we have to picture the
whole man the physical or bodily, the man of soul and the
spiritual man. What we can see with our eyes, perceive externally
through the senses, what materialism considers the sole being of
nature, is to spiritual research nothing but the first member of the
human being the physical body. We know that in respect of its
substances and laws this is common to man with all the rest of the
lifeless world. But we know too that this physical body is called to
life through what we call the etheric or life-body. We know this
because for spiritual research the life-body is not a speculation but
a reality which can be seen when the higher senses slumbering in man
have become open. We look upon the second part of the human being,
the etheric body, as something which man has in common with the rest
of the plant world. We regard the astral body as the third member of
man's being; it is the bearer of sympathy and antipathy, of desire
and passion which man has in common with the animal. And then we see
that man's self-consciousness, the possibility of saying I
to oneself, is the crown of human nature, which man has in common
with no other being. We see that the I arises as the
blossoming of the three bodies, physical, etheric and astral. So we
see a connection of these four bodies to which spiritual research has
always pointed. The Pythagorean quadrature is
nothing else than the four-foldness, physical body, etheric body,
astral body and I or ego. Those who have occupied themselves more
deeply with spiritual science know that the I works out from itself
what we call Spirit-Self or Manas, Life-Spirit or Budhi, and the
actual Spirit-Man or Atma.
That
is once more put before you so that we may orientate ourselves in the
right way. Man therefore appears to the spiritual investigator as a
four-membered being. Now comes the point where genuine spiritual
research, which sees behind the beings with the eyes of the spirit
and penetrates to the deeper laws of existence, differs profoundly
from a purely external way of observing. It is true that as man
stands before us we say too that chemical and physical laws must be
the foundation of the body, of life, the foundation of sensation,
consciousness, self-consciousness. But when we penetrate existence
with spiritual science we see that things are just the reverse.
Consciousness, which arises out of the physical body, which in the
sense of phenomenon appears to be the last, is to us the original
creative element. At the base of all things we perceive the conscious
Spirit and therefore the spiritual researcher sees how senseless is
the question: Where does the Spirit come from? That can never
be the question. It is only possible to ask: Where does matter come
from? For spiritual research matter has sprung from Spirit, is
nothing but densified Spirit.
As a comparison,
picture a vessel with water in it. Think of one part of the water
being cooled down until it turns to ice. Now what is the ice? It is
water, water in another form, in a solid condition. This is the way
that spiritual research looks at matter. As water is related to ice
so is Spirit to matter. As ice is no more than a result of water, so
is matter nothing else than a result of Spirit, and as ice can become
water again, so can Spirit originate again out of matter, can proceed
from matter, or, reversed, matter can again dissolve into Spirit.
Thus we see Spirit in
an eternal circulation. We see the Spirit which flows through the
whole universe, we see material beings arise out of it, densifying,
and we see again on the other hand beings which cause the solid to
evaporate again. In all that surrounds us today as matter is
something into which Spirit has flowed and become rigid. In every
material being we see rigidified Spirit. As we need only bring the
necessary heat to the ice to turn it into water again, so we need
only bring the necessary Spirit to the beings around us to renew the
Spirit in them. We speak of a rebirth of the Spirit which has flowed
into matter and is hardened there. Thus does the astral body
the bearer of likes and dislikes, of desires and passions
appear to us not as something which could originate from physical
existence, but as the same element as lives in us as conscious
Spirit, as what appears to us as the element flowing through the
whole world and being dissolved again out of matter, through a
process of human life. What appears as last is at the same time the
first. It has produced the physical body and likewise the etheric
body, and when both have reached a certain degree of development
appears to be born out of them anew.
This
is how spiritual research looks at things. Now these three members
we only use words for clarifying appear to us under three
distinct names. We perceive matter in a certain form, appearing to us
in the outer world in a certain way. We speak of the Form, of the
shape of matter and of the Life which appears in the Form and lastly
of Consciousness which appears within the Life. So we speak as of
three stages: physical body, etheric body, astral body, and also of
three stages: Form, Life, Consciousness. Only from Consciousness does
Self-consciousness arise. We shall not occupy ourselves with that
today but only in our next lecture.
People
at all times and particularly in our own day have pondered much over
the actual meaning of life and its origin. Modern natural science has
been able to give few clues to the meaning and nature of life. One
thing, however, the more recent natural science has accepted for some
time, something which has been expounded again and again as a fact by
spiritual science also. This is namely: Life within the physical
world is fundamentally distinguished as to substance from the
so-called lifeless only through the manifoldness and complexity of
its formation. Life can be present only where a much more complicated
structure is found than exists in the realm of the lifeless. You
know, perhaps, that the basic substance of life is a kind of
albuminous substance for which the expression living albumen
would not be out of place. This living albumen differs essentially
from dead lifeless albumen through one characteristic. Living albumen
disintegrates directly it is forsaken by life. Dead albumen, that for
instance of a dead hen's-egg, cannot be kept for any length of time
in the same condition. It is the essential character of living
substance that the moment when life has left it, it can no longer
hold its parts together. Although we cannot go further into the
nature of life today, yet one phenomenon can point to something that
is deeply connected with life and characterises it. And what is this
characteristic? It is just this peculiarity of living substance
that it disintegrates when life has gone out of it. Think of a
substance denuded of life it decays, it has the peculiarity
of dispersing. What then does life do? It sets itself again and again
against disintegration; thus life preserves. That is the
youth-giving element of life: it ever resists what would take place
in its substance. Life in substance means: resistance to decay.
Compare with life the external process of death and it will be clear
that life does not show what characterises the process of death
the disintegration in itself. Far more does it ever and again rescue
substance from decay, sets itself against decay. Thus, inasmuch as
life ever renews the substance which is falling to pieces in itself,
it is the foundation of physical existence and of consciousness.
This has not merely
been a verbal explanation; it would have been one if what it
signifies were not continuously carried on. You need, however, only
observe a living substance and you will find that it continually
takes up matter from outside, incorporates it into itself, inasmuch
as portions of itself become destroyed: a process through which life
perpetually works against destruction. We have, in fact, to do with a
reality.
To throw off old
material and form new again that is life. But life is not yet
sensation, not yet consciousness. It is a childish kind of
imagination that makes many scientists have such a false idea of
sensation. To the plants to which we must ascribe life, they also
attribute sensation. If one says that because many plants close their
leaves and flowers on an external stimulation, as if they felt it,
then one could also say that blue litmus paper, which goes red
through outer stimulus, has sensation. We could also ascribe
sensation to chemical substances because they react to certain
influences. But that is not enough. To have sensation the stimulus
must be reflected inwardly. Only then can we speak of the first
element of consciousness, of sensation and feeling. And what is this
first element of consciousness? When in further investigation of the
world we raise ourselves to the next higher stage and try to
comprehend the nature of consciousness, we shall not do so
immediately, but shall nevertheless feel it dawn a little into the
soul, just as we could explain a little the nature of life.
Consciousness can arise only where there is life, can spring only
from life. If life arises out of apparently lifeless matter, since
the combination of the material is so complicated that it cannot
preserve itself and must be seized upon by life in order to prevent
continual decay, then consciousness appears to us within life as
something higher. Whenever life is continually destroyed as life,
where a being stands close to the threshold between life and death,
where life threatens all the time to vanish again from the living
substance, then consciousness arises. And as in the first place
substance would have disintegrated if life did not permeate it, so
now life seems to us to be dissipated if a new principle,
consciousness, is not added to it. We can grasp consciousness only by
saying: Just as life is there in order to renew certain processes,
for lack of which matter would decay, so is consciousness there to
renew again and again the life that would otherwise die.
Not every life can
always renew itself inwardly in this way. It must have reached a
higher stage, if it is to renew itself from itself. Only a life that
is so strong in itself that it perpetually bears death within can
awaken to consciousness. Or does no life exist which in every moment
has death in itself? You need only look at the life of man and
remember what was said in the last lecture: Blood is a very
special fluid. Human life renews itself continually out of the
blood, and a clever German psychologist has said that man has a
double (Doppelgänger) from whom he continually draws strength.
But the blood, has another power as well: it continually creates
death. When the blood has deposited the life-awakening substances on
the bodily organs, then it carries the life-destroying forces up
again to the heart and lungs. What flows back into the lungs is
poisonous to life and makes life continually perish.
When a being works
against disintegration and decay then it is a living being. If it is
able to let death arise within it and to transform this death
continually into life, then consciousness arises. Consciousness is
the strongest of all forces that we encounter. Consciousness, or
conscious spirit, is that force which out of death, which must be
created in the midst of life, eternally makes life arise again. Life
is a process which is concerned with an outer world and an inner
world. Consciousness, however, is a process which has to do only with
an inner world. A substance which can die externally cannot become
conscious. A substance can only become conscious that creates death
in its own centre and overcomes it. Thus death as a gifted
German theosophist has said is not only the root of life but
also the root of consciousness.
When we have grasped
this connection then we need only look at the phenomena with open
eyes and pain will appear comprehensible. All that gives rise to
consciousness is originally pain. When life manifests externally,
when life, air, warmth, cold encounter a living being then these
outer elements work upon it. But as long as they only work upon it,
as long as they are taken up by the living being, as they are taken
up by the plant as bearer of internal life-processes, so long does no
consciousness arise. Consciousness first arises when these outer
elements come into opposition with the inner life and a destruction
takes place. Consciousness must result from destruction of life.
Without partial death a ray of light is not able to penetrate a
living being, the process can never be stimulated in the living being
from with consciousness arises. But when light penetrates into the
surface of life, produces a partial destruction, breaks down the
inner substances and forces, then that mysterious process arises
which takes place everywhere in the external world in a quite
definite way. Picture to yourselves that the intelligent forces of
the world had ascended up to a height where outer light and outer air
were foreign to them. They remained in harmony with them only for a
time, then they came to completion and an opposition arose. If you
could follow this process with the eye of the spirit, then you could
see how when a ray of light penetrates a simple being, the skin
becomes somewhat transformed and a tiny eye appears. What is it
therefore that first glimmers there in the substance? In what does
this fine destruction (for it is destruction) manifest? In pain,
which is nothing else than an expression for the destruction.
Whenever life comes up against external nature destruction takes
place, and when it becomes greater even produces death. Out of pain
consciousness is born. The very process which has created your eye
would have been a destructive process if it had gained the upper hand
over the nature that had developed up to the human being. But it has
seized upon only a small part with which out of the destruction and
partial death it could create that mirroring of the external world
which we call consciousness. Consciousness within matter is thus born
out of suffering, out of pain.
When we realise this
connection of suffering and pain with the conscious spirit that
surrounds us, we shall well understand the words of a Christian
initiate who knew such things fundamentally and intuitively, and saw
pain at the basis of all conscious life. They are the words: In all
Nature sighs every creature in pain, full of earnest expectation to
attain the state of the child of God. You find that in the
eighth chapter of Paul's Epistle to the Romans as a wonderful
expression of this foundation of consciousness in pain. Thus one can
also understand how thoughtful men have ascribed to pain such an
all-important role. I should like to quote just one example. A great
German philosopher says that when one looks at all Nature around one,
then pain and suffering seem to be expressed everywhere on her
countenance. Yes, when one observes the higher animals they show to
those who look more deeply an expression full of suffering. And who
would not admit that many an animal physiognomy looks like the
manifestation of a deeply hidden pain?
If we look at the
matter as we have just described it then we see the origin of
consciousness out of pain, so that a being who builds consciousness
out of destruction causes a higher element to arise from the decay of
life, creates itself continuously out of death. If the living could
not suffer, never could consciousness arise. If there were no death
in the world never in the visible world could Spirit exist. That is
the strength of the Spirit that it remoulds destruction into
something still higher than life, and so in the midst of life forms a
higher state, consciousness. Ever further and further we see the
various experiences of pain develop to the organs of consciousness.
One sees it in the animals which for an external defence have only a
reflex consciousness, just as man shuts the eye as protection against
a danger to it. When the reflex movement is no longer enough to
protect the inner life, when the stimulus becomes too strong, then
the inner force of resistance rises up and gives birth to the senses,
sensation, eye and ear. You know perhaps from many a disagreeable
experience, or perhaps even instinctively, that this is so. You know
indeed out of a higher state of your consciousness that what has been
said is a truth. An example will make it still clearer. When do you
feel certain interior organs of your organism? You go through life
and do not feel your stomach or liver or lungs. You feel none of your
organs as long as they are sound. You feel them only when they give
you pain, and you really know that you have this or that organ only
when it hurts you, when you feel that something is out of order there
and that a destruction-process is beginning.
If we take this example
and explanation then we see that conscious life is continually born
from pain. If pain arises in life it gives birth to sensation and
consciousness. This giving birth, this bringing forth of a higher
element, is reflected again in consciousness as pleasure, and there
would never be a pleasure unless there had been a previous pain. In
the life below which just raises itself from physical material, there
is as yet no pleasure. But when pain has produced consciousness and
works further creatively as consciousness, then this creating is on a
higher level and is expressed in the feeling of pleasure. Creation is
based on desire and pleasure. Pleasure can only appear where inner or
outer creation is possible. In some way creation lies at the base of
every happiness, as every unhappiness is based on the necessity of
creation.
Take something that
expresses suffering on a lower level, the feeling of hunger, for
instance, which can destroy life. You meet this with nourishment, and
the food taken in becomes enjoyment because it is the means of
enhancing, producing life. So you see that higher creation, pleasure,
arises on the basis of pain. Thus before the pleasure there is
suffering. The philosophy of Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann can
therefore say with justification that suffering is a common feeling
of life. However, they do not go back far enough, to the origin of
suffering, do not come to the point where suffering is to evolve to
something higher. The origin of suffering is found where
consciousness arises out of life, where spirit is born out of life.
And therefore we can
also understand what dawns in man's soul of the connection of
suffering and pain with knowledge and consciousness, and we could
still show how a nobler, more perfect state is born out of pain.
Those who have heard my
lectures fairly often will remember the allusion to the existence of
a sort of initiation, whereby a higher consciousness enters and man
raises himself from a mere sense-perception to the observation of a
spiritual world. It was said that forces and faculties slumber in the
human soul which can be drawn out of it, just as the power of sight
can be produced through operation in someone born blind, so that a
new man arises to whom the whole world seems transformed to a higher
stage. As in the case of one born blind, so do things appear in a new
light to the spiritually born. Yet this can come about only if the
process which has just been described is recapitulated on a higher
level, when what is united in the average man becomes separate and a
kind of destruction-process enters the lower human nature. Then the
higher consciousness, the beholding of the spiritual world, can
enter.
There are three forces
in human nature: thinking, feeling and willing. These three depend on
the physical organisation of man. Certain acts of will appear after
certain thought and feeling processes have taken place. The human
organism must function in the right way if these three forces are to
harmonise. If certain transmissions are interrupted, certain parts
diseased, then no proper harmony exists between thinking, feeling and
willing. If the organs of will are crippled a man is unable to
transform his thoughts into will-impulses. He is weak as a man of
action; he can doubtless think, but cannot resolve to put thoughts
into reality. Another case is when a person is not in a position to
let his feelings be guided rightly through thoughts, to bring his
feelings into harmony with the thoughts behind them. Insanity is
fundamentally nothing else than this.
A harmony between
thinking, feeling and willing is to be found in the
normally-constituted man of today as against a sufferer. This is
right for certain stages of evolution, but it must be noted that this
harmony exists in present-day man unconsciously. If he is to be
initiated, however, if he is to see into the higher . worlds, then
these three members, thinking, feeling, willing, must be separated
from one another. The organs of will and feeling must suffer a
division, and therefore the physical organism of an initiate is
different from that of a non-initiate. Anatomy could not prove that,
but the contact between thinking, feeling and willing is interrupted.
The initiate would be able to see someone suffering deeply without
being stirred by any feeling, he could remain quite calm and merely
look on. Why is that so? In an initiate nothing must be inter-linked
unconsciously; he is a compassionate man out of freedom and not
because something external compels him to be. That is the difference
between an initiate and a non-initiate. Such a higher consciousness
creates, as it were, a higher substance and the human being falls
apart into a feeling-man, a will-man and a thought-man. Ruling over
these three there appears for the first time the higher, new-born
man, and from the level of a higher consciousness the three are
brought into accord. Here again must death, destruction, also
intervene. Should this destruction arise without at the same time a
new consciousness springing up, then insanity would appear. Insanity
would therefore be nothing else than the condition in which the human
entity was shattered without the creation of the higher, conscious
authority.
So here too there is a
double element: a kind of destroying process of the lower by the side
of a creating process of the higher. As poison is created in the
blood in the veins, and as in the normal man consciousness is created
between the red and the blue blood, so in the initiated man the
higher consciousness is created inwardly in the co-operation of life
and death. And the state of bliss arises from a higher pleasure,
creation, that proceeds from death.
This is what man
instinctively feels when he senses the mysterious connection between
pain and suffering and the highest that man can attain. Hence the
tragic poet, as his hero succumbs to suffering, lets this suffering
give rise to the feeling of the victory of life, the consciousness of
the victory of the eternal over the temporal. And so in the
destruction of the earthly nature of Christ Jesus in pain and
suffering, in anguish and misery, Christianity rightly sees the
victory of eternal life over the temporal and transitory. So too our
life becomes richer, more full of content, when we let it extend over
what lies outside our own self, when we can enter into the life that
is not our own.
Just as we create a
higher consciousness out of the pain stimulated through an external
ray of light and overcome by us as living being, so a creation in
compassion is born when we transform the sufferings of others in our
own greater consciousness-world. And so finally out of suffering
arises love. For what else is love than spreading one's consciousness
over other beings? When we deprive ourselves, give away, make
ourselves poorer to the extent that we give to the other being, when
we are able, just as the skin receives the ray of light and is able
out of the pain to form a higher being, an eye; when we are able
through the expansion of our life over other lives to absorb a higher
life, then love, compassion with all creatures, is born in us out of
that which we have given away to the other.
This also underlies the
expression of the Greek poet: Out of life grew learning; out of
learning, knowledge. Here again, as already mentioned in the previous
lecture, a knowledge based on the most recent research of natural
science touches the results of old spiritual investigation. The older
spiritual research has always said that the highest knowledge can
proceed solely from suffering. When we have a sick limb and it has
given us pain, then we know this limb best of all. In the same way we
know best of all what we have deposited in our own soul. Knowledge
flows from our suffering as its fruit.
The same too underlies
the Crucifixion of Christ Jesus which was soon followed, as
Christianity teaches, by the outpouring into the world of the Holy
Spirit. We now understand the coming forth of the Holy Spirit from
the Crucifixion of Christ Jesus as a process indicated in the parable
of the grain of corn. The new fruit must arise from destruction, and
so too the Holy Spirit, which poured itself out over the Apostles at
the Feast of Pentecost, is born from the destruction, the pain
endured on the Cross. That is clearly expressed in St. John's Gospel
(7.39) where it is said that the Spirit was not yet there, for the
Christ was not yet glorified. One who reads this Gospel more deeply
will see for himself that significant things emerge from it.
One
can hear many people say that they would have not missed pain, for it
had brought them knowledge. Everyone who has died could teach you
that what I have now said is true. Would people fight against the
destruction going on in them up to actual death if pain had not stood
continually beside them like a guardian of life? Pain makes us aware
that we have to take precautions against the destruction of life. Out
of pain we create new life. In the notes of a modern natural
scientist on the expression of the thinker, we read that on the
countenance of the thinker something lies like a repressed pain.
When there is the
enhancement which flows from knowledge attained through pain, when it
is therefore true that from suffering we learn, then it is not
without justification as we shall see in the next lecture
that the Biblical story of Creation brings the knowledge of good and
evil into connection with pain and suffering. And so it has always
been rightly emphasised by one who looks deeper how the origin of
purification, the lifting up of human nature, lies in pain. When the
spiritual-scientific world-conception with its great law of destiny,
karma, points from a man's present suffering to what he did wrongly
in earlier lives, then we understand such a connection only out of
man's deeper nature. What we brought about in the external world in
an earlier life is transformed from base forces into lofty ones. Sin
is like a poison which becomes remedy when it is changed into
substance of life. And so sin can contribute to the strengthening and
raising of man; in the story of Job pain and suffering are shown to
us as an enhancement of knowledge and of the Spirit.
This
is meant to be only a sketch which is to point to the connection
between earthly existence and pain and suffering. It is to show how
we can realise the meaning of suffering and pain when we see how they
harden, crystallize in physical things and organisms up to man, and
how through a dissolution of what has hardened, the Spirit can be
born in us again, when we see that the origin of suffering and pain
is in the Spirit. The Spirit gives us beauty, strength, wisdom, the
transformed picture of the original abode of pain. A brilliant man,
Fabre d'Olivet, made a right comparison when he wished to show how
the highest, noblest, purest in human nature arises out of pain. He
said that the arising of wisdom and beauty out of suffering is
comparable to a process in nature, to the birth of the valuable and
beautiful pearl. For the pearl is born from the sickness of the
oyster, from the destruction inside the pearl-oyster. As the beauty
of the pearl is born out of disease and suffering, so are knowledge,
noble human nature and purified human feeling born out of suffering
and pain.
So we may well say with
the old Greek poet, Aeschylos: Out of suffering arises learning; out
of learning, knowledge. And just as in respect of much else, we may
say of pain that we have grasped it I only when we know it not only
in itself but in what proceeds from it. As so many other things, pain
too is known only by its fruits.
|