I
The
Inner Experience of the Activity of Thinking
In my last lectures I have been dealing with the nature of
man's being in a way which I think our visitors who are giving
us the pleasure of attending the Teachers' Course here will
have had no difficulty in following. To link up with my last
lecture I will briefly recapitulate the main points.
In speaking about man's external observations and
sense-perceptions and about the way in which the
intellect, possibly assisted by experiments, is able to arrange
and co-ordinate them, I pointed out that in all these
functions it is, to begin with, only man's physical body
that is in active manifestation
This physical body is permeated by what may be called the
etheric body or the body of formative forces a finer
organisation of the human being, a Second Man within
man, so to speak. How can one have actual
perception of this Second Man? It must again and
again be emphasised that it is by no means so very difficult to
gain a true perception of this Second Man, a
perception as clear and authentic as anything perceived by the
senses or conceived by the reasoning intellect. One
thing however, is necessary, because in our own time man
does not live with such intensity
in the element of thought itself as he did
in earlier epochs of evolution, but adopts
a more passive attitude to thought and
is content to let impressions simply come to him from the world
of the senses. For this reason it is necessary to
strengthen thinking by means of
exercises. Of course man has thoughts today, but he can
hardly have real insight into the nature and activity of
thinking because by force of habit he allows the
external sense-impressions to stream into his thoughts
the moment he wakes from sleep, because he sets store
only by these external sense-impressions. True, this
fills his thoughts with a content derived from external
sense-perceptions but he does not actually feel or
experience his own activity of
thinking. Modern man can achieve this,
however, with the help of such exercises as I have
indicated, for instance, in my book,
“Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment.”
Such exercises require man as it were to throw himself with
the whole of his being into the activity of thinking, to give
himself up to this thinking with all inner intensity and, with
complete indifference to what the outer senses present to him,
to live consciously and exclusively in this activity of
thinking.
It can be of great assistance in these meditative
exercises if one has had some practice in mathematics,
especially in geometry. As regards the activity of thinking
that has to be applied in geometry, one need only take a
resolute plunge, as it were, into one's own inmost
being, to experience the nature of this thinking in its
independence, in its plasticity, in its inner weaving life, and
one has an experience of the activity of thinking when
drawing, say, a triangle.
Of course you can draw a triangle on the blackboard. But
is that a triangle, in reality? What you have on
the blackboard is not a triangle but a vast number of
tiny particles of chalk which stick to the board and could
actually be counted if one had a sufficiently powerful
microscope. That is no triangle! To think that the triangle is
there on the blackboard is nonsense. You can have the
triangle only in your mind, in the
thought you form with the aid of these
bits of chalk on the blackboard. But without the
use of chalk and blackboard, when simply sitting or standing
quietly without even moving a finger, when you have merely the
idea, the thought of the triangle fixed in your mind, then you
can picture to yourself — but always
only in your thoughts — how you begin to
draw a line here, then a second, then a third.
Then you can live in this inner
activity without doing anything
externally. You can do more and more
exercises of this kind, especially more complicated
ones. For instance (it is being drawn on the
blackboard): you have here a patch of red chalk
and here one of green chalk. I draw it once again, and now
you can, for instance, do
the following. — What you
have pictured before you in these two figures you are to do
inwardly; now, as previously you drew the triangle in your
mind, quickly imagine this: the red stretches over into the
green as far as this, and the green pushes
through beneath the red, so that this figure grows out of that,
and that out of this, entirely in thought. There you have the
red in the centre, the green around it. Now picture the red
expanding, the green contracting, and then you get a
green circle in the centre and surrounding it the red
wheel; then reversed: the red moves inwards, the green expands,
and you keep changing from one to the other in
rhythmic sequence, an inner circle, an
outer wheel: red, green; green, red; red, green; green,
red ... You picture this to yourself without it being
necessary to do anything outwardly. And you will
gradually become aware that to think means
doing something inwardly, just as one uses one's hands
or arms outwardly. When you use your arm,
you are aware of it. So now you must learn to be
aware of the forces of thought.
When aware of exercising your arms you experience
your physical body. When you begin to exercise
your thoughts in this way, you experience the Second Man
within you, your etheric body, your body of formative
forces. As soon as you have reached the
point where you need only give yourself a mental push in order
to transfer your awareness of arm-and-leg
movements to an awareness of your inner forces of thought, you
experience this Second Man within you, your etheric
body, your body of formative forces. But you
experience this Second Man as being
woven entirely of thoughts. And at
that moment the whole of your earthly
life spreads out before you as if present.
In a single panoramic survey, you behold your
earthly life right back to your
earliest childhood.
What is here experienced as the Second Man is
not a space-body, but a time-body.
And, as I have already said in the course of these lectures,
when drawing a sketch of the physical body, one can insert into
it a sketch of this time-body. But this represents only a
momentary phase, as if you were catching a
glimpse of a flash of lightning. This body of formative forces
does not live in space except for one fleeting moment. The next
moment it has already changed. It is always in a state of flux,
ever-changing. And this changing is experienced as the
life-tableau.
But simultaneously with this experience one feels oneself
part of the whole universe, one no longer feels enclosed within
one's skin, but one feels that one is actually in this
condition of flux within the universe. One is really only
a ripple in the etheric cosmos. — And one
experiences other aspects of this Second
Man.
One perceives that this Second Man is perpetually
trying to dissolve the physical substance of
the body into nothingness. In another
connection I said to some of you the other
day: physical matter, physical
substance presses;
the etheric forces suck,
draw out of space the content which fills it, suck
up everything. And throughout our
earthly life we live in this interplay of
forces. For our nourishment we take physical
matter into ourselves. Through the process of
nourishment this physical matter streams into
our body, setting in action all
kinds of processes in accordance with its
own nature. When we eat pickled cabbage
it enters our system, where its action is
conditioned by its own chemical and physical
properties. When we drink milk, its action
proceeds according to the nature of
milk. But very soon a stop is put
to this action of milk and cabbage.
The etheric body begins to assail
the
milk-and-cabbage-properties in
order to effect their extinction. So that
within our system a perpetual battle is in
progress between the action of the
cabbage-and-milk-properties on the one
hand, and, on the other, the
counter-action which aims at their extinction.
This battle takes place and its effect
becomes manifest in what man excretes and
in that which, as formative forces, as
man's super-sensible organisation, moves in
the direction of the
head. In exact proportion to the
amount of matter we excrete through the
various secretory organs, an equal amount
changes, in the other direction,
into negative matter, into negative substance which lives
as the principle of
suction in our nervous system, especially in
our brain.
Nobody can understand the human being by looking at the
physical body only, for then we see, merely from the
periphery, no more than part of the processes operating
within the human organism. A certain amount of knowledge is
gained about the processes working within the alimentary track
and about what is excreted through sweating and so
on. But for all excretion, that is to say,
all that is passing into the grossly material condition, there
is the other pole, representing what is drawn into the
nervous system as the etheric
element. For everything we excrete as
material substance, an etheric equivalent flows into us.
This etheric element whirls and surges and weaves
in our etheric body or body of formative forces which
permeates us in the way I have described.
And one also learns to know oneself as this Second
Man by observing how the power of memory, the ability to
remember, can change. In ordinary life we become aware
of external impressions. These continue inwards,
entering our thoughts, our mental pictures, and then come
to a standstill. We can
call them forth again, but the inner force by means of
which we recall them does not extend beyond the
nerve-endings.
Take for example, the eye.
What happens when we
perceive something outside is
that we push through the optic
nerve-endings which are spread out in the
eye right into the blood-circulation of the
eye. That is how perception is brought
about. When we only
remember, however, we penetrate
no further than where the optic
nerve comes to an end in the eye.
With our etheric body or body of
formative forces we do not reach through the
nerve-endings into the blood stream.
When we now intensify thinking, it is
not as if we merely experience the san з
rebound as in the ordinary functioning of
memory, when external perceptions are transformed
into mental pictures which are then held and thrust
back. If, as it were in reverse, we also perceive what is
etheric in the world, we thrust just as far into
our organism with this etheric thought-content of the
world as with our ordinary memory-pictures which,
however, are only reminiscences of life. And then
we develop a consciousness of the etheric working in
the cosmos; we live within the etheric
formative forces of the world.
How a man experiences himself when living
consciously within the weaving of the etheric cosmic forces
can be sketched in this way. (The drawing cannot
here be reproduced.) Here we have the play of the
etheric forces in their manifold manifestation. This
must be taken configuratively. Everything lives
and weaves within it. And then man experiences
himself in this etheric weaving. It makes
a strange picture, but that is how it is
and how it must be imagined.
The feet and legs are hardly noticeable. One has
the feeling that at one point, as it were, one is
growing out of this play of the etheric forces.
One experiences their action as far as one's
nerve-endings. It runs through the back and on to the
nerve-endings in the front of the body, and that is the
extreme limit to which the etheric world extends in
us. That is man's position in the present etheric
cosmos. The way in which one experiences the
etheric world when finding oneself edged, as it were, into some
extreme corner of the etheric cosmos is that it reaches
only with its fringe into one's organism,
where the etheric action then comes to a halt. In
short, that is the way in which one learns to live in
the etheric world.
And indeed this would by no means be so difficult an
achievement, if only nowadays people would take
the trouble to practise such mental activity as I
have described. The easiest way to become an adept in this
way of thinking is to absorb in the right manner and really
live through what is contained in my
“Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.”
There is, for instance, the section which deals with
this awareness of the activity of thinking in relation to the
ethical and moral principle in the world. What I
have described there is the same from the
qualitative aspect. And when one studies the
“Philosophy of Spiritual Activity”
in the right way, one
begins to understand what the nature of this life in the
Etheric, what this experience of the formative
forces, really is.
The
Inner Aspect of the Activity of Speaking
Our next experience after that of the activity of thinking,
can be awareness of the activity of speaking. And a
beginning can well be made with the activity of speech
in ordinary, everyday life. Only it is necessary to become as
well trained in governing speech as in governing thought.
Control of the latter must be achieved to the extent that the
senses are silent, that one lives only in active thinking, that
sense-impressions are eliminated. As regards
speech, it is necessary to reach the point of having a great
deal to say — for one must have a command
of words and not be inarticulate — but at the same time
to be able at will to check the impulse for a time and to
practise absolute silence.
I know that in the case of some people this is asking a
great deal; but in order to gain knowledge of the Third Man,
this is absolutely necessary. One must have a clear idea of
what it means to be eager to deliver a carefully-prepared
speech, to have the words on the tip of the
tongue, and yet to keep silent. That is
how one learns to practise active
silence. To practise passive silence
— as one might in an empty room (not an
airless room, of course, but with no other people present),
when there is nobody to speak to — to remain passively
silent is useless? one must learn to be
actively silent.
Now you can say: A dull fellow indeed, going
about practising silence in people's company, walking up to
them and, instead of talking to them, just
looking at them and remaining wrapped in silence.
Well, I admit, my dear friends, that socially this
would certainly be anything but pleasant; it could, however,
actually prove exceedingly fruitful for spiritual
advancement, and beneficial results could ensue if, for
instance, one attended a party at which people, including
oneself, were by no means silent as a rule, and if one now
began to practise silence. One says nothing although one knows
a great deal and, in giving freely of one's store of knowledge,
has formerly always been a great talker. I say that one could
do this, but one need not do it outwardly and, although it
could be fruitful, it would not be so very helpful when aiming
high; the idea is that the entire exercise, as I
have described it, is carried out inwardly, that one is
fully prepared to speak but has the ability to suppress the
impulse inwardly.
You will understand better what I mean when I tell you, for
instance, that in ordinary, everyday life one does not think in
the true sense of the word. One does think in the
field of mathematics if, for instance, one makes a mental
picture of a triangle in the way I have described. One does
some real thinking particularly when the mind is occupied with
unusual things of a kind for which the language has no
words. But when completely absorbed in the things
which nowadays make up the content of current popular interest,
one does not really do any actual thinking, for in this mental
process the organs of speech constantly co-vibrate, albeit so
quietly that one does not hear it. The mental
activity of modern man, who so dislikes thinking about anything
that is not to be found in the external world of the senses, is
not real thinking. The mind is merely weaving in
shadow-pictures of words..
You can test it yourself and you will find this weaving of
the soul in the shadow-pictures of words to be a fact.
When one can really bring the larynx inwardly into a
state of complete rest while still maintaining that inner
activity of the soul which normally animates the movements of
the larynx, so that the escape from the spoken word
remains an entirely inward exercise — if, in other
words, one does with the activity of speech what one has
previously done with the activity of thinking that is a
transformed faculty of memory (where one pushes only as far as
the nerve-endings, while now one exercises the activity of
speech only as far as the larynx, just to the point where the
latter is about to break into speech) — then gradually
there will develop what in recent lectures I have called
“the deep silence of the human soul,”
because checking and preventing speech inwardly means
developing the deep silence of the soul.
To get an idea of what this deep silence in the soul means,
imagine yourself in a town, not Basle, perhaps,
but in London or in a city even noisier still. You are right
within this noise and turmoil. Now you leave the
town and the noise gradually fades as you get further away.
Presently you find yourself in the stillness and
solitude of a wood. You say: All is quiet within and
without. There comes a point when the stillness reaches
the degree ‘nought.’ First the
noise, then it grows quieter, then absolute stillness at
point ‘nought.’
But now this can go further. And indeed this process of not only
experiencing the quietness of a silent outer world and the soul
at rest, but of passing into the deep silence, can be the direct
result of abstaining from the use of words while maintaining that
full inner activity which normally is bent on becoming vocal. One
merely refrains from making use of the physical body. (I have
described the various meditative exercises in my book
“Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment.”)
Then one realises that there is
something beyond the point ‘nought’ of stillness.
In public lectures I have made use of a commonplace
comparison. I said: Supposing someone with a certain
amount of capital spends some of it and reduces
his means; then continues to spend until finally there is
nothing left; he has reached point
‘nought.’ But he goes on spending and runs
into debt. Now he has less than nought; and so it
goes on. Here the mathematicians have
introduced the negative numbers: -6, -4, -2,
0, 2, 4, 6, 8, etc. In a similar way you can also imagine
how in the realm of sound the stillness at point
‘nought’ passes over into the negative, into a state
that is stiller than stillness, quieter than
quietness. You can establish the same conditions in the depths
of your soul.
But then, when the outer world is now not only
silent but has passed beyond mere silence, when the soul's
reaction extends beyond the stillness at point
‘nought’ into the negative sphere of all external sound,
then the spirit begins to speak out of the
depths of the soul's stillness and we become
aware of our Third Man, the astral man, as we say.
Expressions do not matter, they are terminology; another
name could serve as well.
Of this Third, astral Man, we become
aware when we reach the deep silence of the soul, and from out
of this profound silence the Spiritual sounds forth, a
sounding which is the opposite of physical
sound.
This astral body, as you will see, takes us in every respect
further than the etheric body alone could have
done. To make this clear, let me deal with it from a
cosmic point of view.
What is the modern physicist or
astronomer, in fact the modern scientist, trying to do?
He studies the laws of nature. Through observation or
experiment he establishes them. These laws of nature
constitute his science. They present him with
what is inherent in things. With that he ought to
rest content. But instead, he begins to be proud of his laws of
nature, he begins to be arrogant. And he now
asserts what he cannot by any means substantiate, that these
laws apply to the whole of the universe. He says:
Discoveries I make in my laboratory on the earth
would, if tested under similar conditions, prove
equally valid on the most distant stars of the universe, stars
from which the light takes so many light-years to reach the
earth — people pretend that these things make sense
— so that, given similar conditions the same laws of
nature must prevail there, because their validity is
absolute.
Yes, but it is not like that. At its source the light
shines brightly into its immediate surroundings; further
away from the source its strength
decreases and the further we go the weaker it becomes, it grows
faint. The power of light diminishes at a ratio equal to the
square of the distance. So it is with light. And
curiously enough, so it is also on earth with the laws of
nature.
The validity of what you establish on the earth as laws of
nature becomes less and less the further you get away from the
earth. To be sure it seems dreadful to say such a
thing, and in the eyes of a staunch student of natural science
anyone with such ideas must necessarily appear as the perfect
idiot. That one can well understand, because when
this happens, and one looks at it from the modern scientist's
point of view, one can very easily put oneself in his
place. Only the reverse does not happen: the
modern scientist cannot put himself in the place of the
spiritual investigator. The latter knows perfectly well how the
student of natural science arrives at his facts. Such
understanding is lacking when the case is reversed. Therefore
most criticisms levelled at spiritual science from that quarter
are, from their point of view, quite justified.
But they merely show that the student of natural science cannot
honestly find any real meaning in what the spiritual
investigator has to say. That one must grant him, because it is
a fact. It is simply beyond him. He must himself become a
spiritual investigator before one can enter into
polemics with him. For that reason the futility
of polemics with a man who, firmly entrenched in natural
science, has no mind for the findings of spiritual science, is
obvious.
Well, with what has been said about the
light, the student of natural science will agree,
as he has discovered it himself, but as far as the laws of
nature are concerned, he will disagree. However, with regard to
light, the spiritual investigator must make a
reservation. Natural science says: As the light
radiates, its strength diminishes with
distance, until at last it fades to the
extent that its strength is identical with
the degree ‘nought.’ But such a
statement is just as clever as if someone were to say: Here I
have an elastic rubber ball; now I press it. Naturally the ball
tends to bulge out on the other side. The elasticity pushes the
surface this way and that way. Now someone says:
That cannot be; if I press elastic substance the process must
go on and on, only it becomes so weak at last
that it is no longer perceptible. — It is,
however, not like that: elasticity rebounds.
And this also applies to the light. The light
does not radiate in a way that one could say: Far out there it
is so weak that it will soon approach the point of
darkness, yet it continues to spread further and
further. That is not true. Its radiation extends only to
a certain point, to the periphery of a given sphere; then
it rebounds. And as it comes back it is visible only to the
spiritual investigator, not to the natural scientist. Because
when the radiation of light has exhausted its elasticity and
rebounds, it returns as spirit, as the
super-sensible. Then the natural scientist
cannot perceive it. There is no light that
shines and does not come to a certain boundary from which it is
thrown back to return as
spirit.
What I am now telling you about the light applies
equally to the laws of nature. The
validity of these laws diminishes the further you get away into
space. But this continues only as far as the
outer shell of a given sphere; thus everything comes
back. The laws of nature, however, then
return as thoughts that are wisdom-inwoven. And
that is the cosmic ether.
The cosmic ether does not radiate in an outward direction
with regard to the earth, it radiates with a centripetal
movement from all sides. But what lives in all these
incoming forces that radiate to the earth
are creative, wisdom-filled
thoughts. The cosmic ether is at the same time a
thought-world of formative forces.
There is, however, a difference: When here on
earth I form the kind of thoughts which lead to the laws of
nature, such thoughts are, figuratively speaking, neatly
aligned, so that one can say: there exists a certain
constancy of matter, a constancy of energy. We
have exponents of the law of light, and so on.
The formulations of what lives in matter are made by means of
thoughts.
But when the thoughts come back, when one experiences how
they live in the cosmic ether, they are not thoughts born of
logic, not thoughts with such sharply defined outlines; they
are experienced as pictorial thoughts, pictures,
Imaginations.
When such questions arise one meets with strange
things in modern cultural life. To some of you present here
I said a few days ago: During the last
40 to 50 years, theories without number or, if you like,
hypotheses, have been advanced about the cosmic
ether. Some have conceived it as a rigid body,
some as a liquid body, others as cosmic gas, as something in a
state of whirling motion or the like, and so on. But what is
happening when such hypotheses are advanced? They are simply
the logical outcome of a mental approach that clings to the
kind of thinking that has become habitual in dealing with the
visible beings and processes of nature. But what comes back to
us from the cosmos has long since become incapable of being
grasped within the framework of thoughts in which the laws of
nature are formulated. What is coming back
can be apprehended only when one begins to think in pictures,
to think imaginatively.
One could say: the validity of all that is contained
in and governs the formulation of the laws of nature diminishes
at the ratio of the square of the distance measured up to the
periphery of a given sphere. There the laws of nature have
altogether ceased to exist as such. They have become fused,
they blend, to return, now, as pictures; they come back in
figurations, in images.
And now, when one has achieved the stage of vision I have
described, one perceives the world etherically, that is to say,
in the form of pictures, and one has to acknowledge that now,
while living in the etheric realm one does not only see nothing
of one's physical body, but also one's power of thought that is
employed in the ordinary world has ebbed away.. Instead, it is
as if the universe were radiating back
pictures, Imaginations, from all
directions. So that in order to understand
the ether, one begins to change ordinary thinking into thinking
that is plastic, pictorial. It follows then, as a matter of
course, that the ether could never be understood by means of
any of these misconceived hypotheses. For at the
boundaries of etheric radiation, all those calculations and
theories concerned with physical phenomena in nature
have lost their meaning. At that point the
outstreaming has ceased and we have
incoming radiation which no longer responds to
the range of thought that depends on the ordinary
consciousness, but demands a fundamentally
artistic approach, inspired by thoughts
springing from the realm of art, from the realm of art
in the earthly sense.
What I have to tell you now will sound paradoxical,
but it is the simple truth for one who sees the world in its
true light. Supposing I carve a figure in wood, mould it into
the shape of a human being and really succeed in creating a
good likeness of the outward appearance of a man. But there is
one thing a sculptor cannot do, namely, to let the space
be ‘sucked out.’ All I can do as a
sculptor is to master the physical material. If I were also
able to make the laws governing the cosmic ether operate within
the space occupied by my wooden figure, that is to
say. if that deep silence were to reign
externally, if the negative stillness, not only the stillness
at point ‘nought,’ were to take possession,
leaving not only space but something space-less, then my
wooden sculpture would not, it is true, become a human
being, but something like a plant. The
wooden figure remains a sculpture only, as it has only physical
properties and is merely a replica of an external form, because
space-suction, which should really be the supplementary element
in the form, does not also come into operation. As it is, that
cannot happen, otherwise my wooden sculpture would be a growing
organism.
You must realise that with ordinary artistic thinking, with
ordinary artistic feeling, you cannot reach the
etheric world because, to do so, one has not only to project
mental images into space, but one must really lay hold
of space, so that the ether empties
it. Then one experiences
life, the living, in this sucked-out
space, or rather in the process of this
suction. Thus a very different kind of thinking is needed to
reach these higher worlds. —
And when one has also had the other
experience I described as the deep silence
of the soul, then something else happens.
One experiences how, coming out of
cosmic space, etheric forms approach one,
and in these forms one feels the
presence of sentient, spiritual being. Not only
etheric formations but actual spiritual beings of the so-called
higher Hierarchies approach one. One lives
as spirit among spirits; one experiences
a real spiritual world. It
approaches with the inflow of this
back-streaming radiation. Wherever the
etheric forms approach us the
spiritual world is revealed. The physical
has departed and returns in etheric
forms. But now, together with
these returning etheric forms,
spiritual beings can
approach us. Only, if you were to ask yourselves:
Where do they come from?
— the ‘where’ has
no longer any spatial meaning. Their
relation to space is that, converging from the
periphery of the universe, they are coming in from
all sides of the universe, because they
let themselves be borne in on the cosmic
ether. The cosmic ether gives them a spatial
‘where,’ but this ‘where’ connotes a gravitating
from without.
These two ‘substantialities’ which I discover
in this way in the world, the one which, working in the
formative forces, approaches me in etheric forms and suffuses
me, and the other, which lives and has its
being in the spiritual world — these two substantialities
the human being acquires as he descends from his
pre-earthly to his earthly life,
filling his whole being with a content held together by
a part of the infinite world of formative forces
— infinite only in a relative sense, namely,
only as far as the boundaries of the universe; and itself
filled with the astral body, with what is borne in on
the ether and has a ‘where’ only through the ether.
We bear within us the physical body consisting of
physical ingredients of the earth; we bear within us the
etheric body which we receive from out of
cosmic space; and within the etheric
body we bear the astral body which
is spirit from cosmic spirit. We confine within
the limits of our own being what appears without contour and
without limit in the universe.
And when we now proceed to do still more advanced
exercises in which we do not only reach the deep
silence of the soul but, penetrating this deep silence, we
awake in the activity of our own will, as we normally
awake only in the activity of thinking and conceiving, then we
experience our fourth member, our ‘I.’ — About this experience
of the ‘I’ it is my intention to speak to you to-morrow.
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