II
The
Physical World and the Moral-Spiritual Impulses
When I last spoke to you, it was to show how, besides
the physical body, man has an etheric and an astral body. And
it was further pointed out how the etheric body, or the body of
formative forces can be experienced when a man becomes aware of
the inner life of thinking.
Man can have this experience if he becomes conscious of this
inner life of thought. When he becomes so
vividly conscious of this that he can live in this
activity of thinking even when it is free from
impressions arising out of external sense-perceptions and
is not engaged in co-ordinating those perceptions but is free
from all outside influences — when he rises by sheer
inner strength to full awareness of a weaving, surging life of
thought in himself, then this body of formative forces can be
experienced.
This experience of thinking is at the same time
experience of the etheric world. And I have already
explained how, by rousing oneself inwardly and achieving this
kind of thinking — which is by no means so difficult
— one feels oneself living in one's Second Man and
experiencing this Second Man as a kind of time-body, as
something not at rest in a confined space like the
physical body, but always in a state of flux and movement,
something that can be observed in space only for a fleeting
moment and even then hardly in defined outline. But this
time-body reveals itself to human experience as the
life-tableau which places before the eye of soul the entire
course of earthly life hitherto in one comprehensive
vision.
It is in fact a spiritual experience for the human soul when
through this inner awareness of thinking a man enters into the
etheric life of the universe. In this imaginative weaving and
quickened life of the soul, which becomes experience of
the etheric, one does not feel that shadowy, inner dimness
which characterises the ordinary, dreamlike consciousness
of the soul. Nor does one feel so separated from the world as
one does in the physical body, isolated within
the skin. One feels the outer world streaming into one,
and one's own being streaming out into the world. One
feels a member of the whole etheric universe, caught up in a
world of movement. At the same time, however, all this is
a rather disquieting experience, as of something unreal.
Whereas in his physical body man is accustomed to feel
himself standing firmly on the earth, in this etheric
experience he feels a certain insecurity in regard to his own
existence. He has the feeling of being lifted out of the
physical world while riot yet firmly established
in the spiritual world.
But that sense of being firmly rooted in the spiritual world
is experienced when by earnest striving man attains what I have
called the “deep silence of the soul.”
As regards the force which normally serves him as modified
breathing-power, man must learn not to spend this power
in the breathing-process for forming words of vocal
speech but, as indicated in
“Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment,”
to hold back what wants to
pour itself into words. At the same time, however, he must
strive inwardly to maintain that activity which otherwise finds
its outlet in the spoken word. This is how he must achieve the
inner silence. And when the soul does not stop at point
‘nought’ of this silence, but descends still more
deeply into the negative region of silence, to the level below
experienced silence, when by the strength of the spirit
we hold in check the forces which want to press on into our
breathing and our speech, and when at the same time we inwardly
foster the impulse to speak but hold back the words before they
take possession of the larynx — to put
it differently, if we practise silence while developing the
inner potentiality of speech — then we not only gain an
inner stillness but the deep silence of the soul. In its
relationship to speech, to the spoken word Which
sounds in the outer, physical world, this deep silence
corresponds not merely to the degree of
‘nought,’ but to the negative potency.
Then out of this deep silence there sounds
what the spiritual world has to say to us, what
— to use an ancient word — the
Logos wants to reveal from out [of] the universe.
Then we no longer speak, but
have become the instrument through which the Logos
speaks. And then we become aware of
our own astral body within us and of the astral
world of which I have spoken.
This astral world is very different from the
world which ordinary consciousness experiences through
the senses and the reasoning intellect.
In this world of the senses and reasoning intellect
we perceive in ordinary consciousness the material
objects and processes in their gross density,
filling space, and — to use a
popular if not quite accurate figure of speech —
pressing in upon our senses, so that we may
have sense-perception. While on the one
side our senses and the reasonings of our intellect present to
us the objects and processes of the external world in
their gross substantiality, we have on the other side what are
called the unreal thoughts and unreal feelings, those thoughts
and feelings about which, as regards their relationship to
reality, philosophers have argued through the
ages. Whenever thoughts and feelings
alone rise up in the soul, a man who
depends entirely upon his ordinary consciousness has the
desire to stretch out his hands, as it were, to
take hold of something substantial in the material world,
to make sure of the reality of
existence.
Thus on the other side of existence, in our thoughts and
feelings, we lead a life which is not immediately
felt as real; yet out of these thoughts and emotions emerges
man's moral world, the world of moral impulses.
To regard the world like this, in its duality — on the
one hand all that is grossly material and concrete and, to
begin with, represents reality, and on the other, the less real
thoughts and feelings which contain the moral impulses —
this has something depressing about it for one who, confronted
by science's assertion of the conservation of matter and
energy, finds a kind of eternity being attributed to what is
externally real, while that which arises out of thoughts and
feelings as the moral World-Order appears to be
doomed to perish in a vast graveyard of material existence
— a conception to which the hypothetical conclusions
drawn from the phenomena of nature must inescapably lead. Thus
ordinary consciousness is faced with this duality: on the one
hand the material world, on the other the
moral-spiritual world, and man lives in this world, or
rather in both the worlds which have so little to do
with one another. With one side of his being man is
given over to the material world in which the nutritive
processes operate and in which, from these processes, his
desires rise up where his senses receive impressions and his
intellect co-ordinates these impressions.
He is conscious of belonging to this material world, but he
is also conscious of the fact that his dignity as a human being
can only be maintained if the moral-spiritual impulses which
flow from the thoughts and feelings, whose reality is in
dispute, have real meaning for him. And in his
ordinary consciousness man here finds himself faced with the
problem of imbuing his physical body, through which he is
membered into the physical world, with qualities which for him
must contain the element of unreality. In external nature he
can discover nothing that is governed by the principle of
moral-spiritual impulses. There he sees the
stones subject to inexorable laws, containing
nothing of moral-spiritual impulses. He
observes the plants in their gentle tranquillity,
how in unfolding their blossoms they respond to the neutral
light and warmth of the sun, and here again he can find no
trace of moral impulses entering into the sun's warmth and
light as they awaken the plants to life.
And finally, looking at the third kingdom of nature, the
animal world with which, in respect of his physical
organisation, man himself has so much in
common, he must admit that in the animal the moral functions
have developed forms to which the designation ‘moral’ cannot be
applied. The beast of prey is cruel but this
cruelty cannot be judged by moral standards, because the animal
has descended below the level on which the moral
impulses could with any justification be regarded as a
moral-spiritual Impulse. And then man may well look at his own
physical-material nature and find that with part of his being
he too has followed the descent.
Nevertheless, what is demanded of man, if his dignity as a
human being is to be fully maintained, is that he
himself must Implant the moral impulses into this sunken part
of his being. It is beyond ordinary consciousness to conceive a
harmonious concord, a spontaneous merging of the
physical-material impulses, and the spiritual-moral impulses.
Here spirit and matter fall asunder. And man, contemplating the
course of earthly life before him up to the time of his death,
feels that as long as he lives, his own being
will be involved in this conflict where, on the one side his
physical-material organisation calls for the introduction
of the moral-spiritual impulses, while on the other side,
nature shows him that nowhere in the laws of nature as such can
moral-spiritual impulses take effect. Until the time of his
death man finds himself in this dual position.
But then, when out of the deep silence of his soul, as I
have described it, man's astral body and the world to which he
belongs through his astral body begin to sound, there emerges
from the depths of his soul a world the experience of which his
ordinary consciousness denies him, but for which that same
consciousness makes him long for when he feels the
duality of the physical-material and the spiritual-moral. Then
he p3rcelves a world which is not unreal, a world
which he experiences as being quite as real as the dense,
material, concrete world of the senses, yet a world which,
wherever its processes are in operation, lets the
moral-spiritual impulses flow into the physical-material
impulses. Here, on a higher level, man beholds a world which,
compared with this earthly world, functions
as if in the latter moral impulses
were to enter into its binding and dissolving
chemical processes.
Man looks into a world in which there is no such thing as
hydrogen and oxygen combining in accordance with neutral laws
of nature bat in which hydrogen and oxygen
combine by following moral impulses. Nothing ha opens there
that has not at the same time a moral-spiritual meaning. But
now man realises that yonder world, in which the enhanced
material element and the now powerfully creative
moral-spiritual element interpenetrates, is the world
which he will enter when he has passed through the gate of
death; that it is the world from which he descended into
the physical world, from his pre-earthly into his
earthly life. It becomes clear to him that it is only this
earthly physical world, the world of dualism, of opposites, in
which nature and spirit face each other as if separated by an
abyss, so that neither can reach the other. But
what man also learns to understand is that he had to be placed
into this physical world in order that he may experience how in
this earthly physical world the spirit cannot really touch
matter and that he himself, the earthly man, is
the only being in the physical, earthly world who, of his own
free will and acting on his own inmost, individual
impulses, can establish this connection between
spirit and matter.
If, under objective laws, anywhere in this
physical world a moral-spiritual impulse could enter into a
chemical process, into plant-growth or into sentient
animal life, then it would have become impossible for man, as a
combination of all that is in the cosmos, ever to
gain his inner freedom and the ability to unite of his
own free will the spiritual with the
material.
In man's earthly life, however, there are two states
of consciousness: there is the waking state from the time of
awaking until falling asleep, and the sleeping state from the
time of falling asleep until waking.
During his waking hours man lives entirely in the
world where spirit and matter are complete opposites,
where spirit cannot touch matter and permeate it, and
matter is powerless to raise its processes to the spiritual.
But when man has penetrated into that world
of which I said that it sounds out of the soul's
deep silence, then he perceives that activity which he pursues
during sleep, the activity of his astral
body. And then he knows that every time he falls
asleep he leaves behind the life which belongs to the earth and
returns to it on waking, that during the time
when sleep interrupts his waking life he lives in
that world in which he can begin to prepare for the union of
spirit and matter. But in all that
is woven during sleep between birth and death in a fine
etheric-astral element, so that on waking it
enters again into the duality between
spirit and matter as that which man
experiences and weaves during all the periods of
his life passed during sleep between birth and
death — in all this there lives what
man carries with his being through the gate of
death into yonder world where the possibility of
matter being powerless to lift its processes to
spirituality, or of the spirit being precluded from reaching
matter does not arise. With all that he
has woven during his sleep, man now enters that
world in which the functions of everything akin to matter rise
to a spiritual level, while the spirit continually
manifests in matter. And man perceives that the duality
between spirit and matter exists only in that
world in which he lives episodically between birth and
death. Furthermore he knows that here he enters
an entirely different world which, between falling asleep and
waking, appears to him only as a reflection in a mirror, as
Fata Morgana, where he prepares himself
for the reality of that world.
But when he has passed through the gate of death he actually
enters that world and there continues with the weaving of the
pattern traced by the life he led between
birth and death. But now ha weaves in such a way that he
has not, on the one side, spirit free of matter, destined at
some time to disappear in respect of its spiritual-moral
impulses, for instance when the earth reaches the state of
entropy (Wärmetod). He
enters a world where that which between falling asleep
and waking had appeared to him in
images, as it were, in a Fata Morgana
of soul-and-spirit, is now part of a real world, in
which there is no duality between spirit and
matter, in which spiritual substantiality
perpetually penetrates the substantiality that
has a resemblance to the material; where the laws of nature
do net operate by themselves but merely form the
lowest grade of the spiritual laws; where there are
not mere abstract laws of the spirit-realm, but
where the processes and laws of the lower spiritual grades
already play into the processes — which are like material
processes — operating at that level. Into this
world man enters, to start on his way along the path
between death and a future birth.
In this world man finds his way when he listens to what
sounds from the depths of the soul's deep silence and
apprehends what the spirit, the universal
but individualised Logos speaks to him, not in a
physically audible language, but in a language
that is not only inaudible but even less than inaudible and,
for that very reason, spiritually
apprehensible. Thus man advances as he gains
the inner word which does not become the external spoken word
and yet inwardly applies the power which
otherwise manifests itself only through the process of
breathing, in the spoken word. — Thus man
gradually develops his perceptive faculty for that world from
which he descended, a spiritual world so intensely real as to
leave not the slightest doubt that it is the world from which
he descended to his physical, earthly existence and to which he
will ascend again when he passes through the gate of
death. In that world, all the spiritual forces
are as simultaneously active as are the material
processes on the earth. Everything material
is here so far elevated as to prevent grossness
and density from offering resistance to the
moral-spiritual impulses.
To find one's way into the etheric-imaginative
world, one has to get behind the ordinary ways of thinking,
the abstract, dead thinking, as it were, to the inner, living
thinking. If one is to enter into the world of the deep
silence where everything akin to matter becomes
spiritual and all spiritual life becomes creative in matter, it
is necessary not only to develop the faculty of living thinking
behind the ordinary dead thinking, but to be
able to pass behind the faculty of audible speech to the
apprehension of the faculty of inaudible speech
beyond, which is not audible sound but deep
silence, from which no audible words resound. It
is here that through the medium of profoundest silence the
Logos speaks. But if one wants to advance still
further, it is not enough to rise from living thinking which,
comparatively speaking, is only a process of forming images, to
that which weaves and flows through the world but in its
weaving and flowing speaks out of the deep silence, so that one
feels caught up in the stream of this weaving world of flowing
harmonies with one's Third Man — to progress even
further one must lift oneself to yet another
inner process.
In living thinking one is active in the
Etheric. At the second stage we live in a
process not initiated by us but illumined by the Logos, a
process which otherwise manifests only in the physical air
through the spoken word. At the
third stage one must become aware of a process
which corresponds to what in the physical life of the earth is
a process of destruction. What is needed
to reach the third stage is not only intensified
thinking and an intensified faculty of speech projected
into the stillness, but an inwardness of purpose in
our activities as human beings on the earth. Only
one must bear in mind that ‘activity’ is not to
be understood as applying merely to
external physical action. We are also active when
occupied only mentally in thoughts, for there too the will
operates.
Every motive by which man rouses himself to activity, be it
an inner or external process, finds its outlet in
action and not in mere passive endurance. But
every time action takes place, even if only in thinking that
contains the initiative for action,
a physical process takes place. Just as physical
thinking gives rise to a process in the brain,
and physical speech a modified breathing-process, so in the
action prompted by the initiative of the will-forces we have to
do with an inner process, a process which can be likened to
that destruction of material substances which we observe in all
processes of combustion.
When we observe how a flame destroys the substance of
a candle, we see — I need not here deal with any specific
chemical aspect but I only wish to show
what the senses can and must observe as a physical
occurrence — we see how, irrespective of any
metamorphosis end disappearance into something
less visible, the flame, the process of
combustion, destroys the constituent parts of the
material.
Such processes as that in which the flame consumes the
candle-substance occur wherever initiatives of will are astir
within us. In his ordinary consciousness
man ‘sleeps through’ these obscure
processes of the will, as it were; they remain below the range
of his cognition. He does not know what happens between the
intention of lifting a hand and the actual movement of the
hand. He does not know how the intention, which
lives in his thoughts, shoots into his muscles and then effects
the lifting of the hand. It is only the actual movement
of the hand which the eye then sees. What lies
between is a process similar to that of combustion.
Within the human organism we are, however,
incapable of such observations, whereas on a higher
spiritual level we discern this process of
combustion, which is the material process for the unfolding of
the human will. When we
follow this process of combustion we can find no
indication that only matter is being changed,
what happens is the elimination of the processes
which go out from the ordinary nutritive functions in the human
body. All those physical processes which are
similar to combustion and form the
basis for the unfolding of the will, take place between the
continuing action of the nutritive functions and blood
formation.
There, where we see the blood forming, we gain
an insight into these combustion-like processes. But within
these processes we also find the surging will-forces in
action. We witness a receding
material process. To use a popular phrase, we see matter
disappearing. But here we can become aware of
something similar to what we
experience in meditation, when we pass from
thinking that is externally stimulated to inwardly quickened
thinking; then, in this inwardly quickened thinking, we
have something of which we become aware entirely through our
own activity. — In the deep silence of the soul we have
something which lies behind our physical
breathing-process and which, coming out of the negative
from the opposite direction, sounds forth
from the spiritual World-Soul as the voice of the
Logos sounding out of the silence.
But we also gain an insight into those processes which work
as combustion in our organism when we can discern what
lies behind them, when in the destructive processes, in
the generating of combustion in our organism we can behold the
cosmic Will at work; as the power of the Logos
stands behind the breathing engendered by the externally
audible spoken word, so the creative power of the cosmic
Will holds sway behind the forces of combustion ever
active in our organism. As we apprehend what
spiritually underlies the modified breathing as
it develops from the larynx into the spoken word, as we
apprehend that voice of the spirit which rises out of the deep
silence from the opposite direction to that of spoken
words, but has to be arrested
before it reaches the larynx — as we have this
spiritual experience which brings us into the presence of the
silent but all the more distinctive voice of the
World-Logos — so in all the combustion-like
processes which we can observe within our organism, we
discern the cosmic Will as it flows
and weaves within them, and in which we ourselves participate
— not unthinking will as imagined by Schopenhauer, but a
will quickened and permeated by the
spirit.
Now we feel a Fourth Man within
us. Wherever in our physical organism combustion and the
destructive processes take place, we feel
creative processes.
We experience ourselves within the creative
world and in this creative world we become aware of all that is
creative in ourselves.
And whereas previously through our Third Man, the astral
man, we perceived a world in which there is no distinction
between matter and spirit, so now we find
a world in which the spirit not only lives in all processes
and functions, but is the creative force in a
world where nothing in the nature of material substance exists
that is not formed out of the realm of the spirit.
And likewise do we so experience the creative
forces at work in us that within their sphere there is
nothing akin to matter that is not their
creation. And as we have already become
aware of a world without the duality of spirit and
matter, so we now learn to know a world in which the
moral-spiritual impulses themselves are the
only reality. As we look into this
world, a drop of which is working individually in ourselves,
and as in our Fourth Man we are given our share in this
world to which we have ascended, we recognise in this Fourth
Man a creative principle within us, but a creative principle of
which we must say: it is something that does not exist anywhere
in the surrounding world of nature, where the spirit does not
reach matter, nor is it, to begin with, to be
found anywhere in the world which appears to us
within our own astral body. But it does become active
wherever something higher, something in the nature of
being enters this astral world.
Just as man as a physical being moves in the physically
penetrable air, so we experience life in the astral, a
spiritual atmosphere of soul-life, where spiritual beings move
about as we, as physical human beings, move in the physical
atmosphere of the air. We now become aware
not only of the voice of the Logos resounding through
the astral world, but we now behold
spiritual beings, moving and weaving in this astral
world.
And there we learn to recognise our own being, which
cannot now be here, but which, having
passed through the etheric world in pre-earthly
existence, lived in a former life on earth. Now we perceive
how the destroying combustion-process is connected with the
moral impulses emanating from our last or several previous
lives on earth, how there lives in us this Fourth Man who at
the same time is the creator of our destiny. Behind the
seething combustion in our body we discover the creative power
of the content of our previous life on earth, which has now
been able to rise to this region where, as creative force, it
counteracts the destructive force of combustion. It can
do so because it is not of the nature of present existence but
of life on earth long past, which has divested itself of all
that is connected with the duality of spirit and matter and
having passed through the spiritual world, has there assumed
its spiritually creative character. And we
discover in the impulses which rise and surge up in our own
being out of the depths of our otherwise obscure
will-forces, something which once was more or less the
equivalent of what now constitutes part of our experience in
the present earthly life, but which has undergone changes by
first having been etherealised, then having lived in an astral
world and finally having risen in this astral world to a thrice
higher stage. And this we now find contained in our shadowy
‘I’ of the present as the sustaining
reality-bearing force of the creative will-power
of our previous earthly lives.
Thus we have risen from the physical being of man to his
three higher forms, the
etheric man containing the
formative forces, the astral man,
bearing the soul-forces proper, and lastly to the
true ‘I’ which is the result of previous earthly
lives, while in the present life on earth our ‘I’ weaves in
that way only between falling asleep and waking.
I have already described to you
how during the time between falling asleep and awakening, the
astral body weaves and lives within the ocean of the
astral world; but, as has also been explained, during
that time between falling asleep and waking up we still carry
within this astral body, the ‘I.’
But this ‘I’ in as far as it is the ‘I’
of the present, is not yet capable of bringing its
forces to bear upon the physical body.
For here man shares the fate of the rest of
nature, the duality of spirit and matter. Here man himself is
faced with the spirit that is not yet active in matter, and
matter that is impotent and divorced from the
spirit.
The outcome of this battle between spirit and matter
as kindled by the will to overcome the duality of spirit
and matter in the external physical world of the earth, it
lights up in man's being — the outcome of
this inner conflict which, behind the scenes of man's life
continues also during waking hours in the sphere of the will,
takes effect behind the scenes of existence
during the time between, falling asleep
and waking. As long as man has only his
ordinary consciousness, this is covered up by
sleep. But during this sleep is woven that essence which, when
again etherealised and ‘astralised’ after death, attains that
creative force which, after having passed through the next
period between death and a new birth, will have added a new
measure of strength to the power which flows into our
will-forces from long past lives on earth.
And so we can make a study of human life. We
do not at first see into the depths of the will; we cannot
observe what occurs in sleep. Real spiritual vision,
however, reveals to us what is at work there as
the creative principle, connected with long past earthly
lives, counteracting the process of combustion.
And we discover how out of their moral, destiny-building
impulses the former lives on earth pulsate through our
will. We discern how, while we sleep, all that is
performed impulsively, emotionally and intentionally by the
human will, remaining dormant even during waking hours, weaves
itself during the time between falling asleep and awakening
into that being which sleep conceals from modern man, but
which, pulsing as active will in our blood
in the combustion-process of our future body, will
unfold in our next earthly life as the creative
‘I.’ This creative
‘I’ will then again have been increased
in strength to the extent of what we have developed in our
present life between birth and death as a further addition to
that which, as described, has come to us from previous earthly
lives.
In this way we can distinguish the four members of man's
constitution, and as we experience the reality of these four
members in the human being, we gain at the same time a
picture of human life as a whole. As I showed yesterday, the
life which is earthly widens out into the life in
the universal ether, which reaches to the boundaries of a kind
of outer global shell, but radiates back the
astral in the cosmos from all sides. With our
astral body we live in this astral world which remains
hidden from earthly observation; but when, in the way
I have described, we have reached the stage where we can
experience the astral world, it does not only resound as
the World-Logos, but there emerge from the
words of the Logos, as from the very foundations of spiritual
life, the beings of the higher and lower Hierarchies themselves
and among them our own spirit-being from long past earthly
lives.
Thus the knowledge we gain about man at the
same time widens our soul's spiritual
conception of the Cosmos, of the Universe, not only in the
physical and etheric sense, but of the Cosmos as living
soul-and-spirit as well.
Knowledge of man expands to knowledge of the
world. As in our physical life on earth there can
never be inhalation alone or exhalation alone,
because the alternating in-and-out breathing must
penetrate and flow through us — living as
we are in, this rhythmic in-and-out breathing, we likewise
cannot on a higher level acquire only a one-sided
knowledge of man or knowledge of the worlds As the
inhaling calls for exhaling, knowledge of man demands knowledge
of the world; as the exhaling calls for inhaling, knowledge of
the world demands knowledge of man.
Systole and diastole, contraction and expansion of the great
physical-soul-and-spirit life of the world is knowledge
of the world and knowledge of man, not side
by side, but ever in an eternally changing rhythm,
together-apart, together-apart,
penetrating each other and functioning like the immortal life
of the Cosmos itself, to which immortal man also
belongs.
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