LAUGHING AND WEEPING
27th April 1909
This winter we have
given a whole series of talks on spiritual science with the specific
purpose of coming more closely in touch with the whole nature of
man's being. We have looked at the great riddle of man from as many
aspects as possible. Today we will make it our task to speak of
something that is absolutely a part of everyday life. And perhaps,
for the very reason that we start from something really commonplace,
we shall see that life's riddles really encounter us on all sides,
and that we ought to take hold of them, so that in understanding them
we see into the depths of the world. For the things of the spirit,
and altogether that which is greatest, is not to be sought in unknown
distances, for it reveals itself in the most ordinary things of life.
In the smallest most insignificant things of life we can find the
greatest wisdom, if we can only understand this. Therefore let us
include in this cycle of lectures this winter a study of the everyday
theme of laughing and weeping from the spiritual scientific point of
view.
Laughing
and weeping are certainly very common things in human life. But only
spiritual science can bring a deeper understanding of these
phenomena, because spiritual science is the only thing that can
penetrate into the deepest parts of man's being where he is
distinctly different from the other kingdoms with whom he shares this
globe. By virtue of the fact that man has acquired on this globe the
greatest and most powerful share of divinity, he towers above his
fellow creatures. Therefore only a knowledge and understanding that
reaches the spirit will really fathom man's real nature. Laughing and
weeping deserve to be properly observed and appreciated, for they
alone can remove the preconception that would rank man's nature too
close to that of animals. The way of thinking that would so dearly
like to reduce man as near as possible to animal level, emphasises as
strongly as it can that a high level of intelligence is to be found
in the various accomplishments of animals, an intelligence often far
superior to that of man. But this does not particularly surprise the
spiritual scientist, for he knows that when the animal does something
intelligent it does not arise out of an individual element in the
animal but out of the group soul. It is very difficult, of course, to
make the concept of the group soul convincing for external
observation, even though it is not absolutely impossible. But one
thing should be noticed, for it is accessible to any kind of external
observation if it is extensive enough: the animal, neither weeps nor
laughs. Certainly there will be people who maintain that animals also
laugh and weep. But you cannot help such people if they do not want
to know what laughing and weeping really imply, and therefore ascribe
it to animals as well. A person who really observes the soul knows
that the animal cannot weep but at the most howl, nor can it laugh
but only grin. We must be alive to the difference between howling and
weeping, grinning and laughing. We must go back to some very
significant events if we want to throw light on the real nature of
laughing and weeping.
From
lectures given in various places, including Berlin, and particularly
the one about the nature of the temperaments, you will remember that
there are two streams in human life. One stream includes all the
human capacities and characteristics we inherit from our parents and
other ancestors, and which can be passed on to our descendants, and
the other stream consists of the qualities and characteristics we
have by virtue of being born an individuality. This stream takes on
the inherited characteristics like a sheath, its own qualities and
characteristics originating from past lives in previous incarnations.
Man
is essentially a twofold being: one part of his nature he inherits
from his forefathers, the other part he brings with him from earlier
incarnations. Thus we differentiate between the actual kernel of
man's being which passes from life to life, from incarnation to
incarnation, and the sheaths surrounding it, comprising the inherited
characteristics. Now it is true that the actual individual kernel of
a man's being, that passes from incarnation to incarnation, is
already united with his physical bodily nature before birth, so you
should not imagine that when a man is born it is possible under
normal conditions for his individuality to be exchanged. The
individuality is already united with the human body before birth.
But
at what moment this kernel of individuality can start its formative
work on man is a different matter. The individual kernel is already
in the child, as we said, when the child is born. But before birth as
such it cannot bring to effect the capacities it has acquired in past
lives. It must wait until after birth. So we can say that before
birth there are active in man the causes of all those characteristics
and qualities we can inherit from parents and ancestors. Although the
kernel of man's being is there, as we said, it cannot take control
until the child has come into the world.
When
the child has entered the world this kernel of individuality begins
to transform man's organism, assuming that circumstances are normal,
of course, as it is different in exceptional cases. It changes the
brain and the other organs so that they may become its instruments.
Thus it is chiefly the inherited qualities that are visible in the
child at birth, and little by little the individual qualities work
their way into the general organism. If we wanted to speak of the
individuality's work on the organism before birth, that is quite
another chapter. We can for instance also say that the individuality
is actively engaged in choosing his parents. But this, too, is
basically done from without. All the work that is done before birth
by the individuality takes place from without, for example through
the mother. But the actual work of the individuality on the organism
itself does not begin until the child has come into the world. And
because this is so, the really human part can only start, little by
little, to come to expression in the human being after birth.
To
start with, therefore, the child has certain qualities in common with
animal nature, and these are just those qualities that find their
expression in today's subject, laughing and weeping. In the first
weeks after birth the child really cannot either laugh or weep in the
proper sense of the words. As a rule it is forty days after birth
when the child cries its first tears and also smiles, because that is
the moment when the kernel from previous lives first enters the body
and works on it to make it a vehicle of expression. It is just this
which gives man his superiority over the animal, that in the case of
animals we cannot say that an individual soul passes from incarnation
to incarnation. The basis of animal nature is the group soul, and we
cannot say that what is individual in the animal is reincarnated. It
returns to the group soul and becomes something that only lives on in
the animal group soul. It is only in man that the fruits of his
efforts in one incarnation survive and, after he has gone through
Devachan, pass into a new incarnation. In this new incarnation it
gradually transforms the organism, so that it becomes not only the
expression of the characteristics of his physical ancestors but also
of his individual abilities, talents, and so on.
Now
it is just the activity of the ego in the organism that calls forth
laughing and weeping in a being such as man. Laughing and weeping are
only possible in a being that has his ego within his own organism and
whose ego is not a group ego as it is with the animals. For laughing
and weeping are nothing less than a delicate, intimate expression of
the ego-hood within the bodily nature. What happens when a person
weeps? Weeping can only come about when the ego feels weak in
relation to what faces it in the environment. If the ego is not in
the organism, that is, if it is not individual, the feeling of
weakness in relation to the outer world cannot occur. Being in
possession of ego-hood, man feels a certain disharmony in his
relationship to the environment. And this feeling of disharmony is
expressed in the desire to defend himself and restore the balance.
How does he restore the balance? He does so in that his ego contracts
the astral body. In the case of sorrow that leads to weeping, we can
say that the ego feels itself to be in a certain disharmony with the
environment, and it tries to restore the balance by contracting the
astral body within itself, squeezing together its forces, as it were.
That is the spiritual process underlying weeping. Take weeping as an
expression of sorrow, for example. You would have to examine sorrow
carefully in every single case, if you wanted to see what was causing
it. For example, sorrow can be the expression of being forsaken by
something you previously had. There would be a harmonious
relationship of the ego to the environment if what we have lost were
still there. Disharmony occurs when we have lost something and the
ego feels forsaken. So the ego contracts the forces of its astral
body, compresses it as it were, to defend itself against being
forsaken. This is the expression of sorrow leading to tears, that the
ego, the fourth member of man's being, contracts the forces of the
astral body, the third member.
What
is laughter? Laughter is something that is based on the opposite
process. The ego tries as it were to loosen the astral body, to
expand and stretch it. Whilst weeping is brought about by
contraction, laughing is produced through the relaxing and expanding
of the astral body. That is the spiritual state of affairs. Every
time someone weeps, the clairvoyant consciousness can confirm that
the ego is contracting the astral body. Every time someone laughs,
the ego is expanding and making a bulge in the astral body. Only
because the ego is active within man's being and not working as a
group ego from outside can laughing and weeping arise. Now because
the ego only gradually begins to be active in the child, and at birth
it is not yet actually active, and has as it were not yet taken hold
of the strings which direct the organism from within, the child can
neither laugh nor weep in its earliest days but only learns to do so
to the extent that the ego becomes master of the inner strings that
are, in the first place, active in the astral body. And because
everything spiritual in man finds expression in the body, and the
body is the physiognomy of the spirit — condensed spirit —
these qualities we have been describing are expressed in bodily
processes. And we can learn to understand these bodily processes from
the spiritual point of view if we become clear about the following:
The
animal has a group soul, or we could say a group ego. Its form is
imprinted upon it by this group ego. Then why has the animal such a
definite form, a form that is complete in itself? This is because
this form is imprinted upon it out of the astral world, and
essentially it has to keep it. Man has a form, which, as we have
stressed many a time, contains as it were all the other animal forms
within it as a harmonious whole. But this harmonious human form, the
human physical body, has to be more mobile within itself than an
animal body. It must not have such a rigid form as an animal body. We
can see that this is so in man's changing facial expressions. Look at
the fundamentally immobile face of the animal, how rigid it is, and
compare that with the mobile human form, with its change of gesture,
physiognomy, and so on. You will admit that within certain limits, of
course, man has a certain mobility, and that in a way it is left to
him to imprint his own form on himself because his ego dwells within
him. Nobody is likely to say that a dog or a parrot has as individual
an expression of intelligence on its face as a human being, unless he
were just making comparisons. Speaking of them in general it could
certainly be so, but not individually, because with dogs, parrots,
lions or elephants the general character predominates.
With
man we find his individual character written in his face.
And
we can see the way his particular individual soul forms itself more
and more in his physiognomy, especially in its mobile parts. Man
still has this mobility because man can give himself his own form
from within. It is this fact of being able to work creatively on
himself that raises man above the other kingdoms.
As
soon as man changes the general balance of forces in his astral body
from out of his ego this also appears physically in the expression of
his face. The normal facial expression and muscular tension that a
man has all day is bound to change when the ego makes a change in the
forces of the astral body. When, instead of holding the astral body
in its normal tension, the ego lets it go slack and expands it, it
will work with less force on the etheric and physical bodies,
resulting in certain muscles changing their position. So when in the
case of a certain display of feeling the ego makes the astral body
slack, certain muscles are bound to have a different tension from
normal. Laughter, therefore, is nothing else than the physical or
physiognomical expression of that slackening of the astral body that
the ego brings about. It is the astral body, from within, under the
ego's influence, that brings man's muscles into those positions that
give him his normal expression. When the astral body relaxes its
tension the muscles expand and laughter occurs. Laughter is a direct
expression of the ego's inner work on the astral body. When the
astral body is compressed by the ego in the grip of sorrow, this
compression continues into the body, resulting in the secretion of
tears which in a certain respect is like a flow of blood brought
about by the compression of the astral body. This is what these
processes really are. And that is why only a being that is capable of
taking an individual ego into himself and working from out of it on
himself can laugh and weep. The individuality of the ego begins at
the point where the person is capable of tensing or relaxing the
forces of the astral body from within.
Every
time we see someone smiling or weeping we are confronting the proof
of man's superiority over the animals. For in the astral body of the
animal the ego works from outside. Therefore all the conditions of
tension in the animal's astral body can only be produced from
outside, and the inner quality of such an existence cannot express
itself in an external form like laughter and weeping.
Now
we shall see much more in the phenomena of laughing and weeping if we
observe the breathing process when people laugh or cry. This enables
us to see deeply into what is happening. If you watch the breathing
of someone who is weeping, you will notice that it consists
essentially of a long out-breath and a short in-breath. It is the
opposite with laughing: a short out-breath and a long in-breath. Thus
the breathing process changes when the human being is under the
influence of the phenomena we have been describing. And you only need
a little imagination to find the reasons why this must be so.
In
the phenomena of weeping the astral body is compressed by the ego.
This is like a squeezing out of the breath: a long out-breath. In the
phenomenon of laughing there is a slackening of the astral body. That
is just as though you were to pump the air out of a certain space,
rarefy the air, and the air whistles in. It is like this with the
long in-breath when you laugh. Here, so to say, in the change in the
breathing process we see the ego at work within the astral body. That
which is outside in the case of the animal, the group ego, can
actually be glimpsed at work in man, for this particular activity is
even accompanied by a change of breathing. Therefore let us show the
universal significance of this phenomenon.
Animals
have a breathing process that is so to speak strictly governed from
outside and is not subject to the inner individual ego in the way it
has been described today. That which sustains the breathing process
and actually regulates it was called in the occult teaching of the
Old Testament ‘Nephesh’. This is really what we call the
‘animal soul’. The group ego of the animal is the
nephesh. And in the Bible it is stated quite correctly: And God
breathed into man the nephesh — the animal soul — and man
became a living soul. This is often wrongly understood, of course,
because people cannot read such profound writings today, they are too
biased. For instance when it says: And God breathed nephesh, the
animal soul, into man, it does not mean He created it at that moment,
for it already existed. It does not say that it was not previously in
existence. It was there, outside. And what God did was to take what
had previously been in existence outside as group soul and put it
into man's inner being. The essential thing is to understand the
reality of an expression like this. One can ask what came about
through the fact that the nephesh was put into man? It made it
possible for man to rise above the animals and to develop his ego
with inner activity, so that he can laugh and cry and experience joy
and pain in such a way that they work creatively in him.
And
that brings us to the significant effect that pain and joy have in
life. If man did not have his ego within him he could not experience
pain and joy inwardly and these would have to pass him by
meaninglessly. However, as he has his ego within him and can work
from within on his astral body and consequently on his whole bodily
nature, pain and joy become forces that can work creatively in him.
All the joy and pain we experience in one incarnation become part of
us, to carry over into the next incarnation; they work creatively in
our being. Thus you could say that pain and joy became creative world
forces at the same time as man learnt to weep and laugh, that is, at
the same time as man's ego was put into his inner being. Weeping and
laughter are everyday occurrences, but we do not understand them
unless we know what is actually happening in the spiritual part of
man, what actually goes on between the ego and the astral body when a
man laughs or cries.
Now
all that forms man is in continuous development. That man has the
ability to laugh or cry is due to the fact that he can work on his
astral body from out of his ego. This is certainly correct. But on
the other hand man's physical body and also his etheric body were
already predestined to have an ego working within them when man
entered his first earthly incarnation. Man was capable of it. If we
could squeeze an individual ego into a horse, it would feel highly
uncomfortable in there, because it would not be able to do a thing;
it could find no outlet for the individual work of the ego. Imagine
an individual ego in a horse. The individual ego would want to work
on the astral body of the horse by compressing or expanding it, and
so on. But if an astral body is joined to a physical and etheric body
that cannot adapt themselves to the forms of the astral body, then
the physical and etheric bodies create a tremendous hindrance. It
would be like trying to fight a wall. The ego inside the being of the
horse would want to compress the astral body but the physical and
etheric bodies would not follow suit, and this would drive the horse
mad. Man had to be predestined for such an activity. For that to be
so he had right at the beginning to receive the kind of physical body
that could really become an instrument for an ego and could gradually
be mastered by the ego. Therefore the following can also occur: The
physical and the etheric body can be mobile within themselves, proper
vehicles of the ego, so to speak, but the ego can be very undeveloped
and not yet exercise proper mastery over the physical and etheric
body. We can see this in the fact that the physical and etheric
bodies act as sheaths for the ego but not so that they are a complete
expression of the ego. This is the case with the kind of people who
laugh and cry involuntarily, giggle on every occasion and have no
control over the laughter muscles. This shows that they have a higher
human nature in their physical and etheric bodies but have at the
same time not yet brought their humanity under the control of the
ego. This is why giggling makes such an unpleasant impression. It
shows that man is at a higher level with regard to that which he can
do nothing about than he is with regard to that which he can already
do something about. It always makes such an unpleasant impression
when there is a being who does not prove to be at the level to which
external conditions have brought him. Thus laughing and weeping are
in a certain respect absolutely the expression of the ego nature of
man, because they can only arise through the fact that the ego dwells
in the being of man. Weeping can be an expression of the most
terrible egoism, for in a certain way weeping is only too often a
kind of wallowing in sensual pleasure. The person who feels forsaken
compresses his astral body with his ego. He tries to make himself
inwardly strong because he feels outwardly weak. And he feels this
inner strength through being able to do something, namely shedding
tears. A certain feeling of satisfaction — whether it is
admitted or not — is always connected with the shedding of
tears. Just as in different circumstances a kind of satisfaction is
obtained from smashing a chair, tears are often shed for no further
reason than the sensual pleasure of inner activity; pleasure wearing
the mask of tears, even if the person is not conscious of it.
Laughter
can be seen to be a kind of expression of ego nature because if you
really enquire into it you will find that laughter can always be
attributed to the fact that the person feels superior to the people
and happenings around him. Why does a person laugh? Someone
invariably laughs when he fancies himself to be above what he sees.
You can always find this statement verified. Whether you are laughing
at yourself or at someone else your ego is always feeling superior to
something. And out of this feeling of superiority it expands the
forces of its astral body, broadens and puffs them up. Strictly
speaking this is what is really at the root of laughter. And this is
why laughter can be such a healthy thing. And this pluming oneself
should not be condemned in the abstract as egoistic, for laughter can
be very healthy when it strengthens man's feeling of selfhood,
especially if it is warranted and leads him beyond himself. If you see
something in your surroundings or in yourself or others that is
absurd, a feeling of being above such absurdity is sparked off and
makes you laugh. It is bound to happen that man feels superior to
something or other in the environment, and the ego brings this to
expression by expanding the astral body.
If
in the breathing process you understand what we tried to explain with
the statement: And God breathed nephesh into man, and man became a
living soul, you will also sense the connection this has with
laughing and weeping, for you know that whilst laughing and weeping
even man's breathing process itself changes. By means of this example
we have shown that really the most everyday things can be understood
only when we take spirit as the starting point. We can understand
laughing and weeping only when we understand the connection between
the four members of man's being. In the days when people still to
some degree possessed clairvoyant traditions and had at the same time
the ability to portray the gods with real imagination, they portrayed
them as happy beings, whose chief quality was a kind of happy
laughter. And not for nothing did people ascribe howling and gnashing
of teeth to those regions of world existence in which primarily
something resembling exaggerated egoism holds sway. Why was this? It
was because laughter on the one hand signifies a raising of oneself,
a setting up of the ego above its environment; that is, the victory
of the higher over the lower. Whereas weeping signifies a knuckling
under, a withdrawal from what is outside, a becoming smaller, the ego
feeling forsaken, a withdrawal into itself. Sadness in life is so
moving, because we know that it will and must be overcome, but how
very different, hopeless and not at all moving is the appearance of
sorrow and tears in that world where they can no longer be overcome.
There they appear as the expression of damnation, of being cast into
darkness.
We
must pay good attention to these feelings that can come over us when
we make a broad survey of what comes to expression in man as the work
of the ego upon itself, and follow them up in their subtlest details.
Then we shall have understood a great deal of things that meet us in
the course of time. We must be conscious of the fact that there is a
spiritual world behind the physical, and that what appears in human
life as the alternations between laughing and weeping, when we meet
them apart from man, appear on the one hand as the happy light of
Heaven and on the other hand as the dark, bitter misery of Hell.
These two aspects are absolutely there at the root of our world, and
we must understand our middle world as deriving its forces from these
two realms.
We
shall get to know many more things about the being of man. But I
would like to say that one of the deepest chapters on the being of
man is that of laughing and weeping, despite the fact that laughing
and weeping are such everyday occurrences. The animal does not laugh
or cry because it does not have the drop of divinity within it that
man bears in his ego-hood. And we can say that when in the course of
his life the human being begins to smile and to weep, this proves to
anyone who can read the great script of nature that a divine spark is
really living within man, and when a man laughs this spark of God is
active in him seeking to raise him above all that is base. For
smiling and laughing are elevating. On the other hand when a man
weeps it is again the spark of God warning him that his ego could
lose itself if it did not strengthen itself inwardly against all
feelings of weakness and of being forsaken. It is the God in man
admonishing the soul, in laughing and weeping. This accounts for the
wrath that comes over anyone who understands life when he sees
unnecessary weeping. For unnecessary weeping betrays the fact that
instead of living and feeling with the environment, the pleasure of
being within ones own ego is too great. But bitter feelings also
arise in anyone who understands the world when the elevating of the
ego above its surroundings, which otherwise expresses itself in
healthy laughter, is found in someone as an end in itself, as
indiscriminate laughter, or as malicious criticism. For he realises
that if the ego does not draw into itself all it can from its
environment, and does not want to live with its environment, but
raises its ego nature above it without cause, then this ego nature
will not have the necessary depth or necessary upward thrust that we
can only acquire by taking from the environment everything we
possibly can for the development of the ego. Then the ego will move
backwards instead of forwards. The right balance between sorrow and
joy makes a tremendous important contribution to human development.
When sorrow and joy are not just within a man's own self but have
their justification in the environment, and when the ego wants to
establish the correct relationship between sorrow and joy and the
surrounding world all the time, then sorrow and joy will be real
evolutionary factors for man.
Great
poets often find such beautiful words for the kind of sorrow and joy
that are in no way rooted in arrogance nor in a contraction of the
ego but originate out of the relationship between the ego and the
environment, where their balance has been disturbed from outside, and
which alone explains why a man laughs and weeps. We can understand it
because we can see that it is in and through the outer world that the
relationship between ego and outer world has been disturbed. That is
why man must laugh or weep; whereas if it only lies within man, we
cannot understand why he is laughing or crying because then it is
always unfounded egoism. That is why it is so moving when Homer says
of Andromache, when she is under the twofold grip of concern for her
husband and concern for her baby: ‘She could laugh while she
cried!’ This is a wonderful way of describing something normal
in weeping. She is neither laughing nor weeping on her own account.
The right relationship is there with the outside world, when she has
to be concerned about her husband on the one hand and on the other
about her child. And here we have the true relationship of laughing
and weeping, that they balance one another: smiling while crying —
crying while laughing. A natural child often expresses itself this
way too, for its ego has not become so hardened in itself as later on
in adulthood, and it can still cry while it laughs and laugh while it
cries. And the one who understands these things can again ascertain
the fact that whoever has overcome his ego to the point of no longer
seeking the causes of laughter and weeping in himself but finding
them in the outer world, can also laugh while he cries and cry while
he laughs. Indeed, in what goes on around us every day, we have, if
we understand it, the real expression of the spiritual. Laughing and
weeping are something which can in the highest sense be called the
physiognomy of the divine in man.
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