LECTURE III.
You will have been able to see
from yesterday's lecture that there is a connection between the
physical body of man and what we call the world of the senses. We saw
how the human physical body is of the same substance as we find in
the sense world outside us — the substance that we spoke of
yesterday, and that we recognised to be of the nature of will. In the
sense world outside us and in the human physical body as well, we
have active ruling will. To this extent it is, therefore, true to say
that the physical body of man is a part of the external world of the
senses. You will remember that we went on to speak of how behind the
world of the senses lies a world of coming into being and passing
away, and in this latter world we found wisdom; we found that its
true form may be described as active ruling wisdom. And what we call
the etheric body of man is really composed of the substance of
wisdom. Now the etheric and physical bodies of man have something
more inserted into them, they contain within them an astral body and
an ego; for as we know, man as a whole, as we encounter him on earth,
is a conjunction of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego.
At this point I shall have to
direct your thought to a matter which may perhaps be a little
difficult, but which, when we have once grasped it, will help us very
greatly in our understanding of the world and especially of the
nature of man himself. You will be ready to accept the assumption
that physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego must at some
time have been brought together and formed into a whole. Now it is a
fact that if one who has developed clairvoyance tries to observe how
the four members of man's nature are joined together, then he
has the impression — we shall see later why it is important to
consider this impression — he has the impression that they are
united in an irregular manner. In the human being of the present day
we find them combined in such a way as to force us to conclude that
at one time or other a disorder and an irregularity has come in. That
is a remarkable fact and demands our attention — that an
investigation of the four members of man's being leads to the
conclusion that they are not placed one into the other as they
originally belonged together, but that a disarrangement has at some
time come about. This is the impression they make upon one.
Now here we have once more an
opportunity of seeing what infinite depths are contained in the
primal truths of religion if they are but rightly understood. For
what we have expressed as a disarrangement is marvelously described
in the Bible in the words that are spoken to man by Lucifer, when he
is trying to tempt man. He says: “Your eyes shall be opened and
you shall distinguish between good and evil.” In these words
lies a very deep truth. We are not to understand that the eyes only
are to be opened. The eyes are here representative of all the senses.
If we understand Lucifer's words aright we may render them as
follows: “All your senses shall work in a different way from
the way they would work if you were going to follow the Gods and not
me” — i.e. Lucifer. Owing to the influence of
Lucifer the senses have a different form of activity from what they
would otherwise have. It is extraordinarily difficult for a man of
the present day to picture to himself how the senses work, and I
shall have here to say something that will strike you as absurd, in
my endeavour to make clear for you how the senses would work if no
disorder had come into the conjunction of the four members of man's
nature through Lucifer. It must sound absurd, because it is almost
impossible to believe that some other form of activity in the senses
was the original right one, rather than the activity we experience in
them. If you are asked the question: What are the eyes of man really
for? then what is more natural and obvious than to answer: Why, of
course, for seeing. And from that aspect there is certainly some
justification for calling a man a fool who says the eyes are not for
seeing. In reality, however, if we go back to the beginnings of Earth
evolution we find that the eyes of man did not originally belong to
the faculty of seeing: that they do so now is due to the temptation
of Lucifer. It is like this. The power of vision that man has was not
intended to press through the eye and go out beyond to reach
so-called “things”; what should have happened if all had
gone forward in accordance with the original purposes of the Gods was
that in every act of seeing man should become directly conscious of
his eye — that is, he should not see the external object,
but feel and experience his own eye. He should become
aware of the activity that is going on in the eye itself. As it is
to-day he is not aware of this but only of what happens by means of
the activity in the eye, he is aware of the external object with
which he is confronted. He ought really to be involved in his seeing
at a much earlier stage, and not only when the seeing has reached the
object; in the eye he ought to be already conscious of himself. The
activity of the eye — this is what he ought to feel.
In the case of the eye such an
experience is scarcely possible to-day unless one has undergone
special occult development. With the hand it is possible. A man can
at least distinguish whether he is catching hold of an object with
his hand or whether his hand is merely moving freely in an aimless
way. In the latter case he is conscious only of the actual activity
of the hand itself. But if to-day a person directs his power of
vision to the eye he sees nothing. This is how it stands with
present-day man. It was not, however, so intended from the beginning.
The intention was that when the human being considered his eye or his
ear or any of his sense organs, he would perceive the ruling will of
which we have spoken, he would really swim in the ruling will and
recognise the fact from the peculiar manner in which it affected his
eye, etc. His experience with the eye would thus have been similar in
every respect to his experience with the hand. When you take hold of
an object you discover that it is hard or soft, according to whether
it yields to your touch. But you are all the time really aware of
what you yourself are doing with your hand. This is how it would be
also with the eye. But that could only be if the etheric body were
rightly fitted into the physical body. Only then should we be able
directly to perceive our eye and feel its connection with the ruling
will. The etheric body is, however, not rightly fitted into the
physical body. That is the remarkable fact we have to recognise. But
this is only one example of the disarrangement that exists in the
human being. There is no single member of man's nature that is
rightly fitted into the other members, everything is in disorder. If
it had not been for the Luciferic influence at the beginning of Earth
evolution all the members of man's being would have been placed
within one another quite differently. That is the point I want to
make clear to-day; I want to show you the particular and significant
results that have followed on the disorder brought about by Lucifer's
influence in the connections between the four members of man's
being.
It will be helpful at this point
if I begin to write down the facts in tabular form on the blackboard.
See table.
We will take first the relation
that exists between the physical body and the etheric body which is
inserted into it. If, as was originally intended by the Gods who
guided human evolution, the etheric body had been poured into the
physical body in a perfectly regular manner, then the human being
would experience all around him — I can assure you it is hard
to find words for it when there is no such experience! —
something like a perpetual flowing and trickling of ruling will.
Everywhere he would perceive differentiated will, for he would detect
a certain difference in the workings of the will according as he was
conscious of directing his eye or his ear or some other organ on the
world around him. All these organs in their variety would only afford
him the possibility of experiencing will in as many new ways, but it
would always be will, flowing will. That is what would have happened
if the etheric body had been fitted into the physical body in the way
that was intended by the Gods. It is, however, not the case. What has
happened is that the etheric body is not completely within the
physical body, it has, as it were, left a piece of the physical body
for itself, it does not penetrate the whole of it; with the result
that the physical body has from a certain aspect a surplus of its own
activity which it should by right not have. Thus there are places in
the physical body of man which are not filled with the etheric body
as they should have been in accordance with the original intention of
the Divine Spiritual Beings who guide Earth evolution. And these
places where the physical is not properly penetrated by the etheric
body are where the sense organs have come to development. It is owing
to this fact that the sense organs have attained their present form.
Hence it is that in the case of every sense organ we find the very
remarkable phenomenon of a purely physical activity from which the
prevailing life activity is completely excluded.
For consider how you have, for
example, in the eye something you can compare with the purely
physical workings of a camera obscura, of a photographer's
apparatus. It is just as if a piece had been left out in the general
penetration of the etheric body. And that is what has actually
happened. It is the same with the peculiar inner ear where there is a
kind of keyboard in the labyrinth of the ear. The etheric body has
been, as it were, pushed back and you have activities that are purely
physical in character and are not penetrated with the etheric body.
This is the origin of what we call sense impressions. The experience
of colour is due to the fact that the etheric body does not penetrate
the organ of vision in the proper way, and that consequently purely
physical activities are carried on there. And it is the same with all
the senses, there is a preponderance of physical body over etheric
body. We can, therefore, set this down as our first result. In the
relationship between physical and etheric body we have to do with a
condition which we may call a preponderance of physical over
etheric body. Were this preponderance of the physical body not
present then we should not have around us, as we have to-day, the
whole expanse of the world of the senses, but man's connection
with the world around him would be that he would perceive it all as
flowing, surging, ruling will. Were it not for this preponderance of
the physical over the etheric body, man would not feel himself to be
passive, but active, as he does when he stretches out his hand. We
are here stating a fact of extraordinarily deep interest that is
actually manifest to higher and occult observation — the fact
that the whole world of the senses depends on this, that the etheric
body has been, so to say, held up from entering into the sense
organs, and that where these are situated there the purely physical
world has found place in man.
And now we come secondly to the
relation between etheric body and astral body. Again there is not a
right and proper penetration the one of the other, but a
preponderance shows itself of the etheric body over the astral body
in the nature of man. A very slight degree of clairvoyance will
quickly lead to an investigation of this preponderance of etheric
body over astral body. It does not take much to perceive it. If there
were no such preponderance then among other things man would never be
able to shed tears. If you observe some one weeping, excreting from
the glands of the eye that singular salty fluid, then if you have a
slight degree of clairvoyance you will notice at once that there is
in this case a too great activity of the etheric body in relation to
the activity of the astral body. What he experiences astrally the
human being is unable to impress fully into the life of the etheric
body; the etheric body has a preponderance over the astral body and
this comes to expression in the fact that the etheric body works back
on to the physical and presses out the tears from it. And it is the
same with all processes of glandular excretion in the human being.
They all depend on a preponderance of etheric body over astral. The
disturbance of balance, when its effect is continued on into the
physical body, comes to expression in the various glandular
excretions. Otherwise no excretion would take place when the glands
were active; but the activity of the astral body, if it were to
coincide with the etheric body, would be used up in the inner
movement and activity of the glands. The glands would not expel
anything, they would fulfil their whole function in themselves. No
expulsion of matter would take place. Thus you see how tremendous to
an occult observation appear the consequences of the Luciferic
temptation. If Lucifer had not entered into the world order nobody
would ever, for example, be able to perspire, but instead of the
activity that takes place in perspiration, there would be in the
corresponding organs an activity and movement that exhausted
themselves inside the organs; nothing at all would be expelled from
the glands. So that we may put down as our second point a
preponderance of etheric body over astral body. If the
peculiar nature and appearance of our sense world is to be traced to
the first preponderance, the preponderance of physical over etheric
body, then this second preponderance, that of etheric over astral
body, must be regarded as the cause of what we may call our
impressions and sensations. For man's whole general feeling of
his bodily condition comes from this preponderance of etheric body
over astral body. It is the subjective expression of this
preponderance.
But now, if we would continue
the train of thought, we must not proceed diagrammatically. If you
were to proceed diagrammatically it would, of course, be perfectly
easy, you would simply have to say: He has demonstrated to us a
preponderance of physical body over etheric body, and then a
preponderance of etheric body over astral body, and now we come to a
preponderance of astral body over ego. This is how you would proceed
to complete the scheme on purely intellectual foundations. You would,
however, get no true result; the train of thought cannot be continued
in that way at all. As a matter of fact, whenever you receive a
communication of an occult fact and set out to draw conclusions with
your intellect in a schematic way, you will always find that reality
gives quite a different result. It is no use trying to carry on the
train of thought in an intellectual way; sometimes it will be correct
for a while, but then it will fail. And here the fact is that we have
to take as our third disarrangement an inverted preponderance,
namely, a preponderance of astral body over etheric body. Thus it is
once more the relationship of these same two bodies that concerns us,
and this time occult observation discovers a preponderance of the
astral over the etheric body. And this preponderance is the one that
in the eyes of man is the most important of the three. For when you
consider the human being from a perfectly material point of view you
can really imagine him to be as he is pictured in many materialistic
books, namely, as nothing else than a great big apparatus of
digestion, a sort of machine that eats and digests and builds up its
body out of the substances it has received in eating and has
elaborated in all kinds of ways. As a matter of fact you find the
human being described in this way in books that are written from a
materialistic outlook; the picture they give is little more than of a
great digestive apparatus, that takes in food, works it up and
distributes it to the muscles, bones, sinews, etc. If you look away
from all that man is through the fact that he perceives the world of
the senses and through the fact that in the whole feeling he has of
his body he experiences various glandular processes of excretion —
if you look away from all this and consider the human being merely
from the point of view of the receiving of nourishment, investigating
what happens with the substances from the time they are received
through the mouth until the time they are absorbed into the blood
stream, then you have before you a material process which is the
ultimate physical expression of the preponderance of the astral over
the etheric body. You will remember that whenever we consider the
world from a spiritual point of view we always have to see behind
every phenomenon of the senses a spiritual reality. What the senses
can perceive is no more than the external appearance. And so behind
all these coarser processes of the receiving and the elaboration of
nourishment we have to look for spiritual forces, and these spiritual
forces are to be found in the preponderance of the astral over the
etheric body. This preponderance is expressed in the normal physical
organic life-processes.
It is indeed a strange
conclusion to which we have come, and I beg you to regard it closely.
You must be clear that the very thing that materialism often sees as
the whole human being, the very thing that for most people is the
principal concern and care of life — to receive nourishment and
to bear it to the various organs of the body — has only come
into existence through the fact that the Luciferic influence has
given rise to a preponderance of the astral over the etheric body in
man. In other words, if it had not been for Lucifer, if Lucifer had
not at the beginning of the evolution of man shifted in this way the
relationship between the astral and etheric bodies, then the human
being would not eat and digest and work over the substances as he
does to-day. What, from a materialistic standpoint, is the principal
thing about a human being is thus all due to a Luciferic action, for
it is nothing else than the result of a displacement between astral
and etheric body. The astral body has through Lucifer come in for an
extra share of activity and has thereby achieved a preponderance over
the etheric body. It is Lucifer's doing and it has had the
result of making man a receiver of coarse material nourishment. For
man was not destined to receive material nourishment, he was intended
to have a kind of existence that did not require it. This fact brings
to expression in a marvellous way how through the temptation of
Lucifer there has come about what we may call the “expulsion
from Paradise.” For to be in Paradise means nothing else than
to be a spiritual being and to have no need of physical nourishment.
That which appears to the vast majority of people who are
materialistically inclined as the greatest pleasure in life —
when we see it for what it is, is their expulsion from Paradise.
Human beings have not only been punished by being obliged to receive
and digest food, but they have been doubly punished. For the very
event which as related in the symbols of the Bible was seen to
inflict the greatest loss and sorrow to man, the very event which by
the expulsion from Paradise makes it necessary for man to take
physical food, has become for the majority of human beings one of the
keenest enjoyments of life! Such a change has man undergone that to
be outside Paradise has become his greatest pleasure. It is indeed a
strange fact in human life that we here have to face, but it must be
learned and known.
Finally we come to a fourth
disarrangement. And the fourth concerns the relationship between the
ego and the astral body. Here the Luciferic displacement has brought
about a preponderance of the ego over the activity of the astral
body. You see what it is that is missing; we have no preponderance of
astral body over ego. Such a thing does not exist. One must not just
make a diagram, one must always proceed according to observation. As
we have seen, in the astral body and etheric body we have first one
relation and then its reverse, whereas here we only have the
preponderance of ego over astral body. This means that the ego or I
has not that relation with the astral body which it was originally
intended to have before the entrance of the Luciferic influence; it
is more egoistic than it ought to be. This has happened through the
Luciferic influence. What then exactly took place to bring about this
fourth preponderance? In order to understand this we need first to
have a clear idea of what would have been the right and proper
relation between I and astral body.
The only way to come to know the
right and true relation is to re-establish it. In the human being as
he stands to-day in the world, subject as he is to the Luciferic
influence, the relation between I and astral body is not in order;
the I has the preponderance. Man is more I-ish than he should be.
(You must forgive the strange expression; it is literally true.) Now
we have in these lectures been pursuing a consideration which leads
us to see what the I of man ought really to be like. A right and
proper relationship will come about when man undertakes a wise and
energetic and patient self-discipline and acquires the qualities we
have described under the names of wonder, reverence, feeling in
harmony, surrender. The ego will then stand in such a relation to the
astral body that an unprejudiced observer will have the impression
that the relation is now a true one, that the ego has now cancelled
and undone what came in through the Luciferic influence. Only by
developing these four qualities of the soul in the very highest
degree can the original relationship be righted again. And how does
the ego stand then to the astral body? The relationship is a very
remarkable one. You can form an idea of it if you will follow
attentively some of the chapters in
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.
As man is to-day, he is perpetually
intimately interwoven with his thinking, feeling and willing. It is
not easy to discover a condition in external consciousness where man
is merely in his ego and not interwoven with thinking, feeling and
willing. Make the experiment of trying to grasp the pure thought of
the I. Our friends make valiant attempts to grasp the pure thought of
the I when Dr. Unger makes the demand upon them again and again to
think this thought of the I apart from all thinking, feeling and
willing. They are left breathless in their efforts!
(See “Principles of Spiritual Science,” by Carl Unger.)
You see how difficult it is to
come to the I of man even in thought, to say nothing of actually
separating it in reality from thinking, feeling and willing. In the
ordinary way man's soul is traversed all the time with thoughts
and feelings and impulses of will, as well as with desires. His ego
is never for a moment separated from thinking, feeling and willing.
But this separation is what we attain by means of the four conditions
of soul as I described them. We become able to stand outside
thinking, feeling and willing, and to look upon these as something
outside ourselves. Our own thoughts must then be as indifferent to us
as are the objects around us. We no longer say: I think — for
our thinking has for us the appearance of a process that goes on of
itself and is no concern of ours. And it must be the same with
feeling and willing. If one reflects a little one is bound to admit
that although it may be possible to have this before one as an ideal
some day capable of fulfilment, yet man is, as a matter of fact, so
mixed up with his thinking, feeling and willing that it is an
exceedingly difficult matter for him to extricate himself. He would
find it most difficult to go through the world saying to himself:
Here am I going through the world, and with me all the time is a
companion who hangs on to me because I have grown together with him,
who is like a kind of double. All my thinking, feeling and willing go
on alongside of me. I am not that which thinks and feels and wills, I
am what I am in my I, and I walk by the side of what I carry around
with me like three sacks, one filled with my thinking, one with my
feeling and one with my willing. But until we have come to a
practical realisation of this “three sacks” theory we
shall not be able to form any correct idea of how the ego would now
stand in relation to thinking, feeling and willing if all were as
originally intended by the divine beings before the Luciferic
influence interposed. Man was destined to be an onlooker of himself,
it was not intended that he should live inside himself. For what was
really the nature of the original temptation? Let us put it as
tritely as possible: —
Lucifer approached the human I
or ego, which man ought to have preserved in all its purity beside
the astral body that had been given to him on the Moon, and said
something like this: “Look here, Man! It is tedious to go
wandering about always with this one single centre-point of ‘I
am’ and merely to be able to look on at the rest; it would be
much more amusing to dive down into thy astral body. I will give thee
the power to do this, and then thou wilt not any longer be standing
there on one side with thine ego and looking on at thy double, but
thou wilt be immersed in thy double. And then needst not fear that
thou wilt be overwhelmed and drowned, I will provide for that, I will
give thee some of my own power.” Thereupon the ego of man did
dive down into the astral body and was saved from drowning by being
inoculated with Luciferic power. And the Luciferic power that man
then received was the preponderance of the I over the astral body, it
was the excessive egoism, which is a Luciferic quality in man. And
what is this quality actually? How does it manifest in life? It shows
itself to begin with in the fact that we are involved and entangled
first in our thoughts, and then also in our feelings and our impulses
of will. In the first place with our thoughts. If it had not been for
Lucifer man would never have hit upon the ridiculous idea that he has
an intelligence inside him and that he himself cherishes thoughts
within him. He would have known that the thoughts are outside him and
that he has to look on at his thinking. Man would always have
considered and contemplated, and waited till the thought was given to
him, waited until the purpose and meaning of the thinking was
revealed. You will find this set forth, for example, in my
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.
Man would never have had the idea that he
has to connect together all kinds of thoughts and form a judgment or
opinion within himself. This forming of judgments within ourselves,
independent of revelation, is a Luciferic nature in us. And the whole
intelligence of man, in so far as he regards it as his property, is a
mistake. It is nothing but the temptation of Lucifer that makes man
imagine he should have intelligence. And now you will understand how
this intelligence, having come about through a shifting of this kind,
can by no means be taken as the criterion for all human comprehension
of reality.
I pointed out in my lectures in Carlsruhe
(From Jesus to Christ)
that for a man who builds upon his intelligence it seems quite reasonable to
say: “If I am to understand the Resurrection as part of the Mystery of
Golgotha I must simply discard my intelligence altogether. For everything it
says contradicts the Resurrection.” So says the man of the
nineteenth century, so says even the theologian of the nineteenth
century in so far as he is a theologian of the liberal school. But
how should he ever expect that the Mystery of Golgotha — a deed
that is not entangled with the Luciferic influence, a deed that lies
altogether outside Lucifer's domain and came into the world for
the very purpose of vanquishing Lucifer — how could he expect
that he could ever grasp such a deed with an intelligence that he
owes to Lucifer? Nothing can be more obvious than that these things
can never be grasped with a man's own intelligence. For his
intelligence is Lucifer's gift to him and is not adapted to
understanding things that have nothing to do with the working of
Lucifer. You see what deep connections lie behind these things. Were
the Mystery of Golgotha comprehensible with human intelligence, then,
my dear friends, there would have been no need for it to take place.
The Mystery of Golgotha would have been quite unnecessary. For the
very purpose of it is to balance out the disorder which arose through
the Luciferic influence. The Mystery of Golgotha was enacted in order
to cure man of that singular arrogance and pride which manifests in a
desire to comprehend everything by means of the intellect. This is
the very place where we can perceive how limited is the intellect as
such. I have frequently protested against the idea that human
knowledge is limited, but the intellect as such is certainly limited.
1. Preponderance of physical body over etheric body.
(a) The sense world.
2. Preponderance of etheric body over astral body.
(b) The whole feeling of the body.
3. Preponderance of astral body over etheric body.
Normal organic bodily processes.
4. Preponderance of I over astral body.
N.B. — At (b) Lucifer and Ahriman meet.
Let us now study this table and
discover where was the starting point of the shifting or displacement
that occurred in man's nature. It is obvious that the first
disarrangement to come about was what we have called the
preponderance of the I over the astral body. All the Luciferic
influence over man began with this — that Luciferic power was
given to the I and the I got impurely mixed up with thinking, feeling
and willing, and then maintained the Luciferic preponderance over the
astral body. The astral body in consequence was able to gain an
ascendancy on its part over the etheric body. And thus the whole
balance in man was upset. It is just as though by the Luciferic
influence a blow had been dealt at the astral body, and the astral
body had passed it on and so gained an ascendancy over the etheric.
But it can go no further that way. The etheric body does not hand on
the blow. It is like hitting a rubber ball. You can push into the
ball for a certain distance but then it comes back again. So we can
speak of a preponderance of astral over etheric body, and then the
story is reversed. For now it is the etheric body that rebounds and
asserts a predominance over the astral, giving us a reverse
predominance of what we had before. And then follows the predominance
of physical body over the etheric body. These latter two strike in
the opposite direction. Why do they strike back? It comes about
because while here Lucifer is striking in, Ahriman, in the physical
and etheric body, is striking back from the other side. Here in the
middle, where you have on the one hand the ascendancy of etheric body
over astral body and physical body over etheric body, and on the
other hand the ascendancy of astral body over etheric body and I over
astral body — here in the middle you have Lucifer and Ahriman
in collision. Here they come up against one another. Thus, there is
in man a centre point where Lucifer and Ahriman meet in their own
true nature. And man can either swing in the direction of Lucifer and
bore his astral body deeper than is right into his etheric body, or
he can take hold of the impetus in the power of Ahriman and strike
the etheric body too deep into the astral body. Such are the dynamic
effects with which we have to deal.
Our next step will be to realise
that everywhere in man's nature we actually have to do with the
working of forces. Except for one instance, namely in the case of a
preponderance of astral over etheric body, where we have to consider
the taking of food and the elaboration of substances in digestion —
nowhere but in this one instance have we come across a working of
matter. This leads us to feel a necessity to investigate from an
occult point of view the nature of what we call substance or matter;
and with this question we will begin our considerations tomorrow.
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