LECTURE VI.
These
lectures will perhaps have given you some idea of what a complicated
being man is and from how many sides we must consider him if we would
come near to his real nature. I want now to point to one more fact of
evolution, and it is one that may be classed among the most
significant of all the results we can arrive at when, with the help
of clairvoyant research, we study the whole course of man's
evolution — looking back over the period from very ancient
times until to-day, and looking forward to what shall come for the
race of man in the future. I have, in the course of these lectures,
drawn your attention to a perception that man can acquire when he
educates his faculty for knowledge in the way we described; when,
that is to say, his soul in its efforts after knowledge enters into
the moods we characterised as wonder, reverence, wisdom-filled
harmony with the events of the world, and lastly, devotion and
surrender to the whole world process. You will remember I explained
how if the soul enters upon these moods or conditions, man's
faculty of knowledge can gradually rise to a perception of two
converse processes that are everywhere around him. Man learns to
distinguish in his environment between what is becoming and what is
dying away. He says to himself at every turn: Here I have to do with
a process of becoming, something that will reach perfection only in
the future, and here again, on the other hand, I encounter a gradual
dying away, a gradual disappearing. We perceive the things of the
world as existing in a region where everything is either coming into
being or passing away. And I pointed out in particular how the human
larynx is really an organ of the future, how it is called to be in
the future something entirely different from what it is to-day.
To-day it merely communicates to the outer world by means of the
spoken word our inner moods and conditions, whereas in the future it
will communicate what we ourselves are in our entirety; that is to
say, it will serve for the procreation of the whole human being. It
will be the reproductive organ of the future. A time will come when
the larynx will not merely help man to express by means of the word
what is in his heart and mind, but man will use the larynx to place
his own self before the world; that is to say, the propagation of man
will be intimately connected with the organ of the larynx.
Now in this complicated
microcosm, in this complicated “little world” which we
call “man,” for every such organ that is only as yet a
seed and will later on in the future attain a higher degree of
perfection, there is another corresponding organ which is gradually
dwindling, gradually dying away. And the corresponding organ for the
larynx is the organ of hearing. In proportion as the hearing
apparatus little by little disappears, in proportion as it grows ever
less and less, will the larynx grow more and more perfect and become
more and more important. We can only estimate the greatness of this
fact when we look back, with the help of the Akashic Records, into a
far distant past of mankind and then from what our research reveals
are in a position to form some conception of what the ear was once
like. Great new vistas are opened up for a knowledge of the nature of
man when we trace back the human ear to its original form. For in its
present state this hearing apparatus of ours is no more than a shadow
of what it once was. To-day it hears only tones of the physical
plane, or words that express themselves in tones on the physical
plane. But that is only a last remnant of what used to flow into man
through the hearing; for through this hearing apparatus once flowed
into man the mighty movements of the whole universe. And as to-day we
hear earthly music with our ear, so in ancient times did world music,
the music of the spheres, flow into man. And as to-day we men clothe
words in tones, so in times past did the divine Word of the Worlds
clothe itself in the music of the spheres — that Word of the
Worlds of which the Gospel of St. John tells, the Logos, the divine
Word. Into what we may call man's hearing in the old sense of
the word, there flowed from the spiritual world a heavenly music, the
music of the spheres, just as now into our hearing flows the human
word and the earthly music, and within the music of the spheres was
what the divine Spirits spoke. And as to-day man compels the air into
forms with his word and his singing and his tone, so did the divine
words and the divine music bring forth forms.
And now let us consider that
most wonderful of all the forms created by Divine music. We may
approach it in the following way. When to-day you give utterance to a
word or even only to a vowel, let us say the sound “A” —
then through this sound the possibility arises of creating a form in
the air. It was in like manner that form entered into the world out
of the cosmic Word, and the most precious of all these forms is man
himself; man himself was created in his original state by being
spoken out of the divine Word. “The Gods spake!”
As to-day the air comes into forms through the word of man, so did
our world come into its form through the Word of the Gods. And man is
the most excellent of these forms. The organ of hearing was, of
course, then infinitely more complicated than it is now. It is to-day
quite shrunk and shriveled. To-day it is an external organ,
penetrating only a limited distance into the brain, but once it
extended inwards over the whole human being. And everywhere
throughout man's being moved the paths of sound which spoke man
into the world, as the utterance of the Word of God. Thus was man
created — spiritually — through the organ of hearing, and
in the future, when he has ascended again, he will have an ear that
is quite small and rudimentary. The meaning and purpose of the ear
will have completely gone. The ear is in a descending evolution; to
compensate for this, however, the larynx, which is to-day only like a
seed, will have developed to greater and greater beauty and
perfection. And in its perfection it will speak out what man can
bring forth for the world as the reproduction of his being, even as
the Gods have spoken Man into the world as Their creation. So is the
world process in a sense reversed. When we consider the whole human
being as he stands before us we have to see in him the product of a
descending evolution, and when we take an organ like the ear we find
it has already reached a densification of the bony matter in the
small bones of the ear, it is, as it were, in the last stage of
descending evolution. The sense as such is disappearing. Man,
however, is developing on into the world of spirituality, and his
ascending organs are the bridges that carry him over into
spirituality. Such is the relationship between the world of the
senses and the world of the spirit. The world of the senses makes
itself known to us in descending organs, and the world of the spirit
in ascending organs.
And it is the same everywhere.
In the whole world as it presents itself to our view we can follow in
some way this becoming and dying. And it is important that we should
learn to apply the idea to the other things in the world. It will
teach us a great deal. Thus in the mineral world, for example, we can
also find something that is in an ascending evolution, something that
is to-day only at the seed stage. It is quicksilver. Quicksilver is a
metal that will undergo transformations in the future but
transformations that will lead to greater perfection. Quicksilver as
metal has not yet pulverised all the forces that every substance
possesses in the spiritual before it becomes substance at all. Powers
that belong essentially to the nature of quicksilver still remain in
the spiritual, and these it will in the future be able to bring forth
and place into the world. It will assume new forms. Thus quicksilver
corresponds in the world of the minerals to the human larynx, and
also in a sense to the organ that is attached to the larynx —
the lung. Other metals — copper, for example — are in a
kind of descending evolution. Copper will, in the future, show itself
as a metal that has no more inner spiritual forces to place out into
the world, and that is consequently more and more obliged merely to
split up and crumble to cosmic dust.
I have here set before you a few
examples of connections which will in future increasingly become an
object of study. Men will study more and more the relationships
between the processes of becoming and of passing away in the several
kingdoms of nature, and will learn to find — not through
experiments and tests but through an Imaginative knowledge —
relationships between particular metal substances and particular
organs in the human body. And as a result substances whose effects
are already partially known from external experience will, through
Imagination, be able to be known in all their healing power, in all
their reproductive and restorative power over the human body. All
kinds of relationships and connections will be discovered between the
several things and beings of the world.
Thus, man will come to recognise
that the virtues which lie in the seed of a plant are differently
connected with man than the virtues contained in the root. All that
we find in the root of a plant corresponds in a manner to the human
brain and to the nervous system belonging to the brain. [see
Summary]
It goes so
far that in actual fact the eating of what is to be found in plant
roots has a certain correspondence with the processes that take place
in the brain and nervous system. So that if a man wants his brain and
nervous system to be influenced from the physical side in its task as
physical instrument for the life of the spirit, he receives with his
nourishment the forces that live in the roots of plants. In a sense
we may say that he lets think in him what he thus receives in food,
he lets it do spiritual work in him, whilst if he is less inclined to
eat of the root nature of plants it will be rather he himself who
uses his brain and nervous system. You will see from this that if a
person consumes a quantity of root food he is liable to become
dependent in respect of his experiences as soul and spirit; because
something objective and external works through him, his brain and
nervous system surrender their own independence. And so if he wants
it to be more himself who works in him, then he must diminish his
consumption of roots. I am not, my dear friends, giving suggestions
for any particular diet, I am merely informing you about facts of
nature. And I warn you expressly not to set out to follow what I have
said without further knowledge. Not every person is so far advanced
as to be able to dispense with receiving the power of thought from
something outside himself; and it may very easily happen that a man
who is not ripe to leave it to his own soul-life to provide him with
the power of thinking and feeling — it can easily happen that
if such a man avoids eating roots he will fall into a sleepy
condition, because his soul and spirit are not yet strong enough to
evolve in themselves out of the spiritual those forces which are
otherwise evolved in man quite objectively, and independently of his
soul and spirit. The question of diet is always an individual
question and depends entirely upon the whole manner and condition of
the development of the person in question.
Again, what lives in the leaves
of plants has a similar connection with the lungs of man, with all
that belongs to the system of the lungs. Here we may find an
indication of how a balance can be created, for example, in a person
whose breathing system, owing to inherited tendencies or to some
other condition, works too powerfully. It would be well in such a
case to recommend the person not to eat much of what comes from the
leaves of plants. There may be another person whose breathing system
requires strengthening, and then we shall do well to advise him to
eat freely of such food as comes from leaves. These things have their
close connection also with the healing forces that are in the world
in the several kingdoms of nature, for those parts of the individual
plants which have a definite relationship to man's organs
contain forces of healing for those regions of man's organism.
Thus, roots contain great forces of healing for the nervous system,
and leaves for the lung system.
The flowers of plants contain
many healing forces for the kidney system, and seeds in a particular
way for the heart, but only when the heart sets itself too strongly
in opposition to the circulation of the blood. If the heart yields
too easily to the circulation, then it is rather to the forces that
are in the fruits, i.e. in the ripened seeds, that we must
turn. These are some of the indications that result when we take into
consideration that the moment we pass from man to surrounding nature
all that presents itself to our senses in the world of nature is
actually only the surface.
Summary: |
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Roots
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— Brain.
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Leaves
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— Lungs.
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Flowers
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— Kidneys.
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Seeds
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— Heart.
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Fruits
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— Blood system.
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In the plants, what belongs to
the world of the senses is only on the surface. Behind what reveals
itself to sight and taste and smell are the soul-and-spirit forces of
the plant. But these soul-and-spirit forces are not present in such a
way that we could speak of each single plant as ensouled, in the same
way that each single human being is ensouled. That is not the case.
Whoever were to imagine it would be giving himself up to the same
delusion as a man who thought that a single hair or the tip of the
ear, or, let us say, a nose or a tooth, were ensouled. The whole
human being is ensouled in his totality, and we only learn to look
into the soul nature of man when we pass from the parts to the whole.
And we must do the same in the case of every living thing. We must
take care to observe it spiritually and see whether it is a part or
in some sense a whole. All the various plants of the earth are by no
means a whole for themselves; they are parts, they are members of a
whole. And as a matter of fact we are only speaking of a reality when
we speak of that to which the several plants belong, as parts belong
to a whole. In the case of man we can see at once to what his teeth,
his ears, his fingers belong; physically they belong to the whole
organism. In the case of the plants we do not see with the eye that
to which the single plant belongs, we cannot perceive it with a
physical organ at all, for the moment we reach the whole we come into
the realm of the spirit. The truth about the soul nature of the plant
world is that it has the plants for its individual organs. There are,
as a matter of fact, for our whole earth only a few beings who are,
so to say, collected together in the earth and have as their single
parts the plants, just as man has the hairs on his body.
We can, if we wish, refer to
these beings as the group souls of the plants. We can say, when we go
beyond what our senses can behold of the plant, that we come to the
group souls of the plants, which are related to the single plant as a
whole to a part. Altogether there are seven group souls — plant
souls — belonging to the earth, and having in a way the centre
of their being in the centre of the earth. So that it is not enough
to conceive of the earth as this physical ball, but we have to think
of it as penetrated by seven spheres varying in size and all having
in the earth's centre their own spiritual centre. And then
these spiritual beings impel the plants out of the earth. The root
grows towards the centre of the earth, because what it really wants
is to reach the centre of the earth, and it is only prevented from
pushing right through by all the rest of the earth matter which
stands in its way. Every plant root strives to penetrate to the
centre of the earth, where is the centre of the spiritual being to
which the plant belongs.
| Diagram 10 Click image for large view | |
You see how extraordinarily
important is the principle we laid down — to go always to the
whole in the case of every being or creature, to see first whether it
is a part or a whole. There are scientists in our days who look upon
the plants as ensouled, but they look upon the individual plant in
this way. That is no cleverer than if we were to call a tooth a man;
both stand at the same mental level. Many people are ready to think,
when they hear views like this put forward, that they are quite
theosophical, just because the plants are regarded as having soul;
but really all such talk on the part of science has no value at all
for the future, the books are so much waste paper. To look for
individual souls in the separate plants is to say: I will extract a
tooth from a human being and look in it for a human soul. The plant
soul is not to be found in the single plant but has its most
important point in the centre of the earth, whither the root tends,
for the root is that force in the plant which strives ever towards
the most spiritual part of plant existence.
When we are considering a theme
such as this we shall find, my dear friends, that we come across
statements made from the standpoint of the present-day view of nature
which can bring us near to the gateway of truth, but only to the same
degree as Mephistopheles can bring Faust into the realm of the
Mothers — namely, just to the outermost door and no further.
For as little as Mephistopheles can go down with Faust into the realm
of the Mothers, so little can present-day natural science enter into
the spiritual. But as in a certain sense Mephistopheles gives the
key, so does natural science. Natural science gives the key, but it
does not want to enter itself, even as Mephistopheles does not want
to enter himself into the realm of the Mothers. It is true in a sense
that natural science gives us clues which, if we have acquired the
mode of knowledge described in these lectures, can often bring our
knowledge to the gateway of truth.
Natural science to-day,
following the impulse of Darwin, has drawn — from observation
of the world of the senses alone — an important conclusion;
natural science speaks of the principle of the so-called “struggle
for existence.” Who is not ready to see this struggle for
existence all around him as long as he takes cognizance only of what
the external world of the senses affords? Why, we meet with it at
every turn. Think of the innumerable eggs laid by the creatures of
the sea, how many are destroyed and perish, and how few actually grow
up and become new creatures. There you have, apparently, a fearful
struggle for existence. One could well begin to lament over it if one
listened only to the world of the senses, and say: of the millions
and billions of eggs so many, so very many, go under in the struggle
for existence and so few survive. But this is only one side of a
thought, my dear friends. Take hold now of the same thought at
another end! In order to bring your thinking on in a certain
direction, let me ask you to grasp the same thought at another point.
You can also lament in a similar way over the struggle for existence
in another connection. You can cast your eyes over a field of corn
where so-and-so many ears are standing, each holding so-and-so many
grains of corn, and you can ask the question: How many of these
grains of corn are lost in some way or other and never fulfil their
true purpose; and how few of them are planted again in the earth that
they may become new plants of the same kind as the old ones? We can
thus look over a field of corn that is promising a rich and plenteous
harvest and say to ourselves: How much of all that sprouting life
will perish without having attained its goal! Only a very few grains
will be buried in the earth for new plants of the same kind to arise.
Here again we have an instance, only in a rather different sphere
from that of the sea-creatures, where also only a very few come to
fulfilment.
But
now let me ask you what would become of the human beings, who must
eat something, if every single grain of corn were buried again in the
earth? Let us suppose that it were possible — theoretically we
can suppose anything — for such an abundant growth to take
place that every single grain of corn could come up again; but we
must also think of what would happen to the beings who have to find
their nourishment from corn. Here we come to a strange pass; a belief
that might appear justified when we look at the world of the senses
is shaken. When we look at a field of corn in respect of its own
physical existence we might seem quite justified in concluding that
every single grain should grow into a whole plant. And yet the
standpoint is perhaps false. Perhaps in the whole connection of
things in the world we are not thinking correctly when we ascribe to
each single grain of corn this aim and object, namely to grow into a
whole plant. Perhaps there is nothing to justify us in saying that
the grains of corn which serve other beings for food have somehow
failed in their cosmic aim. Perhaps there is nothing that compels us
to say that the eggs of the creatures of the sea have failed in their
aim when they have not grown into fishes. It is in reality no more
than human prejudice to suppose that every single seed ought to
become again the same being. For we can only measure the tasks of the
individual beings when we turn our eyes to the whole. And all the
eggs that perish by the million in the sea every year, and do not
grow into fish, provide food for other beings who are only not yet
accessible to man's vision. And in very truth those spiritual
substances which struggle their way through to existence and become
the countless eggs of the sea that are apparently lost — they
do not lament that they have missed their goal; for their goal is to
be nourishment for other beings, to be received up into the very
being of these other beings. Man stands outside with his intellect
and imagines that only that has meaning which strives towards the
goal which he, through his senses, is bound to see as the ultimate
goal. But if we look at nature without prejudice and with an open
mind we shall see in every single stage of every single being a
certain perfection and fulfilment, and such perfection does not rest
only in that which the being will eventually become, but is contained
already in what it is.
These are some of the thoughts,
acquired in occultism, which must take root in your heart and minds.
And if you now turn away from the external world and look into your
own soul you will observe that you have there in your soul a rich
store of thoughts. Thoughts are perpetually streaming into your soul,
perpetually lighting up within it; and only a very few of these
thoughts are clearly grasped, only a very few become a conscious part
of the human soul. When you go for a walk in the town, reflect how
much enters your soul by way of your senses, and yet how little you
observe in such a way that it becomes a permanent part of your
soul-life. You are continually receiving impressions, and the sum of
all the impressions you receive is related to the portion of them
which becomes a permanent conscious possession of your soul as the
great mass of fish spawn in the sea that is brought into being year
by year is related to the proportion of it that actually grows into
fish. You, as well, have to be forever going through this same
process in your own soul, the process of bringing, over a vast
region, only a very small quantity to fulfilment. And when man begins
to lift the veil a little and gain some vision of the great flood of
pictures of fantasy and of thought out of which he emerges when he
emerges from sleep — the dream affords for many persons a last
trace of the immeasurably rich life man leads in sleep — then
he can come to realise that there is meaning in the fact that
he receives so many impressions that do not come to clear
consciousness. For the impressions that actually come to clear
consciousness are lost to the inner work of man, they cannot work
upon the system of the sense organs, nor the system of the glandular
organs, nor the system of digestion, neither can they work upon the
systems of nerves, muscles and bones. That which becomes conscious in
the soul, and which present-day man carries in him as his conscious
inner soul-content, has no more power to work upon the organism; its
characteristic is that it is torn loose from the mother earth of the
whole human being and thus comes into his consciousness. All the rest
of the soul-content — which bears the same relation to these
conscious thoughts and ideas as the many eggs do to the few that
become fish — all the countless impressions that come into our
soul from without and do not come into consciousness, work upon the
whole human being.
Everything in his environment
works continually upon man in his totality. The dream can sometimes
teach you how far what lives on in your soul as conscious idea, how
very far that is from being all that enters your soul; many other
impressions are entering your soul all the time. You have only to
give attention to such things and you will find they occur constantly
in life. You dream of some situation. Perhaps you dream you are
standing opposite a man who is talking with another man. You are
standing there and making a third. In your dream you have a clear and
exact picture of the countenance of the man opposite you. You say to
yourself: “How do I come to have such a dream? It gives the
impression of being concerned with people I know in physical life, it
seems to relate itself to physical life. But where does it come from?
I have never heard or seen this person.” And now you pursue it
further; and when you examine carefully you find that a few days ago
you were opposite this person in a railway carriage, only the whole
experience passed by you without your consciousness being awakened.
In spite of that, however, it entered deeply into your life. It is
only owing to inexactitude of observation that people as a rule know
nothing about these things.
The conceptions that dreams
bring before us in this way are by no means the most important of the
impressions that work upon the soul. The most important are quite
other impressions. Think for a moment, my dear friends, how the
process I described to you yesterday has been continually happening
all the time in the evolution of humanity. By means of his bony
system man has been continually producing Imaginations, by means of
his muscular system he has been sending into the world Inspirations,
and by means of his nervous system Intuitions. All these are now
there in the world. The outstreamings that are evil, each man must
himself receive back again and carry away through his destiny. But
the rest builds up and takes form and is perpetually there in man's
environment. In very deed all the Imaginations and Inspirations and
Intuitions that man has given out into the earth world, even only
since the Atlantean catastrophe, are present and are part of our
environment. The good things man has given out — these the
individual men do not need to take back again in the course of their
Karma; but what they have sent out into the spiritual atmosphere of
the earth all through the centuries of the successive epochs is
actually present for the men who are now living on earth, just as
much as the air is present for physical man. As man breathes physical
air, as the air from his environment enters right inside him, so do
the Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions that have been
developed penetrate into man, and man partakes of them with his soul
and spirit. And now it is important that man should develop a real
relation to all this in his environment, that he should not meet what
he has himself imparted to the earth in earlier epochs of its
existence as if it were strange to him, as if he were unconnected
with it. He can, however, only become connected with this spiritual
content he has given to the earth when he gradually acquires the
power to receive it into his soul.
How can this come about? When we
come to make a deep study of the spiritual meaning of earth evolution
we discover that in the time when post-Atlantean man had still
something left of ancient clairvoyance, Imaginations, Inspirations
and Intuitions were communicated in great abundance to the spiritual
atmosphere of the earth. That was a time when spiritual substance was
given forth in large measure. Since the fourth post-Atlantean epoch,
and especially from the present day onwards, we gradually send out
less and less; what falls rather to us is to receive the old
substance, for it is something with which we are intimately
connected; we have the task to take up again into ourselves what has
been sent out. That means it is required of man to replace an earlier
spiritual outbreathing by a spiritual inbreathing. Man must grow ever
more sensitive and receptive to the spiritual that is in the world.
In ancient times that was not so necessary, for men of those olden
times were able to put forth from them spiritual substance, they had,
so to speak, a reserve store. But this reserve of spiritual substance
has been so deeply drawn upon since the fourth post-Atlantean epoch
that in future man will, in a sense, only be able to send out what he
has first absorbed, what he has first inbreathed. In order that man
may be able to take his place with full understanding in this new
task in earth existence — to this end is Anthroposophy or
Spiritual Science there in the world. When a man feels drawn to
Anthroposophy it is not just that it takes his fancy as one among
many other things in the world that take his fancy. He is drawn to
Anthroposophy because it is intimately and deeply bound up with the
whole of earth evolution, intimately bound up with the task that lies
immediately before man to-day in evolution, namely to develop
understanding for the spiritual all around him. For from the present
time onwards it will be the case that those who do not develop
understanding for the spirit behind the senses, for the world of the
spirit behind the world of the senses, will be like men whose
breathing system is so injured that they cannot take in air and they
suffer from difficulty in breathing. To-day we still have left in our
ideas a certain inheritance from primeval human wisdom, and we feed
upon these old ideas. If, however, we are able to observe the
evolution of mankind in modern times with the eye of the spirit we
shall perceive that while discoveries abound in the field of the
material and external, in the spiritual a kind of exhaustion shows
itself, a strange poverty of spiritual content. New ideas, new
concepts, arise less and less among mankind. It is only those who do
not know of ancient concepts and who are always rediscovering the old
for themselves — that is to say, their whole life long remain
in a sense immature — who can imagine that it is possible for
ideas to develop and mature in these days. No, the world of abstract
ideas, the world of intellectual ideas is exhausted. There are no
more new ideas springing up. The time of Thales marks the rise of
intellectual ideas for Western thought. And now we stand at a kind of
end; and philosophy as such, philosophy as a science of ideas, is at
an end. Ideas and thoughts belong only to the physical plane, and man
must learn to lift himself up to what lies beyond ideas and thought,
that is, beyond the world of the physical plane. To begin with he will
lift himself up to Imaginations. Imaginations will again become for him
something real and actual. That will bring about a new fructification
of the spiritual in mankind. That is why, my dear friends,
Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science gives Imaginations of great and
mighty world processes. Note how different from everything else of
its kind is the description given of Saturn, Sun and Moon. Compare it
with the abstract concepts of natural science. Everything in
Spiritual Science has to be given in pictures, it has to be presented
in such a way that it is not directly realisable in the external
world of the senses. We say of Old Saturn that it had a condition of
warmth, of warmth alone. That is sheer nonsense for the present-day
world of the senses; for the world of the senses knows nothing of
warmth substance as such. But what is nonsense for the world of the
senses is truth for the world of the spirit, and the next step
required of man in the near future is to live his way into the world
of the spirit. Those who will not resolve to breathe the air of the
spirit — and Spiritual Science has come into the world to make
the soul of man susceptible to the air of the spirit — those
who do not want to make themselves responsive to Spiritual Science
will actually approach a condition of spiritual shortness of breath
and spiritual exhaustion. One can already see many persons
approaching this condition, and it leads on to a spiritual wasting
and decline, to an actual “consumption” of the spirit.
Such would be the lot of men on
earth if they wanted to stop short at the world of the senses. They
would go into a spiritual decline. In the future development of
civilisation there will be men full of sensitiveness for the
spiritual, full of heart for all that Spiritual Science will give,
and for the world of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition as it
springs up spontaneously in the souls of men. So will it be for a
part of humanity: they will have understanding and devotion for this
world of the spirit. And it will be these men who will fulfil the
task that is set before the earth in the near future. Others perhaps
will be content with the world of the senses, not wanting to go
beyond it, not wanting to go beyond that shadow picture which the
conceptions of philosophy and of natural science afford. Such people
are moving in the direction of spiritual shortness of breath,
spiritual consumption, spiritual sickness and disease. They will
become dried up in earth existence and not attain the goal that has
been set for earth evolution. Evolution goes on, however, in such a
way that each one is compelled to ask himself the question: Which way
will you choose? In the future men will stand, as it were, on two
paths, to the right and to the left. On one path will be those for
whom the world of the senses alone is true, and on the other will be
those for whom the world of the spiritual is the truth.
And since the senses, such as
the ear, for example, will disappear, since at the end of the earth
all the senses that belong to the earth will have completely
disappeared, we can form some idea of what that consumption and
wasting away will be like. If we abandon ourselves to the world of
the senses we abandon ourselves to something which abandons man in
the future of earth evolution. If we press through to the world of
the spirit we develop ourselves in the direction of something that
wills to come nearer and nearer to man in the future of earth
evolution. If we want to express it in a symbol we may say that it is
possible for man to stand there at the end of the earth evolution and
to speak as Faust did when he had been blinded physically —
(for man will be not only blinded to the world around him but deaf to
it in addition, he will stand there blind and deaf and deprived of
taste and smell) — he will be able to say with Faust: “But
in my inmost spirit all is light — yes, and all is glorious
ringing tones and words of men!” Thus will the man be able to
speak who has turned to the world of the spirit. But the other, the
man who wanted to remain at the world of the senses would be like a
Faust who, after he was blinded, would be compelled to say: “Blind
hast thou become without, and within shines no light of the spirit,
darkness alone receives thee.”
Man has to choose between these
two Faust natures in his relation to the future of the earth. For the
first Faust would be one who had turned to the world of the spirit,
whilst the second would be one who had turned to the world of the
senses and had thereby become closely united with something of which
man must feel that it is unsubstantial and unreal, and moreover that
it robs him of his own reality and being. Thus does that appear which
we set out to discover and bring from occult heights — thus
does it appear, my dear friends, in its relation to the immediate
daily life of man. I think I need not spend words in pointing out
what moral principles and will impulses for present-day humanity can
proceed from a real understanding of occult science.
For out of a rightly understood wisdom will a rightly understood goodness
and virtue be born in the human heart. Let us strive after a real
understanding of world evolution, let us seek after wisdom — and
we shall find without fail that the child of wisdom will be love.
Printed
by C. F. Hodgson & Son, Ltd., 2 Newton St.,
London, W.C.2.
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