I
T
IS MORE than a year since I was able to speak here about those
things that lie so deeply on our hearts, those things that we believe
must enter more and more into human knowledge because, from our time
onward, the human soul will feel increasingly that these things
belong to its requirements, to its deepest longings. And it is with
great pleasure that I greet you here in this place for the second
time, along with all those who have traveled here in order to show in
your midst how their hearts and souls are dedicated to our sacred
work the whole world over.
When I was able to
speak to you here last time we let our spiritual gaze journey far
into the wide regions of the universe. This time it will be our task
to stay more in the regions of earthly evolution. Our thoughts,
however, will penetrate to regions that will lead us nonetheless to
the portals of the eternal manifestation of the spiritual in the
world. We shall speak about a subject that will apparently lead us
far away in time and in space from the here and now. It will not on
that account lead us less to what lives in the here and now, but
rather to what lives just as much in all times and in all the places
of the earth because it will bring us near to the secrets of the
eternal in all existence. It will lead us to the ceaseless search of
man for the wells of eternity where he may drink for the healing and
refreshment of something in him which, ever since they gained
understanding of it, men have considered all-powerful in life,
namely, love. For wherever we are gathered together we are
gathered in the name of the search for wisdom and the search for
love. What we seek is extended out into space and can be observed in
the far horizon of the Cosmic All, but it can also be observed in the
wrestling soul of man wherever he may be. It meets us especially when
we turn our gaze to one of those mighty manifestations of the
wrestling spirit of man such as are given us in some great work like
the one that is to form the basis of our present studies.
We are going to speak of one of the greatest and most penetrating
manifestations of the human spirit — the
Bhagavad Gita,
which, ancient as it is, yet in its foundations comes before us with
renewed significance at the present time. A short time ago the
peoples of Europe and those of the West generally, knew little of the
Bhagavad Gita.
Only during the last century has the fame of
this wonderful poem extended to the West. Only lately have Western
peoples become familiar with this marvelous song. But these lectures
of ours will show that a real and deep knowledge of this poem, as
against mere familiarity with it, can only come when its occult
foundations are more and more revealed. For what meets us in the
Bhagavad Gita
sprang from an age of which we have often spoken
in connection with our anthroposophical studies. The mighty
sentiments, feelings and ideas it contains had their origin in an age
that was still illumined by what was communicated through the old
human clairvoyance. One who tries to feel what this poem breathes
forth page by page as it speaks to us, will experence, page by page,
something like a breath of the ancient clairvoyance humanity
possessed.
The Western world's
first acquaintance with this poem came in an age in which there was
little understanding for the original clairvoyant sources from which
it sprang. Nevertheless, this lofty song of the Divine struck like a
wonderful flash of lightning into the Western world, so that a man
of Central Europe, when he first became acquainted with this Eastern
song, said that he must frankly consider himself happy to have lived
in a time when he could become acquainted with the wondrous things
expressed in it. This man was not one who was unacquainted with the
spiritual life of humanity through the centuries, indeed through
thousands of years. He was one who looked deeply into spiritual life
— Wilhelm von Humboldt, the brother of the celebrated
astronomer. Other members of Western civilization, men of widely
different tongues, have felt the same. What a wonderful feeling it
produces in us when we let this
Bhagavad Gita
work upon us, even in its opening verses!
It seems that in our
circle, my dear friends, perhaps particularly in our circle, we
often have to begin by working our way through to a fully
unprejudiced position. For in spite of the fact that the
Bhagavad Gita
has been known for so short a time in the West, yet its
holiness has so taken our hearts by storm, so to say, that we are
inclined to approach it from the start with this feeling of holiness
without making it clear to ourselves what the starting-point of the
poem really is. Let us for once place this before us quite
dispassionately, perhaps even a little grotesquely.
A poem is here before
us that from the very first sets us in the midst of a wild and
stormy battle. We are introduced to a scene of action that is hardly
less wild than that into which Homer straightway places us in the
Iliad. We go further and are confronted in this scene with
something which Arjuna — one of the foremost, perhaps the
foremost of the personalities in the Song — feels from the
start to be a fratricidal conflict. He comes before us as one who is
horror-stricken by the battle, for he sees there among the enemy his
own blood relations. His bow falls from his grasp when it becomes
clear to him that he is to enter a murderous strife with men who are
descended from the same ancestors as himself, men in whose veins
flows the same blood as his own. We almost begin to sympathize with
him when he drops his bow and recoils before the awful battle
between brothers.
Then before our gaze
arises Krishna, the great spiritual teacher of Arjuna, and a
wonderful, sublime teaching is brought before us in vivid colors in
such a way that it appears as a teaching given to his pupil. But to
what is all this leading? That is the question we must first of all
set before us, because it is not enough just to give ourselves up to
the holy teaching in the words of Krishna to Arjuna. The
circumstances of its giving must also be studied. We must visualize
the situation in which Krishna exhorts Arjuna not to quail before
this battle with his brothers but take up his bow and hurl himself
with all his might into the devastating conflict. Krishna's
teachings emerge amid the battle like a cloud of spiritual light
that at first is incomprehensible, and they require Arjuna not to
recoil but to stand firm and do his duty in it. When we bring this
picture before our eyes it is almost as though the teaching becomes
transformed by its setting. Then again this setting leads us further
into the, whole weaving of the Song of the Mahabharata, the
mighty song of which the
Bhagavad Gita
is only a part.
The teaching of
Krishna leads us out into the storms of everyday life, into the wild
confusion of human battles, errors and earthly strife. His teaching
appears almost like a justification of these human conflicts. If we bring
this picture before us quite dispassionately, perhaps the
Bhagavad Gita
will suggest to us altogether different questions from those that
arise when — imagining we can understand them — we
alight upon something similar to what we are accustomed to find in
ordinary works of literature. So it is perhaps necessary to point
first to this setting of the Gita in order to realize
its world-historic significance, and then be able to see how it can
be of increasing and special significance in our own time.
I have already said
that this majestic song came into the Western world as something
completely new, and almost equally new were the feelings,
perceptions and thoughts that lie behind it. For what did Western
civilization really know of Eastern culture before it became
acquainted with the
Bhagavad Gita?
Apart from various things
that have only become known in this last century, very little
indeed! If we accept certain movements that remained secret, Western
civilization has had no direct knowledge of what is actually the
central nerve impulse of the whole of this great poem. When we
approach such a thing we feel how little human language, philosophy,
ideas, serving for everyday life, are sufficient for it; how little
they suffice for describing such heights of the spiritual life of
man upon earth. We need something quite different from ordinary
descriptions to give expression to what shines out to us from such a
revelation of the spirit of man.
I should like first to
place two pictures before you so you may have a foundation for
further descriptions. The one is taken from the book itself, the
other from the spiritual life of the West. This can be comparatively
easily understood, whereas the one from the book appears for the
moment quite remote. Beginning then with the latter, we are told
how, in the midst of the battle, Krishna appears and unveils before
Arjuna cosmic secrets, great immense teachings. Then his pupil is
overcome by the strong desire to see the form, the spiritual form of
this soul, to have knowledge of him who is speaking such sublime
things. He begs Krishna to show himself to him in such manner as he
can in his true spirit form. Then Krishna appears to him (later we
shall return to this description) in his form — a form that
embraces all things, a great, sublime, glorious beauty, a nobility
that reveals cosmic mysteries. We shall see there is little in the
world to approach the glory of this description of how the sublime
spirit form of the teacher is revealed to the clairvoyant eye of his
pupil.
Before Arjuna's gaze
lies the wild battlefield where much blood will have to flow and
where the fratricidal struggle is to develop. The soul of Krishna's
disciple is to be wafted away from this battlefield of devastation.
It is to perceive and plunge into a world where Krishna lives in his
true form. That is a world of holiest blessedness, withdrawn from
all strife and conflict, a world where the secrets of existence are
unveiled, far removed from everyday affairs. Yet to that world man's
soul belongs in its most inward, most essential being. The soul is
now to have knowledge of it. Then it will have the possibility of
descending again and re-entering the confused and devastating
battles of this our world. In truth, as we follow the description of
this picture we may ask ourselves what is really taking place in
Arjuna's soul? It is as though the raging battle in which it stands
were forced upon it because this soul feels itself related to a
heavenly world in which there is no human suffering, no battle, no
death. It longs to rise into a world of the eternal, but with the
inevitable force that can come only from the impulse of so sublime a
being as Krishna, this soul must be forced downward into the chaotic
confusion of the battle. Arjuna would gladly turn away from all this chaos,
for the life of earth around him appears as something strange and
far away, altogether unrelated to his soul. We can distinctly feel
this soul is still one of those who long for the higher worlds, who
would live with the Gods, and who feel human life as something
foreign and incomprehensible to them. In truth a wondrous picture,
containing things of sublime import!
A hero, Arjuna,
surrounded by other heroes and by the warrior hosts — a hero
who feels all that is spread before him as unfamiliar and remote —
and a God, Krishna, who is needed to direct him to this world. He
does not understand this world until Krishna makes it comprehensible
to him. It may sound paradoxical, but I know that those who can
enter into the matter more deeply will understand me when I say that
Arjuna stands there like a human soul to whom the earthly side of
the world has first to be made comprehensible.
Now this
Bhagavad Gita
comes to men of the West who undoubtedly have an
understanding for earthly things! It comes to men who have attained
such a high degree of materialistic civilization that they have a
very good understanding for all that is earthly. It has to be
understood by souls who are separated by a deep gulf from all that a
genuine observation shows Arjuna's soul to be. All that to which
Arjuna shows no inclination, needing Krishna to tame him down to
earthly things, seems to the Westerner quite intelligible and
obvious. The difficulty for him lies rather in being able to lift
himself up to Arjuna, to whom has to be imparted an understanding of
what is well understood in the West, the sense matters of earthly
life. A God, Krishna, must make our civilization and culture
intelligible to Arjuna. How easy it is in our time for a person to
understand what surrounds him! He needs no Krishna. It is well for
once to see clearly the mighty gulfs that can lie between different
human natures, and not to think it too easy for a Western soul to
understand a nature like that of Krishna or Arjuna. Arjuna is a man,
but utterly different from those who have slowly and gradually
evolved in Western civilization.
That is one picture I
wanted to bring you, for words cannot lead us more than a very
little way into these things. Pictures that we can grasp with our
souls can do better because they speak not only to understanding but
to that in us which on earth will always be deeper than our
understanding — to our power of perception and to our feeling.
Now I would like to place another picture before you, one not less
sublime than that from the
Bhagavad Gita
but that stands infinitely nearer to Western culture. Here in the West we
have a beautiful, poetic picture that Western man knows and that means much
for him. But first let us ask, to what extent does Western mankind
really believe that this being of Krishna once appeared before
Arjuna and spoke those words? We are now at the starting-point of a
concept of the world that will lead us on until this is no mere
matter of belief, but of knowledge. We are however only at the
beginning of this anthroposophical concept of the world that will
lead us to knowledge. The second picture is much nearer to us. It
contains something to which Western civilization can respond.
We look back some five
centuries before the founding of Christianity to a soul whom one of
the greatest spirits of Western lands made the central figure of all
his thought and writing. We look back to Socrates. We look to him in
the spirit in the hour of his death, even as Plato describes him in
the circle of his disciples in the famous discourse on
the immortality of the soul. In this picture there are but slight
indications of the beyond, represented in the “daimon”
who speaks to Socrates.
Now let him stand
before us in the hours that preceded his entrance into the spiritual
worlds. There he is, surrounded by his disciples, and in the face of
death he speaks to them of the immortality of the soul. Many people
read this wonderful discourse that Plato has given us in order to
describe the scene of his dying teacher. But people in these days
read only words, only concepts and ideas. There are even those —
I do not mean to censure them — in whom this wonderful scene
of Plato arouses questions as to the logical justification of what
the dying Socrates sets forth to his disciples. They cannot feel
there is something more for the human soul, that something more
important lives there, of far greater significance than logical
proofs and scientific arguments. Let us imagine all that Socrates
says on immortality to be spoken by a man of great culture, depth
and refinement, in the circle of his pupils, but in a different
situation from that of Socrates, under different circumstances. Even
if the words of this man were a hundred times more logically sound
than those of Socrates, in spite of all they will perhaps have a
hundred times less value. This will only be fully grasped when
people begin to understand that there is something for the human
soul of more value, even if less plausible, than the most strictly
correct logical demonstrations. If any highly educated and cultured
man speaks to his pupils on the immortality of the soul, it can
indeed have significance. But its significance is not revealed in
what he says — I know I am now saying something paradoxical
but it is true — its significance depends also on the fact
that the teacher, having spoken these words to his pupils, passes on
to look after the ordinary affairs of life, and his pupils do the
same. But Socrates speaks in the hour that immediately precedes his
passage through the gates of death. He gives out his teaching in a
moment when in the next instant his soul is to be severed from his
bodily form.
It is one thing to
speak about immortality to the pupils he is leaving behind in the
hour of his own death — which does not meet him unexpectedly
but as an event predetermined by destiny — and another thing
to return after such a discourse to the ordinary business of living.
It is not the words of Socrates that should work on us as much as
the situation under which he speaks them. Let us take all the power
of this scene, all that we receive from Socrates' conversation with
his pupils on immortality, the full immediate force of this picture.
What do we have before us? It is the world of everyday life in Greek
times; the world whose conflicts and struggles led to the result
that the best of the country's sons was condemned to drink the
hemlock. This noble Greek spoke these last words with the sole
intention of bringing the souls of the men around him to believe in
what they could no longer have knowledge; believe in what was for
them “a beyond,” a spiritual world. That it needs a
Socrates to lead the earthly souls until they gain an outlook into
the spiritual worlds, that it needs him to do this by means of the
strongest proofs, that is, by his deed, is something that is
indeed comprehensible to Western souls. They can gain an
understanding for the Socratic culture. We only grasp Western
civilization in a right sense when we recognize that in this respect
it has been a Socratic civilization throughout the centuries.
Now let us think of
one of the pupils of Socrates who could certainly have no doubt of
the reality of all that surrounded him, being a Greek, and compare
him with Krishna's disciple Arjuna. Think how the Greek has to be
introduced to the super-sensible world, and then think of Arjuna who can
have no doubt whatever about it but becomes confused instead with the
sense-world, almost doubting the possibility of its existence. I
know that history, philosophy and other branches of knowledge may
say with apparently good reason, “Yes, but if you will only
look at what is written in the
Bhagavad Gita,
and in Plato's
works, it is just as easy to prove the opposite of what you have
just said.” I know too that those who speak like this do not
want to feel the deeper impulses, the mighty impulses that arise on
the one hand from that picture out of the
Bhagavad Gita,
and on the other from that of the dying Socrates as described by Plato.
A deep gulf yawns between these two worlds In spite of all the
similarity that can be discovered. This is because the
Bhagavad Gita
marks the end of the age of the ancient clairvoyance. There
we can catch the last echo of it; while in the dying Socrates we
meet one of the first of those who through thousands of years have
wrestled with another kind of human knowledge, with those ideas,
thoughts and feelings that, so to say, were thrown off by the old
clairvoyance and have continued to evolve in the intervening time,
because they have to prepare the way for a new clairvoyance. Today
we are striving toward this new clairvoyance by giving out and
receiving what we call the anthroposophical conception of the world.
From a certain aspect we may say that no gulf is deeper than the one
that opens between Arjuna and a disciple of Socrates.
Now we are living in a
time when the souls of men, having gone through manifold
transformations and incarnations in the search for life in external
knowledge, are now once more seeking to make connection with the
spiritual worlds. The fact that you are sitting here is most living
proof that your own souls are seeking this reunion. You are seeking
the connection that will lead you up in a new way to those worlds so
wondrously revealed to us in the words of Krishna to his disciple
Arjuna. So there is much in the occult wisdom on which the
Bhagavad Gita
is founded that resounds to us as something responding to
our deepest longings. In ancient times the soul was well aware of
the bond that unites it with the spiritual. It was at home in the
super-sensible. We now are at the beginning of an age wherein men's
souls will once more seek access in a new way to the spiritual
worlds. We must feel ourselves stimulated to this search when we
think of how we once had this access that it once was there for man.
Indeed, we shall find it to an unusual degree in the revelations of
the holy song of the East.
As is generally the
case with the great works of man, we find the opening words of the
Bhagavad Gita
full of meaning. (Are not the opening words of
the Iliad and the Odyssey most significant?) The story
is told by his charioteer to the blind king, the chief of the Kurus
who are engaged in fratricidal battle with the Pandavas. A blind
chieftain! This already seems symbolical. Men of ancient times had
vision into the spiritual worlds. With their whole heart and soul
they lived in connection with Gods and Divine Beings. Everything
that surrounded them in the earthly sphere was to them in unceasing
connection with divine existence. Then came another age, and just as
Greek legend depicts Homer as a blind man, so the Gita tells
us of the blind chief of the Kurus. It is to him that the discourses
of Krishna are narrated in which he instructs Arjuna concerning what
goes on in the world of the senses. He must even be told of those
things of the sense-world that are projections into it from the
spiritual. There is a deeply significant symbol in the fact that old
men who looked back with perfect memory and a perfect spiritual
connection into a primeval past, were blind to the world
immediately around them. They were seers in the spirit, seers in the
soul. They could experience as though in lofty pictures all that
lived as spiritual mysteries. Those who were to understand the
events of the world in their spiritual connections were pictured to
us in the old songs and legends as blind. Thus we find this same
symbol in the Greek singer Homer as in that figure that meets us at
the beginning of the
Bhagavad Gita.
This introduces us to the
age of transition from primeval humanity to that of the present day.
Now why is Arjuna so
deeply moved by the impending battle of the brothers? We know that
the old clairvoyance was in a sense bound up with external blood
relationship. The flowing of the same blood in the veins of a number
of people was rightly looked upon as something sacred in ancient
times because with it was connected the ancient perception of a
particular group-soul. Those who not only felt but knew their
blood-relationship to one another did not yet have such an ego as
lives in men of the present time. Wherever we look in those ancient
times we find everywhere groups of people who did not at all feel
themselves as having an individual “I” as man does
today. Each felt his identity only in the group, in a
community based upon the blood-bond.
What does the
folk-soul, the nation-soul, signify to a man today? Certainly it is
often an object of the greatest enthusiasm. Yet we may say that,
compared with the individual “I” of a man, this
nation-soul does not really count. This may be a hard saying but it
is true. Once upon a time man did not say “I” to himself
but to his tribal or racial group. This group-soul feeling
was still living in Arjuna when he saw the fratricidal battle raging
around him. That is the reason why the battle that raged about him
filled him with such horror.
Let us enter the soul
of Arjuna and feel the horror that lived in him when he realized how
those who belonged together are about to murder each other. He felt
what lived in all the souls at that time and is about to kill
itself. He felt as a soul would feel if its body, which is its
very own, were being torn in pieces. He felt as though the members
of one body were in conflict, the heart with the head, the left hand
with the right. Think how Arjuna's soul confronted the impending
battle as a battle against its own body, when, in the moment he
drops his bow, the conflict of the kinsmen seems to him a conflict
between a man's right hand and his left. Then you will feel the
atmosphere of the opening verses of the
Bhagavad Gita.
When Arjuna is in this
mood he is met by the great teacher Krishna. Here we must call
attention to the incomparable art with which Krishna is pictured in
this scene: The holy God, who stands there teaching Arjuna what man
shall and will discard if he would take the right direction in his
evolution. Of what does Krishna speak? Of I, and I,
and I, and always only of I. “I am in the earth,
I am in the water, I am in the air, I am in the fire, in all souls,
in all manifestations of life, even in the holy Aum. I am the wind
that blows through the forests. I am the greatest of the mountains,
of the rivers. I am the greatest among men. I am all that is best in
the old seer Kapila.” Truly Krishna says nothing less than
this, “I recognize nothing else than myself, and I admit the
world's existence only in so far as it is I!” Nothing
else than I speaks from out the teaching of Krishna.
Let
us once [and] for all see quite plainly how Arjuna stands there as
one not yet understanding himself as an ego but who now has to do so.
How the God confronts him like an all-embracing cosmic egoist,
admitting of nothing but himself, even requiring others to admit of
nothing but themselves, each one an “I.” Yes, in all that
is in earth, water, fire or air, in all that lives upon the earth, in
the three worlds, we are to see nothing but Krishna.
It is full of significance
for us that one who cannot yet grasp the ego is brought for his instruction
before a Being who demands to be recognized only as his own Self. Let him
who wants to see this in the light of truth read the
Bhagavad Gita
through and try to answer the question,
“How can we designate what Krishna says of himself and for
which he demands recognition?” It is universal egoism
that speaks in Krishna. It does indeed seem to us as though through
the whole of the sublime Gita this refrain resounds to our
spiritual hearing, “Only when you recognize, you men, my
all-embracing egoism, only then can salvation be for you!”
The greatest
achievements of human spiritual life always set us riddles. We only
see them in the right light when we recognize that they set us the
very greatest riddles. Truly, a hard one seems to be given us when we
are now confronted with the task of understanding how a most sublime
teaching can be bound up with the announcement of universal egoism.
It is not through logic but in the perception of the great
contradictions in life that the occult mysteries unveil themselves to
us. It will be our task to get beyond what seems so strange and come
to the truth within the Maya.
When we are speaking
within Maya we must recognize what it really is that we may rightly
call a universal egoism. Through this very riddle we must reach out
from illusion into reality, into the light of truth. How this is
possible, and how we may surmount this riddle and reach reality, will
form the subject of the following lectures.
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