III
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THE last lecture I was trying to show you how the thinking of
the present day, which tends to the formation of abstract concepts,
is not really a gift of the outer physical world but a gift of the
spiritual world. I tried to show you how at bottom this abstract
thinking enters man's soul in exactly the same way as the revelations
of the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies. The point then is this, that
in our most ordinary life we really have something in us that is
already of like nature to clairvoyant perception. Now we have
something else in us as well, which is even more akin to clairvoyant
perception even though in a more hidden way. I mean that
consciousness that appears between our ordinary waking state and our
sleeping — our dream consciousness. We cannot become familiar
in a practical way with the ascent of the soul into higher worlds
without trying to get a clear idea of the peculiar life that the soul
leads in the twilight consciousness of dreaming. What now is a dream
in reality?
Let us begin by
considering the dream pictures we have around or before us, which in
general are more fleeting, less sharply outlined than the perceptions
of ordinary life. These pictures seem to flit past our souls. When,
afterward, we come to analyze them objectively we can be struck
by the fact that in most cases they have some kind of
connection with our life on the physical plane. Of course, there are
people who are only too ready to see something high and wonderful in
their dreams, or to interpret them at once as revelations of higher
worlds. There are those who really believe that a dream has given
them something altogether new, something that has never been there
before. In most cases we shall be mistaken in interpreting our dreams
in such a way. In our careless haste we fail to recognize how, after
all, some experience or other we have had on the physical plane more
or less recently, or perhaps even many years ago, has reappeared in
the changing, weaving pictures of our dreams. For this very reason it
is quite easy for the materialistic science of our age to reject the
idea that there is anything remarkable in the revelations of our
dreams, and instead point out that dreams are simply copies or
reflections of what has been experienced in external life. If you are
acquainted with the present-day science of dreams you will realize
that it is always at pains to prove that a dream contains nothing
more than the reflections of the physical world that the brain
carries in itself. It must be admitted that such an attitude can
easily reject any higher significance in our dream life, showing that
the higher revelations many people claim to have are pictures
characteristic of the age in which they live, pictures that could not
have been seen at all in any other age. So, for example, people today
often dream in images derived from inventions and discoveries only
made in the nineteenth century. It of course is easily proved that
images derived from external life steal their way into the
ever-changing play of dreams.
A person who would gain
a clear idea of his dream experiences, learning something from them
to help him in entering the occult worlds, must therefore be
exceedingly careful in this realm. He must make a habit of carefully
following out all the hidden connections. If he does so, he will
realize that most of his dreams give him no more than he has already
experienced in the outer world. But it is just when we become more
careful in analyzing our dream life — and every aspiring
occultist should do so — that we shall gradually begin to
notice how one thing or another wells up before us that we could not
possibly have experienced in our external life during this
incarnation. One who follows such indications as are given in my book
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment
will notice
that his dream-life gradually begins to change. His dreams do
actually begin to assume a different character. One of the first
experiences he can have may be the following.
Perhaps he has been
thinking for a long time about some perplexing problem and has at
last concluded that his understanding is not yet equal to solving it,
nor is all that he has been able to learn from external sources
adequate for solving it. Now it will not generally happen that he is
immediately conscious of having a dream in which this problem is
solved for him. Even so he will be able to have a certain higher
consciousness at a comparatively early stage. As if awaking from a
dream he will seem to remember something. He can say to
himself, “I have not been dreaming about this problem, nor was
I conscious of a dream I have had before. Yet a kind of memory is
arising in me. It is as though some being had come near to me who
solved this problem for me by giving or suggesting a solution.”
One who gradually
widens his consciousness by following the indications I have given
will have this experience fairly easily. He will recall something he
has lived through as though in a dream, and will know that at the
time he was not aware of experiencing it. Such an experience will
seem to shine upward from the depths of his soul and he will say to
himself, “When I was not there with my intelligence, my
cleverness, when I was protecting my soul from the suggestions of my
intellect, then my soul had greater power. My soul could come freely
in touch with the solution of the problem, before which I was
powerless with my intellect and understanding.”
No doubt scientists
will often find it easy here too to give a materialistic explanation
for such an experience. But one who has had it knows full well that
what has appeared to him, emerging like the recollection of a dream
experience, reveals something quite different from a mere
reminiscence of ordinary life. The whole mood of his soul afterward
tells him he has never had such an experience before. It brings him
into a wonderful feeling of bliss and elation to realize that in the
depths of his soul something more is active than is present in his
ordinary consciousness. This recognition can become still more
distinct, and it happens in the following way.
If we carry out
energetically the exercises given in my book
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment,
and if we continue to do so for
a long time — even perhaps for several decades — then an
experience may arise in our soul quite similar to what I have just
been describing. For example, one which is mixed up with the
recollection of an experience in everyday life we had years ago,
perhaps a most disagreeable experience that we felt as a hard blow of
fate and could never recall without pain and bitterness. Now
something like the memory of a dream arises in our consciousness but
it is a strange dream. It tells us that feelings live within us that
drew this bitter experience to us with irresistible force and
welcomed it gladly. Something lives in us that felt a kind of delight
in bringing about all the circumstances that led up to this stroke of
fate. When we have had such a dream remembrance, we know full well
that while in our usual consciousness, which regulates our external
affairs, there has not been a single moment — not one in the
whole course of our present life — when we did not feel this
stroke of fate with bitter pain. Yet, deep down within us there is
something that stands in quite a different relation to this blow of
fate. It used all its power and magnetic force to draw together the
circumstances needed to bring about this misfortune. We did not know
it at the time. Now we notice that behind our everyday consciousness
another, deeper layer of our soul life was wisely at work.
If we have such an
experience — and we shall have them if we earnestly carry
through the exercises I have indicated — from then onward we
have an extended area of knowledge and conviction. In ordinary life
we feel ourselves in a certain relation to the outer world and the
events that come to us in the course of our destiny. We meet these
events with sympathy and antipathy. In the case mentioned this
particular blow of fate was felt as a bitter and hateful experience.
We did not know that all the time our soul had another wider life
that had longed to live through what we felt to be so unwelcome. This
feeling is quite different in its quality from any recollection out
of ordinary life, for in our innermost being we are very different
from what we imagine. It is just this difference that now becomes
evident in our soul. It enters in such a way that we know it has
brought us revelations from realms into which our everyday
consciousness cannot penetrate. It widens our whole concept of our
life of soul. We know then, by experience, that our soul-life
contains something far more than its content within the limits of
birth and death. If we do not penetrate into these deeper regions we
have no idea that beneath the threshold of consciousness we are quite
different beings from what we imagine ourselves to be in everyday
life. When a new, significant feeling thus arises, the horizon of
what we call our world expands into a new region. We realize why it
is that in ordinary life we can enter it only under certain
conditions.
In attempting to
describe to you what may be called the occult development of
dream-life, I have set before you two quite different conditions. Our
ordinary dream-life, that most people experience continually at the
border of sleeping and waking and that is nourished by images of
everyday life, and an altogether new world of inner life that can
arise on going through a certain training. We have the power to
plunge into the regions of dream-life in such a way as to find a new
world dawning upon us, one in which we have actual experiences of the
spiritual worlds. One condition must be fulfilled, however, if we
would have these new experiences between sleeping and waking during
the night. We must be able to exclude the recollections and images of
our ordinary life. So long as these interfere in this realm of
dreams, so long do they make themselves important in it and block the
way to real experiences of the higher worlds.
Why is it that the
images from our everyday life thrust so insistently into this higher
realm? Because, whether we confess it or not, we have the liveliest
interest in all that concerns our particular selves in the external
world. If some people imagine that they no longer take any special
interest in their life, that makes no difference at all. No one who
realizes how in this connection people can give themselves up to the
grossest illusions, will be misled by such imaginings. After all, man
is closely attached to the sympathies and antipathies of his
everyday life. If you really try to carry out the exercises I have
given for soul development you will soon realize that it all comes to
this, that you must detach your interest from your everyday life.
People carry out the directions given in
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment
in all sorts of ways. The book is read
by many different people, and for many different reasons, and one's
reason for looking into it will determine one's attitude to it. Thus,
someone begins reading perhaps with the most beautiful feelings of
how he may gain insight into the higher worlds. Then his curiosity is
aroused — and why indeed should we not be curious about this
realm! Curiosity often begins to stir even if one begins with the
most holy feelings. That will only carry through for a little while,
however, for all sorts of inner feelings begin coming in and make us
stop, so we give it up.
But these feelings that
we do not wish to recognize clearly, and generally interpret wrongly,
are just those connected with sympathies and antipathies. We have to
free ourselves from them in quite another way if we really mean to
carry out these exercises. In fact, we do not free ourselves from
them. That is why we stop doing the exercises. Though we say we want
to break free of them we do not do it, but when a person is really in
earnest about doing the exercises the effect they can have is seen
very soon. His sympathies and antipathies toward life change a
little. I must say this does not happen very often. When it does
happen the change is of very great significance because it
means we are struggling against the very forces that allow the images
from our everyday life to arise in our dreams. They can no longer
find their way in if we have come so far as to alter our sympathies
and antipathies in any sphere of life, no matter which.
This alteration in the
forces of sympathy need not occur in a high realm of life, but in
some domain it must be carried out, perhaps in the most
everyday affairs. There are people who say they do their exercises
every day, morning and evening, and for hours at a time, and cannot
go even one step into the spiritual worlds. Sometimes it is difficult
to explain to them how easily one can understand that. In many cases
they only need to realize this fact, that they are still grumbling
about the same things they were grumbling about twenty, even thirty
years ago, although they have been doing exercises all the time. The
very language of their grumbling is still the same.
Then there are those
who try to apply external means that can have certain effects in
occultism. For example, they become vegetarians. In spite of all
their endeavors to break away from a liking for meat, however, they
attain no results from continued exercises. They may ascribe it to
quite other reasons, thinking for instance that they need meat for
their body, their brain, and therefore return occasionally to the
flesh-pots of Egypt. Let us not imagine that it is an easy thing to
transform one's sympathies and antipathies. To quote a passage from
Faust, “Easy it is, yet is the easy hard.” This is an apt
expression of the situation of the evolving soul that is trying to
rise into higher worlds.
It is not a question of
changing this or that particular sympathy or antipathy but of
changing any whatsoever. If we do, then after certain
exercises we can enter the domain of dream life in such a way that we
bring nothing into it of our everyday sense experiences. Thereby in a
certain sense new experiences have room to enter. When, through an
occult development, we have really gone through such experiences in
practice, we become aware of a certain layer of consciousness present
in us that lies behind the everyday consciousness with which every
person is familiar. In ordinary life our dreams take place in this
second layer of consciousness, “dream-consciousness,” but
it only becomes such through our carrying into it what we experience
from our waking consciousness. If, however, we hold back all our
everyday experiences from this region then experiences from the
higher worlds can enter. These higher experiences are present in our
surrounding world here every day. When they first arise we begin to
realize that our everyday consciousness itself seems like a dream
compared to the reality of those experiences. We find that
reality only begins on that higher level.
Returning to the
example of suffering a blow of fate that subsequently caused such
bitter feelings, let us try to understand how one actually comes to
realize the beginning of higher consciousness. Along with this
bitterness we notice that there was something in us that sought out
this misfortune, even feeling the need of it for our development. Now
for the first time we realize in practice what karma is. We entered
this incarnation with an imperfection in our soul. We felt it deeply,
and thus were drawn by a magnetic power toward this blow of fate. By
fully experiencing it we have mastered and done away with the
imperfection. That is something real, and important. How superficial
then is everyday judgment in creating a feeling of antipathy toward
the misfortune. Here rather is the higher reality: Our soul goes
forward from one life to another. How short is the time in which it
can feel antipathy toward a blow of fate! When it looks out beyond
the horizon of this incarnation, it feels one thing only to be
necessary, to become ever more perfect. This feeling is stronger than
any we have in our ordinary consciousness. Ordinarily, if it had been
confronted previously by this blow of fate it would have slunk past
it like a coward, would not have chosen the compensating necessity.
But the deeper consciousness of which we know nothing does not do
this. Instead it seeks its destiny, and feels it as a process of
growth toward perfection. It says, “I entered into this life. I
was aware of an imperfection that has been in my soul since birth. If
I would develop my soul this imperfection must be remedied, but to do
this I must go on to meet this misfortune. I must seek it out.”
There we have the
stronger element in the soul, compared to which the web of ordinary
life with all its sympathies and antipathies is like a dream. There
beyond we enter into that life and feeling of which we can say, “It
knows us better, is stronger in us than our ordinary consciousness.”
Now we notice another
thing. If we really have the experience just described, if we do not
merely know it in theory but truly experience it, then of necessity
at the same time we have another experience. While we feel we can
already enter into those regions where everything is different from
what it is in ordinary consciousness, a feeling arises in us, “I
do not want to enter.” This feeling is very deep. As a rule the
curiosity that impels people to enter the spiritual worlds is not
nearly strong enough to overcome the feeling of revulsion that says,
“I will not enter.” The aversion we feel at this
particular stage arises with tremendous force, and all sorts of
misunderstandings about it are possible.
Suppose that someone
has even received personal instructions. He comes to his instructor
and says, “I cannot get on at all, your instructions are of no
use.” Indeed he may honestly think so. If the instructor gives
him the answer due him, however, he would not be able to understand
it at all. This answer is, “You can enter perfectly well but
you do not want to.” The pupil honestly believes he has the
will to enter because his reluctance remains hidden in his
subconsciousness. Indeed, the moment he begins to realize his
reluctance he lessens it. The idea that he does not want to enter
horrifies him so, he immediately begins to damp down his
unwillingness.
This reluctance is a
subtle and insidious thing. We feel that we cannot enter with the
ego, the self, that we have acquired in this world. If a person wants
to evolve to higher things he feels very strongly that he must leave
this self behind. That, however, is a difficult thing to do
because man would never have developed this self if he did not feel
in his daily consciousness that he has it in order to develop it
here. His ordinary ego has come into this world in order to evolve.
Thus, when man wants to enter the real world he feels he must leave
behind what he has been able to evolve in the ordinary world. Then
there is only one way. He must have developed this self more strongly
than he needs for his ordinary consciousness. As a rule he only
develops it as far as he needs it in his ordinary life.
Now if you observe the
second point in
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment,
you will find it amounts to this, that the self must be made stronger
than is necessary for the purposes of daily life. Only then are we
able to go out of our body at night and still retain something that
we have not used up. It is only when we have fortified our ordinary
self by our exercises, and have an excess of self-reliance in us that
we no longer want to shrink back from the higher worlds. But then a
new and considerable danger arises. We no longer perhaps bring the
recollections of ordinary life into our dreams but we bring something
else — our expanded and strengthened self-consciousness. It is
as though we filled that realm with it.
Anyone who carries
through such exercises as given in my book and thus comes to have
experiences like the inner soul experiences of Arjuna, enters the
realm of dream-life with an expanded, strengthened self. The result
is the same whether done by special training or whether we were
destined to expand it at a definite period in our life. Arjuna is in
this position. He stands at the boundary between the everyday world
and that of dreams. He lives his way into that higher region because
through his destiny he has a more powerful self in that realm than he
needs in his ordinary life. This point I shall have to elaborate
still further, showing why Arjuna has this more powerful
consciousness, because now, as soon as he penetrates into that realm,
Krishna at once receives him. Krishna lifts him out of the self he
has acquired in ordinary life, and thus he becomes a different man
from what he would have been if with his expanded self he had not met
Krishna. In that case he would certainly have said to himself, “Blood
relations are fighting against one another, events are taking place
that must ruin the ancient holy caste-distinctions and the service to
our ancestors — events that must corrupt our womankind, and
conditions that will prevent us from kindling the fires of sacrifice
to our forefathers.” All these things were part of Arjuna's
everyday consciousness. By his destiny he was torn out of it. He must
stand on ground where he has to break with all these accustomed
feelings connected with old traditions. Thus he would have to say to
himself, “Away with all I hold sacred; with all the traditions
that have been handed down to me. I will hurl myself into the
battle.” But that is not what happens. Krishna appears, and
utters what must appear to Arjuna as the most extreme
unscrupulousness, as egoism driven beyond all bounds. The excess of
force that Arjuna would otherwise have experienced, that he would
have used to live through his own life, Krishna uses as a power
whereby he makes himself visible to Arjuna. To make this thought
still more clear we may say that if Arjuna had simply met Krishna,
even though the latter had actually come to him, he would have known
nothing of him, just as we would know nothing of the sense-world if
we had not received something from the sense-world itself that formed
our senses for perceiving it. Similarly, Krishna must take from
Arjuna his expanded and strengthened consciousness. He must in a
sense tear his self out of him, and then by its help make himself
visible to Arjuna. He makes a mirror, we can say, of what he has torn
from Arjuna, so that he may be able to appear to him.
We have sought out what
in Arjuna's consciousness enabled Krishna to meet him. There still
remains unexplained how Arjuna came to it at all. Nowhere do we see
the statement that Arjuna had done occult exercises. In fact he had
not done any. How then is he able to meet Krishna? What was it that
gave Arjuna a higher and stronger self-consciousness? We shall start
from this question in the next lecture.
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