Lecture
VII
We
have talked during these lectures about the way the clairvoyant
consciousness ascends into super-sensible worlds, where the true being
of man, which is native there, can be thoroughly fathomed. And we
have tried in these last few days to show how the human soul,
crossing the threshold in its ascent, first passes through the
elemental realm and then enters the spiritual world. We showed, too,
how the soul meets with what we may call the other self of man.
The ascent could be described in the
following way. At first we have a human being living in the physical
body in the physical-sense world. When he sheds this physical
organism, he goes on living in the etheric body, with the elemental
world as his environment. (I have promised for tomorrow to clarify
things for those troubled by a sense of possible confusion between
the terms used here and in my book
Theosophy.)
When a person has shed his etheric body also, he ascends to the spirit world
itself and this then forms his environment during the time he is living in
his astral body, where he experiences his other self. We have
emphasized that we experience this other self, which continues from
incarnation to incarnation, in such a way that we feel almost as
though we — as a third entity — were confronting two
other entities. As a point-like being, we confront what we might call
our past, brought into the spirit world in the form of memory and
transformed into something spiritual by being brought there. And this
past of ours begins a conversation in the region where living
thought-beings converse. A spiritual conversation of this kind begins
when the soul, as though newborn, has to listen to its own past
conversing with the spiritual environment, thereby ripening and
growing as a living thought-being itself.
Now
a great many things can be observed in the process of growing into
these spiritual worlds. Let us take the case, for a better
understanding, of an ideally normal ascent into the spiritual world,
in other words, the ascent of a soul in a completely undisturbed
condition. Of course, hardly any such soul exists. That is exactly
the reason why I tried to describe the spiritual path as I did, not
just in general terms but dramatically as happens with every soul
that starts out from its own particular departure point, making an
ideally normal ascent out of the question.
Every soul has its own individual spiritual path.
( 17 )
This can naturally be demonstrated only by
showing how the individual ascent takes place, as, for example, in
the case of Maria, Johannes Thomasius, Capesius, and Strader. But we
can leave this for the moment. Let's picture instead how it would be
if a soul's ascent were the ideal one, an example in which all the
most ideal conditions for crossing the threshold and entering the
spiritual world were met. Such a soul, on encountering its other self
in the spiritual world, would not experience this encounter as though
it were looking at a photograph of itself. Instead, what is
subjective in the physical-sense and elemental worlds and what lives
in our souls as abstract subjectivity, namely, the soul forces of
thinking, feeling, and will, which we say are inside us, are now no
longer within us. The thinking, feeling, and will we have in the
physical world confront us objectively as a trinity on meeting our
other self in the spiritual world. Encountering this trinity, we have
to realize that these three are the self. I tried to represent them
in the figures of Philia, Astrid, Luna; they are very real figures.
There are as many of them in the world as there are human souls; once
you know one, you know them all; it's like knowing all oat grains
when you have seen one. But we should be clear that what is usually
only a pale, shadowy presence in the human soul, becomes on meeting
the other self a living trinity, experienced as three distinct
entities. We ourselves are Philia, Astrid and Luna, but they are
nevertheless thoroughly independent living thought-beings.
What a sufficiently strengthened soul must be aware of
is that it is itself the unity of these three beings. And one must be
further aware that what is called thinking, feeling and will is maya,
the shadow cast into the soul by these three. Soul sickness would
consist either in not recognizing oneself as these three beings in
the spiritual world, seeing them as entities with whom one has
nothing to do, or in an incapacity to keep them unified, perceiving
instead one part of the soul as Luna, another as Astrid and a third
as Philia. But it takes an ideal soul development, hardly to be found
in human beings, to see this other self in its complete
threefoldness.
We have to say, if we want to see things as they are,
that the beings called Lucifer and Ahriman send their impulses into
the physical-sense world. We have noted their influence there in a
great many areas. But human souls that have taken the path of
clairvoyant consciousness come into far more intensive touch with
them on leaving the physical world and attempting to enter higher
realms. Then Ahriman and Lucifer come at such souls and do their best
to influence them in various directions.
Let us use the following to illustrate some of their
actions. The human soul is pretty complicated and has many
conflicting tendencies which it cannot control. These live deep down
within it, beyond the reach of our ordinary consciousness. As I have
already mentioned, the experience of entering the elemental world can
be likened to the grotesque act of sticking one's head into an ant
hill. As we stick our consciousness into the elemental realm, every
thought becomes an individual living thought-being and begins to lead
an independent life, in which our consciousness is immersed.
Now the clairvoyant has the following experience. All
human beings have elements in their souls beyond their full control,
elements to which they are emotionally attached. Ahriman becomes
particularly active towards these especially intense attachments. The
soul contains portions that can be pried loose from its entirety, and
because we do not fully control these components, Ahriman pounces on
them. Through Ahriman's unjustified activity, overstepping his proper
domain, a tendency arises for those parts of man's etheric and astral
being that are inclined to separate from the rest of the soul's life
and become independent to be formed by Ahriman and even given human
shape.
As a matter of fact, there are all sorts of
thoughts sitting in us that are capable of taking on human form. When
Ahriman has the chance to make these parts of the soul independent
and give them human shape, they confront us in the elemental world as
our Doppelgänger, or double. We have to be aware that
everything changes as soon as we leave our physical body and enter
the elemental world. One can't encounter oneself while in the
physical body, but we can be in an etheric body on entering the
elemental world and still see this etheric body from outside as one
sees the double.
In terms of its substance, the double is a large part of
the etheric body. We retain part of that body, but another part of it
separates off and becomes objective. We look at it and see that it is
part of ourselves, to which Ahriman has given our own shape. Ahriman
tries to squeeze everything to make it conform to physical laws. The
physical world is ruled by the Spirits of Form, who share this
rulership with Ahriman. Therefore Ahriman can shape part of the human
being into the double.
This encounter with the double is in the
nature of an elemental phenomenon. It can happen as a result of
subconscious soul impressions and impulses even to a person who is
not clairvoyant. The following can occur: Somebody or other may be an
intrigant and thereby have done harm to other people. He may
have gone out and set another intrigue in motion. On returning home,
he may enter his study, where papers are lying on his desk, papers
that may contain things he made use of in his intrigues. Now what may
happen, despite the cynical cast of his ordinary consciousness, is
that his subconscious may be seized by these impulses to make
intrigues. He comes in, looks at his desk — and what does he
see? He sees himself sitting there!
It's an uncomfortable encounter, to enter
one's own room and see oneself sitting at the desk. But such things
belong to the realm of the possible; they happen often and most
easily to those given to intrigue. What one encounters is indeed the
double. The double is one among many tasks I have set myself to
tackle in the two plays,
The Guardian of the Threshold
and
The Souls' Awakening.
We know that the double is
experienced by Johannes Thomasius. It is due to his peculiar
development and to the strange experiences he has lived through that
he has these encounters with the double in the scenes shown;
( 18 )
Ahriman can form a part of his soul in such a way at this soul
fragment — essentially a part of his etheric body — is
filled with self-seeking soul elements. This sort of thing occurs
only when the preconditions are such as those in Johannes Thomasius's
case. You can get quite an idea of Johannes's particular soul in the
course of the four dramas. A certain stage in his soul development is
also indicated at the end of
The Guardian of the Threshold.
( 19 )
Such a stage is reached by many seekers on the spiritual path.
Let us summarize how things stand with this
Johannes Thomasius. Looking back to the Portal, we find him,
as it were, experiencing the higher world. But how does he experience
it? We might say that if we observe him only in this early part of
the dramas,
The Portal of Initiation,
he hasn't advanced very far — not beyond what might be called
“imaginative soul experiences,” with all the imbalance
and mistakes attendant on them. All the experiences presented there
are subjective, except for the scenes that are not part of the
action, the Prelude and the Interlude preceding Scene Eight. All the
other action is the subjective imaginative experience of Johannes
Thomasius; he doesn't get beyond this stage in the Portal. Everything
we see on the stage should be conceived as happening in Johannes's
soul as imaginative insight. This is very clear from the stage
directions, which — except for the two scenes mentioned —
require Johannes to be on stage throughout; this is very tiring for
the actor. Even though in the Temple scene at the end of the drama,
Johannes Thomasius says all sorts of things that theoretically have
objective validity, we might agree that people say a lot of things in
various temples that do not reflect maturity, for which a longer
growth period is needed. But words are not what matter here; we see
from the whole presentation that we are dealing with the subjective
imaginations of Johannes Thomasius.
New developments come about in
The Probation of the Soul.
A higher ascent is brought about by
Johannes's achieving impressions of earlier earth lives. This does
not remain in the realm of imagination but extends into the objective
world where spiritual facts are encountered, which exist
independently of his soul. We move away from his subjectivity into
the objective world. In the course of these first two plays, Johannes
gradually frees himself from his subjective state and enters the
objective spiritual world. That was why it happened so naturally —
since in
The Probation of the Soul
Johannes was achieving the
first stage of actual initiation — that Lucifer gains the
seductive influence shown at the end of the play.
( 20 )
Thus conditions are met that allow the further development of a soul like
that of Johannes Thomasius, as portrayed in
The Guardian of the Threshold.
In this play Johannes Thomasius is brought into the
objective spiritual world. His work impels him at first to a more
subjective encounter with Ahriman there; as a result of this meeting,
Johannes develops an egotism counter to the divine world order. But
now begin his objective experiences and these are Lucifer's domain.
Here we are definitely no longer dealing with the merely subjective
but with a picturing of the spiritual world apart from man. The
spiritual world is a spiritual experience just as the physical world
is a physical one.
Johannes Thomasius now enters the objective
spiritual world for the first time. This means that he is able to
bring in with him all the possibilities of erring of which the soul
is capable, especially his strange relationship to Theodora. Johannes
enters the higher world, burdened with all the slag of his lower
self, but even so, confronting the higher world. If I may use a
shallow term for it, I would have to say that Johannes Thomasius
falls occultly in love with Theodora. Certain physical impulses
intrude into the higher world in this relationship. As he goes
through all this, Johannes Thomasius reaches the point described at
the end of
The Guardian of the Threshold.
Here he experiences his ordinary self, belonging to the physical and
elemental worlds, as well as the other self he met upon entering the
spiritual world. In Scene Nine, the Morning Walk, as well as in Scene
Eleven, the Temple, in the presence of Hilary, Johannes reaches what
one might describe as his inner sensing of both these two selves. But
it is clear that he has not yet created any balance in the
relationship between the ordinary and the other self; he wavers back
and forth between the two. Considering that at the end of the
Guardian and thus at the beginning of
The Souls' Awakening,
Johannes Thomasius stands before us as a soul who feels the
separate yet parallel activity of these two selves, we can understand
that much exists in his soul-being that can be dug out, so to speak.
At first Ahriman digs out the double. But there is more in Johannes's
soul to be extracted.
Let me emphasize that I am not describing all this as a
commentary on the dramas
( 21 )
but in order to make use of what they
portray to illustrate actual spiritual conditions and spiritual
reality. If we consider human karma, the lawful order of human
destiny, we must say that there is a great deal of fulfilled karma in
the human soul but also much that is unfulfilled. We have gone
through a great deal in a former earth life that requires
harmonizing; for the moment it may be lying unresolved in the depths
of the soul. Every soul has unresolved karma of this kind.
Johannes Thomasius has to become conscious of an
especially large amount of unresolved karma, when his inner being
separates into his ordinary and his other self. When this happens,
much of his unresolved karma is separated from him. Those elements
are detached that are readily felt by every soul gradually developing
clairvoyance to be detaching themselves. Such souls are born into
physical existence possessing the game qualities all young people
have. Even clairvoyants start out in life as ordinary children do, to
their own benefit; we do not always find them ready to become, the
sort of person Krishnamurti was made into.
( 22 )
Then a moment comes —
a karmically determined moment — when the spiritual world
lights up. But it often happens — and this is important —
that a clairvoyant soul experiences the sight of its own youth as
though it were an objective being,
( 23 )
when the soul is in an
extremely elegiac or tragic mood. We behold our outgrown youth and
ask ourselves, what would have become of this now almost alien youth,
if we had not found our way into a spiritual clairvoyance? A real
splitting apart takes place. One experiences a kind of rebirth and
looks back to one's own youth as to something alien. We have to
say of a great deal of the karma of our youthful years that it cannot
be resolved in this incarnation. Much of this karma lies buried and
will have to be resolved later, or else one has to make an effort to
start working it out now. Johannes's soul is burdened by much
unresolved karma.
Unresolved karma of this kind and the
looking back at one's younger self as though at someone else
are both inwardly experienced. Lucifer finds entry here; he can take
away a substantial part of the etheric body and, as it were, ensoul
it with the unresolved karma. It becomes a shadow-being under
Lucifer's influence, a being like that portrayed in the Spirit of
Johannes's Youth. A shadow-being of this kind is an actual being. It
is there, separate from Johannes Thomasius, but involved in gruesome
concerns, running as it does counter to the world order. This
shadow-being outside Johannes Thomasius ought really to be within
him; the fact that it is not has caused what we feel to be the
tragic fate of this being, which lives outside as a part of his
etheric body in the elemental and spiritual worlds.
A person who has this important, meaningful
experience gathers from it the insight that his unresolved karma has
loaded a burden of cosmic debt upon himself and has created a being
that rightly belongs not outside but within him. The Other Philia
makes Johannes Thomasius aware in
The Souls' Awakening
that he has given birth to a soul-child, who suffers a sort of illegitimate
existence off by itself. The remarkable thing about growing up into
the spiritual world is that one encounters one's own being but can
encounter it in multiple, spiritually objective copies. In Johannes
Thomasius's case we are dealing with manifold duplication. One part
of his being comes to meet him as his double, and then another part —
for karma belongs to the essential nature of a human being —
comes as the Spirit of his Youth.
And now a third element enters the picture, for Johannes
is not yet ready to undergo what Maria has gone through. She has had
a relatively normal development. In Scene Nine, Astrid and Luna
appear to her — not in the company of the real Philia —
just these two soul forces. This is still a comparatively normal
development. It would have been completely normal for Maria to have
experienced the presence of all three, with thinking, feeling, and
will so objectified that Maria felt them to be a unity. But such a
normal development scarcely exists. Let me emphasize that the soul
forces I tried to characterize here are real figures, so that the
situation described is fully possible. Maria's consciousness soul and
intellectual soul are more evenly developed than her sentient soul;
she therefore meets Astrid and Luna but not Philia. A soul like hers
still has a highly normal development.
However, Johannes Thomasius's development
deviates considerably from the normal. First of all, his double
appears. As he nears his other self, the double and then the Spirit
of his Youth appear. All this accompanies his approach to the other
self, because the latter brings these inner conditions to light. If
Johannes Thomasius were to get really close to the other self, he
would be confronted by all three soul forces. But he has to undergo a
great deal that looms up on the way to his other self. Since Johannes
does not at once attain to the other self, he is met by the Other
Philia, who is more closely related to his subjectivity. The Other
Philia is, in a sense, the other self. But the other self, which is
still resting in the soul's depth and has not fully separated from
it, is still connected with what in the physical world is most
similar to the spiritual realm. This soul force is also linked with
an all-prevailing love and because of this, it can guide us into
higher worlds. And so the Other Philia, the third figure, is
encountered by Johannes Thomasius on the way to his other self. If a
soul were to meet all three soul forces, it wouldn't have to contend
with any obstacles. As it is, however, the whole being of man can
take objective form and appears in the outside world in its entirety.
That is the case when we see the Other Philia at the end of Scene Two of
The Souls' Awakening.
Now I explained to you that as a man grows into the
elemental world and even into the spiritual world, he must acquire
the capacity to transform himself, because everything in those worlds
is always in a state of transformation; nothing there remains in
static or finished form. Finished form exists only in the physical
realm, whereas in the elemental world everything is mobile and
capable of change.
But since everything is constantly changing, mixups can
occur. If one is not alert enough, one can mistake one being for
another. That is what happens to Johannes Thomasius: first the Other
Philia appears and later on he mistakes the double for her. Mistakes
of this kind can happen very easily. We must realize that we have to
work our way very gradually to an exact beholding of higher worlds
and that because of the constant change there, mixups can well occur.
And the way these mistakes come to light is extraordinarily
significant for the course of a soul's development.
Johannes has had an experience three times over,
( 24 )
as you will remember; the nature of this experience is due to the
particular way he has developed. The first is with the Other Philia,
the second with the double, the third again with the Other Philia —
a triad of experiences. Everything in the world comes in threes! If
we don't find them, we should look for them. The fact that Johannes
Thomasius encounters the Other Philia twice and the double only once,
and on one occasion mistakes one for the other, is due to the stage
of development he has achieved. His perceiving of his soul-child, the
Spirit of his Youth, goes back to the same fact. Of course, Lucifer
helped create this child, which now exists as an independent being.
It is one of the most shattering experiences the clairvoyant can have
to find the spiritual world peopled by shadowy beings created by
Lucifer from parts of unresolved Karma. We can find many such
shadow-beings, which we ourselves, prompted by Lucifer, have placed
in the spiritual world through our unresolved karma. These
experiences with shadow-beings correspond to the point our soul
development has reached.
Let us assume that Johannes Thomasius's case had been
different. He would have made two mistakes, would have been wrong
twice and once right, have seen the double twice and the Other Philia
once. But the actual fact was that he was too caught up in
subjectivity. Maria, in contrast, has gone so far in the direction of
objectivity as to be confronted by two soul forces. But Johannes has
to strengthen his soul to a point where what still remains rather
subjective can confront him objectively: “enchanted weaving of
one's own being.” These words strengthen his soul. And as this
enchanted weaving of his own being becomes more evident and brings
him closer to his other self, Johannes confronts himself in his
double, in the Spirit of his Youth and in the Other Philia.
Johannes Thomasius would have to have a
different make-up to experience this triad differently — making
two mistakes, let's say, and seeing the double twice. He would not
have seen just one Spirit of his Youth as
The Souls' Awakening
has it; he would instead have seen many of his soul-children in the realm
of shadows. Here great secrets of soul life make themselves felt.
You can see from all I've been saying that the
clairvoyant path to man's true being is complicated, for the soul
itself is complex. To approach it means to ascend step by step into
spiritual realms. It means also that you become a being of memory, a
being of the past, for you become aware that you are not in the
present nor for the moment have you any future. You are what you have
been and carry your past into the present. Your further spiritual
growth is then such that what you have thus carried into realms of
the spirit, what you experience spiritually, starts a spiritual
conversation with the surrounding spirit world. You grow as you
listen to this conversation of your own past with the living thought
beings of the spiritual world. But when you feel yourself thus
transposed into the spirit world wherein you come upon your other
self, you will also have a feeling that can be described like this:
“You are now indeed in the spiritual world. You can find your
other self as a spiritual being, due to the fact that you are living
in the realm of the spirit clothed in the astral body. But as yet you
cannot find your ultimate true being in this world. In spite of
ascending into spiritual realms, you cannot yet find the being whose
shadow is your ego in the physical world.” One learns little by
little what a significant experience one must still undergo in order
to penetrate to the true ego, the true inner being, enveloped in the
other self.
Man's being is indeed complex and lives far down in the
soul's depths. And actually to reach the real ego requires living
through a variety of experiences. It has been emphasized how one can
penetrate into the spiritual world with memory, how no new
impressions are received, how what one has been must be allowed to
speak, and how one, now a point-like being, must listen to the
spiritual conversation between one's past and one's spiritual
environment. We retain this memory. It also stays with us between
death and rebirth.
The memory of real sensory existence
between birth and death stays firmly present in the soul between
death and rebirth. But if one penetrates to the true ego after having
become clairvoyant, one comes to realize that a decision, a spiritual
deed is necessary. And it can be said of it: This must be a strong,
determined decision of the will, to root out, to forget the memory of
what we have been, in all its detail. With this we come to something
that was also dimly apparent in earlier clairvoyant and cognitive
stages of experience. In Scene Three of
The Souls' Awakening
where Strader stands at the abyss of his existence, there is a
foreshadowing of this experience that one has in spiritual realms.
But one stands in the fullest sense of the word at the abyss of
existence when one makes the decision in true freedom and energy of
will, to blot out and forget oneself.
All these things are completely true of all human
beings; nevertheless people are unaware of them. Every night we are
required to blot ourselves out, without being conscious of it. But it
is an entirely different matter fully consciously to give over to
destruction and to forget one's remembering ego — to stand in
the spiritual world as a nothing on the edge of the abyss of
nothingness. This is the most shattering experience one can have; one
must approach it with great confidence that the true ego will he
brought to us out of the cosmos. And this is indeed the case.
We know, after we have achieved forgetfulness on the
edge of the abyss, that everything we have ever experienced is
blotted out, and this we did ourselves. But out of an as yet unknown
world — a world I might call super-spiritual — our real
ego, whose only remaining concealment has been the other self, comes
toward us. Only now do we meet our true ego, whose shadow or maya as
it exists in the physical world is the lower ego. For man's true ego
belongs to the super-spiritual world. All this is inner experience:
the ascent to the super-spiritual realm, the perceiving of a
completely new world at the edge of the abyss, the receiving of the
true ego from this world.
I wanted this description to serve as a bridge to
tomorrow's lecture. You should mull it over. We will continue
tomorrow, linking up with what I have said today in regard to the
encounter that takes place at the edge of the abyss.
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