|
|
|
Rudolf Steiner e.Lib
|
|
The Riddle of Humanity
Rudolf Steiner e.Lib Document
|
|
The Riddle of Humanity
Schmidt Number: S-3239
On-line since: 29th July, 2002
When we cast a glance back over the discussions of the previous two
meetings, allowing the main experience to stand before our souls, we
become aware of the fundamentally dual nature of the human being. We
have seen how everything that comes to life in a human soul during
waking consciousness can be traced back to the influence on man of the
heavens and of the universe to what these, taken in their
cosmic significance, have imprinted on humanity. The foundations of
certain other, deeper regions of human nature, regions which in a
normal life only well up in dream-consciousness, can be traced back to
terrestrial influences and impressions that are earthly in a more
narrow sense. When the world is observed in the light of spiritual
science, everything that is perceived by the senses must be seen as a
real expression of the spirit.
The picture a human being presents to the senses reveals his dual
nature. That is most easily imagined if you consider the skeleton.
There it is most clear, for the skeleton is clearly divided into two
distinct parts: the head the skull and the remaining
parts of the body. And, in principle, the only thing that holds these
two together is a thin skeletal cord. The head really has just been
set on top of the rest. One can knock it off. This is an outer,
pictorial expression of the dual nature of a human being, for the head
makes waking consciousness possible. The remaining parts, the parts of
the skeleton that hang down from the head, form the basis for the life
that plays itself out more or less unconsciously. The unconscious life
only wells up in dreams or in the creative fantasy of poets and
artists, penetrating normal consciousness with its fire and warmth and
light. In that, something of an unquestionably earthly nature is
working into usual waking consciousness the noblest part of
earthly nature, perhaps, but earthly all the same. Yesterday, in the
awareness of time that was typical of the ancient Hebrew culture we
found direct evidence that mankind once possessed knowledge, explicit
and fundamental knowledge, of the connections between super-earthly
occurrences and human waking consciousness. We saw how that which can
be called cosmic thought, and which is expressed in the movements of
the stars, creates an image of itself in waking human consciousness.
Man has a waking consciousness because, in the first place, he is able
to make use of the organs in his head. And we have considered the
wonderful way that mankind participates in the whole universe, and
includes both its heavenly and its earthly aspects.
If one is going to do justice to everything connected with these
weighty and significant facts, one must free oneself from prejudice.
One ahrimanic prejudice is particularly common in those who still
harbour a longing to be mystics. The prejudice comes to expression in
a certain sensibility, and consists in the belief that what is earthly
is worthless and absolutely must be overcome that it is coarse,
contemptible stuff that a spiritually striving person does not even
mention. That for which one must strive is the spirit! This is the way
such people experience things, even if their concept of the spirit is
confused and they can only picture it in terms of the physical senses.
Therefore I said that this prejudice expresses itself more as a
sensibility in a particular direction. But one will never be able to
understand the nature of either mankind or of the world as long as one
clings to this prejudiced mode of experience. A person who is living
on earth in an earthly human body can only preserve such a sensibility
by viewing the earth in a one-sided way. Following from this attitude
to the earth comes a longing a partially justified longing
for the super-earthly and for things that should be experienced
between death and a new life. But one will never be able to develop
any sort of clarity in one's feelings for the life between death and a
new birth as long as earthly things are regarded in the manner to
which I just alluded. For, paradoxical though it may sound, the
following is a true statement and you will find it clearly
expressed in various lecture cycles: the dead, those living in spirit
and the soul in the interval between death and a new birth, speak of
the earth in the same way that men on earth speak of heaven. The earth
is a shimmering vision that hovers in front of them in the way the
vision of heaven hovers in the mind's eye of those on earth. Earth is
the desired other world for which those living in heaven yearn. They
speak of earth in the way we speak of heaven. It is the longed-for
land towards which they strive, the land of their approaching
incarnation. If one loses sight of this, one forms a false picture of
how the dead live.
I have often warned you not to interpret the basic dictum, In
the spirit, everything is reversed, too pedantically. One cannot
obtain a correct picture of the spiritual world simply by turning
around all one's pictures of the physical world. Nothing very special
comes from applying such a rule abstractly. The particular facts must
be considered, even though, as I have told you, this rule about
reversal applies to many things. Then, for example, someone who is
investigating the spiritual worlds can get to know an extraordinary
land, a land where individuals find themselves among other men. The
men among whom they find themselves are normal, earthly men like the
devout people we meet on earth. I say, specifically, like
devout people on earth, for these are people who have a certain
feeling for things of the earth and a certain feeling for the things
of heaven. Also among the people to be met there are those who totally
deny everything earthly. They deny all matter, all substance. They
maintain that only spirit exists and that it is a superstition to
believe in matter.
The land I am describing is not in the physical world; it belongs to
the spirit-region that is revealed when one's gaze is directed towards
a particular part of the spiritual world that lies between, say, the
middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth centuries.
All of you were then living in the spiritual world. At least in the
first part of this period, we were all still living in the spiritual
world. The majority of us were experiencing the heavenly realms which
were about us, and also the earthly realm towards which we were
striving and which, over there, was the world beyond. But then there
were those who viewed all talk of earthly things as superstition. They
maintained that only the spirit exists and that the earthly, material
realm is just a dream world. And yes, naturally, these men, too, were
eventually born. They were known by such names as Ludwig Buchner
(see Note 5),
Ernst Haeckel
(see Note 6),
Carl Vogt
(see Note 7),
and so on. These men, whose lives on
earth you are well-enough acquainted with, are the same ones who
explained away belief in material things as superstition and who,
during the stage when they were approaching their most recent life in
the physical world, viewed the spiritual world as the only real world.
They did this because the spiritual world was what was around them and
they did not want to consider something that was not around them, some
world beyond. Why, you will be asking yourselves, would such
individuals be born into souls that developed the view that material
is all that exists? You may ask yourselves this, but you can
nevertheless understand it, when you see that these individuals showed
a lack of understanding for the material world before they were born,
and that this remained with them. For anyone who sees matter as
something absolute, rather than as an expression of the spirit, has
completely failed to understand matter. One is not a materialist when
one represents materialism in the way the aforementioned personages
represented it. Understanding the substantial nature of the material
world does not make one a materialist; a person becomes a materialist
precisely because he does not understand the substantial nature of
matter. Thus, these individuals did not change, they retained their
lack of understanding for matter.
So there you have an area in which the spiritual world is a total
reversal of what the appearances in the physical world would lead you
to expect. But, as I said, this rule should not be abstractly extended
to cover everything. I have gone into all this about how the earthly
realm becomes the other world when we are living between
death and a new birth so that you will not misinterpret the contrast
that ancient Greek mythology expressed with the words,
Uranus and Gaia. Uranus and Gaia were not
incompatible, one referring to what is absolutely valuable and the
other to what is absolutely worthless. They were conceived as a
polarity that exists within a unity: Uranus represents the peripheral,
encircling realm whose polar opposite is the point at the centre,
Gaia. To begin with, when they spoke of Uranus and Gaia, the Greeks
did not limit their thoughts to the narrow confines of human sexuality
or earthly life. They were thinking of the contrast we just mentioned
between heaven and earth. This is the contrast they intended.
I must go into this, as otherwise we will not be able to understand
what is to follow. As it is these days, it is difficult to make
certain truths about humanity accessible. But it is possible to just
touch on certain things, which is what we shall do, in so far as that
is possible.
As we enter into these considerations, I ask you keep in mind the
sense in which human nature is dual, and how this is outwardly
expressed in the form of the human body, with its head that is
attached to everything else. The whole process of shaping the human
head, the whole of the essential process, takes place during the time
between the last death and a new birth. The physical head must be
produced on earth, of course, but that is not what I am talking about.
I mean the form that it acquires; and the way the head is formed
depends on forces that go far back in time. The human head is
received, ready-shaped, from heaven, for all the powers that are at
work between death and a new birth are really concerned with building
the head. The human head comes from the heavens, even though it must
follow the path of physical birth and physical heredity. The rest of
the body is the only part that comes from the earth. So, as regards
the form of the body, a human being is a product of Uranus and Gaia:
the head originates in heavenly forces, the body originates in earthly
forces Uranus and Gaia.
Now at birth, when a human being makes his appearance, this whole
thing is so strongly evident that one can truly say that part of him,
his head, has just been introduced into the physical world and still
expresses only the forces of the heavenly realm from which it has come
and that another part, the body, is the expression of earthly
forces. This is especially evident just after birth. There is a strong
contrast between the head and the rest of the body for those whose
sight is informed by a deeper knowledge of the human being. With a
little child there really is this strong contrast. One has only to
learn to observe such things without preconceptions; then one will
soon notice what an immense and pronounced contrast there is between
the head, which is the Uranus sphere of the human being, and the
remaining body, which is the sphere of Gaia.
Lets us consider the first significant phase of life, the phase up to
the change of teeth at approximately the seventh year. As you know,
this marks the end of the first significant stage of human life. It is
a very important time, a time marked also by the appearance of a
paradox that it is very important to understand. For, during the
period leading to the change of teeth at around the seventh year,
those who observe a human being physically are observing falsely. I
have frequently alluded to this from other points of view. To put it
briefly, people look upon a human being during the first seven years
as if it already were male or female. From a higher point of view this
is entirely false. But the materialism of today does hold this view.
That is why the materialists of today look upon manifestations during
the first seven years as if they were already manifestations of
sexuality, which is not at all the case. Matters will be in a much
healthier state when it is understood that a child is an asexual being
during its first seven years, and not a sexual being at all. To use a
trivial expression, it only looks as though a child were already male
or female during the first seven years. This is because there is no
physical distinction between what one calls masculine or feminine
during the first seven years and what one calls masculine and feminine
later. For materialism, the physical is all that there is, so what
comes later seems to be a continuation of what was already there. But
that is not the case at all. And I now ask you to really experience
what I am saying, to take it into yourselves, so that it is not
misunderstood and immediately mixed up with value judgements. What I
say is meant objectively, so please do not fall into the pattern so
often found in other areas today, whereby one judges on the basis of
previously-held values instead of judging objectively.
During the first seven years, what appears to be masculine is not
masculine as such and here I ask you to keep in mind what I
have said about Uranus and Gaia; it has the external form that it has
in order that the heavenly forces working from the head can continue
to influence the individual being and the human form in accordance
with what is super-earthly and heavenly. That is why it appears
masculine. But it is not male; it is formed by Uranus in accordance
with the super-earthly! I said: the head is the part of the human
being where the heavenly takes precedence, the earthly takes
precedence in the rest of the body. But the earthly radiates into the
heavenly, just as the heavenly radiates into the earthly. Mutual
relationships connect them; it is only a question of which one
predominates. I would like to describe matters by saying that, with
one kind of human being, the heavenly aspect is the preponderant
influence on the body, including the parts other than the head, with
the result that one says he is male. But this still has nothing to do
with sexuality, but only with the fact that this particular
organisation is more Uranian, whereas in the case of other
individuals, their organisation is more terrestrial, Gaian. During the
first seven years, the human being is not a sexual being; that is
maya. The bodies differ in that some show more how the heavenly side
is at work and others show more from the earthly side. In anticipation
of value judgements that might insinuate themselves into our
discussions, I began by saying that from a universal point of view the
earthly sphere has as much value as the heavenly. I did not want
anyone to harbour the belief that we were devaluing the feminine, in
the style of Weininger, by taking some elevated, mystical standpoint
that makes it out to be merely earthly or merely Gaian. Each is the
pole of the other, and this has nothing to do with sexuality.
What, then, is going on in the human being, in the human organisation,
during the first seven years? You must take what I am going to
describe as the predominant circumstances; the opposite is also there,
but what I am characterising is the predominant situation. For you
see, during the first seven years the head is constantly being worked
on by forces that stream to it from the rest of the organism. There
are also forces that flow from the head to the rest of the organism,
of course, but during this period these are relatively weak in
comparison to the forces that stream from the body to the head. If the
head grows and continues to develop during the first seven years, this
is due to the fact that the body is actually sending its forces into
the head; during the first seven years, the body imprints itself into
the head and the head adapts to the bodily organisation. With regard
to human development, the essential thing during the first seven years
is that the head becomes adapted to the bodily organisation. This
welling-up of the rest of the organisation into the head is what is
behind the distinctive facial metamorphoses that someone with a finely
developed sense for it can observe during the first seven years. Just
watch once the development of a child's face, and observe how it
changes at the time of the change of teeth, when the whole body is
more or less poured into the facial expression.
Then comes the period that leads to sexual maturity roughly
from the seventh to the fourteenth year. And now exactly the opposite
happens: the forces of the head flow uninterruptedly down into the
organism, into the body; now the body adapts to the head. The
resultant total revolution in the organism is very interesting to
watch: the welling-up of the forces of the body into the head during
the first seven years concludes with the change of teeth. Then there
is a reversal in the flow of forces, which begin to stream downward.
It is these downward-streaming forces that turn a human being into a
sexual being. Now, for the first time, the human being becomes a
sexual being. To begin with, what turns the organs that are simply
heavenly or earthly into sexual organs, comes from the head; and that
is spirit. The physical organs are not even intended for sexuality
that is exactly the way to put it they are only adapted
to sexuality later on. And the judgement of those who maintain that
they are originally adapted to sexuality is superficial. On the
contrary, the organs are adapted to the heavenly sphere in one case,
to the earthly sphere in the other. They first acquire a sexual
character during the period between the seventh and fourteenth years,
when this is introduced into them from without by the forces that
stream down from the head. That is when a human being begins to become
a sexual being.
It is extraordinarily important to form a precise view of these
things, for in practice one is constantly being confronted by people
who come with their very small children, complaining about sexual
improprieties. But such things are not possible before the seventh
year, because nothing sexual is yet present, nothing that has sexual
significance. In such cases no healing can come from a medical
direction; it needs to come naturally, as people stop calling things
by false names and thereby cease to surround them with false concepts.
One should recover that holy innocence with which the ancients viewed
such matters. Given their atavistic knowledge of the spiritual world,
it never would have occurred to them to begin applying sexual terms to
those who were still children. I have already alluded to these things
in other contexts.
In the light of these important truths about the human being that we
have obtained from the spiritual world, truths concerning man's
relation to the earthly and heavenly worlds, you can begin to
appreciate how the caricature-like ideas of such a man as Weininger do
have a certain justification. For if he could have understood matters
in the way they have been presented here, he would have been justified
in saying: A human being comes into this physical world from the
spiritual world in such a way that the head must first develop here in
the physical world for seven years before it can produce the masculine
out of heavenly forces and the feminine out of earthly forces.
Later on, it will be our task to look at other currents and forces
important to human development. For the moment, it will be helpful to
concentrate our attention on the first fourteen years of human
development. Only through such things will you begin to see how true
it is to say that external life is a life of maya is the great
deception. For it really is a deception that a human being seems to
arrive in the world as a male or a female. A human being first becomes
a sexual being through what is acquired by the head from the earth
during the first seven years there.
Now, those who take these things into their hearts, as well as their
heads, are sure to stumble over a question at this point. Nor is it a
question that can easily be evaded: How is it that man comes to live
in maya, in deception? What is the meaning of this? Is the fact that
we live in deception not grounds for an inherent sadness? Surely it
would have been better if the Godhead, the gods, had not allowed human
beings to live in deception at all? Would it not have been better for
man to apprehend the world without being deceived, so that he would
not always have to seek truth behind the appearances? Why, why must
man live in a world of deception? These questions about why we must
live surrounded by deception can lead to a very pessimistic view of
the world. But there are good reasons why we must live in the midst of
deception; for if we were born into truth to begin with, if truth came
at birth without our having to search for it, we would never be able
to develop a personality and would never be able to acquire freedom.
Only in the sphere of the Earth can a human being achieve freedom. And
he can only do so by developing a personality through his earthly
striving. Initially he confronts a world of mere appearances whose
inner substance has to be sought out. The search releases inner forces
that will make him, gradually and through many incarnations, into a
free person. Take some worthwhile book like Dante's Divine
Comedy. Theoretically, and not only theoretically for it is
altogether conceivable, a person of today might come to know Dante's
Divine Comedy in an entirely different way from what is usual.
Today how does someone become acquainted with The Divine
Comedy? Either it is recited and he hears it presented in external
sounds that have nothing to do with the content of The Divine
Comedy, or else he reads it. If he reads it, in reality he has
nothing before him but abstract characters, which do not have the
slightest thing to do with the content of The Divine Comedy.
Yes, this is how people become acquainted with the contents of a
worthwhile work today. One becomes acquainted with it externally
through recitation, although speaking has nothing to do with the work
as it sprang from Dante's head; it is only an external means of
communication. Theoretically and I say emphatically, not only
theoretically it would be possible for us to approach the
contents of The Divine Comedy in a different fashion: it could
make its appearance from within us if, at a particular age, the
contents were to simply rise up out of our soul and appear in waking
consciousness through a dream. This is not just theoretical; it could
very easily happen if the world were not organised so that, to begin
with, we had to make our way through maya. If it were not that we
first had to make our way through maya, there would come one fine day
when we would experience, rising up like a dream, everything that has
ever been accomplished by the likes of Homer, say, and Dante, and
Plato, and so on. We would not have to resort to anything external in
order to become acquainted with it. Raphael would not have had to
create external pictures. He need only have brought them to life in
his spirit, and those that lived after him, without recourse to
anything beyond a certain orientation towards Raphael, would have been
able to experience the pictures rising up out their own inner being.
What I am telling you is no hypothesis; on the Moon this is how things
stood with us, this is how things were passed on. This is how things
really were then. On the Moon, one did not have to learn to read;
everything arose out of one's own inner being. An event had to happen
once; thereafter it rose up from within. But freedom was not possible.
One was an automaton, subject to the past. What rose up from within
was determined by the past. It was not possible to become a free
person. Not there. We do not have to strive for knowledge in order to
repeat, pointlessly, what is already there, but in order to become a
free person. And we have progressed to the Earth period from the Moon
period, from a time when we were not free beings and when everything
simply rose up in our imaginations. Now we have to reach out to the
external world. Our spiritual experience of the process of reading or
listening enables us to be there as a free individual. It is not
entirely true to say that man strives for knowledge for the sake of
knowledge. Humanity achieves knowledge in order to become free and
individual. We do not want to lose sight of this fact.
The other thing we do not want to lose sight of can be introduced with
a further question. One can question why the external world should
need to be repeated in our concepts and ideas. What, really, is the
point of it? Why should we, with our thoughts and ideas, repeat the
external world? Surely it is of no concern to the external world that
we repeat it! If you pursue the following train of thought you
will get a more exact grasp of this: A man is there. If he had been
murdered in his youth, he would not be there. Because he is there, he
experiences in addition to the fact that the world is there
a repetition of that world as a picture within his own inner
world. That picture would not exist at all if he had been murdered in
his youth. And yet nothing would be different in the outer world. It
is a different matter if he intervenes in that world, but as far as
the external world is concerned, what lives in our knowledge is pure
repetition. If we were robots, and everything we did between birth and
death were a reaction to the external world, then our knowledge would
be entirely superfluous. We would do all that we had to do, and
knowledge would just be a superfluous parallel phenomenon. You could
imagine that the knowledge man carries with him is something added to
nature and to the universe, but that it makes no difference to nature
or to the universe that such a thing is added to it. Nature could just
as well have produced robots whose thoughts do not mirror everything
that happens. For nothing out there is changed when we accompany
events with our thoughts and concepts, creating pictures of them. If
you take a picture of some place with a camera, then, in addition to
the place, there also is a picture of it, but it is entirely the same
to that place whether the picture exists or not. This is how it is
with our ideas. They are an addition. So why should nature not be
organised like this? thus one might question. All of us have
long since become so accustomed to thinking that we do not ask this
question any more; we have grown so fond of thinking. Like eating and
drinking, we are used to it, so the question does not arise for us.
But you know how many people there are out there who would be quite
delighted not to have to think and to be able to function like a
machine. Thinking is too heavy a burden to them and they flee from
every thought. Now that, too, is contained in the question: Why hasn't
nature fashioned man so that thinking is not even included among his
possessions? We have answered one part of this question. Man becomes a
free individuality by virtue of his thinking. Such a question,
however, allows of many kinds of answers. Nor is it the only thing
that can help us to understand.
Let us suppose that we had been born with a different organisation. As
children, after we had received our head from the heavens, our body
from the earth, and had been set down by the beings of the
hierarchies, by the angels, the archangels, and so on, suppose that we
had proceeded to go about doing what we had to do without our ever
having to suffer under the strain of all the pains and torments this
so often involves without our ever developing an inner soul
life. If we assume that this were so, then very important consequences
would follow. We could only be born once and die once if we were
organised like this; we could not live a succession of lives on earth.
A plant whose blossoms never develop into fruit only lives once. A
plant develops further through its seeds. The seed of our next earthly
life develops within our developing soul life. Within it is the seed.
If we did not have an unfolding soul life, with its knowledge, our
earthly death would be the end of our life. Therefore, the
understanding we develop in our inner soul life is not a mere
repetition of what is out there; to the extent that our souls are
shaped by knowledge, we carry the future within us. And that has great
significance. Except for the things related to knowledge, everything
we bear in and with us, is more or less the work of the past. The
understanding we develop represents the real seed of the future. The
real seed of the future develops within the sphere of our knowledge.
Now, in closing, I would like to touch on the leading thought of our
next lectures. It will take us into important areas concerned with the
cosmic aspects of human nature.
We carry all our knowledge within us, all of it, from the most naive
understanding to the most abstract knowledge and the two are
not so terribly different we just have an incorrect sense of
their value. Thus, deep beneath our outer surface we carry this within
us. It is super-sensible, for the content of knowledge is, of course,
a super-sensible thing. In reality it is a collection of forces that
rest within us. And then we pass through the gates of death; what
happens then? Now, I have often described what happens then, but I
would like to describe it once more from the standpoint of these
forces.
A human being consists of head and body. No matter how precious it may
seem, our head actually is on the way out. Here I am
referring to forces, not to the outer form. You can let a person's
body waste away, or you can burn it, of course, but the forces do not
cease to exist. They remain externally present, and the spiritual
forces on which the body depends also remain. But the head disappears.
As I said, you may well consider it to be a valuable part of your
organism, but after death that does not matter after death it
is nothing special. This refers to the outer form of the head, of
course, not to its soul content. For, as regards your passage from
death to a new birth, what is important to the heavens is the part of
your last earthly life that you could only receive from the earth,
namely, the rest of the body. That, with its various forces, is what
is transformed into the new head during the time between death and a
new birth. Here you have the head, there, the rest of the body. This
head was the body of your previous incarnation; your present body will
be the head of your next incarnation. The forces that you develop by
means of your head in this life are what will transform the forces of
your body into a head for the next life. The earth gives you a body
for that purpose. The head you carry around now is the transformed
body of your previous incarnation, for metamorphosis applies to all of
life. It is not only there in the transformation of a plant's leaves
into the petals of its blossom; metamorphosis does not just affect our
subordinate aspects; metamorphosis rules throughout. Your body is a
head that is yet to come your head is a transformed body.
These are the ideas I wanted to touch on. You carry your head about in
its present state. Phrenologists study the shapes of the head, but
what they do is not worth much unless it is based on initiation,
because everyone possesses his own kind of head. The head is nothing
other than the inherited body of the previous incarnation. Every
person's head is different from the head of anyone else and the
characteristic types the phrenologists describe are merely rough
observations. Just think what a marvellous connection there is: A
human being has a dual nature. But not only does man have a dual
nature; in addition to that, his external shape also carries both past
and future. The human head gives you reincarnation where you can
really put your hands on it, for the shaping of the head is the result
of our previous life. The head we bear in the next life will be a
transformation of our body. Wherever one looks deeply into the
foundations of existence one finds metamorphosis. Someone who
understands the things I have just been explaining is enabled to look
deep, deep into the nature and origins of world existence and human
existence. As I said, I wanted to touch on these ideas because they
will provide the leitmotif of the next two lectures. These will
be concerned with how one incarnation works on in the next
incarnation, and how the previous incarnation works over into the
present one, through the metamorphic relationship of man's head-ness
to his body-ness, if I may be allowed to use these expressions.
|
Last Modified: 02-Nov-2024
|
The Rudolf Steiner e.Lib is maintained by:
The e.Librarian:
elibrarian@elib.com
|
|
|
|
|