LECTURE I.
Dornach, 29th January 1921.
You
will have observed from our various studies that a connection
exists, even though an inner connection, between a principal
being inhabiting a planetary body at a certain period and this
celestial body itself. One can consider this link between the
human being and all that belongs to the whole earth from most
varied aspects. We will study the subject today from a single
aspect and thence again form ideas about the actual being of
man.
We
know, of course, that man goes through his earthly life in
successive incarnations, and that these bring him into a more
intimate relation with the actual planet Earth than the periods
which lie between death and a new birth. The periods that man
lives through between death and a new birth represent for him
more of a spiritual existence; at such times, he is more
withdrawn from the Earth itself than in the time between birth
and death.
To
be more withdrawn from the Earth or to be more closely
connected with it, means, however, from time to time to stand
in a certain relationship to other beings. For what we call the
regions of the world outwardly perceptible to the senses is,
after all, only the expression for certain connections between
spiritual beings. Though our Earth may look to physical sight
what the geologists imagine, may seem to be only a mineral mass
surrounded by a sheath of air, yet in the last resort that is
only the outer semblance. What actually appears as this mineral
mass is nevertheless the bodily nature of certain spiritual
beings. And again what we behold beyond the Earth, shining down
as the world of stars, that too as we see it is only the outer
sense expression for a certain association of Spiritual Beings,
of Hierarchies. It is by virtue of the solid Earth, the firm
ground upon which we live between birth and death, this
physical external earth, it is through this that in the main we
develop our life between birth and death. Through all that
shines down to us from cosmic space, that sparkles to us as the
star-world and that seems to concern us so little, with this we
have a greater connection between death and a new birth. It is
more than a picture, it is a reality of deepest significance if
one says: Man descends from star- worlds to physical birth that
he may pass through his existence between birth and
death. We must not think, however, that the appearance of the
universe which we have here on earth when we talk of the
star-world is the same as what meets our spiritual vision in
the period between death and a new birth. That which appears
externally to man living upon earth as the star-world is then
displayed in its inner being, its spirit-nature. There we have
to do with the inner nature of what is outer nature for our
earthly existence here. In fact we must say to ourselves:
Whether we look down to the earth or up to the cosmos, what
meets our sense-perception is always but a kind of illusory
picture, and we only reach the truth if we go back to the
Beings who underlie this semblance with the different grades of
cosmic self-consciousness.
Thus it is semblance, illusion, whether one looks upwards
or down: the truth, the essentiality, lies behind the
semblance. That illusion meets us above end beneath is
connected with the fact that our life between birth and
death, on the one hand, and between death and a new birth, on
the other hand, is always threatened with the possibility of
leaving the path of full humanity. Here on earth between birth
and death we can become too closely related to the earth, can
unfold an urge to find too great an affinity with the earthly
powers. And likewise between death and a new birth we can
develop an urge to become too closely allied to the cosmic
powers outside the earth. For here on earth we stand too near
the external symbolic expression, to what is clothed in
physical materiality, we stand here, as it were, estranged from
the inner spirituality. When we evolve between death and a new
birth we stand fully within the spirituality, we live with it,
and again we are threatened with the possibility of being
swallowed up, of being dissolved in it. Whereas here on earth
we are exposed to the threat of growing hardened in physical
existence, between death and a new birth we are exposed to the
possibility of drowning in spiritual existence.
These two possibilities are due to the fact that besides those
powers that are meant when speaking of the normal orders of the
Hierarchies, other beings are also in existence. Just as the
elemental beings are to be found in the three kingdoms of
nature, just as man exists, as the nearer hierarchies
exist of whom a genuine spiritual science says that they are
there “according to their cosmic time,” so there
exist other beings, who, as it were, unfold their nature at the
wrong time. They are the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings of whom
we have often spoken. You will have already realised that the
Luciferic beings are essentially those who as they now present
themselves should have lived in an earlier cosmic epoch. On the
other hand, the Ahrimanic beings as they now present themselves
should live in a later cosmic epoch. Retarded cosmic beings are
the Luciferic beings, premature cosmic beings are the Ahrimanic
beings. The Luciferic beings disdained to take part with others
in the age that was appointed to them; they are retarded,
because they scorned to take full part in evolution. When they
manifest themselves today, therefore, they are revealed as
having stayed behind at earlier stages of existence.
The
Ahrimanic beings cannot, so to say, wait till a later age in
cosmic evolution to develop the qualities implanted in them.
They want to forestall the time. And so they harden in their
present existence and reveal themselves to us now in the form
they should reach only in a later development of cosmic
life.
When we look out into cosmic space and behold the totality of
the stars — what is this sight? Why do we have this view?
We have this special sight, the appearance of the Milky Way,
the appearance of the rest of the star-strewn heavens, because
it is the manifestation of the Luciferic nature of the world.
All that surrounds us shining and radiating is the
manifestation of the Luciferic nature of the world, it appears
as it does because it has remained behind at an earlier stage
of its existence. And when we walk over the solid ground of the
earth it is hard and solid because conglomerated within it are
the Ahrimanic beings, beings which should only possess at a
later time of their evolution the stage that they now provide
for themselves artificially.
Thus it is possible that if we surrender ourselves to the sense
world by gazing at the aspect of the sky, we make ourselves
more and more Luciferic. When in the life between birth and
death we have this inclination to gaze upon the heaven, this
means nothing actually immediate and direct; it means a sort of
instinct that has remained in us from the time before birth or
conception when we were in the spiritual world and lived with
the stars. We have entered then into too close a relationship
with the cosmic worlds and we have retained this inclination
— though indeed to surrender oneself to gazing at
the physical star-world is not a particularly noticeable
tendency of mankind. We develop this tendency when
through our karma — which we always draw to us between
birth and death — we have too deeply slept away the time
between death and a new birth, when we have developed too
little inclination to live there in full consciousness.
If
we immerse ourselves in the earthly life, on the other hand,
that is directly developed here between birth and death. That
is the actual Ahrimanic possibility in man's life. The
Luciferic possibility is connected with what we acquire through
our relationship to the illusory spirit-world; the Ahrimanic
relationship which we form is due to our developing too great
an inclination between birth and death towards the surrounding
physical external world.
If
we grow too strongly into a connection with the earth, so
strongly that we never turn our thoughts to the super-sensible
that lies beyond the merely terrestrial, then the Ahrimanic
affinity appears in us.
Now
all this has a deeper significance for the whole development of
man's being. If between death and a new birth we are swallowed
up, as it were, in the spiritual world and then later do not
find the right balance between the spiritual and the material
world, evolving with too strong an affinity to the
extra-earthly, we can gradually come to an earth existence
— can come even in the next incarnation to an
existence in which we cannot grow old. Such things are
now, in this age, reaching a critical point. That is the one
possibility that confronts us as a danger — the not being
able to age. We can be reborn and the Luciferic powers con hold
us back at the stage of childhood, they can condemn us in some
way not to become mature. Those people who give themselves up
all too easily to an ardent enthusiasm, a nebulous mysticism,
who have a disinclination for severely contoured thinking and
scorn to form clear concepts of the world, those people, that
is to say, who scorn to develop inner activity of soul and go
through life more or less in dream — they are exposing
themselves to the danger in their next incarnation of not being
able to grow old, of remaining childish in the bad sense of the
word. It is a Luciferic attack that will break into humanity in
this way.
Such human beings would then not descend rightly into earthly
life in the next incarnation, they would not leave the
spiritual world sufficiently in order to enter earthly life.
The Luciferic powers, who at one time formed a connection
with our earth, endeavour to unfold instincts in man that would
make his earthly evolution come to a stage where men remain
children, where they do not grow old. The Luciferic
powers would like to bring about a condition where no aged
people walked about on earth but only those who spent their
life in a sort of illusory youth. In this way, the Luciferic
powers would gradually bring the earth planet to the point of
becoming one body with one common soul, in which
the separate souls, so to say, were swimming. A common
soul-nature of the earth, and a common bodily-nature of the
earth, that is Lucifer's aim for humanity's evolution. He would
make of the earth a great organic being with a common soul in
which the single souls would lose their individuality,
I
have often explained that the course of earthly evolution
does not depend on the mineral, plant, animal kingdoms, which
are all, in fact, waste products of evolution, but on what
takes place within the boundary of the human skin. The
evolutionary forces of our planet lie within the organisation
of man. If you remember this you will understand that what
finally becomes of the earth cannot be learnt by forming
physical concepts, such concepts have only a narrow, limited
interest for us. In order to realise what will become of the
earth we must know the human being itself. But the human being
can enter into a union, a relation of forces with the Luciferic
power that has united itself with the earth, and then the earth
can carry too few individualised beings; it can become a
collective being with a common soul-nature. That is what the
Luciferic powers are striving for. If you take the picture that
many nebulous mystics describe ns a desirable future state,
where they want to merge into the ALL, to vanish in some kind
of pantheistic Whole, you will be able to see how this
Luciferic tendency is already living in many human souls.
On
the other hand, the Ahrimanic beings have also entered into a
connection with our earth. They have the opposite tendency.
They act above all through the forces that drew our organism,
into itself between birth and death, that permeate our organism
through and through with spirituality, that is, make us
more and more intellectual, imbue us increasingly with
reasoning and intelligence. Our waking intelligence depends on
the connection of the soul with the physical body, and when
this is exaggerated and becomes too strong, then we become too
similar to physical existence and likewise lose the
balance. The inclination then arises which hinders man in
future from alternating in the right way between earthly life
and the spiritual life that lies between death and a new
birth.
That is the goal for which Ahriman strives; he would hold men
back in the coming earthly age from passing in the right way
through earthly life and super-earthly life. Ahriman wishes to
hold man back from going through future incarnations. He would
like even now, in this incarnation, to cause man to live
through everything that he can live through on earth. But that
can only be done intellectually, one cannot do that in full
humanity. It is, however, possible for man to become so clever
that in his cleverness he can conceive of all that still may be
on earth. In fact, many men have just such an ideal, that is,
to form an intellectual concept of all that may yet come
about on earth, But one cannot acquire the experiences that are
still to be passed through in future lives. In this life, one
can only acquire the pictures, the intellectual pictures, and
these then become hardened in the physical body. And then man
reaches a profound disinclination to go through future
incarnations. He positively sees a sort of blessedness in
not wanting to appear on earth again.
I
have often pointed out that oriental culture has fallen into
decadence and Ahriman is particularly able to create this
deviation in the decadent East. While the Orientals are
inwardly under the influence of Lucifer, Ahriman can approach
their nature and implant in them the inclination in a definite
incarnation to wish to have done with earth existence and not
appear again in a physical body. The Ahrimanic approach is the
more easily accomplished since the Oriental is already under
the power of Lucifer. It can then even be placed before men as
an ideal by certain teachers, who are in the service of
Ahriman, that in a certain incarnation, before the earth
itself has reached its goal, they should have finished with
physical existence on earth.
Certain theosophical teachings have slavishly borrowed various
things from the modern decadent Orient. Among these tenets
appears one which has never in any way been taken over into our
anthroposophical conception, namely, that it even denotes a
special grade of perfection for a human being to appear no more
in an earthly life. That is an Ahrimanic impulse and one in
fact, that can also bring about something of a terrible nature.
The earth could reach the point not, as desired by Lucifer of
becoming a great unitary organisation with a unitary
soul-nature, but of becoming over-individualised. Men would
someday reach a stage of Ahrimanic development where they
would. certainly die, but the terrible part would be that,
after they had died, they would become as like the earth as
possible, would continue to cling to the earth, so that the
earth itself would become merely an expression of separate
individual human beings. The earth would become a sort of
colony of the single individual human souls.
This is what Ahriman strives to do with the earth: to make it
entirely an expression of intellectuality, to
intellectualise it completely. It is absolutely essential
for mankind to realise today that earthly destiny depends on
man's own will. The Earth will become what the human being
makes of it. It will not be what physical forces make of it.
These physical forces will die out and have no significance for
the Earth's future. The Earth will be what man makes of it.
We
are living in a decisive hour of earthly evolution in which
humanity can choose one of three paths. One can live in
nebulous mysticism, in dreaming, in an infatuation for things
of the physical, senses, that is, in going along in a muse
— for life in material nature is indeed only musing and
brooding — in a sleep condition in which one passes
through life without clear ideas. That is one of the
tendencies to which man may incline.
A
second tendency would be for men to permeate themselves
entirely with intellect and intelligence, to gather together as
it were everything that intellect can gather together, to scorn
all that poetry and phantasy can spread over earthly existence,
to turn everywhere to the mechanical and to dried-up pedantry.
Men stand today before the decision either to become spiritual
voluptuaries entirely sunk in their own existence — for
whether one submerges in one's own existence through nebulous
mysticism or material desolation is ultimately only two sides
of the same thing — or else to consider everything
prosaically, to bring everything into a routine scheme,
to classify and correlate everything. Those are two of the
possibilities.
The
third possibility is to seek for the balance, the equilibrium
between the two. One cannot speak of the equilibrium in
so definite a way as of the two extremes. One must strive for
equilibrium by not being too strongly attracted by either, but
pass through the two in a proper balance of life, letting the
one be regulated and ordered by the other.
This cosmic hour of decision stands before the human soul
today. Man can decide to follow the Luciferic temptation
and not let the earth complete its evolution, to let the earth
resemble the Old Moon, or rather make it a caricature of
the Old Moon, a great organism with an individualised dreamy
soul, in which the human beings are contained as in a common
Nirvana. Or man can become over-intellectualised, give up the
common possession of the earth, desire to have nothing in
common, but ossify the body and make it sclerotic by permeating
it with too much intellect. Man can decide whether to make the
body a sponge through nebulous mysticism and sensuality, or
make it a stone through over-intellectuality,
over-self-sufficiency. And modern humanity looks as if it did
not desire the balance between the two alternatives, but wanted
the one or the other.
We
see on the one hand an ever-increasing expansion of the Western
instincts which aim at intellectuality, self-sufficiency,
pedantry, and form opinions in such a way that intellectualism
is pressed too strongly into the body. On the other hand, we
see the danger threaten from the East that men burn up and
consume the body. We see it in the conceptions of the
decadent Orient and we see it — only another aspect
— in the frightful social developments arising in Eastern
Europe. The hour of decision has already arrived. Mankind must
decide today to find the equilibrium. And the actual task set
before man can only be recognised from the depths of
spiritual-scientific knowledge. One must study those ideas that
can show what possibilities of evolution lie before mankind in
two directions, On the one hand we have the merging in Nirvana
which has in fact become a “sacred doctrine of the
Orient” — though far removed from the ancient
conception of Nirvana which meant a striving for equilibrium
out of the old clairvoyance. The Nirvana as now conceived by
the decadent Oriental is the world of Lucifer. On the other
hand, what the modern Western civilisation is striving for
— in so far as it does not fill itself with the knowledge
of Spiritual Science — is the mechanising of the world, a
continuous striving to make the processes of human existence
mechanical. Ahrimanising on the one hand — Luciferising
on the other hand.
I
described lately from a certain aspect the chaotic,
unorientated life of recent times and if this should continue
then undoubtedly humanity would become Ahrimanised. This
process can only be checked if the conception of the spiritual
world is brought into the over-intellectual life, the
over-individualised human existence completely saturated with
egoism. This concept of the spiritual world is needed
everywhere, but above all it is necessary for a spiritual
impulse to enter the different sciences. Otherwise it will
gradually come to the point where the various sciences rule
mankind like some abstract authority. Humanity will become
totally Ahrimanised by these different sciences which encircle
man with authoritative power. It is especially important at the
present day when social life problems are so thrusting at human
evolution to lift up the gaze to the connection of man with his
planetary life.
Within the old religious Faiths man's conception of this
connection with the spiritual world is outworn and stunted. It
is stunted to a merely abstract intellectual acknowledgment as,
for instance, the evangelical Confession threatens to become,
or stunted to an external power-principle as the Roman
Faith. Those are in fact only other expressions for what is
drawing near man to seduce him. It is essential, however, for
man to find his inner orientation and to acquire an inner
impulse so that the view may be unimpeded of what links him to
his planet and through his planet to the whole cosmos. Men must
feel again that Geology is not knowledge of the earth. A
colossal mineral mass on which are watery oceans and which is
surrounded by air is not the earth, and what surrounds us as
Milky Way and suns, that is not the universe, The universe is
Ahrimanic beings beneath, Luciferic beings above, which appear
through the outer sense-illusion, and Beings of the normal
Hierarchies to whom man raises himself when through both
sense-illusions he comes to the truth; for the actual Beings do
not appear in the external sense-illusion, they only manifest
themselves through it.
The
man of today must recognise this: I can consider the earth. If
I am able to interpret what appears on the earth below as the
emanation of Spiritual Beings then I perceive what lives
in Cherubim, Seraphim, Thrones. But if I am unable to form a
spiritual picture of what lives on the earth, if I surrender
myself to the illusion of its material appearance, then I
remain geologist. I cannot swing myself up to geosophist, then
my being becomes Ahrimanised. And if I gaze up to the
star-worlds and only form concepts of what I see physically,
then I make myself Luciferic. If I am able to read the Spirit
in what appears to me in outer semblance. if I can say to
myself: Yes, I behold stars, I behold a Milky Way and suns,
they inform me of Kyriotetes, Exusiai, Dynamis — Spirits
of Wisdom. Powers, Mights — then I find the
equilibrium.
It
is not a question of talking of cosmic beings as superior to
earthly beings, the point is everywhere to penetrate the
sense-appearance to the genuine essentiality, to that
essentiality with which we as men are really connected.
Sense-appearance of itself does not deceive us. If we
interpret sense-appearance in the right way, then the
Spiritual Beings are there, then we have them. Sense-appearance
as such is not deceptive, it is our concept of it that can be
deceptive, through our too close relationship with the earthly
between birth and death on the one hand, through our too close
relationship on the other hand with the extra-earthly while we
dwell there between death and new birth.
If
man confines himself to what has gradually formed within our
civilisation he experiences hardly anything of such views. And
our civilisation has totally forgotten that it was once
different. People read today even with a certain eagerness what
was written about Nature in the twelfth, thirteenth centuries
but they do not read it with enough discernment. If they read
with discernment they would realise that the time in which man
thinks as he does now is only a few centuries old. They would
see that people thought differently about things of the outer
world in the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth centuries, even in
the fourteenth century; that in the stone, in the earth, they
did not see stone, earth, but the body of the divine-spiritual.
And in the stars they certainly did not see what one sees today
but the revelation of the divine-spiritual. It is only in
recent centuries that man has merely a geology and a cosmology
but not a geosophy and a cosmosophy! Under the cosmology he
would become Luciferised, under the geology he would become
Ahrimanised, unless he saved himself by finding the
equilibrium through a geosophy and a cosmosophy, And, in
fact, since man is born out of the whole universe all this
together is needed to give Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy
consists of these different “sophies,” cosmosophy,
geosophy, and so on. We only understand man aright when we know
how to bring him into a spiritual connection with the universe.
Then we shall not look for him in a one-sided way in his
relationship with light, levity, which would mean servitude to
Lucifer, nor one-sidedly in his relationship with gravity, a
servitude to the Ahrimanic powers, but endeavour to pour into
his will the impulse to find the equilibrium between levity and
gravity, between inclining to the earthly and inclining to the
Luciferic. Man must reach this balance and he can do so only by
again acquiring the super-sensible in addition to his
sense-concepts.
Now, still something of a complete paradox: Bring before your
soul what has just been said, and how man must know of it so
that he can come to a decision in this world-age; assume that
one must actually speak of a possible Ahrimanising and
Luciferising of the world. Bring this before your soul as a
weighty matter for humanity. Then take what you read today in
popular literature, what reaches your mind from lecture rooms
and other educational institutions, and observe the immense
disparity, then you will see what is required if men are to
come out of the present decadent life to what is of urgent
importance. Serious work in spiritual fields is urgently
necessary and this can only be accomplished if one resolves to
take earnestly such ideas as we have again discussed today.
Tomorrow we will continue further.
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