AT THE CENTRE OF MAN'S
BEING: I
Evil and the Power of
Thought
R u d o l f S t
e i n e r
The first of two
Lectures given at Dornach on September 23-4, 1921
-
From a shorthand
report, unrevised by the lecturer. Published by permission of the
Rudolf Steiner-Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach,
Switzerland.
F
an oriental sage of early times, who had been
initiated into the Mysteries of the ancient East, were to turn his
glance towards modern Western civilisation, he might perhaps say to
its representatives: “You are living entirely in fear; your
whole mood of soul is governed by fear. All that you do, as well as
all that you feel, is saturated with fear and its reverberations in
the most important moments of life. And since fear is closely
related to hatred, so hatred plays a great part in your whole
civilisation.”
Let us make
this quite clear. I mean a sage of the ancient Eastern civilisation would
speak thus if he stood again to-day among Western people with the
same standard of education, the same mood of soul, as those of his
own ancient time. And he would make it plain that in his time and his
country civilisation was founded on a quite different basis. He would
probably say: “In my days, fear played no part in civilised
life. Whenever we were concerned to promulgate a world-conception and
let action and social life spring from it, the main thing was joy
— joy which could be enhanced to the point of a complete giving
of oneself in love to the world.” That is how he would put it,
and in so doing he would indicate (if he were rightly understood)
what were from his point of view supremely important constituent
factors and impulses of modern civilisation. And if we knew how to
listen to him in the right way, we should gain much that we need to
know in order to find a starting point for trying to get a grip on
modern life.
In fact,
an echo of the ancient civilisation still persists in Asia, even though
strong European influences have been absorbed into its religious,
æsthetic, scientific and social life. This ancient
civilisation is in decline, and when the ancient oriental sage
says, “Love was the fundamental force of the ancient oriental
culture,” then it must certainly be admitted that but little of
this love can be traced directly in the present. But one who is able
to discern it can perceive even now, in the phenomena of decline of
the Asiatic culture, the penetration of this primeval element of joy
— delight in the world and love for the world.
In those ancient
times there was in the Orient little of what was afterwards required of man
when that word resounded which found its most radical expression in
the Greek saying, “Know thyself!” This “Know
thyself” entered the historical life of man only when the early
Greek civilisation set in. The old eastern world-picture,
wide-ranging and light-filled, was not yet permeated by this kind of
human knowledge; it was in no way orientated towards directing man's
glance into his own inner being.
In this respect
man is dependent on the circumstances prevailing in his environment. The
ancient oriental civilisation was founded under a different influence
from the sun's light, and its earthly circumstances were also
different from those of Western civilisation. In the ancient East,
man's inner glance was captured by all that he experienced in the
surrounding world, and he had a special motive for giving over his
entire being to it. It was cosmic knowledge that wove in the ancient
oriental wisdom, and in the world-conception that owed its origin to
this wisdom. Even in the Mysteries themselves — you can
infer this from all you have been hearing for many years — in
all that lived in the Mysteries of the East there was no fulfilment
of the challenge, “Know thyself!” On the contrary —
“Turn your gaze outwards towards the world and endeavour to let
that approach you which is hidden in the depths of cosmic
phenomena!” — that is how the precept of the ancient
Oriental civilisation would have been expressed.
The teachers
and pupils of the Mysteries were compelled, however, to turn their
glance to the inner being of man when the Asiatic civilisation began
to spread westwards; as soon, indeed, as Mystery colonies were
founded in Egypt and in North Africa. But particularly when the
Mysteries began to develop their colonies still further to the west
— a special centre was ancient Ireland — then the
teachers and pupils of the Mysteries coming over from Asia were
faced, by virtue of the geographical features of the West and its
entirely different elemental configuration, with the necessity of
cultivating self-knowledge and a true inner vision. And simply
because these Mystery pupils, when still living in Asia, had acquired
knowledge of the outer world and of the spiritual facts and beings
lying behind the outer world — simply by the strength of this
fact, they were now able to penetrate deeply into all that exists in
man's innermost being.
Over there
in Asia all this could not have been observed and studied at all. The
inward-turning glance would have been paralysed, so to speak.
But by means of all that the men of the East brought to the Western
Mystery centres, their gaze having long been directed outwards so as
to penetrate into the spiritual worlds, they were now enabled to
pierce through into man's inner being. And it was only the strongest
souls who could endure what they perceived.
We can indeed
realise when an impression was produced by this self-knowledge on the
teachers and pupils of the Oriental Mysteries if we repeat a precept
which was addressed to the pupils over and over again by the teachers
who had already cultivated that vision of man's inner being, a
precept which was to make clear to them in what mood of soul this
self-knowledge was to be approached. The precept I mean is frequently
quoted. But in its full weight it was uttered only in the older
Mystery colonies of Egypt, North Africa and Ireland as a preparation
for the pupil and as a reminder for every Initiate in regard to the
experiences of man's inner being. The precept runs thus:
“No-one who is not initiated in the sacred Mysteries should
learn to know the secrets of man's innermost being; to utter these
secrets in the presence of a non-Initiate is inadmissible; for
the mouth uttering these secrets then lays the burden of sin upon
itself; likewise does the ear burden itself with sin when it hearkens
to those secrets.”
Time and again
this precept was uttered from out of the inner experience to which a man,
prepared by Oriental wisdom, was able to attain when he penetrated,
by virtue of the terrestrial configuration of the West, to the
knowledge of man. Tradition has preserved this precept, and to-day it
is still repeated — without any understanding of its
intrinsic nature — in the secret orders and secret societies of
the West which, externally, still have a great influence. But it is
repeated only from tradition. It is not uttered with the necessary
weight, for those who use it do not really know what it signifies.
Yet even in our own time this word is used as a kind of motto in the
secret societies of the West: “There are secrets concerning
man's inner being that can be transmitted to men only within the
secret societies; for otherwise the mouth uttering them is sinful,
and the ear hearing them is likewise sinful.”
We should be
aware that in the course of time many men in Western countries (I am not
speaking of Central Europe) learn to know in secret societies what
has been handed down as tradition from the researches of the ancient
wisdom. It is received without understanding, although as an impulse
it often flows into action. In later centuries after about the middle
of the 15th century — the human constitution became such as to
make it impossible to see these things in their original form; they
could be understood only intellectually. Ideas about them could be
picked up, but a true experience of them could not be attained,
though individuals had some inkling of it.
Such men have
sometimes adopted strange forms of outer life, as for instance Bulwer
Lytton, the author of “Zanoni.” What he became in his
later life can be understood only if one is aware of how he received,
to begin with, the tradition of self-knowledge, but how, too, by
virtue of his individual constitution, he was also able to penetrate
into certain mysteries. Thereby he became estranged from the ordinary
ways of life. Precisely in him one can observe what a man's attitude
towards life becomes when he admits into his inner experience this
different spiritual world; not only into his thoughts, but into his
whole soul. Many facts must then be judged by other than conventional
standards.
Of course, it
was something quite outlandish when Bulwer travelled about, speaking of
his inner experiences with a certain emphasis, while a young person
who accompanied him played a harp-like instrument, for he needed to
have this harp-music in between the passages of his talk. Here and
there he appeared in gatherings where everything else went on in a
quiet formal, conventional way. He would come on in his rather
eccentric garb and sit down, with his harp-maiden seated in front of
his knees. He would speak a few sentences; then the harp-maiden would
play; then he would continue his talk, and the maiden would play
again. Thus something coquettish in a higher sense of the word
— one cannot help characterising it in this way at first
— was introduced into the conventional world where Philistinism
has made such increasing inroads, above all since the middle of
the 15th century.
Men have little
idea of the degree of Philistinism into which they have grown; they have
less and less idea of it just because it comes to seem natural. They
see something as reasonable only in so far as it is in line with what
is “done.” But things in life are all interconnected, and
the dryness and sleepiness of modern times, the relation human beings
now have to one another, belongs to the intellectual
development of the last few centuries. The two things belong
together. A man like Bulwer, of course, did not fit into such a
development; one can quite well picture to oneself people of older
times travelling about in the world accompanied by a younger person
with some pleasant music. One needs only to perceive the distance
between one attitude of soul and another; then such a thing will be
seen in the right light. But with Bulwer it was because something lit
up in him that could no longer exist directly in the immediate present,
but appeared only as a tradition in the modern intellectual age.
*
We must,
however, recover the knowledge of man that lived in the Mystery colonies
of which I have spoken. The average man to-day is aware of the world
around him by means of his sense-perceptions. What he sees, he orders
and arranges in his mind. Then he looks also into his own inner
being. The sense-perceptions received from outside, the ideas
developed therefrom, these ideas as they penetrate within becoming
transformed by impulses of feeling and of will, together with
all that is reflected into consciousness as memories — here we
have what forms the content of the soul, the content of life in which
modern man lives and out of which he acts. At most he is led by a
false kind of mysticism to ask: “What is there really in my
inner being? What does self-knowledge yield?” In raising such
questions he wants to find the answers in his ordinary
consciousness. But this ordinary consciousness gives him only what
originated in external sense-perceptions and has been
transformed by feeling and will. One finds only the
reflections, the mirror-pictures, of external life, when looking into
one's inner being with ordinary consciousness; and although the outer
impressions are transformed by feeling and will, man is still unable
to tell how feeling and will are actually working. For this reason he
often fails to recognise what he perceives in his inner being as a
transformed reflection of the outer world, and takes it, perhaps, as
a special message from the divine eternal world. But this is not so.
What presents itself to the ordinary consciousness of modern man as
self-knowledge is only the transformed outer world, which is
reflected out of man's inner being into his consciousness.
If man really
and truly desired to look into his innermost being, then he would be
obliged — I have often used this image — to break the
inner mirror. Our inner being is indeed like a mirror. We gaze on the
outer world. Here are the outer sense-perceptions. We link
conceptions to them. These conceptions are then reflected by our
inner being. By looking into our inner being we get only to this
mirror within. We perceive what is reflected by the memory-mirror. We
are just as unable to penetrate into man's inner being with ordinary
consciousness as we are to look behind a mirror without breaking it.
This, however, is precisely what was brought about in the preparatory
stage of the ancient way of Eastern wisdom so that the teachers and
pupils of the Mystery colonies that came to the West could penetrate
directly through the memories into the innermost being of man. Out of
what they saw they afterwards uttered those words which were meant to
convey that one must be well prepared — above all in those
ancient times — if one desired to direct one's glance to the
inner being of man. For what does one then behold within?
There, one
perceives how something of the power which belongs to perception and thought,
and is developed in front of the memory-mirror, penetrates below this
memory-mirror. Thoughts penetrate below the memory-mirror and work
into the human etheric body — into that part of the etheric
body which forms the basis of growth, but which is equally the source
of the forces of will. As we look out into the sunlit space and
survey all that we receive through our sense-perceptions, there
radiates into our inner being something which on the one hand becomes
memory-ideas, but also trickles through the memory-mirror, permeating
it just as the processes of growth, nutrition and so on permeate us.
The thought-forces
penetrate first through the etheric body, and the etheric body,
permeated in this way by the thought-forces, works in a very special
manner on the physical body. Thereupon a complete
transformation sets in of that material existence which is within the
physical body of man. In the outer world, matter is nowhere
completely destroyed. This is why modern philosophy and science speak
of the conservation of matter. But this law of the conservation of
matter is valid only for the outer world. Within the human being,
matter is completely dissolved into nothingness. The very being of
matter is destroyed. It is precisely upon this fact that our human
nature is based: upon being able to throw back matter into chaos, to
destroy matter utterly, within that sphere which lies deeper than
memory.
This is what
was pointed out to the Mystery pupils who were led from the East into the
Mystery colonies of the West, and especially of Ireland. “In
your inner nature, below the powers of memory, you bear within you
something that works destructively, and without it you would not have
developed the power of thought, for you have to develop thought by
permeating the etheric body with thought-forces. But an etheric body
thus permeated with thought-forces works on the physical body in such
a way as to throw its matter into chaos and to destroy it.”
If, therefore,
a person ventures into this inner being of man with the same frame of
mind with which he penetrates as far as memory, then he enters a
realm where the being of man has an impulse to destroy, to blot out,
that which exists there in material form. For the purpose of
developing our human, thought-filled Ego we all bear within us, below
the memory-mirror, a fury of destruction, a fury of dissolution, in
respect of matter. There is no human self-knowledge which does not
point with every possible emphasis towards this inner human fact.
For this
reason, whoever has had to learn of the presence of this centre of
destruction in the inner being of man must take an interest in the
development of the spirit. With all intensity he must be able to say
to himself: Spirit must exist, and for the sake of the maintenance of
the spirit matter may be extinguished.
It is only
after one has spoken to mankind for many years of the interests connected
with spiritual scientific investigation that one can draw attention to
what actually exists within man. But to-day we must do so, for
otherwise man would consider himself to be something different from
what he really is within Western civilisation. Enclosed within
him he has a fiery centre of destruction, and in truth the forces of
decline can be transformed into forces of ascent only if he becomes
conscious of this fact.
What would
happen if men should not be led by Spiritual Science to this awareness?
In the developments of our time we can see already what would happen.
This centre which is isolated in man, and should work only within
him, at the one single spot within, where matter is thrown back into
chaos, now breaks out and penetrates into human instincts. That is
what will happen to Western civilisation; yes, and to the
civilisation of the whole Earth. This is evidenced by all the
destructive forces appearing to-day — in the East of Europe,
for instance. It is a fury of destruction thrust out of the inner
being of man into the outer world; and in the future man will be able
to find his bearings in regard to what thus penetrates into his
instincts only when a true knowledge of the human being once again
prevails, when we become aware once more of this human centre of
destruction within — a centre, however, which must be
there for the sake of the development of human thought. For this
strength of thought that man needs in order that he may have a
world-conception in keeping with our time — this strength of
thought, which must be there in front of the memory-mirror, brings
about the continuation of thought into the etheric body. And the
etheric body thus permeated by thought works destructively upon the
physical body. This centre of destruction within modern Western man
is a fact, and knowledge merely draws attention to it. If the centre
of destruction is there without any awareness of it, this is much
worse than if man takes full cognisance of it, and from this conscious
standpoint enters into the development of modern civilisation.
*
It was fear
that seized upon the pupils of these Mystery colonies when they first
heard of these secrets. This fear they learnt to know thoroughly.
They became thoroughly acquainted with the feeling that a penetration
into man's innermost being — not frivolously in the sense of a
nebulous mysticism but undertaken in all sincerity — must
arouse fear. And this fear felt by the ancient Mystery pupils of the
West was overcome only by disclosing to them the whole weight of the
facts. Then they were able to conquer by consciousness what
arose in them as fear.
When the age
of intellectualism set in, this same fear became unconscious, and as
unconscious fear it still exists. Under all manner of masks it works
into outer life. It belongs, however, to our time to penetrate into
man's inner being. “Know thyself” has become a rightful
demand. It was by a deliberate calling forth of fear, followed by an
overcoming of it, that the Mystery pupils were directed to
self-knowledge in the true way.
The age
of intellectualism dulled the sight of what lay in man's inner being,
but it was unable to do away with the fear. Thus it came about that
man was and still is influenced by this unconscious fear to the
degree of saying, “There is nothing at all in the human being
that transcends birth and death.” He is afraid of penetrating
deeper than this life of memory, this ordinary life of thought which
maintains its course, after all, only between birth and death. He is
afraid to look down into that which is eternal in the human soul, and
from out of this fear he postulates the doctrine that there is
nothing at all outside this life between birth and death. Modern
materialism has arisen out of fear, without men having the slightest
idea of this. The modern materialistic world-conception is a product
of fear and anxiety (Angst).
So this fear
lives on in the outer actions of men, in the social structure, in the course
of history since the middle of the 15th century, and especially in
the 19th century materialistic world-conception. Why did these
men become materialists — why would they admit only the
external, that which is given in material existence? Because they
feared to descend into the depths of man.
This is what
the ancient Oriental sage would have wished to express from out of his
knowledge by saying: “You modern Westerners live entirely
steeped in fear. You found your social order upon fear; you create
your arts out of fear; your materialistic world-conception has been
born from fear. You and the successors of those who in my time
founded the ancient Oriental world-conception, although they
have come into decadence now — you and these men of Asia will
never understand one another, because after all with the Asiatic
people everything sprang ultimately from love; with you everything
originates in fear mixed with hate.”
These are strong
words indeed, but I prefer to try to place the facts before you as an
utterance from the lips of an Oriental sage. It will perhaps be
believed that he could speak in such a manner if he came back,
whereas a modern man might be considered mad if he put it all so
radically! But from such a radical characterisation of things we can
learn what we really must learn to-day for the healthy progress of
civilisation. Mankind will have to know again that intelligent
thinking, which is the highest attainment of modern times, could not
have come into existence if the life of ideas did not arise from a
centre of destruction. And this centre must be reckoned with, so that
it may be kept safely within and not pass over into our outer
instincts and thence turn into a social impulse.
One can really
penetrate deeply into the connections of modern life by looking at
things in this way. Thus the realm that manifests as a centre
of destruction lies within, beyond the memory-mirror. But the life of
modern man takes its course between the memory-mirror and the outer
sense-perceptions. Just as little as man, when he looks into his
inner being, is able to see beyond the memory-mirror, so far is he
from being able to pierce through all that is spread out before him
as sense-perceptions; he cannot see beyond it. He adds to it a
material, atomistic world, which is indeed a fantastic world, because
he cannot penetrate through the sense-images.
But man is no
stranger to this world beyond the outer sense-images. Every night between
falling asleep and awakening he enters this world. When you sleep,
you dwell within this world. What you experience there beyond the
sense-images is not the atomistic world conjectured by the
visionaries of natural science. What lies beyond the sphere of the
senses was in fact experienced by the ancient Oriental sage in his
Mysteries. It can be experienced only when one has devotion for the
world, when one has the desire and the urge to surrender oneself
entirely to the world. Love must permeate the act of cognition if one
desires to penetrate beyond the sense-perceptions. And it was this
love that prevailed especially in the ancient oriental civilisation.
Why must one
have this devotion? Because if one sought to pierce beyond the
sense-perceptions with one's ordinary human Ego, one might be harmed.
The Ego, as experienced in ordinary life, must be given up, if one
wants to penetrate beyond the sense-perceptions. How does this Ego
originate? It is brought into existence by man's capacity to plunge
into the chaos of destruction. This Ego must be tempered and hardened
in that realm which lies within man as a centre of destruction. And
with this Ego one cannot live on the far side of the outer sense-world.
Let us picture
to ourselves the centre of destruction in man's inner being. It extends
over the whole human organism. If it were to spread out over the
whole world, what would then live in the world through man? Evil.
Evil is nothing else but the chaos thrust outside, the chaos which is
necessary in man's inner being. And in this necessary chaos, this
necessary centre of evil in man, the human Ego must be forged. This
human Egohood cannot live beyond the sphere of the human senses in
the outer world. That is why the Ego-consciousness disappears in sleep,
and when it figures in dreams it is often as though estranged or weakened.
The Ego which
is forged in the centre of evil cannot pass beyond the realm of the
sense-perceptions. Hence to the ancient oriental sage it was clear
that one can go further only by means of devotion and love, by a
surrender of the Ego; and that on penetrating fully into this further
region one is no longer in a world of Vana, of weaving in the
habitual, but rather in the world of Nirvana, where this habitual
existence is dissolved.
This
interpretation of Nirvana, of the sublimest surrender of the Ego, as
it occurs in sleep and as it existed in fully conscious knowledge for the
pupils of the ancient oriental civilisation — it is this Nirvana
that would be pointed out to you by such an ancient sage as I placed
hypothetically before you. And he would say: “With you, since
you had to develop Egohood, everything is founded on fear. With us,
who had to suppress Egohood, everything was founded on love. With
you, there speaks the Ego that desires to assert itself. With us,
Nirvana spoke, while the Ego flowed out into the world in love.”
One can formulate
these matters in concepts and they are then preserved in a certain
sense, but for humanity at large they live in feelings and moods,
permeating human existence. And through such feelings they bring
about a living difference to-day between the East and the West. In
the West, men have a blood, a lymph, that is saturated by an Egohood
tempered in the inner centre of evil. In the East men have a blood, a
lymph, in which lives an echo of the longing for Nirvana.
Both in the
East and in the West these things escape the crude intellectual concepts
of our time. Intellectual understanding draws the blood from the living
organism, turns it into a preparation, places it under a microscope,
looks at it and then forms ideas about it. The ideas thus arrived at
are infinitely crude even from the point of view of ordinary
experience. That is all one can say about it. Do you think that this
method touches the subtly graded differences of the people who sit
here next to one another? The microscope, of course, gives only crude
ideas about the blood, the lymph. Subtle shades of difference are to
be found even among people who have come from the same milieu. But
these shades of difference naturally exist much more
emphatically between the men of the East and those of the West,
although only a crude idea of them can be had by modern thinking.
All this comes
to expression in the bodies of the men from Asia, Europe and America,
and in their relation to one another in outer social life. With the
crude understanding that has been applied in the last few centuries
to the investigation of external nature we shall not be able to
tackle the demands of modern social life; above all we shall not be
able to reach an adjustment between East and West. But this
adjustment must be found.
*
In the late
autumn of this year (1921) people will be going to the Washington Conference,
and discussions will take place there about matters which were summed
up by General Smuts, the Minister of Africa, with his
instinctive genius. The evolution of modern humanity, he said, is
characterised by the fact that the seed-ground for cultural
activities, which has hitherto been in the regions bordering
the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, is now moving to the Pacific.
The culture of the countries situated round the North Sea has
gradually spread throughout the West and will become a world culture.
The centre of gravity of this world culture will be transferred
from the North Sea to the Pacific.
Mankind stands
face to face with this change. But men still talk in such a way that their
speech savours of the old crude ideas and nothing essential is
reached — although it must be reached if we are really to go
ahead. The signs of the times stand with menacing significance before
us and their message is: Until now only a limited trust has been
needed between men, who in fact were all secretly afraid of one
another. Their fear was masked under all sorts of other feelings. But
now we need an attitude of soul that will be able to embrace a world
civilisation. We need a confidence which will be able to bring into
balance the relationship between East and West. Here a significant
and necessary perspective opens out. The assumption to-day is that
economic problems can be handled quite on their own account —
the future position of Japan in the Pacific, or how all the trading
peoples on earth may have free access to the Chinese market, and so
on. But these problems will not be settled at any conference until
men become aware that all economic activities and relations
presuppose the trust of one man in another. In future this trust will
be attained only in a spiritual way. Outer civilisation will be in
need of spiritual deepening.
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