Lecture IV
Dornach, October 1, 1921
We saw
yesterday how the human being in his consciousness approaches
the world from two sides, as it were: when he is active from
within and when he is active from without. The ordinary
consciousness, however, is not able to grasp what lives
within the human being, because consciousness strikes up
against it. We have seen, moreover, how karma also lives in
man from two sides between birth and death. On the one hand
there is the moment of awaking when man plunges into his
etheric body, where, while he is submerged, he can have the
reminiscence of dreams in ordinary consciousness. Then he
passes, as it were, the space between the etheric body and
the physical body — he is in the physical body only
when he has full sense perception — and there he passes
through the region of the living thoughts active within him.
These are the same thoughts that actually have taken part in
building up his organism and that he has brought with him
through birth into existence; they represent, in other words,
his completed karma. On falling asleep, however, man strikes
up against that which cannot become deed. What enters into
deeds as our impulses of will and feeling is lived out during
our lifetime. Something is always left behind, however, and
this is taken by the human being into his sleep. Yet it is also
present at other times. Everything in the soul life that does
not pass into deed, that stops short, as it were, before the
deed, is future karma, which is forming itself and which we
can carry further through death.
Yesterday I
sought to indicate briefly how the forces of karma live in
the human being. Today we will consider something of the
human environment to show how the human being actually stands
within the world, in order to be able to give all this a sort
of conclusion tomorrow. We tried yesterday to examine
objectively the human soul life itself, and we found that
thinking develops itself in that region which is in fact the
objective thought region between the physical body and the
etheric body. We also found that feeling develops itself
between the etheric and astral bodies, and willing develops
itself between the astral body and the I or ego. The actual
activity of the soul thus develops itself in the spaces
between — I said yesterday that this expression is not
exact, yet it is comprehensible — the spaces that we
must suppose are between the four members of human nature,
between the physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I.
If we wish to view the spaces between objectively, they are
the interactions among the members of the human being.
Today we wish
to look at something of the human environment. Let us bring
to mind clearly how the human being is in a fully living
dream life, how he has pictures sweeping through the dream
life. I explained yesterday that the Imaginative
consciousness can perceive how these pictures descend into
the organization and how what works in these pictures brings
about our feelings. Our feelings are therefore what actually
would be grasped if one were to look more deeply into man's
inner being as an approach to dream pictures. Feelings are
the waves that mount up from the day's dream life into our
consciousness. We dream continuously, as I said yesterday,
beneath the surface of the conceptual life, and this dream
life lives itself out in feelings.
If we now look
into the environment of the human being and consider first
the animal world, we find in the animal world a consciousness
that does not rise to thinking, to a life of thought, but
that is developed actually in a sort of living dream life. We
can form a picture of what reveals itself in the soul life of
the animal through a study of our own dream life. The soul
life of the animal is entirely a dreaming. The animal's soul
life thus is much more actively at work on the organism than
the soul life of man, which is more free of the organism
through the clarity of the conceptual life. The animal
actually dreams. Just as our dream pictures, those dream
pictures that we form during waking consciousness, stream
upward as feelings, so is the soul life of the animal based
mainly on feeling. The animal actually does not have a soul
life penetrated by the clear light of thought. What therefore
takes place in us between the etheric body and the astral
body is essentially what is taking place in the animal. It
forms the animal's soul life, and we can understand animal
life if we can picture it as proceeding from the soul
life.
It is important
to form a certain image of these relationships, for then one
will comprehend what actually takes place when, let us say,
the animal is digesting. Just watch a herd lying in a field
digesting. The whole mood of the creatures reveals the truth
of what has come to light through spiritual research, namely,
that the aroused activity taking place essentially between
the etheric body and astral body of the animal presses
upward in a living feeling and that the creature lives in
this feeling. The animal experience consists essentially of
an enhancement and a diminishing of this feeling, and, when
the feeling is somewhat subdued, of a participation in its
dream pictures, the picture taking the place of feeling. We
can say, therefore, that the animal lives in a consciousness
that is similar to our dream consciousness.
If we seek for
the consciousness that we ourselves have as human beings here
on earth, we cannot look for it within the animal; we must
seek it in beings who do not come to immediate physical
existence. These we call the animal species-souls, souls that
as such have no physical, bodily nature but that live
themselves out through the animals. We can say that all lions
together have such a species-soul, which has a spiritual
existence. It has a consciousness such as we human beings
have, not like that of the single animal.
If we now
descend to the plant world we find there not the same sort of
consciousness as an animal's but a consciousness similar to
the one we have between sleeping and awaking. The plant is a
sleeping being. We also, however, develop this consciousness
between the astral body and the I in willing. What is active
in the plant world is of essentially the same nature as what
lives in our willing. In our willing we actually sleep even
when we are awake. The same activity that prevails in our
willing actually prevails over the whole plant world. The
consciousness that we develop as sleep consciousness is
something that actually continues as an unconscious element
inserted into our conscious element, forming gaps in our
memory, as I described yesterday. Our consciousness is dull
during sleep, however, indeed altogether extinguished for
most people, just as is the case in plant consciousness.
If we then look
in plant life for what corresponds to animal life, we cannot
seek it in the individual plant but must seek it in the whole
earth-soul. The whole earth-soul has a dreaming consciousness
and sleeps itself into the plant consciousness. Only insofar
as the earth takes part in cosmic becoming does it flicker up
in such a way that it can develop a full consciousness such
as we human beings have in the waking state between birth
and death. This is chiefly the case, however, in the time of
winter, when there is a kind of waking of the earth, whereas
the dull dream consciousness exists during the warm time, in
summer. I have often explained in earlier lectures that it is
entirely wrong to conclude that the earth awakes in summer
and sleeps in winter. The reverse is true. In the stirring
vegetative activity that develops during the summer, during
the warm time of the year, the earth exists in a sleeping, or
rather in a dreaming, state, while the waking state exists in
the cold time of the year.
If we now
descend to the mineral realm we must admit that the
consciousness there is still deeper than that of our sleep, a
consciousness that indeed lies far from our ordinary human
experience, going out even beyond our willing. Nevertheless,
what lives in the mineral as a state of consciousness lies
far from us only apparently, only for the ordinary
consciousness. In reality it does not lie far from us at all.
When, for instance, we pass from willing to real action, when
we perform some action, then our willing cuts itself off from
us. That within which we then swim, as it were, that within
which we weave and live in carrying out the deed (which, in
fact, we only picture
[vorstellen]
— our consciousness does not penetrate the action, we only
picture it) but what penetrates the deed itself, the content of
the deed, is ultimately the same as what penetrates the other
side of the surface of the mineral in mineral nature and that
constitutes the mineral consciousness. If we could sink still
deeper into unconsciousness we would actually come to where
the mineral consciousness is weaving. We would find
ourselves, however, in the same condition as that in which
our action itself is also accomplished. The mineral
consciousness thus lies for us on the other side of what we
as human beings are able to experience. Our own deed,
however, also lies on the other side of what we human beings
can experience. Insofar, therefore, as our deed does not
depend on us, does not lie in the sphere of what is
encompassed within our freedom, our deed is just as much an
event of the world as what takes place in the mineral
kingdom. We incorporate our deed into this event and thus
actually carry man's relation to his environment to the point
where man with his action even comes over to the other side
of his sleeping consciousness.
In becoming
aware of the mineral world around him and seeing the minerals
from the outside, the human being hits upon what lies beyond
his experience. We could say that if this (see drawing) represents the circumference of
what we see within the human realm, the animal realm, and the
plant realm, and then we come here to the mineral realm, the
mineral realm shows us only its outer side in its working
upon our senses. On the other side, however, where we can no
longer enter, the mineral realm develops — turned away
from us, as it were — its consciousness (red). It is
the consciousness that is developed there that is received
from the inner contents of our deeds, that can work further
in the course of our karma.
Now let us pass
on to the beings who do not stand beneath the human being in
the ranks of the realms of nature but who stand above the
human being. How can we receive a certain mental image of
these beings; how, for the consciousness that we must
establish through spiritual research, through anthroposophy,
can a mental image of such higher beings be formed? You know
from the presentation in my book,
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment,
and from lectures I have
given on the subject that we can ascend from the day
consciousness, which we call the objective consciousness, to
Imaginative consciousness. If we ascend to Imaginative
consciousness in a healthy way, we first become free of our
bodily nature. We weave in the ether life. Our mental images
will thereby cease to have sharp contours, they will be
Imaginations flowing into one another. Moreover, they will
resemble the thought life that I characterized yesterday and
that we find on awaking between the etheric body and the
physical body. We become accustomed to such a thought life.
In this thought life to which we become accustomed in
Imagination, we do not link one thought to another in free
will; rather, the thoughts link themselves to one another. It
is a thought organism, a pictorial thought organism to which
we grow accustomed. This pictorial thought organism
possesses, however, the force of life. It presents itself to
us as being of thought substance, but also as actually
living. It has a life of its own: not the individual life
possessed by physical, earthly things but a life that
fundamentally lives and weaves through all things. We live
into a world that lives in imagining, whose activity is
imagining.
This is the
world that is first experienced above the human being, this
weaving world, this self-imagining world. What is woven in
us between our etheric and physical bodies, which we can find
on awaking and know to be identical with what enters through
conception and birth into this physical world from the
spiritual world, this we find only as a fragment, as
something cut out of this weaving, self-imagining world. That
world which is the self-imagining world finally dismisses us,
and then it works still further after our birth in our
physical body. There a weaving of thought takes place that is
unrelated to our own subjective thought-weaving. This weaving
of thought takes place in our growth. This weaving of thought
is active as well in our nourishment. This weaving of thought
is formed out of the universal thought-weaving of the
cosmos.
We cannot
understand our etheric body without understanding that we
have this universal thought-weaving of the world (see drawing, bright) and that our etheric body
(red) is woven, as it were, out of this thought-weaving of
the world through our birth. The thought-weaving of the world
weaves into us, forms the forces that underlie our etheric
body and that actually manifest themselves in the space
between etheric body and physical body. They are drawn in, as
it were, through the physical body, separated from the outer
world, and then they work in us with the help of the etheric
body, the actual body of formative forces.
We thus can
picture what is behind our world. The cognition next to ours
is the Imaginative, and the next state of being that is in
our environment is the self-imagining one, expressing itself
in living pictures. Such an expression in living pictures
underlies our own organization. In our etheric body we are
entirely formed and fashioned out of the cosmos. As we have
to ascribe to the animal in the realm below us a
consciousness like our dreaming consciousness, so in rising
upward we find what we then have subjectively in Imagination.
What we cultivate inwardly as a web of Imaginations exists
for us outwardly; we behold it, as it were, from outside. We
imagine from within. The beings just above man imagine
themselves from without, revealing themselves through
Imagination driven outward, and we ourselves are formed out
of this world through such an Imagination driven outward.
Thus in fact a weaving of thoughts, a weaving of
picture-thoughts, underlies our world, and when we seek the
spiritual world we find a weaving of picture-thoughts.
You know that
in the development of our cognitional capacities the next
stage is the stage of Inspiration. We can experience
Imagination from within as a process of cognition. The next
world beyond the world of self-imagining, however, is one
that weaves and lives in the same element we hit upon with
Inspiration, only for this world it is an
“exspiration,” a spreading out of oneself, as it
were. We inspire ourselves with knowing. What the next world
does, however, is to “exspire” itself; it drives
outward what we drive inward in Inspired cognition.
By beholding
from the reverse side what we experience inwardly as
Inspiration, we thus arrive at the objectivity of the next
higher beings, and so it is also with Intuition, with
Intuitive cognition. I must first say, however, that if as
human beings we were merely spun out of the thought-weaving
of the world, we would not bring with us into this life the
element of our soul that has gone through the life between
the last death and this birth. What is spun out of the
universal thought-weaving of the world has been assigned to
us by the cosmos. Now, however, the soul element must enter
it. The entry of the soul element is through such an activity
of “exspiration,” through an activity that is the
reverse of Inspiration. We are thus “exspired”
from the soul-spiritual world. Inasmuch as the cosmos weaves
around us with its thought-weaving, the soul-spiritual world
permeates us in “exspiring” with the soul
element. First, however, it must receive this soul element,
and here we come to something that can be comprehended
correctly only through the human being.
You see, as
human beings living in the world between birth and death we
continuously receive impressions of the outer world through
our sense perceptions. We form mental images about these and
permeate our mental images with our feelings. We pass over to
our will impulses and permeate all these. This forms in us at
first, however, a kind of abstract life, a kind of picture
life. If you look from within, as it were, at what the sense
organs have formed inwardly as soul experience of the outer
world, you find, in fact, the content of your soul. It is the
soul content of the human being that in the higher waking
consciousness presents what the outer world gives him between
birth and death. His inner being receives it, as it were. If
I sketch this inner being, in perception the world as it were
enters (see next below, red),
becomes inwardly penetrated by the forces of feeling and
will, and presses itself into the human organism. We actually
bear within us a view of the world, but we bear this view of
the world through the effects, the impressions, of the world
pressing into us. We are not able to understand fully in our
ordinary consciousness the destiny of what actually goes on
in us with these impressions of the world. What presses into
us and — within certain limits — what is a
picture of the cosmos is not only permeated by feelings and
inner will impulses, which enter us in consciousness, but is
pulsed through by all that otherwise,lives within the human
being. In this way it acquires a certain tendency. For as
long as we live, right up until death, it is held together by
the body. In penetrating the portal of death, it takes with
it from the body what one can call a wish to continue what it
became in the body, a wish to accept the being of man. When
we carry our inner soul life through death it acquires the
wish to accept the being of man.
That is what
our soul life bears through death: the longing for the being
of man. And this longing for the being of man is particularly
strongly expressed in all that is dreaming and sleeping in
the depths of our soul life, in our will. Our will, as it
incorporates itself into the soul life, which arises out of
the impressions of the outer world, bears within it as it
goes through death into a spiritual world, into the weavings
of a spiritual world, the deepest longing to become man.
Our thought
world, on the other hand, that world which can be seen in our
memories, for example, which is reflected from us ourselves
into our consciousness, bears within it the opposite longing.
It has indeed formed a relationship with our human nature.
Our thoughts have a strong relationship to our human nature.
They then bear in themselves, when they go through death, the
most intense longing to spread out into the world — to
become world (see 1st diagram this
lecture).
We therefore
can say that as human beings going through death our thoughts
bear within them the longing to become world. The will, on
the other hand, which we have developed in life, bears within
it the longing to become man.
Thoughts: Longing to
become world.
Will:
Longing to be come man.
This is what
goes with us through death. All that rules as will in the
depths of our being bears in its deepest inner being the
longings to become man. One can perceive this with
Imaginative consciousness if one observes the sleeping human
being, whose will is outside him, whose will with the I is
outside him. In what is to be found outside the human body,
the longing is already clearly expressed to return, to awake
again, in order to take human shape within the extension of
the human physical body itself. This longing, however,
remains beyond death. Whatever is of a will nature desires to
become man, whereas whatever is of a thought nature and must
unite with the thoughts that are so near to the physical
life, with the thoughts that actually form our human tissue
and bear our human configuration between birth and death
— that acquires the longing to be dispersed again, to
disintegrate, to become world. This lasts until approximately
the middle of the time that we spend between death and a new
birth.
The thought
element in its longing to become world then has come, as it
were, to an end. It has incorporated itself into the entire
cosmos. The longing to become world is achieved, and a
reversal comes about. Midway between death and a new birth
this longing of the thoughts to become world slowly changes
into the longing to become man again, again to interweave
itself so as to become the thought-web that we can perceive
next to the body when we awake. We can say, therefore, that in
the moment that lies midway between death and a new birth
— which I called the Midnight Hour of Existence in my
Mystery Dramas — we have a rhythmic reversal from the
longing of our thoughts to become world, now that it has been
fulfilled, into the longing to become man again, gradually to
descend in order to become man again.
In the same
moment that the thoughts receive the longing to become man
again, the reverse appears in the will. The will at first
develops the longing to become man in the spiritual element
where we live between death and a new birth. It is this
longing that predominantly fills the will. Out there between
death and a new birth the will has experienced a spiritual
image of the human being; now there arises in it the most
vivid longing again to become world. The will spreads out, as
it were; it becomes world, it becomes cosmos. By reason of
this spreading out it extends even to the vicinity of the
stream of nature that is formed through the line of heredity
in the succession of generations. What works as will in the
spiritual-physical cosmos and begins in the Midnight Hour of
Existence to have the longing again to become world already
lives in the flow of generations. When we then embody
ourselves in the other stream that has the longing to become
man, the will has preceded us in becoming world. It lives
already in the propagation of the generations into which we
then descend. In what we receive from our ancestors the will
already lives, the will that wished to become world after the
Midnight Hour of Existence. Through what in our thoughts has
desired since the Midnight Hour of Existence to become man,
we Meet with this will-desiring-to-become-world, which then
incorporates itself into what we receive from our
ancestors.
Thoughts: Longing to become world
— longing to become man.
Will: Longing to become man — longing to become
world.
You see,
therefore, that when we thus follow with spiritual vision
what lives on the one hand in the physical and what lives on
the other hand in the spiritual, we really picture man's
becoming. Since we incline downward to our physical existence
through the thought-web that longs to become man, however, we
are there related to all the beings who live in the sphere
just above man, beings who imagine themselves. We pass
through the sphere of the beings who, as it were, imagine
themselves. At the very moment when this reversal takes
place, our soul, permeated with the I, also finds the
possibility of living on in the two streams. They diverge, it
is true, but the soul lives with them, cosmically lives,
until, when the longing to become man again has been fully
realized, it incarnates and becomes indeed an individual
human being. The life of the soul is very complex, and here
in the Midnight Hour of Existence it passes over the abyss.
It is inspired, breathed in, out of our own past, that past
at first lying between our last death and the Midnight Hour
of Existence. We pass this Midnight Hour of Existence through
an activity that resembles, experienced inwardly, an
inspiring, and that outwardly is an
“exspiration,” proceeding from the former
existence. When the soul has passed the Midnight Hour of
Existence we come together with those beings who stand at the
second stage above man and who live, as I have said, in
“exspiration.”
The third stage
in higher cognition is Intuitive cognition. If we experience
it from within, we have experienced it from one side; if we
experience it from without then we have an intuiting, a
self-surrender, a true surrender of self. This
self-surrender, this flowing forth into the outer world, is
the nature of the hierarchy that stands at, the third stage
above man, the “intuiting.” This intuiting is the
activity through which the content of our former earthly life
is surrendered to our present one, streams over, pours itself
into our present life on earth. We exercise this activity
continually, both on the way to the Midnight Hour of
Existence and beyond it. This activity permeates all else,
and through it, in going through repeated earthly lives, we
participate in that world in which are the beings living in
real Intuition, the self-surrendering beings. We, too, out of
our former earthly life, surrender ourselves to the earthly
existence that follows.
We can thus
gain a picture of the course of our life between death and a
new birth in the environment of these three worlds. Just as
here between birth and death we live in the environment of
the animal, plant, and mineral worlds, so between death and
rebirth we live in that world where what we otherwise grasp
in Imagination lives in pictures formed from without. Hence
what we carry out of the spiritual cosmos into our bodily
form we can also grasp through Imagination. Our soul element,
which we carry through the Midnight Hour of Existence, which
lives in us principally as the activity of feeling, though
dulled into the dreamlike, we can grasp through Inspired
cognition, and this is also, when it appears as our life of
feeling, permeated by such beings.
In fact, we
live fully as human beings only in our outer sense
perception. As soon as we advance to thinking, something is
objective for this thinking, which is given for Imagination
in picture form. We raise into our consciousness only the
abstract thoughts out of the picture-forming. Immediately
behind our consciousness there lies the picture-weaving of
thoughts. As human beings between birth and death, we come to
freedom through the fact that we can raise the abstract
thoughts out of this picture-weaving. The world of
Imaginative necessity lies behind, and there we are no longer
alone in the same way as we are here. There we are interwoven
with beings revealing themselves through Imagination, as we
are then in our feeling nature interwoven with beings
revealing themselves through “exspiration,”
through inspiring turned outward. In going from earthly life
to earthly life we are interwoven with those beings who live
by Intuition.
Our human life
thus reaches downward into the three realms of nature and
reaches upward into the three realms of the divine,
soul-spiritual existence. This shows us that in our view of
the human being here we have only man's outer side. The
moment we look at his inner being he continues toward the
higher worlds, he betrays to us, reveals to us his
relationship to the higher worlds. We live into these worlds
through Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition.
With this we
have gained some insight into the human environment. At the
same time, however, we have discovered the world that stands
as a world of spiritual necessities behind the world of
physical necessities. We learn then to appreciate all the
more what lies in the center: the world of our ordinary
consciousness, through which we pass in the waking condition
between birth and death. There we incorporate into our actual
human nature what can live in freedom. Below us and above us
there is no freedom. We bear freedom through the portal of
death by taking with us the most essential content of the
consciousness that we possess between birth and death.
Indeed, the human being owes to earthly existence the mastery
over what in him is the life of freedom. Then, at all events,
it can no longer be taken from him, if he has mastered it by
passing through life between birth and death. It can no
longer be taken from him if he carries this life into the
world of spiritual necessities. This earthly life receives
its deep meaning precisely by our being able to insert it
between what lies below us and above us. We thus rise to a
grasp of what can be understood as the spiritual in the human
being.
If we wish to
know about the soul element, we must look into the spaces
between physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I; we
must look into what is weaving there between the members of
our being. If we wish to acquaint ourselves with man as a
spiritual being, we must ask what man experiences with the
beings who imagine themselves, with the beings who reveal
themselves outwardly through Inspiration, or actually through
“exspiration,” with the beings who reveal
themselves through Intuition. If we therefore wish to examine
the life of the soul we must look for the interaction
developed among our human members, and if we wish to study
man as a spiritual being we must look for the intercourse
with the beings of the hierarchies.
When we look
down into nature and wish to view the human being in his
entirety, then this human being unveils itself to spiritual
vision the moment we can say from inner knowledge: the human
being, as he is today, bears in himself physical body,
etheric body, astral body, and I. One thus has learned to
recognize what man is within nature. Now we become aware
— at first in a subjective way through inner experience
— of the weaving of the soul. We do not behold it, we
stand within it. In rising to a view of the soul we must
search between the members that we have discovered as the
members of man's being in natural existence. What these
members do with one another from within unveils itself for us
as the objective view of the soul's life.
Then, however,
we must go further and must now not only seek the members of
man and the effect of these members upon one another, but we
must take the whole human being and see him in interaction
with what lives in the widest circumference of the
perceptible world environment, below him and above him. Then
we discover what lives beneath him, as though sleeping in
relation to what is above him, and what proves itself to be
the actual spirituality of the human being —
spirituality as experience of our activity with the beings of
the higher hierarchies. What is experienced above as the
actual spirituality and what is experienced below in nature
is experienced as an alternation, a rhythmic alternation
between waking and sleeping. If we go from the human
consciousness, which is the waking consciousness, down to the
animal consciousness, which is the dreaming consciousness,
down to the plant realm, the sleeping consciousness, and if
we go still deeper, we find what is deeper than sleep; if we
go upward we first find Imagination as reality fulfilled.
Therefore there is a further awakening in relation to our
ordinary consciousness, a still further awakening with the
higher beings through Inspiration and a fully awakened
condition in Intuition, a condition of such awakeness that it
is a surrendering to the world.
Now I beg you
to follow this diagram, which is of the greatest significance
for understanding the world and man. Take this as the central
point, as it were, of ordinary human consciousness. It first
descends and finds the animal's dreaming consciousness; it
descends further and finds the plant's sleeping
consciousness; it descends further and finds the mineral's
deeply sleeping consciousness.
Now, however,
the human being rises above himself and finds the beings who
reveal themselves in Imaginations; he goes further upward and
finds the beings who reveal themselves in Inspirations,
actually through an “exspirating” being; he
finally finds the beings who reveal themselves through
Intuition, who pour themselves out.
Where do they
pour themselves? The highest consciousness pours itself into
the deeply sleeping consciousness of the mineral realm. The
mineral realm spread around us reveals one side to us. If you
approached this one side and were really able to penetrate it
— though not by splintering it into atoms — on
the other side you would find, raying in from the opposite
direction, that which, in Intuitive consciousness, streams
into the deeply sleeping consciousness of the mineral realm.
This process that we can fmd there in space we, as human
beings, go through in time in our evolution through different
earthly lives.
We will speak
further about these relationships tomorrow.
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