Lecture VI
Dornach, October 7, 1921
We have seen
how the study of the conditions of soul of the human being
leads us into the spaces, as it were, between physical body,
etheric body, astral body, and I; the study of the spiritual
conditions in the human being, however, leads us beyond the
phenomenon of the human being as he is here in his life
between birth and death out into the vast spiritual universe.
One might say that insofar as the human being is spirit he
stands absolutely in relation to the whole spiritual
universe. Hence it is only in this connection with the entire
universe that we can study what takes place in the human
being as spiritual events. The soul element is, so to speak,
man's intimate inner life, taking its course in a threefold
form in such a way that the thinking aspect is situated
between physical body and etheric body, the feeling aspect
between etheric body and astral body, and the aspect of
willing between astral body and the I. We therefore remain in
our study of the soul element entirely within the human
being. As soon as we approach the actual spiritual events,
however, we must leave the human being as he usually
confronts us as a self-contained being in the world between
birth and death.
Now we know
— and eight days ago we were speaking of this from
another viewpoint — that when we first ascend into the
spiritual we come to beings who are arranged above the human
being in the same way as the human being has his place above
the animal, plant, and mineral realms. As we ascend we
therefore have — names add nothing to the matter
— the angeloi or angelic beings, the archangeloi or
arch-angelic beings, and the archai or primal beings, time
spirits. We have already characterized from various points of
view these beings who constitute the realm we encounter when
we perceive the position of human beings in regard to the
spiritual. The beings whom we designate as angeloi or angels
are those who have the strongest relationship to the
individual, to the single human being. The individual human
being actually has a relationship to the hierarchy
immediately above him such that he in a way — this is
not expressed very exactly, but it can be said in the way
that it is commonly expressed — develops a certain
relationship to such an angelic being.
Those that then
make up the second hierarchy above him are the archangels. We
can say of them that among their functions is that which
works as folk spirit, that which therefore embraces groups of
those belonging together as a people, although here there are
all possible gradations.
When finally we
ascend higher, to the archai, we have the guiding beings
throughout certain epochs of time, beyond the
differentiations among peoples. These are certainly not the
only functions, let us say, of these beings, but to begin
with we receive certain conceptions if we keep to these
particular functions that they perform.
Just as we can
make man's physical life on earth comprehensible by asking
ourselves what kind of relationship the human being has to
the animal organization, to the plant organization, and to
the mineral organization, so we must also ask ourselves, in
order to learn what man is as a spiritual being, what kind of
relationship he has to these ascending stages of beings in
the spiritual.
For this we
must proceed in the following way. Let us picture from
certain viewpoints the way in which the human being goes
through the portal of death. We know that in this age of
earthly evolution that encompasses many years we live as
human beings in such a way that there are present in the
ordinary consciousness the laws underlying the mineral realm.
From birth to death man fills himself, we might say, with
everything that makes the mineral realm in a certain sense
comprehensible, and he has a feeling that with the concepts
and ideas at his disposal he is able to understand the
mineral realm.
It is not the
same where the plant realm is concerned. You know that
science stops short on coming to the plant realm; at best it
holds to the ideal that the complicated combination of the
plant cells, of living cells generally, will one day be
explicable in their structure. As I have explained to you,
this is beginning completely at the wrong end, because the
structure of the plant, or of living cells generally, is not
distinguished by being a particularly complicated structure
but by the chemical structure passing into chaos. Man,
however, does not get beyond the concepts of the mineral
realm. With his mineral concepts he comes still less —
if I may venture to say so — to what concerns the
animal realm or even to self-knowledge. All this must be
given by spiritual-scientific investigations. The human being
thus adopts a mineral consciousness, let us call it, that is,
a consciousness adapted to the mineral realm. The human being
carries the outcome of this consciousness, the weaving of
which takes place between birth and death, with him through
death. When he therefore goes through the portal of death and
lives in the spiritual realm itself, he can journey through
his further existence-with what became of this
consciousness.
There is
essentially something else, however, that pushes up into
this consciousness. What penetrates up into this mineral
consciousness, in spite of not belonging to it, what colors
it, is the moral consciousness. This is what arises out of
all the processes of consciousness connected to our will
impulses, to our conduct. What we feel as satisfaction about
this or that, what we feel as remorse, as reproach and the
like, all this gives color, as it were, to our mineral
consciousness and is something that the human being takes
with him through the portal of death. One can therefore say
that the human being goes through the portal of death with a
mineral consciousness colored by moral experience; with what
becomes of this consciousness, he then lives further in the
spiritual realm.
Man not only
understands the mineral world through this mineral
consciousness, but through this mineral consciousness he
develops his relationship to the being from the hierarchy of
the angels, therefore to that being to whom he wishes to turn
as the nearest to his individual development. When the human
being has gone through the portal of death, it is a question
of how far, through the consequences of his mineral
consciousness, he can preserve intact his relationship to
this angel being. He can do this only in accordance with what
from the moral side has colored this mineral consciousness,
for after death this mineral consciousness strives, as it
were, to spread itself out in the world. It strives to become
cosmic, to adapt itself to the whole universe; it strives to
get beyond what is individual.
We can also say
that in life between birth and death man is nearest to the
angel being when he is living in the condition out of which
dreams arise, which certainly also have something to do with
his individual being, and which on the one hand deny and on
the other hand hold fast to this mineral-thought being. Man
would be unable to find even the subconscious relationship to
the hierarchy of the angels were not this mineral
consciousness colored by the conditions that in a certain
sense he sleeps through but that reach up out of the sleeping
condition and live out their life in the world of dreams. The
dream itself, though in its outlines it does not adhere to
outer sense reality and often actually denies contact with
it, is nevertheless woven out of the same substance as the
world of thoughts is woven between birth and death. In going
through the portal of death, therefore, in order to maintain
the relationship to his angel being, the human being takes
with him what he has developed in himself within his mineral
consciousness.
Now in the way
we live today in humanity's present epoch man —
especially when he reckons himself to be among the most
enlightened — penetrates but little with his moral
experience into what he possesses as mineral consciousness.
On the contrary, he makes every possible effort to hold this
mineral consciousness quite apart from the moral sphere. He
would like at least to set up these two worlds; on the one
hand he would like to study what ultimately may be
comprehended in the realm of mineral nature, and the mineral
nature in the plant, animal, and human realms, and would then
like to study the moral element as something surging up from
his inner being. It is not harmonious with the spirit of the
time to think of what lives in nature as being at the same
time permeated with moral impulses. There yawns an abyss
between what is of a moral and what is of a mineral nature.
The human being does not easily find the bridge to
incorporate the moral into the mineral nature. I have often
drawn attention to how man pictures the evolution of the
earth to be a purely mineral affair, from the content of the
Kant-Laplace theory up to the mineral nature of modern
thinking, and how man eliminates everything in the way of
moral feeling. It thus comes about that the human being is
able to develop only an extremely slight relationship to the
being of the angeloi; in our present age he cannot unite
himself intimately with his angel being, to use an ordinary
expression.
If the mineral
consciousness were completely separated from moral coloring,
then at what I call the Midnight Hour of Existence man would
face the danger of entirely losing the necessary connection
with his angel being. I say he would face the danger. Today
only a small number of people face this danger, but if a
spiritual deepening of the whole evolution of humanity on
earth does not come about, a deepening of human thinking,
human feeling, and human willing, then what lives as a danger
may be realized. Then there would be countless human beings
who, on approaching the Midnight Hour of Existence between
death and a new birth, would have to sever the relationship
to their angel beings. It is true that the angel being would
always keep the relationship on his part, but it would remain
one-sided, from his side to the human being. The human being
between death and a new birth would not be able to
reciprocate adequately. We must be perfectly clear that in
our modern civilization, hastening as it is toward
materialism, the human being injures his relationship to his
angel being, so that this relationship becomes ever
looser.
Just when the
human being is approaching the Midnight Hour of Existence,
however, he must enter into relationship to the archangelic
beings through the angel being. Should this relationship be
of such a nature — as it may well be when man is living
in the spiritual world — that it not only comes from
the side of the angel being to humanity but can be
reciprocated by the human being, then man must absorb a
spiritual content, which means that he must color his moral
impulses religiously.
If the present
trend of evolution persists, the human being of today faces
the danger of his connection with the angel being becoming so
slight that he cannot form any inner relationship to the
archangelic being. The archangel, however, participates in
bringing man back into physical life. This archangelic being
is particularly involved in building up the forces that bring
man back into the community of a certain people.
When human
beings live inwardly unspiritually — as has been the
case for centuries — the relationship of the archangel
to the human beings develops one-sidedly, and then man does
not grow into his people with the inner soul being, but he is
inscribed from outside, as it were, by means of the world
order, into the people that the archangel is assigned to
guide. One does not arrive at an understanding of our present
age, which may be characterized by the one-sided way in which
the peoples are cultivated, until one knows that this
actually may be attributed to the souls who have recently
come down to earthly existence having a loose relationship to
their angel beings and by reason of this having no inner
relationship to the archangelic being — thus growing
into their people only from without. The people thus remains
in them as an impulse from outside, and it is only through
outer impulses that human beings take their place within a
people, through all sorts of impulses inclining toward
chauvinism. He who stands within his people with soul —
and this is the case with very few people today — will
be unable to develop in the direction of chauvinism, of
one-sided nationalism; he takes up the fruitful forces within
the people and develops these, makes these individual. He
will not boast of his people in a one-sided way. He will let
his people flow into his being as color, as it were, flow
into his human manifestations, but will not parade this
outwardly, and particularly not in an outwardly hostile
attitude toward others.
The fact that
today it is exactly this that provides the keynote for world
politics — that all relations built on peoples create
such difficulties today for human evolution — all this
rests entirely on what I have been indicating. If the bond
that begins in the-Midnight Hour of Existence — before
and after this, throughout long periods — cannot be
ensouled by one's taking the appropriate religious inwardness
through the portal of death — a religious feeling that is
spiritual and not merely a matter of lip service — then
the archangel is able to work only on what is plant-like in
the cosmos and what as plant-like nature is imparted to the
human being. Through very subconscious forces connected with
his plant nature, which means with that which is placed in
him by his breathing condition and is modified by all that
has to do with conditions of language, by everything,
therefore, that in language pushes in a plant-like way into
the human organism, through all this man can be guided only
by his archangel. It then happens that when the human being
is born, when he grows as a child, he grows into his language
in a more-or-less outer way. Had he been able to find the
relationship, the inner relationship of soul, to his
archangel through his angel, he would then have grown with
his soul into all that had to do with his language, he would
have understood the genius of the language, not merely what
constitutes the outer mechanical aspect of it.
Today, however,
we can see how strongly it is the case that in many respects
the human being is an imprint of the mechanical in his
language, so that actually he does not bear the element of
language as a keynote in his entire being but receives an
exact imprint of it. One can see quite clearly how the facial
expression itself is an expression of the element of
language. What confronts us in the people, what confronts us
as their unique, national physiognomy, comes to man from the
archangels in a completely outer way.
What takes
place outwardly in humanity, insofar as it works into the
spiritual of the human being, actually can be explained only
through the kind of study we pursue in an anthroposophical
spiritual science. All modern anthropology and things of that
kind are actually what might be called a mere playing with
terminology. In what is written today by anthropologists or
their kind about the configuration of humanity on the earth,
about the differentiation of humanity, we really in many
respects have nothing to orient us, no guiding viewpoint,
because what is there understood as concept is merely the
classification of outer characteristics. One could just as
well redistribute the whole picture. A real content streams
into the matter only if it is studied spiritually. Then,
however, one must not shrink back if in this study real,
concrete spiritual beings arise.
One sees from
this that only spiritual deepening can heal the damages of
our modern age. The damages of today, insofar as they
confront us in public life, are founded on the loose
relationship of the human being to his angel and the
consequent loose bond with the archangel, who is thus able to
have an influence only from outside.
When a human
being between death and a new birth undergoes his further
evolution, which after the Midnight Hour of Existence leads
him once more into physical, earthly life, he enters
especially the realm of the archai, of the primal spirits.
These archai, these primal spirits, in the present cosmic
evolution have to do with leading the human being back into
the earthly limits of his being.
When the human
being passes through the portal of death his further life
takes its course in such a way that he experiences to begin
with the consequences of his mineral consciousness with its
moral coloring — thereby expanding himself, as it were,
over the world. Then, after the Midnight Hour of Existence,
he draws himself together again. First he is led over into
the plant element, which is incorporated into him. The more
nearly he approaches earthly life, the more he draws himself
together, so that he is able to be born once more as a being
enclosed in his skin.
What must
happen to a human being when he enters the realm of the
archai is an incorporating, a densification, of the plant
element into the animal element. In passing through the
Midnight Hour of Existence, a man acquires first the
forces — naturally not the organs but first the forces
— which determine his breathing and also the
differentiated breathing. The concentration of these forces
into the actual forces of the organs comes about only after
the Midnight Hour of Existence, comes about only in the realm
of the archai. Man becomes, so to speak, ever more and more
human. The fact is, however, that this cosmic activity
exercised upon the human being as forces coming from the
archai actually organizes him in such a way that the organs
tend toward the animal structure. If we perceive the human
being in his relationship to the cosmos we find that while
the human being is striving away from the Midnight Hour of
Existence toward a new life on earth he is subject to cosmic
laws, just as here on earth he is subject to earthly laws. We
may say the following: the human being is defined from the
immeasurable expanses of the universe, in that he draws
himself together more and more. Up to the Midnight Hour of
Existence there is, as it were, an expansion of man, by means
of his mineral consciousness, into the breadths of the
universe (see drawing, arrows), into the immeasurable breadth
of the universe. When the Midnight Hour of Existence arrives
(see drawing, blue) those forces incorporate themselves into
the human being that work in him as plantlike forces. Man
returns from this Midnight Hour of Existence in order to
confine himself within the appropriate limits for earthly
life (arrows going in). This Midnight Hour of Existence is
altogether a tremendously significant moment in human
evolution.
While after his
death a human being lives on into the cosmos, he becomes
increasingly one with the world. He hardly distinguishes
himself from the world. Expressing myself figuratively
— naturally out in the cosmos we cannot speak of
physical organs, but you will understand me if I present this
to you in images taken from physical existence — I might
say: man learns, as it were, how the eye grows together with
the light and then no longer distinguishes the eye from the
light, or the sound from the ear. By expanding himself out
into the cosmic breadths he grows together with the
universe.
Having passed
the Midnight Hour of Existence, where he begins to draw
himself together in order to become once more a being with
limits, there dawns in him a kind of objective conception:
this is not the world, this is the human being. A
consciousness grows more and more intense in the human being
— a consciousness that is most intense when the human
being returns into earthly life. As here on earth, however,
the content of our consciousness is the minerals, the plants,
the animals, the mountains, rivers, clouds, the stars, sun,
and moon, so on our way back to the earth the being of man is
the main conception.
It is really so
that if we take the seemingly quite complicated world that
lies outside our skin, with all that is within it, if we take
the world with its soul and spiritual elements, it is indeed
most complicated; what lies within our skin, however, is just
as complicated and is different from the world outside only
in size, but the size is not important. Between birth and
death our world is what lies outside our skin; what is within
we cannot really observe except in what during life man
certainly is not, namely, the corpse. From the Midnight Hour
of Existence, however, until the next life on earth, the
human world, the inner being of man, is his body, soul, and
spirit (see drawing, right, blue).
There man is, as it were, the world. Up to the Midnight Hour
of Existence we gradually lose the world as we know it
through the mineral consciousness; we lose it by living into
the world as though it were our self, our whole,
all-embracing self, so that we no longer distinguish between
our self and the world. In returning, our world becomes the
human being. We do not behold the stars, we behold the
membering of the human limbs; we do not behold all that is
contained in the universe, let us say, between stars and
earth, we behold what is within the human organization,
insofar as it is formed out of spirit and soul. We behold the
human being, and what we thus behold is what leads us to our
renewed existence on earth. We behold the human being
receiving his form.
In the time of
the Midnight Hour of Existence we live in the human being who
is forming himself in accordance with the plant-like. When we
come into the region of the archai we live in what forms the
organs of the human being, in the sense of animal forces. I
have said that just as between birth and death we are
dependent on what works on us from the earth, so we are
dependent, in that we are outside in the universe, on what is
beyond the earthly — it is no longer a question of
space, but naturally we can only present this in spatial
terms. The moment we pass through the archai, we can express
the laws that work in us in the sense of the universe —
in the same way, as during our life here in an earthly
community we test the laws of the earth by the laws of modern
physics — we can express these laws by relating
ourselves to Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo,
Libra, and so on.
By relating the
positions of the sun to these stars, to the heaven of the
fixed stars in general, in the constellations of the sun with
this heaven of fixed stars we have the laws that prevail in
the realm of the will of the archai. The will that prevails
there, which permeates these laws, is the will of the
archai.
If we were to
look outside for natural laws corresponding to our natural
laws, as natural laws correspond to us here on earth during
earthly existence, we would have to look to these
constellations of the stars. We remain a long time in the
kingdom where we are dependent on the star constellations
— though not more dependent than we are dependent here
on earth on natural laws where our will works also, which is
something higher than the laws of nature. There too we may
not speak of the cosmos in the sense of a cosmic law that
works with mechanical necessity. What we find in the
constellations of the stars, however, is the expression, as
it were, the image, of these laws that work upon us there. As
formerly, when we were in the kingdom of the archangeloi, the
laws of the plant-like worked upon us, so now there work upon
us the laws holding good in the animal realms.
When these
things are found again through spiritual science, one comes
upon the tremendously significant fact that the people in
ancient times who used to acquire knowledge from certain
dreamlike visions of the universe, which were then lost, that
these people really showed a touch of atavistic genius, one
could say, in naming this picture circle, which represented
for them the heaven of the fixed stars, the Zodiac
(Tierkreis, “animal circle”). I can only
think that our new science of the spirit, which shows us
these things again, is led from a completely different basis
to an understanding of what was once grasped in a dimly
sensed knowledge. It is tremendously moving when one finds
the teaching about the Zodiac and its influence on the human
being preserved from ancient times and when one then —
quite apart from what has been preserved — with the means
at the disposal of present-day spiritual science, comes once
more to connect knowledge with the constellations of the sun,
with the zodiacal signs, in other words, with the heaven of
the fixed stars.
It is this that
links the more recent science of the spirit so closely to the
wisdom of the ancients. Between our time, when we wish to
make spiritual science our quest, and this period when the
wisdom of the ancients held sway, we have an age that was
indeed necessary for the striving after human freedom; this
age basically, however, was an age of darkness.
We thus come
into the realm of the archai and receive and incorporate into
us that which is our animal nature. What is our animal
nature? Our animal nature is above all what gives us our
organs, which even in number are very similar to the organs
of the higher animals. Before we approach birth, however, we
are stripped — if I may so express it — of the
realm of the Zodiac and enter the realm of the planets
— Saturn, Jupiter, and so on. In entering the realm of
the planets, and thus in coming nearer to the earth, nearer
the point of time when we take on the boundaries of our human
form, what is incorporated into us out of cosmic law as the
animal nature is given its direction, if I may express it in
this way. Before we sink down into the planetary system, and
therefore into the forces of the planetary system, our
vertebral column, for example, has not taken on a direction
away from the earth, which would raise the head aloft. We are
more subject to the directional forces governing the posture
of the animal. Everything, for example, that designs the
hands as the organ of our soul element, not only as an organ
for grasping or for walking — what makes of them organs
that can act freely out of the impulses of the soul element,
all this we owe to this planetary influence. All that helps
us to be truly human, right into the lowest stages of our
animal organization, we have by virtue of the constellations
of the moon with the rest of the planets.
We are made
human, therefore, as we return through the planetary system.
I told you that man himself, man as he forms himself, is the
world that is living in our consciousness during our return
journey from the Midnight Hour of Existence. We also see how
at first everything is present in him that ultimately
pulsates in rhythm with the animal forces. We live through
this in such a way that we actually experience a kind of
decline, a kind of icy process. All this, however, is
loosened on our entering the planetary realm, and this first
forms the cosmic world, which we see as the human world, the
world represented by the earthly human being who Wrests
himself away from the animal element, who grows out of the
animal element. All this now fills us; it becomes the content
of our consciousness. We carry in us as a system of forces
that which the cosmos has given us.
Thus we descend
soul-spiritually from the spiritual worlds. We have lived
through the worlds in which we were in direct touch, stood in
connection with, angels, archangels, archai. We descend as
man. It is true, however, that if, in the way characterized,
we have failed to establish an intimate relationship to our
angel being, we have difficulties when penetrating into the
planetary region, because we have been unable to make any
divine-spiritual connection with the world of the archai.
Outwardly we become incorporated into a people. The archai
are then obliged to work into us, as it were, only from
outside. Through this we are given a definite place on the
earth, for all the forces of the archai tend toward that end.
The archangels give us our place among a people and our
particular place within this people is then determined by the
archai. Not imbued with soul and spirit, however, we grow in
an outer, mechanical way into this environment.
This is a
characterization of our modern age — that the human
being no longer has that inner relationship, that intimate
inner relationship, that he had to his environment in more
ancient times, when he grew into this immediate environment
also with his soul. This is still maintained at best in a
caricaturish way — as a caricature, I repeat —
when today, even if it is already coming to an end, children
perhaps grow up in some particular castle after previously
having been attracted to their ancestors. Here we will have a
relationship that in earlier ages had to do with the soul
element. Today a human being is pressed into his environment
in such a way that he basically has little inner relationship
to the place in which he finds himself, to which his karma
takes him in an entirely outer way, so that he feels his
whole placement into physical existence as something external
to him.
When man's
being is formed through education and life in such a way that
he is filled with soul, filled with spirit, and comes to a
spiritual conception of the world, he will then carry this
through life between death and a new birth so that he does
not lose the inner connection with his angel, so that through
his archangel his soul is carried into his particular people,
and so that he is not placed in a merely outer way into his
immediate existence by the world of the archai. He should
rather be able to absorb once again into his animal
organization something that he experiences in such a way that
he says: there is a deep significance in the fact that just
from this place where my consciousness first gradually
awakens, where my education is carried on — that just
from this place I am to unfold my activity in the world. This
is certainly something that should lead us to bring about
reform in education, so that the human being once more feels
that from the place where he is educated he takes something
with him that gives him his mission in the world. When this
is so, a human being grows beyond the merely outer realm of
the archai. He will experience the forces directing human
beings in a way that is permeated by soul and spirit, and he
will grow into his new life in a way different from what is
frequently the case today.
What happens,
then, when the human being enters a new earthly life? His
consciousness is filled with the way in which he is building
himself up from within as a human being. He is filled with a
world that he beholds, a world of activity, not a mere world
of thought. As I have already mentioned, after the Midnight
Hour of Existence this world gradually takes on the tendency
of the will toward being human, and the human being immerses
himself into what is offered him through heredity in the
generations, through the substance he receives from his
ancestors. Into this he immerses himself. He envelops himself
with the physical sheath; he enters the physical world. On
observing the human being spiritually, we can actually find
out about the content of the soul element when he is
immersing himself in a new life in physical existence.
Of all the
realms lived through by the human being between death and a
new birth it is natural that a human being comes into the
closest relationship to the angeloi, archangeloi, archai, but
these things stand in further relationship to the higher
hierarchies. Between death and a new birth a human being thus
pursues his course through a realm in which his relationship
to that realm depends on what he carries through the portal
of death. The extent to which he has succeeded in permeating
with his mineral consciousness that which as spirit wishes to
rise out of the depths of his being determines to what extent
he can become intimate with his angel being. By being able to
be intimate in this way with his angel being, however, he
grows into the world of the archangeloi, so that knowing, as
it were, experiencing their forces out of himself, he can
consciously reciprocate and proceed further, so as to become
the individualized being he must gradually become if the
world is to move toward its ascent and not its decline.
It is perfectly
possible to give from the most varied points of view a deeply
significant description of this life between death and a new
birth. One point of view is to be found in the lecture course
I held in 1914 at Vienna;
[ Note 7 ]
today I have been developing another point of view for
you. All these points of view are intended to lead to
increasing knowledge of the human being from his spiritual
aspect. Those who are unwilling to explore a whole spiritual
world in this way will never be able to grasp the spiritual
in man himself. Just as we must go into the spaces between
physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I in order to
penetrate the soul element in its objective nature, so we
must proceed out of the human being into the spiritual world
to study his relationship to this spiritual world. Then we
discover what actually weaves and lives in the human being as
the spiritual. It is only the love of comfort today that
makes man speak of the spirit in general terms. We must
become capable of speaking about the spirit in all its
particulars, just as we do of nature. Then there will arise a
real human knowledge; as man needs it, the primeval saying of
truth will be fulfilled, the saying that sheds its light from
ancient Greece, the fulfillment of which must continue to be
striven for by the human being — the truthful saying,
“Know thyself.”
Self-knowledge
is knowledge of the world, and world knowledge is knowledge
of self, for if we are living between birth and death, the
stars, the sun, the moon, mountains, valleys, rivers, and the
plants, animals, and minerals are our world, and what lives
within our human boundaries is what we are. If we are living
between death and a new birth, then we are what is concealed
as the spiritual behind sun, moon, and stars, behind
mountains and rivers, and our outer world is then the inner
being of man. World and man alternate rhythmically, the human
being living both physically and spiritually. For the human
being here on earth the world is what is outside. For the
human being between death and a new birth the world is what
is within. Hence it is a question only of alternating through
the times for man to be able to say that, in the most real
sense, knowledge of man is knowledge of the world; knowledge
of the world is knowledge of man.
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