IV
THE OTHER SIDE OF HUMAN EXISTENCE
LONDON, AUGUST 30, 1922
SINCE WE CAN come together
so seldom and would like to include as much as possible in these
lectures, it could easily happen that too much is included.
Nevertheless, today, from a certain point of view, I would still like
to try to characterize for you what could be called the other side of
human existence on earth. I would then like to relate that to the
significance of a deeper spiritual knowledge of our
time.
How much do we finally know about our
existence if we use only our senses and the intellect bound up with
those senses as our source of knowledge? Ordinary sense-consciousness
only allows us to spend the waking part of our existence in full
consciousness. The spiritual powers that lead the world did not
add the sleeping state to human existence for nothing. From falling
asleep to waking up a very great deal happens to the human being.
Indeed, most of what the spirit has to effect through human beings in
earthly existence is actually achieved during the sleep
state.
During the waking state, all that can occur
on earth is what we can undertake with ourselves and the things
around us. But what higher, spiritual beings undertake with the human
soul in human evolution, in order to bring the soul to complete
development within earthly existence — this happens during the
sleep state. We should not lose sight of the fact that modern
initiation knowledge can look closely at the significance of the
events that occur when the human being is asleep. Of course, these
events occur not only for initiates but for all people; the
development of all human beings depends upon them. The initiate can
only draw attention to these sleep state events. However, every human
being who gives any thought at all to the meaning of earth existence
should increasingly feel and sense the significance of what occurs
while he sleeps.
Today I would simply like to describe all
that plays into the sleeping state of the human being. As you know,
when a person falls asleep we characterize what happens externally by
saying that the astral body and the I are loosened from the physical
and etheric bodies. The I and the astral body are then in the
spiritual world; they no longer permeate the physical and etheric
bodies as they did in the state between waking and falling asleep.
When we look at what happens with human beings in the sleeping state
our attention is drawn to the various ways they are connected to the
earth during waking. To begin with, we are connected to the earth
through our senses — we perceive and know the appearances of
the various kingdoms of nature. However, we are also connected with
the earth through what we do unconsciously while awake. For example,
we breathe — for the most part, unconsciously — and the
entire earth, if I may put it this way, plays into the air we
breathe. Innumerable substances dispersed in a very fine state are
present in the air we breathe. Precisely because they are in this
finely dispersed state they have an extraordinarily significant
effect when inhaled into the human organism. What enters the human
being when he perceives through his senses enters consciously.
But a great deal also enters the human being unconsciously when
he is awake. And this unconscious element has more substance than
what enters through the abstract, ideal state of perceiving and
thinking. The world around enters us in a more substantial form
through our breathing.
If you would only take into consideration
just how dependent the human organism is upon everything that it
takes in with the various substances of earthly nourishment, then you
would be able to acknowledge that there is much that affects us in
our waking state. But this fact is of less interest to us
today. We are much more concerned with what is working on the human
being in his sleeping state. The point here is this: Just as we see
external earthly substances connected with us during our waking
state, so too, when we enter the sleeping state, we enter into a
certain connection with the entire cosmos.
That is not to say that we should imagine a
human being taking on the magnitude of the cosmos every night
with his or her astral body — that would be an exaggeration
— but we do grow into the cosmos every night. Just as we are
connected here on earth during the day with the plants, the minerals,
and the air, so too we are connected during the night with the
movements of the planets and with the constellations of the fixed
stars. From our falling asleep until our waking the sky full of stars
becomes our world just as the earth is our world in the waking
state.
Now, to begin with, we can distinguish
various spheres through which we pass between falling asleep and
waking. The first sphere we pass through is that in which the human I
and the human astral body — that is, the human soul when asleep
— feels itself connected with the movements of the planets.
When waking in the morning and, as it were, having slipped into our
physical body we can say that we have in us our lungs, our heart, our
liver, our brain. Likewise when we enter the sleep state we must say
that in the first sphere with which we come into contact after
falling asleep — which is also the sphere we are again in
contact with just before awakening — in this sphere we have
within us the forces of planetary movement.
It is not that we take the entire movements
of the planets into ourselves every night. But what we carry within
us as an image or copy is a small picture, in which the movements of
the planets are actually copied, reflected. And this is different
with every human being. We can say that, when falling asleep, every
human being experiences the movements of the planets. Everything that
goes on as movement “out there” in the space of the
universe between the planets is experienced inwardly in a kind of
globe of planets in the astral body. That is the human being's first
experience after falling asleep.
Do not ask, my dear friends, what this has
to do with you. Do not say that you do not perceive this. You may not
see it with your eyes nor hear it with your ears. But in the moment
you fall asleep, at that moment, that part of your astral body that
during waking permeates and is a part of your heart — that part
becomes an eye. We see with this organ, which I will call a
“heart-eye.” When we enter the sleep state this organ
begins to perceive what is happening in the way I have just
described. This heart-eye really does perceive what the human being
experiences there — even if the perception is, for present-day
humanity, very dim and obscure.
What we experience there is perceived by
this heart-eye in such a way that, in the time after falling asleep
when the physical and etheric bodies are lying there in bed, this
heart-eye looks back at us. The I and the astral body look back at
the physical and etheric bodies with the heart-eye. What the I and
the astral body experience in their body inwardly as a picture of the
movements of the planets, radiates back to the heart eye from their
own etheric body. The I and the astral body see the mirror image of
the planetary movement coming out of their own etheric
body.
Upon awakening, because of the way the human
being is presently constituted, we immediately forget the dim
consciousness provided by our heart-eye during the night. This
consciousness is dim and, at the most, can only be found echoing in
certain dreams; in their inner flexibility these dreams still have
something of the planetary movements. As we approach
wakefulness, images from our lives settle into these dreams which,
fundamentally speaking, are actually dependent upon the
movements of the planets. The images enter at this point because the
astral body is being submerged into the etheric body, which preserves
our memories of earthly life.
The following is a specific example: You
wake up in the morning; you have once again gone through the
spheres of planetary movement. Let us say you have experienced there
a special relationship between Jupiter and Venus because such
an event is connected with your destiny, your karma. This could
happen. You could have experienced a special relationship between
Jupiter and Venus. If you could lift what was experienced there
between Jupiter and Venus into the light of your day
consciousness, then much concerning your human abilities would be
clear to you. For those abilities have come from the cosmos, not from
the earth. How you are related to the cosmos determines how you are
gifted, how you are good, or at least how you are inclined to good or
to evil. You would be able to see what Jupiter and Venus discussed
with one another, and what you perceived with your heart-eye. (I
could just as well say heart-ear, for it is hard to distinguish such
things.) But this is all forgotten because it has been perceived so
very dimly. As this exchange between Jupiter and Venus continues
within you it causes corresponding movements in your astral body and
something else, from your etheric body, mixes in — for example,
what you experienced around noon when you were seventeen, or
when you were twenty-five years old, say, in Oxford or Manchester or
anywhere. Such earthly images are mixed with the cosmic experiences.
The pictures in dreams do have a certain significance; but the
pictures arc not what is of primary importance. They are, so to
speak, the fabric woven to clothe cosmic events.
Concerning the experience that thus comes
into existence for the perception of the heart, we can say that it is
bound up with a certain anxiety. For almost everyone there are
feelings of a spiritual kind of anxiety mixed in with this
experience, especially when what was experienced cosmically shines
back and echoes from the human etheric body. For example, this
anxiety arises for the perception of the heart if what has been
brought about through the special relationship between Jupiter and
Venus radiates back with a ray — which would say a lot for your
heart perception — radiates back from the human forehead, and
if this ray is then mixed with the sound and light from another ray,
say, from the region just below the heart. This perception of anxiety
leads every soul not entirely hardened to such perceptions to
actually say to itself in sleep: The mists of the cosmos have taken
me into themselves. It really feels like you have become as thin as
the mists of the world and are swimming like a cloud, just a part of
cosmic fog, within the larger mists of the cosmos. This is the
experience immediately after falling asleep.
Then out of this anxiety, out of this
feeling of one's self as just another mist within the cosmic fog,
something comes into the human soul that could be called devotion to
the divine that is weaving through the world. Those are the two basic
feelings that come over the human being in the first sphere after
falling asleep: first that I am within the mists of the world, and
then that I would like to rest in the bosom of God so as to be safe
from dissolution in these mists. These feelings must be carried by
the perception of the heart when we again awaken in the morning and
enter into our physical and etheric bodies. If this experience were
not carried over into life then all the substances we take into our
bodies for nourishment the next day, or whatever else our metabolism
may process — even if we starve, for then the substances are
taken from our bodies — these substances would assume solely
their earthly character and would thus bring about disorder in the
whole human organism.
It is simply a fact that for the human
waking condition the significance of sleep is enormous. In this
epoch of earth's development man is still spared the task of
having to carry the divine from sleep into waking. Because of the way
human beings in the present age are constituted they could hardly
muster the strength to carry these things in full consciousness from
the other side of existence to this side of existence.
After the experiences connected with the
planetary movements, the human being goes into the next sphere.
In doing so we do not leave the first; it remains for the perception
of the heart. The next sphere is much more complicated and is
perceived with that part of the astral body that, during the day,
during waking, permeates and is a part of the solar plexus, permeates
and is a part of our entire limb system. The solar plexus and limb
system of the human being, that part of the astral body that
penetrates and permeates the solar plexus and the arms and legs
— this part of the astral body perceives what happens in the
night in the next sphere.
In the next sphere we feel the forces in our
astral bodies that originate in the constellations of the zodiac.
These forces come in two forms, the first consisting of those forces
which come directly from the constellations of the zodiac, the other
form arising when these forces from the zodiac pass through the
earth. It makes a very big difference whether the zodiacal signs are
above or below the earth.
In this sphere the human being perceives
with what I would like to call “sun perception” because
that part of the astral body connected with the solar plexus and the
limb system is involved in the perception. I would like to call this
perceiving part of the astral body the “eye of the sun”
or the “sun-eye.” Through it we become aware of our
entire relationship to the zodiac and the movements of the planets.
In this sphere the picture is enlarged, we grow more into the picture
of the cosmos.
This experience is again mirrored to us by
our own physical and etheric bodies, which we are now looking at.
What comes forth from our body every night is brought into connection
with the entire cosmos, with the movements of the planets and the
constellations of the fixed stars. The experience with the fixed
stars may occur for some people half an hour after falling asleep,
for some after a longer period and for others very shortly after
falling asleep. A person experiences himself in all twelve
constellations. The experiences with the fixed stars are
extraordinarily complicated.
My dear friends, I believe you could have
visited the most important regions of the earth as a world traveler
and still you would not have had the sum of experiences that your
sun-eye gathers for you from a single constellation of the zodiac.
Because the people who lived in ancient times still had powerful
dreamlike powers of clairvoyance and perceived, in a dreamlike
way, much of what I have been describing, all of this was relatively
less confusing to them. Today, a person's sun-eye can hardly come to
any kind of clarity — and we must come to clarity even if we
forget it in the day. We can hardly come to any kind of clarity
concerning what we experience in twelve-fold complexity during the
night unless we take into our hearts and minds what Christ wanted to
become for the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha. Simply having
felt what it means for the life of the earth that Christ went through
the mystery of Golgotha, simply thinking about Christ in our ordinary
life on earth brings such a tinge, such a hue, into our astral body,
by the indirect path through the physical and etheric bodies,
that Christ can become our leader through the zodiac from falling
asleep to waking.
Once again the human being wonders: Will I
be lost in the multitude of stars and their activities? But if we can
look back to thoughts, feelings, and will impulses turned toward
Christ during our daytime waking state, then Christ becomes a leader
who helps us to bring order into the complex and confusing events of
this sphere.
Only when we observe the other side of life
do we realize the full significance of Christ for the earth life of
humanity since the Mystery of Golgotha. In the present, ordinary
civilization, there is actually no one else who understands what
Christ must still become for the life of earth. All these things,
which have not yet been experienced by many people, are wrongly
explained. Only when you know what I have just explained can you
understand the various ways in which people who have not yet been
touched by the Christ event bring their nightly experiences while
asleep into waking day consciousness. When we have gone through the
misty existence in the sleep state and entered the second sphere we
stand before a complicated and confusing world. Only when Christ
steps forward as a spiritual sun and becomes our leader is
complex confusion resolved into a kind of harmonious
understanding.
This point is important because our karma
appears, actually appears to our sun-eye, the moment we step into
this sphere of whirling confusion, this sphere of planetary movement
and of the fixed star constellations of the zodiac. All human beings
perceive their karma, but only in the sleeping state. The afterimage
or afterglow of this perception slips into our waking state through
our feelings.
Much of the condition of soul that we can
find in ourselves — if, to some extent, we strive for
self-knowledge — is a very dim echo of this zodiacal
experience. People can receive strength for their daily lives because
Christ appeared as the leader and led them from Aries through Taurus,
Gemini, and so forth, and explained the world to them in the night.
What we experience in this sphere is nothing less significant than
this: Christ becomes our leader through the complex and confusing
events in the zodiac; he stands there as the being who leads us, who
leads us from constellation to constellation, in order for us to take
into ourselves, in an orderly fashion, the spiritual forces that we
once again need — and they are, indeed, ordered — for our
waking life.
Fundamentally speaking, this is what the
human being experiences every night between falling asleep and
waking. He experiences this because he is related to the cosmos
as a soul and spirit. Just as he is related to the earth through his
etheric and physical bodies, he is also related to the cosmos with
his soul, with his spirit and his astral body. When the human being
has separated from his physical and etheric bodies and so grown out
into the cosmic world, he then feels within himself a strong kinship
to the world he is entering. He feels this kinship in his experience
of the pictures reflected back to him from what has been left lying
in bed. He feels a strong tendency to move out beyond the zodiac with
his inner life. But this he cannot do between birth and death because
another element mixes into all these experiences during the time when
the human being is asleep, another element which, compared with what
comes from the planets and the fixed stars, is of an entirely
different nature. This is the element of the moon.
During the night the element of the moon,
even during the new moon, tinges to a certain extent the entire
cosmos with a special something that is like a substance. This
tingeing is also experienced by us. But we experience it in
such a way that these moon forces hold us back within the world of
the zodiac and lead us once again to waking. With a dimly conscious
awareness we already experience this moon element in the first
sphere. But during the second sphere we experience the secrets
of birth and death in an especially powerful way. With an organ lying
even deeper than the heart-eye and the sun-eye, with an organ that
is, so to speak, apportioned to the whole human being, we actually
experience every night how our soul-spirit being descends
— that is, has descended — from the world of soul and
spirit and has entered into physical existence through birth; and we
experience how the body gradually goes over into death. The human
being is actually always dying. In every moment he only subdues death
until death then really occurs as a single event. But in the moment
we experience how the soul, so to speak, goes through earthly
nature, bodily nature, in this same moment we also experience —
and through the very same forces — our connection with the rest
of humanity.
You have to remember this: Not even the most
insignificant encounter, insignificant relationship — or even
the most decisive — is without a connection to our total
destiny, to the total karma of the human being. All our involvement
with other human beings, all human relationships, which have, of
course, an intimate connection with the mystery of birth and
death, appear, I would like to say, before our spiritual eye at this
point during the second sphere. This comprehension of karma happens
whether the souls with whom we have ever had a connection in past
lives, or with whom we now, in this earth life, have a relationship,
are presently in the spiritual world or are on the earth. We feel
ourselves at this point to be in touch with and living within
our total life destiny.
This experience is connected with the fact
that all the other forces, those of the planets and the fixed stars,
want to draw us out into the cosmos while the moon wants to put us
again into the world of people, basically tearing us out of the
cosmos. The moon has forces that are actually opposed to the forces
of the sun as well as the forces of the stars. It constitutes our
kinship to the earth. For this reason every night, in a certain
sense, it brings us back from the experiences of the zodiac into the
planetary experiences and once again into earthly experiences,
in that we are brought back into the physical body of a human being.
From a certain point of view this is the difference between sleeping
and dying: When a human being merely falls asleep he or she
maintains a strong connection to these moon forces. Every
night, in a certain sense, these moon forces also point out to us
again the meaning of our life on earth. But this can only be the case
because we receive everything reflected back from the etheric
body.
In death we pull the etheric body out of the
physical body; the backward view of memories from the last life on
earth then appears. For a short while, a few days, the etheric body
permeates the cloud of which I have spoken. As I said, every night we
experience ourselves as a cloud, as a cloud of mists in a world
of fog. But this cloud of mists that we ourselves are, this cloud is
without our etheric body during the night. When we die the cloud is,
to begin with, in the first days after our death, with our etheric
body.
Then the etheric body gradually dissolves
into the cosmos and our memory disappears. And now, in contrast to
what we had earlier when our experience of the stars was only
radiated back from the human being, who remained lying in bed, now,
after death, we have an immediate, inner experience of the movements
of the planets and the fixed star constellations.
If
you read my book
Theosophy
[Note 1]
you will find, described from a
certain point of view, what these experiences after death consist of.
I describe what appears as if surrounding the human being between
death and a new birth. But just as the world would have no color if
there were no eyes in your body, no sounds if you were without ears,
just as you could not breathe without lungs and a heart, so too,
after death you would not be able to perceive what I have described
as the soul world and spirit land, your environment in the
spiritual world, unless you had Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Aries,
Taurus, Gemini, and so forth. That is then your organism: with your
cosmic organism you experience all of this. The moon can no longer
bring you back because it could only bring you back to an etheric
body; but your etheric body has been dissolved into the
cosmos.
As I described the process in
Theosophy,
there is still so much left of the power bequeathed to the human
being by the moon that after death we must remain a while in the soul
world. We keep looking at the earth intently, until we go over into
what I described as spirit land. There we experience ourselves as
being beyond the zodiac, beyond the realm of the fixed stars. In this
way we live through the time between death and a new birth. I could
describe the details of this entry into, and life within, the
spiritual world — the entry made every night. But the concepts
I use for this description must not be pushed too far; these things
can hardly be expressed with earthly concepts. Nevertheless, I can
describe it to you as follows.
Picture a meadow and picture flowers in this
meadow; from every blossom in the meadow and on the trees, a kind of
spiral goes forth unwinding upward into cosmic space. The spirals
contain the forces through which the cosmos regulates and
effects the growth of plants on the earth. For plants grow not only
out of their seeds; plants grow out of the cosmic, helical forces
that surround the earth. These forces are also present in
winter, also in the desert, and also when there are no plants
present. In order to enter into the movements of the planets every
night we must use these helical forces as a ladder. Using the
ladder-like quality of the spiraling forces of the plants we climb up
into the movements of the planetary world. With the force that the
plant uses to grow upward, a force coming forth from its roots (you
see, it has to apply a force in order to grow upwards) with this
force the human being is carried into the second sphere that I
described. When it comes to those experiences I have described for
you — when we are beset by a certain anxiety and say: I am a
figure of mists in the universal cosmic fog, I must rest in the bosom
of God — when we consider these experiences with respect to
conditions on the earth, then, again, the soul can say to itself: I
rest in all of that which lays like a cosmic blessing over a field of
grain when it blossoms, which lays over a meadow when it blossoms.
Everything that sinks down to the plants lives and expresses
itself in the spiraling lines of force, is, fundamentally speaking,
the bosom of God, the bosom of God enlivened and active within
itself. Therein the human being feels embedded in every period of
sleep.
The moon leads us back again to our animal
nature while the forces of plants constantly strive to carry us
further out into the universe. In this way we are connected with the
cosmos. In this way the cosmos works between our falling asleep and
our waking. And the heart-eye, sun-eye, and human eye go
through the night feeling things in a way similar to the way, say,
that we experience any kind of relationship to another human
being. But we are not told this, neither do we think this out by
ourselves, but rather the plants tell us this, the plants, which give
us a ladder to climb up into the planetary world where we are then
forced out into the world of the zodiac.
One could have an experience like this: I
have a relationship to a particular person; the lilies tell me, the
roses tell me, because the forces of the roses, the forces of the
lilies, the forces of the tulips have driven me precisely to this
place. The entire earth becomes a kind of “book of life”
that enlightens us about the human world, the world in which we live,
the world of human souls.
The people of various ages and epochs have
had these experiences in different ways. If you look toward old
India you will see that those wanting to discover something through
the sleeping state, through a relationship with the world of the
stars, wanted information only from those fixed stars and
constellations that happened to be above the earth at any given time.
They never wanted connections to the constellations below, the
constellations whose forces had to go through the earth. Just take a
look at the Buddha posture or at the posture of any sage whatsoever
from the Orient, who strives for spiritual wisdom through exercises!
Look at how he crosses his legs one over the other and sits on them.
He assumes this posture because he wants only his upper body and what
is connected to the stars above to become active within. He does not
want what also works through him through the sun-eye, what works
through the limb system, to become active within. He wants the forces
of the limb system more or less excluded. Therefore, you can
see, in the position of every Oriental striving for wisdom, how he
wants to develop a relationship only to what is above the earth. He
wants only to develop those connections leading to knowledge in the
soul realm.
The world would have remained incomplete if
this had remained the only kind of search for knowledge, if, in order
to acquire knowledge, humankind had been restricted to the Buddha
posture alone. Already, during the age of the Greeks, a human being
had to enter into a relationship with the forces encountered when he
develops in the direction of those constellations that, at any given
time, are below the earth. This tendency is hinted at in a
wonderfully intimate way in Greek tales. You are always told of a
kind of initiation in Greek tales. When it is said that certain
heroes in Greece have descended into the underworld, that they have
experienced initiation, this means that they have become acquainted
with those forces that work through the earth. They have come to know
the chthonic powers.
Every age has its special task. In order to
teach other people, the Oriental initiate learned primarily about
what was to be found before birth, before conception actually, that
is, what lay in the soul-spiritual realms human beings live through
before descending into the earthly world. What approaches us in
such a magnificent way in Oriental writings and in the Oriental
worldview comes to us because people back then could look into the
life human beings led before they descended to the earth.
In Greece people began to know the forces
that depended upon the earth itself: Uranus and Gaia. Gaia, the
earth, stands at the beginning of Greek cosmology. The Greek always
sought to find out about, to know, the mysteries of the earth itself,
mysteries that were, of course, also cosmic mysteries that worked
through the earth. The Greeks wanted to know about the mysteries of
the underworld. In this way the Greeks developed a proper
cosmology.
Consider how little knowledge of history (as
we call it) the Greeks had. Yet the Oriental never had any at all.
The Greeks were far more interested in what was going on when the
earth was being formed in the cosmos and then later when the inner
powers of the earth, the Titanic forces, fought against other
powers. The Greeks pointed to these gigantic, powerful
spiritual forces that form the foundation for earthly conditions and
in which humanity is so entangled. It is incumbent upon us in the new
age to understand history and be able to point out that humanity has
come out of an old, dreamlike clairvoyant condition, that we
have now arrived at an intellectually colored consciousness
that is merely tinged with the mythical. We must now work our way out
of this consciousness and once again into a seeing into the spiritual
world.
This present epoch marks the transition to a
conscious experience of the spiritual world that can only be
achieved with effort. For this purpose we must, above all, look at
history. We have, therefore, in our anthroposophical movement, again
and again reviewed the various historical epochs from our time all
the way back to the time when human beings still received knowledge
from higher, supra-earthly beings. We have followed the historical
development of humanity.
The external knowledge of our time views
this historical development of man in a completely abstract way. What
abstract lines are drawn when people today develop knowledge of
history! Ancient peoples followed a history still clothed in mythos,
a history that included nature and its events. We can no longer
do that. But people have not yet acquired a faculty that would lead
them to ask: What was it like when the first human beings received
wisdom from higher beings? And what was it like as that wisdom
gradually faded away? What was it like when a God himself descended
in order to incarnate in a human body through the mystery of
Golgotha, in order to fulfill a grand, cosmic mission with the earth,
so that the earth could receive its meaning?
The whole of nineteenth and twentieth
century theology suffers from the inability to understand the
spiritual significance of Christ. You see, modern initiation science
must bring this understanding. There must be a modern science
of initiation that can penetrate once again into the spiritual world,
that can speak once again about birth and death, about life between
birth and death and life between death and a new birth, and about the
life of the human soul in sleep just as we here today have spoken to
one another. Once again it must be possible for man to know about
this spiritual, other side of existence. All of humankind's progress
in the future will be possible only if human beings also become
acquainted with this other side of existence.
Once people turned to the upper worlds alone
for their knowledge. This can easily be observed in the posture
of the Buddha. Later people came to their cosmology by reading it out
of the development of the earth; they were initiated in the Greek
chthonic mysteries, as passages in the Greek myths recount again and
again. Now that the secrets of heaven and the secrets of earth have
been studied in the old science of initiation we need a modern
science of initiation that can move back and forth between heaven and
earth, that can ask heaven when it wants to know something about
earth and that can ask the earth when it wants to know something
about heaven.
If
I may say so in all modesty, this is how the questions are posed and
given preliminary answers in my book
An Outline of Occult Science.
[Note 2]
The attempt is made there to describe what the modern human being
needs, just as the ancient Orientals needed the mysteries of heaven
and the Greeks needed the mysteries of the earth. In our present age
we should observe how things stand with this modern initiation and
its relationship to modern man.
To characterize briefly the tasks that form
the foundation of modern initiation I will say something now that I
was already able to say to a few of you in Oxford during these days
of my visit to England. Namely, I would like to begin by pointing out
that while it was important for the most ancient initiates to look up
into the spiritual world from which man descended when he clothed
himself with an earthly body, and while for later initiates such
things as I characterized by pointing to Greek portrayals of a
descent into the underworld were important, it is the obligation of
modern initiation, as I have already said, to seek as knowledge the
rhythmical relationship of heaven and earth.
This can only be achieved if we consider the
following. Certainly, we must know heaven, and certainly we
must know the earth. But then we must also look at the human being,
in whom, among all the beings around us, heaven and earth work
together to create a unity. We must look at — that means with
our sun-eye, with our heart-eye, with the entire human eye — we
must look at the human being. The human being! For humanity contains
infinitely more secrets than the worlds that we can perceive
with our external organs of perception, that we can explain with an
intellect bound to the senses. The task of present-day
initiation knowledge is to come to know the human being spiritually.
I would like to say that initiation science wants to come to know
everything for this reason: in order to understand the human being
through knowledge of the whole world, through knowledge of the
whole cosmos.
Now compare the situation of the present-day
initiate with the situation of the ancient initiate. Because of all
the abilities that existed in the soul of ancient humanity the
initiate then could awaken memories of the time before the descent
into an earthly body. For this reason initiation for the ancient was
an awakening of cosmic memories. Then, for the Greeks, initiation
meant looking into nature. Modern initiates are concerned to
know the human being directly as a spiritual being. Now we must
acquire the ability to set ourselves free from the grasp of earth,
from the ties connecting us with the world. I would like to repeat an
example that I have just recently mentioned.
Achieving
a relationship to the souls who have passed through the gate of death,
who have left the earth, either recently or long ago, is one of the most
difficult tasks of initiation knowledge. However, it is possible
to achieve such a relationship by
awakening forces that lie deeper in the soul. Here we must
understand clearly, however, that we have to accustom ourselves,
through exercises, to the language we must speak with the dead. This
language is, I would like to say, in a certain sense, a child
of human language. But we would go completely astray if we thought
that this human language here could help us to cultivate
communication with the dead. The first thing we become aware of
is that the dead are only able to understand for a short time what
lives as nouns in the language of earth. What is expressed as a
thing, a closed off thing, the characterization of a noun, is no
longer present in the language of the dead. In the language of the
dead everything is related to activity and movement. For this reason
we find that some time after the human being has passed through the
gate of death, he has a real feeling only for verbs. In order to
communicate with the dead we must sometimes direct a question to them
by formulating it in such a way that it is understandable to them.
Then, if we know how to pay attention, the answer comes after a
while. Usually several nights must pass before the deceased person
can give us an answer to our questions. But we must first find our
way into the language of the deceased; finally the language appears
for us, the language the dead actually have, the language the
deceased has had to live into after death, distancing himself
from the earth with his entire soul life. We find our way into a
language that is not at all formed according to earthly conditions,
but is rather a language arising from feelings, from the heart. It is
a kind of language of the heart. Here, language is formed in
the way vowels or feeling sounds are formed in human language. For
example, when we are amazed we say “Ah!” or when we want
to lead ourselves back to ourselves we speak the “ee”
sound. Only in such instances do the sounds and sound combinations
receive their due, their real meaning. And beginning with such
instances language becomes something that no longer sounds bound up
to the speech organ. It is transformed into what I have just
described, a language of the heart. When we have learned this
transformed language, the forces that rise from the flowers give us
information about humankind and we ourselves begin to speak
with what comes from the flowers. When we enter into the tulip
blossom with our soul forces we express, in the Imagination of the
tulip, what is expressed here on the earth in the formation of words.
We grow again into the spiritual aspect of everything.
From the example of language, just
characterized, you see that the human being grows into entirely
different conditions of existence when he has gone through the gate
of death. You see, we really know very little about a human being if
we only know his or her external side; the modern science of
initiation must know the other side. This begins with language. Even
the human body, as it is described if you read the relevant
literature, becomes something else for us. The body becomes a world
in itself when we grow into the science of initiation.
While the initiate in ancient times
reawakened an ability in people that had been lost, while he brought
to memory what they had experienced before descending to the earth,
the initiate of the present age must do something entirely new,
something that represents progress in the human being, that
will still have significance for us when humanity itself will
one day have left the earth, indeed, when the earth is no longer even
present in the cosmos. This is the task of modern initiation science.
Out of this strength modern initiation science must speak.
As you know, from time to time the science
of initiation enters into the spiritual development of the earth.
This has happened again and again. The initiation science we need
actually sees only a beginning in the assumptions of contemporary
science. This initiation science will be increasingly
contested. You will need strength to get through all that stands
against modern initiation. Before modern initiation, which is a
conversation with super-sensible powers, actually first received
its proper power in the last third of the nineteenth century, the
adversarial powers were already at work to bring about a condition of
human culture and civilization, in many ways an unconscious
condition, which actually amounts to a complete extermination
of modern initiation.
Just consider how popular it has become to
respond to everything that appears in the world as knowledge
with the words: This is my point of view. People say “This is my
point of view” without having gone through any kind of
development. Everyone is supposed to make his own point of view count
from the location where he just happens to be standing at the moment
when he speaks. And people are offended, even angry, when a higher
knowledge is mentioned, a knowledge that can only be acquired through
the work of self-development.
When the possibility of achieving a modern
initiation appeared, primarily in the last third of the nineteenth
century, adversary powers were already at work. Above all they wanted
to bring about a great leveling of people, also in the spiritual
realm. There are many people I could mention through whom these
enemies of modern initiation have worked.
My dear friends, you must believe that the
words I must speak out of the spirit of this initiation science must
also sound the way they do from the point of view of ordinary
conditions here on the earth. If I attempt to make clear to you how
the sounds of human language become different when language is to be
used in the presence of the beings of the spiritual world, then you
will not misunderstand me when I say: I myself will never
misunderstand the great significance, spoken from the merely earthly
point of view, of someone like Rousseau; and if I speak from the
merely earthly standpoint I will set out with all élan to praise
and speak well of Rousseau, just as others speak of him.
[Note 3]
But if I should rise to an attempt to clothe in earthly words what
initiation knowledge says concerning Rousseau I would have to say
that with his equalization, with his spiritual leveling, Rousseau
represents the supreme babbler of modern civilization.
This is something that humanity cannot
readily assimilate, that someone like Rousseau can be called a great
spirit, a great personality, from the earthly point of view but
— if we really want to get to know this person through the
modern science of initiation (where we must know heaven and earth and
describe the rhythm between them from both sides) — must be
called the supreme babbler from the point of view of
initiation. Only the harmony of what resounds from the one side and
from the other side leads to a true knowledge of the human being. For
this true knowledge of the human being must be built upon the same
wisdom the old initiates build upon:
Ex deo nascimur.
All remembering must by built upon what comes to meet us when we look out
into the world where, as I have today described the process, we have
unconsciously allowed Christ to become our leader. But we must bring
him into our consciousness more and more. Then we can recognize what
belongs to death in the world as standing under the leadership of
Christ. Then we can recognize that we live into the dead world with
Christ: In Christo morimur.
Finally, because we are submerged in the
grave of the earth and its life we experience with Christ the
resurrection and the sending of the Spirit:
Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.
The
modern initiate must strive above all for this
Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.
If you consider this counsel and compare it with the modern attitude
coming from science you will recognize that there will still be
immense opposition, perhaps of a kind you cannot even imagine today,
which will take the form of external actions and deeds that, above
all, will have a tendency to make initiation science entirely
impossible. What I would like to leave in your hearts, in your souls,
when I speak in such an intimate circle of friends, is this:
Through the descriptions given by modern initiation science, I would
like to awaken strength so that a few people are actually present in
the world who can find the proper place between what wants to come
into the earthly world from spiritual worlds and what, from the
direction of the earthly world, wants it to be impossible for
spirituality to penetrate into the life of earth. This is what I have
wanted to draw attention to, in such an intimate circle of friends.
An opportunity had already been given to speak in a more external
lecture, such as, to my great satisfaction, we were able to
have in Oxford. Since the opportunity was given to describe the
external side, so the esoteric side must also be handled in this
smaller circle, it must also be described. I believe it would be good
if you could get beyond the fact that there is much that sounds
paradoxical when I speak out of spiritual worlds. It has to
sound paradoxical because the language of spiritual worlds is so
different from any earthly language. What should actually be
expressed differently can only be brought into earthly language with
a great exertion of force. Therefore, it should be understandable if
some things are shocking when they appear unmediated as a simple
description of spiritual worlds.
My dear friends, in addition to
characterizing the fundamental intention that was behind today's
lecture, I also want to express my deep satisfaction that I have been
able to be here and speak to you in London. It is always gratifying.
As I have already said, we are seldom together here. May what we can
found in our hearts, in our souls, through such rare gatherings bring
about a togetherness that should always be present among those who
call themselves anthroposophists — a togetherness of hearts and
souls extending over the whole world. Today's lecture has been given
with this goal in mind, that we use such brief times together as an
inspiration for the greater togetherness that unites all our
hearts and all our souls. And to document, as it were, this intention
I would like to add the following words. Speaking out of this frame
of mind I would like to say: Let us remain together, my dear friends,
even as we leave now to go in such widely separate directions.
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