III
Initiation-Knowledge
— New and Old
In the study
of Anthroposophy, a justifiable objection at first can be that the
anthroposophical investigation of facts concerning the spiritual
worlds depends upon calling up, through the training I have
described, deep-lying forces in the human being, before these facts
can be reached. Hence it might be said: All those who have not gone
through such a development, and have therefore not yet reached the
point of perceiving super-sensible facts for themselves, and actually
experiencing super-sensible beings, have no means of proving the truth
of what is said by the investigator of those worlds. Often, when the
spiritual world is spoken of in public and information about it
is given, the protest is heard: How should such ideas concern those
who cannot yet see into this super-sensible world?
This objection
rests on an entirely erroneous idea — the idea that anyone who speaks
about the super-sensible worlds is talking of things quite unknown to
his listeners. That is not so at all. But there is an important
distinction, with regard to this kind of Initiation-knowledge,
between what is right today and what was once right in the old
days of which I was speaking yesterday.
You will
remember how I described the path into the spiritual worlds. I spoke
of how it leads us first to a great life-tableau, in which we see the
experiences that have become part of our personality during
this life on Earth. I went on to speak of how, having progressed from
Imaginative-knowledge to that of Inspiration, a man is able, with
empty consciousness and in absolute stillness and peace, to survey
his pre-earthly life. He is thus led into that world of spiritual
deeds which he has passed through between his last death and his
recent descent to Earth.
Consider how,
before making this descent, every human being has gone through such
experiences; there is no-one who has not experienced in its full
reality what the spiritual investigator has to tell. And when the
investigator clothes in words facts at first unrecognised, he is not
appealing to something quite unknown to his hearers but to what
everyone has experienced before earthly life. The investigator of the
spiritual world is simply evoking people's cosmic memories; and all
that he says about the spiritual world is living in the souls of
everyone, though in the transition from pre-earthly to earthly life
it has been forgotten. In fact, as an investigator of the spiritual
world, one is simply recalling to people's memories something they
have forgotten.
Now imagine
that during life on Earth a man comes across another human being with whom
he remembers experiencing something, twenty years before, which
the other man has completely forgotten. By talking with him, however,
about the incident that he himself remembers clearly, he can bring
the other man to recall it also. It is just the same process,
though on a higher level, when I speak to you about spiritual worlds,
the only difference being that pre-earthly experiences are more
completely forgotten than those of earthly life. It is only because
people are disinclined to ask themselves seriously whether they find
anything in their souls in tune with what is said by the spiritual
investigator — it is only because of this feeling of antipathy
that they do not probe into their souls deeply enough when hearing or
reading what the investigator relates. Hence this is thought to be
something of which he alone has knowledge, something incapable
of proof. But it can quite well be proved by those who throw off the
prejudice arising from the antipathy referred to. For the
spiritual investigator is only recalling what has been experienced by
each one of us in pre-earthly existence.
Now someone
might say: Why should anyone be asked, during his life on Earth, to take
on this extra task of concerning himself with matters which, in
accordance with cosmic ordering, or one might say with divine decree,
he experiences during life beyond the Earth? There are those, too,
who ask: Why should I go to this trouble before death to gain
knowledge about the super-sensible worlds? I can very well wait till I
am dead. Then, if all these things really exist, I shall come face to
face with them.
All this,
however, arises from a misunderstanding of earthly life. The facts of
which the spiritual investigator speaks are experienced by human beings
in pre-earthly existence, but they are not then the subject of thought,
and only during life on Earth can thoughts about them be experienced.
And only those thoughts about the super-sensible world that have been
worked upon during earthly life can be carried with us through the
gate of death, and only then can we understand the facts we
experience between death and rebirth.
One might say
— if one wished to give an uncompromising picture — that
at this present stage of evolution a man's life after death is
extraordinarily hard if, during life on Earth, he gives no thought to
the spiritual world. For, having passed through the gate of death, he
can no longer acquire any real knowledge of his surroundings. He is
in the midst of what is incomprehensible for him. Understanding of
what is experienced after death has to be striven for during
life on Earth. You will learn from further descriptions that it was
different for men of earlier ages. But, at the present moment of
human evolution, men will be increasingly constrained to strive for
an understanding of what they are to experience in the super-sensible
world between death and rebirth. So one can say that speaking
publicly of Spiritual Science is fully justified, for it can be
proved by everyone. When it is established deeply enough in a man's
soul, he will gradually come to say to himself: “What has been
said through this spiritual investigator lights things up for me. It
is just as if I had already experienced it all, and was now being
given the thoughts in which to clothe the experience.” For this
reason, when speaking of Spiritual Science, of spiritual knowledge,
it is very necessary to choose terms of expression different from
those used in ordinary life. The point is that a student of Spiritual
Science, through the very words used, should have the impression:
“I am learning something which does not hold good for the
sense-world, something which in the sense-world is sheer
nonsense.”
Then, you see,
our opponents come and say: “What is said there about spiritual
knowledge is all nonsense — pure fancy.” As long as these
people know of nothing outside the world of the senses, and do not
want to know of anything else, such a statement is justified, for the
super-sensible world looks different from that of the senses. But if
someone forgoes the one-sided witness of his senses and delves more
deeply into his own soul, then he will say: “What the spiritual
investigator says should simply give me the impulse to draw up from
my own soul what is already there.”
Naturally
there is much to hinder our making such a confession. Yet, where
understanding of the super-sensible worlds is concerned, it is the
most necessary confession of all. And it will be found that even the
most difficult things become comprehensible when we are willing
to penetrate in this way into our own depths.
There is no
doubt that mathematical truths are among the most difficult things. They
are held to be irrefutable. But the curious fact is that on entering the
spiritual world we find that our mathematics and geometry are no
longer correct. A very simple example will make this clear. From
early youth we have learnt to look upon the old truths of Euclid as
axiomatic, self-evident. For instance, it is stated as obvious that,
given two points, A and B, the shortest distance between them is a
straight line, and that any curved path between them is
longer.
On a recognition
of this fact — obvious for the physical world — rests the
greater part of our geometry. But in the spiritual world it is the
other way round. The straight line there from A to B is the longest
way, and any other way is shorter because it can be taken in freedom.
If at the point A one thinks of going to B, this very idea suggests
an indirect way; and to hold to a straight course, and so at
each single point to keep in the same direction, is hardest and
causes most delay. Hence, in determining the most direct way in the
two-dimensional or one-dimensional space of the spiritual world, we
look for the longest way.
Now anyone
who reflects about attentiveness, and delves deeply into his soul to
discover what attentiveness really means, will find that in this
connection, also, what is said by the spiritual investigator is true.
For he will say to himself: “When I go around just as I choose,
I get there easily, and I don't have to worry about traversing a
particular stretch; I need do only what I do every day.” And
most people are bustling around from morning to night. They are in
such a hurry that they hardly notice how much of all they do is done
from sheer habit — what they have done the day before, what
other people say they should do, and so forth. Then it all goes
smoothly. Just think what it would be like if you had to pay careful
attention to every detail of what you do during the day. Try it! You
will soon see how this slows you down.
Now in the
spiritual world nothing is done without attentiveness, for there is no
such thing as habit. Moreover, there is no such word as the
impersonal pronoun “one” — at a certain hour one
must have lunch, or one must have dinner at some other time. This
“one” — for this occasion one ought to dress in a
certain way, and so on — all that under the aegis of this
little word plays such a great part in the physical world,
particularly in our present civilisation, has no place in the
spiritual world. There, we have to follow with individual attention
every smallest step, and even less than a step. This is
expressed in the words: In the spiritual world the straight way
between two points is the longest way. So we have this
contrast: In the physical world the direct way between two
points is the shortest, whereas the direct way between two points is
the longest in the spiritual world.
If we go down
far enough into our soul, we find we can draw up from its depths a real
understanding of this curious circumstance; and it becomes easier and
easier to admit: “What the spiritual investigator says is
actually wisdom I myself possess — I have only to be reminded
of it.”
Then, side
by side with this — since the steps to be taken for acquiring
super-sensible cognition can to-day be found in books such as
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds
— everyone, in so far as
his destiny, his karma, make it possible, can, as we shall see,
follow this path and thus acquire his own perception of the
spiritual worlds. In this way he comes to knowledge of the
facts. Understanding for the ideas of the spiritual world has to be
won by his coming to know in his own being all that was forgotten on
entering earthly life.
Now it may
be said that anyone is capable of grasping knowledge of the spiritual
world when it is communicated in ideas. Thus, for understanding what
the spiritual investigator offers, all that a man needs is his own
sound, unprejudiced reason, provided it searches deeply enough
into the soul. The investigator of spiritual facts, entering into the
spiritual world, and speaking of its facts from first-hand
knowledge — all this naturally requires a person to have pursued
the path of knowledge on his own account. Hence it is
justifiable for anyone who has acquired knowledge of the
spiritual worlds to speak of them quite publicly to-day; for what
people now absorb in life, if only at school, is an intellectual
capacity, a power of discrimination, which equips them to understand
what Spiritual Science brings forward. Here, too, things were
different in earlier times, and the teachers in the Mysteries, the
teachers of art and religion, went about it in a different way.
Anyone to-day who speaks about spiritual knowledge to his
contemporaries must so order his ideas that memories are aroused of
their pre-earthly life. What he says to his audience, what he writes
for his readers, must be so arranged that memories of the life before
birth are evoked.
Whenever one
speaks about Spiritual Science it is as if this appeal were made to the
audience: Listen to what is said, and if you look deeply enough into
your souls you will find it all there. Moreover, it will dawn on you
that you cannot have learnt it during your life on Earth; no flower,
no cloud, no spring, nothing earthly can have told you, not even
science — for that is founded on the senses and the intellect.
Gradually you will realise that you have brought this knowledge
with you into earthly life, and that before this life you took part
in things which have lingered on in your soul as a cosmic memory. All
this has ben stirred up in you by the spiritual investigator. What he
says, therefore, is indeed a call to the very depths of the human
soul, not a demand that you should accept anything unknown. It is
simply an appeal to men to call up in memory the greatest treasures
of their own souls.
It was not
so for mankind in the distant past. The wise men of the Mysteries, the
priests, had to proceed in another way, for people then had a
spontaneous memory of their pre-earthly existence. A few thousand
years ago, even the most primitive man would never have questioned
the presence in his soul of something brought down with him from the
super-sensible into the life of the senses; it was an everyday
experience in his dreamlike imaginations. In his soul he had
something of which he said: “I do not owe this to my eyes
that see the trees; I do not hear it with my ears that listen to the
nightingale's song; nor have I received it through any other sense. I
cannot have absorbed it during life on Earth; it was there as I made
my descent; and when as an embryo I was given my earthly, physical
body by another human body, there was already within me that which
lights up now in my dreamlike imaginations. I have clothed it in my
physical human body.”
Hence in those
olden days a man would not have been shown the way to further development
by his attention being called to what must be emphasised to-day: that
we have a memory, at first unconscious but capable of being made
conscious, of pre-earthly existence. In the old Mysteries,
attention had to be drawn to something quite different.
A man in those
days had a feeling of intense sadness when looking at all that was most
lovely in the sense-world. He looked at the flowers, springing out of
the earth in their wonderful beauty, and watched the blossoms unfold.
And he saw also how beneficent the flowers were for him. He saw the
loveliness of the springs bubbling forth in shady places, and his
senses spoke to him of their refreshing powers. But then, he said to
himself: “It seems as though all this has fallen — fallen
through sin from the world I bear within me and which I have brought
down into physical existence out of spiritual worlds.” So the
teachers in the Mysteries then had the task of explaining how in the
flowers, in the rippling waters, in the woodland murmurings and the
song of the nightingale — everywhere spirit is working and
weaving, everywhere spiritual beings are to be found. They had
to impart to men the great truth: What is living in you lives also
outside in nature. For a man looked upon the external world with
sorrow, with pain, at the very time when his senses were freshest and
most responsive — a time when least of all the intellect spoke
to him of natural laws, and he looked upon the outer world with
primitive senses. The beauty of its sprouting and budding
forced itself upon his sight, his hearing and other senses; but all
he felt was sorrow; for he was unable to reconcile it with the
content of his pre-natal existence, which still lived on in his soul.
Thus it was incumbent upon the wise men of the Mysteries to point out
how the divine-spiritual dwells in all things, even in those of the
senses. It was the spirituality of nature that these teachers had to
make clear.
This, however,
could be done only by taking a different path from that of to-day. Just as
now it is necessary above all to guide men to a remembrance of their
life before birth, for teachers in the ancient Mysteries it was
necessary to call up in those around them a different
memory.
Now a man
passes his life rhythmically between two states, or really three: waking,
dreaming, sleeping. Sleep takes its course in unconsciousness. The
human beings of older epochs had indeed this state of unconsciousness
in sleep, although it differed in certain respects from that of
people to-day. They did sleep, however; they did sink down into the
state of experiencing nothing in their souls, in their
consciousness. But during sleep we are of course still living; we do
not die and are born again when we wake. As soul and spirit we have a
life during sleep, but the experience of it is completely wiped out
for ordinary, everyday consciousness. People remember their waking
experiences and at the most those during their dreams, but in
ordinary consciousness they have no memory of anything they
experience during dreamless sleep. The Mystery teachers of old
treated their pupils — and through the ideas these spread
abroad, all who came to them — in such a way that they were
awakened to what was experienced in sleep.
Modern
Initiation-knowledge has to recall what has lived in men's souls
before earthly existence, whereas the old Initiation-knowledge
had to evoke a memory of experiences during sleep. Thus all the
knowledge that the Mystery teachers clothed in ideas was so designed
that their students, or anyone else who heard it, could say:
“We are being told of something we always go through in sleep.
We press it down out of mind. The priests of the Mysteries have
simply been enabled by their Initiation to perceive in sleep many
things that are hidden from ordinary consciousness, but are all the
same experienced.”
Just as in
the old Initiation-wisdom there was a recalling to memory of what a man
had lived through in sleep, to-day there is a recalling to memory of
pre-earthly life. One of the signs distinguishing the old Initiation
from the new is that in the old Initiation a man was reminded of what
he normally slept through, which means that he had no recollection of
it in waking life. The wise men of those Mysteries drew the
experiences of the night up into waking consciousness of day,
and to the people they said: “During the night you dwell with
your soul in the spiritual world, and the spiritual world lives in
every spring, in every nightingale and every flower. Every night you
enter into the midst of all that you merely perceive with your senses
during the day.”
And then a
man could be convinced that the Gods he experienced in his waking dreams
were also there outside in nature. Thus, by showing his pupil what
happened in sleep, the wise teacher of the Mysteries made clear to
him that divine-spiritual Beings were active out there in the realms
of nature all the time. In the same way the spiritual investigator
now has the task of showing that a man, before descending to Earth,
was living as a spiritual being among spiritual beings in a world of
spirit; and that what he experienced there he can recall on Earth in
terms of concepts, of ideas.
In the
Initiation-science of to-day, the real facts that distinguish
sleep from waking come to be known when we advance from
Imagination to Inspiration. What a man himself is as soul, as spirit,
from falling asleep until he wakes, becomes clear only to Inspired
knowledge, whereas the advance to Imaginative knowledge gives a man
the tableau of his life. When this life-tableau unfolds for him in
his waking state and with empty consciousness he is wrapped in cosmic
stillness — as I have described — there enters his soul
from the Cosmos, as Inspiration, the life before birth. And then his
own true being appears to him in the form he lives in as a being of
soul and spirit between going to sleep and waking.
Through
Inspiration we become conscious of that which remains unconscious during
sleep. We learn to perceive what we do as soul and spirit while asleep,
and we become aware that on falling asleep the soul and spirit leave the
physical body and the etheric body. The physical body is left in bed
and also the etheric body — or body of formative forces, as it
is seen to be in Imagination, and as I have described it. The higher
members of man's nature, the astral body and the Ego-organisation,
leave the physical and etheric bodies, returning to them when the
time of waking comes. This cleavage of our being, which comes about
in the rhythmical alternation of sleeping waking, can be seen in its
real nature only through Inspiration. We then perceive that
everything absorbed in ordinary waking life through our thinking,
through our world of thought, is left behind. The thoughts we work
upon, the thoughts we struggle with at school, whatever we have done
to sharpen our earthly intelligence — all this has to be left
behind with our physical body and etheric body every time we
sleep. Out of these two bodies we take into the spiritual world,
where as Ego and astral body we pass the time of sleeping, something
quite different from anything we experience in our waking state. When
we pass from waking to sleeping we experience what is not
normally brought into consciousness. Hence, in speaking to you of
these experiences, I have to clothe them in pictorial concepts, so
that they can be reflected on with healthy human understanding. These
pictorial concepts, which are mere shadows of really living
thoughts, we leave behind when we fall asleep; and we then come to
live in a world where thinking is not as it is here on Earth, but
where everything is inwardly experienced. During sleep, in fact, we
experience light unconsciously. In waking life we think about the
effects of light — how it makes shadows and colours appear in
relation to objects. All these thoughts, as I have said, we leave
behind. In sleep we enter into the weaving, living light; we
pour ourselves out into the light. And as in day time here on Earth
we carry our body with us, and also our soul and spirit, and go about
on the surface of the Earth through the air, so there, as sleeping
man, we enter the weaving, waving light, becoming ourself a being, a
substance, of the living light. We become light within the
light.
When a man
comes to Inspired knowledge of what he actually is each night, when this
rises up into his waking consciousness, he at once realises that during
sleep he lives like a cloud of light in cosmic light. This does not
mean, however, living simply as the substance of light, but living in
the forces which in waking life become thoughts, are grasped as
thoughts. The light then experienced is everywhere permeated by
creative forces, the forces which work inwardly in the plants, in the
animals, besides existing independently as spiritual worlds. Light is
not experienced in the same way as in the physical world but —
if we may express it figuratively — the weaving, living light
is the body of spiritual weaving, as it is also the body of each
spiritual being.
Here, as men
of the physical world, we are enclosed in our skins, and we see our
fellow-men so enclosed. But in our sleeping state we are light within
the light, and other beings are also light within the light. We do
not, however, perceive it as light in the way it is perceived in the
physical world, but — again figuratively — the clouds of
light that we ourselves are, perceive other clouds of light.
These clouds of light are either another man, or some kind of being
giving new life to the plant world, or a being who, never incarnating
in a physical body, dwells always in the spiritual world.
Light,
accordingly, is not experienced there as it is in earthly life, but as
living, creative spirituality. Now you know how, as physical men here
on Earth, we live in something besides light — in the warmth our
senses perceive. We feel and experience heat and cold.
If, now, on
going to sleep we pass out of our physical body and etheric body, we live
as substance of the warmth in the cosmic substance of warmth, just as we
live as light in the light. Thus we are not only what I have called a
cloud of light, but a cloud of light permeated by weaving waves of
warmth; and what we perceive also bears warmth within it. Just as
when we are asleep, and as beings of soul and spirit, we experience
light not as light but as living spirit, and when through Inspiration
we realise ourselves and other beings also to be living spirit
— so it is in the case of warmth. It is impossible to make any
headway in the spiritual world, even with Inspiration, if we cling to
ideas acquired here on Earth. We have already found it necessary to
get used to a different conception concerning the distance between
two points, and we must do likewise for everything else. And just as
when experiencing ourselves as light within light we actually
experience ourselves as spirit in the spiritual world, so when
experiencing ourselves as warmth, within the cosmic warmth, we do not
experience this as warmth in the usual way of the sense-world, but as
weaving, strength-giving love. As the beings of love which we are in
the super-sensible, we experience ourselves among beings who can
do no other than draw love out of their own essence; who can have no
other existence than that of beings of love in the midst of a
cosmic existence of love. Thus do we experience ourselves, to begin
with, between going to sleep and waking, in a spiritual existence
imbued through and through with love.
Therefore,
if we wish really to enter the world in which we are every time we go to
sleep until we wake, we must enhance our capacity for loving; otherwise
this world is bound to remain an unknown world. Here in our earthly
world it is not spiritualised love that holds sway, but a love in
which the impulse of the senses prevails. In the spiritual world,
however, it is spiritualised love — as I have been picturing
it. Hence, whoever aspires to enter consciously the world he
experiences every night has to develop his capacity for loving in the
way described yesterday.
Now a man cannot
find his true self without this capacity for love; for all that he really
is during sleep — during a third part of his life on Earth
— remains a closed book for him unless he can find his way into
it through the training and enhancement of love. All that is
experienced during sleep would have to remain an unsolved riddle for
earthly being if they had no wish to enhance their capacity for love,
so as to be able to gain some degree of knowledge about their own
existence, their own being, in the changed condition between
going to sleep and waking. But the form of activity developed in our
thinking when we have our physical body and etheric body within us
— that is, in our waking state — we leave behind in bed,
and during sleep this becomes united in movement with the whole
Cosmos. Anyone who wishes to understand clearly what goes on in the
physical and etheric bodies during the night would have to be able to
perceive from outside, while living as a being of warmth and
light, how the etheric body goes on thinking all through the
night.
We still have
the power to think even when with our souls we are not there at all, for
what we leave behind in the bed carries the waves of thinking on and
on. And when we wake in the morning, we sink down into what has thus
continued to think while lying there in bed. We meet our own thoughts
again. They were not without life between our going to sleep and
waking, although we were not present. To-morrow I shall be describing
how, when thus absent, we can be much cleverer, far more intelligent,
than during the day, when with our soul we are actually within our
thoughts.
To-day I wished
to indicate how thinking is continuous in the etheric and physical
bodies, and how on waking in the morning, when we are aware of having
had a dream, the dream tells us, as it were: When your soul wakes,
and dives down again into the etheric body and physical body, it
loses something of its power. On the one hand you have the physical
body and etheric body; and on the other hand you have the astral
organisation and Ego-organisation which in the morning re-enter the
physical and etheric bodies. When they re-enter, it is as if a dense
wave were flowing into one less dense — there is a blockage,
experienced as a morning dream. The Ego and the astral body, which
have been weaving all night in light and warmth, dive back into the
thoughts, but by not at once understanding them, get them confused,
and this blockage is experienced as a morning dream.
What more there
is to say about dreams, how they are a puzzling element in human life, and
the further relation between sleeping and waking — all this we
will consider tomorrow.
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