VII
The Interplay of
Various Worlds
In human life
there is a perpetual interplay between the super-sensible world and the
world of the senses; and I have also referred to extreme cases where the
two worlds — or really all three — play into one another
without a man contributing anything to it through his own
development. To-day we shall be speaking about human examples of
interplay between the various worlds. I will first describe the
ordinary sleep-walking type, then the Jacob Boehme type, and finally
the type represented by Swedenborg.
The relation
of these three types to one another is such that each may be said to
indicate, as if by a universally valid experiment, how human evolution
is connected with the evolution of the world as a whole. This too I
would bring to your notice in what I have to say.
In studying
these three types of men, who enter and leave the spiritual world without
fully recognising the presence of the Guardian at the Threshold, we
find indeed that all three — the sleep walker type, the Jacob
Boehme type and the Swedenborg type — have a way of perceiving
the super-sensible world — or, as is particularly true of the
sleep-walker, are active therein which is different from the way
opened by Imaginative, Inspired, and Intuitive cognition. This
derives from the fact that when anyone enters the spiritual world
— and everyone does so, if only unconsciously, whenever he goes
to sleep — all things, as I have already pointed out, become
different from what they are in the physical world.
Three features
of the super-sensible world, above all, are the opposite of those in the
physical world. This contrast has such a strong effect on human
beings and is so disturbing to all they hold true, right, salutary
and so on in the physical world that, given the present earthly
condition of soul and body, people should never be transplanted
suddenly into the super-sensible world without due preparation. Hence
in my book,
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds,
I have laid
particular stress on the necessity for the right sort of preparation.
It is described there in such a way that anyone who follows the
directions will be prepared in all respects for entering the
super-sensible world in the right way. All the three types I am
speaking of to-day, however, enter not because of preparation but
through their destiny, and their destiny, their karma, protects them
from any dangers. Indeed, through their karma they are made
acquainted with many things concerning mankind which can
otherwise be known only through Imaginative, Inspired and Intuitive
cognition.
First of all,
in the spiritual-super-sensible world, all weight, all gravity ceases. When
really within the spiritual world, one is never in anything that can
be weighed, but in the imponderable. The first conscious experience
there is like the feeling we might have in the physical world if the
ground were falling away under our feet, and we had to hold firm
through our own inner forces.
So you must
imagine how, if we wish really to enter the spiritual world, we are bound
to have this feeling of the ground being spirited away from under us,
and how with no gravity to rely on, we have to maintain ourselves in
free space by the strength within us.
The second thing
that ceases in the super-sensible is all that we have as sense-perception
in the physical world. To put it briefly: in the super-sensible world
light ceases and one finds oneself in darkness. But that is not the
whole story, for in reality it is not only light that ceases; light
ceases in the physical world for the blind, who still possess other
senses. But in the science of the spirit the word light often
embraces not only light and colour, but everything audible, tangible
or perceptible as warmth, and so on. In the super-sensible world, all
this ceases. And one can imply this by referring simply to what for
most people is their chief sense-experience, and so by saying: Where
there was light, everything becomes dark.
The third thing
to be met in the spiritual world — and we must strive to feel this in
its full reality — is emptiness in place of fullness. Here in
the physical world there is generally something to touch, and when
there is nothing else you are still surrounded by the air. Everywhere
is fullness. In the spiritual world it is just the opposite;
everywhere is emptiness. Hence we can say: In the physical
world of the senses, the prevailing experiences are of the
ponderable, of light in the physical sense, which includes everything
experienced by the senses; and thirdly, fullness. Whereas in the
spiritual world there prevail the imponderable; darkness in which a
man must provide his own light from what he has developed inwardly
during his evolution; and emptiness he has to fill for higher
consciousness with the reality he absorbs by entering into other
spiritual beings through Intuition.
Now when a
man, through instinctive destiny, is led out of the ponderable into the
realm where the imponderable prevails, he is seized upon by forces
from beyond the Earth. Anyone going about the physical Earth, or even
when lying down, is always subject to the laws of gravity. If he were
to escape from them for a few minutes, the opposing force,
counter-gravity, comes into play. He then experiences within himself
a force dragging him away from the Earth, instead of chaining him to
it. This is the same force that comes from the Moon, besides the
light it reflects.
When,
therefore, anyone is going about on Earth, he is exposed in normal life
to the force of gravity which draws him down and holds him fast to the
Earth. If through his karma, which is then linked with the
nature-forces holding sway in him, this earthly gravity is withdrawn
at certain moments, so that Moon-forces can begin to act on him as
counter-gravity, then, though he is still asleep, he starts to wander
about. He is then exposed to the forces that govern his physical and
etheric bodies forces which are related not only to forces reflected
back from the Moon in light but to many other forces streaming from
Moon to Earth. These forces pull on the man; they are always trying
to draw him away from the Earth. In the moment when, instead of being
in the grip of earthly gravity, he is seized upon by the forces of
counter-gravity, coming from the Moon and working against the earthly
forces, he may wander about in the moonstruck way of the
somnambulist. The forces holding sway in a man at this moment are
quite different from the normal earthly ones; but this applies only
to the present day. These forces are now found only in the
somnambulist, and are abnormal. Call to him by his earthly name when
under the influence of the Moon he is wandering about on a roof
— and he will fall. He thus comes immediately into the realm of
Earth-forces; but in other epochs men were not given names such as
they have to-day, and the temporary condition of the sleepwalker was
then normal. Anyone who looks right into the matter will see that
earthly man, in his so-called normal life to-day, is bound up with
the forces of the Earth. The moonstruck person, however, points
us away from human evolution to world-evolution, and in fact to
that epoch when world-evolution was Moon-evolution.
The moment
a man enters the realm of Moon-evolution, he behaves as though he did
not live in the physical realm of the Earth at all, but in the astral
world, though the astral enters into the physical and makes use of
the physical body. And that which the astral develops physically in
this way was at one time Moon-evolution. We are reminded that astral
activity in the physical was once world-evolution —
Moon-evolution — and will be so again. But then a man
will be able in full consciousness to walk up steeply sloping
surfaces, as flies can do to-day. This is an indication of what will
come about in the future during the Jupiter-evolution. Thus, if we
rightly understand the somnambulist, we can study the physical
picture he presents, as if nature herself were giving us a
demonstration of what we experienced during our Moon-existence
— not, certainly, in a physical body of flesh, but in an
infinitely finer substance — and of what we shall experience
again when we learn to master physical substance quite
consciously, during the Jupiter-evolution. So this
sleep-walking state points both to the past and to the future in the
evolution of the world.
In this
connection we are concerned entirely with human beings whom we can call
Moon-men, who in certain moments of their life become somnambulists. But
this sleep-walking behaviour, this going about in the imponderable, can
be accomplished spiritually, in full consciousness, if at the same time
one has sufficient strength to keep perfectly still. The somnambulist
follows the impulses of the Moon-forces; he gives himself over
unconsciously to them and makes every movement to which they impel
him. But anyone who goes through this experience with exact,
conscious clairvoyance refrains from any such movements; he keeps
still. The effect is that the movements undergo a metamorphosis in
him and become Intuitions. Conscious Intuition, therefore, the
highest development of strict clairvoyance, actually consists in
arresting the actions which a sleep-walker is instinctively
compelled by the Moon-forces to perform. Anyone who brings about this
metamorphosis does not give himself up to the physical forces of the
Moon but holds them in check within himself. Thus he is enabled to
devote himself intuitively to the relevant spirituality; that is, he
attains to Intuition.
Hence it is
really very good to study in these Moon-men how, on the one hand, man is
related to world-evolution, and on the other how the somnambulist and
the exact clairvoyant are opposites. Whereas it is instinctive people
who are the moonstruck sleep-walkers, exact clairvoyants are
intuitive seers who, refraining from action, hold their own against
the Moon. That is what we are shown at this point in the relation of
man to the world.
Now the second
of the three types of men of whom I am speaking to-day is exemplified in
Jacob Boehme. He was so fully endowed a man that at certain moments
of his life, as though through his natural destiny, his karma, he was
able while completely awake to conjure up before him, instead of the
sunlit world, dark space. From what I have already said you will be
clear that here it is a question not only of the darkness which is
absence of light, but of the blotting out of everything perceived by
the senses. It was possible for Jacob Boehme, under certain
conditions during his life, to be faced by darkness in place of
light, by silence and stillness instead of the various sounds in the
world, and instead of warmth by something — equally unlike
warmth or cold — we might call anti-warmth, and so on. So that,
if through Inspiration one had examined these states of his, without
experiencing them oneself, one would have had to say that Jacob
Boehme, instead of having sunlit space around him, was at
certain times faced by complete darkness.
People who have
this experience without being conscious of it — who are, that is, in
a light sleep though still feeling themselves to be in the
ordinary sunlit world — have what is called second-sight: and
this is what Jacob Boehme had in its most pronounced form. Only, in
his case, it was applied less to individual particulars on the Earth
and more to the constitution of the Earth as a whole. What,
then, was his vision?
Now picture
this to yourselves. When other people have before them the light of the
Sun, Jacob Boehme had — precisely from the point where the visual
rays of the eyes meet, on looking at some object far away or near, or
from behind the point where a barrier arises when we fold our right
hand over our left and shut ourselves off from the outer world
— there Jacob Boehme was faced by darkness and silence in
respect of all his senses. Imagine this complete darkness! There is a
physical picture closely corresponding to it. When you stand before a
mirror, you don't see what is behind it — only what is in
front. Spiritually, it is the same for anyone who sees in Jacob
Boehme's way. The darkness behind creates something in front like a
mirror, in which one sees reflected the earthly world in its
spirituality. Thus, if you were of the Jacob Boehme type, at certain
moments in your life you would look into darkness, and, because this
darkness rayed back to you the spiritual life of the Earth, you would
behold the spiritual constitution of the Earth and the course of its
existence.
It was a
powerful second-sight that Jacob Boehme had. Another man may have certain
moments in his life when he is faced by darkness which shuts out the
physical light, enabling him to look into the spiritual. Then, if he
understands how to make the right use of this spiritual mirror, which
consists simply in the existence of the darkness, then, through the
inner communications between all earthly things, deeds and even
thoughts, he will be able when in Europe to perceive a friend in
America. For what we perceive with our physical eyes and senses
results, above all, from the action of the Sun. But there are also
hidden workings of the Sun, active in everything — in minerals,
plants, animals, and also in human beings. While you may be in
Europe, yet through these hidden workings of the Sun within you, you
are in communication with a friend in far-off America, in whom these
same forces are active.
These
communications have karmic effects. Many a person has had his destiny
for marriage, love, friendship, linked with someone in America, perhaps,
who was unknown to him at that time. In this working of karma on Earth
the hidden forces of the Sun are active; they are made visible there,
as though in a mirror.
This applies
particularly to people leading isolated lives on islands, in mountain
valleys, or in other places favourable in this respect, and the fact
that second-sight is fairly common in such places is because persons
leading secluded lives respond more readily than others to these
inner communications and are able to spread a partial darkness
around them in life. Hence the Scottish and the Westphalian
second-sight, and the second-sight in a secluded valley of Alsace so
beautifully described by Oberlin. Thus such things appear in special
districts of the Earth. Where they are genuine, like those hidden
effects of the Sun of which I have just spoken, they need to be
judged quite differently from the way in which they usually are
judged in our materialistic age.
Certain people
nowadays, proud of their cleverness, discuss whether there ever was a
King Arthur, whether he was a real or a legendary figure. But those
who can look more deeply into the matter will speak differently. And
for them, anyone who doubts whether King Arthur ever lived is
himself far more legendary than King Arthur! Take a modern
scholar who denies the existence of Arthur — well, he is
physically present among us, but in fact he belongs far more to the
realm of sagas and legends than King Arthur does, at least in the
opinion of those who can see into the truth of these
things.
Hence we can
say of people who have second-sight, the gift manifest to the highest degree
in Jacob Boehme, that they are in a special sense Sun-men. Just as we
normally see the effects of the Sun in the external world, these
Sun-men are inwardly permeated by the Sun's hidden forces. And just
as our first type was seen to consist of Moon-men, the second type
consists of Sun-men, like Jacob Boehme with his second-sight. They
are Sun-men who through their natural karma bear within them
something which is abnormal to-day, but for that very reason
thoroughly in accordance with reality; for what is abnormal to-day
has been, at some time, quite normal.
Thus, by
realising what men with second-sight are able to perceive, by bringing
home to ourselves the nature of the Sun's hidden forces, by which these
Sun-men are permeated, we are able to say: This living in the hidden
effects of the Sun, now abnormal, was normal at an earlier stage of
the Earth's evolution, and it will be normal again. It was normal
during the period which as Sun-evolution preceded Earth-evolution. It
was normal then for men everywhere to look into darkness as if into a
mirror, in order to have the spiritual reflected back to them. The
whole Earth went through that stage of evolution which made man, in
his tenuous, volatile materiality at that time, a Sun-man.
Consciousness was then very dim.
This condition
will come again. A man will then be able to penetrate with full
consciousness the darkness around him, producing by his own efforts a
reflected image of the whole world. By that time we shall have
arrived at the Venus-evolution, a future stage of
Earth-evolution.
Persons wishing
to acquire second-sight must cast off their coarse perceptions and
sensibility, and the sensations they receive from the physical in
their environment; they must draw a free sensibility out of
themselves. This can also be arrived at inwardly, though not without
danger. It can be done by anyone who fixes his gaze — I am not
advising this, simply giving you facts — on some glittering
object, so to induce a state of fascination. In this way outer
sensibility is weakened, inner sensibility is encouraged, and
second-sight is evoked. In ancient times, under certain
circumstances, second-sight was evoked quite systematically. Stories
of this refer to a “magic mirror”: this was in fact an
instrument designed to fascinate and so to damp down outer sensation,
thereby calling up inner sensation as its polar opposite. A physical
mirror was thus used for calling up a spiritual reflection. The
important thing was not what was seen in the physical mirror; the
physical mirror merely drove away all outer sensation and inner
sensation was evoked. That is how the belief arose that in the magic
mirror itself the feelings, the thoughts, and so on, of distant
friends could be seen. In reality the person saw the state of soul
brought about in himself by the ordinary mirror.
Anyone who
elicits this kind of seeing sees actual realities. He sees the spiritual
activity that goes on in the kingdoms of nature, and he is, as it
were, united with everything on Earth that is Sun-like.
In order really
to understand Jacob Boehme's writings, one must take their whole content
as deriving from a complicated, wonderful second-sight.
Another
personality, Paracelsus, was constituted in a similar yet somewhat
different way. Sensation in his case was combined with greater intellectual
power; hence he always interpreted the pictures revealed to him
by second-sight. When we reflect intellectually about physical,
sense-perceptible things, we do not change them, for the intellect is
powerless in face of the physical; but it is not powerless in face of
anything seen in a mirror in the way described. To perceive the inner
constitution of the world so purely in terms of second-sight is
possible only for someone like Jacob Boehme, who was able to
surrender himself quite selflessly to external things. The unending
love with which he looked upon all things, and which made itself felt
in his whole way of grasping the reflected images of the spiritual in
the world, speaks in almost every line he wrote. So these reflections
remained for him in the utmost purity as a kind of Imaginations of
the spiritual in the world.
With Paracelsus,
all these things went through a change in accordance with his strong
intellectual bent. Hence they are reflected images given a different
form. Even from a physical mirror you can learn that what it reflects
can go through a change — you have only to look at your face in
a concave mirror. You would certainly be loath to have a face as you
see it there! That is more or less what intellectuality does to
the reflecting surface into which one looks — if one is an
intellectual such as Paracelsus. By this means, however, one
penetrates more deeply into the inner forces.
Thus Jacob
Boehme, beholding all things with his truly sublime love, became a
contemplative observer; whereas Paracelsus, concentrating more on the
inner forces, and distorting the mirror-images he was dealing with,
approached nearer to the healing forces that lie within things as
hidden Sun-forces.
When anyone
learns to master consciously the hidden Sun-forces, so that he does not
use the outspread darkness for seeing reflected images but carries into
the darkness the inner light kindled in soul and spirit through
meditation and concentration; when he becomes able to fill with inner
soul-forces the space otherwise lit up by the physical Sun so that he
can illuminate it with the light of his own soul and spirit, then
indeed conscious Imagination arises. This conscious Imagination, that
can be evoked in the way we have learnt to do on the path of
knowledge, is the source of what Jacob Boehme, as a Sun-man, has
recorded to a certain extent unconsciously in his writings, and with
less mastery of the world of ideas and so on.
And so, just
as Intuition arises when the secret forces of the Moon in a man are held
fast, and not expressed in somnambulistic wanderings, so the
mirror-images conjured up by the Sun-forces out of spiritual darkness
are changed to conscious Imagination.
While the
sleep-walking type lives in the forces of the Moon, and the Jacob
Boehme type in those of the Sun, so a third type lives in the
conditions of warmth and cold always present in the space around the
Earth. In normal life people grow accustomed to the prevailing
temperature. But there is a certain delicate, intimate
sensitivity that becomes independent of the external warmth or cold,
and on the contrary is very susceptible to the hidden workings of
heat and cold which permeate the space surrounding and penetrating
the Earth. A faculty of this kind for perceiving these hidden
workings was acquired at a certain time in his life by Swedenborg.
Anyone wishing to make a study of the mysterious side of
Swedenborg's life will gradually come to see clearly that this
susceptibility appeared in him at a certain age, for up to that
time he had been a distinguished representative of the official
science of his day: his writings in this field are very numerous.
They were not all published at the time, but now a society of Swedish
scholars is preparing an edition of his scientific works in many
volumes. Swedenborg will certainly give these scholars some hard nuts
to crack! They are obliged to admit that his works prove him to have
been one of the greatest geniuses of his age, but at a certain moment
of his life he became clairvoyant — which, in the opinion of
those editing his officially recognised works, is another word for
half-witted.
Now we must
turn our attention rather to this higher vision developed by Swedenborg
after he had made himself familiar with the rest of the knowledge
recognised in his day. We must examine more closely the reasons for
his thus becoming “half-witted” in the eyes of official
learning.
On looking
deeply into Swedenborg's personality, we find that he “lost
his senses” because in his fortieth year he developed an
overwhelming love for all that he had learnt up to that time. There
can hardly be anyone who has loved pure knowledge as much as
Swedenborg came to love it. It was this love for knowledge that
enabled him at a certain point in his life to look in his own way
into the spiritual world, and to become susceptible to the hidden
effects of warmth and cold in surrounding space.
These hidden
effects of warmth and cold come neither from Moon nor from Sun, but
chiefly from a heavenly body that sends very unassuming rays into
interplanetary space — from Saturn. These modest rays carry the
hidden forces which, at a certain time of his life, permeated
Swedenborg particularly. On this account he developed a capacity for
perceiving, instead of the fullness by which we are surrounded
in the world of the senses, emptiness — and to this, one day,
he became sensitive. He made no effort to become so; it arose
instinctively. Nor did he undergo any training such as I have
described in the book
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds;
this sensitivity dawned within him like a delicate higher instinct. And
so he became able to look into the world — not a physical world
— which is perceptible only when we have entered into the
conditions of warmth and cold that stream as rays from Saturn through
interplanetary space. Thus he developed a very individual form of
vision.
If you read
what Swedenborg has recorded as the results of this vision, it really
seems almost like an etherealised, subtilised, earthly experience.
The spiritual beings he sees, Angels, Archangels, and so on,
certainly move with the freedom of the imponderable, but almost
in the manner of earthly beings. We may ask whether the world he was
looking at was real, or whether he was simply projecting into the
void what he drew from his own inner resources. No — the truth
is quite different. Besides the world into which we look with our
physical senses, and besides the second world we can experience, the
etheric world, we are surrounded by a purely spiritual world. In this
spiritual world there are spiritual beings who have never descended
to Earth, beings leading a life of movement and activity. These
beings have to send their influence into earthly life; hence they
impart to the etheric element of the Earth their activity in the
purely spiritual world. We can describe it in this way. The Earth is
surrounded, permeated, by its etheric element, and outside —
actually outside space — there is the world of these active
spiritual beings which enters into the earthly realm. The Earth is
what it is only through the activity of these beings.
This activity
rays into the earthly realm, but is rayed back and reflected in the ether
of the Earth; and the forces of the ether are actually the etheric
realisation of the spiritual above them. When we study the etheric
around us on the Earth, we find it permeated with the activity of
these spiritual beings in the form of etheric pictures. The actual
activity takes place above it or within it. What immediately
surrounds us on Earth is the activity that is projected back into the
ether of the Earth. It is just as if a looking-glass were not only to
reflect images but gradually to develop an activity of its own.
Spiritual activity is rayed back from the Earth into the ether, and
this activity is really a projection of spiritual
activity.
Just as Jacob
Boehme saw in a mirror the reflection of what goes on in the human body
or in nature, in the way I have described, for Swedenborg the Earth
itself was the mirror which threw back to him in the ether the
pictures of spiritual activity in the spiritual world. We can say
that what he saw is not the spiritual world, or we can equally well
say that it is. It is just the realisation of an image reflected by
the Earth. It is a true image, but true only as a reflection of the
reality that lies behind it.
That is
what Swedenborg perceived. In the ether of the Earth he saw how the
super-earthly beings develop forces in the ether — forces which
play a positive part in human life and also in other forms of life on
Earth. These etheric forces are neither Angels nor Archangels, but
forces vibrating in the ether. To-day it is abnormal for anyone to
see into these hidden etheric forces, which project everywhere into
the surrounding ether an etheric image of the higher spiritual
archetypes. In an earlier epoch of Earth-evolution, however,
this was perfectly normal — in the time which preceded the
Sun-evolution and may be called the Saturn age. It was made known at
that time that one day we shall experience a Venus age, after which
will come the Vulcan age.
In Swedenborg
there arose this special kind of vision — the mode of existence once
passed through by the Earth; how the Earth revealed itself to the men
of that time; and how it will reveal itself in future.
When someone
has acquired the capacity for seeing consciously the pictures
Swedenborg beheld in the ether; when to the emptiness of world-space
he can oppose his own fullness — then, for exact clairvoyance,
the beings who were reflected etherically for Swedenborg vanish from
etheric vision, and begin to be audible to spiritual hearing,
spiritual ears. When they are effaced as visionary pictures, they
gradually become Inspirations, sounding into consciousness from out
of the spiritual world.
Hence we can
say: The unconscious Imagination, rising up in Swedenborg as etheric images,
will — if one carefully observes the warnings of the Guardian
of the Threshold, which Swedenborg could not do — go through a
metamorphosis and reappear as fully conscious astral
Inspiration.
Now I have
shown you how the more subconscious state of the sleep-walker, the Jacob
Boehme type of vision, and the Swedenborg type, are related to what can
be striven for consciously as Intuition, Imagination, Inspiration.
These have had to be put in a different order to-day because I have
been giving a cosmic picture. If this is done in accordance not with
names but with the things in themselves, then, if descriptions are
given from different points of view, the sequence has to be changed,
just as things may often appear in a different order when the
perspective is changed. For instance, say I am between two men, with
one behind me and the other in front. If I move ahead of the one in
front, then I can face them both. So, too, in cosmic space things
change in accordance with our point of view.
That is why
in my lecture-cycles you find things appearing in a different order
according to the various standpoints from which they have to be
described. When this is not fully appreciated and anyone persists in
an abstract approach, he will say: This does not tally. But the only
people who can afford to satisfy the pure intellectualist in this
matter are those whose descriptions derive from mere assumptions.
Anyone who is describing realities must allow them to appear
contradictory, as from different points of view they often
can.
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