LECTURE I.
Dornach, November 23,
1923.
I
WILL begin today with the soul-life of man, and lead on from thence
to a penetration into cosmic secrets.
Let us start with
something of the very simplest. Let us consider the soul-life of a
human being as it is seen when he carries his inner self-reflection
beyond the point I specially had in mind when I wrote the articles in
the Goetheanum on the
Life of the Soul.
(Now published
as a brochure entitled Vom Seelenleben). We shall consider the
soul-life more intimately than was done in the Goetheanum
articles. Those four articles on the soul-life form a kind of
introduction, a preparation for that which we are now to consider.
When we practise self-reflection in a wide and
comprehensive way, we see how this soul-life can be raised to a level
higher. We begin by letting the external world work upon us —
we do this from childhood — and then we form thoughts upon that
which the outer world has brought to us. We are really human beings
in that we allow the impressions of the outer world to live on
further in our thoughts, realising them inwardly in our thoughts,
creating a world of mental pictures, which in a certain way reflect
the impressions made on us from outside. We are not doing anything
specially helpful for the soul-life if we simply form a number of
thoughts as to how the outer world is reflected in our soul, for in
so doing we only attain what I might call a shadowy picture of the
world of ideas in our inner being. We really practise better
self-reflection if we focus our attention rather on the inner energy,
in the attempt to enter livingly ourselves into the element of
thought, without looking at the outer world, and follow further in
thought what has come to us as impressions of the outer world. One
man may thereby be led, according to his disposition, into mere
abstract thinking. He may create world-systems, or he may make
schemes about all imaginable things in the world, and so on. Another
man, while reflecting upon the things that have made an impression on
him, and by spinning out his thoughts further, may perhaps evolve
some even more fanciful conception or other.
We will not enter further into the way in which,
according to temperament or character or other influences on a man,
this inner thinking, devoid of outer impressions, may develop, but we
will recognize the fact that it is a matter of especial significance
for us when we withdraw in regard to our senses from the outer world
and live in our thoughts and ideas, spinning them out even further,
often perhaps in the direction of mere possibilities only.
Many people regard it as unnecessary to develop this
living in thought, in the direction of mere possibilities. Even in
these difficult times one may see people occupied the whole day with
their business (which of course is necessary for the outer life)
afterwards meeting together in small groups, playing cards or
dominoes or such like, in order, as is frequently said, to pass the
time. It does not often happen, however, that people come together in
such groups in order to exchange thought for instance, about all the
things in which they were engaged during the day, and to consider
what might have happened if this or that had been different. They
would not be so much interested in this as in playing cards, but it
would be a spinning out of their thoughts, and if we preserve a
sufficiently sound sense of reality such a continuation of our
thoughts need not become fantastic.
This life in thoughts
leads finally to what you encounter if you read
The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity
in the right way. If you read
The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity
in the right way you must
become acquainted with this feeling of living in thoughts.
The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity
is wholly drawn from reality,
while at the same time it has proceeded entirely from actual
thinking. You will find therefore a fundamental tone or feeling in this
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.
I conceived it
in the eighties, and wrote it at the beginning of 1890, and I can
truly say that in all those who at that time were in a position to
make acquaintance with the root-nerve of this
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,
everywhere I met with lack of understanding.
This lack of understanding arises from a definite reason. Human
beings, even the so-called thinkers of today in reality only get so
far in their thinking as to experience in it an image of the outer
sense-world; and then they say: perhaps there might come into a man's
thinking something of a super-physical world, but it would have, to
enter in the same way as a chair or a table which is outside of us,
and which is acknowledged by our thinking to be outside of us. Thus
this thinking which is within us would have to be able to experience
in some way or other something super-sensible, outside of man in the
same way as the table or chair is outside of us and is experienced.
In some such way as this, Edward von Hartmann conceived the activity
of thinking.
This book,
The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity
then came to his notice. In this
book thinking is so experienced that within the experience of
thinking we come to this realisation, viz. that if a man really
experiences thinking, he is living, even if at first somewhat
indefinitely, in the cosmos, This union of man in his innermost
thinking experience with the cosmic secrets is the root-nerve of
The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.
Therefore in this book
you find the sentence, “In thinking, man lifts an edge of the
veil of the cosmic secret.” This is perhaps simply expressed,
but it is meant to imply that when a man really experiences thinking,
he no longer feels himself to be outside the cosmic secret, but
within it, no longer outside the divine Essence but within It. When a
man attains to the reality of thinking within himself he attains to
the Divine within himself.
It was this fact which could not be understood. For if a
man really understands it, if he has really taken the trouble to
acquire this experience of thinking, he rests no longer within the
world in which he was previously, but he is living in the etheric
world. He is living in a world of which he knows: it is not
conditioned from any part of physical earthly space, but by the whole
cosmic sphere.
He can no longer doubt
the order and reality of the cosmic etheric sphere if he has grasped
thinking as it is portrayed in the
Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.
Thus he reaches what may be called etheric experience.
When a man enters into this experience he really makes a noteworthy
step forward in his whole life.
I may characterise this step forward thus: If we think
in ordinary consciousness, we think: in this room are tables, chairs,
human beings and so on. We may perhaps think of much more also; but
we think of these things outside us. Thus we comprehend these things
in our thinking — and there are various things outside —
from the central point of our being. Every man is aware of this; he
wants to grasp the things of the world with his thinking.
If however we have acquired the experience of thinking
just characterised, it is no longer the world we should grasp. Man is
not so much riveted, as I might say, in his own ego; something
entirely different happens. He has the feeling, quite a right
feeling, that with his thinking, which is not confined to any one
place, he can grasp everything inwardly. He feels that he is
contracting the inner man. Just as in his ordinary thinking he
extends spiritual feelers outwards, as I might say, so with this
thinking which experiences itself within him he extends himself
continually into his own being. Man himself becomes the object.
This is a very important experience which a man may have
when he realises: formerly you always comprehend the world; now that
you have this experience in thinking you must comprehend yourself.
The result of this process of strong self-comprehension is that he
breaks through the skin.
And just as he inwardly grasps his own self he also
grasps from within the entire cosmic ether, not in its details,
naturally, but he gains the conviction that this ether is spread out
over the cosmic sphere within which he exists together with the
stars, sun and moon, etc.
A second thing which man can develop in the inner life
of his soul is the power not to be stimulated immediately in his
thoughts from outside, not to spin these thoughts out and weave them
further, but to give himself up to his memories. If he does this, and
really makes his memories an inner experience, then again a quite
definite experience results. The experiencing of thinking already
described leads a man to himself, he grasps himself; and he has a
certain satisfaction in this grasping of his own inner being.
When, however, he passes on to the experience in memory,
then, if undergone inwardly in the right way, it finally seems to be
no longer the most important thing to approach oneself. This is the
case in the experience of thinking. That is why one finds in thinking
that freedom which depends entirely on the personal element in man.
Therefore, a philosophy of spiritual activity must start from the
experience of thinking, because man thereby arrives at his own being;
he finds himself as a free personality. This is not the case with the
experience of memory. In the experience of memory, if a man follows
it up seriously and immerses himself entirely in his memory, he will
finally acquire the feeling of becoming free from himself, of getting
away from himself. Therefore those memories which enable one to
forget the present are the most satisfactory. (I will not say that
they are always the best, but they are, in many cases the most
satisfactory).
We can get an idea of the value of memory if we can have
memories which carry us out into the world, in spite of the fact that
we may be completely dissatisfied with the present and would like to
get away from it. If we can develop memories of such a nature that
our feeling of life is intensified while giving ourselves up to our
memories this furnishes what I might call a kind of preparation for
what memories may become when they are much more real.
You can make memory a real experience if you recall with
the utmost possible realism something which you actually experienced
say ten, twenty or thirty years ago. I will merely indicate how this
can be done. Suppose you go over your old treasured papers and look
up, let us say, old letters which you had written or which. were
written to you on some occasion or other. Place these letters before
you, and by means of them you will live intensely in the past. Or
perhaps a better way may be not to take the letters you have written,
or which other people have written to you, because too much
subjectivity comes into this; it would be still better, if you are
able to do so, to take your old school books and look at them as you
did long ago when you really sat in front of them as a child at
school, and in this way bring back into your life something which
formerly existed. That is really an extraordinary experience. If you
carry out something of this kind you change the whole mood of soul
which you possess at present. It is very extraordinary. But you must
be a little resourceful in this connection, and all kinds of things
can help you in this. Perhaps a lady may find in some comer or other
a garment, or something she wore twenty years ago; she puts this on
and thereby transports herself back into the position in which she
was at that time; or anything of a like nature which may bring the
past with utmost possible reality into the present. In this way you
are able to separate yourself thoroughly from your present
experience.
When we have experiences in our present consciousness we
really stand too intimately in the experiences, too close for the
experiences to result in anything, so to speak. We must be able to
stand further away. Man is further away from himself when he sleeps
than when he is awake; for he is then outside his physical and
etheric bodies with his astral body and ego. When you actually invoke
past experiences into the present, as I have described, you draw near
to the astral body which is outside the physical body in sleep. You
may not at first believe that such a vivification of past experiences
by means of an old garment perhaps can have the powerful effect I
have indicated, but it is really only a question of making an
experiment yourself in these matters. If you do make the experiment
and you really enchant into the present what has been experienced in
past years so that you can live in it and entirely forget the present
you will then see that you draw very near to your astral body, to
your astral body of sleep.
Now if you expect that it is only necessary to look to
right or left and see a cloudy form as your astral body, you will be
disappointed, for it does not happen in that way; you must pay
attention to what really does occur. What may really occur is, for
example, that after a time, through such experiences, you may
gradually see the dawn in a new way; you may have a new feeling on
seeing a sunrise. Gradually, along this path you will come to
experience the warmth of the dawn as something of a prophetic nature,
as if it were announcing something, as if the dawn had a natural
prophetic force in itself. You will begin to feel the dawn as
spiritually forceful, and you will be able to connect an inner
meaning with this prophetic force, so that you get a feeling, which
you might at first regard as an illusion, that the dawn is related
with your own being. Through such experiences as I have described you
may gradually bring yourself into a condition in which you feel when
you see the dawn: “The dawn does not leave me alone. It is not
merely yonder while I am here; I am inwardly united with this dawn;
it is a quality of my own inner feeling. I myself at this moment am
the dawn.” When you feel thus united with the dawn so that you
yourself experience as it were the colour, radiation, and shining,
the appearing of the sun out from the colours and the light, so that
in your own heart a sun arises, as it were, out of the morning glow
as a living feeling, — then you will also feel as if you
yourself are traveling with the sun over the vault of heaven; you
will feel that the sun does not leave you alone, the sun is not there
while you are here but you feel that your existence extends in a
certain sense to the sun existence and that you travel with the light
throughout the day.
If you develop this feeling which, as we have said, does
not come from thinking — for in that way one can only reach man
himself — but which we can develop out of memory in the way
indicated, when you develop this experience out of your memory, or
rather out of the forces of memory, then the things which you
perceived formerly with your physical senses begin to wear a
different aspect; they begin to be spiritually and psychically
transparent. When a man has once attained this feeling of traveling
with the sun, of gaining strength at dawn to go with the sun, he sees
all the flowers of the meadow in a different aspect. The blossoms do
not remain passive, showing the yellow or red colours which they have
on the surface but they begin to speak. They speak to our hearts in a
spiritual way. The blossoms become transparent. The spiritual part of
the plant stirs inwardly, and the blossoming becomes a kind of
speaking.
In this way man really unites his soul with the external
life of nature, and he thus gains the impression that there is
something behind the existence of nature, that the light with which
he has united himself is borne by spiritual Beings, and in these
spiritual Beings he gradually comes to recognize the features of that
which has been pictured by Anthroposophy.
Let us now consider the two stages of feeling which I
have described. Let us take the first feeling which can be brought
about through thinking as an inner experience; this inner experience
of thinking carries him far, and the feeling of being in a confined
space entirely ceases. Man's experience widens out; he feels quite
distinctly that in his inner being there is a portion which extends
right out into the entire cosmos, and which is of the same substance
as the cosmos. He feels himself one with the whole world, with the
etheric substance of the world; but he feels too that standing on the
earth, his feet and legs are drawn down by the gravity of the earth.
He feels that he is bound with his entire human nature to this earth.
But in the moment man has this thinking-experience he no longer feels
bound to the earth, but he feels himself dependent on the wide spaces
of the cosmic sphere. Everything comes from the universe, no longer
from below, up from the centre of the earth, but everything comes in
from the expanses of space. One feels that if one is to understand
man, this feeling of streaming in from space must be there.
This extends even to the understanding of the human
form. If I wish to grasp the human form either in sculpture or in
painting I can really only do so as regards the lower part of the
form by thinking of something proceeding out of the inner bodily
nature of man. I shall not be bringing the right spirit into this
unless I can draw the upper part in such a manner that I think of it
as borne in from outside. Our brow, the upper part of our head is
from without and is really placed on the rest of the body. He who has
looked with artistic understanding at the paintings in the small
cupola in the Goetheanum (now destroyed) will have seen that the
lower part of the countenance was always so represented as having
grown out from within man, and the upper portion of the head as
something given to him from the cosmos. In the ages when men had a
feeling for such things this was especially felt. You will never
understand the form of a true Grecian sculptured head unless you have
this feeling for it, for the Greeks created under the inspiration of
such feelings.
Thus man feels himself united with the environment in
his experience of thinking.
Now one might imagine that this process was simply
carried further, and that one would go still further out when one
passes on from the experience of thinking to the experience of
memory; but this is not the case. If you really develop this
experience of thinking in yourself you will ultimately gain an
impression of the third Hierarchy, of the angels, archangels and the
Archai.
Just as you may picture man's bodily experience here on
earth in the forces of gravity and in the transmutation of
nourishment in digestion, so you may also form an idea of the
conditions under which these beings of the third Hierarchy live, if,
through this experience of thinking, instead of wandering about on
the earth you feel yourself carried by forces which stream towards
you from the furthest expanses of the cosmos.
Now when man passes from
the experiences of thinking to that of memory it is not as if this
were the end of the cosmic sphere, the limit to which man can attain.
We can reach such a cosmic boundary if we really enter into the
reality of this thinking-experience; but we do not then go further
out; the matter presents itself differently. Here, for instance, we
may have an object of some kind, a crystal, a flower or an animal;
and if we pass from the experience of thinking to all that the
experience of memory can bring us, then we look right into this
object. The gaze which has extended to the universe can, if carried
further through the memory-experience, look into things. It is
not that you press forward into indefinite abstract distances; the
gaze that is carried further looks into things and sees the
spiritual in everything. It sees, for example, in the light the
active spiritual beings of light, and so on. It sees in the darkness
the spiritual beings active therein. So that we can say: the
experience of memory leads us into the second Hierarchy.
There still exists something in the human soul-life
which goes out beyond memory. Let us make clear to ourselves what
this is. Memory gives our soul its colouring. We can know quite
exactly, when we approach a man who judges everything in a
disapproving way, one who emanates his sour atmosphere over
everything, a man who, if one tells him something beautiful
immediately replies with something unpleasant, and so on, we can know
with certainty that all this is connected with his memory. Memory
gives the soul its colouring.
We may meet a man who always has an ironic twist of the
mouth, especially if we say something to him; or he may wrinkle up
his brow or pull a tragic face. Another man may look at us in a
friendly way, so that we are cheered not only by what he says but by
the way he looks at us. Indeed it is interesting, at some special
statement in a lecture to glance at the countenances in the audience,
to see the expression of the mouth, or to look at the foreheads or
the blank expression on many of the countenances, or the nobility of
many others and so on. In what you see there is expressed not merely
what has remained as memory in the soul and has given the soul a
certain colouring, but something is expressed which has passed over
from the memory into the physiognomy, into the gesture, into the
whole attitude of a man. If a man has taken nothing in, if he shows
by his countenance that he has not learnt anything by what he has
experienced of sorrow, pain or joy in his life, that too is
characteristic. If his countenance has remained quite smooth, that is
as characteristic as if it expresses in deep wrinkles the tragedy or
the earnestness of life, or even perhaps its many satisfactions. That
which remains in the soul as the result of the power of memory passes
over into and moulds the physical body; and so markedly does this
take place that man later actually has from it outwardly his
physiognomy and his gestures, and inwardly his temperament, for we
have not always the same temperament in old age as we had in
childhood. The temperament in old age is often the result of what we
have undergone in life, and which has inwardly become memory in the
soul.
That which passes inwardly into man in this way can also
be carried into reality, though this is more difficult. It is still
fairly easy to bring before our soul-vision things which we
experienced in childhood or, many years ago, in order to realize
memory to a certain extent, but it is more difficult to transpose
oneself into the temperament of one's childhood, into one's earlier
temperament. But the practice of such an exercise may be of infinite
significance for us; and more is really attained when we can do this
inwardly in the depths of the soul than if we do something
externally.
Something is already attained in a man if, say at the
age of forty or fifty, he plays a child's game, or jumps as he did
when a child or if he tries to make a face such as he made when an
aunt gave him a bonbon when he was eight years of age; and things of
that kind.
To transpose oneself back to the very gesture, to the
very attitude, brings something into our life which leads
convincingly to the feeling that the outer world is the inner world,
and the inner world is the outer world.
We then enter with our whole being, e.g., into the
flower, and we have in addition to the thought-experience and the
memory-experience what I may call the experience of gesture, in the
truest sense of the words. From this we gain an idea of how the
spiritual everywhere works unimpeded in the physical world.
You cannot apprehend inwardly with full consciousness
your behaviour of say twenty years ago as regards your gesture on any
occasion without realizing the union of the spiritual and the
physical in all things; that is, if you penetrate into the depths of
this matter with all earnestness and energy. Then you have arrived at
the experience of the first Hierarchy.
Thought-experience: third Hierarchy.
Memory-experience: second Hierarchy.
Gesture-experience: first Hierarchy.
The memory-experience leads us to identify ourselves
with the dawn when we stand face to face with the morning glow. It
enables us to feel inwardly, to experience inwardly all the warmth of
the dawn; but when we rise to the experience of gesture, then that
which approaches us in the dawn unites with everything that can be
experienced objectively as colour or tone.
When we regard the objects around us illuminated by the
sun and simply look at them as they appear to us, we see them in the
light. But we do not see the dawn in this way, especially when we
pass over gradually from the memory-experience to the experience of
gesture; then everything which is experienced as colour gradually
separates itself off from all material existence. The experience of
colour becomes living, it becomes psychic, spiritual. It forsakes the
space in which the external dawn appears to us. The dawn begins then
to speak to us of the secret of the connection of the sun with the
earth; and we learn how the Beings of the first Hierarchy work. When
we again turn our gaze to the dawn and it appears to us almost as it
did formerly in the mere experience of memory we learn to recognize
the Thrones. Then the dawn dissolves away. The colour becomes living,
becomes psychic, becomes spiritual, becomes a Being, and speaks to us
of the relation of the sun to the earth as it once existed in the old
Sun-period; it speaks to us in such a manner that we learn what the
Cherubim are. And then, when full of enthusiasm and veneration we are
carried away by this two-fold revelation of the dawn, the revelation
of the Thrones and of the Cherubim, and we live on further within the
soul, there presses into our own inner being, from out of the living
Being which the dawn has now become, that which constitutes the
nature of the Seraphim.
Everything which I have described to you today, I have
done simply to point out how, from the simple following on in the
soul from thinking to the gesture that is full of thought and
permeated by soul, man can acquire for himself a feeling (for, to
begin with he has only feelings) about the spiritual foundations of
the cosmos, right up to the sphere of the Seraphim.
I wanted to give you this as a kind of introduction to
the studies which are to lead us on from the soul-life out into the
expanses of the spiritual cosmos.
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