Initiation
Berlin, 28 November 1907
In the course of our winter talks on
spiritual science, we have already dealt with some unpopular
and only tolerated issues. However, one can say that no issue
is less popular and tolerated than the object of our today's
consideration: the initiation.
If one speaks of the
spiritual, higher worlds, the thought will also appear of
course: how does the human being come to the knowledge of these
higher worlds? The today's consideration on initiation can only
give a preliminary answer — only all talks of this winter can
give a complete answer. We must assume two principles of any
spiritual science that we have already touched in the first
talk. The first principle is the knowledge that there is
another or even a number of other supersensible worlds behind
the sense-perceptible one. The second knowledge is that to the
human being these supersensible worlds can become accessible
gradually, so that he can recognise them by his own
development.
Of course, with it,
spiritual science causes the opposition of all those people who
speak about such matters and say, “we” or
“one” cannot recognise. With it from the start, the
speaker concerned who wants to make himself the standard
measure of any human knowledge postulates a kind of knowledge
monopoly, of infallibility.
Spiritual science stands
exactly on the opposite point of view. It has the point of view
that the human being has abilities and cognitive forces that
are embryonic in him and can be developed higher and higher.
One has to admit that it is quite right if anybody says, he
cannot recognise certain higher worlds. However, at the same
time, one has to say that these higher worlds are not to be
penetrated just only with those cognitive forces that he means,
and that logically nobody has a right to say: my cognitive
forces are the absolute only ones; what I recognise signifies
the limit of any possible knowledge. — For one rejects the
human ability of development with it, denies from the start
that the human being can ascend to higher and higher stages.
However, it is the basic conviction of any human being who
looks impartially at the world, and especially within our
German education, it is easy to acknowledge this
principle.
Goethe repeatedly pronounced and emphasised in the most various,
wonderful sentences what founds a way of thinking leading to initiation.
I would like to place some words of Goethe's deep-thought fragment
The Secrets
(The Mysteries)
at the head of our considerations today. He points
there to the inner human force that strives on and on and
higher and higher, indeed, that is hindered by that what
surrounds us at every moment what is forced upon us from the
outside, from the sensuous as the inhibiting force. However,
the inner force has still a means to come to the inner, to the
world knowledge.
Goethe says in this poem
The Secrets
(The Mysteries)
in which he speaks of a special initiation of the
Rosicrucians and indicates the principle of initiation with the
profound words:
For any force rushes forward into the vastness
To live and to work here and there;
However, the stream of the world hinders
And constrains us from any side and tears us off;
In this inner storm and outer quarrel
The mind hears a hardly understood word:
From the force that binds all creatures
That man is delivered who masters himself.
It completely complies with Goethe's way of
thinking to search this force of the human being that can be
developed to higher cognitive forces, to look for means and
ways to an objective knowledge and wisdom beholding into the
inside, into the spiritual of the things. It complies with his
way of thinking if we eavesdrop on him where he expresses his
level of knowledge most intimately. There we find many tips,
which pronounce this clearly.
At the beginning of his
Theory of Colours,
Goethe says that the
eye is created “by the light for the light.” The
time has not yet come to understand this work of Goethe;
perhaps, in some time if the perspectives prevail which I have
mentioned in my talk
The Natural Sciences Facing a Crucial Decision.
He says, it was an indifferent, not photosensitive
organ. The light caused the organ to see the light, to perceive
the illumined objects. One has to think in the sense of Goethe
what I have said in the sense of spiritual science: the human
being had no eyes in primeval times, which could perceive
light; the eyes arose from quite different organs. Which force
accomplished this change? The light! It conjured up the eye
that had become photosensitive. At the same time, Goethe
indicates that there are other, unknown and misjudged abilities
in the human being which — if they are developed — just open a
new world as the eye opens the world of light and colours if it
is elicited. In no other sense, we speak in spiritual science
of the higher, extrasensory worlds.
Exactly in the sense of
the dictum of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the great thinker, we
speak of such extrasensory perception. Fichte says, if a
sighted man goes among blind people and tells them about light
and colours, they regard him probably as a daydreamer. Also is
that what he, Fichte, had to say to his listeners in those days
only for an organ which has to originate only, and this — only
on a higher stage — can be compared to the organ of the
blind-born who has recognised the world only touching before
the operation and sees it lighting up in colours and light
afterward. Thus, it is also possible to elicit abilities by the
development of forces slumbering in the human being to perceive
new forces and objects in the surroundings that one can only
perceive with spiritual abilities. In this logical sense, one
speaks in spiritual science of higher worlds.
He who doubts the higher
worlds is on the same level of the power of judgement as
someone who is born blind and says, there is no world of light
and colours because I do not see them.
Nobody can really assess the possibility. However,
someone can decide on the reality who knows it. Not anybody has
to decide on a matter who knows nothing about it, but only
someone who knows something of it. Indeed, only the principle
of experience has to decide on initiation.
However, is it
unnecessary to talk about these matters? No, it is necessary;
for in which sense does anybody talk who informs about such
higher worlds? He talks about them because he knows that merely
by these communications, merely by this report the abilities
and forces slumbering in all human beings can be woken up to
penetrate to these worlds. Someone who is reluctant to receive
information about these worlds resembles someone who was once
reluctant to take part in the development of the eyes with
which the human being can see the sun. He could also have said,
why shall I develop anything, so that I can recognise the sun
and the light? He did not know the sun and the light before.
Only by a foreign power approaching us, the inner disposition
can develop in the human being. Only if we can open the soul
freely to the communications about the higher worlds, we get
the first impulse to develop the higher forces which make us
sighted, initiated finally.
One spoke of the
principle of initiation at all times of the human development.
Only the relation to the public working was different from that
in our age. If we go back to the ancient Indian, Chaldean,
Babylonian, Egyptian, or Greek-Roman culture-epochs, if we go
up then to the Middle Ages, to the 16th, 17th centuries and
our time, initiates and disciples of the initiates always
existed. However, one did not speak about that publicly. What
meant to be initiated? One differentiates an initiate, a
clairvoyant, and somebody who applies the higher forces in the
service of the physical world.
However, we do not want
to get involved in these finer differences. Somebody is a
clairvoyant who is able to behold into the extrasensory worlds
to whom the worlds that are concealed to the usual human being
are obvious, discernible worlds. Why was the introduction to
such higher worlds pursued, so to speak, secretly? Why did one
not speak of it publicly in former times? We speak of the
dangers of initiation next time. I would like today to draw
your attention only to the fact that on the border between the
sensuous-visible world and the invisible-extrasensory world,
indeed, a certain danger lies in wait for the human being, and
that someone who wants to become an initiate has to overcome
this danger at first. It consists in the fact that it is
exceptionally difficult to distinguish illusion from reality,
dreams from reality, vision from the real view at the border of
the physical and the supraphysical worlds. In this area, it is
very easy to confuse own fantastic things of the soul with the
objective reality. One needs different qualities that are
explained in the following: keeping cool, retaining certainty
of the soul, courage, perseverance and energy at the border. If
the human being lost the clearness about that which is
appearance and what is reality at this border, he would have
lost his mind, then he would be a fool instead of an
initiate.
Nowadays an immense
greed, a true fury exists with most people indeed, if they hear
of such matters to behold something of the higher worlds.
However, with most human beings the perseverance and the will
and above all the strength to overcome everything that must
remove the indicated dangers do not exist. Hence, at all times
it was necessary that one examined the people whom one admitted
to initiation concerning their intellect, their spiritual and
moral abilities and their feelings. Only those who could stand
the test before the pervasive view of the initiate could be
admitted to initiation. There were such persons who were able
because of their living conditions to submit to that, which
enabled them to distinguish appearance and truth, vision and
reality on the border between the physical and the spiritual
worlds.
The question may now
arise: why are those not quiet also today who know something
about these matters after one could be quiet so long? Why does
one not carry out the principle of the strict seclusion also
today concerning the introduction to the higher worlds? Why is
it broken? This has good reasons. Humanity advances. It is
different in the different epochs of its development. History
is also much more different in its organisation and
developmental stages than the nonprofessional believes it.
Someone who does not know the matters imagines that the human
beings are the same today as they were centuries ago. Those who
studied history and anthropology also have the same idea
tacitly. The human beings of different centuries differ really
very much who are apparently the same to the external anatomy
and physiology. The differences are not obvious at first sight,
and the external anatomy and physiology know nothing at all
about them. Humanity progresses, and the human mind and the
human soul have advanced so far that one needs the knowledge of
the world secrets, the views, concepts, and ideas that lead us
into the depth of the things, which were always preserved in
the so-called secret schools to the general welfare and
progress of humanity.
I present the further
details in the following talks. We need only to point to the
immense difference that took place in humanity in the course of
a few centuries. We need only to mention one thing that deeply
intervened in the human development: the art of
printing.
Imagine once how the
human beings lived concerning their soul, their spiritual
education before the invention of the art of printing, how the
communication was between those who knew something, and those
who wanted to learn something, before there were books. Compare
how today the communications of science and scholarship
penetrate to any soul by thousands and thousands means, by
popular writings and newspaper articles. If you go on
imagining, you can get the idea that today it looks different
in the souls, and you do not think that the sensations,
thoughts, and impulses in the souls have no influence on life
as a whole. Someone who believes that everything obvious is an
imprint of the spiritual says to himself that the human beings
have other physical and social needs today than in past times.
Once it was possible that single persons knew something of
certain events, of truth and wisdom. Today, however, the
principle of initiation must be made accessible to everybody.
Because of a duty towards humanity the strict secrecy and
seclusion of former times was broken through. That is why today
not only about that is spoken which is to be said about the
higher worlds from the viewpoint of the spiritual research, but
one also speaks in a certain way at least in the elements how
the human being ascends even to these worlds, how he can
accomplish the first steps of initiation. However, from the
start one has to call attention to the fact that nobody should
believe that the principle of initiation is to be taken easily
and less seriously because the first steps of initiation are
accessible to everybody today. Everybody can accomplish these
first steps in every situation, as you will hear. Then higher
and higher stages begin up to that of an initiate in the true
sense of the word.
I have to characterise
this concept first. What is an initiate? If I assume that there
are higher and higher worlds behind our sensuous world, an
initiate would be someone who has an insight into these higher
worlds. The training for the initiation gives the human being
the means and instructions how he can develop his spiritual
eyes and ears to be able to behold into this spiritual world as
he looks with his physical organs at the physical
world.
Strictly speaking, all
that is only a preparation for the real initiation. He who
becomes a pupil of initiation receives certain instructions
from his teacher how he can develop the abilities slumbering in
him. All that aims to a point that leads him into a preliminary
depth of the world to the highest degree, to a centre from
which the rays of world creation and world principles go out.
Such a thing does exist. This secret would be pronounceable
even in words and, nevertheless, it is not pronounced. Allow me
this indication from the start, because even if it sounds
apparently mysterious, someone who thinks a little bit about it
will find that even the kind in which such a thing is
pronounced is very significant for the sensation that one
should appropriate to understand the principle of
initiation.
One prepares the pupil
for the acceptance of the world secret that would be
pronounceable if one is allowed to pronounce it. The initiate
is somebody who knows a certain secret that is significant to
the highest degree, for the life of the human beings. A secret,
because if it were pronounced in the everyday life it would
appear mad, brainless, paradoxical. Now, this would still be
the less. However, there are other reasons why, nevertheless,
someone who could pronounce the secret is not allowed to
pronounce it. The reason is so deep that the secret that
finishes certain stages of initiation cannot be wrested from
anybody who knows it even not if one tormented and tortured
him. He can never wrest this secret from himself. For this
secret is not informed in words from human being to human
being. The essentials consist of the fact that one brings the
pupil to the point where he gets around by the imparted
development of his own abilities and forces to solving the
riddle by himself which is behind the matter, so that, so to
speak, the pupil faces the teacher with that luminous eye which
announces: I have found it!
Training means leading to
finding oneself. A big part of that what the human being has to
gain for the penetration into the higher worlds lies just in
that big and immense sensation of the soul when it awakes and
feels as newborn, after it was led to the higher capabilities
and stages of development. One can compare that feeling on a
lower level with that of a blind-born who could only touch the
things up to now, and to whom after the operation light,
colours, and forms appear from the darkness. Only if this
relationship exists between teacher and pupil, the relationship
is a healthy one. It is built on the highest that there can be
between human being and human being: on freedom. That
relationship must be there in which nothing at all of an
unjustified influence from the teacher is there, because
everything that should be developed is got out from the pupil
himself.
After we have
characterised the mood that should control the principle of
initiation, we want to go somewhat more precisely into the
development of the abilities slumbering in the human being. We
start from the obvious matters and advance to the more distant
ones. Three abilities are already there for the usual
observation: thinking, feeling and willing, thought, feeling
and will. This is the level of the average human being. All
three abilities are developable. At first the thinking: it
cannot lead the human being beyond the physical world, even if
it is developed ever so subtle, ever so intimate. However, the
thinking is still the first stage of development if it is a
matter of getting beyond the physical world. We shall solve
this ostensible contradiction, however, straight away. I have
to speak immediately of those principles of initiation which
were usual in the course of the last centuries in the secret
schools and which are informed initially today to the public by
those who know something of them.
First, the pupil has to
develop the thinking free from sensuousness. What does one call
thinking free from sensuousness? If the human being looks at
the world around himself by his senses, he creates mental
pictures and ideas of the world. These mental pictures and
ideas make the world comprehensible to him. However, all that
is no thinking free from sensuousness. The modern science,
because of a certain inner weakness, often does not want to
accept another thinking. Nevertheless, another thinking has its
origin solely in the human inside, in the human soul. The
modern human being only knows very little of the big extent of
this thinking that is free from sensuousness and if anybody
hears anything of it, he rejects it, and does not want to
accept it.
The human being cannot
only have thoughts referring to the sense-perceptible world; he
can also have thoughts that arise from an inner power that the
senses can never stimulate. Even philosophers do not see that
today. I can produce evidence. Mathematics, geometry, can
deliver it. Nobody can outdoors see a real cycle; nobody can
outdoors see the principle that two times two are
four.
However, one can get out
by inner meditation without counting beans that two times two
are four, or one can construct the circle by inner view, so
that the circle line is always equidistant to the centre. What
did the great Plato write above his school? He wrote that
nobody could be accepted without knowledge of geometry. That
does not mean that he had to know the entire geometry, but that
he had a suitable sense for it. If we reproduced the external
circle in concepts only, we would never be able to form a true
circle. However, we can form a circle and its principles in our
mind that way. Thus, we must work out the circle from own mind.
This is thinking free from sensuousness. Mathematics is not
popular, and, nevertheless, it is the only thinking free from
sensuousness that is done in our schools. However, most
people laugh at someone if he says that there are still other
concepts that one can find wholly spiritually, as those of
space and number and figures. One ignores and despises the
philosophers and thinkers who asserted that the human being is
able to put up a building of ideas that harmonises with the
world.
Someone who has put up
such ideas free from sensuousness within our German education
and culture for other fields than geometry is Goethe again. It
is a wonderful great achievement of the spiritual life of
humanity what Goethe performed with the type of the plants,
with the archetypical plant, and the type of the animal, the
archetypical animal. What sort of thoughts are these? Goethe
himself tries to make clear them his way. Many people wrote
about that. However, the most is nonsense because most people
are not able to understand how a spiritually constructed circle
whose principles we can see relates to the circle drawn on the
board which is nothing but a number of little chalk particles.
However, Goethe's archetypical plant relates to the external
sense-perceptible plant. Outdoors are the different plants —
Goethe thought —, the one looks this way, the other that way.
However, an inner spiritual strength lives in us with which we
are able to find the concept of the archetypical plant out of
inner production. The botanists thought that Goethe meant an
imperfect plant. This is nonsense! He meant the spiritually
beheld plant! I tried in one of my books to reconstruct this
archetypical plant, as one also constructs the circle in mind.
Goethe's archetypical plant contains possible plants if one is
able to conjure up all possibilities out of it. His
archetypical animal contains all possible animals. Goethe
created a spiritual biology there. It enables us to create in
spirit what cannot appear to our senses. However, there we
start from a profound, significant spiritual fact. Goethe
started from this fact, from which he got what he found as
archetypical plant. This was no mere idea to him, but it was
the creating force in all plants. The archetypical animal was
the creative in any animal to him.
I have often cited a
famous conversation about the plants that immediately at the
beginning of their acquaintance Goethe and Schiller had with
each other. They came from a talk of the society of naturalists
in Jena. Schiller said that it is unsatisfactory to look at the
creatures in such a way that one cannot see their coherence.
Goethe answered that there could be also another method where
one can see the common, the spiritual tie, which holds
everything together. Goethe describes the conversation to us,
and that he took his pencil then and drew the picture of the
archetypical plant with some characteristic lines.
There Schiller, the speculative
poet, said, this is no fact; this is an idea, no reality.
Goethe answered, if this is an idea I see the ideas outdoors
with my eyes. In the plant is the force creating life. Because
of the deep view that the Goethean mind had of such a being it
was possible that in his mind that was awoken which creates in
all animals and plants. A mysterious tie exists between the
human inside and that which is spread out in the animal and
plant realms. If the human being conjures up the archetypical
plant in himself, he conjures up that form after which the
plants have been created. We regard ourselves in this way as
spiritual participants in the productions of nature. Goethe as
it were immerses in the things and conjures up in his mind the
spirit living in the things. Goethe presents this to the human
being.
One can try the same in
higher fields. A German philosopher did it, not sufficiently
but fundamentally and profoundly, but one did not understand
him. If an anecdote were true, it would prove this fact in its
depth. For Hegel (Georg Friedrich Wilhelm H., 1770–1831) should
have said: “Only one understood me, and also he
misunderstood me.” Hegel tried to create concepts free
from sensuousness of the surroundings and history of the human
beings. His
Philosophy of History
has now appeared in
Reclam's Universal Library in which he gives a great survey of
the whole world history. Many things in it are not right,
unfortunately. Many things are as one-sided as just only Hegel
could be one-sided, so that the book can serve only as
suggestion. However, it may serve to find the principle. Hegel
cared about thinking free from sensuousness, so that he lets
everything appear in its own spirit, which is the same spirit
that led humanity. He, who wants to do this, needs a more
intimate knowledge of the human spirit and that of the peoples
than Hegel could possess. Hence, everything seems
abstract, grey, and logical in the bad sense; however, the
things are ingenious and stimulating. One has to say, what is
wrong there can be even more useful to humanity than many right
but trivial things.
Just as one can think in
mathematics free from sensuousness and create as one can do it
also in history, my
The Philosophy of Freedom
should give a picture of
the inner development of the human being with his entire
cognitive faculties as one can grasp this from the thinking
free from sensuousness. This is a book like an organism where a
sentence follows the other, a book of a thinking that moves in
itself and is self-contained. I wanted to show in it how the
human being who wants to go from sensuousness to the
extrasensory has to cultivate his thinking.
However, there are easier
means, namely those about which spiritual science informs. What
we can read in the spiritual-scientific books about the
different human members, about reincarnation and karma, the
life after death, the development of the human races and
cultures and about what we shall still speak you cannot see
with senses, but it is something that you can understand if you
generally get involved with human understanding. Spiritual
science gives the human beings a thinking free from
sensuousness as it was given in the secret schools once, and as
the human being must have it, before he is able to behold into
the spiritual worlds. Clairvoyance and initiation are necessary
for that. However, he who has got the possibility to inform in
a certain way can form a bridge. Then everybody can convince
himself by enclosing logical thinking and a healthy power of
judgement that the things are right. Clairvoyance is necessary
to find the higher profundities, only a healthy mind and logic
to understand them.
Indeed, today many people
are possessed by a more or less materialistic thinking or by
that arrogance of infallibility that is due to the positivistic
science. This is a real pipe dream. If the people only know
that they live, strictly speaking, under suggestions, that they
do not know what is real and what is not real! Indeed, they do
not want to acknowledge the infallibility of the pope; however,
they regard themselves as infallible. That who stands on the
viewpoint of science is the most intolerable one. He regards
the spiritual scientist as a fool and himself as an infallible
man! One can inform about the world that is not accessible to
the senses only with a thinking free from sensuousness. Hence,
the first training is the training of thinking which only makes
it possible to develop the thinking and to lead to a real
beholding into the spiritual worlds.
The second is the
development of feeling. Nobody should train the feeling, before
he has not brought the thinking free from sensuousness to a
certain level. That who knows how it looks in these higher
worlds tells you: if you ascend to the higher worlds, you come
to the astral world and then to the spiritual or devachanic
one. The impressions are completely different there than the
human being can imagine who knows the physical world only. Even
if all experiences are different, one thing remains: the logic,
the healthy thinking. The human being who appropriates the
healthy thinking who is a reasonable person firmly standing on
his legs cannot go astray if he ascends to the worlds that
offer many surprises. That who develops this self-assured
thinking working from the origin of the soul has a sure leader
also beyond that border where one can hard distinguish between
the physical and the supraphysical.
With healthy thinking one
gets over the abyss which opens there. If anyone lives without
healthy thinking and says, you give me thoughts only;
however, a divine power lives in me, why should I not be
able to ascend to the higher worlds? — Then I can only answer:
those who speak in such a way have no idea of the conditions of
the higher worlds where the outer world does not correct us
where we must have the leader in ourselves if we should not go
astray.
The development of the
feeling happens with the help of Imagination at the school of
those to be initiated. The pupil creates a figurative notion of
the world at first; then he has to carry out his world
consideration rather quietly under the Goethean saying:
“All that is transitory is only a symbol.” I would
like to give you an example that I have given several times how
one leads someone who aims at a spiritual development into the
depths of the things, how one teaches the development of the
feeling by Imagination
(anthroposophic concepts of initiation are capitalised).
If you want to
understand the development of the beings and stop at the
thinking, you never can go fairly beyond this sensory world.
You can appropriate the most different concepts how
subordinated beings develop higher and higher up to the human
being, you can take even the spiritual-scientific evolutionary
theory how the logos poured forth and formed more and more
complex forms and worlds: plants, animals, human beings, how
all differentiations formed, evolutions and involutions and so
on. These are teachings that you find in theosophical books,
nice and interesting concepts. However, you cannot come into
the higher worlds this way. You can thereby form ideas, which
are analogies of higher worlds, but you never can come with
them into these worlds. You need Imagination. This is not
anything that one imagines.
It is something that is
produced with a productive power and amounts to nothing more
than concepts only, so that these concepts, like Goethe's
archetypical plant and archetypical animal, correspond to the
outer realities; but pictures are formed corresponding to the
spirit that creates behind these things. I would like to
explain in the form of a dialog what one said always in such
secret schools to the pupils. I say this to you to make clear
the principle, the method of initiation. What I speak in a few
words takes a long period of training. The dialog that I
describe never did take place, but that what it shows has
always taken place in any spiritual school. One says to the
pupil, look at the plant, which points with its root to the
earth, which lets grow its stalk, its leaves, and blossoms
upwards, and compare it to the human being. You would compare
wrongly if you wanted to compare the head to the blossom and
the foot to the root. — I would like to remark that also that
who founded the newer natural sciences so greatly gets to this
view. He compares the root to the head of the human being and
regards the plant as the reverse human being and the human
being as the reverse plant. — The root is the head that the
plant sticks toward the centre of the earth, just as the human
being sticks his head that he holds in the opposite direction
toward the sun or the heavenly forces. The plant turns its
reproductive organ, the blossom, virginally to the sunbeam that
one called the “holy lance of love” in the medieval
secret schools. The human being is the exact opposite. He
sticks his organs of conceptions toward the centre of the
earth, the head toward the space. In between, one says to the
pupil, is the animal who does half a turn, so that the spine is
horizontal. Look at plant, animal, and human being and you
understand the dictum of Plato that the world soul is crucified
on the cross of the world. Plato understands plant, animal, and
human being by the world. The plant stands vertically, the
human being reversely to it so that he looks with the head at
the free world ether, and the crossbar is the animal. This is
the prototype of the cross, as one knew it in ancient times and
in all secret schools.
Then one says the
following to the pupil: imagine the plant and its pure, chaste
substance. The human being is on a higher level than the plant.
The plant resembles the sleeping human being. It has physical
body and etheric body as the sleeping human being has physical
body and etheric body. The human being is, actually, beyond the
physical and etheric body. That what thinks in him and feels
desire and pain has been cut off in the sleeping state. The
plant has a consciousness that we know as sleep
consciousness.
What does the development
from the horizontal line up to the entire turn mean? It means
that be the human being has attained his present bright day
consciousness. With the transition from the animals, the human
being has become a being with bright day consciousness. He had
to lose something else for it. Look at the plant: a body of
desires, an astral body does penetrate it. The plant has
physical body and etheric body. The human being must go through
the animal and integrate instincts, desires, and passions. He
has higher risen integrating the astral body into the plant
body.
Now spiritual science
puts a great Imagination before him. This spiritual science
shows how he can gradually develop the strength that leads him
back again to the purification of his desire nature that leads
him up to that point where he lives again in the pure, chaste
body on higher developmental stages while retaining his current
state of consciousness. There he has overcome what he had
necessarily to absorb in himself with the transition to the
higher stages. What the teacher put before the pupil was a
future ideal: you will have the plant nature again! One gave
him the means to attain it. One said to him, the entire
humanity comes again to this stage once when the human beings
have developed the purely spiritual strength. Then he is no
longer tied to the desire nature, he no longer sticks his
organs of conception toward the spiritual sunbeam. In the
initiatory training, one calls this organ the Holy Grail, which
then the human being has attained, and which is a spiritual
organ.
Imagine the difference
between the dry abstractions that one puts in mathematics or in
idealistic writings before you and this idea where we go up
through the animal state to the human being and again up to
other future stages of humanity. If we visualise that, we
accompany this Imagination with our sensations and feelings if
we are generally able not only to think the spirit but also to
feel it. We shall see this development not only in
spirit, but we shall feel it. The evolution in the universe
appears immense and big to us if we visualise it that way, not
in abstractions. The whole universe with
all world riddles was presented to the pupils. They claim not
only his thinking, but also his feeling and sensing. It was to
him, as if his whole soul went out and lived in everything that
was round him. As with the Goethean archetype something is
created in us that lives in all plants and animals, it is also,
if the developed feeling rises from us, as if we felt the world
soul which flows as power through all beings.
Thus, everything came to
life that was around the pupil, it became Imagination. Where he
went through woods and meadows, everywhere the pictures worked
in his soul. This loosened the inner power in him and he looked
behind the beings and behind the things gradually. If one tells
this in such a way, it seems almost unbelievable. If the pupil
was introduced under the guidance of the teacher in the
Imaginative of the world, he was guided not only to the
thinking, but also to the feeling and the impulses that have
gushed out from the soul of the world creator. He was
introduced in an essential world. Then the development
continues from the feeling to the willing.
As well as the feeling
develops by pictures, the will develops by the occult letters.
This will is the deepest of the concealed power. This will
becomes something like a skeleton that the human being squeezes
out by the will into the outer world. If you remember the
pictures of the Munich congress, of the columns and seals, they
are there to train the will. In the portfolio, which we edited as
Pictures of Occult Seals and Columns,
they are reproduced. I want to discuss the principle of
these occult seals and columns once and give their meaning for
the initiation. Any seal explains what you can find in the
Apocalypse
or
The Revelation of John.
In this portfolio, you find signs. Any sign has an immense,
stimulating effect on the human being.
You find a human figure
on the first seal. The feet are like from liquid brass, a fiery
sword goes out from the mouth. I do not want to describe the
remainder. He who becomes engrossed in this seal sees that just
this seal gives him something marvellous in particular by this
contrast. We shall hear in the last talk of this winter on
Sun, Moon and Stars
that we are led back by spiritual science
also to states of the earth where the earth was in a
fiery-liquid state and that — in contrast to the materialistic
science — the human being already existed. Spiritual science
can make the objection to itself that the human being could not
live in a fiery-liquid state. At that time, the human being was
formed from fiery liquid mass. This beginning of the earth is
shown in the fiery-liquid metal feet. A later future state is
shown with the fiery sword that comes out of the mouth, and
appears in all myths again. I can only indicate what it
concerns here. You will see how spiritual science is connected
deeply with the innermost essence of the world.
How does the mediation
happen, if I speak to you? What I speak are my thoughts at
first. These accept tones that make the air vibrate. The air is
thereby set in motion in this hall. The oscillations of the air
come to your ear, come to your soul, and impart themselves to
your soul. My words live here in the room in certain forms of
oscillation. If you could see them, you would see particular
oscillations if I pronounce the word “soul.” As
well as the human being is able today to form the air and make
arise that what lives in his soul in the oscillating air, he
will also be able to form organs. There are organs in the human
being, which are at the beginning, and other organs are at the
end of their development. The larynx and the heart are at the
beginning of development. I know that I assert something
scandalous for the positive science, because one regards these
two organs as mechanical apparatuses, the heart like a pump.
However, just the theories of the heart and the blood
circulation will experience reorganisations in the not too
distant future. One will find that the circulation of the blood
is due to something quite different from the heart, and that
the heart moves only by the blood circulation. If the human
being feels abashed, he blushes. This is an influence of the
blood. The heart will be in future a voluntary muscle, and it
prepares itself to become one.
Here something is given
that will almost coin the future of the human being
externally-physically. The heart is a crux to the usual anatomy
and physics. It has the configuration of a voluntary muscle,
while it is no voluntary muscle today. A voluntary muscle has
striated muscle fibers. The heart has such striated fibers,
although it is not voluntary even today. However, it is on the
way of becoming a voluntary muscle.
The larynx will also have
another function. It will be the reproductive organ of the
human being. The larynx that produces words of the soul will
undertake the reproduction. The fire principle is the speech,
and the fire principle of the speech will be a creative
principle; hence, the sword in the mouth. This fiery sword is
intimately related to the world forces. If the human being
becomes engrossed in its picture, this strengthens his
willpower. One can say that only that way. He who does it
experiences it. Then he anticipates, thinks, and feels not
only, but he penetrates with his willpower into the things.
This is the way through the occult writing. One can state quite
concretely, in which way one should develop thinking, feeling,
and willing. If one has woken the forces slumbering in the
human being, thinking, feeling, and willing become particular
organs, which one calls spiritual eyes. From them the spiritual
eyes originate which show the world of the flooding spiritual
light and its colours and the spiritual forces behind our
physical world. The trained willpower becomes the spiritual
ears of which also Goethe speaks who was deeply initiated into
these matters:
In ancient rivalry with fellow spheres
the sun still sings its glorious song,
and it completes with tread of thunder
the journey it has been assigned.
Goethe remains in the right picture. If one
is introduced in the higher spiritual world, one is introduced
by the ear. If one comes in the spiritual realm, it is
immediately said: “In these sounds the new day is already
born for spiritual ears.” Those who believe to understand
Goethe but say, this is nonsense, and need an explanation of
it, which one cannot expect the poet to accept, one has to
answer: no, one cannot expect that Goethe wrote nonsense:
“the sun still sings ...” is nonsense only if one
applies it to the physical world.
Thus, we have seen that
the principle of initiation is based on the fact that one gets
out particular forces slumbering in the human being, so that
these forces guide the human beings into the spiritual world
surrounding him. What gets out these forces of the human
being? We have to explain the matter
completely in the sense of Goethe. Once there was a sense
organ, an indifferent organ in his sensuous body, which was
flooded from light. The light made it the eye, so that the
human being could see the colours and forms round himself with
the eyes. The eye originated that way. Unknown and unrecognised
organs which one does not want to recognise slumber in the
human being. In addition, other worlds are round us, except the
world of light and colours. As well as with the blind human
being the eye was woken for seeing, the spiritual ears and eyes
are trained with the clairvoyance and clairaudience, so that
the human being can behold into the surrounding spiritual
world.
The human being has
gained self-consciousness. He has become in such a way that he
can relate everything to himself. However, because he develops
the spiritual eyes and ears following the principle of
initiation he immerses again in the outer world. He finds his
higher self in this world. We are not allowed to say that we
find the divine and spiritual in ourselves. This is a wrong
expression. Recognise yourself! Is an old saying. However, one
has to understand it in such a way as Adam recognised his
woman. He fertilised her. Thus, that applies also to the
organs. Fertilise yourself, be fertilised by the world. — Thus,
the human being should develop the forces slumbering in him. It
is true what Goethe says:
Unless the eye were like the sun,
How could we see the light?
Unless God's own strength were in us,
How could delight us the divine?
Indeed, the sun force is in us, and the eye
does not create the divine being, does not create the sun, but
it sees it, after it has been created.
We can develop higher
forces and penetrate deeper and deeper into the world this way.
Then the outer world does no longer appear to us as something
that restrains and restricts us, but as that which brings true
and spiritual reality. Harmony is created between the human
being and the world. Thereby we overcome the lower self that
looks out into the sensuous world. We attain the higher ego of
the human being that is spread out in the whole
universe. Goethe means this
indicating the principle of initiation in his poem
The Secrets
(The Mysteries)
with the words with which we want to close. They show how the
human being flows out by self-conquest and into the feeling
permeating the world, into the spiritual of the world, into the
will of the cosmic spirits pulsating through the
world:
For any force rushes forward into the vastness
To live and to work here and there;
However, the stream of the world hinders
And constrains us from any side and tears us off;
In this inner storm and outer quarrel
The mind hears a hardly understood word:
From the force that binds all creatures
That man is delivered who masters himself.
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