The
Origin of the Human Being
Berlin, 4 January 1912
What spiritual science has to say about the
origin of the human being must be of the highest interest to
all those persons who are interested in spiritual science out
of the big questions of worldview. Since one met the question
of the origin of the human being with immense interest from all
sides in the last decades that has been enkindled in particular
in the second half of the nineteenth century by the big,
admirable progress of natural sciences. One can understand that
with the powerful way with which natural sciences have tried to
rise as the worldview the question of the origin of the human
being had to be repeatedly put.
Now in case of a superficial consideration
it may appear, as if just compared with this question that
worldview, which wants to stand on the firm ground of natural
sciences, and spiritual science would face each other with the
starkest contrast. But if one considers the conditions within
the scientific development, as they still existed few decades
ago or maybe still before short time, then it may seem
plausible to accept such a stark contrast.
Since one has only to think what it signified in 1864, when
from the scientific views of Darwin which already began seizing
the broadest circles, on a German naturalists' meeting,
— before
still Darwin had expressed the
question of the origin of the human being — Ernst Haeckel
(1834–1919) applied Darwin's principles to the science of the
human being. He represented not only the relationship of the
human being his form and life
conditions with the higher animals, but he energetically
represented the immediate origin of the human being from the
higher animal world.
At that time, one probably had to suppose
that the coming discoveries of scientific research would
confirm more and more what Ernst Haeckel had pronounced in 1864
like a courageous program of research that the proper use of the scientific
principles would lead to the fact that one might recognise how
from the animal orders the order of the human being has
gradually developed. If that which Haeckel announced at that
time like a kind of program that yet counted to himself already
as irrefutable truth had proved to be true if the scientific
research had really followed this path, today the mentioned
radical contrast would certainly exist between natural sciences
and spiritual science. But now this did not happen that way.
Natural sciences themselves produced quite different results
and have taken consequences from them, in particular in the
last decades, as one had assumed at that time. The fact that
one has ever so big difficulties in our days to see clearly in
this realm if one tries to show the relation of natural
sciences to spiritual science, is due solely to the fact that
the popular spreading of scientific knowledge does not keep
abreast of the discovery and production of this knowledge. We
stand there even today compared with the popular consciousness
in such a way that with many people like a firm dogma, in
particular in the popular literature, the view is spread, as if
really only someone stands on the firm ground of scientific
knowledge who completely accepts the assertion that the human
being has externally developed in the course of time from
animal forms which are directly next to him. This faith is
widespread, so that one simply says to someone who wants to
counter something to this dogma: you know just nothing about
that what arises as worldview if one really stands on the firm
ground of scientific facts.
Most people, actually, know nothing about
it, because the popular literature shows everything in such a
way that one can know nothing about the fact that this belief
has become rather fragile during the last years. Since what
natural sciences delivers as facts our question is for the materialistic-monistic
worldview already in an alarming proximity of that what
spiritual science has to say. Since one would like to say:
natural sciences have developed with our question during the
last years in such a way that everywhere one has to doubt the
old views of a direct origin of the human being from the animal
order bordering on him. If we outline the development of
science only briefly, before we come on the
spiritual-scientific things, it will become obvious that
spiritual science contradicts the facts of natural sciences,
actually, much less than the scientific theories and hypotheses
which are still held by a materialist-monistic
worldview.
We turn back to the views that could find quite comprehensible
spreading, for example, in the sixties, seventies of the
nineteenth century. Which view has formed when Darwin
(Charles Robert D., 1809–1882) published his brilliant book
The Descent of Man
in 1871 after his book
On the Origin of Species
had appeared in 1859
with him and his followers? There the view has formed that once
in a bygone time the human being has gradually developed from
the forms which belong to the simian species, from forms,
indeed, which did not comply with the forms of these animal
species which have survived until today, but which were
externally related in a way to them. One regarded a kind of
being as ancestor of the human being which had four limbs which
were shaped more of the same kind, a kind of a four-handed
being with which also the today's feet of the human being were
like hands. Thereby the human being would have been a kind of a
haired four-handed climbing animal with an imperfectly
developed brain and with an accordingly different developed
skull. Then such a pithecoid being would have developed to the
today's human being in more or less straight line by the
adaptation to the relations and by everything that has arisen
in the struggle for existence. One has gone so far that one has
not only dedicated himself to the view, as if the outer forms
and the living conditions of the human being belonging more to
the animal had gradually developed from such animal-like forms,
but as if also all spiritual activities of the human being only
showed a higher developmental level of the mental activities in
the animal realm.
One has in particular tried there to show
that the human thinking, feeling and willing only turn out as a
perfection of simpler, more primitive mental activities which
are also found in the animal realm, which were so transformed
then just as the outer forms of the brain or the limbs. It
would be important that such a view would have to lead to the
assumption that everything that the human being experiences
today as his spiritual, as the contents of his soul life,
actually, is only the product of a physical-bodily life which
can be traced back to times in which there is, actually, only a
still animal, bodily life where it does not make sense to speak
of such spiritual processes or spiritual contents as they were
found in the human soul today. The human spiritual life would
have developed like a kind of superstructure of former lower
forms, so that one would not be entitled to connect the human
spiritual life to a spiritual world reaching to our physical
world.
For even more distant times of the past
would arise that the animal life has developed from lower forms
and that the mental of the animals must be led back to an
existence in which there have been only those processes and
beings which the human being regards today as if they contain
nothing spiritual. However, with it the spirit would be, so to
speak, an appearance for this worldview, a mock substantiality
which develops from the bodily, and everything spiritual would
have to be led back to something sensory-physical.
One knows quite sufficiently that in the
second half of the nineteenth century worldviews mushroomed
which were completely invigorated by the just characterised
spirit that saw their greatness to break with all old views of
the origin of the human being from a spiritual world and of an
acceptance of the human being in a spiritual world when he
dies. One may say that just the fairest sense of truth and
sharpened intellectual conscience have led to such a worldview
with the most manifold personalities in the course of the
nineteenth century. To a worldview which had at that time by no
means a materialistic attitude in the background, but which
absolutely wanted to act and think in harmony with a noble and
real idealism which said to itself, no one can hope that he
belongs to a spiritual world immediately, but only that the
spirit which has developed from the material existence finds a
more or less long existence in the human soul. Even the human
culture will further the spiritual in the course of
development, but that what one himself could do in the
spiritual,would not survive in a spiritual world, but can live
on with the entire erasing of his individuality only in that
what the human race produces as culture.
Nay, one is allowed to say that even with
many persons much soul heroism was
mixed in such a view, and that one cannot state any contrast to
moral worldviews just with the leading persons. Since many
people have said to themselves, it is just that what the soul
has to strive for that it works unselfishly based on that what
it can gain in the world, and then dedicates itself unselfishly
again, knowing that it is extinguished, and that only its
actions live on. One repeatedly stressd that it is, actually,
egotistic to search immortality in any form.
Spiritual science is generally not inclined
to belittle things that have arisen from a real sense of truth
and an intellectual attitude, but it has to understand how such
views form. Spiritual science could never get involved with the
depreciation of worldviews pointing to the morally fateful that
must arise from the characterised worldview. Nevertheless, it
is something different if an objective view of the world, a
deeper knowledge proves everywhere that such a worldview is
fragile. There one has to say, everything that has been done in
such an admirable way by developmental history, by comparative
anatomy, by palaeontology and geology and the other natural
sciences and what seemed to be decided to confirm such a
worldview has led just more and more to the fact that it has
become impossible to stop on basis of the scientific facts at
such a worldview today.
Hence, certain researchers got around to
fighting against ideas that have developed on basis of former
assumptions and hypotheses just because the most advanced
scientific knowledge has brought facts to light which do not
comply at all with certain hypotheses and views. I would like
to point to a person like Kollmann (Julius K., 1834–1918)
because he is typical for the views that we find in various
nuances also with others, namely, because they have a basis in
the facts. Kollmann had to conclude from that what arose from
the observations of developmental history, from the
observations of the prenatal human being, of the human embryo
and the animal embryos, and from that what appeared to him in
palaeontology that one could not suppose that the ancestors of
the human being were formed in a former time is such a way as,
for example, the orthodox Darwinians have assumed and assume
still today. One cannot assume the figures of the human beings
in such a way that one may notice a low sloping forehead, a
still undeveloped shrivelled brain, so to speak, and a figure
that reminds of the today's figures of apes. On the contrary he
saw himself repeatedly forced because of his discoveries to
suppose that one has just vice versa to assume a cerebral
configuration exceeding the today's unity of the human brain
and the brains of apes from which then the today's brain of the
apes would have developed from an original form which must have
been more similar, actually, to our brain than to the present
brains of apes. So that one would have to regard the present
brain of apes as degeneration of a form which does no longer
exist today, and which one has to assume as the original form
of the human brain because it has become more definite in its
formation. In addition, the same researcher had to assume that
one cannot derive the human being from the forms of the higher
animals but from small Pygmy-like beings. Hence, he looked
everywhere for rests of such an old, dwarfish human race.
If you open yourself to such a hypothesis,
you will say to yourself, the question is soon solved,
actually, why palaeontology, geology, cannot show any documents
of such a prehistoric man assumed by Kollmann, and why
everything that can be found of fossilised apes and human
beings differs from this prehistoric man's form. — You can soon
realise this. If you consider the today's earth conditions, you
must say to yourself that it is impossible that such a
prototype which would be that of the human being and of the
apes at the same time would be capable of surviving today that
it could exist under the present earthly living
conditions. — However, from that follows that today the
earth must have conditions quite different from those of former
times that we must look back at former times that had quite
different living conditions, and that we could find on no earth
that already had the present living conditions the original
form of the present human being. Thus, we would have to go back
to such conditions on earth that would differ
much from that what we have as ideas of the
present earth. Such a scientific hypothesis points to the fact
that, actually, our earth must have had another figure in
prehistory and all conditions must have been different from
those of today.
However, with it the whole question is
generally shifted. Why did it happen that the naturalists
advanced to such a worldview? Because they had to break from
their ideas by their sense of truth and their intellectual
conscience with the old view, for example, with that of
Linné (Carl von L., 1707–1778, Swedish botanist and
zoologist) after which the single forms of the living beings
would have been put as it were side by side in the world. This
view was not abreast with the scientific research to accept
arbitrary acts of creation that had put the single forms of the
animals and of the human being on earth. If one goes into it,
why this view did not seem scientific, one must answer: it
rightly seemed not scientific if one considers the principles
and formative conditions of the living beings, because
positioning the animal forms and human forms side by side cut
across the physical principles. If on the other side the
scientific facts themselves forced to assume quite different
conditions of the earthly existence in former times, then the
basis is no longer valid. Then one cannot say that it is
difficult to imagine the single forms of the living beings in
such a material independence of each other and to understand a
spiritual dependence of each other only.
However, the mentioned naturalist is only
one type. Of quite special importance is that what such
scientific thinkers like Klaatsch (Hermann K., 1863–1916) and
Snell (Karl S., 1806–1886, mathematician and natural
philosopher) have to say from particular scientific results.
They realised and pronounced it in the clearest way that after
that what can be observed as scientific facts generally there
can be no talk that the human being is directly related to
higher, pithecoid mammals.
Today I cannot go into the results, for
example, of haemotology of the last years, although it would be
interesting. Today I would like to go into the figure. However,
one could say about Friedmann's research (Adolph Hermann F.,
1873–1957,
The Convergence of the Organisms. An Empirically Founded Theory
as Substitute of the Theory of Evolution. 1904)
completely the same what I have said about the morphological
development. These last-called researchers thought that one
cannot speak of the fact that the human being has developed
from higher mammals because a conscientious study of the
results of palaeontology forces us to realise that the
formative forces and conditions of the higher mammals can be
only understood in such a way that they go back to basic forms
which are much more similar, actually, to the human being than
to the present pithecoid mammals. The present monkeys would be
much more unlike the original forms from which they would have
to be derived than the human being is compared with this
original form.
This is an exceptionally interesting turn
which has come especially from Klaatsch in the development of
zoology that the researchers saw themselves forced to the view:
if one observes, for example, the human hands, it is impossible
to believe even a moment that they have changed from the limbs
of the present higher mammals, but one has to assume original
forms in primeval times which were much more like the present
human hands than to the present limbs of the higher
mammals.
That is why, Klaatsch said, for example, if
we realise that the gibbon, this strange species of apes always
adduced because of its humanoid appearance, has limbs which are
most like the human ones, one must say, it lacks them, because
the human form has developed from its form, but because it has
kept the prototype best of all apes from which also the human
being is descended and which he has kept best of
all.
Thus, this researcher got around to
assuming a kind of living being in primeval times whose
constitution the present human being has kept best of all, and
that those animal forms show the most divergences which have
developed then beside the human being from these original forms
of primeval times. Thus, the human being would have kept an
original life form best of all that existed for this researcher
long before not only our apes but also the other mammals
existed. A prototype that goes back to those times in which our
mammals did not yet exist. It is interesting that Klaatsch
almost says, one must think this prototype of the animals more
related to the old dragons about which geology tells than the
present mammals and monkeys. So that all mammals are descended
from a prototype which they would have distorted to
caricatures, while the human being has kept it best of
all.
We find out not with the help of spiritual
science which scientists regard as fantastic, but which we find
within the scientific research in such a way that the
researchers who feel urged by that what they realise to assert
such matters. But now one can say that such researchers do
strange leaps and that one can argue a lot against it. But if
one imagines that strange living being from which the human
beings and the mammals should be descended, one must say to
himself, under the present conditions such a living being is
still quite impossible, it cannot exist at all
today.
The human being has just adapted his form
of that time gradually to the present conditions. It is
interesting now that a researcher like Klaatsch feels pressured
by the development of that prototype of the human being, what
even nothing would have to do with the principles which
produced the different figures of the mammals, into assuming
places of development from such a prototype just where the
human being would be in the least disturbed by the Darwinian
struggle for existence. Since he says, if the human being had
to fight against predators in areas where predators were
especially spread, he could never have survived this fight; he
had to be saved from it in regions that were away from this
struggle for existence. — Thus such a
researcher tries to show — because he has still
always a materialist-monistic thinking in the background
— how the
present human foot has formed from a limb of the primeval
beings, supposing that the second pair of the limbs was used
for climbing. This prototype of the human being would have
stayed — of course, this is pure hypothesis of the
researcher —
in regions where it lived on high trees. It
was not a climbing animal, indeed, but adapting to his climbing
because it could rest upon trunks it could form the delve of
the foot and the peculiar sharp position of the big toe. Since
when the human being became a being, Klaatsch thinks, that
walked on the ground, he had to have already formed the foot
for it; he had to form this foot from other conditions that
way.
However, this is a weird conclusion and a
strange hypothesis. For one can raise the justified objection
that the feet when it was still a climbing hand had to be
adapted to the conditions of that time. The
materialist-monistic thinking is not enough. Nevertheless, it
is interesting to observe how such a researcher gets around to
rejecting that Darwinian principle of the struggle for
existence for the creation of the human being from a primal
being so that he wants just to keep away the human being from
this struggle for existence. How could one say there that the
present scientific facts confirm the programme of worldview
that was designed in the dawn of Darwinism so daringly? The
extremely interesting fact seems to turn out to us that
naturalists felt pressured into pointing to forms as original
forms of the human being that do not exist today that are only
hypothetical forms, so to speak, for the naturalists. This goes
so far that, for example, Klaatsch can say, compared with all
ideas that the human being has developed by the struggle for
existence from higher mammalian forms during the ice age, this
is a childish idea which could not at all be maintained today.
Of course such an idea called childish by this researcher will
still be represented everywhere in the popular literature, and
still enough writers of this popular literature say that they
state facts, while these are only hypotheses which fail
compared with that what other researchers state as facts. That
is why the scientific thinking completely leads out of what is
often given even today as a scientific worldview.
How is the course of the scientific
research from former times up to now? During the seventies one
said: look at the higher mammalian forms, there you have a
picture how the human being has looked in distant past. One
says today, in these mammalian forms you have animal forms
which have originated only from the fact that they have
deviated completely from a primal human being, what cannot be
found in palaeontology for which there is no outer evidence,
but what can be constructed today only from that what is found
by geology. Natural sciences themselves lead back to creations
that do no longer exist today. Thus, the human being is
connected in primeval times to forms that are surely different
from that what one still believed before relatively short time
that the human beings are descended from it.
This way shows that it must flow directly
into that which spiritual science has to say about the origin
of the human being. In what way does spiritual science differ
from scientific-materialistic monism the question of the origin of the human
being?
Spiritual science has to assume that the
present human being goes back to a past that we are led to
former embodiments at first. What lives today as mind or soul
in the human being, we must look at this after that what has
arisen in the last talks in such a way that it can have not
only a life within the physical body in which it faces us in
the sensory world at first, but that it can also have a life in
the so-called disembodied state, so that the whole human life
consists of the part, which is spent in the time from birth or
conception to death, and of that part, which lasts from death
to a new birth where the human being lives in a purely
spiritual world and uses and transforms the forces that he has
got in the physical body.
The human being then goes through a new
birth to existence in such a way that he attains, indeed, the
outer forms of his body from the line of heredity in such a way
that that what is hereditary does not enclose the real human
essence. Since this is in a spiritual world before the human
being enters existence. In this spiritual world, he has
equipped himself with corresponding forces from former lives,
and he can experience plastic formations and transformations
then by this spiritual essence, in so far as he has inherited
forms as body forms and is composed of physical materials, that
he is transformed that way and that he is organised in the
first years of childhood individually, so that the body can
become a useful tool for the spiritual-mental that enters him
as something independent. Hence, we consider the
spiritual-mental as something independent, as something first
in spiritual science which works on the human being so that he
takes over the material basic scaffolding of his figure from
heredity, but that he works the subtler, more individual
configuration into this according to the spiritual-mental
conditions. But we do not see the spiritual-mental essence
working on the human figure in such a way, as if it shapes the
whole human being, but in such a way that within that physical
body still so much mobility remains that the spiritual-mental
essence can work into it.
If we trace back the human being to former
times, we realise that the life in the spiritual is attached to
the life in the sensory world between the last death and the
birth of our present life but that then a previous life on
earth is attached and then a spiritual life again and so on.
Turning back with the means of spiritual research to the former
existence of the human being, we realise that the embodiments
stop once in this primal time, so to speak, that there the
spiritual-mental essence of the human being existed but
different from now where he enters the physical existence by
birth, but came from the spiritual world also as now he also
comes out if he combines with the conditions of heredity.
However, we would realise that he came originally from the
spiritual world in distant primeval times in such a way that he
found earthly relations that were completely different from the
present ones.
Spiritual science shows that this
spiritual-mental found such earthly conditions in primeval
times that at that time much more was to be transformed of that
what was given as body to the human being as a spiritual-mental
being. In the end, we come back to such primeval times in which
the human spiritual-mental did not yet depend on finding a
ready body in which it had only to form the subtler formations
of the brain, of the glandular system et cetera. We come back
to primeval times in which the spiritual-mental of the human
being found such conditions that without the processes of the
present heredity and reproduction the material conditions and
principles of that time could be directly transformed by the
spiritual. Thus we are led back not to a hypothetical form
which should have had a sensory-physical existence once as
Klaatsch assumes it for the time of the dragons, but we are led
back in truth to a spiritual prototype.
In the first embodiment of the human being
we have to see the directly formative working out of the
physical body, and then under the advancing conditions of the
earth the more solid formations of the human body were
transferred, so to speak, more and more to heredity, and the
possibility remained for this inner, weaker and weaker growing
spiritual essence only to form within the line of heredity.
That is why today the spiritual-mental only organises the
subtler relations: the structures of the brain, of the blood
circulation, of the glandular system. It finds the physical
body given by heredity. But if we go back to the primeval
times, we find there quite different conditions on earth and
quite different conditions of the body in which the spiritual
does not only transform the rest of the physical substances as
it is the case today, but it formed the whole human being
immediately from itself. In the spiritual-scientific sense the
present human form crystallised from the spiritual as we can
see a salt cube crystallising from a salt solution. As it is
not necessary that the salt cubes which all resemble each other
because of their inner structure are descended from just one,
just as little it is necessary to remember that a bodily blood
relationship exists with the animals if that what the human
being has today in his forms, in his skeleton and in the
construction of the other organs reminds of the relations and
the functions of the animals which have similar forms. We have
to lead back the similarity of the forms to the form principle
that we can recognise even today as something immediately
spiritual-mental. I have explained this in detail in my
Occult Science. An Outline.
As spiritual science leads the human being
to a spiritual prototype of the human being which is
interspersed so strongly with forces that it still masters the
matter, this idea should be presented. Besides, I wanted to
show how natural sciences can only form the prototype to which
they are led there, and which is not pithecoid from the
hypothetical idea. But natural sciences still think that this
prototype must have worked as a material being in primeval
times. It has not worked as a material being in primeval times,
just as little as today, for example, the sleeping human being
adjusts certain conditions of production as a material being
during the time from falling asleep up to awakening. While
today the spiritual-mental works more during sleep than during
the waking state, namely removes tiredness, we have to imagine
that what is there creating in the human being what removes
tiredness during sleep, so increased in primeval times that it
could cause the forms of the whole human being. If then one
asks himself, which sense does the whole evolution have, so one
has to say, already the present human being shows not in daring
hypotheses, but by a consideration without prejudice in what
the sense of such a development is contained. If we look at the
human being in his life how he remembers his childhood with his
consciousness, the thread of memory breaks off once, and for
the usual consciousness we can only hear from our parents, or
from our brothers and sisters how we were there before this
time, but we would have to set our origin much later. Did now
the mental-spiritual not exist in these times that we cannot
remember, in the hazy like sleeping life of the child? It
existed; it was even stronger in the first years of childhood
than later in relation to outer effectiveness.
Before the ego-consciousness appeared in
the human being, this dreamlike-active human being worked just
on the subtler formations of the brain and the physical body,
and because it sent his forces into it, an inner human soul
being with ego-consciousness did not yet come about. When then
the human being had developed the subtler formations of his
body from his soul, this force working on the human being from
without transformed into a conscious inner soul life. That is
why we see the creative power of the spiritual-mental becoming
weaker and weaker for the outer figure, so that it can appear
as consciousness. Hence, it is not absurd if spiritual science
goes back in time and looks at the spiritual-mental in such a
way that it created the human figure first, and then it has
assumed shape that was kept by heredity through the
generations. The spiritual-mental forces could withdraw to an
inner life, to a human soul life becoming more and more
conscious. Thus, this spiritual-mental essence of the human
being has only become weak in truth with the outer creation,
but that which it has lost and which it has delivered to
heredity appeared in the forces of consciousness that develop
in the cultural processes on and on.
Now it must interest how compared with this human creation one
has to think the origin of the animal world. There I can say
something only briefly that I have further explained in the
Occult Science.
One can say that the
earthly conditions with which the human being had to
familiarise himself developed sooner than the human body. The
human being entered the sensory world from the supersensible
world at a certain time, so that he as a purely spiritual
prototype worked the spiritual-mental into the bodily so far
that he could appear as a bodily being. We have to imagine that
that into which he worked was quite different from the later
forms of the body, namely flexible, plastic in
itself.
The human being formed this plastic
material in a time in which it was possible for the human
forms, because the animal realm
spiritual science has to assume that it formed in the sensory
matter in a substantially earlier time that it could not wait,
until the conditions had arisen which gave the human being his
present form. The human being waited as it were, until the
earth was ripe so that he could impress that in the plastic
organic matter as the present form of the human body that was
reflected in his spiritual. The animals attained the body forms
earlier and under other conditions, and that caused
— while
with them the prototype is spiritual — that this
spiritual-mental of the animals working in much narrower
conditions appeared in other forms in the animals. Hence, we
have to consider the animals as beings which the human being
sent ahead as it were to the earthly existence and which we
have to consider —
because they did not embody themselves in
the conditions in which the human being embodied himself
— as
embodied in old forms which were not adapted to the later
conditions on earth.
If spiritual science wants to think
strictly in the sense of natural sciences, it does not only
want to think its logic completely in the sense of natural
sciences, because you will have realised that the just done
explanations are not only thought strictly scientifically, but
that also the facts of natural sciences completely point to
that what I have said today: that simply those forms which the
naturalists imagine from the facts as material-sensory
prototypes must be transformed into spiritual-mental forms
which only led to the present human form because they have
embodied themselves later in the earthly conditions than the
animal forms did.
Nevertheless, natural sciences show their
results not only with hypotheses, but also with experiments.
Spiritual science does also not stay behind natural sciences in
this respect. I have already pointed in previous talks to the
fact that the human being can develop further in relation to
his spiritual-mental, that he can work by intimate soul
processes —
meditation, concentration and the
like — on his spiritual-mental in such a way that it becomes
much stronger in itself than it is in the normal life. Today I
can point only to the fact that the thoughts must be generated
in the meditative life from human arbitrariness if they should
educate the human being to a spiritual researcher, while all
the other thoughts are formed from the surrounding relations.
If he begins with full perseverance, dedicating himself to such
a meditative life if he puts certain images, feelings, and will
impulses consciously in the centre of his soul life, he can
separate his spiritual-mental from the bodily. Then he can
advance to an inner life, even if one laughs and mocks so much
at this, where he knows: now I live in my spiritual-mental
essence and I am directly connected by it with the spiritual
world. I experience not by my senses or by the mind that is
bound to the brain, but I experience a spiritual-mental human
being in myself, who has emerged from his physical body, even
from his cerebral instrument.
I have mentioned that the human being has
the feeling in the first stadia of such an advance if he has
not yet advanced far enough: now you experience an inner
spiritual life, but you cannot transform it into
concepts. —
This is a transitional state that can seem
rather doubtful to you. It is true, while you consider
yourself, otherwise, as a reasonable person if you can form
concepts of your experience, something is there now, if you
cannot conceptualise the things, so that you cannot consider
yourself as a reasonable person but as an idiot. You experience
something, but you cannot understand it!
As strange as it sounds, you become a kind
of idiot in a certain higher sense for a certain time. But if
you then advance, you transform this spiritual-mental essence
in such a way that it receives even stronger forces to take
part consciously in that what the spiritual-mental essence does
what is usually unaware. While you work in the first childhood
unconsciously on your outer configuration, you notice now that
the spiritual-mental essence is so strong that you create an
organ now consciously, while you work on your cerebral
organisation, so that you can understand what you could not
understand before. The communicability of spiritual science is
based on that. What you can behold in the first times of
spiritual-scientific experience is so uncertain, so completely
an experience in a new element of existence that it has no
conceptual contours. However if it remained only in such a way,
you would not be able to inform of spiritual science. You can
inform of it, now you can lead down these experiences into your
consciousness and can conceptualise them. However, you are able
to do this only with the brain. Therefore, the spiritual
researcher has to transform his brain consciously; that is why
he feels his brain first like a block that he has to
transform.
Thus, we can positively experience the work
of the human being in this higher spiritual development out of
his spiritual being as an experimental work on the organisation
of the matter. —
Higher spiritual knowledge proceeds always
in such a way that the human spiritual life that exists only in
the spiritual is worked into the matter. There we see the human
soul, which becomes aware of itself on a certain step
continuing the process that we see taking place at the
beginning of the human development from the spiritual world,
and then it points to that which the human being experiences as
a spiritual researcher, to the spiritual origin of the human
being. As the former states appear in memory to him in his
everyday life, in the life between birth and death, so that he
knows if he has become fifty years old what he has experienced
at the age of twenty, thirty years et cetera, and his
consciousness is extended backward, the human consciousness is
extended by meditation and concentration backward beyond birth
into regions which are completely hidden to us usually if we
adhere only to the brain in the earthly-bodily.
There we have a matter that is still far
from the today's consciousness for which an understanding will
be there in relatively short time if civilisation has been
fertilised by spiritual science. An area is touched in which
the human consciousness crosses the border of the brain and the
senses. We thereby attain an extension of our memories beyond
the present life, an extension of the consciousness for mental
and spiritual processes. Then, indeed, these mental and
spiritual processes present themselves in such a way that one
can say: one does no longer work only with logical conclusions
as one does it in geology, palaeontology, comparative anatomy
and other sciences, but one works with facts which face us
spiritually like recollections of the former times of our earth
days. The spiritual beholding increases. Then you experience
that spiritual original state of your life on earth, while the
spiritual-mental essence is developing, which is conjured up
before the spiritual eye in which then not the forms of the
beings are included as they are round us, but those beings that
have not yet assumed forms, that look like crystals that have
not yet assumed forms and are suddenly materialised.
Briefly, we learn to recognise what is in
the human being, apart from the bodily formative forces,
without considering the bodily which is hereditary. One gets to
know him spiritual-mentally, and then we can imagine how the
human being was in his place of origin when he worked himself
formatively into the bodily and embodied himself in the sensory
world the first time.
With it, I have stated a result which every
human being can check if he uses the necessary perseverance and
courage to such a self-experiment. If the human being
experiences his spiritual-mental essence in himself, he does
not experience, before he understands it, anything that faces
him as something completely strange, although it is not born
out of the sensory environment, but as something quite new. He
feels, it is related to your whole innermost nature what you
feel as the innermost impact; you yourself are this as
something everlasting that forms the basis of any outer bodily
formation as the first.
There one feels that one faces the whole
human being now not with the senses, but spiritually. There we
find a strange possibility of comparison with that what faces
us in the everyday life. The spiritual researcher experiences
that he cannot say, what I develop is connected with my brain
or with my eyes et cetera, but he has to say, it is connected
with the whole human being. — It is as if we
consider a child in the usual life. There we see a child
laughing and crying different from the adult human being. It is
different, indeed. The child laughs and cries with the whole
body. That what comes about with the adult only by the outflow
of the lachrymal glands goes into the whole organism of the
child. It feels shaken by what expresses itself in crying. The
same applies to laughing: the child laughs with the whole body
where maybe the adult turns up his mouth only.
The whole human being is seized at first by
that what seizes the soul, and then only it seizes the
lachrymal glands or the laughing muscles. The influence
specialises in a particular organ. Pursue how you feel
something like a tension in the breast with an emotion in a
certain time of life, later in life this concentrates upon a
quiet feeling in the larynx that the human being can notice if
he pays attention to it. The spiritual-mental works its way out
of the whole human being and then it specialises in single
parts.
The spiritual researcher exactly
experiences the same process. There he feels the second human
being developing in himself. He feels that this inner human
being works only to a lower degree on the arrangement of the
organic than he has worked originally at the beginning of the
earth evolution.
I have stated single facts which can
confirm the assertion that still today the human being would
not come — as natural sciences still
believe — if he is led back to the original place of his earth
existence, to an original life form, which is, indeed,
different from the today's form, but it is still a sensory
human form or animal form. However, we realise that we are led
back to a spiritual-mental prototype and that generally, before
the first embodiment was possible in a physical human form, the
human being existed as a spiritual-mental being. The human
being is also in this respect that being which creates itself
from his innermost spiritual-mental essence and gives itself
its forms after the conditions that it has in the
spiritual-mental. However, the spiritual-mental is also
for the human being in the past the original. The spirit is the
actually creative, and later the material life appears in the
outer world developed by the spirit.
Today it should concern only of showing you
this special chapter about the origin of the human being back
to the point of his development, when he not yet was a sensory
but a spiritual-mental being. If natural sciences further
pursue the ways that I have indicated today, they will meet
with spiritual science. Someone who considers the matters
without any prejudice has to say, it has only seemed, as if one
can lead back the human being to animal original forms, as if
one had to consider the spiritual-mental as an arrangement of
physical forms. It is vice versa: that what one has believed
that it was the result of the sensory turns out to be the
original, the creative, and the sensory is a result. Everywhere
the human being is led to the spiritual where he can perceive
with the senses and think with the mind. If he recognises the
eternity of the spirit, he feels protected in the
spiritual-mental of the world that we must consider as
everlasting.
Everything originates from the spirit! This
is the knowledge of spiritual science. Because everything
originates from the spirit, and the material existence is only
a transitory state in which we should appropriate forces which
we cannot appropriate somewhere else, we feel the material
existence as a point of passage again to a spirit-filled life
in future. As the earthly embodiments of the human being have
started by the fact that he has arisen from a purely spiritual
being, they will end if they have fulfilled their task for the
human being: to give him that what impressed itself in the
human being to take it with him into the spiritual world. As
the human being returns after every death to the existence on
earth to develop what he could not yet develop as we look back
at a beginning of incarnation, we see approaching an end of
incarnations in the future, but with it also the return of the
human being to the spiritual world.
Everything originates from the spirit. The
human soul lives in the spirit that feels powerful in it. It
returns to the spirit if it has accomplished its goal on earth
and has got what the bodily can give. From the spirit
— through the matter —
to the spirit! Spiritual science has to
give the big important answer to the question of the origin and
of the determination of the human being.
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