Lecture X
WHAT
we have now been
studying for some time in our Group-lectures is meant as a completion
or expansion of the subjects that have occupied us during the winter.
It may well be that a remark here or there seemed somewhat aphoristic,
and we want by means of these studies to enlarge or round off thoughts
and concepts that have been aroused in us.
In the last lecture we
were particularly occupied with the presence of all sorts of spiritual
beings which are to be found, so to speak, between the sense-perceptible
kingdoms of nature that surround us. We saw especially how in the place
where the beings of different nature-kingdoms come together, where the
plant is pressed close to the stone at a spring, where ordinary stone
impinges on a metal as constantly occurs under the earth, where there
is a communion as between bee and blossom, how everywhere in such spots
forces are developed which draw various beings, whom we have called
elemental beings, into earthly existence. Moreover, in connection with
these elemental beings we have been occupied with the fact of a certain
cutting off, a detaching of beings from their whole connection. We have
seen that the elemental beings called by spiritual science “Salamanders”
have in part their origin from detached parts of animal group souls.
These have, as it were, ventured too far forward into our physical world
and have not been able to find their way back and unite again with the
group soul, after the death and dissolution of the animal. We know that
in the regular course of our life, the beings of our earth, the beings
of the animal, plant, mineral kingdoms, have their “ego soul”
— if one may so call it, have indeed such ego souls as man, differing
only in the fact that the ego souls of other beings are in other worlds.
We know that man is that being in our cycle of evolution who has an
individual ego here on the physical plane — at least during his
waking life. We know further that the beings which we call animals are
so conditioned that — speaking loosely — similarly-formed
animals have a group soul or group ego which is in the so-called astral
world. Further, the beings which we call plants have a dreamless sleeping
consciousness for the physical world here but they have group egos which
dwell in the lower parts of the devachanic world; and, finally, the
stones, the minerals, have their group egos in the higher parts of Devachan.
One who moves clairvoyantly in the astral and devachanic worlds has
intercourse there with the group souls of the animals, plants and minerals
in the same way as here in the physical world he has intercourse during
the day with other human souls or egos.
Now we must be clear that
in many ways man is a very complicated being — we have often spoken
of this complexity in different lectures. But he will appear more and
more complicated the further we go into the connections with great cosmic
facts. In order to realize that man is not quite the simple being which
he may perhaps appear to a naive observation we need only remember that
by night, from going to sleep to waking up, the man of the present evolutionary
cycle is quite a different being from what he is by day. His physical
and etheric bodies lie in bed, the ego with the astral body is lifted
out of them. Let us consider both conditions, and in the first place
the physical and etheric bodies. They lie there, and if we disregard
the transitional state of dream, they have what we may call a sleep
consciousness devoid of content, perceptions, or dreams. But the ego
and the astral body outside have, in this present cycle of evolution,
just the same dreamless sleep consciousness. The sleeping man, whether
in the members remaining here in the physical world, or in those which
are in the astral world, has the same consciousness as the plant covering
of the earth. We must occupy ourselves a little with these two separated
parts of the sleeping human being.
From other lectures we
know that the man of the present time has arisen slowly and gradually.
We know that he received the first rudiments of a physical body in the
embodiment of our Earth lying in a primeval past which we call the Saturn
evolution. We know that then in a second embodiment of our Earth, the
Sun evolution, he received the etheric or life body, that in the third
embodiment, the Moon evolution, he also received the astral body, and
that in the present Earth embodiment of our planet he acquired what
we call the ego. Thus the human being has evolved quite slowly and gradually.
This physical body which man bears today is actually his oldest part,
the part that has gone through most metamorphoses. It has undergone
four changes. The first rudiment, received by man on ancient Saturn,
has gone through three modifications, on the Sun, on the Moon, and finally
on the Earth, and is expressed in man's present sense-organs.
They were quite different organs on ancient Saturn, but their first
rudiments were there while no other part of the physical body as yet
existed. We can look on ancient Saturn as a single being, entirely consisting
of sense-organs. On the Sun the etheric body was added, the physical
body went through a change, and the organs arose which we call today
the glands, though at first they existed merely in their rudiments.
Then on the Moon when the physical body had undergone a third transformation
through the impress of the astral body, were added those organs which
we know as the nerve organs. And finally on the Earth was added the
present blood-system, the expression of the ego, as the nervous system
is the expression of the astral body, the glandular system of the etheric
body, and the senses system the physical expression of the physical
body itself. We have seen in former lectures that the blood system appeared
for the first time in our Earth evolution and we ask: Why does blood
flow in the present form in the blood channels? What does this blood
express? Blood is the expression of the ego and with this we will consider
a possible misunderstanding, namely, that man actually misunderstands
the present physical human body.
The human body as it is
today is only one form of many. On the Moon, on the Sun, on Saturn,
it was there but always different. On the Moon, for instance, there
was as yet no mineral kingdom, on the Sun there was no plant world in
our sense, and on Saturn no animal kingdom — there was solely the
human being in his first physical rudiments. Now when we reflect on
this we must be clear that the present human body is not only physical
body, but physical-mineral body, and that to the laws of the physical
world — hence it is the “physical body” — it has
assimilated the laws and substances of the mineral kingdom, which permeate
it today. On the Moon the physical human body had not yet assimilated
those laws: if one had burnt it there would have been no ash, for there
were no minerals in the present earthly sense. Let us remember that
to be physical and to be mineral are two quite different things. The
human body is physical because it is governed by the same laws as the
stone; it is at the same time mineral because it has been impregnated
with mineral substances. The first germ of the physical body was present
on Saturn, but there were no solid bodies, no water, no gases. On Saturn
there was nothing at all but a condition of warmth. The modern physicist
knows of no such condition because he thinks that warmth can only appear
in connection with gases, water, or solid objects. But that is an error.
The physical body which today has assimilated the mineral kingdom was
on ancient Saturn a nexus of physical laws. We are physical laws working
in lines, in forms, what you learn to know as laws in physics. Externally
the physical human being was manifested on Saturn purely as a being
which lived in warmth. We must thus clearly distinguish between the
mineral element and the actual physical principle of man's body.
It is physical law which governs the physical body. It belongs, for
example, to the physical principle that our ear has such a form, that
it receives sound in quite a definite way; to the mineral nature of
the ear belong the sub-stances which are impregnated into this scaffolding
of physical laws.
Now that we have become
clear about this and realize particularly how the sense-organs, glands,
nerves and blood are the expressions of our fourfold nature, let us
turn again to the observation of the sleeping human being. When man
is asleep the physical and etheric bodies lie on the bed, the astral
body and the ego are outside. But now let us remember that the astral
body is the principle of the nervous system and the ego that of the
blood system. Thus during the night the astral body has deserted that
part of the physical body of which, so to say, it is the cause —
namely, the nervous system. For only when the astral body membered itself
into man on the Moon could the nervous system arise. Thus the astral
body callously leaves what belongs to it, what it is actually due to
maintain, and in the same way the ego deserts that which it has called
into life. The principles of the blood and of the astral body are outside
and the sleeping physical and etheric bodies are absolutely alone. But
now nothing of a material physical nature can subsist in the form which
has been called forth by a spiritual principle when this spiritual principle
is no longer there. That is quite out of the question. Never can a nervous
system live unless astral beings are active in it, and never can a blood
system live unless ego-beings are active in it. Thus you all meanly
desert in the night your nervous and blood systems and relinquish them
to other beings of an astral nature. Beings which are of the same nature
as your ego now descend into your organism. Every night the human organism
is occupied by beings fitted to maintain it. The physical body and the
etheric body which lie on the bed are at the same time interpenetrated
by these astral and ego beings; they are actually within the physical
body. We might call them intruders, but that is in no sense correct.
We ought in many ways to call them guardian spirits, for they are the
sustainers of what man callously deserts in the night.
Now it is not so bad for
man to leave his bodies every night. I have already said that the astral
body and the ego are perpetually active in the night. They rid the physical
body of the wear and tear which the day has given, which in a broad
sense we call fatigue. Man is refreshed and renewed in the morning because
during the night his astral body and ego have removed the fatigue which
were given him by the impressions of daily life. This all-night activity
of the astral body in getting rid of the fatigue substances is a definite
fact to clairvoyant perception. The ego and astral body work from outside
on the physical and etheric bodies. But in the present cycle of his
evolution man is not yet advanced enough to be able to carry out such
an activity quite independently. He can only do so under the guidance
of other, higher beings. So the human being is taken every night into
the bosom of higher beings, as it were, and they endow him with the
power of working in the right way on his physical and etheric bodies.
These at the same time are the beings — that is why we may not
call them intruders — who care for man's blood and nerve systems
in the right way in the night.
As long as no abnormalities
arise the co-operation of spiritual beings with man is justified. But
such irregularities can very well enter and here we come to a chapter
of spiritual science which is extraordinarily important for the practical
life of the human soul. One would like it to be known in the widest
circles and not only theoretically but as giving the foundation for
certain activities of the human soul life. It is not generally imagined
that the facts of the soul life have a far-reaching effect. In certain
connections I have also called your attention to the fact that it is
only when viewed in the light of spiritual science that events in the
life of the soul can find their true explanation. We all know the deep
significance of the statement: “Regarded from the spiritual-scientific
aspect a lie is a kind of murder.” I have explained that a sort
of explosion really takes place in the astral world when man utters
a lie — even, in a certain way, if he only thinks it. Something
takes place in the spiritual world when man lies, which has a far more
devastating effect for that world than any misfortune in the physical
world. But things which one relates at a certain stage of spiritual-scientific
observation, characterizing them as far as is possible then, gain more
and more clearness and confirmation when one advances in the knowledge
of spiritual science.
Today we shall learn of
another effect of lying, slandering, although these words are not used
here in the ordinary crude sense. When more subtly, out of convention,
for in-stance, or out of all sorts of social or party considerations,
people color the truth, we there have to do with a lie in the sense
of spiritual science. In many respects man's whole life is saturated,
if not with lies, yet with manifestations bearing an untruthful coloring.
The enlightened materialist can at any rate see that an impression is
made on his physical body if he receives a blow on the skull from an
axe, or if his head is cut off by the railway, or he has an ulcer somewhere
or is attacked by bacilli. He will then admit that effects are produced
on the physical body. What is not usually considered at all is that
man is a spiritual unity, that what happens in his higher members, the
astral body and ego, has positive effect right down into his physical
nature. It is not considered, for instance, that the uttering of lies
and untruthfulness, untruth even in the affairs of life, has a definite
effect on the human physical body. Spiritual vision can experience the
following: If a person, let us say, has told a lie during the day, its
effect remains in the physical body and is to be seen by clairvoyant
perception while the person sleeps. Let us suppose this person is altogether
un-truthful, piling up lies, then he will have many such effects in
his physical body. All this hardens, as it were, in the night, and then
something very important happens. These hardenings, these “enclosures,”
in the physical body are not at all agreeable to the beings who from
higher worlds must take possession of the physical body in the night
and carry out the functions otherwise exercised by the astral body and
ego. The result is that in the course of life and by reason of a body
diseased — one might say — through lies, portions of those
beings who descend into man at night become detached. Here we have again
detachment processes and they lead to the fact that when a man dies
his physical body does not merely follow the paths which it would normally
take. Certain beings are left behind, beings which have been created
in the physical body through the effect of lying and slander, and have
been detached from the spiritual world. Such beings, detached in this
circuitous way, now flit and whir about in our world and belong to the
class that we call “phantoms.” They form a certain group
of elemental beings related to our physical body and invisible to physical
sight. They multiply through lies and calumnies, and these in actual
fact populate our earthly globe with phantoms. In this way we learn
to know a new class of elemental beings.
But now, not only lies
and slanders but also other things belonging to the soul life produce
an effect on the human body. It is lies and slanders which so act on
the physical body that a detaching of phantoms is caused. Other things
again work in a similar way on the etheric body. You must not be amazed
at such phenomena of the soul: in spiritual life one must be able to
take things with all calmness. Matters, for example, which have a harmful
result on the etheric body are bad laws, or bad social measures prevailing
in a community. All that leads to want of harmony, all that makes for
bad adjustments between man and man, works in such a way through the
feeling which it creates in the common life that the effect is continued
into the etheric body. The accumulation in the etheric body caused through
these experiences of the soul brings about again detachments from the
beings working in from the spiritual worlds and these likewise are now
to be found in our environment — they are “spectres”
or “ghosts.” Thus these beings that exist in the etheric
world, the life world, we see grow out of the life of men. Many a man
can go about amongst us and for one who is able to see these things
spiritually, his physical body is crammed, one might say, with phantoms,
his etheric body crammed with spectres, and as a rule after a man's
death or shortly afterwards all this rises up and disperses and populates
the world.
So we see how subtly the
spiritual events of our life are continued, how lies, calumnies, bad
social arrangements, deposit their creations spiritually among us on
our earth. But now you can also understand that if in normal daily life
the physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego belong together,
and the physical body and etheric body have to let other beings press
in and act upon them, then the astral body and the ego are not in a
normal condition either. At any rate they are in a somewhat different
position as regards the physical and etheric bodies. These two have
in sleeping man the consciousness of the plants. But the plants on the
other hand have their ego above in Devachan. Hence the physical and
etheric bodies of sleeping man must likewise be sustained by beings
which unfold their consciousness from Devachan. Now it is true that
man's astral body and ego are in a higher world, but he himself
also sleeps dreamlessly like the plants. That the plants have only a
physical and an etheric body and that man in his sleeping condition
possesses further an astral body and ego, makes no difference as regards
the plant-nature. True, man has been drawn upwards into the spiritual,
the astral world, but yet not high enough upwards with his ego, to justify
the sleep-condition. The consequence is that beings must now enter his
astral body too when the human being goes to sleep. And so it is: influences
from the devachanic world press all the time into man's astral
body. They need not in the least be abnormal influences, they may come
from what we call man's higher ego. For we know that man is gradually
rising to the devachanic world, in as much as he approaches ever nearer
to a state of spiritualization, and what is being prepared there sends
its influences into him today when he sleeps. But there are not merely
these normal influences. This would simply and solely be the case if
human beings were fully to understand what it is to value and esteem
the freedom of another. Mankind at present is still very far removed
from that. Think only how the modern man for the most part wants to
over-rule the mind of another, how he cannot bear someone else to think
and like differently, how he wants to work upon the other's soul.
In all that works from soul to soul in our world, from the giving of
unjustifiable advice to all those methods which men employ in order
to overwhelm others, in every act that does not allow the free soul
to confront the free soul, but employs, even in the slightest degree,
forcible means of convincing and persuasion, in all this, forces are
working from soul to soul which again so influence these souls that
it is expressed in the night in the astral body. The astral body gets
those “enclosures” and thereby beings are detached from
other worlds and whir through our world again as elemental beings. They
belong to the class of demons. Their existence is solely due to the
fact that intolerance and oppression of thought have in various ways
been used in our world. That is how these hosts of demons have arisen
in our world.
Thus we have learnt again
today to know of beings which are just as real as the things which we
perceive through our physical senses, and which very definitely produce
effects in human life. Humanity would have advanced quite differently
if intolerance had not created the demons which pervade our world, influencing
people continually. They are at the same time spirits of prejudice.
One understands the intricacies of life when one learns about these
entanglements between the spiritual world in the higher sense and our
human world. All these beings, as we have said, are there, and they
whiz and whir through the world in which we live.
Now let us remember something
else which has also been said before. We have pointed out that in the
man of the last third of the Atlantean age, before the Atlantean flood,
the relation of etheric body to physical body was quite different from
what it had been earlier. Today the physical part of the head and the
etheric part practically coincide. That was quite different in ancient
Atlantis; there we have the etheric part of the head projecting far
out — especially in the region of the forehead. We now have a
central point for the etheric and physical parts approximately between
the eyebrows. These two parts came together in the last third of the
Atlantean age and today they coincide. Thereby man is able to say “I”
to himself and feel an independent personality. Thus the etheric and
physical bodies of the head have joined together. This has come about
so that man could become the sense being that he is within our physical
world, so that he can enrich his inner life through what he takes in
through sense impressions, through smell, taste, sight, and so on. All
of this becomes embodied in his inner being so that having obtained
it he can use it for the further development of the whole cosmos. What
he thus acquires can be acquired in no other way, and therefore we have
always said we must not take Spiritual Science in an ascetic sense,
as a flight from the physical world. All that happens here is taken
with us out of the physical world and it would be lost to the spiritual
world if it were not collected here first.
But humanity is now getting
nearer and nearer to a new condition. In this Post-Atlantean age we
have gone through various culture epochs: the old Indian, the ancient
Persian, lying before the time of Zarathustra, then the epoch which
we have called the Babylonian-Assyrian-Chaldean-Egyptian, then the Greco-Latin,
and now we stand in the fifth culture-epoch of the Post-Atlantean age.
Ours will be followed by a sixth and a seventh epoch. Whereas in the
course of past ages and up to our own time the united structure of our
etheric and physical bodies has always grown firmer, more closely united
inwardly, man is approaching a period in the future when the etheric
body gradually loosens itself again and becomes independent. The way
back is taken. There are people today who have a much looser etheric
body than others. This loosening of the etheric body is only right for
man if during his different incarnations in those culture-epochs he
has absorbed so much into himself that when his etheric body goes out
again it will take with it the right fruits from the physical sense
world of the earth, fruits suitable for incorporation into the increasingly
independent etheric body. The more spiritual are the concepts which
man finds within the physical world, the more he takes with him in his
etheric body. All the utilitarian ideas, all the concepts bound up with
machine and industry which only serve outer needs and the outer life,
and which man absorbs in our present earthly existence, are unsuitable
for incorporation in the etheric body. But all the concepts he absorbs
of the artistic, the beautiful, the religious — and everything
can be immersed in the sphere of wisdom, art, religion — all this
endows man's etheric body with the capability and possibility of being
organized independently. Since this can be seen in advance, it has often
been emphasized here that the world-conception of spiritual science
must send its impulses and activities into practical life. Spiritual
science must never remain a conversational subject for tea-parties or
any other pursuit apart from ordinary life; it must work its way into
the whole of our civilization. If spiritual-scientific thoughts are
one day understood, then men will understand that everything our age
accomplishes must be permeated by spiritual principles. Many human beings,
among them Richard Wagner, fore-saw in certain fields such a penetration
with spiritual principles. Some day men will understand how to build
a railway-station so that it streams out truth like a temple and is
in fact simply an expression suited to what is within it. There is still
very much to do. These impulses therefore must be effective and they
will be effective when spiritual-scientific thoughts are more fully
understood.
I still have a vivid recollection
of a rectorial address given about twenty-five years ago by a well-known
architect. He spoke about style in architecture and uttered the remarkable
sentence: “Architectural styles are not invented, they grow out
of the spiritual life!” At the same time he showed why our age,
if indeed it produces architectural styles, only revives old ones and
is incapable of finding a new style because it has as yet no inner spiritual
life. When the world creates spiritual life again then all will be possible.
Then we shall feel that the human soul shines towards us from all we
look at, just as in the Middle Ages every lock on a door expressed what
man's soul understood of outer forms. Spiritual science will not
be understood till it meets us everywhere in this way as if crystallized
in forms. But then mankind too will live as spirit in the spirit. Then,
however, man will be preparing more and more something that he takes
with him when he again rises into the spiritual world, when his etheric
body becomes self-dependent. Thus must men immerse in the spiritual
world if evolution is to go further in the right way.
Nothing symbolizes the
permeation of the world with the spirit so beautifully as the story
of the miracle of Pentecost. When you contemplate it, it is as though
the interpenetration of the world with spiritual life were indicated
prophetically through the descent of the “fiery tongues.”
Everything must be given life again through the spirit, that abstract
intellectual relation which man has to the yearly festivals must also
become concrete and living again. Now, at this time of Pentecost, Whitsuntide,
let us try to occupy our souls with the thoughts that can proceed from
today's lecture. Then the Festival, which as we know is established
on a spiritual foundation, will again signify some-thing living for
man when his etheric body is ripe for spiritual creation. But if man
does not absorb the Whitsuntide spirit then the etheric body goes out
of the physical body and is far too weak to overcome what has already
been created, those worlds of spectres, phantoms, demons, which the
world creates as phenomena existing at its side.
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