PART I
THE WISDOM OF MAN (Anthroposophy)
LECTURE IV
Supersensible Currents
in the Human and Animal Organizations.
The Group Soul and the Rôle of the Ego.
E HAVE been dealing with the various force
currents that shape the human organism and give it form in a manner
enabling us to comprehend it. If we really learn to know these
formative forces, we must perceive that they could not function
otherwise, that our heart, our eyes, inevitably had to become exactly
what they are. We have traced the sense image of ourselves back to
those super-sensible currents that flow back and forth in different
directions, from above downward, from right to left, from the back
forward, and so forth. At this point someone may try to catch me out
by objecting that while dealing with the currents I had failed to
explain a certain significant phenomenon in the human organism, that
in addition to the asymmetrical organs (heart, liver, stomach, etc.)
there are those that are arranged symmetrically. You might say that
my description could at a pinch be accepted if the whole organism
were laid out asymmetrically, but not in connection with the
symmetrical organs. This objection, however, can be cleared away,
too, as follows.
We have learned that the physical and etheric bodies
stream from left to right and from right to left respectively, that
is, in the plane in which the human being is formed symmetrically.
Spiritual science teaches us that the physical body is an ancient
entity, stemming from the old Saturn, while the germs of the etheric
body, the astral body, and the ego were prepared on the old Sun, the
old Moon, and the Earth respectively. In its first appearance on
Saturn the physical body was asymmetrical, conditioned by a current
corresponding to the one active today from left to right, and the
first germ of the etheric body was also asymmetrical, with a current
from right to left. Thence development proceeds; the physical body is
further formed on the old Sun, the old Moon, and so on. Had this not
occurred, the physical body would have remained lopsided,
asymmetrical. As it actually happened, however, the further
development of the physical body and of the other members continued
on the old Moon and on the Earth, during which something occurred
that altered the whole previous development and brought about a
turnabout, so to speak, a reversal of the direction. If the physical
body were to be formed, not into a lopsided but into a symmetrical
structure, the Saturn current running from left to right had to be
opposed by one running from right to left. How was this brought
about? By the separation of the old Sun from the old Moon. The Sun
forces, which hitherto had worked on the physical body from within,
acted henceforth from without, that is, from the opposite direction.
The physical body, as it was constituted up to the time of the old
Moon, was then influenced by the Sun from without.
The etheric body experienced a similar transformation.
You might ask why it is that this other side of the physical body,
the result of Sun forces acting from without, is not much smaller, in
a sense stunted, in comparison with the first, the older portion? It
is because those beings that left the Moon and passed over with the
Sun could develop stronger influences from their new sphere of
action, owing precisely to this separation that meant a higher
development for them. They had a more difficult task than the Saturn
beings, for they had to counteract what was already developed in one
direction. This condition obstructed the whole process of formation,
so they had to become more powerful if they were to fulfill their
task. This, in turn, necessitated their acting from the Sun during
the Moon period, whereby their influence was intensified. In this way
these younger but more powerful currents — from right to left —
balanced the weaker ones — from left to right — and the
physical body became a symmetrical structure.
We will now examine more closely some important details
of the effects of those force currents, remembering that the sentient
body sends its forces into the human organism from the front
backward, but that the emanations of the sentient soul run forward
from the back. Given the existence of the physical and etheric bodies
and the general background, we ask in what manner these forces
proceed to build the human organism?
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By being dammed up, stopped by the physical body, the
backward-flowing currents of the sentient body could now bore into
the human organism and build divers organs into what was already
there. At the same time the sentient soul works in the organism from
the back toward the front. The currents of the sentient body are
dammed by the physical organism and bore their way in. In this way
they are obstructed by the physical body, so they really had to bore
holes, as it were.
In front (cf. sketch) we have the currents of the
sentient body boring their way in. They form the sense organs. In the
rear the formative forces are active that build the brain over them;
this gives us the diagram of the human head seen in profile. The
openings represent the eyes, ears, organs of smell, etc., and the
brain is superimposed behind and above them. If spiritual science
tells the truth, it is clear that the human head could not possibly
appear different from the way it actually does. If a human head were
ever to come into being at all it would have to look as it does. It
does look that way, and that is evidence proffered by the world of
outer phenomena itself.
In that connection there is another point to mention.
The work of the sentient body proceeds inward, that of the sentient
soul outward, or at least, it has that tendency. As a matter of fact,
it is obstructed before emerging; it remains in the physical body of
the brain and emerges only at those points where previously the
sentient body had, so to speak, bored the holes for the sense organs
in the front of the physical body. What we find, then, is that a part
of our inner life flows outward as sentient soul.
The intellectual soul would not be capable of this. It
is completely dammed up within, and no currents come to meet it from
the opposite side. That is why human thinking takes place wholly
within. Objects don't think for us; they don't show us the thoughts
from without, nor bring them to us. That is the great secret of the
relation of human thought to the outer world. With our sense organs
we can perceive outer objects, and if these organs are healthy they
do not err. The mind, on the other hand, which cannot directly
contact objects, is the first inner member of the human being that
can err, because its activity is completely dammed up within the
brain and does not emerge. From this it follows that our thoughts
about the outer world cannot be correct without an inner tendency to
permit right thoughts to arise within us. What the outer world can
give us is correct sense perception but not right thoughts. Thought
is subject to error, and the power of right thinking is something we
must have within ourselves.
For the thinker this fact alone points to an earlier,
prehistoric existence of man. It is incumbent upon him to form right
thoughts concerning the wisdom of the outside world, but his thoughts
cannot emerge or come in contact with what he perceives.
Nevertheless, that wisdom must be within him as well as without; it
must permeate him just as it does what surrounds him. The two
currents, therefore, belong together, though they are now separated.
At some time, however, they must have been united. That
was before the human ego had begun to dam up the currents within us,
at a time when it still received the wisdom of the world directly.
There was a time when the currents of the mental soul were not held
up but flowed out, and that was the time when man directly envisioned
the wisdom of the world. What is now relegated to the brain as
thinking was once in contact with the outer world, like our sense
perception, so that man could look at his thoughts. That was a form
of clairvoyance, though not a conscious one irradiated by the ego.
Man must have passed through earlier stages in which he possessed a
dim clairvoyance, and again it is the human physical organization
itself that shows us that in bygone times he was differently
constituted.
Something important for practical life follows from the
foregoing. In all cases involving the sense world, sense perception
(apart from illusions) can be taken as truth, for there the human
being is in direct contact with the outer world. But concerning all
that is within him, his knowledge is limited to what he acquires by
thinking. Now, the separation that exists between our intellectual
soul and the objects in space, and that makes it possible for our
thinking about those objects to err, does not apply to the ego. When
the ego streams into us it is within us, and it is natural that we
should have a voice in its activity. The meeting of the intellectual
soul and the ego is what produces the purest thinking, the thinking
that is directed inward. This form of thinking, having itself as the
object, cannot be exposed to error in the same way as can the other
kind, which is occupied with outer objects and roves about in an
endeavor to form judgments by observing them. The only thing they can
yield is sense perception. What we must do is meet them with
concepts, as though holding up their mirrored reflection to them.
Thinking is herein free from error only in so far as it is attracted
to the tendency to truth. Out of a right tendency to truth we must
let concepts of things, thoughts about things, rise up in us.
In the first instance we can form a judgment only of
such things in the outer world as are encountered by the senses. The
senses themselves cannot judge what is beyond their reach; no such
judgment can be arrived at from the physical plane. If the
intellectual soul nevertheless does just that, unless it be guided by
the inner tendency to truth, it must inevitably fall into all sorts
of errors.
To clarify these conditions by an illustration, let us
turn to the various doctrines of the descent of man. Here we
distinguish between two kinds of ancestors. You are familiar with one
of them from theosophical research, which tells us of the different
forms we passed through in former periods, such as the Lemurian. That
is disclosed by spiritual science. We have seen how wonderfully
comprehensible everything perceived by the senses becomes when we
have made this teaching our very own, and it will reveal more and
more.
In contrast, we will now consider material research, the
materialistic doctrine of descent, the crux of which is the so-called
biogenetic law. According to this, man in his germinal states passes
through all forms recalling animal stages, thereby repeating, in a
sense, the various forms of the whole animal kingdom. At the time
when this doctrine was rampant the conclusion was drawn that man
really passed through these forms that thus appear in the germ state.
In itself that is not erroneous because in prehistoric times man
actually did develop through such forms. Fortunately, as we can say
in view of the materialistic doctrine of the descent, the foresight
of the gods kept this fact secret until such time as the opinions
regarding it could be corrected by spiritual science. The development
of man before he became outwardly perceptible on the physical plane
could not have been observed. It was shrouded by the gods and
withdrawn from observation, otherwise people would have evolved even
wilder theories regarding it than they do now. The facts are there,
but they are frequently misinterpreted because the senses that speak
the truth cannot perceive them. In reasoning, however, the power of
the intellectual soul becomes active, and this cannot reach what is
imperceptible to the senses. In reality, the facts referred to prove
the exact opposite of what people try to infer from them. Here we
have a striking example of the way the power of judgment can plunge
into a sea of errors when its approach to external matters is purely
by way of the mind.
What is shown by the fact that on a certain plane man
resembled a fish? Precisely that he never was a fish; indeed, that he
had no use for the fish nature, that he had to expel it before
entering upon his human existence, because it in no way pertained to
him. This he did in turn with all the animal forms, because they were
not of his nature. He could not have become a human being if he had
ever appeared on earth in one of those animal forms. He had to
discard these in order to become what he did. The fact that in the
germ the human being resembles a fish is the very proof that never in
his whole line of descent was he like a fish or any other animal
form. He had to expel all these forms because they were inadequate
and he therefore must never resemble them. He had to slough off these
forms, eject them. They are images he never resembled. All these
forms of germinal life show shapes he never bore. Thus we can find
out precisely through embryology how prehistoric man never looked. He
cannot be descended from something he had expelled. To infer that he
passed through these forms would be the same as to imagine that the
father is descended from the son. The father is not descended from
the son, nor the son from himself, but the son is descended from the
father.
That is one of the cases in which the mind has proved
wholly incapable of thinking the facts of reality through to the end.
It has exactly reversed the order of development. Certainly these
pictures of the remote past are extraordinarily important, because
they show us how we never looked. But that is something that can be
learned even more readily in another way, namely, through realms that
lie open in the sense world, that are not hidden from us. There we
have all those forms — fishes and so forth — and they can
be properly studied with the ordinary means of human observation. As
long as men restricted themselves to observing outer objects with the
senses, and did not occupy their minds with matters concealed from
sense perception, they avoided arriving at false conclusions; they
were rightly guided by their natural sense of truth. They would look,
for instance, at a monkey and doubtless experience the queer
sensation that every normal human being would have, a certain sense
of embarrassment. This judgment expressed through feeling means that
the monkey is really a retarded being, having remained behind in the
evolution of man. This feeling is nearer the truth than is the later
judgment of the erring mind because it embodies the realization that
the monkey is a being that dropped out of the human current, that had
to be divided off from man if the latter was to achieve his goal. The
moment our fallible mind approached this fact it inverted it; instead
of realizing that the monkey was eliminated from the evolutionary
human current it concluded that the monkey was the starting point of
human descent.
Here the error comes to light. In judging external
things accessible to the senses we should never forget that they are
built up from within, through the agency of spiritual currents.
Suppose we are observing those parts of the human being that are
accessible to perception proper, or we observe part of another person
that the eye can see — his face, for example. In studying this
face we must not imagine it as having been built up from without. On
the contrary, we must realize the need to distinguish between two
currents flowing into each other, the current of the sentient body
running backward from the front, and that of the sentient soul
running forward from the rear. In so far as we perceive the human
countenance by means of the senses, the sense image is true. That is
given us by sense perception and we will not go astray there. But now
the human mind joins in, at first subconsciously, and is at once
misled. It regards the human countenance as something merely
fashioned from without, whereas in reality, this fashioning occurred
from within, through the agency of the sentient soul. What you see is
not really outer body; it is the outer image of the sentient soul.
Disabuse your mind of the notion that the human face
might be outer body, and you will see that in truth, it is the image
of the soul. A fundamentally false interpretation results from
reasoning in a way that ignores the true nature of the countenance as
being the outer image of the sentient soul acting outward. Every
explanation of the human countenance based solely on physical forces
is wrong. It must be explained through the soul itself, the visible
through the invisible. The deeper we penetrate into theosophy the
more we will see in it a great school for learning to think. The
chaotic thinking that today dominates all circles, particularly
science, finds no shelter in theosophy, which is therefore able to
interpret life correctly.
This ability to interpret phenomena correctly will
further stand us in good stead when, in the course of our
investigations, we come to phenomena that lead us out of the region
of individual anthroposophy into the realm of the anthroposophy that
concerns the whole of mankind.
Returning once more to the sense of sound and the sense
of visualization, let us ask ourselves which of these came into being
first in the course of human development? Did man learn first to
understand words or to perceive and understand the conceptions that
came to him? This question can be answered by observing the child,
who first learns to talk and only later to perceive thoughts. Speech
is the premise of thought perception because the sense of sound is
the premise of the sense of visualization. The child learns to talk
because he can hear, can listen to something that the sense of sound
perceives. Speech itself is at first mere imitation, and the child
imitates long before he has any idea of visualization whatever. First
the sense of sound develops, and then, by means of this, the sense of
visualization. The sense of sound is the instrumentality for
perceiving not only tones but also what we call sounds.
The next question is how it came about that at one time
in the course of his development man achieved the ability to perceive
sounds and, as a result, to acquire speech? How was he endowed with
speech? If he was to learn to speak, not just to hear, it was
necessary not only that an outer perception should penetrate, but
that a certain current within him should flow in the same direction
as that taken by the currents of the sentient soul when they press
forward from the rear. It had to be something acting in the same
direction. That was the way in which speech had to originate, and
this faculty had to appear before the sense of visualization, before
man was able to sense the conception contained in the words
themselves. Men had first to learn to utter sounds and to live in the
consciousness of them before they could combine conceptions with
them. What at first permeated the sounds they uttered was sentience.
This development had to take place at a time when the
transposition of the circulatory system had already occurred, for
animals cannot speak. The ego had to be acting downward from above
with the blood system in a vertical position. As yet, however, man
had no sense of visualization, consequently no visualizations. It
follows that he could not have acquired speech through the agency of
his own ego, but rather, he received it from another ego that we can
compare with the group ego of animals. In this sense speech is a gift
of the gods. It was infused into the ego before the latter itself was
capable of developing it. The human ego did not yet possess the
organs needed to give the impulse for bringing about speech, but the
group ego worked from above into the physical, etheric and astral
bodies, and as it encountered an opposing current, a sort of whorl
came into being at the point of contact. A straight line drawn
through the center of the larynx would indicate the direction of the
current employed by the speech-giving spirits, and the larynx itself
represents the physical substance, the dam, that resulted from the
encounter of the two currents. That accounts for the peculiar shape
of the human larynx.
It was under the influence, then, of a group soul that
man had to develop speech. In what manner do group souls operate on
earth? In animals the current of the group soul passes through the
spinal cord horizontally, and these force currents are in continual
motion. The force currents running downward from above move
constantly around the earth, as they did around the old Moon. They
don't remain in one spot but move around the earth retaining their
vertical direction of influence. If men were to learn to speak under
the influence of a group soul, they could not remain in one place,
they had to migrate. They had to move toward the group soul. Never
could they have learned to speak if they had remained in one spot.
What direction, then, would men have to take if they
were to learn to speak? We know that the etheric currents flow from
right to left and the physical ones from left to right, and this is
the case not only in man but on the earth as well. Now, where are the
group souls that endow man with speech? Let us look at the earth in
its peculiar development. Man learned to speak at a time when his
outer structure was already complete. Strong currents were therefore
needed because the larynx had first to be transformed from a soft
substance that in no way resembled a larynx. This called for special
conditions on earth. Suppose we stand facing east. There flow in us
from left to right the currents connected with the formation of the
physical body. This current exists outside us as well; it was present
during the formation of the earth. Running from north to south are
those strong currents that produce solid physical matter. From the
other direction, from the south, flow the etheric currents that lack
the tendency to solidify the earth. This explains the lopsidedness,
the lack of symmetry on the earth. In the northern hemisphere we find
the great continents, in the southern, the vast oceans; the tendency
of the earth was asymmetrical.
From the south the current acts that is of the same
nature as the one that runs from right to left in man, but while the
current from back to front streams outward, the one from front to
back originates in the sentient body and enters the sentient soul.
With all this in mind we understand why the attainment of speech
called for a current passing outward from within; this current had to
encounter a group soul current in order that the two could be dammed
up in man's own organism. Man had to move toward a current that could
act upon his astral element. He could therefore go neither toward the
north nor toward the south, but had to take a direction at right
angles to these. It was latitudinally that man had to proceed when he
was acquiring speech, that is, from east to west. At that time he
inhabited ancient Lemuria, where today we have the ocean lying
between Asia and Africa. Thence, in order to learn to speak, he
migrated westward into old Atlantis, to meet the group soul that was
to engender speech in him. There he had to develop the organism
suitable for speech, and thus it was in old Atlantis that he learned
to speak.
The next step was to develop the sense of visualization
by means of the speech man had acquired, but in order to do this he
could not continue in the same direction. He had to proceed in a way
that would cause the same current to act from the opposite direction.
Recall here what was said in the last lecture concerning the origin
of sound and of visualization. Sound comes into being when we
subconsciously convert a melody into a harmony, ignore the
fundamentals themselves, and mentally hear only the harmony produced
by the harmonics (overtones); visualization arises when we push back
and disregard this harmony of the harmonics as well. So, if we are to
develop the sense of visualization, we must destroy on the one hand
what we had built up on the other. We must face about and proceed in
the opposite direction. One element of speech has to be suppressed,
the harmonics must be pushed back, if we are to develop
visualization. The old Atlanteans had to face about and migrate
eastward; by doing this they were able effectively to develop the
sense of visualization. This could not have been accomplished if they
had continued westward. It was the tragic fate of the American
aborigines to migrate in the wrong direction. They could not hold
their ground, but had to yield to those who had migrated properly and
returned to them only later.
In this way a great deal becomes clear. When we know the
secret of those currents that fashion man and the earth we can
understand the organization of the earth, the distribution of oceans
and continents, the migrations of men. Anthroposophy leads us into
that life through which the outer world becomes transparent and
comprehensible.
Evolution proceeds. Humanity was not destined to stop at
visualizations but to achieve concepts as well, and in order to
accomplish this it had to ascend from mere visualizations to the soul
life proper. After the sense of visualization, the sense of concepts
had to be developed, and again a new direction had to be taken. In
order to gain the life of visualizations, humanity — or as much
of it as comes into consideration — moved eastward, but pure
concepts could be acquired only by returning in a westward direction.
We could similarly present the migrations of peoples in the four
post-Atlantean periods from an anthroposophical viewpoint, and you
would see a wondrous interplay of spiritual forces at work upon the
whole shaping of man, and of what comes to expression in forming the
earth.
But this is not the end. We have dealt with the currents
running downward from above, forward from the rear, etc., but in a
sense we now appear to have reached a dead end. Spiritual science,
however, discloses higher forces holding sway above the capacity for
visualization and forming concepts, that is, the imaginative, the
inspirative, and the intuitive senses. We have learned that as a rule
these stream inward, but in clairvoyants, outward. All these currents
must operate too, and for that purpose must develop the necessary
organs. So we ask how they do this? How do they live and operate in
the physical human being?
In order to answer this question we will first consider
a force possessed only by the human being, not by animals: the inner
soul force of memory. Animal memory is a pure figment of the
scientists' imagination. Animals have no memory; they merely manifest
symptoms to be explained by the same principle as those of human
memory. In order to produce human memory, the main position of
animals would have to be raised to the vertical, so that the ego
could stream in. Since their principal position is horizontal, they
can have no ego. But in certain animals the forward part of the body
is in the same position as that of the human being, hence it can act
intelligently, although this intelligence is not permeated by an ego.
This is the beginning of a vast region of
misconceptions. When an animal manifests a capacity similar to that
of memory and acts intelligently, nothing more is proved by these
facts than that a being can be guided by an intelligence without
being intelligent itself. Phenomena resembling memory can appear in
the animal world, but not memory itself.
In memory we see something special, something quite
different from what we find in mere intelligent thinking, for
example, or in visualization. The essence of memory lies in the
retention of a visualization we have had; it is still present after
the act of perception has passed. The repetition of an action
previously performed is not memory. A clock would in that case be
endowed with memory, for it does today exactly what it did yesterday.
If memory is to come about, the ego must seize a conception and
retain it.
If the ego is to seize a conception in this way, an
organ must be formed for the purpose, and this is accomplished as
follows. Out of its own essence the ego must engender special
currents and must pour and bore these into the various horizontal
currents already active minus the ego. The ego must overcome
currents. When a current appears running inward from without, the ego
must be able to produce within itself a counter-current.
That the ego was originally not capable of this we
learned when studying the origin of speech; then the group ego had to
co-operate. But when the soul life proper commences, beyond
visualization, when a higher faculty such as memory is to be
developed, the ego must activate new currents independently, currents
that bore into others already there. Of this process the ego is
clearly aware. In developing the senses up to and including
visualization, this activity of the ego is not required, but when a
higher activity is to be brought about, the ego must oppose the
currents already functioning. This becomes manifest through the
addition of a fourth phenomenon to the three currents at right angles
to each other in space. This boring in of the ego becomes perceptible
in the consciousness of time, and that is why memory is linked with
temporal conceptions. We do not follow time in any spatial direction,
but into the past. The direction of the past is bored into the
directions of space. That is what occurs in all that the ego develops
out of itself. Through spiritual science we can even indicate the
current that comes into play when the ego evolves memory. It runs
from left to right, and when habits are developed by the ego, the
currents run from left to right as well. The ego bores its way into
the opposing currents, those that were formed without the ego. Here
the law is exemplified that tells us that the higher activities of
the soul always have currents running in the opposite direction from
that of the next lower activity.
To gain inner contact with the ego, the intellectual
soul had to develop up to the ego plane. Now we ascend to the
consciousness soul. When this functions consciously its active
current runs in the opposite direction from that of the intellectual
soul, which is still able to function subconsciously. Under certain
earthly conditions the following law in human evolution can be
proved. Learning to read is an intelligent activity, but one that
does not necessarily proceed from the consciousness soul. The idea of
learning to read and write occurred to men before the consciousness
soul was developed. Reading by means of the intellectual soul had its
inception in the Greco-Latin epoch. Then followed the ascendancy of
the consciousness soul, and the direction of the current had to be
reversed. Arithmetic could only develop with the consciousness soul.
The European peoples read and write from left to right, but they
figure from right to left, as in adding. It will be seen from this
how the currents of the intellectual soul and of the consciousness
soul overlap, and we can actually understand the nature of the
European peoples by pondering the matter.
But there have been other peoples with other missions.
They were advance guards, so to speak, and their task was to develop,
or at least prepare, the feature of the intellectual soul that the
European peoples, who had postponed their cultural development, did
not evolve until after the consciousness soul had become active.
Those were the Semitic peoples, who write from right to left.
They were the peoples who were to prepare in advance the later period
of the consciousness soul.
In such considerations we find the means for comprehending all cultural
phenomena on earth. We shall learn to know everything of that sort,
down to the letter formations of the various languages. The reason
why peoples write from top to bottom, from right to left or from left
to right follows from an understanding of the underlying spiritual
facts. It is the mission of spiritual science to see that light dawns
in the minds of men, and that the obscure becomes clear.
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