PART II
THE WISDOM OF THE SOUL (Psychosophy)
LECTURE IV
Consciousness and the Soul Life.
MORE intimate understanding of what was said
yesterday and what still remains to be said will be brought about by
endeavoring to compare the youthful Goethe's poem you just heard
[TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: The title of the poem that
was recited at the beginning of this lecture is Poetic Thoughts on
Jesus Christ's Descent into Hell. Like The Wandering Jew
it is here omitted, but again, a little imagination on the part of
the reader will adequately fill the gap.] with
that of Hegel, recited yesterday. This comparison will be
enlightening as emphasizing the difference in the souls of the two
personalities in question. Try to sense the profound difference
between the two poems. Lack of time restricts us to a mere mention of
certain aspects, but we shall be able to understand each other.
The poem you heard yesterday (Eleusis) was
written by a philosopher who reached tremendous heights of pure
thought. We saw that thought itself become poetically creative, as it
were, in Hegel. We felt mighty thoughts bearing upon the Mysteries,
the enigmas of the world. At the same time we sensed a certain
awkwardness in the poetical treatment of the material; poetry is not
this man's chief mission. He wrestles with the poetic form, and we
have the impression that the thought had to struggle to reach that
realm where poetic form becomes possible. Clearly, not many such
poems could have been written by Hegel.
Let us compare this poem with the other from a definite
point of view. In the first lecture an altered version of a youthful
poem by Goethe was read to you, showing how two souls lived in his
breast. Today, you heard another poem by the young Goethe that needed
no alterations. The form in which it was written, with its mighty
images, would have been worthy of the mature Goethe as well. In this
poem we see working in Goethe a soul force totally different from the
one activating Hegel. Unfailingly, a wealth of compelling imagery
flowed into the young Goethe. His innate genius was such that an
abundance of teeming images streamed into his soul life. We become
aware that when the grandeur of the subject overwhelms him, much of
what remained in his other poem to mar it has here been overcome by a
powerful soul life that seeks to express itself in telling images.
We find three points of interest in the poems recited.
In Hegel, the thought is the motive force. It achieves images only
with a struggle, and the intensity of this struggle is still
discernible even in the pale images. In Goethe, on the other hand, a
totally different soul force is at work, thundering along in mighty
images. We perceive how this soul force can be impaired in another
way, as in The Wandering Jew that has remained a fragment
because of the conflict between the two soul forces. This points to
the manifold nature of the soul life. In Hegel we find a thought
force that penetrates with difficulty into that other soul force that
was the stronger one in Goethe. On the other hand, we see how the
best force in Goethe's soul bores its way into something opposed to
it. Let us keep that in mind.
Now we will resume our psychosophic studies. Remember
what we found at work in the soul life: reasoning, and the
experiences of love and hate that originate in the capacity for
desire, but we could group this differently. By the power of
reasoning we mean mental activity, the faculty that desires to
understand the truth. We encounter an entirely different soul force
when we think of the soul as being interested in the outer world, in
one way or another. The soul is interested in the outer world in so
far as love and hate take an active part in the latter.
Even so, the phenomena of love and hate have nothing to
do with the power of reasoning. Interest and the power of reasoning
are two forces acting quite differently in the soul. For example,
were you to seek will in the soul, imagining it to be a function by
itself, you would discover interest in what is willed. In short,
interest awakened by love and hate, and reasoning. Aside from these
experiences you would find nothing in the inner region of the soul.
They exhaust the content of the soul life.
In the foregoing, however, one of the most important
features of the soul life, one that we encounter at once, has been
left out of account. It is what we designate with the word
consciousness. Consciousness is an integral part of the soul
life. When we search the content of the soul life from every aspect,
we encounter the power of reasoning, and interest, but in dealing
with the inner peculiarities of the two soul forces we may count them
among the elements of the soul life only in so far as we can ascribe
consciousness to the soul.
Now, what is consciousness? I shall not proceed to
define the word but will merely characterize. If you approach the
concept “consciousness” in the light of what we have
already studied, you will see that in view of the continuous stream
of visualizations the condition of consciousness in the soul does
not, after all, coincide with the soul life. Why is that? We have
seen, you know, that the soul life differs from the condition of
consciousness through the fact that a visualization can live on in
the soul without entering consciousness. A conception out of the past
lives on in our soul life. We can recall it, but if we do so only
after a day or so, not immediately, it was not in our consciousness
in the interim, it was only in our memory. Memory is not always
conscious. The conception, then, existed in the soul but was
momentarily not in our consciousness. Consciousness is not the same
thing as the continuous stream of the soul life. We must put it this
way. Representing the visualizations, which we may possibly remember
some time, by an arrow pointing in the direction taken by the stream
of visualizations in time, we thereby include all the visualizations
flowing out of the past into the future. In order to be conscious of
them we must first call them up out of the unconscious life of the
soul by an act of will.
When the soul is awake, the condition of consciousness
is something that pertains to the soul life, but not in the sense
that everything pertaining to it must pertain to the condition of
consciousness as well. On the contrary, consciousness illuminates but
a part of the soul life. If you ask the reason, someone could answer,
“Well, what you designate ‘the continuous stream of
visualizations’ is nothing but the established and permanent
arrangement of nerves and brain, and all that is needed is that at a
certain moment the brain arrangement should be illuminated by
consciousness.” That would, indeed, be the case if the
perception had not been robbed of something in becoming a
visualization. In that case the perception would not have to be
transformed into a visualization. The latter, however, is a response,
a perception from within, that has robbed the outer perception of
something that was not always linked with consciousness, but, rather,
that must be illuminated by it.
Next we ask how it is possible to throw light upon this
continuous stream that embraces unconscious visualizations, to
illuminate it in such a way that its content can become visible in
memory. A certain fact of the soul life such as can occur on the
physical plane will serve to illustrate. It is a fact totally ignored
by physiology, but we are concerned with facts, not prejudices. We
have many kinds of feelings, for example, longing, impatience, hope,
doubt, and finally such feelings as apprehension, fear, etc. What do
they tell us? Examination shows them to have something strangely in
common. They all refer to the future, to something that may eventuate
and that is hoped for. Our soul life, then, is so constituted that in
our feelings we take an interest not only in the present but in the
future as well, and a lively one at that. It is even stronger in the
case of pronounced desires. Just try watching the upheaval in your
soul when you desire something that is to materialize in the future!
You can go farther; try to hunt up in your memory what you
experienced as joy or sorrow in your youth, and compare it with
similar feelings you have had recently. Try it, and you will see how
pale such memories remain when you try to freshen them up. In the
present, such memories are fresh and strong, but the farther we are
removed from them, the paler they become.
I should like to ask how many people bemoan something
that happened to them ten years before, provided the cause has ceased
to exist? There is a tremendous difference in the way we look at the
future and the past. Only one possible explanation of this fact
exists. What we call desire simply does not flow in the same
direction as the stream of visualizations, but the latter comes to
meet it. A powerful light will be thrown upon your soul life if you
will take this one fact for granted. Desire, love, hate, wishes,
interest, and so forth, form a current flowing from the future into
the past, that is, toward you.
It would take days to elaborate that in detail, but the
riddles of consciousness will be solved and the whole peculiar nature
of the soul life clarified if you start with the premise that the
current of desire, love and hate comes to meet you out of the future,
and meets the current of visualizations flowing out of the past into
the future. At every moment you are actually in the midst of this
encounter of the two streams, and considering that the present moment
of your soul life consists of such a meeting, you will readily
understand that these two currents overlap in your soul. This
overlapping is consciousness.
If at any moment of the present you search your
conscious soul life, you will find there something that acts out of
the past into the future and something that runs from the future into
the past. Consciousness can be explained in no other way than by the
overlapping of these two streams, and if you will visualize all the
damming up that comes about here, you will see that the soul takes
part in all that flows out of the past and in what streams to meet
that current out of the future. Observing the conscious soul life at
any given moment, you will see a certain interpenetration of these
two streams. Here are all the conceptions you have brought along,
there is everything that flows out of the future into the past,
meeting the current of visualizations as interest, wishes, desire,
and so forth.
Since these two currents can be distinguished quite
clearly, we will designate the soul life by two names, though the
names themselves are immaterial. If I were giving a public lecture, I
should choose curious names, as is customary. For example, I could
call one current A and the other B; then you could get right to work
on an equation, where A and B would be useful. The names are not what
matters, yet I should here like to select names that will recall to
your mind what you must already know from another angle, so that you
can contemplate it from two aspects. First, from that of the pure
empiricist who can choose any names he likes for the proven results
of his researches, that is, where the name is immaterial, and second,
from the point of view of one who selects such names because he
observes the facts clairvoyantly. Thus, we will designate the current
of visualizations, flowing from the past into the future, “the
etheric body of the soul,” and the other, the current of
desires, running from the future into the past, “the astral
body of the soul.”
Consciousness is the meeting of the astral and etheric
bodies. You can test this. Try to recall all that you have learned
from the research of clairvoyant consciousness about the etheric and
astral bodies, and to apply it here. You only need ask yourselves
what brings about the damming up, the intersection of the two
streams. The answer lies in the fact that the two currents meet in
the physical body. Assume for the moment that the physical and
etheric bodies were removed. What would happen? The current from the
past to the future would be missing, and the other, the astral
current, would have an unobstructed course. Now, that is exactly what
occurs immediately after death, with the result that during the
period of kamaloka consciousness runs backwards. Thus in following
our psychosophic paths we rediscover what we learned by way of exact
theosophy.
Many of the results of clairvoyant research will at
first contradict observations made on the physical plane because the
latter must first be properly arranged but, when this is done, the
results of clairvoyant research can invariably be verified. The
results of the two methods will coincide.
Now we will examine another phenomenon of the soul life,
in common parlance called “surprise,” “amazement.”
What exactly is this? When can we be surprised by something we
encounter? Only when, at the moment of encountering it, we are not at
once in a position to reason when our judgment is not immediately
equal to coping with the impressions made upon our soul life. The
moment our reasoning becomes equal to the task, amazement ceases.
Something our reasoning can at once cope with causes us no surprise
at all, surprise doesn't enter. In encountering a phenomenon and
experiencing surprise, amazement — perhaps even fear —
that is, in receiving a conscious impression without our reasoning
having time to intervene, feelings arise, but not at first reasoning.
In seeking the reason for this we must realize that our state of
interest, our capacity for desire, cannot flow in the same direction
as the power of reasoning, otherwise the two would coincide;
therefore, reasoning must be something different from ordinary
interest.
Neither can reasoning be identical and flow together
with the soul current from the past to the future. Otherwise,
reasoning would continuously coincide with the current of
visualizations and the entire soul life would have to take part
whenever we reason. Visualizations would have to have ceased at this
moment. Reasoning, however, is conscious; yet at the moment of
reasoning, how far we are from facing all the visualizations our soul
embraces! Reasoning is not able instantaneously to grasp the
continuous stream of the soul life, hence these two cannot coincide
either. Nor can reasoning coincide with the current from the future
to the past, otherwise, fear, anxiety, amazement, surprise would not
be possible. Reasoning, therefore, coincides with none of these
currents.
Keeping this fact in mind, let us now examine the
continuous stream of the etheric body that flows from the past to the
future. It discloses, indeed, something highly peculiar, namely, that
it not only can flow along in the soul unconsciously, so to speak,
but can become conscious. Let us keep clearly in view that
unconscious conceptions passing through the soul life can become
conscious. They are always present, but not always conscious. Let us
try by a simple example to focus our attention upon the moment at
which such unconscious visualizations become conscious. You are
walking through a picture gallery and stop to look at a picture. At
this moment the same picture bobs up in your consciousness; you have
seen it before. What was it that called up this memory? Well, it was
the impression of the new picture that magically and visibly conjured
up before your mind's eye the old visualization of the picture. If
you had not encountered the picture, the old visualization would not
have been stimulated to come to the surface. You can understand this
process by explaining it as follows. What I term my ego has entered
anew upon an interrelationship with the picture by confronting it.
The circumstance that your ego receives something new
into itself acts upon something that is contained in the continuous
stream of the soul life and thereby becomes visible again. Let us try
to get a picture of this by means of which we can describe the
process. Think of all the objects that are at the moment behind you,
but without turning around; you cannot see them. Under what
conditions can you see them without turning around? When you hold up
a mirror. Something similar must take place between the
visualizations that live along unconsciously in the soul and the
process produced by a new impression. The latter mixes with your old
visualizations in such a way as to render these visible to the mind's
eye.
Then, what is it that blots out the view of the old
visualization, rendering it invisible? It is your ego that stands in
the way and, when a new process provides the impulse for a
reflection, the result is the process of memory, of the becoming
conscious of the old visualization. The stream of memory runs
backward to the old visualization, just as the light rays run
backward to the mirror, thence to be reflected forward.
Enquiring next into the cause of such a reflection, let
us recall the highly significant fact that man's retrogressive memory
stops at a certain point. From that time back to birth he remembers
nothing. Where does memory of past events commence? In fact, which
processes of human life are the only ones that return to memory at
all? Only those in which the ego participated, which the ego had
really assimilated because it is at about the same time, according to
the demands of a certain law, that the child can start to develop his
ego visualization. Only such visualizations are remembered at all in
our physical life as were received while the ego took part as an
active force, conscious of itself.
What about this ego during the first three years of a
child's life? At first it receives all impressions unconsciously, so
to speak; it is not itself present. Then it begins to unite with all
visualizations received from without. That is the moment at which the
human ego begins to stand in front of its visualizations, placing
these behind it. Up to that time the whole life of ego visualizations
was lived purely in the life of the present; now it emerges, faces
the future in freedom, and is equipped to receive whatever comes to
meet it out of the future, but past visualizations it places behind
itself.
What must take place at the moment when the ego begins
to assimilate all visualizations, when it becomes conscious? The ego
must join the continuous current we have called the etheric body. At
the moment when the child begins to develop an ego consciousness the
stream of life has made an impression on the etheric body, and
therewith the capacity for ego consciousness comes into being. Ego
perception can never come to you from without; the visualizations
relating to the physical world are what is given from without.
Previous to the moment at which the child begins to sense his own
ego, he cannot feel his own etheric body, but from then on the ego
reflects back into itself the current of the etheric body. This gives
you the mirror as well. To sum up: While all other visualizations —
those that relate to physical space — are received by the
physical human being, the ego consciousness, the ego visualization,
arises when the ego fills out the etheric body and is reflected, as
it were, from its inner walls. The essential feature of ego
consciousness is that it is the etheric body being reflected inward.
What can bring about this inner reflection? The inner
delimitation of the etheric body. Only through this does the ego
become conscious as the result of inner reflection. We learned, you
remember, that the astral body comes to meet the etheric body. It is
the ego that fills out the etheric body and, through inner
reflection, becomes conscious of it as such. This ego consciousness
is powerfully gripped by all interest, all desires, for these implant
themselves firmly in the ego. Nevertheless, even though this takes
place to such a degree that we characterize it as egotism, there is
something peculiar about this ego perception, something in a certain
way independent of desires. There is a certain demand that the human
soul makes upon itself, readily attested by the soul; every soul
knows that mere desire cannot possibly call forth the ego. However
much you want to do it, it cannot be done. Ego consciousness does not
consist of the stream of desires any more than it does of the stream
of visualizations. It is an element fundamentally different from
either, but one that assimilates both streams. We can represent this
state of affairs graphically by drawing the ego current at right
angles to the stream of time. That gives a correct picture.
That is the only way
to account for all the psychic phenomena involved. You will always be
able to cope with these if you assume a current running at right
angles to the other two, to the one from the past to the future, and
to the one from the future to the past. That is the current
corresponding to the human ego element itself.
| Diagram 5 Click image for large view | |
There is something else, something in the nature of a
human-psychic experience, that is connected with the ego. It is the
power of reasoning. This enters with the ego. If you visualize this
picture, you will really be able to understand only the phenomenon of
surprise, of interest, not the reasoning activity of the ego. The
latter cannot possibly enter the process from the direction of the
past, and unless the ego can enter simultaneously with desire, it is
impossible for reasoning to meet the future-past current. What is
indispensable if reasoning activity is to enter with the ego current?
A reflection, and this must come about in such a way that the ego has
the unconsciously flowing visualizations positively behind itself.
That would be the case if the ego current entered from
the direction indicated by the arrow in the diagram, but were then to
change its course within the body to that shown by the other arrow,
toward the future. Now the ego has joined the current of the etheric
body, has entered the etheric body — has itself, so to speak,
become a mirror. This tallies strikingly with the facts. If the ego
has the unconsciously onward-flowing visualizations behind itself,
what does it encounter in front, toward the future? Imagine you are
looking into a mirror. If nothing is behind you, you see nothing but
an endless void, and at first that is man's view of the future. When
do you see something there? Only when something out of the past
appears. You see the past, not the future; the mirror shows you the
objects that are behind you. Now, if the ego is reflected inwardly at
the moment when the child arrives at self-consciousness, the entire
soul life from then on signifies that experiences and impressions of
the past are reflected as well. That is why you can remember nothing
that occurred before the ego became a means of reflection. If
something out of the past is to be seen in the mirror, you naturally
see nothing of the future, just as you see nothing behind the
quicksilver that lines the mirror.
It should be noted here that the child, when it is
reflected in the etheric body at the inception of the ego, remembers
nothing that happened previously. Everything is explained by the one
essential fact that the human ego, in so far as it enters the etheric
body and receives visualizations out of the past, itself becomes a
reflecting apparatus impressionable to everything it receives from
that time on.
Now let us recall the fact, already mentioned, that
there are two kinds of memories, the one resulting from the external
repetition of a perception, the other called up out of the soul by
the power of the ego, without external repetition. What must occur if
the ego is to reflect past events? We can say that, if you receive an
outer impression through a picture you have seen before and which you
encounter for the second or third time, the raying of the reflection
from the other side is thereby held back in such a manner as to make
it strike the inner soul mirror. What if no repetition of the outer
impression occurs? In that case the ego itself must gather what is to
be reflected from within, that is, it must create a substitute for
what is otherwise effected by the outer impression.
What is this ego primarily as it appears in physical
human life? It is the inner fulfillment of the etheric body. It must
therefore itself be transformed into a mirror within the etheric
body, and this is accomplished through the delimitation of the
etheric body. With regard to your outer sense impressions you are
sequestered by reason of being in a physical body, and it is due to
this fact that what lives in the etheric body can be reflected. There
must be, however, another force to account for what you remember
freely. The etheric body must have a foil, like a mirror, and this is
provided for the memories, which are called forth by the new
impression, by the sense organs, the physical body.
In the absence of anything acting from without, we must
seek the foil elsewhere. The only alternative is to employ as an
auxiliary force what approaches the ego at right angles, that is,
desire, or the current flowing toward us. This we use as a foil for
the mirror. Only by appropriately strengthening the astral body can
we call in the force of desire and develop out of the ego a force
capable of recalling to our memory those visualizations that
otherwise refuse to appear. Only by strengthening the ego, as it
expresses itself in the physical world, are we able actually to use
the current flowing out of the future and to make a mirror-foil of
it. Solely by strengthening the ego, by making it master of what
comes to us out of the future (astral body), can we do anything about
the visualizations that refuse to be mirrored, refuse to surrender to
us. If we cannot recall the visualization, it is because our desire
lacks the requisite strength. We must take out a loan in order to be
able to reflect it.
A strengthening of the ego can be brought about in two
ways. In everyday life, for example, you experience things simply by
following the continuous stream of experience. When a bell tolls you
hear the first tone, the second, third, and so forth, in order; in a
play you hear the various parts one after another, then you've
finished. With your ego you live along in the continuous stream of
etheric life but, if you systematically set about to experience the
opposite stream of life, you follow the astral current. For instance,
in the evening recall the events of the day in reverse order, or
recite the Lord's Prayer backwards. You are then not following the
usual ego current, which lives because the ego fills the etheric
body, but the opposite one, and the consequence is that you
incorporate forces out of the astral current. That is an
extraordinarily good exercise for strengthening the memory.
There is another exercise for the same purpose. If
someone suffers from a particularly poor memory, he can combat the
condition by trying with all his might to take up some occupation of
his youth. Supposing he is forty, and he tackles a book that had
entranced him at the age of fifteen. If he keeps on trying
religiously to become absorbed in it with the feeling of that earlier
time, he draws strength from the backward-flowing current. You recall
the same facts you did in the past, then the current out of the
future comes to your aid. Why, for example, does an old man like to
recall the occupations of his youth?
Such considerations can show you that actually your ego
must fortify itself from the astral current that flows to meet the
etheric current if it would strengthen the memory. If one were to pay
careful attention to such matters in teaching, the effect would be
highly beneficial. For example, seven school classes could be so
arranged as to comprise a middle class, the fourth. In the fifth
would be repeated in modified form what was studied in the third, in
the sixth the subjects of the second, in the seventh, of the first.
That would be an excellent way of strengthening the memory, and if
people would put such things into practice they would see that ideas
of that sort derive from the laws governing life.
From all this we perceive that in our ego visualization,
our ego perception, we have something that must first come into
being. . It arises in early childhood through the inward reflection
of the etheric body. No wonder there is no ego visualization in the
night, for when the ego is out in space during sleep, it naturally
cannot be reflected in the etheric body. That is why it must submerge
in unconsciousness at night. The etheric body is the current
continuously flowing in time, and in the course of time it receives
the ego visualization through the circumstance that what flows
forward in the etheric body is illuminated from the other side by the
astral body.
All that we have in the way of ego visualization is
exclusively in the etheric body; it is merely the entire etheric body
seen from within, reflecting itself within itself. Only the ego
visualization is active in the etheric body, not the ego itself. What
is the ego? It is the power of reasoning striking in at an angle. If
you would comprehend the ego you must not turn to the ego perception
but to reasoning. In relation to all else, reasoning is independent,
and we must clearly distinguish between visualizing and reasoning.
“Red” is not a verdict; reasoning stops at the sense
perception. The moment, however, the verdict “red is” is
pronounced — when the “red” is endowed with “being”
— the ego stirs, the reasoning that is directed toward the
spiritual. When the ego passes judgment based upon outer impressions,
the latter are objects of judgment.
Now, if the ego is a being apart from all its
visualizations and perceptions, as well as from self-perception (just
as a reflected image is not identical with the object reflected), and
if, further, it is the impetus of self-perception, a verdict must be
possible in relation to which the ego, as in all reasoning, feels
itself master, and not dependent upon outer perception. This occurs
at the moment, not when you have the ego visualization, but when you
pronounce the judgment “I is.” Thereby you have filled
out with reasoning capacity what otherwise lives in the “I”
without achieving consciousness. What was previously an empty bubble
is now filled with the power of reasoning, and when the ego thus
fills itself out the spirit is encompassed by reasoning.
Let us recall that reasoning is an activity of the soul,
an inner activity; that soul activities arise within, in the inner
soul life; that they lead to visualizations. Among the visualizations
that appear, the ego visualization is one. True, we found that the
ego visualization leads to a conception of the ego, but aside from
that we could learn nothing about the ego. What we did learn,
however, is that the ego visualization, though having the same
character as other visualizations entering from the physical world,
cannot originate in the outer world, the physical world. This being
the case, and since reasoning, which is one of the elements of the
soul life, must be applied to the ego, it follows that the ego must
enter the soul life from the other side. This is conclusive evidence
that just as the conception “red” enters the soul life
from without and is then encompassed by a verdict, so something in
the ego appears from the other side and acts in the same way.
When we say “I is,” we receive an impression
out of the spiritual world and encompass it with a verdict. “Red”
corresponds to physical conditions of existence. The verdict “red
is” can, as such, come about only within the soul life through
the agency of the physical world. “I is” comes from the
other direction; so we say that this impression comes from the
spiritual world. “I is” is a fact of the spiritual life,
just as “red is” is a fact of the physical life. The
usage of speech expresses this coming from the other side by
exchanging “is” for “am”: I am. The ego can
be admitted to have being [Sein, the
infinitive “to be,” used here as a noun. Ordinarily it
could be translated with “existence,” but here that would
be a half-truth. The linguistic connection with “I is,”
“I am,” etc., must be retained.] only
when it can be encompassed by a judgment; when, just as in the case
of “red,” something approaches the soul that can be
encompassed by a verdict in the same way as can something coming from
the physical world.
When I now draw a line indicating the fourth direction,
upward from below, you will not be surprised that this represents a
physical force. Graphically represented, the impressions of the
physical world proceed upward from below and manifest themselves in
the soul as sense impressions. In one plane the ego and its
bodily-physical sense organs are opposed, in the other, the currents
of the etheric and of the astral bodies. When the ego makes contact
with the physical body through the eye, the ear, etc., it receives
impressions of the physical world. These are then carried on in the
soul by reason of the latter's possessing consciousness, which in
turn arises through the impact of the etheric and astral bodies upon
each other. The whole picture shows that a comparatively good diagram
of the co-operation of the various worlds in the human soul can be
had by opposing the ego and the physical body in one plane, and at
right angles, the etheric and astral bodies.
Innumerable riddles will be solved for you if you will
thoroughly work your way through this diagram. You will see that
precisely this cross, intersected by a circle, gives you a good
picture of the soul life as it borders below on the physical, above
on the spiritual world. Now you must imagine the stream of time, and
you must rise to a visualization of it, not as something flowing
along smoothly, but as meeting the life of the senses. You must see
that the life of the ego can be comprehended only when thought of as
striking at right angles into the stream of time. With this in mind
you will readily understand that quite different forces meet in our
soul. Our soul is the stage, so to speak, where these forces
encounter each other from many directions.
As an example, take someone in whom the reasoning ego preponderates.
He will find it difficult to endow abstract concepts with sufficient
body to make them appeal directly to feeling; that is, a man like
Hegel, who is strong in reasoning, will not easily give in full
measure of what speaks to the feelings. On the other hand, one whose
every tendency tells of a rich astral life, who is full of interests
that flow against the continuous current of the physical life, will
bring with him into the world the gift for living
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concepts, because he is open to the stream coming out of
the future. He will not appear on the physical plane as a man of
thought, but rather, he will prove how readily he can clothe his
inner experiences in words that speak powerfully to men. Such a one
was Goethe.
If you think of a man as bringing over from a former
incarnation a tendency toward the one current or the other, you must
imagine in Goethe's soul a predisposition for the stream out of the
future. When he yields himself to it, he quite naturally gathers
ideas of the future as vital concepts. Once Goethe permits all this
to come into conflict with what has only been acquired in this
incarnation, with the visualizations of the recently acquired etheric
body, the result is something like what we designated worthless in
his Wandering Jew.
On the other hand, when a Hegel brings with him the gift
for extracting mighty conceptions from his reasoning, he struggles
with the current that streams from the future into the past. The fact
is, we incessantly place our ego in such a position as to cover up
the continuous stream. The ego covers it and lets the endless current
of desire come to meet it, and into this focal point we peer as into
a mirror.
I have been able to evoke for you but little out of the
infinite realm of psychosophy, but you will find the answers to many
riddles of life by taking into account the presence of the
unconscious visualizations of the etheric body. The physical body is
in constant communication with the etheric body, and just because the
visualizations are unconscious they can develop their lively activity
in the other direction toward the physical side. Furthermore,
precisely those visualizations that our consciousness is unable to
call up out of our unconscious soul life are in this way immeasurably
destructive; they develop destructive forces that penetrate our
corporeality. It is a fact that something a person has experienced at
the age of ten or twelve, and totally forgotten — something he
is incapable of raising into consciousness because the ego lacks
sufficient strength — continues to act in his etheric body and
can impair his health. That means that in the etheric body there live
visualizations that can cause sickness.
If you know that, you also know that there is a remedy.
It consists in robbing these visualizations of their power by
deflecting them in another direction. You can help the sufferer, if
he is not strong enough to do so himself, by providing him with
associations that will bring these visualizations to consciousness.
That accomplishes a great deal. It is really possible to bring a
person's conceptions to his consciousness and thus call forth
health-giving forces.
Some of you will say that that sort of thing is being
tried at the present time and, indeed, there are psychiatric cures
that consist in calling forth visualizations. I cannot here mention
the name of the school I have in mind because its aim is to unearth
only visualizations of the sexual life — visualizations to
which the matter here under discussion does not apply. In such cases
it is of no avail, and for that reason the Freudian School in Vienna
is such as to produce results that are the exact opposite of what is
aimed at.
You will have gathered that, if one goes to work
conscientiously and intelligently in observing life on the physical
plane, the knowledge acquired on the psychosophic path verifies what
reaches us through clairvoyant research, but the latter does not seek
the facts in order to see whether they tally with conditions on the
physical plane. On the contrary, the clairvoyant seeker is often
surprised himself to find the results of his research so beautifully
borne out on the physical plane. If reversed, the process would
hardly yield accurate information. Research practised on the physical
plane alone tends to group things in a wrong way and to meet facts
with a slap in the face. The fundamental impression I hope you have
gleaned from these lectures is one of justified confidence in
clairvoyant research.
That is why, in addition to all that I tell you from
clairvoyant sources, I am at pains to draw your attention from time
to time in a matter-of-fact way to the laws of the physical plane
because we are placed on this plane in order that we may learn to
know it. We have a twofold duty. On the one hand, we must study the
physical plane upon which the great world powers have not placed us
fortuitously, and we must really identify ourselves with it by
renunciative thinking. On the other hand, we have already arrived at
the stage of human development at which we are aware that we can no
longer cope with the physical plane without the aid of occult
research. Science must inevitably err without occult science as a
guide to point the lines of approach to all that can be learned
through physical research. After the establishment of physical
research at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this
necessarily remained the center of interest; now the time is ripe for
another sort of research to intervene and indicate the lines of
approach. If the occultist will not only learn this but count it
among his duties, he will have fulfilled the demands of our time,
namely, to spread the conviction that we base firmly on the physical
plane. Certainly anyone who has grasped the idea of the astral
current flowing in from the future can be depended upon in this
matter. That this is true I have already proved to you by a fact.
Only one of the many psychologists of the present has,
with no knowledge of occultism whatever, approached the study of the
soul with a fine schooling. He is Franz Brentano. He took up
psychology in the eighteen-sixties and, although what he did amounted
to no more than scholastic speculating, it was like a child's first
steps in the doctrine of desire, feeling, and reasoning. What he says
is all askew, but the tendency is significant. It could have been
right had it not been for his complete ignorance of every occult
context. The first volume of his work appeared in the spring of 1874
and the second was due in the fall of the same year, but to this day
(1910) it has not appeared. He was bound to become mired, and from
these lectures you will understand why. He had already defined and
indicated what the second volume was to contain; he had planned to
deal with the ego, with immortality. The stream of occult research,
however, failed to enter from the other side; the fructifying element
was not forthcoming. Franz Brentano lived as a child of our time,
that is, he began to arrange facts into groups, so he could not get
on. He is now living in Florence, an old man.
Wundt also wrote a psychology, but it is nothing but a
tangle of concepts. It contains nothing about the real soul life,
nothing but the author's preconceived opinions. Such people thrash
empty straw, even when dealing with the psychologies of peoples and
of languages. All sciences would come to a similar impasse unless
something came to meet them from the spiritual side.
My dear friends, you have identified yourselves with a movement in
which your store of knowledge can increase if you think of your present
knowledge as a karmic fact. In that way you will have arrived at a
crossroads, a vantage point from which vigorous co-operation in this
work is clearly discernible as a task enabling you now or in a future
incarnation to serve humanity. Do not think of that as an abstract
ideal, but keep constantly returning to it in a practical way. This
work must be made to bear fruit.
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