LECTURE VII
Hebrew - English Bible
N
our efforts to understand existence it is our
practice to trace the course of some aspect of its development up to
the present time, and we have had many opportunities of becoming
familiar with the idea that everything we perceive around us is in
course of evolution. We must get used to applying the idea of
evolution more widely, we must apply it in spheres not usually
associated with it today — for instance, we must apply it to
the life of the soul. We probably do recognise it as it manifests
itself outwardly in the life of the individual between birth and
death. But so far as humanity as a whole is concerned, people
immediately think of evolution as an ascent from the condition of the
lower animals and draw the conclusion — even from the
standpoint of modern knowledge a somewhat fanciful one — that
the human has evolved out of the animal — as if the higher
could, without more ado, evolve out of the lower! It is of course not
my task in this cycle to show in detail, as I have often done, that
our present consciousness has undergone a far-reaching evolution,
that the kind of consciousness, the kind of soul-life we have today,
was preceded by another form of consciousness. We have often
described this earlier form as a kind of lower clairvoyant
consciousness. Our modern consciousness furnishes us with mental
images of outer objects by means of external perception. But that
other earlier consciousness can best be studied if we look back to
the Moon evolution.
The most outstanding
difference between the evolution of the Moon and that of our present
earth is that the old form of clairvoyance, a kind of
picture-consciousness, has been superseded by the present-day
object-consciousness. I have for many years been calling attention to
this, and years ago I was able to give information out of the Akasha
Chronicle on the subject of evolution. It appeared in the early
essays of the magazine Lucifer-Gnosis.
[ 1 ]
There I pointed out that the old, dreamlike picture-consciousness
which characterised our own nature in former times has developed into
our earth-consciousness, into what today gives us consciousness of
external things, consciousness of things outside us in space as
contrasted with what we ourselves are in our inner being. This
ability to distinguish between external objects and our own inner
life is what characterises our present state of consciousness. When
we have an object in front of us — let us say a rose — we
say: “That rose is there in space! It is separated from us; we
stand at a different spot from it.” We perceive the rose, and
make a mental image of it. The mental image is within us, the rose is
outside. The distinction between outer and inner is the mark of our
present-day consciousness. Consciousness on the Moon was not like
that. Beings with the Moon-consciousness made no such distinction.
Suppose that when you looked at the rose you were not conscious that
the rose was outside, and that you were making a mental image of it,
but that you felt “The real being of this rose which hovers
there in space is not confined to the space which it occupies, but
its being extends outward into space, and is actually in me.”
Indeed you could go further. Suppose that when you looked at the sun
you did not feel that the sun was above you and that you were below,
but felt that while you were forming a mental image of the sun it was
within you; suppose your consciousness was taking hold of it in amore
or less spiritual way! Then there would be no distinction between
outer and inner. If you can make that clear to yourselves, you will
have grasped the outstanding characteristic of consciousness as it
was throughout the Moon evolution.
Another quality of
this consciousness was that it was pictorial; things did not appear
directly as objects, but as images, just as today dreams often unfold
as imagery. For example, a dream can take its course in such a way
that a fire external to ourselves appears as a being radiating light.
It was somewhat in this way that consciousness on the Moon perceived
things. It was a pictorial consciousness, at the same time permeated
with the quality of inwardness.
There was yet another
essential in which the consciousness of that time differed from that
of our present time. It did not work in such a way that outer objects
would have been there at all as they are for our present
earth-consciousness. For the consciousness of the Moon period what we
today call our environment, what we perceive in the vegetable, the
mineral, the human kingdoms as sense-objects, was not there. What was
there — on a lower, dreamlike level — was something
similar to what there is in the soul today when the power of seership
awakens, when conscious clairvoyance awakens. The first awakening of
clairvoyant consciousness is of such a nature that to begin with it
does not extend to external Beings. This is a source of countless
deceptions to those who are training themselves esoterically to
develop clairvoyance.
Such a training
progresses by stages. There is a first stage which unfolds in various
ways. In it the student sees many things around him. But he would
make a great mistake if he were straightway to think that what he
sees around him, so to say in spiritual space, is also spiritual
reality. Johannes Thomasius in my Mystery Play goes through this
stage of astral clairvoyance. Let me remind you of the scenes which
rise before his soul as he sits in meditation down-stage, and feels
in his soul the dawn of the spiritual world. Pictures arise in his
soul, and the first one is that the Spirit of the Elements brings
before him persons whom he has previously known in life. In the Play,
Johannes Thomasius has come to know Professor Capesius and Doctor
Strader. He knew them on the physical plane, and there formed certain
impressions of them. Then, when after his great sorrow his
clairvoyant capacity breaks through, he sees them again. He sees them
in remarkable forms. He sees Capesius as a young man, as he was at
the age of twenty-five or twenty-six, and not as he is at the moment
when he, Johannes Thomasius, sits meditating; and he sees Doctor
Strader as he will be in his present incarnation when he is old. This
and many other pictures pass through the soul ofJohannes Thomasius.
These pictures which are really living in the soul through meditation
can only be represented in the play as happening on the stage. It
would be quite wrong for Johannes Thomasius to regard this as
deception. The only right attitude towards all this would be to say
to himself that he cannot yet know how far this is reality or
deception. He does not know whether what the pictures show is an
external spiritual reality or not; that is, he does not know whether
it is something inscribed in the Akashic record or whether he has
expanded his own self to a world. It could be either, and he must
recognise that fact. It is only from the moment when the Devachan
consciousness begins, when in Devachan he perceives the spiritual
reality of a being whom he knows on the physical plane — Maria
— that he is able to look back again and to discriminate
between reality and mere picture-consciousness. Thus you can see that
man has to pass through a stage in the course of his esoteric
development in which he is surrounded by pictures, but is unable to
distinguish between what is a manifestation of spiritual reality and
what is merely picture. The scenes of the Mystery Play of course were
intended to express spiritual realities. The appearance of Professor
Capesius is a real picture of the young Capesius, as it is inscribed
in the Akashic record, and the appearance of Doctor Strader is the
real Strader as he will be in his old age. They are intended to be
real in the play, only Johannes Thomasius does not know it.
The stage of
consciousness I have just described was experienced on the Moon, only
at a lower, more dreamlike level, so that no faculty of
discrimination was possible. The ability to discriminate only began
later. You must try to get a thorough grasp of what I am telling you.
Let us bear in mind that the clairvoyant lives in a kind of
picture-consciousness. But during the Moon period the pictures which
arose were in the main quite different from the objects of our
earthly consciousness; and the same thing applies today in the early
stages of clairvoyance. To begin with, the clairvoyant does not see
spiritual things at all; he sees pictures, and the question is what
do these pictures signify? In the first stages of clairvoyance they
do not express real spiritual Beings, but a kind of organic
consciousness. The experience is a pictorial representation, a
projection into space, of what is actually taking place in himself.
To take an actual example, when the clairvoyant begins to develop
these forces in himself, he can have the experience of seeing two
luminous globes far outside in space. He sees pictures of two globes
in luminous colour. If he were then to think to himself “there
outside me are two Beings,” the probability is that he would be
quite wrong; at any rate that would be the case to begin with. What is
happening is that his clairvoyance is projecting outwards into space
forces which are at work in himself, and he sees them as two globes.
And these two globes could represent what is at work in his astral
body to produce within him the power of sight in his two eyes. This
power of sight can be projected outwards in the form of two globes.
Thus what is actually to be seen is an inner faculty showing itself
as an external phenomenon in astral space. It would be a very great
mistake for such an experience to be taken to herald the external
presence of spiritual Beings.
It would be a still
greater error if in these early stages by some means or other it were
to happen that voices were heard, and these voices taken as
inspirations from outside. That is the greatest error into which one
can fall. Such an experience can hardly be more than an echo of an
inner process; and while what appears in picture form, in colour,
usually represents fairly pure inner processes, voices as a rule
manifest lower and rather worthless elements of soul-life. It is best
for anyone who begins to hear voices to cultivate the greatest
distrust of them. The early stages of these imaginal representations
should always be received with the greatest caution. It is a kind of
organic consciousness, a projection outwards into space of
one's own inner being. Such an organic consciousness was quite
normal during the Moon evolution. The human being at that stage
scarcely perceived anything except what was happening to himself.
I have often called
attention to an important saying of Goethe's: “The eye
has been formed by the light for the light.” This saying should
be taken quite seriously. All man's organs have been formed by
his environment, out of his environment. It is a superficial
philosophy which stresses only one side of this truth, that without
the eye man could not perceive light. For the other important aspect
of the truth is that without light the eye could never have
developed; and in the same way without sound there would have been no
ear. Looked at from a deeper standpoint Kantianism is very
superficial, because it only gives half the truth. The light which
weaves and floods throughout the cosmos — that is the cause of
the organs of vision. During the Moon period, the main task of the
Beings who took part in the development of our universe was the
construction of our organs. First these organs have to be built up;
then they are able to perceive. Our present objective consciousness
is due to the fact that organs have first been formed for it. The
sense organs, as purely physical organs, had already been formed on
Saturn, with the eye somewhat like the photographer's camera
obscura. Purely physical apparatuses like that can perceive nothing.
They are constructed according to purely physical laws. In the Moon
period the organs acquired an inner life. Thus on Saturn the eye was
so formed that it was merely a physical apparatus; at the Moon stage,
through the sunlight which fell upon it from without, it was
transformed into an organ of perception, an organ of consciousness.
The essence of this activity during the Moon evolution is that the
organs were, so to say, drawn forth from the Beings. During the earth
period light works essentially on the plants, maintains plant
development. We see the outward result of this activity of light in
our flora. During the Moon evolution light did not act in this way,
it drew forth our organs; and what was perceived by man at that time
was this work upon his own organs. He perceived it in the form of
pictures which seemed, it is true, to fill cosmic space. The pictures
seemed to be spread out in space. In reality they merely represented
the work of elementary existence upon the human organs. During the
Moon period what man perceived was his own inner becoming, he
perceived this work upon himself, saw the way he was fashioning
himself, the way he was evolving his perceiving eye out of his own
being. Thus the outer world was an inner world, because the entire
outer world was working upon his inner being. And he made no
distinction between outer and inner. He did not perceive the sun as
external to himself. He did not separate the sun from himself, but
within himself he felt his eyes coming into existence. And this
active coming into existence of his eyes expanded for him into a
pictorial perception which filled space. That was how he perceived
the sun, but it was an inner process. The characteristic thing about
the Moon-consciousness was that one was surrounded by a world of
pictures, but these pictures represented an inner development, an
inner formation of soul. Thus the Moon-man was enveloped in the
astral and felt his own development as an external world. Today it
would be an illness to perceive this inner development as an outer
world, not to distinguish these pictures from the world outside, to
perceive the outside world merely as a reflection of one's own
growth. During the Moon evolution it was normal. For instance, man
perceived in his own being the work of those Beings who later became
the Elohim. He perceived the activity of the Elohim somewhat as today
you might perceive your blood flowing into you! It was inside him,
but it was reflected in pictures from without.
But on the Moon such
a consciousness was the only one possible. For what happens upon our
earth has to take place in harmony with the whole cosmos. A
consciousness such as man has upon the earth, with this distinction
between outer and inner, with this perception that real objects are
there outside us, and that our inwardness exists alongside them,
called for the whole evolutionary transition from the Moon to the
earth, called for an entirely different kind of cleavage in our
cosmic system. During the Moon evolution, there was no separation
between Moon and earth, as there is today. We have to think of the
Moon as the present earth would be if the moon were still united with
it. So all the other planets, including the sun, were quite
differently formed; and under the conditions which then obtained only
a picture-consciousness was possible. It was only after our whole
cosmos had assumed the form it now has, encompassing the earth, that
our present objective consciousness could develop.
Such a consciousness
as man has on earth today was withheld from him until the time of
earth evolution. Not only was man without it, but none of the other
Beings whom we speak of as belonging to this or that hierarchy had
it. It would be superficial to think, because the angels underwent
their human stage on the Moon, that they must therefore have had on
the Moon such a consciousness as man has today on the earth. It was
not so, and this is what distinguishes them from men — that they
experienced their humanity in another consciousness. An exact
repetition of the past never takes place. Each evolutionary impulse
happens once only, and happens for its own sake and not for the sake
of repeating something. Thus to produce what we know today as human,
earthly consciousness all the processes which have actually brought
this earth about were needed — for that purpose man had to be
there as man. It was impossible for such a form of consciousness to
develop at an earlier stage of evolution. To us an object is
something outside us; earlier, all the Beings of whom we can speak
had a consciousness which made no distinction between outer and
inner, so that it would have been nonsense for any of them to say:
“Something is standing before me.” Even the Elohim could
not say that; they had no such experience. They could only say:
“We live and weave in the cosmos; we create, and in creating
are aware of this our creation; objects do not stand before us, do
not appear to be before us.” To say “objects appear
before us” conveys a situation in which we are confronted by
something real formed in an external space from which we ourselves
are separated. This did not come about even for the Elohim until the
time of earth evolution. During the Moon evolution, when these Elohim
felt themselves weaving and working in the light which streamed from
the Sun upon the Moon, they might have said to themselves: “We
feel ourselves to be within this light, we feel how with this light
we sink into the beings who live as men on the Moon; we speed through
space with this light.” But they could never have said:
“We see this light outside us.” There was no such thing
on the Moon. That was a completely new earth experience.
When at a certain
stage in the Genesis account the momentous words occur And God said,
Let there be light, it meant that something new had happened, that
the Elohim did not merely feel themselves to be flowing with the
light, but that light streamed back to them from objects, that
objects appeared to them from without. This is expressed by the
writer of the Genesis account when to the words And God said, Let
there be light he adds: And God saw the light. In this ancient
document there is nothing superfluous, nothing meaningless. If only
men could learn, among much else that this document could teach them,
to ascribe to it nothing that is not pregnant with meaning, to take
nothing in it as an empty phrase! The writer of the Genesis account
wrote nothing unnecessary, nothing by way of commonplace
embellishment to enhance the beauty of the creation of light; he does
not make the Elohim say anything like this: “We see the light
and are very pleased with ourselves that we have made it so
well.” What the brief sentence emphasises, what it signifies,
is simply that something new has come about.
Moreover it does not
say merely And God saw the light, but that He saw that it was
beautiful — or good.
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Note that in the
Hebrew tongue the distinction between “beautiful” and
“good” was not made as it is today. The Hebrew language
has the same word for good and for beautiful. What is the
significance of this? In ancient Sanskrit, even in German, there is
still an echo of what it meant. The word “beautiful”
covers all words in all languages which mean that an inner spiritual
element reveals itself in an external form. To be beautiful means
that something inward is externally manifest. Today when we use the
word “beauty” we are thinking most truly when we hold
that an inner spiritual reality in the beautiful object is
represented on its surface in physical form. We say that something is
beautiful if the spiritual, so to say, shines through what is
externally sense-perceptible. When does a marble sculpture become a
thing of beauty? When its form arouses the illusion that spirit
indwells it. Beauty is the manifestation of the spiritual through the
external. Thus when in Genesis we come to the words God saw the
light, we can say that they convey the specific quality of earth
evolution; also that what could formerly only be experienced
subjectively now manifests itself from without; that the spirit
presents itself in its external manifestation. Thus we can paraphrase
the biblical words by saying “and the Elohim experienced the
consciousness that something in which they themselves formerly
existed confronted them as an external phenomenon; and they realised
that the spirit was behind this appearance and came to expression in
the external.” This is the significance of the word
“beautiful” or “good.” Wordy explanations
will not help us to understand the Genesis account, but only diligent
search for the secrets which are really hidden behind the words. Then
research will yield rich fruits; whereas all too many interpretations
are nothing but tiresome pedantry.
Let us go a step
further. We have seen that the characteristic features of the Moon
evolution were only able to come about through the separation of the
Sun from the Moon. Then we have seen that during the earth evolution
it again became necessary for the sun to separate off from the earth;
we have seen that a duality is necessary for a life of full
consciousness. The earth element had to withdraw. But in such a
withdrawal something else is also involved; the elementary conditions
of the moon nature and of the sun nature change, become different. If
you make a study of our present sun, even from a purely physical
aspect you are obliged to say to yourselves: “The conditions
which we have on earth and which we call solid and liquid are not to
be found in the physical sun.” The most you can say is that the
sun still condenses to the gaseous state. This is recognised by
modern physics. Such a separation of elementary conditions comes
about through the severing of what was previously a unity.
We have seen that the
earth develops in such a way that a gradual densification downward
takes place from warmth to solid, to earth, and that what is above as
elementary existence light-ether, sound-ether, life-ether —
seems to press inwards from without. But this description does not
fit the part which goes out as the sun. It would be better therefore
to say that there are seven states of elementary existence. The
first, the most rarefied state, which constitutes and brings about
life; then what we call number, or sound-ether; then light-ether;
then warmth-ether; then we have air, or the gaseous element, the
watery element and fmally the earthy or solid. It is in the earth
that we have to look mainly for the elements up as far as warmth.
Warmth permeates the earth, whereas the earth only shares in light in
so far as the Beings in its environment — or if you like the
bodies in its environment — take part in the life of the earth.
Light streams upon the earth from the sun. If we wish to locate the
three higher elementary states — light-ether, the ether of
spiritual sound, and life-ether — we must place them in the
sphere of the sun. In the earth we have to look for the solid, fluid
and gaseous elements; warmth is shared by both earth and sun.
The Sun separated off
for the first time during the Moon evolution. It was then that the
light was for the first time active from without, but not then as
light. I have just pointed out that the sentence in Genesis which
reads And God saw the light ... could not have been spoken in
respect of the Moon evolution. There one would have had to say that
the Elohim speeded through space with the light, were in the light,
but saw it not. Just as today one swims in water and moves forward in
it without actually seeing it, so one did not see the light, but
light was a bearer of the work in cosmic space. It was with the
coming of earth evolution that light began to appear, to be
reflected by objects.
It was natural that
this, which held good for light on the Moon, should itself reach a
higher stage of development during earth evolution. It is therefore
to be expected that what applied to light on the Moon should during
earth evolution apply to the sound-ether. This would involve that
what we call spiritual sound was not perceived by the Elohim as
reverberating back to them in the manner of the reflected light.
Thus, if Genesis wished to convey that evolution was advancing from
the activity of the light-ether to that of sound-ether, it would have
to say something like this: “And the Elohim saw the light in
the developing earth, and saw that it was beautiful.” But it
could not go on in the same way to say: “And the Elohim during
this phase perceived the sound-ether”; it would have to say
“they lived and wove in it.” Nor could it be said of the
second “day” of creation that the Elohim perceived the
stir which separated the elements above from those below; it could
not be said of this work of the Elohim that they perceived.
The words “perceive” and “beautiful” would
have had to be omitted. Then the description would correspond with
what can be observed through Spiritual Science.
Thus the seer who
wrote the Genesis account had, when describing the second
“day,” to leave out the words: And God saw ...
Now look at Genesis.
On the first “day” it reads: And God saw the light,
that it was good. On the second day of creation, after the end
of the first day, it says: And God said, Let there be a firmament
in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the
waters ... and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the
evening and the morning were the second day. The sentence
And God saw ..., which we find on the first day, is left out
on the second day. Genesis gives the facts as we should expect them
to be given from what we have been able to observe by spiritual
scientific method.
Here again is a
knotty point of which the commentators of the nineteenth century have
not known what to make. There have been commentators who said:
“What does it matter if the second time the words are omitted?
The writer just forgot them.” Men should learn that Genesis not
only records nothing irrelevant, but also omits nothing relevant. The
writer has forgotten nothing There is a profound reason why on the
second day of creation these words are not to be found. Here we have
another example — I could quote many — of what fills us
with immense reverence for such ancient records.
We could learn much
from these ancient writers, who really needed to take no oath, but
followed of their own accord the rule of telling the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth which they knew. They felt through and through
that every word that stands there must be sacred to us, and equally
that nothing essential must be omitted.
We have now gained an
insight into the composition of what are called the first and second
“days” of creation. Anyone who discovers through
spiritual investigation what lies behind things might well say to
himself, as he turns to his Bible, “It would be marvellous, it
would be astounding, if these intimate details which can be
discovered by scrupulous spiritual investigation should be
corroborated by the words of the ancient seer who took part in the
making of Genesis.” And when he finds that the astounding thing
is true, a wonderful feeling comes over him — a feeling such as
should indeed penetrate human souls if they are once more to
appreciate the holiness of this ancient document.
Notes:
1.
Many of these articles were subsequently published in English in
book form as
Atlantis and Lemuria
(Anthroposophical Publishing Co., 1923).
2.
The English Authorised Version uses the word “good.”
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