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Rudolf Steiner e.Lib
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Esoteric Christianity and the Mission of Christian Rosenkreutz
Rudolf Steiner e.Lib Document
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Esoteric Christianity and the Mission of Christian Rosenkreutz
Schmidt Number: S-2531
On-line since: 1st July, 2004
THE DAWN OF OCCULTISM IN THE MODERN AGE
Cassel, 29th January 1912
Today we will lead on from the lecture of the day before yesterday to
certain matters which can promote a deep personal understanding of
Anthroposophical life. If we survey our life and make real efforts to
get to the roots of its happenings, very much can be gained. We shall
recognise the justice of many things in our destiny and realise that
we have deserved them. Suppose someone has been superficial and
thoughtless in the present incarnation and is subsequently struck by a
blow of fate. It may not be possible, externally, to connect the blow
of fate directly with the thoughtlessness, but a feeling arises,
nevertheless, that there is justice in it. Then again, looking back on
our life, we find blows of fate which we can only attribute to chance,
for there seems no explanation for them whatever. These two categories
of experience are to be discovered as we survey our life.
Now it is important to make a clear distinction between apparent
chance and obvious necessity. When a man reviews his life with
reference to these two kinds of happenings, he will fail to reach any
higher stage of development unless he endeavours to have a very clear
perception of everything that seems to him to be due to chance. We
must try, above all, to have a clear perception of those things we
have not wished for, which go right against the grain. It is possible
to induce a certain attitude of soul and to say to ourselves: How
would it be if I were to take those things which I have not desired,
which are disagreeable to me, and imagine that I myself actually
really wanted them? In other words we imagine with all intensity that
we ourselves willed our particular circumstances.
In regard to apparently fortuitous happenings we must picture the
possibility of having ourselves put forth a deliberate and strong
effort of will in order to bring them about. Meditatively as it were,
we must induce this attitude to happenings which, on the face of them,
seem to be purely fortuitous in our lives. Every human being today is
capable of this mental exercise. If we proceed in this way, a very
definite impression will gradually be made upon the soul; we shall
feel as though something were striving to be released from us. The
soul says to itself: Here, as a mental image, I have before me a
second being; he is actually there. We cannot get rid of this image
and the being gradually becomes our double. The soul begins to feel
a real connection with this being who has been imagined into
existence, to realise that this being does actually exist within us.
If this conception deepens into a vivid and intense experience, we
become aware that this imagined being is by no means without
significance. The conviction comes to us: this being was already once
in existence and at that time you had within you the impulses of will
which led to the apparently chance happenings of today. Thereby we
reach a deeply rooted conviction that we were already in existence
before coming down into the body. Every human being today can have
this conviction.
And now let us consider the question of the successive incarnations of
the human being. What is it that reincarnates? How can we discover the
answer to this question?
There are three fundamental and distinct categories of experiences in
the life of the soul Firstly our mental pictures, our ideas, our
thoughts. In forming a mental picture our attitude may well be one of
complete neutrality; we need not love or hate what we picture
inwardly, neither need we feel sympathy or antipathy towards it.
Secondly there are the moods and shades of feelings which arise
alongside the ideas or the thoughts; the cause of these moods in the
life of feeling is that we like or love one thing, dislike or abhor
another, and so forth. The third kind of experience in the life of the
soul are the impulses of the will. There are, of course, transitional
stages, but speaking generally these are the three categories.
Moreover it is fundamentally characteristic of a healthy life of soul
to be able to keep these three kinds of experiences separate and
distinct from one another. Our life of thought and mental presentation
arises because we receive stimuli from outside. Nobody will find it
difficult to realise that the life of thought is the most closely
bound up with the present incarnation. This, after all, is obvious
when we bear in mind that speech is the instrument whereby we express
our thoughts; and speech, or language, must, in the nature of things,
differ in every incarnation. We no more bring language with us at the
beginning of a new incarnation than we bring thoughts and ideas. The
language as well as the thoughts must be acquired afresh in each
incarnation. Hebbel
( 51 )
once wrote something very remarkable in his
diary. The idea occurred to him that a scene in which the reincarnated
Plato was being soundly chastised by the teacher for his lack of
understanding of Plato would produce a very striking effect in a play!
A man does not carry over his thought and mental life from one
incarnation to another, and he takes practically nothing of it with
him into his postmortem existence. After death we evolve no thoughts
or mental pictures but have direct perceptions, just as our physical
eyes have perceptions of colour. After death the world of concepts is
seen as a kind of net stretching across existence. But our feelings,
our moods of heart and feeling these we retain after death, and we
also bring their forces with us as qualities and tendencies of soul
into a new earthly life. For example, even if a child's life of
thought is undeveloped, we shall be able to notice quite definite
tendencies in his life of feeling. And because our impulses of will
are linked with feelings we also take them with us into our life after
death. If, for instance, a man succumbs to a mistaken idea, the effect
upon his life of feeling is not the same as if he devotes himself to
the truth. For a long time after death we suffer from the consequences
of false mental presentations and ideas. Our attention must therefore
turn to the qualities and moods of feeling and the impulses of will
when we ask ourselves what actually passes on from one incarnation to
another.
Suppose something painful happened to us ten or twenty years ago. In
thought today we may be able to remember it quite distinctly and in
detail. But the actual pain we felt at the time has all but faded
away; we cannot re-experience the stirrings of feelings and impulses
of will by which it was accompanied. Think for a moment of Bismarck
( 52 )
and the overwhelming difficulties we know
he had to face when he took his decision to go to war in 1866; think
of what tumultuous feelings, what teeming impulses of will were
working in Bismarck at that time! But even when writing his memoirs,
would Bismarck have been conscious of these emotions and resolves with
anything like the same intensity? Of course not! Man's memory between
birth and death is composed of thoughts and mental pictures. It may
be, of course, that even after ten or twenty years a feeling of pain
comes over us at the recollection of some sorrowful event, but
generally speaking the pain will have greatly diminished after this
lapse of time; in thought, however, we can remember the very details
of the event. If we now picture to ourselves that we actually willed
certain painful events, that in reality we welcomed things which in
our youth we may have hated, the very difficulty of this exercise
rouses the soul and thus has an effect upon the life of feeling.
Suppose, for example, a stone once crashed down upon us. We now try
with all intensity to picture that we ourselves willed it so. Through
such mental pictures that we ourselves have willed the chance
events in our life we arouse, in the life of feeling, memory of
our earlier incarnations. In this way we begin to realise that we are
rooted in the spiritual world, we begin to understand our destiny. We
have brought with us, from our previous incarnation, the will for the
chance events of this life.
To devote ourselves in meditation to such thoughts and elaborate them,
is of the highest importance. Between death and a new birth too, much
transpires, for this period is infinitely rich in experiences
purely spiritual experiences, of course. We therefore bring with us
qualities of feeling and impulses of will from the period between
death and a new birth, that is to say, from the spiritual world. Upon
this rests a certain occurrence of very great importance in the modern
age, but one of which little notice is taken. The occurrence is to be
found in the lives of many people today, but it is usually passed by
unnoticed. It is, however, the task of Anthroposophy to point to such
an occurrence and its significance. Let me make it clear by an
example.
Suppose a man has occasion to go somewhere or other and his path takes
him in the wake of another human being, a child perhaps. Suddenly the
man catches sight of a yawning chasm at the edge of the path along
which the child is walking. A few steps further and the child will
inevitably fall over the edge into the chasm. He runs to save the
child, runs and runs, entirely forgetting about the chasm. Then he
suddenly hears a voice calling out to him from somewhere: Stand
still! He halts as though nailed to the spot. At that moment the
child catches hold of a tree and also stops, so that no harm befalls.
If no voice had called at that moment the man would inevitably have
fallen into the chasm. He wonders where the voice came from. He finds
no single soul who could have called, but he realises that he would
quite certainly have lost his life if he had not heard this voice;
yet, however closely he investigates he cannot find that the warning
came from any physical voice.
Through close self-observation many human beings living at the present
time would be able to recognise a similar experience in their lives.
But far too little attention is paid to such things. An experience of
this kind may pass by without leaving a trace then the
impression fades away and no importance is attached to the experience.
But suppose a man has been attentive and realises that it was not
without significance. The thought may then occur to him: At that point
in your life you were facing a crisis, a karmic crisis; your life
should really have ended at that moment, for you had forfeited it. You
were saved by something akin to chance, and since then a second life
has as it were been grafted onto the first; this second life is to be
regarded as a gift bestowed upon you and you must act accordingly.
When such an experience makes a man feel that his life from that time
onwards has been bestowed upon him as a gift, this means that he can
be accounted a follower of Christian Rosenkreutz. For this is how
Christian Rosenkreutz calls the souls whom he has chosen. A man who
can recall such an occurrence and everyone sitting here can
discover something of the kind in their lives if they observe closely
enough has the right to say to himself: Christian Rosenkreutz
has given me a sign from the spiritual world that I belong to his
stream. Christian Rosenkreutz has added such an experience to my
karma. This is the way in which Christian Rosenkreutz chooses his
pupils; this is how he gathers his community. A man who is conscious
of this experience knows with certainty that a path has been pointed
out to him which he must follow, trying to discover how he can
dedicate himself to the service of rosicrucianism. If there are some
people who have not yet recognised the sign, they will do so later on;
for he to whom the sign has once been given will never again be free
from it.
Such an experience comes to a man because during the period between
his last death and his present birth he was in contact with Christian
Rosenkreutz in the spiritual world. It was then that Christian
Rosenkreutz chose us, imparting an impulse of will which leads us now
to such experiences. This is the way in which spiritual connections
are established. Materialistic thought will naturally regard all these
things as hallucinations, just as it regards the experience of Paul at
Damascus as having been an hallucination. The logical conclusion to be
drawn from this is that the whole of Christianity is based upon an
hallucination, therefore upon error. For theologians are perfectly
well aware that the event at Damascus is the foundation stone of the
whole of subsequent Christianity. And if this foundation stone itself
is nothing but an illusion, then, if thought is consistent, everything
built upon it must obviously be fallacy.
An attempt has been made today to show that certain happenings,
certain experiences in life may indicate to us how we are interwoven
in the spiritual fabric of world existence. If we develop the memory
belonging to our life of feeling, then we live our way into the
spiritual life which streams and pulses through the world. Theoretical
knowledge alone does not make men true Anthroposophists; those who
understand their own life and the life of other human beings in the
sense indicated today they and they alone are true
Anthroposophists. Anthroposophy is a basic power which can transform
our life of soul. And the goal of the work in our groups must be that
the intimate experiences of the soul change in character, that through
the gradual development of the memory belonging to the life of feeling
we become aware of immortality. The true theosophist or
Anthroposophist must have this conviction: If you really will, if you
apply the forces within you in all their strength, then you can
utterly transform your character. We must learn to feel and experience
that an immortal element holds sway in ourselves and in everything
else. An Anthroposophist becomes an Anthroposophist because his
faculties remain receptive his whole life long, even when his hair is
white. And this realisation that progress is possible always and
forever will transform our whole spiritual life today.
One of the consequences of materialism is that human beings become
prematurely old. Thirty years ago, for example, children looked quite
different; there are children today of ten or twelve years of age who
give the impression almost of senility. Human beings have become so
precocious, especially the grown-ups. They maintain that lies such as
that of babies being brought by the stork should not be told to
children, that children should be enlightened on such matters. But
this enlightenment itself is really a lie. Those who come after us
will know that the souls of our children hover down as bird-like
spirit forms from the higher worlds. To have an imaginative conception
of many things still beyond our comprehension is of very great
importance. As regards the fact in question it might be possible to
find a better imaginative picture than the story of the stork. What
matters is that spiritual forces operate between the child and his
parents or teachers, a kind of secret magnetism must be there. We must
ourselves believe in any imaginative picture we give to the children.
If it is a question of explaining death to them, we must point to
another happening in nature. We can say: See how the butterfly flies
out of the chrysalis. The same thing happens to the human soul after
death But we must ourselves believe that the world is arranged in
such a way that the forces in the butterfly emerging from the
chrysalis present us with an image of the soul going forth from the
body. The world-spirit has inscribed such a picture in nature to draw
our attention to the process. It is tremendously important to be
always capable of learning, of remaining young, independently of our
physical body. And that is the great task of theosophy that has become
Anthroposophy: to bring to the world the rejuvenation which it needs.
We must get beyond the banal and the purely material. To recognise
soul and spirit as powers operating in life this must be the
aim of the work in our groups. We must be permeated more and more with
the knowledge that the soul can gain mastery over the external world.
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Last Modified: 07-Oct-2024
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