VII
T
IS NATURAL, though it is usually ignored by science, that man
as he is simply cannot know one part of his being. As he looks out
upon the world it shows itself, roughly expressed, as an ascending
scale from the mineral kingdom through the plant and animal kingdoms
up to man. It goes without saying that man must assume some creative
force behind all the forms he perceives around him in the
kingdoms of nature. The point is, however, that man gains knowledge
of the world he lives in just because the mineral, plant, and animal
kingdoms are outside him and he can observe them. As to all man has
within himself, however, he can only gain knowledge of that insofar
as the same forces are at work in him as are active in the three
kingdoms of nature outside him. The forces active within him which
transcend those three kingdoms he cannot know by the usual
methods of knowing nature — not in the least. It is just what
man has within himself over and above the kingdoms of nature that
enables him to build up systematically a knowledge of those kingdoms
outside him. Just as little as the eye, whose purpose it is to see
outwardly, can see itself, just so little can man gain knowledge of
what in himself is there in order that he may acquire knowledge. This
is a very simple idea, but sound.
It is impossible for
the eye to see itself because it is there to see out, and it is
impossible for those forces in man that are there to acquire outer
knowledge, to acquire knowledge of themselves. Further, it is these
very forces that represent what it is in man that makes him something
more than an animal. Materialistic Darwinism disposes of this fact
easily by simply leaving out of account the fact that this special
human power of acquiring knowledge itself cannot be known by man's
usual instrument for knowledge. Recognizing that this power is
unknowable, science denies its existence and accordingly considers
man only insofar as he is still animal. You see on what the peculiar
fallacy, the illusion of materialistic Darwinism rests. Man cannot
know in himself those forces that are the actual means of knowledge.
But the eye can see another eye, and for this reason, other
things being equal, it can believe in itself. With the faculty of
knowledge this is not the case. It would be logically possible
for a man to confront another man and perceive in him the knowing
faculty that raises him above animals. Logically, that is. But even
that is actually impossible, for the very reasons implied in what we
have described previously about the effects of thinking.
What does ordinary
knowledge involve in the external world? We saw that it involves a
perpetual destruction of the nerve structures in the brain. This is
an actual external process. The creative forces on the other hand —
those that really distinguish man from the animal — cannot
develop at all in our waking life when we normally acquire knowledge.
In this life they must behave so as not to interfere with the wearing
away of the nerve structures. Therefore in waking life these forces
are at rest. They sleep.
We have recognized a
great truth if we can thoroughly enter into the thought that all that
would have to be known to realize the full fallacy of materialistic
Darwinism, even on the physical plane, is actually asleep in our
waking life; that what raises man above the animal is at rest and a
destructive process is taking place. The creative forces that bring
forth the animal organism are not so far perfected as those at work
in the organism of man. In our waking life the latter are inactive,
and the process that takes their place is perpetually destroying just
what in man transcends the animal. These very creative forces are
destroyed during waking life. They are not present at all, but during
sleep they appear and begin building up again what has been
destroyed. These creative forces that raise man above the animal can
really be perceived in a sleeping man. So we should have to say that
whatever it is that repairs in sleeping man the forces he spends in
his waking life, must be the forces that raise him above the animals.
These forces are still
unknown to external natural science, which is only beginning to
surmise them. Science, however, is on the way and one day will reveal
these forces by purely external methods. Indeed, there are already
exceptions to the statement that the forces leading man out beyond
the animal nature are ordinarily unobservable in him. When science
once learns to distinguish these forces in man it will discover in
the sleeping human body the physical evidence of man's transcending
the animal kingdom. When it distinguishes the regenerative forces in
man from what is present in the animal kingdom also, it will
recognize how the creative forces active in the earth's life to raise
man beyond the animal are awake only when man sleeps. From all this
we can gather that in self-knowledge man's creative forces, the real
human forces, can only be perceived by man when he becomes
clairvoyant during sleep; that is, when in a condition otherwise like
sleep he awakes clairvoyantly. In the fifth lecture we already
indicated this fact.
Today I have said that
to some extent, from the processes observable in sleeping man,
science will after a time find indications of the forces whereby man
transcends the animal, but they will only be indications. These
forces, when they appear to clairvoyant consciousness today, are seen
to be of such a nature that they cannot be revealed externally to the
senses in their true form. It will be possible to indicate their
existence by deductions from scientific facts. Apart from their not
being perceptible in their essence there is quite another reason why
it will become possible to discover them if not to perceive them.
These human creative forces have a very special relation to all the
other forces of nature. We are here approaching a difficult subject,
but it may be possible to make it clear in the following way.
Let us imagine we have
here the receiver of an air-pump, say a glass bell-jar, and suppose
we succeed in making a really perfect vacuum inside it. That is very
nearly possible ordinarily. Everyone whose intellect is bound to the
world of sense will now say, “Inside there is no air, only an
empty space; we cannot go any farther, there cannot be less than no
air inside.” Actually that is not true. We can pump until no
air at all is left, then go on pumping until we get a space still
more empty of air than a vacuum. People dependent on the material
will find it difficult to imagine this “less than nothing.”
Or, suppose you have ten shillings in your pocket. You can gradually
spend them until you have nothing left. In this domain of life there
is a real “less than nothing.” It is often one of the
strongest realities — you can go into debt for a few
shillings. In practical life less-than-nothing is often more
intensely real than the reality of possession.
It is remarkable what
things are sometimes accepted as axioms, as obvious truths. Thus, you
can read in many Western philosophic books that there can nowhere be
less than nothing, that there is no such thing. Even more, it is
sometimes said that nothing itself cannot exist. Yet, what exists in
our illustration about debt exists also in the universe. All
philosophic dicta about “nothing,” however pretentious
the form they take, are really rubbish. They are themselves a kind of
ill-defined nothingness. It is true that the physical something that
surrounds us can be reduced to nothing, and then still further to
less than nothing. This “nothing” actually is a
real factor on all sides. We must imagine the world that surrounds
us, which we know in the forces of nature throughout the mineral,
plant, and animal kingdoms, reduced down to nothing, then down to
below nothing. Then it is that those forces arise that are creatively
active in man when he sleeps. Natural science knows only the external
side of these forces. In fact, it holds fast to a mere abstraction
about them and therefore cannot enter into or appreciate them because
ordinary science is to the reality in the forces of nature as the
abstract number ten, for example, is to ten beans or ten apples. If
we eliminate quality and say that all these are “ten” and
nothing else, we are doing what natural science does, making no
distinctions, touching only the surface of things. Suppose it gains
the idea that regenerative forces must be present building up the
organism again in sleep, then it will treat these forces as does a
man who, when someone meets him saying, “I have fifteen
shillings in my pocket,” replies, “Not so, you have
fifteen.” The man leaves out of account the very thing
that matters. Consequently science will confuse these forces with the
ordinary natural laws, and will fail to recognize that higher laws
are at work in them.
I mention all this to
show what difficulties external science has and must have in getting
to know the truth. It will draw certain conclusions and thus come
near the truth. For some persons this will not be necessary, because
science will gradually be supplemented by clairvoyant perception that
does experience the difference between these forces and those active
out in the three kingdoms of nature. At present I cannot deal fully
with the superficial objection that animals also sleep. Such
objections have little logical value but people do not notice it, nor
their superficiality, for they judge according to concepts instead of
the real nature of things. By introducing animal sleep into the
argument one would speak the same fallacy as if someone were to say,
“I sharpen my pencil with a knife and I also shave with a
knife,” and another person replied, “That is impossible,
knives are there to cut meat.” People are always making that
kind of judgment. They think that a given thing must have the same
function in different realms of nature. Sleep is an altogether
different function in man from what it is in the animals.
I wanted to call your
attention to forces at work in man's nature that we find at first in
the regeneration of his organism as he sleeps. Now these forces are
closely related to other forces, those that also develop in man with
a certain unconsciousness. I mean the forces having to do with the
propagation of the race. We know that up to a certain age man's
consciousness is filled with a pure and straightforward
unconsciousness of these forces; the innocence of childhood. Then at
a certain age this consciousness awakens. From that time onward the
human organism is permeated by an awareness of the forces afterward
known as sensual sex-love.
What in earlier life
lives as a sleeping force and only wakens with puberty, seen in its
original and essential form is the very same as those forces that in
sleep regenerate the outworn forces in man. Only they are hidden by
the other parts of human nature in which they are mingled. Invisibly
in man there are at work forces that can become capable of either
good or evil only when they awaken, but that sleep, or at most dream,
until the time of puberty. Since the forces that manifest themselves
afterward must first be prepared, they are intermingled, though not
yet awake, with the remaining forces in man even from birth onward.
All this time his nature is permeated by these sleeping forces. This
is what meets us in the child as such a wonderful mystery. It is the
sleeping generative forces that only waken later on. One who is
sensitive to these things feels something like a gentle breath of God
in the activity of these forces withdrawn into reticence in
childhood, whatever the naughtiness, obstinacy and other more or less
unpleasant characteristics a child may have. These innocent qualities
of the child are those of the grown-up person, but in childlike form.
One who recognizes them as among the generative forces feels the
breath of divine powers. While in later life they appear in man's
lower nature, they are so wonderful because they really breathe the
pure breath of God so long as they work in unconscious innocence. We
must feel these things and be sensitive to them, then we shall
perceive how wonderfully human nature is composed. The generative
forces, sleeping during the most tender age of childhood, waken
around the time of puberty, and from then on are still active in
innocence when at night man sinks back into sleep.
Thus man's nature falls
into two parts. In every human being two persons confront us —
the one that we are from the time we waken until we go to sleep, the
other, from going to sleep to waking again. In our waking state we
are continually at pains to wear and worry our nature down to the
animal level with all that is not pure knowledge, pure spiritual
activity. What raises us above humanity holds sway like a pure,
sublime force within the generative powers as they were during
innocent childhood, and then in sleep it is awakened in the
regeneration of what is worn away in waking life. So we have in
ourselves one person who is related to the creative forces in man,
and another who destroys them.
The deeply significant
thing in the double nature of man is, that behind all that the senses
perceive we have to surmise another man, one in whom the creative
forces dwell. This second man is really never there in a pure,
unmixed form; not during waking life nor even in sleep because in
sleep the physical and etheric bodies still remain permeated by the
after-effects of waking life, by the disturbing and destructive
forces. When at last the latter have been removed altogether, we wake
up again.
So it has been since
what we call the Lemurian Age, the beginning, strictly speaking, of
present-day mankind's evolution. At that time, as is described in
greater detail in my
Occult Science
the Luciferic influence
on man set in; and from this influence there came, among other
things, what today compels man continually to wear and tear himself
down to the animal nature. The other element that exists in human
nature, which man as he is now does not yet know — the creative
forces in him — all this came into play in the early Lemurian
time before the Luciferic impulses entered. Thus we rise in thought
from man ‘become’ to man ‘becoming;’ from man
created to man being re-created. In so doing we have to look out into
that distant Lemurian time when man was as yet wholly permeated by
the creating forces. At that time man came into being as he is today.
If we follow the human race from that epoch onward, we have this
double nature of man continually before us in all that has happened
since. Man then entered a kind of lower nature.
At the same time, as we
can see clairvoyantly by looking back into the Akashic record, there
appeared beside ordinary people, who themselves were permeated by the
human creative forces, something like a brother- or sister-soul; a
definite soul. It was as though this sister-soul was held back, not
thrown into the current of human evolution. It remained permeated
through and through by human creative forces only, and by
nothing else. Thus, a brother- or sister-soul (in that ancient time
there was no difference) — Adam's brother-soul — remained
behind. It could not enter the physical process of mankind's
development. It lived on, invisible to the physical world of man. It
was not born as men are born, in the flowing stream of this life,
because if it had entered into birth and death it would have been in
the processes of physical human life. It could only be perceived by
those who rose to the heights of clairvoyance, who developed those
forces that awaken in the state we otherwise know as sleep. In that
state man is near to the forces that live and work in purity in the
sister-soul.
Man entered his
evolution, but holding sway above this life there lived, in
sacrifice, a soul that throughout all the processes of human life
never came down in bodily form. It did not strive like ordinary human
souls for birth and death in successive incarnations, and it could
only show itself to them when in their sleep they attained
clairvoyant vision. Yet it worked on mankind wherever they could meet
it with special clairvoyant gifts. There were men who either by
nature or special training in schools of initiation had this power
and were able to recognize the creative forces. Wherever such schools
are mentioned in history we can always find evidence that they were
aware of a soul accompanying mankind. In most instances it was only
recognizable in those special conditions of clairvoyance that expand
man's spiritual vision into sleep consciousness.
When Arjuna stood on
the battle-field with the Kurus and Pandus arrayed against each
other, when he felt all that was going on around him and deeply
realized the unique situation in which he was placed, it came about
that this soul we have mentioned spoke to him through the soul of his
charioteer. The manifestation of this special soul, speaking through
a human soul, is none other than Krishna. For what soul was it that
could instill into man the impulse to consciousness of self? It was
the soul that had remained behind in the old Lemurian age when men
entered his actual earthly evolution.
This soul had often
been visible in manifestations before, but in a far more spiritual
form. At the moment, however, of which the
Bhagavad Gita
tells us, we have to imagine a kind of embodiment, though much concealed in
Maya of this soul of Krishna. Later on in history a definite
incarnation takes place. This soul actually incarnated in the body of
a child. Those of our friends to whom I have spoken of this before
know that at the time when Christianity was founded two children were
born in different families, both from the house of David. The one
child is mentioned in St. Matthew's Gospel, the other in St. Luke's.
This is the true reason for the external discrepancies between the
two Gospels. Now this very Jesus Child of St. Luke's Gospel is an
incarnation of that same soul that had never before lived in a human
body but is nevertheless a human soul, having been one in the ancient
Lemurian age. This is the same that revealed itself as Krishna.
Thus we have all that
the Krishna impulse signifies incarnated in the body of the Luke
Jesus child. What was there embodied is related to the forces that
are asleep in every child in their sublime purity and innocence,
until they awaken as the sex-forces. In this child they can manifest
themselves and be active until the age of puberty when man ordinarily
becomes sexually mature. But the body of this child that had
been taken from common humanity would no longer have been adapted to
the forces related to the innocent sex-forces in the child. Thus the
soul in the other Jesus child, which was the soul of Zarathustra,
that had passed through many incarnations and reached its eminence by
hard work and special striving, passed over into the body of the Luke
Jesus child, and from then on dwelt in that body.
We touch here upon a
wonderful mystery. We see how into the body of the Luke Jesus child
there enters the soul of man as he was before he descended into the
course of earthly incarnations. We understand that this soul could
hold sway in the human body only until the twelfth year of its life.
After that another soul must take possession, the Zarathustra soul
that had gone through all the transformations of mankind. This
wonderful mystery is enacted, that the innermost essence and self of
man, which we have seen hailed as Krishna, permeates the Jesus child
of the Luke Gospel. In this child are the innermost forces of
humanity, the Krishna forces, for indeed we know their origin. This
Krishna root takes us back into the Lemurian time, the very primeval
age of man. At that time it was one with humanity, before ever the
physical evolution of mankind began. In later time this root, these
Krishna forces, flowing together and uniting in the unknown and
unseen, worked to bring about the unfolding of man's inner being from
within. Concretely embodied, this root is present within a single
being, the Luke Jesus child, and as the child grows up it remains
active beneath the surface of life in this special body after the
Zarathustra soul has entered it.
In
the thirtieth year, in the moment the Bible describes as the Baptism
in Jordan, there comes toward this special human body what now
belongs to all mankind. This is the moment indicated in the words,
“This is my well-beloved Son, this day have I begotten Him.”
Christ now comes toward the physical body from the other side. In the
body that stands before us there, we have in concrete form what
yesterday we thought of abstractly. What belongs to all mankind comes
to the body that contains what, through another impulse, has brought
the inner being of man to the highest ideal of individual strength,
and will carry it to yet greater heights.
I
think when you consider all that has been said today, leading up as
it does to a certain understanding of that great moment pictorially
represented as the baptism by St. John, you will have to admit that
our anthroposophical outlook takes nothing away from the sublime
majesty of the Christ-Idea. On the contrary, by shedding the light of
understanding upon it much is added to all that can be given -to
mankind exoterically. Today I have endeavored to present the matter
in such a way as to give it sense and meaning for those who can
consider it with an open mind, in the light of external human
history. That is not the way, however, by which this secret was
found. Someone might ask, in view of the lectures about St. Luke's
Gospel I delivered years ago in Basel, when for the first time I drew
attention to the different genealogies of the two Jesus children,
“Why did you not explain then all you have added to it now?”
That depends on the whole way these things were discovered. Actually,
this truth has never yet been found in one single and complete whole
by the human understanding. It was not discovered in the form I have
tried to convey it today. The truth itself was there first, as I
indicated in a lecture a few days ago, and the rest followed of its
own accord, adding itself to the main body of this piece of knowledge
about the two Jesus-children. From this you may gather that in the
Anthroposophical Movement for which I am permitted to stand before
you, there is nothing of the nature of intellectual or logical
construction. I do not mean to lay this down as a general rule for
everybody, but I do regard it as my own personal task to say nothing
that is given by the intellect as such but to take things in the way
they are directly and immediately given to occult vision. Only
afterward are they permeated with the power of understanding, The
truth about the two Jesus-children was not discovered by external
historical research, but from the beginning it was an occult fact.
Afterward the connection with the Krishna mystery was revealed.
You
see in this how the science of man will have to work into the occult
realm in the age we are entering; how the fundamental impulses of
earthly evolution will gradually be understood and realized by
individual persons, and how this will throw more and more light on
all that has happened in the past. True science will not only speak
to the intellect, but will fill the whole soul of man. It is just
when we make ourselves acquainted with occult facts that we have a
feeling for the real majesty, the greatness and wonder of these
facts. Truly, the more deeply we penetrate the world of reality the
more we have this feeling of wonder. Not only our intellect and
reason but our whole soul is illumined when we let the truth come to
us in this way. Especially at such a point as this, that wondrous
event when the whole inwardness of humanity lived in a human body;
when a soul that had developed upward to this point through the whole
course of earthly life took possession of this body; then from
outside there came into this body during three years of its life
something that was vouchsafed to all mankind from the great universe
beyond. Truly this can stir our souls to their depths. The spiritual
age that is dawning will in time make it possible to deepen points
like this still more.
One thing is essential
to the coming spiritual age. We must learn to take a different
attitude toward the great riddles and secrets of the cosmos, to
approach them not as in the past with reason and intellect alone, but
with all the faculties of our soul. Then we shall ourselves become
partakers in the whole of human evolution. It will be for us like a
fountain of sublime, all-human consciousness. We shall have fullness
of soul. We shall feel that we may belong to that humanity that over
all the earth is to develop such impulses as have been the subject of
our thoughts today.
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