LECTURE III
Inner Experiences and ‘Moods’ of Soul as the
Vowels and Consonants of the Spiritual World
From what was said yesterday and the day before, you will have
realised that occult reading and occult hearing consist in
experiences of the soul. I used various comparisons to show how
man must become one, firstly with the signs which reveal
themselves to the seer in Imagination, and then, needless to
say, with what these signs signify of spiritual realities.
I
should like to begin to-day by giving you a more precise idea
— as far as is possible in the few lectures that can be
given, and even although it can only be an approximately
precise idea — of what is necessary in order to advance
from disordered clairvoyance to the genuine clairvoyance that
may be called occult reading and occult hearing.
The
first thing of which I will speak may be called the ‘vowels’ of
the spiritual world. The way in which man learns to hear and
read the ‘vowels’ of the spiritual world is, of course, a far,
far more deeply inward process than any process of
ordinary life. Many roundabout descriptions are necessary
before we can even begin to approach what may be called the
experiencing of the vowels, of the intrinsic sounds of the
Cosmos. From what I indicated yesterday you will have realised
that we can speak of seven such vowels — a symbolic
parallelism with the planetary system.
Let
us go back once again to the example I gave yesterday: the
search for someone who is dead. I took that as a starting-point
and tried to describe the kind of experiences through which we
gradually grow into the knowledge of the spiritual world. We
heard that through the different forms of preparation which the
seer has to undergo, he sees, first of all, a series of
pictures, and he faces them just as he faces the things of the
external world. We face a dream picture, too, just as we face
the things of the external world. Only gradually do we learn to
identify ourselves with the pictures, to consume them, as it
were, to become one with these pictures, to live entirely in
them.
But
it must be clearly borne in mind that when these pictures
finally lead us to find the dead or some other event or being
in the spiritual world, they are signs of spiritual realities.
As pictures they are realities in themselves; they express
spiritual realities.
They are there, these pictures. And now the question must
arise: Are these pictures only there when the seer has prepared
himself in the right way and is actually able to behold
them?
These pictures are not only there under such conditions. And it
is very important to keep this in mind. Let us assume that you
are sitting or standing somewhere and are sufficiently prepared
to be able to see something. A series of fluctuating pictures
appears before you. Now suppose that, instead of a seer there
is an ordinary person who has no gift of clairvoyance and sees
nothing of such pictures but only the pictures of the physical
world. Are the pictures not there at all? — They are
always there.
Let
me put it as I did the day before yesterday. In reality, we are
within the bunch of flowers in front of us; our perception of
it depends upon its being reflected through our own organism.
The moment the trained seer has a spiritual Imagination, he too
is within it. In the subsequent procedure — of
identifying himself with the pictures — he is simply
enacting a process of consciousness; actually, he is within the
pictures. Nor does this apply only to a seer; even when a man
confronts an object with ordinary physical eyes and ordinary
mental activity, not only is he within the physical object
— which, as we have seen, is in itself merely an illusion
— but he is within the Spiritual. He is always within the
spiritual Beings who are not physically incarnate. He is really
all the time within those spiritual pictures of which the
clairvoyant sees a part. They are always in the environment and
we are always within them. They remain imperceptible,
invisible, because man's faculty of perception is too dull, too
coarse to perceive these delicately weaving beings and
formations with the ordinary senses.
But
this is speaking in the abstract. We could also ask: All that
weaves spiritually around the world — in which we
ourselves are — why is it that we do not become aware of
it? Why is this?
We
begin for the first time to understand why this is so when we
have identified ourselves with Imagination, when we actually
carry out the process I described yesterday. We really
understand, then, why the human being cannot be conscious in
the spiritual world that is round about him. What is this
experience?
Let
us repeat once again. — A series of pictures is arrayed
before the soul; we try to identify ourselves with these
pictures. We know, then, through the experiences of our own
soul, that we consume these pictures, as it were; we are united
with these pictures. We now know that this is so.
But
at this moment, too, we can answer the question as to why we
have to be outside the body, why we have to go out of the body
and identify ourselves with the pictures if we are to perceive
them. They can only be reflected back from our own etheric
body. When this has become an actual experience, we know why it
is necessary.
Through our experiences in connection with these pictures with
which we have identified ourselves, we know the following.
— If, having completely identified ourselves with the
pictures, we were to pass back again into the physical body, if
we did not remain outside the body and wait until the etheric
body reflected the pictures back, then we should take back into
the physical body everything with which we had become one
— we should take it back into the space that is enclosed
by the skin, and we should immediately destroy the physical
body to the point of death. The germ of death would be in the
physical body. We may not carry into the physical body that
with which we have identified ourselves. This can happen only
when death comes in reality. When death does really come in
earthly existence, the soul has reached the point where it can
identify itself with what lives in the external world as
Imagination in the natural course of life. But that is
death.
So
you see, my dear friends, we may take in deep, deep earnestness
the great motto which runs through all occult studies. It is
the utterance made by all those who have become occultists in
the true sense of the world. — The moment genuine
clairvoyance is attained, the experience is that of facing
death. We reach the Gate of Death.
I
have often emphasised this from another side. We learn to know
how it is with a human being when he passes through the Gate of
Death. Clairvoyance cannot be attained without passing through
this most solemn moment which is described by occultists as
‘Standing before the Gate of Death.’
But
we must learn something else as well. I have spoken of this
from another angle in a lecture-course given at Munich. [The
title of the lecture-course was:
On Initiation, Eternity and the Passing Moment.
(English translation available in typescript.)]
We
learn in deepest earnestness to put a question that is a vital
question of Spiritual Science. We ask: What is the truth of our
existence as human beings, living as we do within the
fluctuating web of spiritual Beings which we dare not carry
into our physical body because that would always mean the germ
of death? Outside, Imaginations are always around us, we are
within a sphere of Imaginations ... and they must not pass into
us. What comes from these Imaginations into us?
Shadow-pictures, reflections, mirror-images — these come
as our thoughts, our mental images. Outside, they are the real,
full-blooded Imaginations. They reflect themselves in us and we
experience them in the weakened, shadowy form of our thoughts
and mental images. If we carried them in their full reality
into ourselves and not merely had them as reflections, we
should at each moment stand before the danger of death.
What does this mean? It means that the cosmic world-order
guards us from experiencing, in their full reality, these
spiritual Beings and happenings, which are always around us; we
are protected, inasmuch as in our everyday consciousness we
contact only the shadow-pictures of these spiritual Beings. And
yet, a whole number of these Imaginations belong to us, belong
to the forces which are creatively active in us. The creative
forces that are within us live in this world of Imaginations.
We may not experience them in their primal form, but only in
the shadowy form in which they are within us as thoughts. This
can only happen through someone taking away from us the
experiencing of the Imaginations which belong to our
thoughts.
They have, nevertheless, to be experienced! But we cannot
experience them. They have to be experienced by Beings stronger
than we are, by Beings who can endure them in their
organisation of spirit-and-soul without coming to the danger of
death. Whenever we are thinking, whenever we are active in our
life of soul, a spiritual Being must hold sway over us all the
time, depriving us of the experience of the Imaginations
underlying our thoughts and mental pictures. If you have any
thought, any experience in your life of soul, this experience
corresponds to a world of Imaginations. And a Being must rule
over you, guard and protect you, taking away from you what you
yourself cannot accomplish.
Here we have reached a point where we can speak in a more real
sense than hitherto, of the Beings of the next higher
Hierarchy, of the Angeloi. They are now spiritually
comprehensible. We see them there, we see how they must watch
and guard what we ourselves are not capable of
accomplishing.
But
it can and must happen to the seer that he becomes aware with
far greater distinctness of what I have just told you. And that
is the case when he goes one stage further in his seership.
We
spoke yesterday of what leads to identification with the series
of pictures which appears before us. The Imaginations are
consumed, sucked in. Thereby they disappear as pictures outside
us — but we experience them within us, we have become one
with them.
But
the thing can go still further. I will start by describing the
subjective experience. I told you yesterday something which I
have repeatedly described. When one is sunk in meditation and
concentration, something approaches which one is seeking
— a series of pictures arises with which one can identify
oneself. I said that something else can happen. When meditation
and concentration have called forth these pictures and we have
tried to get right into them, the occult reading and hearing,
the real perception of the spiritual being of the dead does not
necessarily arise. The whole process may break off just like a
process in a dream and the consequences may appear only
later.
But
if we go further, if we have the necessary patience and
endurance to make progress in occult development through
meditation and concentration, then we experience the process in
still another way.
It
can be experienced in the following way. — We set ourself
the task of observing some being or process in the spiritual
world. We sink into meditation or concentration. Thereby we
draw ourselves out of the physical world and pass into the
condition where the meditation, that is to say, the content of
the soul we ourselves have evoked, flows by and we can feel the
transition. There seems to be greater darkness ... that which
the soul has evoked flows away from the pictures, and they come
up again, far, far more vividly than in a dream.
Now
we confront them consciously and again dive down into them.
Again, there may come a moment when we know: ‘You have now
identified yourself with the pictures, you have become one with
them, you are within them.’ But we no longer feel our own
existence; we feel as though we have sunk into the Cosmos
— nevertheless as if we were in universal nullity.
Thus, we have identified ourself with the pictures, have
extinguished them — and have got nothing in their place.
But now, through the practice of meditation, we have succeeded
in not being brought to despair by the belief that we are
losing ourselves in Nothingness. We have not the feeling of
being utterly forsaken that might easily arise. In short, we
plunge, as though swimming in an ocean of nullity, into the
Cosmos. And then it is like waking up, but not out of a sleep,
out of something with much stronger reality. At the moment of
waking, we know: This was not sleep! We have not passed through
the emptiness of sleep. Something has happened in the interval,
something at which we were present, and now we have wakened
again! We have in our consciousness the happenings which we
could not experience at the time with full consciousness. But
afterwards we know quite definitely that we have experienced
them. It is like a memory! We remember something we have gone
through not with the ordinary self, but with what transcends
the ordinary self. Now it enters our consciousness and we
experience that at which we aimed, the task we set ourselves.
And now, when we meditate on what has happened, we know: ‘You
have gone through something as a thinking being (only
“thinking” here has a much higher significance than
in the physical world). You have gone through this as a
thinking being. But however highly developed you are as a human
being, you cannot experience what you have now gone through.’
It is something that the human being himself cannot experience.
Therefore, in the time that has transpired between the diving
down and the re-emergence, another Being had to take over the
function of thinking for you and think in you. You cannot
yourself do the thinking. You can only remember afterwards what
this Being thought in you. It was an Angelos who was thinking!
And we know that in that intervening period we were interwoven
with our Angelos. The Angelos experienced it for us and because
the Angelos experienced it, our own consciousness was
suppressed. Now we waken and remember with the ordinary life of
thought what the Angelos experienced in us.
That is the process. This is the way in which, as a rule,
spiritual experiences are attained. We attain them in such a
way that we know: We must first pass into a condition where a
Being of the next higher Hierarchy enters into us, identifies
himself with us. What we cannot do in our own weakness, we can
do through a Being of the next higher Hierarchy who is within
us — but our consciousness is suppressed. We cannot have
the experience in its immediate reality, but we have it
afterwards, in memory and in full Ego-consciousness.
And
so, it is that the spiritual experiences vouchsafed to us are
experienced at one time, but we become conscious of them at
another.
I
spoke of an experience I had concerning our dear friend
Christian Morgenstern — a real experience, needless to
say. But we become conscious of such an experience afterwards,
because a Being of the next higher Hierarchy must take over the
function of knowledge during the actual experience.
Again, you will understand why this must be. If we were to
bring into our own organism what a Being of the higher
Hierarchies experiences in us we should not only kill our
organism, but we should burst it, as through an explosion, into
its very atoms. If we carried down these experiences into our
own organism we should not only bring about its death, but
simultaneously, its cremation.
Now
you see again that seership brings us into connection with what
we call the Gate of Death. We can really only know what death
signifies by raising ourselves to that life of soul which can
come from the experiences described. [See the lecture-course
entitled, The inner Nature of Man and Life between Death and a
new Birth. (Obtainable from Rudolf Steiner Press.)]
Only thereby can we understand the human individuality when it
is outside the physical body. But then we also know how it has
to be received into the higher Hierarchies — in order
that it shall not work as a destroying, death-bringing force to
a being of the physical plane, our own being, to begin with.
The feeling of the human soul resting in the bosom of a Being
of the higher Hierarchies becomes real, infinitely real. Now
for the first time we get to know how things appear on yonder
side of death. We know: Here in our earthly life we are
surrounded by minerals, plants, the animal and the human
kingdoms. On yonder side of death we enter the realm of the
higher Hierarchies, to whose environment we belong just as here
we belong to the environment of the physical beings around us.
A feeling of kinship with the Beings of the higher Hierarchies
comes into our soul. Then we learn to know that true entrance
into the spiritual world is simply not possible without
bringing in its train feelings of piety, feelings of being
given up to the higher, spiritual world. But these feelings
have the nuances I have described.
This is able to evoke a necessary ‘mood’ of soul. I can only
express it by calling it that mood of soul in which we feel
ourselves resting in the spiritual worlds. We need this mood of
soul for any real experience of the spiritual worlds, just as
here, in the physical world, in order that we may be able to
understand our fellow-man, we have to use the larynx and other
organs of speech, to utter the sound EE. What makes it possible
in ordinary human speech to utter the sound EE, produces, in
the higher worlds, the experience that flows from devotion.
This kind of devotion is one of the vowels of the higher
worlds. We can perceive nothing, read nothing, hear nothing in
the higher worlds unless we can hold this mood of soul —
and then wait for what the Beings of the higher worlds have to
impart to us because we bring to them this mood of soul.
It
is out of these moods of soul, out of this attitude to the
higher worlds that the vowels of the Cosmos are composed.
If
there is this feeling: Around you is a world but you cannot
live in it with your feeble human powers. What surrounds you
while you live in your physical body can be perceived only in
the shadow-pictures of your thoughts and concepts, or rather is
reflected by them. You may not experience these Imaginations
directly. Your Guardian Angel must take this experience away
from you in your ordinary life. — When a man feels this
inwardly, with the necessary timbre of inner piety, he is able
to become aware of one of the vowels of the spiritual
world.
A
next stage depends upon the development of something I
indicated in my book,
The Threshold of the Spiritual World.
We grow into the spiritual world as I have there described. The
process is that we emerge from ourselves as it were and
identify ourselves with another being. But this is not
sufficient, in no way is it sufficient. It is necessary not
only to be able to identify ourselves with other beings but
also to be able to transform ourselves into other beings, so
that we do not merely remain what we are, but are able to
metamorphose ourselves into other beings, actually to become
that into which we penetrate.
A
good preparation for this faculty is to practise over and over
again a loving interest in everything that is around us in the
world. It is impossible to express how infinitely significant
it is for the developing occultist to awaken this loving
interest for everything in the surrounding world. This is a
hint that is, unfortunately, not usually taken deeply enough,
hence the lack of success that often attends occultism. It is
only too natural for the necessary power of interest to be
maintained only in oneself. Even if a man will not admit it,
the necessary power of interest is applied only to himself. It
may be given another name, but none the less there is very
little real interest in other things, and by far the greatest
for oneself.
It
must of course be said that cosmic law decrees that a man must
have interest in himself, and indeed it requires great effort
not to be interested the whole time in himself. It is after all
a natural part of life on the physical plane. I will ignore the
fact that if we have some illness, pain or disorder, this
interest is always there. It cannot be otherwise. In such a
case, of course, efforts might make it possible for a man not
to be interested in himself — but that is extremely
difficult. It might happen that a man falls ill and is not
especially interested in the fact that he has this illness; he
may be quite indifferent to it. What does interest him may be
how this illness has arisen out of the whole Cosmos, how at
some point in the Cosmos something arose that now is within his
own skin. In such a case the man is interested in a severe
illness in the same way as if it were something outside himself
I
You
will admit that what I have described is very difficult. And so
it is with most things, at least on the physical plane. It is
very difficult to take the most ordinary things we experience
in our senses and thoughts as if we were standing outside them
as objects. But this is just what we must try to do. And
because it is so difficult it is not as a rule attempted. But
everyone may be sure that if with great zeal he carries out the
exercises described in the book, Knowledge of the Higher
Worlds, he will gradually attain this knowledge.
But
for this we must adopt the standpoint therein described —
the exercises are not practised at all adequately. The
knowledge will be attained only along by-paths because it is
extremely difficult. It will be attained in the same measure in
which interest in our own self decreases, so that we are no
longer an interesting subject for ourselves, but an interesting
object. That does no harm; it is indeed very useful because we
ourselves are an object which is always to hand — only it
must not be confused with the subject!
Now
in the same measure in which we ourselves begin to become an
object, we begin to be interested in everything outside us, and
then we develop loving interest in the world and its phenomena.
When the loving devotion to the world and its phenomena
develops more and more, the mood of soul is able to intensify
to the point where we not only pass out of ourselves but are
able to metamorphose ourselves into other beings. Gradually we
become capable of this. But such things are difficult for the
soul of man and all kinds of help must be sought if this loving
devotion is to exist.
I
will indicate something that can be a help. A beginning can be
made by making the physical world a motive for a kind of occult
reading. I have often given an example from which it is good to
start. If we confront a human being and look at his
countenance, we realise: this boundary of the skin, these
lines, what the eye sees — that is not the essential,
that is the physiognomic expression of the indwelling soul. And
if we had a drawing of the lines — the lines would not be
the essential, but the soul which has given itself these lines
as its form. And then we can look at external nature around us
as though it too were an outer physiognomy. Materialistic
investigators face the things of external nature just as if one
were to say of a human being: ‘To talk of an indwelling soul is
unreal, it is fantastic superstition. All that concerns me are
the forms that can be measured and investigated.’
This is how ordinary men investigate external nature. But we
can say to ourselves: Just as it comes naturally to see a man's
countenance as the physiognomy of his soul, so we can look at
the whole of external nature, not in the ordinary way but as
the physiognomy of spiritual Beings behind it. And it is good
here to look at the whole world of animals as the physiognomy
of outer nature. It requires further insight and study not to
see in the animals what is usually seen but to see in them
something that may be conveyed in the following words.
—
There is the eagle, flying towards the Sun; that is the
direction upwards, into the spiritual worlds. I will take you,
the eagle, as the symbol of rising into the spiritual worlds. I
look at the human brow and see something suggesting the
eagle-nature, something that is striving upwards into the
spiritual worlds. I see how what is expressed in the human soul
gives the physiognomy. The eagle is part of the physiognomy of
external nature. In the soaring eagle I see something
suggestive of the brow in the human countenance. I look at a
bull and see how it is bound to the Earth as it chews its food,
how it is only in its real element when it is given over
entirely to the process of digestion, how in its whole
life-process it is bound up with what it takes from the Earth.
The bull suggests earthly gravity to me. Then I look at the
human being and feel, spiritually: There too there is something
of earthly gravity, but it is held in check, kept in
equilibrium by the eagle nature in man. I feel how the bull
nature is also in man, but it does not express itself in the
same way as in the bull itself. The bull nature- is seen to be
a physiognomic expression. So, too, is it with the lion nature
when I contemplate the heart in man and compare it with the
lion in external nature. In this way we can look at the whole
world of the higher and lower animals.
There have been men who have related eagle, bull and lion to
the human soul and they have made drawings. Such men have
attempted to read what is written in the animal world and to
glean from it — but in this case separated into its
single letters — what is experienced as a totality in
connection with the human being. Briefly, we can say: The
physiognomy of nature is the animal world.
But
it is not only the physiognomy which interests us when we
contemplate the human being. When we try to go more deeply into
the soul, we are interested in what we call the facial
expressions. When the physiognomy is in movement, we come
nearer to the soul through the play of facial expressions than
through the physiognomy as such. Again, in external nature we
can find this play of expression of the spiritual world behind.
We find it when we look at the world of plants, at its shades
of colour, its budding in spring, its blossoming throughout the
summer. The Earth first thrusts it out and then, from the other
side, the forces of the spheres enter into it, charming forth
living movements in its infinite blossoming, growing and
greening. When we look at this world of plants and relate it to
a spiritual reality of the Cosmos behind it just as we relate a
man's facial expressions to his soul — then this again is
an exercise.
Thus, we can say: The plant world is the mien of nature. And
then come gestures, movements which emanate from the soul. Just
as we can call the animal world the physiognomy of nature, the
plant world the mien of nature, so we can now see the forms of
the mineral world as the gestures of nature. And to one who is
practising occult reading and hearing in the real way, it is
one of the most beautiful things that can happen to him to
experience the mineral world in such a way that in the forms of
the surface-boundaries of the minerals, in their characteristic
relations to the Cosmos outside, in their iridescence,
transparency, in the crystalline clarity of the quartz, of the
lime-salts, of emerald and chrysoprase, he sees the infinitely
diverse gestures of the spiritual Beings behind nature.
If
we carry out such exercises, if we can really experience in the
otherwise dead stones what is expressed through this dead
mineral kingdom and is as if a soul were expressing in living
gesture what lives in it — this is a help towards
acquiring loving interest for all the beings that are around
us. Then we gradually reach a stage of development in which
— when the attainment of seership is possible — we
are also able to transform ourselves into the beings around us.
We realise that we have the power to do this. We can transform
ourselves into all other human beings, but practice is
necessary in the way described. The human being is capable of
infinite metamorphoses in this connection.
Again, we can put a question, but before doing so let me speak
of the feelings that are bound up with what I have described.
The first experience brings about an attitude to the
Hierarchies; the consciousness of being protected becomes a
feeling that is suffused with piety. The feeling of being able
to transform oneself into all the diverse beings brings respect
for the humanity of man. We learn to value it in all its
preciousness — the humanity that we do not find in the
physical world, that we do not find in ourselves, but only find
when we have really become another being. The feeling that
necessarily accompanies the faculty of transformation does not
lead us to pride, for every single transformation tells us that
we are not as worthy as the being into whom we must transform
ourselves. Realisation of the faculty of transformation means,
at the same time, humility. A feeling of deep religious
humility is bound up with the realisation of the faculty of
transformation.
But
another question can be raised. We evoke these powers of
transformation from our inner being. Are they, then, within us
all the time? Yes; just as the Imaginations we call up in the
way described yesterday and today are always around us, so too
are these powers of transformation always within us. But in
order to have conscious control of them, we must develop in the
way I have told you. At every moment we are not only ourselves
but every other being as well. It is only that we do not
develop our consciousness highly enough. We shall best
understand this by thinking of the cases in life where a man on
the physical plane transforms himself into another being.
On
the physical plane, of course, man uses the forces which are in
other circumstances the forces of transformation. But he uses
them without knowing anything of them. He uses them every time
he dominates his fellow-men by unjustifiably exerting his will
over them, every time he does injustice to his fellow-men. This
incorporates into his fellow-man something that is unjustified.
He gains a certain power thereby because the lie goes on living
in the other man.
So
is it whenever evil is done. The forces with which some evil is
done in the world are these same forces of transformation, but
in the wrong place. Everything evil in the world is the
unlawful application of these powers of transformation.
Profound insight into the secret of existence arises when we
know whence come the injustice, evil, crime and sin that happen
in the world. They happen because the best and most holy powers
which exist in man, the powers of transformation, are applied
in the wrong way. There would be no evil in the world if there
were not these most holy powers of transformation.
Even in a public lecture 1 once indicated this mystery of the
power of evil, saying that it is the distorted application of
the power which, in its proper place, would lead to the highest
good. [The title of the lecture was: Evil in the light of
Knowledge of the Spirit. Berlin, x 5th January, 1914. (Not yet
available in English translation.)] This mood in the soul which
comes when we know: Here in each human soul is something which
on the one side can transform itself into all beings, and on
the other, into egoism ... this is the mood with which we must
confront the Cosmos if it is our aim to have spiritual hearing.
That is a second vowel.
The
mood we can have in regard to the mystery of evil as I have
presented it to you, is the third vowel — what we
experience when we know whereby a man may become evil. If we
understand the mystery that it is the highest forces that in
evil are applied in a distorted way, then we have the mood of a
third cosmic vowel. These moods of soul must be actually
experienced.
Thus, we have spoken of three cosmic vowels. It has taken some
time to-day; we will speak of the others to-morrow. I had first
to speak of the principle that is essential for establishing in
inner experience that relationship to the Cosmos whereby, in
dedicating our own powers of soul, we become hearers and
readers of what is happening out yonder in the spiritual
world.
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