Lecture 11
Etheric Man within Physical Man
Berlin, April 20, 1915
Dear friends, once again let us first
of all remember those who are out there at the front, in
the great arena of present-day events:
Spirits of your souls, guardian
guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard here on earth.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.
And for those who because of those
events have already gone through the gate of death:
Spirits of your souls, guardian
guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard in the spheres.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.
May the
spirit we are seeking as we work towards spiritual
knowledge, the spirit who has gone through the Mystery of
Golgatha for the good of the earth, for the freedom and
progress of man, be with you and the hard duties you have
to perform.
Dear friends, I want to begin today by
reminding you of something I have told most of you, I
think, on previous occasions. If the soul of man develops
in the way I have clearly enough described in my public
and other lectures, we arrive at a different image of the
world. The essential point is that the soul takes the
path, as it were, from the sense-perceptible into the
spiritual world.
As the
development of the soul progresses the physical world
will gradually change in our eyes into the spiritual
world. We might say that the peculiar features of the
physical, sense-perceptible, world gradually disappear
and the forms, entities and realities of the spiritual
world makes their appearance within the horizons of our
conscious awareness. Something important comes to
conscious awareness in this way, something I might
describe as follows: We ourselves become different
— as far as our vision is concerned, of course
— we ourselves become different, and the world
which is around us to be beheld With our senses then also
becomes different. Let us stay with what is nearest to us
to begin with: the world that is our earth. Basically
spealung, people know really very little of the world
beyond this earth during their life on this planet, at
least if we persist in the way in which W have grown
together with our earthly life. As we advance into the
spiritual world—in which case we are outside our
bodies — we shall find, as we look back on the
body, or the whole of our physical life, or the whole
human being, that basically it is growing richer and
richer. This human being is all the time gaining in
content, is expanding into a world. Man is actually
growing and becoming a whole world as we look back on
him. That is the reality of words we often hear stressed
— in that through spiritual development man grows
identical with the world. He sees a new world, a world he
normally Is within, and sees it as though arising out of
himself. He expands into a world. As far as the earth is
concerned, on the other hand, all that is solid in it,
all we are used to seeing as its mountains, rivers and so
on, disappears. It vanishes and we gradually come to feel
ourselves within the earth — please note I am
saying within the earth — as though within a great
organism. We have left our own world and this inner
world, this inner reality, becomes a wide world, whilst
the earthly world that was spread out around us now
becomes an entity, a being, we must imagine ourselves to
be within. As we grow out of ourselves our human world
expands into a wide world; at the same time we grow into
the earth organism and feel ourselves to be within it
just as our finger, say, would feel itself to be part of
the organism if it were to have conscious
awareness.
That is the
experience human beings will have, an experience quite
frequently brought to expression by more poetic natures.
It is very common for instance for people to compare
their awakening in the morning with the awakening of
nature around them, their life in the course of the day
with the ascent of the sun, and dusk with the need for
sleep that develops as we get tired. Such comparisons
arise with the feeling men have of being part of earthly
nature. They are not worth much, however, for they do not
touch on what really matters. As I have said on a number
of previous occasions, if we want to choose a comparison
that is really in accord with the facts we cannot compare
what goes on when we go to sleep and wake up with the
processes occurring in nature outside. Instead, we must
compare 24 hours in our life with the seasonal cycle of
the year. We must take the whole cycle of the seasons to
make a fair comparison with what happens in us in a
single waking-and-sleeping cycle of 24 hours.
[ Note 57 ]
It is quite wrong to
compare the period during which a person is
awake—between waking up and going to sleep —
to summer for instance. This waking state has to be
compared to winter in ouside nature whilst summer has to
be compared to the sleeping state in man. Making the
comparison we would therefore say: The human being goes
to sleep and this means he enters into the summer of his
personal existence, and in waking up he progresses into
the winter of his personal existence. The waking state
would approximately correspond to late autumn, winter and
early spring. Why would this be in accord with the facts?
Because, in evolving into part of the whole earth
organism in the way I have indicated, we would indeed
have to note that the spirit of the earth is asleep in
summer. The earth is then truly asleep; the great
conscious awareness of the earth's spirit is dimming. As
spring comes the earth's spirit begins to go to sleep. It
wakes up again in autumn when the first frosts come. Then
it is thinking, it is awake and thinking. That is how a
day for the earth's spirit corresponds to the cycle of a
year.
Looking
back upon a sleeping person we can indeed see how his
going to sleep means that ego and astral body are leaving
the body. A kind of plant-type activity does actually
develop in the organism when astral body and ego have
departed from it. Their departure initiates a particular
activity in the inner man. We really experience the first
stages of sleep as the onset of a vegetative process, and
sleep progresses in such a way that to the clairvoyant
eye the body is pervaded with vegetative growth processes
that are genuinely apparent to imaginative perception.
This vegetation has a different way of growing from that
of the earth's vegetation, however. These things can be
told and they can be much meditated on and in this way we
continue to make progress.
The plants
of the earth grow upwards from the soil. It is different
when we observe this ‘plant growth’ in man.
The plants have their roots outside and grow into the
human being. This means that we have to look for the
flowers inside the human being. The human betng is very
beautiful when seen asleep by someone who has grown
Clairvoyant. He is like a whole earth shooting and
sprouting, with vegetation growing into it. The picture
is to some extent marred, however, for we get the
impression at the same time that the astral body is
gnawing away at the roots. That is how the progress of
sleep presents itself. The animal world consumes, eats
up, the plants that grow in summer. And we find that our
astral body acts like the animal world except that it
gnaws at the roots. If this did not happen we would not
able to develop that core which we take through the gate
of death. what the astral body makes its own in this way
is the harvest of life which we do, in truth, take with
us through the gate of death. I am describing things the
way they appear to clairvoyant awareness. And just as
winter comes upon the fruits of the earth and its frosts
kill those fruits of the earth, so the entry of our
astral body and ego into the etheric and physical body is
like a frost coming to kill the vegetation, the spiritual
plant growth, that has come up in the organism during the
night.
The entity
I have called the earth's spirit is indeed an individual
entity, just as we are, except that it has a different
form of existences with a year being a day for it. Within
the earth's spirit we are able to perceive everything I
have said of the impulse of Golgotha,
[ Note 58 ]
for within it we find
the life-giving energy that was not in the earth prior to
Golgotha. In it we find ourselves secure, accepted by the
spirit which has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha. We
become aware of this when we are able to enter fully into
the state where the earth has become a being, an entity,
of which we are part of the way a finger is part of our
organism. It is inevitable therefore that when modern man
enters deeply into the world in an occult way there is
also a touch to this of religious immersion in the divine
element that streams through the world, filling it with
spirit. It is a fact that genuine perception of the
spiritual world will never deprive man of religious
feeling but rather make such feeling more profound.
I wanted to
give an indication of what it really looks like when we
enter into the world of images of spiritual reality. What
we seem to be to ourselves in our ordinary everyday
physical awareness is mere semblance, is only an inner
core. Yet at the same time it has to be said that this is
not correct, for it is not easy to find the words for
these significant truths. What we seem to be to ourselves
is always at our periphery when we are outside the body
with our soul element. It is therefore not correct to say
it is a core, for a fruit has its shell or peel on the
outside and its valuable part inside. But many things are
the other way round when it comes to the spirit, and the
valuable Part of man is outside and the shell or peel
equivalent is inside. The inner part is shell-like by
nature and the spiritual part is what may be called the
shell-like part in terms of space. We come to see when we
take the path into the spiritual world that the human
being is far from simple and indeed very complex.
Something we have already made our own to quite an extent
is the knowledge that man bears within him something
through which he takes part in all the worlds that are
accessible to him. Through our physical body we are part
of the physical world, through the soul element within us
we are part of the soul world, and, through our spirit,
of the spiritual world. We extend into these three
worlds. We know that when a human being takes the path
into the spiritual world he will in fact experience
himself in a kind of multiple reproduction. This is what
causes enxiety. Our comfortable feeling of being of one
piece is broken up and one does indeed get the feeling of
belonging to several worlds. This may be presented from
many different points of view. Today I shall take one
particular point of view, drawing your attention again to
what has been the basis of my recent lectures.
Considering
the life of man in its inner aspects we must think of it
as based on a number of principles, and when we step
outside the body man will indeed be found to be divided
into four principles. First of all there is the power on
which our memory is based. Through memory we raise into
consciousness the things we experienced earlier on in
life. Memory creates a context for our life, making this
life between birth and death a whole. A second principle
is the one we call thinking, the forming of ideas. I
cannot define it in detail here, for that is not the
point, but the activity of forming ideas takes place in
the present. And moving further ahead we come to feeling
and yet further on to will activity. Looking into
ourselves, our own inner life apppears in the activities
of remembering, thinking, feeling and exerting our will.
Now we may ask: ‘What is the essential difference
between these four functions of the soul?’
Psychologists will merely list these functions as a rule,
making no further distinction between them. We shall
arrive at the truth only by going into the essential
nature of these four functions of the soul. We shall then
find that will activity is more or less the baby among
our soul functions; feeling activity is older, thinking
still older, and the activity performed in remembering is
th‘old man’, the oldest of our soul
functions. You will understand this more clearly if I
present the matter to you from the following point of
view.
It has been
said on a number of occasions that man's development has
not been on this earth only but that his present
evolution was preceded by evolution on the Old Moon, the
Old Sun and on Old Saturn. Man did not just come into
being on this earth. To become what he is now he needed
to go through evolution on Saturn, Sun and Moon. Now, you
see, any will activity we develop is a product of man's
earth life. Will evolution is not yet complete, in fact,
and it is entirely a product of earth evolution. During
Moon evolution man was not yet endowed with an
independent will. Angels willed for him. Will activity
may be said to have radiated in only with earth
evolution. Feeling on the other hand was already acquired
during Moon evolution, thinking during Sun evolution and
remembering during Saturn evolution. If you now take this
together with the thoughts expressed in my
Cosmic Memory
and
Occult Science,
[ Note 59 ]
you will discover an
important connection. During Saturn evolution the first
beginnings of man's physical body arose; during Sun
evolution those of man's ether body; during Moon
evolution those of man's astral body; and now, during
earth evolution, the human ego is evolving.
Let us now
take a separate look at the process we call remembering.
What is this? The soul retains something of the image of
an event we have experienced just as a book we are
reading has within it something of the thoughts of the
person who wrote it. When you have a book before you, you
are able to read and to think—not always perhaps,
but I'll ignore that — everything thought by the
person who wrote the book. Remembering is a subconscious
reading process; the record consists in signs the ether
body has engraved into the physical body. If something
happened to you years ago, you went through the
experiences to be gained from that event. What remains of
this are impressions made by the ether body in the
physical body. When you recall the event now, the act of
remembering is a subconscious reading process.
The hidden
processes in the organism which enable the ether body to
engrave the signs on which memory depends were in-formed
into it during Old Saturn evolution. It is a fact that
our organism holds within it this hidden Saturn organism.
This may be perceived as a genuine entity into which the
ether body is able to enter the signs which record the
experiences that come from outside, to recall them again
in the process of remembering. Essentially, man owes this
subconscious recording faculty to the fact that his body,
and specifically the element within the physical body
which is to receive those imprints, is still pliable
during the first seven years of life. It is therefore
important not to subject children to forced memory
training. I have drawn attention to this in
The Education of the Child.
[ Note 60 ]
During the first seven
years the still pliable organism should be left to its
own elementary powers and we should not use coercion. We
should tell children as much as we can but not attach too
much value to artificial memory development, rather
leaving the child to itself where memory development is
concerned. This is a point where spiritual science is of
tremendous importance in educational life.
The ability
to remember is thus one of the oldest elements in human
nature. The activity on which thinking is based is part
of what may be said to have evolved on the Sun. It, too,
is relatively ancient. The Sun-forces contain a principle
which organizes man's ether body in such a way that it is
able to perform this specific function of thinking, of
forming ideas. So you see that it is necessary to go far,
far back in the cosmos in order to answer the question:
Why is man able to remember, and why is he able to think?
It is necessary to go back as far as the Saturn and the
Sun stages of evolution.
To consider
man's ability to feel we need only go back as far as the
Moon, and for will activity to earth evolution. This will
make many things clear to you. Certain individuals bear a
particularly strong imprint of earlier incarnations; they
are not pliable but clear cut. Much will imprint itself
upon their organism. These are people with an almost
automatic memory who however cannot be very creative in
their thinking.
The faculty
of remembering thus relates predominantly to the physical
body; the ability to think to the ether body; man's
feelings and emotions to the astral body; and his will
activity above all to the ego. Man is only able to refer
to himself as T because he is a creature of will. If he
were only able to think, life would proceed as in a
dream. All this means that we are an organic complex of
soul functions which were imprinted into our soul life in
the course of evolution. I have said that our will
activity only evolved during earth evolution and that
spiritually higher hierarchies, the Angeloi, willed for
man on the Moon. The result was that during Moon
evolution all will activity in man was such that if we
recall it to clairvoyant consciousness we will indeed see
it to have been at a higher level, yet it was involuntary
will activity in man, as we see it in animal evolution on
earth today. Animals will of necessity follow whatever
seethes and boils up within them for they live within the
common will of the species.
During Moon
evolution, therefore, spiritual entities of a higher
kind, the Angeloi, did our willing for us. Now, the
spiritual entities of a higher kind are active in
determining our karma from one incarnation to the next.
The Angeloi are no longer active in our will but in the
ongoing stream of our karma. During Moon evolution man
did not feel his will to be his own; in the same way we
do not, living on earth, believe that we make our own
karma. It is controlled by spirits from the higher
hierarchies. Only at times when our will is for once able
to be still, as it were, will it be possible to have a
glimmer of the progress of karma even for nonclairvoyant
consciousness, a progress that normally stays hidden.
Please hold
on to the fact I have stated — that a core forms in
man which enters into the spiritual realm through the
gate of death. This core is the vehicle for our karma.
Karma has today already determined what each of us will
be doing tomorrow. We would be able to see through our
karma if it were not our mission on earth to develop the
will. We would be able to see through it to the effect
that we could under certain circumstances foresee our
immediate future. But the will irrupts into the karmic
stream and this obscures the prospect, say, of what will
happen to us tomorrow. The will has to be completely
silent; only then will it be possible for something to
come through of what will happen not through us but to
us.
As an
example, let me give you a story told of Erasmus
Francisci.
[ Note 61 ]
This is based on the truth. As a young man Erasmus
Francisci lived with his aunt. On one occasion he dreamed
that a man whose name was shouted out to him in his dream
was going to take a shot at him, but that he would not be
killed, for his aunt would save his life. That was his
dream. The next day, before anything had actually
happened, he told the dream to his aunt. She got rather
worried, telling him that someone had been shot dead
quite recently in the neighbourhood. She strongly advised
her nephew to stay at home so that nothing might happen
to him. She gave him the key to the apple loft so that he
might go up at any time and get himself some apples. The
young man went up to his room and sat at his desk to read
something. Yet what he had been reading was of less
interest to him at the moment than the key to the apple
loft which his aunt had given and which was in his
pocket. He decided to go up there. Hardly had he got up
from his chair when a shot rang out and the bullet went
exactly to the place where his head had been. If he had
not got up the bullet would have gone straight through
him. A servant in the house next door — whose name
was indeed the one called out to Erasmus Francisci in his
dream, a name not known to him before — this
servant had not known that the two guns he was supposed
to clean were loaded and the gun went off as he started
to handle it. If Francisci had not got up to go the the
apple loft at that very moment, his aunt having given him
the key, he would without doubt have lost his life. His
dream therefore had shown exactly what was to happen the
following day.
An event
occurred of which we are able to say that the will was in
no way involved, for Francisci would not achieve anything
with his will. He could in no way protect himself;
something irrupted into the karma of this individual to
the effect that this life was to continue. The spirit
controlling his karma had already had the idea that would
save his life. The dream represented the pre-vision of
the spirit guiding the young man's karma, perceiving what
was to happen the next day. Francisci's state of soul was
such that a certain depth had already been achieved
through natural meditation as it were, and as a result
something occurred which I might also compare with
something in external life. I think you will agree that
man's gift of prophesy with regard to external life on
earth is rather limited. In a certain sense we are all
prophets for we all know that dawn will come at a certain
time tomorrow and so on, or someone walking across a
field today will be able to say what that field is going
to look like tomorrow. He will not be able to foretell
whether rain is going to fall on that field the next day
and so on. It is the same with regard to the inner life.
Man lives according to his will, and his karma lies
within that will. It is possible to develop a certain
sense for what is coming next, and in the same way there
are certain people whose inner soul has been deepened and
for whom an inner point of light may arise for events
where the will has to fall silent. It is important in the
pursuit of spiritual science to consider such things on
occasion, for we then see that there certainly is
something alive within man that points to the future,
something man is not able to encompass in his ordinary
state of consciousness. Karma emerges through a will that
has fallen silent.
All the
things brought before our soul in this way through
spiritual research are able to show us that what we call
the great illusion consists predominantly in man being
unable to perceive the full picture, in his ordinary
consciousness, of what he is — that man is part of
the whole world whilst his ordinary consciousness really
only shows him the shell, as though he were enclosed
within his skin, and so on. Yet what he is shown within
this enclosedness is merely a fraction of what man really
is, for he is as big as the whole world. We really only
look back on man from the outside in ordinary life. In
becoming fully aware of these things we can gradually
develop a feeling for the presence in man of what is
known as his ether body. It is indeed possible to make
observations in ordinary life that show at least this
second human being, the etheric man, within the physical
human being. Imagine you are having a nice lazy lie-in
one morning, not feeling inclined to get up as yet; you'd
like to stay in bed and it is difficult to find the
resolution to get up. If you depend entirely on what is
within you it will be difficult to reach the point of
getting up. But now imagine there is something in the
next room which you have been waiting for during the last
few days. The thought occurs of something out there and
you will find that this thought can bring about a minor
miracle. You will find that once you enter into this
thought for a bit you will actually leap from your bed!
What has happened? As you woke up, entering again into
the physical body, you felt whatever the physical body
made you feel and this was not likely to give rise to the
thought of getting up. Your ether body then came to act
independently, because you engaged it in something
outside yourself. There you can see how you have been
opposing your ether body to the physical body and how the
ether body took hold of you and lifted you out of bed.
You arrive at a very specific feeling regarding yourself,
the feeling of being an onlooker and making distinction
between two kinds of human actions which we perform.
There are the actions we perform in the ordinary run of
life and those where one is aware of inner activity
coming to the fore. These are rather subtle observations
and it is, of course, always possible to deny them. We
have to attune our observations to life and really see
through life and the way it presents itself. Then man's
whole inner perception will move in the right direction.
It has to be clearly understood that the path to the
spiritual world cannot be achieved all at once. It
gradually leads out of the world so that we ascend to the
point I have just referred to, where what used to be the
world for us loses its deadness and itself becomes a
living entity.
Gaining in
insight, man thus grows together with the spiritual
world. He grows together with what we may call his
portion which remains when he has put away from him
everything gained through the instrument of the physical
body, everything which essentially made up his life
between birth and death. In going through the gate of
death we grow into a world very similar to the one I have
just spoken of as the one revealed to higher perception.
And then we shall discover something that is very
important. In the world we enter on passing through the
gate of death, if we want to make ourselves at home in it
in the right way, we shall just as we need a light to
illumine a dark room — need whatever we have been
able to develop within our innermost souls whilst here on
earth. Earth life is not something to be regarded merely
as a dungeon, a prison cell. It is certainly Part of the
natural progress of evolution that man has to go through
the gate of death. And he can of course live the life
between death and rebirth. But life as a whole exists in
order that every part of us adds something that is
necessary, something new. As we go through the present
cycle, life here is to give us something that ignites
like a torch, so that we are not merely alive in this
life of the spirit but gain insight and live so as to
illumine the whole of this life. The light which
illumines us is the one thing we gain between birth and
and death that shall remain for our life between death
and rebirth.
This is the
one thing of which we must say again and again that as
many people as possible must come to understand it,
particularlY in the present time. All we come to
understand of the spiritual world whilst here in the
physical world in our physical bodies shall be as a flame
to illumine the life of the spirit. In a certain sense
all the difficult things the most developed part of
mankind has to go through in the present time serve as a
reminder that we need to deepen the life of the soul, and
it will have to come about that from the depths of the
human soul a longing is brought forth for the worlds of
which man is part because of his soul. Let us hope that
the present time will cause a longing to arise in which
every soul says to itself: Man is something quite
different again from what he appears to be in so far as
he wears the garment of a body. May the events we are
experiencing serve to remind us of the need to deepen our
soul life, to let the soul become immersed in spiritual
perceptiveness, spiritual vision.
Out of our
awareness for this need to enter deeply into spiritual
science in the present time, and the awareness that the
difficulties of the present time are intended as a
warning, let us again conclude the way we have always
concluded these meetings. I hope it will be possible to
continue in the not too distant future. For today let us
conclude with the words:
Out of courage shown in
battle,
Out of the blood shed in war,
Out of the grief of those who are left,
Out of the people's deeds of sacrifice
Spirit fruits will come to grow
If souls with knowledge of the spirit
Turn their mind to spirit realms.
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