Lecture 14
The Cosmic Significance of Our
Sensory Perceptions —
Our Thinking, Feeling and Will Activity
Berlin, July 6, 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 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.
May the
spirit we are seeking as we work towards spiritual
knowledge, the spirit who has gone through the Mystery of
Golgotha for the good of the earth, for the freedom and
progress of man, be with you and the hard duties you have
to perform.
There are a number of things I want to
recall in this extra session today, themes spoken of in
different lectures which we shall bring together and
consider from a particular point of view today. The rays
of light which arise will then be directed at subjects we
have previously considered from one angle or another.
There is a particular prejudice, a feeling people have,
which stops them from accepting spiritual science in the
present age. People have so little idea of how small a
proportion of whatever a human being accomplishes at any
hour, any moment, basically is within his ordinary
awareness of being a human individual in the physical
world. Just consider how little we would be able to
function as human beings if we were fully conscious of
everything we needed in order to live as human beings. It
is often stressed, and quite rightly so, that modern man
knows very little — taking first of all the purely
physical functions in life — how his brain, liver,
heart and so on really work in order to accomplish what
man has to accomplish to enable him to live on this earth
as a physical entity. All the things man has to
accomplish merely to let his external physical life
progress — all those things he simply has to
accomplish. But consider how little man is able to follow
this with his conscious mind. Just consider some quite
minor thing happening in everyday life and you'll
immediately see that man as an entity in this world, an
entity on earth, is one thing, and what may be called
‘conscious man’ is something quite different.
In relation to what man is within his whole compass, this
conscious man is small, very small indeed. It should
therefore not come as a surprise that man feels a natural
urge to extend this small conscious man more and more
into the region that opens up when we consider man as
part of the cosmos. We shall do this today by returning
to aspects considered in earlier lectures and considering
them in a different context.
Our
conscious existence as a human being starts, in a way,
with sensory perception, with everything our senses
perceive of the world outside us. Sensory perception
— the fact that impressions are made on our senses,
with those impressions arising on the basis of certain
processes, is something quite different from our being
aware of this. Imagine you are sleeping with your eyes
open, not closed. Hares are capable of this. Unless it
were pitch dark the environment would constantly leave
impressions on the eye, only you would not be aware of
those impressions. Our ears are of course always open,
and every sound, all the things we are constantly aware
of during the day when we are awake, are of course also
processed in the ear when we are asleep. Our sense organs
may always be engaged in the whole process of earth life;
yet any significance they may hold for us depends on our
following this process in the sense organs in conscious
awareness' Only the things we take into conscious
awareness are actually ours in this life on earth.
Do these
sensory perceptions as we call them, the ability of our
eyes, ears and so on to perceive, have significance only
for us as human beings living on earth, or do they also
hold a wider, cosmic significance?
To answer
this question we need to use clairvoyant insight to fain
an opinion as to what it is that we actually see of the
stars in the universe. I think we may say that people
taking the point of view of materialistic physics would
say: ‘Well, when we see a planet, the light of the
sun has fallen on it and been reflected, and that is how
we see the planet.’ That is, in fact, the way
objects on earth are seen. Physicists therefore
concluded, on the basis of mere analogy, that planets are
seen in the same way. There is no reason at all why
something applicable on earth — the conclusion that
light falls on objects and these objects become visible
through that light being reflected — should also
apply to heavenly bodies. There is absolutely no reason
to say that this conclusion also applies to the universe.
As to the fixed stars, well, the physicists say these
give off their own light. I remember how, as quite a
young fellow, I asked a former schoolmate from our
village school: ‘What are they teaching you about
light?’ Even in those days I had listened with a
certain youthful scepticism to what was said of the
'real' origin of light, of all the tiny dancing particles
of ether and of light-waves. The other boy, who had had
his further education at a seminary, had heard nothing of
this as yet. He told me: ‘Whenever the question
came up as to the nature of light we were simply told:
“Light is what makes bodies luminous”.’
Well, you see that really is saying something quite
brilliant about light, to say that light is what makes
bodies luminous. Yet modern materialistic physicists are
not really saying much more than that when they say that
we see heavenly bodies because they radiate light. It is
very much the same in principle.
I did
mention on another occasion that materialistic physicists
might get quite a surprise if they were able to travel to
the sun to look and see what the sun really is like. I
said that because in fact there is nothing at all there
in the place where the sun is. What we would find would
be a composite of purely spiritual entities and energies.
There is nothing material there at all.
If we use
clairvoyant awareness to investigate the stars and
inquire into the reason for their luminosity we find that
what is actually there, what we call their luminosity,
really consists in the ability to perceive, an ability
which is rather crude in man and more highly developed in
other entities. If some entity were to look down on the
earth from Venus or Mars and find the earth luminous, it
would have to say to itself: ‘This earth is
luminous not because it reflects the rays of the sun, but
because there are men on earth who perceive with their
eyes.’ The process of visual perception holds
significance not only for our own conscious awareness but
radiates out into the whole of outer space. The light of
this particular heavenly body consists in what men do in
order to see. We do not merely see in order to become
aware of the results of visual perception, we also see in
order that because of this process the earth becomes
radiant to outer space. And it is a fact that every one
of our sense organs has the function not only to be what
it is for us but also has a function within the universe.
Through sensory perception man is an entity within the
cosmos. He is not merely the entity his conscious mind
presents to him as a human being on earth, he is also a
cosmic entity.
Considering
the inner configuration of the soul at a deeper level, we
come to our thinking activity. We are even more inclined
to consider our thoughts our own. Not only are
‘thoughts free from toll’, as the saying
goes, indicating that thoughts really hold significance
only for the individual person, but it is widely thought
that people merely go through an inner process when they
think and that this thinking activity more or less holds
only personal significance for them. The truth is very
different. Thinking activity is, in fact, a process
occurring in the ether body. And people know extremely
little of what really goes on when they are thinking.
Extremely little of what goes on when he is thinking
enters into man's conscious awareness. As he thinks, he
is aware of part of what he is thinking. Yet infinitely
more thinking activity is associated with this even when
we think in the daytime. What is more, we continue to
think during the night, when we are asleep. It is not
true that we stop thinking when we go to sleep and start
again on waking. Thinking activity is continuous. There
are many different dream processes, processes in our
dream-life, and part of all this is that man's ego and
astral body enter into his ether body and physical body
on waking. He comes in with these two principles and
finds himself in the surging billows of something very
active and alive. Giving just a little consideration to
this he will realize that these are weaving thoughts and
that he is becoming immersed in an ocean consisting
entirely of weaving thoughts. People often say to
themselves on waking: ‘If only I could remember
what I was thinking just now. Those were very sensible
ideas, something that could help me enormously if only I
could remember!’ And they are not mistaken. There
really is something like a billowing ocean down there. It
is the billowing, weaving, etheric world, and this is not
simply a more subtle form of matter, the way English
theosophists like to present it,
[ Note 84 ]
but the world of weaving thoughts, something genuinely
spiritual. We become immersed in a world of weaving thoughts.
As human
beings we are really much more sensible and intelligent
than we are just as conscious human beings. This is
something that has to be admitted. It would indeed be
most regrettable if we were no more sensible at the
unconscious level than we are at the conscious level. For
we could do nothing else in that case but repeat
ourselves at the same level of intelligence life after
life. In fact, we already have within us during our
present life the potential for our next life; this will
be the fruit. If we were always able to catch hold of
this element we become immersed in, we would catch hold
of much of what we will be in our next life. So there is
billowing, weaving life down there. It is the germ of our
next incarnation and this is what we take into ourselves.
Hence the prophetic nature of our dream life.
Thinking is
an immensely complicated process and man only takes a
small proportion of what it involves into his
consciousness. A thought involves something which is a
process in time. Our sensory perceptions made in
conscious awareness also make us part of the cosmos. The
activity of seeing causes the earth to grow luminous and
this makes us part of cosmic space. The processes
involved in thinking activity make us part of cosmic
time; all that happened before we were born and all that
is going to happen after death plays its part in this.
Through our thinking, then, we take part in the whole
cosmic process of time, through our sensory perception in
the whole cosmic process of space. Only the earth-based
process of sensory perception is for ourselves.
Let us move
on to feeling. We are even less aware of feeling activity
than we are of sensory perception and of thinking
activity. Feeling is a very profound process. You see, to
discover the true significance of thinking, to find the
real truth — that thinking has cosmic significance
— it is necessary to progress to imaginative
perception, as described in
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.
[ Note 85 ]
Stripping our thinking of the abstract nature we
consciously associate with it, and entering into that
ocean of weaving thoughts, we encounter the necessity to
have not only the abstract thoughts in there that we have
as citizens of the earth but to conceive images in it.
For everything is created from images. Images are the
true or origins of things; images are behind everything
around us; and it is into these images we enter when we
immerse ourselves in the ocean of weaving thoughts. Those
are the images Plato spoke of; they are the images all
who have spoken of spiritual primary causes had in mind,
the images Goethe had in mind with his archetypal plant.
These images are to be found in imaginative thinking.
This imaginative thinking is a reality and we become
immersed in it when we enter the billowing world of
thoughts that move with the stream of time.
We only
enter into the depths of feeling when we attain to what
is called Inspiration. This is a higher form of
perception compared to Imagination. Everything that lies
at the root of feeling in us really is a surging sea of
Inspirations. Just as the image reflected in the mirror
is merely an image of the object which exists in the
world outside, so our feelings are merely reflections
mirrored in our own organism of Inspirations that come to
us from the universe. They are a mirror image which
relates to the flowing movement in the universe the way a
dead mirror image relates to the living creature it is
reflecting. Each of those images reflects the attributes
of entities belonging to higher hierarchies who express
themselves in the world through Inspiration. If we do not
stop at feeling activity but progress to clairaudient
perception we perceive the world as the united activity
of a great multitude of entities within hierarchies. The
world is this entity arising out of the united actions of
entities from the hierarchies. The deeds of the higher
hierarchies are happening in the world. And we are
involved. We are in the mirror. And the deeds of the
higher hierarchies are reflected in our mirror. We then
perceive what has been reflected — through
conscious awareness. As human beings active in feeling,
we live in the womb of the attributes of the hierarchies,
perceiving those attributes because we have
consciousness.
When it
comes to being conscious of his feelings, man is even
smaller compared to what he really is in his ability to
feel than he is compared to his sensory perceptions and
his thinking activity. As feeling human beings we are
also part of the hierarchies, are also working in the
sphere where the hierarchies are at work. We are active
in creating the fabric. We perform deeds that are not for
ourselves alone, deeds through which we share in the
great work of building the world. Through our feelings we
are the servants of the higher entities that are the
world builders. We may think, as we stand before the
Sistine Madonna for example, that this merely meets
certain emotional needs in us. The fact however is that
when a human being stands before the Sistine Madonna and
responds to the painting emotionally this is an entirely
real process. If there were no emotional element, no
element of feeling, the entities which one day are to
share in the work of building Venus as a heavenly body
would lack the powers they need to do this work. Our
feelings are needed for the world the gods are building,
the way bricks are needed in building a house. Again we
have only partial knowledge of our feelings. We know the
joy we experience as we stand before the Sistine Madonna,
yet what is happening there is one element within the
universal whole, irrespective of whether we have
conscious awareness of this or not.
As to our
will activity, this, too, is but a mirror, though in this
case the essential nature of individual members of the
hierarchies is reflected. We are also an entity within
the hierarchies but at a different level. Our reality
lies in our will. We give substance to the world by
somehow or other letting our will live in reality. Again
it holds true that, in so far as we follow our will
activity in conscious awareness, this has significance
only for us as human beings. But apart from this, our
will activity is a reality which is the material the gods
used to build the world.
So you see
how our sensory perceptions, our thinking, feeling and
will activity, have cosmic significance; how they are an
integral part of the whole of cosmic life. It really
seems that modern man should have a fair degree of
understanding and should, with some good will, be able to
accept these things. Occasionally we come across evidence
of someone being aware that there is a small human being
— the conscious human being — and a big human
being who is the cosmic reality. Friedrich Nietzsche
spoke of this in his Zarathustra, for he had some idea of
it. The same holds true for many other people, except
that they do not make the effort to follow the paths that
will show how we progress from being a small human being
to being the greater one. It is really necessary,
however, that a fair number of people come to realize
that the times have passed when it was possible to manage
without such insight.
In the
past, something still remained of the old clairvoyance
that enabled people to see into the spiritual world. In
those days they really were able to see the way man does
today when he is outside his .physical and ether bodies
with his astral body and ego and out there in the cosmos.
Man would never have achieved complete freedom as an
individual and dependence would have been his lot if the
old clairvoyance had persisted. It was necessary for man
to take possession, as it were, of his physical ego. The
form of thinking he would develop if he perceived the
surging ocean of thinking, feeling and will activity that
exists below consciousness would be a heavenly form of
thinking but not independent thinking. How does man
achieve independent thinking?
Well,
imagine it is night-time and you are lying asleep in your
bed. It is the physical body and the ether body which are
lying in your bed. As you wake up the ego and the astral
body enter from outside. Thinking activity continues in
the ether body. And now the ego and the astral body
enter, first of all taking hold of the ether body. This
does not take long, however, for at that very moment the
thought may flash up: ‘What have I been thinking?
Those were sensible thoughts.’ However, the human
being has a strong desire to take hold of the physical
body as well, and the moment he does so everything
vanishes. Now the human being is wholly within the sphere
of earth life. It is because man immediately takes hold
of his physical body that he is unable to gain awareness
of the subtle swell of etheric thinking. To have the
awareness 'It is I who am thinking' man simply has to
take hold of his physical body and make it his
instrument; otherwise he would not feel 'It is I who am
thinking' but ‘It is the angel guarding me who is
thinking’. The conscious thought ‘I am
thinking’ is possible only if the physical body is
taken hold of. Man therefore must be able to use his
physical body. In the time that lies ahead he will have
to make use of what the earth is giving him and take hold
of his physical body more and more. His justifiable
egoism will grow and grow. This will have to be
counteracted by taking hold of the insights provided
through spiritual science. We are now at the beginning of
this era. People might say:
No need
to concern ourselves with this. What do we care as to
the intentions of the gods? We have no desire to
enquire into the will of the gods. We'll accept
whatever they offer us in the course of life on this
earth; they give us the physical body to be an ever
more powerful instrument for physical thinking. But to
feel concerned that we should start to gain something
else that is more than just power — that is too
much of an effort. And we do not really have to. The
gods could take another course.
That, too, is what people say, only
they say it by inventing philosophies and so forth.
It has to
be clearly understood that in the world it really makes
no difference if we decide to put a limit on what is to
happen, a limit to suit our reluctance to be personally
involved. It is quite impossible for the measure meted
out to man to be reduced. If man is intended to develop
certain powers within a particular era and only develops
part of them, the rest will nevertheless emerge. It is
not true to say that they do not emerge. When you heat up
an engine the excess heat supplied does not disappear; it
radiates from the engine. In the same way nothing that
exists in human life can disappear. It is not true,
therefore, that mystical powers — so much despised
by modern man — do not exist. Man is able to deny
them, yet they continue to exist as part of this world.
You can deny them, you can be a great materialist in your
conscious mind, but you cannot be a materialist with the
whole of your being. What happens is that those powers
will, unknown to man, develop in such a way that he will
offer to Lucifer and Ahriman what he would otherwise have
offered to the legitimate gods. Everything you suppress
in your conscious mind, everything you will not allow to
unfold, you offer to Ahriman and Lucifer.
No culture
in the present age, dear friends, can have been more
intensely materialistic down to the last fibre of the
soul than the Italian culture. Present-day Italian
culture, the culture of the Italian nation, has developed
through the influence of the folk soul on the sentient
soul. It is the current mission of English culture to
develop materialism. Materialism will be on the surface
there, but it will be the way it ought to be. The earth
does need a certain materialism and this is developing
there. It is the mission of the British to bring
materialism into earth evolution. With them it cannot
take root in the soul as deeply as it does with the
Italians. An Italian feels everything deeply and in him
materialism takes root at the very deepest level. This is
why present-day Italian culture goes into positive
frenzies of nationalistic materialism and does so with
all its soul, when in fact materialism cannot be accepted
with the whole of one's soul. We may be its protagonists
in the world but we cannot really develop an enthusiasm
for it — unless we are part of the Italian folk
soul. It is true that the present age is the most
materialistic ever. It is equally true that among the
people living in the south of Europe the most
materialistic attitudes of all arise from the sentient
soul. Fichte said: `Anyone who believes in freedom within
the life of the spirit is really one of us.’
[ Note 86 ]
His conception
of nationalism was one entirely determined by the spirit.
There is nothing of this in the Italian concept of
nationalism. In their case it is entirely a matter of
blood substance — their nationalism is entirely
naturalistic. One man's idea of what constitutes a nation
is quite different from that of another. An utterly
nationalistic materialism is alive among the Italian
people. This, of course, only relates to the present
day.
You must
realize that when the soul is so determinedly aiming for
naturalistic materialism in what a nation is intending,
the sense for the mystical cannot be lost on account of
this. It persists. It is merely thrust out from
consciousness and comes to rest elsewhere. It is not
thrust out from man's true and innermost being. It now
serves the powers we refer to by the technical terms of
Lucifer and Ahriman. Those human faculties are then not
directed along the path of the progressive deities but
into the path,. of Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers.
One would
assume that something will have to emerge in those
nations when powers of a mystical nature are thrust out
into public life. Can we find something of this kind in
the South, a stream of mystical will that has been thrust
out?
It was in
May 1347, on Whitsunday, that Cola di Rienzi
[ Note 87 ]
walked up to the Capitol
in Rome at the head of a great procession. He was wearing
ancient Roman armour, which was in accord with the
sentiments of that time, and had four standards. The
Capitol is the place from which speeches concerning Rome
civilization were traditionally addressed to the Romans.
Rienzi proclaimed that he had come to speak in the name
of Jesus Christ, as a man compelled to speak to the
Romans in the name of freedom for the whole world.
Rhetoric was very much the order of the day at the time.
It did have a certain significance then — in 1347
— but no reality. The whole was something like a
puff of smoke. But that is not really my point. I want to
draw your attention to the fact that this happened on a
Whitsunday — on 20 May 1347. It was then that the
man representing this whole stream called himself an
ambassador of Christ. Later, when he had further
elaborated his message, he also called himself a man
inspired by the Holy Spirit.
It was also
a Whitsunday that war was declared against Austria.
Immediately before that a man who did not call himself an
ambassador of Christ but nevertheless let it appear in
what he said that he was filled with the Holy Spirit, had
walked at the head of a large procession and made
speeches in Rome. There certainly was no vestige in the
soul of this man of the mysticism out of which Rienzi had
formerly spoken. Yet — and here we get an element
of mysticism that has been thrust out — the words
were again spoken on a Whitsunday. Yet they were spoken
in the service of those other powers. The Christ impulse
had been thrust out from consciousness. And that it was
very much the Ahrimanic element—an element we must
of course expect in the present age—is evident from
just a few words that were said at the time. A 20th
century orator could not, of course, arrive in Roman
armour and with four standards and so he came in a car.
That is the kind of sacrifice one has to make in this
materialistic age. But somehow he had to bring to
expression — perhaps unconsciously — that an
element of mystical power thrust out by man had been
ceded to another power and was now on the move in the
outside world, having been turned into its opposite. This
man who calls himself d'Annuncio — in reality he is
called something else
[ Note 89 ]
— spoke in such a way that people might
have believed all the great flaming speeches of Rienzi
were coming to life again — it is easy to do this
in Italian — deliberately making every sentence
reminiscent of him. After his oration, which to the
Central European mind consists of nothing but empty
words, he picked up a ceremonial sword and he kissed this
sword to indicate that the power of his oratory should
pass into this sword. The sword was the property of the
editor of a magazine one commonly sees around when one
goes to Italy. The editor of a magazine had presented the
sword to the Mayor of Rome as a sacred relic on this
occasion. The sword belonged to the editor of the cosmic
paper Asino. In time to come a world judging
these things on a different basis from that prevailing
today will realize that many of the things happening at
the present time have to be judged from the point of view
I have presented — that much of what is present in
man by way of mystical powers is thrust out, handed over
to the world process, but does not get lost. It becomes
the spoil of Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers. Rarely is
the irony inherent in world history as obvious to the eye
as in the case I have just presented.
Let us use
all we have been able to absorb out of the work we have
been doing these last years and try to understand clearly
that there is a certain measure of spiritual power that
is given to human nature. Mystical spirituality has to be
thrust out of human consciousness in order that mankind
can grow free in taking hold of the physical body. Yet on
the other hand this mystical spirituality must be made
part of our conscious life, otherwise Ahrimanic and
Luciferic powers will take hold of what has been thrust
out from conscious awareness. Again and again I want to
remind you, dear friends, that having made such efforts
for many years to absorb this into our conscious mind, we
also have the feeling arise in us that something will
have to emerge from the bloodshed of the present time
that will lead mankind towards spirituality, towards
recognition of the spirit. This means, as I have often
said, that there will have to be souls who have grown
able, through spiritual science, to look up into the
spiritual world where all the ether bodies that have come
from young people are present. These have reached the
spiritual world and will continue to be present because
on that plane, too, powers are not lost. We must look up
towards them. They will unite with the powers shining
down for us from the spiritual world and what the dead
have to say will form the impulses of the future —
if souls are present who understand their language. It it
in this spirit that once again we say these simple
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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