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Rudolf Steiner e.Lib
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The Riddle of Humanity
Rudolf Steiner e.Lib Document
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The Riddle of Humanity
Schmidt Number: S-3238
On-line since: 29th July, 2002
Today I would like to begin by considering a simple fact of which
everyone is aware. If we cast an understanding and observant eye over
the variety of natural occurrences, we will notice that they seem to
fall into two very different and distinct realms: one realm which
manifests the greatest kind of regularity and order, and another realm
of extensive disorder, irregularity and virtually impenetrable
interconnections. This, at any rate, is how we experience them. Even
though there is a sharp dividing-line between these two realms, our
normal natural sciences do not distinguish clearly between them. On
the one hand we have all the things that happen with the regularity
with which the sun rises and sets each morning and evening, and with
which the stars rise and set, and with which all the other things
associated with the rising and setting of the sun occur such as
the plants, which regularly send forth their growing shoots in the
spring, develop through the summer, then fade away and disappear in
autumn. And the realm of nature presents us with many other things in
which we can see a similarly great degree of regularity and order.
But there is another realm of nature, one which cannot be experienced
in the same way. One cannot anticipate storms in the way one can
anticipate the sunrise and sunset each morning and evening, for storms
do not occur with that kind of regularity. We can say that the sun
will occupy a certain position in the heavens at ten o'clock tomorrow
morning, but we cannot say that we will see a certain cloud formation
in a certain position, let alone say anything about how the clouds
will look. Nor can we predict, in the way we can predict the quarters
of the moon, that, here in our building in Dornach, we are going to be
surprised by a storm or shower at some particular time. It is possible
to calculate eclipses of the sun and moon that will happen centuries
hence quite accurately, but the occurrence of earthquakes and volcanic
eruptions cannot be predicted with the same degree of certainty.
You see here two distinct realms of nature, one that manifests
regularities our reason can grasp, and the other whose manifestations
are irregular and cannot be experienced in the same way. Great
regularity and extreme unpredictability are intertwined in what we
call nature as a whole. I would like to describe the overall
impression that nature makes on us at a given instant as a mixture of
the orderly procession of regular events with those other events, the
ones that can take us by surprise, even though they come again and
again with at least a certain degree of consistency.
Now, there is a profound truth that we have considered from many
points of view in the course of our studies here, the truth that man
is a microcosm that man mirrors the macrocosm and that
everything that is to be found at large in the macrocosm can be
rediscovered in some form in mankind. So we would expect to find these
two spheres of nature expressed in some human form, one which exhibits
great order, the other which exhibits a pronounced lack of order.
Naturally, in a human life these would be expressed very differently
from the way they are expressed out there in nature. Nevertheless,
that twofold division of nature into order and irregularity should
remind us of something in man. Now, consider the typical example I
tried to present to you yesterday.
That typical individuality was well able to think logically. When it
was a matter of logical thinking, he could reckon, pass judgements and
regulate his life with a degree of order, overseeing it and planning
and acting accordingly. In other words, he had access to everything
that regularity can contribute to the functioning of our
understanding, our reason, our capacity for experience and our
will-impulses. But, alongside these, this person also lived another
life, a life that was expressed in those two works I described to you.
From the little I have told you about the content of these books you
can well imagine how stormy a life this was, how erratic when compared
with what human reason has to offer. There were storms in the depths
of that soul, profound storms, and these storms were lived out in the
way we described yesterday. Such things truly do happen in the way
thunderstorms and outbursts of wind and weather play into the regular
procession of sun and moon, into the orderly succession of sprouting,
fading away and dying in the plant world. Into all that develops out
of the human head and the regular course of the human heart come the
storms we experience as waking dreams or as lightning flashes of
genius. These flash through the soul and discharge themselves like
storms. But be in no doubt about it, every human soul has the tendency
to experience the very same things that Otto Weininger experienced in
such an extreme, radically paradoxical fashion. They are there in the
depths of every human soul. Ordinary people who are not so disposed,
as Weininger was, to experience their own genius, express it through
their dreams but always as dreams. Everyone dreams and, in the
final analysis, dreams are things that bubble up out of the depths of
the astral realm. They make their appearance at times when the astral
body is being reflected in the etheric body. Every human being
possesses a day-to-day awareness that a man like Weininger dismisses
as the pedantic consciousness of a philistine, and every human being
possess that other consciousness, the one that bubbles up in dreams.
One should not say, you see, that these dreams and this world of
dreams are only present at night when one knows one is dreaming or has
been dreaming. For a human being is constantly dreaming. Real dreams,
or what one calls real dreams, are only the results of a temporary
view of the continuous stream of dreams. Actually, however, one is
continuously dreaming. All of you seated here are dreaming. Alongside
the thoughts expressed in this lecture which, I trust, are living in
you, you are all dreaming. In the depths of your souls you are all
dreaming. And the only thing that distinguishes the dreams you have
now from the ones you have at night is that at the moment there are
other thoughts that are more conscious and stronger, and which I would
think outweigh the dreams in most cases. But when waking consciousness
has been suppressed and, simultaneously, sleep is interrupted, then
what is now being dreamed unconsciously can emerge for a while. That
is when a conscious dream appears. The life of dreams, however,
proceeds without any interruption.
The contrast in human nature between the regularity of normal thinking
and the lack of it in dreams is really of this nature. A person is
spiritually ill if he does not have access to the regularity of normal
thinking, to the kind of regularity which governs the appearance of
the sun at its appointed time. A person must be able to apply the
canons of reason and distinguish one event from another. But alongside
his healthy waking consciousness a person also has, living in the
depths of his soul, this other realm that I have described as stormy
and irregular.
The forces upon which waking consciousness is based really do mirror
the astronomical pathway of the stars across the heavens. If the
pathway of the stars were not a part of us, we would have no waking
consciousness. But, as you can see from remarks I made in the lecture
cycle,
The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Humanity,
the very same external forces that can be observed at play in wind and
weather, in storm and earthquake, are also at work in the depths of
the human soul and they are reflected in the unconscious and
half-conscious aspects of human life. In this respect, a human being
is truly a microcosm in which the macrocosm is repeated.
These days, there is a restricted awareness of such things, for we
live in an age when humanity has been called upon to restrict itself
more and more to the physical plane to become materialistic.
The cultivation of an understanding and a rationality divorced of
spirituality is simply a symptom of this. But, as we have often
explained here, humanity will also proceed beyond this age. And the
spiritual-scientific movement should be preparing the manifestations
of the spirit for the time to come.
Men are little aware that the spiritual world is connected with what
they pursue here, with the events and facts of earthly existence. But
mankind has not always lived in the spirit-less style of today. Human
institutions have not always taken so little account of the influences
of the spiritual world on the physical world. Think of Numa Pompilius,
the second king of Rome. I once described to you how he wanted to set
about establishing institutions here on the physical plane. The story
is symbolic, but a significant fact lies behind the symbolism. In
order to find out how the eras of history would unfold, he consulted
the nymph, Egeria, whose knowledge was derived from the spiritual
world. Thereafter, he designated the era of Romulus as the first, his
own as the second, and five others that would follow his, making a
series of seven. There is something remarkable in this story about a
king of Rome: the sevenfold order he constructs is the same as the
order on which the seven members of our organism are based. In earlier
times there was a tendency for physical life to be arranged so that
its institutions reflected the demands of the spiritual world
so that they in some way reflected what happened in the spiritual
worlds. Today, men take no account of this.
I have often mentioned how people have lost their sense of piety as
regards establishing the time of the Easter festival, the festival of
the Easter season. Today there are even some who want to set a fixed
day for Easter Sunday, rather than following the present custom of
determining the festival in accordance with the course of the stars.
For it would simplify our account books if Easter were always to be,
say, the first Sunday in April. Then one would no longer have to set
up the books for a different Easter each year and it would be easier
to close the accounts for the year. This is simply one crass example
from among the countless examples that could be mentioned. It shows
how little sense the men of today have for arranging their earthly
institutions so that they will reflect what is happening in the
spiritual worlds and in the stars. But it was not always so. There
have been times when there was a profound awareness that a man's own
life and the life he shares with other men should be an earthly
reflection of what is happening in the spiritual worlds and is
expressed in the stars. These were earlier ages, when atavistic
clairvoyance was still present.
Let us look at an example from the ancient Hebrews. Their religious
year, and thus the year that really mattered, was a moon year of 354
3/8 days. Now that is somewhat shorter than a sun year. So if one
reckons in moon years, some days will be lost because the moon year
does not entirely fill out a sun year. After a certain time, more and
more days will have been left out. Then a balance would need to be
established again. But the ancient Hebrews had a very special way of
creating a balance between sun years and moon years. I will only go
into this method briefly, since what we need today is to let the whole
sense and spirit of the matter pass before our souls, not the
particular details. Ancient Hebrew tradition recognised a so-called
Jubilee Year. This was a year of universal conciliation
and reconciliation. It was celebrated after 49 sun years, which add up
to slightly more than 50 moon years. In such a year of reconciliation,
people forgave one another for various things for which they held each
other to be to blame: those who were debtors could be, or should be,
released from their debts, property should be returned to those who
had lost it, and such like. It was a year for balancing things out,
for reconciling the 7 x 7 sun years with fifty moon years-actually 50
1/2 moon years, but one can call it 50 because this year lasted for a
while and it furnished the starting point for one's reckoning. Thus, a
Jubilee Period lasted 50 x 354 3/8 days; during this period one
accumulated all the various things that would need balancing out.-If
one takes into consideration that this Jubilee Year was a time for
reconciling 49 (which equals 7 x 7) sun years with 50 moon years, one
can say that it is ordered in accordance with the number 7. Therefore
the institution of the Jubilee Year was based on a certain awareness
of the significance of seven-foldness.
Today we want to make the spirit of the thing present for our souls,
so we should give special heed to the following. We want to see what
it would have been like to live in the ancient Hebrew times when one
said: we experience the course of the days, one following after the
other. After 354 days, a new year begins. And after experiencing 49 or
50, respectively, years in a row, then begins a special festive
year for humanity. And now just imagine how it would have been if,
accompanying everything that people lived through, there was the
awareness that it is 7, 8, or 9, years since the Jubilee Year, and
that one would have to wait a certain number of years for the next
Jubilee Year. Nor is this set up arbitrarily; it is established on the
basis of an occult division according to certain numbers.
You need have no doubts that those who were living 24 years after a
Jubilee Year would be reckoning back 24 years to the last Jubilee Year
and 26 years forward to the next one. That gives you some degree of
access to those times. In other words, the human souls here on earth
were occupied with something that involved them in a particular
numerical relationship, and this numerical order affected the way they
felt things-this numerical order flowed through their souls in an
uninterrupted stream. In the course of thousands of years, human souls
became accustomed to living with what I have just characterised. And
as you know, experiences that are repeated again and again are
imprinted on life. They become part of the life that shapes the soul
and gives it its configuration. Thus, investigating the ancient
Hebrews, one discovers an awareness for a particular temporal order
living in their souls, a particular temporal configuration which
expressed itself in their awareness of the passage from one Jubilee
Year to the next Jubilee Year. This gave every single day a special
relationship to the passage of time. The soul had become accustomed to
an order that was based, on the one hand, on 354, and on the other
hand, on 49 (7 x 7) or, respectively, 50. And this accompanied
the soul wherever it went.
This is comparable to the way it is necessary to learn in one's youth
the calculations that one will need to use later in life; once
learned, they become a possession. A certain configuration has been
established in the soul. We want to take note of that as we now move
on to another consideration.
According to the calculations of today's astronomy, Mercury circles
the Sun much more rapidly than the Earth does, so that if we refer to
the revolutions of Mercury, we obtain a picture of the Earth slowly
moving about the Sun while Mercury moves quickly. Now keep the orbit
of Mercury in mind. We want to take 354 of these in fact, we
can take 354 3/8 of them; and then we want to multiply yet again by 49
or, respectively, by 50. Simply picture these numbers. If you think of
one orbit of Mercury as a kind of celestial day, then 354 of these
Mercury orbits would be a kind of Moon year on the planet Mercury.
Then take 49 or 50 of these: that would be one celestial Jubilee Year.
Naturally, one celestial Jubilee Year is much longer than an earthly
Jubilee Year, but of course it is calculated with reference to
Mercury.
Thus we are calculating a Jubilee Year that is based on Mercury, just
as the ancient Hebrews calculated a Jubilee Year based on Moon and,
respectively, on Earth. For 354 3/8 times they experienced one Earth
day after the other. One year had passed. That, multiplied by 7 x 7
(49 or 50), made up one of the ancient Hebrews' Jubilee Years.
Corresponding to this would be 354 3/8 Mercury orbits multiplied by 50
(or 49). Naturally, that is an entirely different expanse of time, an
entirely different expanse of time from an Earth year, although it is
based on the same numbers.
Now let see how yet another number is determined. Now we take Jupiter.
Jupiter is much slower, it moves much more slowly. It takes twelve
years to go around the Sun once. Mercury moves much more quickly than
the Earth, Jupiter much more slowly. Now we will take Jupiter and
consider one of these years for Jupiter. Actually, it would be a
Jupiter year, but because Jupiter is in the heavens where we can think
on a very large scale, we look upon that as one Jupiter day. We will
let one of the periods in which Jupiter circles the Sun correspond to
one of our Earth days. Then 354 3/8 of these days would add up to a
large Jupiter year of the kind based on the Moon: one large Jupiter
year. We will not multiply it by 7 x 7, but only once, because it
lasts so long. Using the same method, then, we have calculated one
Jubilee Year for Mercury, and one for Jupiter just a single,
great year.
Then we consider yet another planet, one not known to the ancient
Hebrews. They were, however, aware of its sphere, which they thought
of as being beyond the planets; they thought of it as the crystal
sphere that formed the vault of the heavens. Much later it was
discovered that one could speak of Uranus as being there. But we can
consider Uranus, even though it was discovered much later. The only
difference is that the ancient Hebrews thought of a sphere in the
place where Uranus was later located. We will take 49 (or 50) orbits
of Uranus, which moves very slowly. And now we will compare all
of this with Earth years.
Each of these would correspond to a definite number of Earth years,
would it not? Thus, 354 3/8 x 50 revolutions of Mercury around the Sun
would correspond to a certain period of Earth years. One great Jupiter
year, consisting of 354 3/8 orbits, would correspond to another period
of Earth years. And 49 (50) orbits of Uranus would give us yet another
period of Earth years.
The extraordinary thing is that each of these yields the same number
of Earth years. One obtains a given number of Earth years if one takes
50 (49) orbits of Uranus. One obtains the same number if one takes 354
3/8 orbits of Jupiter, or 50 x 354 3/8 of the orbits of Mercury: each
yields that particular span of Earth years. In the case of Uranus, you
multiply by 50, with Jupiter, you multiply by 354 3/8, and with
Mercury, by 50 x 354 3/8 in each case you obtain the period I
have already called a celestial Jubilee
(see Note 4)
Year based on Mercury. All three planets give us the same number.
And how did the ancient Hebrews experience this number? The number is
4182. (Naturally, there are certain irregularities which play into
this and which we are ignoring today.) In each of the three cases the
number comes out at 4182. One has to say that this is approximate, but
you can investigate it exactly, for the irregularities are
balanced-out by compensating movements: it comes to 4182 Earth years!
And what would an ancient Hebrew have had to say about this? He could
say, Here on Earth your soul experiences 354 3/8 x 50 days in
each Jubilee Year, and that is one great year of reconciliation. But
something is also happening out there where cosmic thoughts are
formed. Out there live beings for whom one revolution of Mercury is
equivalent to one of your Earth days. These beings also experience the
macrocosm in other ways, for example, in a way that corresponds to
your experience of a Jubilee Year. And such a being would tell you
that one orbit of Mercury is equivalent to one day and that 354 3/8 x
49 (or 50) of these days is equivalent to one Jubilee Year reckoned on
the basis of Mercury. The being would also tell you that this same
number is identical to one Jupiter year and is also identical to 50
revolutions of the celestial sphere.
The ancient Hebrews had reasons for calculating time from the
beginning of the Earth in the following way we also place an
event at the beginning of our reckoning of Earth time, although it is
a different event. According to their reckoning, 4182 years after the
beginning of the Earth would be the time of a great, cosmic year of
reconciliation, the year in which the Christ would appear in the
flesh. In other words, the ancient Hebraic culture lived in a
time-span that extended from the beginning of the Earth to the
appearance of Christ in the flesh. This span was that of a single
Jubilee Year of Mercury, one great Jupiter year, or 50 revolutions of
the outermost, celestial sphere, which we now know as the orbit of
Uranus.
In this wonderful example you see how the human soul was being
prepared for the great, cosmic Jubilee Year. It was prepared by social
institutions that based the temporal reckoning on 354 3/8 and 7 x 7,
or 50. Thereby the soul was enabled to experience the ordering of the
cosmos, which means that cosmic forms were inscribed in the soul. This
is a tremendous thing. The connections are immensely profound.
And if you follow the thoughts of those who have emerged from Judaism,
you will see that these souls bore thoughts of a cosmos inhabited by
infinitely lofty beings. And they assumed that the laws governing the
movements of the stars would announce to their interpreters the time
of the Christ's descent from the sphere of the Sun to the Earth. The
events out yonder were thought of in terms of 354 3/8 and 7 x 7. Out
yonder, things were ordered so that someone who followed the clock of
Mercury, counting one orbit of Mercury as one day, could determine the
span of one Jubilee Year from the beginning of the Earth to the
Mystery of Golgotha. Just as man thinks of the beginnings of earthly
existence, so also do the cosmic beings think of that moment which,
for the ancient Hebrews marked the beginning of the Earth but
cosmic beings think on a cosmic scale. Meanwhile, here on Earth a
human institution was preparing human souls for thinking the great
thought that is spread out before them in the heavens; it was shaping
their souls so they would be able to apply the thought to their own
passage through time. Those who lived in the time of Christ's coming
and who could understand the place of the Mystery of Golgotha in the
course of time were men who had gone through this preparation and
whose souls had been shaped by it. Thereby they knew: The Mystery of
Golgotha is approaching. They were thereby enabled to write the
Gospels, for they could understand what lay behind the descent of the
cosmic Sun Spirit to Earth. Such an understanding presupposes that the
soul has been prepared.
Here you have a wonderful example of how social institutions that have
been spiritually ordered by initiates can prepare the human soul for
understanding an event or for comprehending it at all. What
does this show us? It deepens our understanding of why we should use
our waking consciousness to shape our human social life so that it is
related to the world of the stars. The Mystery of Golgotha cannot be
understood one cannot bring it within the scope of reason
until one has understood the connection of reason itself to the
course of the stars. This is expressed in numerical relationships.
Thus, everything that is connected with our waking consciousness is
connected consciously or unconsciously with the orderly
procession of the stars. In this case it was consciously determined by
initiates. And so, emerging from the depths of our souls, these things
begin to make their appearance in the forms I have described to you,
in dreams or in the lightning flashes of genius of a man like
Weininger. As I explained yesterday, these things do not belong to the
present course of the stars and will only be developed in later
incarnations.
What, then, are these things connected with? All the things that are
consciously or unconsciously thought by our heads and felt by our
hearts, in short, everything connected with our waking
consciousness corresponds to the movement of the stars. What,
then, corresponds to the things that go on in our more dreamlike or
fantasy-filled states of consciousness and often fill our more
inspired moods? These latter correspond more to the elemental world of
natural events, the world on which such things as thunder and storms
and hail and earthquakes depend. And in this fashion we can look
deeply into nature. It begins to appear to us as it has appeared to
men who are to some degree initiated and who have always asked,
What, then, is this part of nature that is not regulated by the
regular course of the sun and moon and their like this part of
nature that does not proceed regularly or in accordance with rules?
What is this nature of rain, of hail, of storms, of thunder, of
earthquake, of volcanic eruption? And these initiates have
always answered, Here nature appears as a somnambulist!
And now let us look up at the procession of the stars. In its regular,
numerical relationships, as in its occult connections, it presents us
with the macrocosmic representation of our waking consciousness. Then
let us contemplate our dream consciousness and everything that is to a
greater or lesser degree expressed there. There we find mirrored all
the irregular happenings of the external world. Looking up to the
heavens, we behold the external, macrocosmic representation of our
waking consciousness. Looking down towards the Earth and its
manifestations, we find nature as a somnambulist, a somnambulistic
dreamer, who is the mirror and the outer picture of what goes on in
the depths of our souls. Our waking spirit thinks in accordance with
astronomy. Our dreaming, fantasy-filled, often somnambulistic soul
lives and weaves in harmony with the great, somnambulistic
consciousness of earthly nature. That is a profound truth.
Between now and tomorrow, reflect on the extent to which astronomy is
governing your waking consciousness, and the extent to which
meteorology rules in your unconscious. Yesterday, Otto Weininger
provided us with an example of a man in whom astronomy came to
expression only to be obscured by meteorological clouds. We will speak
further about this tomorrow.
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