LECTURE III.
Dornach, 11th March 1921.
I
should like today to put before you a kind of summary of facts
that we already know from one aspect or another. They must,
however, be brought to mind again and again if we would form
impulses out of the depths of the knowledge of Spiritual
Science for what is necessary to human activity in the present
day.
I
have often spoken to you of the different streams working
together to form the whole world in which the human being is
placed, and we know the terminology: Luciferic, Ahrimanic, and
that which, as it were, is the state of balance between those
two and which is best expressed by speaking of the
Christ-stream. You know indeed that the central Group of our
Building is to bring to expression this very mystery of the
trinity of the three aspects — the Luciferic, the
Ahrimanic, and that of the Christ.
When we consider man, who is ultimately the confluence of the
forces of the cosmos, we can plainly see how these three
streams work through him. We know that we have to distinguish
what in the main — you know how that is to be understood
— is the Head-organisation, the bearer of the
nerves-senses system. We must then distinguish the
Rhythmic-system which includes, as its most important part, the
breathing rhythm and the blood circulation, that is to say, all
that takes its course rhythmically. And then as the third
principle of external man we must consider the
Metabolic-system which is intimately connected with the
development of the limb-system. We know moreover that we
can conceive this trinity of man from the aspect of the
soul. For the nerves-senses organisation is in essentials the
bearer of the life of thought, of concepts. The rhythmic
organisation is the bearer of the feeling-life, and the
metabolic organisation is the bearer of the life of will. Now
let us be clear about the following: We only possess a real
day-consciousness, a consciousness fully permeated by light, by
virtue of our nerves-senses system, and the life of concepts
that develops in it. The rhythmic system, or we can also say
the breast system, is the bearer of the feeling-life; feelings
are developed in the middle part of the soul. And the bodily
basis for the feelings is the rhythmic system. We have often
shown that the feeling system is not permeated by clear bright
consciousness in the same way as the conceptual life. If
we examine the soul-life of man without prejudice we can
only say that the feeling-life has no greater clearness of
consciousness than the dream. Dream-life with its pictures and
feeling-life are equally conscious and equally unconscious.
They only seem different because the life of feeling is not
experienced in pictures but only in the quality of the soul
which forms no pictures. Dreams live in pictures and they are
thus differentiated; in intensity of consciousness,
however, they do not differ from each other.
Completely wrapped in unconsciousness, like man's state between
going to sleep and waking, is the will-life with its bodily
basis of the metabolic-limb system. In respect of his life of
will man is a completely sleeping being, even if wide awake.
When he wills he really only sees what is brought about through
his will, he has this before him as he has anything else.
But what is actually active in the will, the inner
soul-experience and willing, that is actually slept through, as
the feeling life is dreamt through.
Now
let us consider this sleeping will-life, consider it from the
bodily aspect, this sleeping metabolic and limb-life. Man in
his whole being stands not merely in the surrounding
world of physical nature; he stands in a spiritual world as
well. He stands with his whole being, no matter to what degree
of consciousness this being has advanced, within the spiritual
cosmos.
If
we now look at the will, we can say something of this sort: If
that is the spiritual cosmos (see diagram, circle) which, at
the moment I will not characterise further — you know
“spiritual cosmos” is very universal, one can
always take only a part of it — then this (red) would be
a certain part of the spiritual cosmos, namely, that to which
our will- life, metabolic-limb-life, mainly belongs.
If
you think of the will-life separated out of man psychically and
the metabolic-limb system bodily and ask how that is
incorporated into a spiritual cosmos, then this whole
relationship to a spiritual cosmos shall be represented to
begin with through this diagram. And the question arises: What
is this white? We know that the red is man's will regarded from
the aspect of the soul, or the metabolic-limb life from the
aspect of the body, but what is it to which this life belongs?
I should like to express myself in another way. If you consider
some member of the human organism, the liver, for instance,
then you will say to yourself: this liver belongs to the whole
organism and has a significance within the whole organism. In
the same way, within a great organism, a world-organism, which
is here represented white, we can consider as a member the
whole human metabolic-limb system, the will-system. And then
the question arises: What is this great cosmic organism in
which is embedded, so to say, the human will-life, the
metabolic-limb life?
You
see, that in which man is embedded with regard to his third
member is the cosmic life of those Beings whom the Bible calls
the Elohim. Really and truly, just as we live in outer nature
which we perceive through our senses, we live in the life of
the Elohim with that part of our being whose activity we
actually sleep through.
Now
we will speak of these things more exactly; I want at first
only to characterise them to you. Let us consider the life of
the Elohim in the whole cosmic evolution. If you re-read my
“Occult Science”
you will find that they are the
Spirits of Form, and that they ascend from former stages of
evolution, If we go back to the earlier evolutionary stage of
the cosmic Moon-existence, these Spirits of Form were there
Archai, Original Forces, Primal Beginnings. If we go back to
the Sun-existence they are there Archangels; and if we go back
to the Saturn existence, they were there Angels. Thus they have
ascended since that time and have come to the Elohim existence,
to the existence of the Spirits of Form.
When we look at our human evolution and say to ourselves: We
too are evolving; when shall we reach the height at which these
Spirits are now? We shall be at this height when we have gone
through the Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan existence and are in that
existence which follows after. If you add together what I have
described in my
“Occult Science,”
you have seven
successive evolutionary stages, one could say seven successive
evolutionary spheres. And the Spirits of Form have entered the
eighth evolutionary sphere.
Saturn-existence
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1
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5
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Sun-existence
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2
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6
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Moon-existence
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3
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7
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Earth-existence
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(Man)
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4
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8
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(Elohim)
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Jupiter-Existence
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5
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Venus-existence
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6
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Vulcan-existence
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7
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________________________________________________________
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(Man)
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8
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That characterises the position of the Elohim. As the Earth
came into being they were at the stage which for us human
beings is characterised as the Vulcan existence. They ascended
into the eighth sphere. Wow the great question, the great
cosmic question, was: How does it stand, or how did it stand
within human beings during this Earth-existence? You see, as
man was formerly a member in the evolution of the Elohim, he
was in the position of remaining such a member. The Elohim
evolved during the Saturn, Sun, Moon evolution to the stage
which I have now described to you. There they carried in their
womb, as it were, the human being as you find him depicted in my
“Occult Science.”
But all that I described there
rested in fact in the womb of the Elohim. It is described in
the same way as if I were to describe to you the development of
the liver. If it were described in its stages, it rests in fact
in the womb of the human being. And the whole development of
man, as I have described it, rested in the womb of the
Elohim.
Now
when the Earth came into existence, there was the question:
Will man now remain simply an inseparable member in the great
organism which mounts to its eighth sphere, the great organism
of the Elohim, or will he develop to freedom and become
independent? This question of whether men should become
independent was decided through a most definite cosmic act. In
respect of our will-system psychically and our
metabolic-limb system we are indeed parts of the Elohim,
there we are asleep. There we are not separate. We are
separated, severed, in respect of our head-system.
What occasioned this severance? It came about through the fact
that certain Spiritual Beings who by a normal evolution
would also have become Elohim did not become Elohim,
they remained behind at the stage of Archai or Archangeloi. We
can say, therefore, that they are Beings who, if they had
advanced normally, could have been Elohim. But they did not
advance normally, they stayed behind. They belong, when we
regard them occultly today, to the same sphere to which the
Angels, the Archangels, belong; but they are not the same
nature as the Angels or Archangels or Archaic They are actually
of the same nature as the Elohim, the Spirits of Form, but have
remained behind in their evolution and have fallen into the
hosts of Angels and Archangels, manifesting themselves in the
same sphere. Their activity has had to confine itself; they do
not work upon the whole man, nor on what man has pre-eminently
acquired upon earth, the metabolic-limb system, but they work
upon the head-system of man. I will draw here the head-system
(see diagram, rose) as the counter-pole of the will-system, the
metabolic-limb system. Here the great cosmic organism of the
Elohim is not active, but actively at work are the backward
Elohim whom I will draw so (yellow), working in this sphere
together with Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai. These Beings,
the laggard Elohim, are actually opponents of the other Elohim.
The other Elohim have separated man off from themselves, but
they would not have been able to give him freedom because they
have an influence on the whole man. On the other hand,
the laggard Spirits of Form restrict themselves to the head and
gave man reason, intellect. They are essentially the
Luciferic spirits and as you may see from what has been
said, they are givers-of-will on a lower level. The Elohim give
will to the whole man; they give will to the head. The head
would otherwise be filled only with will-less concepts.
Concepts only become rational by being penetrated with will and
becoming the power of judgment. That has come about through
these spirits.
You
will perhaps realise from what has now been depicted from a
certain aspect that one must not apply cut-and-dried ideas when
one considers cosmic opposing forces. One must not simply treat
the Luciferic spirits with scorn, turn a cold shoulder —
if I may express myself so — but one must be clear that
these spirits are of an essentially higher order than man
himself. In fact, they are not actually opponents of man, they
are opponents of the Elohim because they have remained behind
in evolution and confine themselves to the human head. That is
what we must bear in mind.
If
you picture what these Spirits would really attain if they had
an entirely free hand with human evolution one comes to the
following. When the Earth cane into existence, there were the
Elohim risen to their high rank while the others had stayed
behind at earlier stages of evolution. These are in this way
the bearers of what was pre-eminently imprinted into man from
the past, from the Saturn, Sun, Moon existence, the bearers of
what is to be implanted into man of the sublime past which we
went through in the three former metamorphoses of
evolution.
Since they have remained behind and set themselves in
opposition, as it were, to what the Elohim purposed for the
human beings of the Earth we can say of them: These Beings who
are really Spirits of Form but who meet us in the
spiritual world among the ranks of the Angels, Archangels
and Archai imprint into man all that would like to keep him
from descending to a complete earth existence. They would
really like to keep him above the mineral kingdom. They would
prefer man to experience only what is in the sprouting plant
world, what lives in the animal world and in the actually human
world. But they do not want him to come down to the dead
mineral world. And in particular they desire above all that he
should have no contact with our technics. That enrages these
Spirits. They would like to keep man in a spiritual sphere and
not let him descend to the earth. In this way they are
opponents of the Elohim, because the Elohim, who have made man
solidly firm in the dust of the earth, as the Bible expresses
it, have drawn him down into the mineral kingdom. But
freedom, the freedom which man is to experience in the earthly
element, actually does not depend on just those Spirits who
would keep him free of the earthly,
Now, by means of the Elohim man has been established in the
terrestrial mineral world and this has enabled still other
spirits to gain access. Note carefully the difference between
the Spirits of whom I have just spoken and the Spirits of whom
I have still to speak. Those of whom I spoke earlier are in the
spheres where the Angels, the Archangels and the Archai are to
be found. We find them among the hosts of these Spirits and it
is they who bring flexibility, mobile reasoning, into the human
head, the activity of phantasy, art, and so on. But because man
has been pressed down into the mineral kingdom, because the
Elohim have given him an independence which is no full
independence, for he experiences it asleep in his will
and metabolic system — because of this, other Spirits
have secured admittance. They smuggle themselves, as it were,
into evolution. The Spirits of whom I spoke before have been
present throughout evolution, they have only stayed behind;
they were not able to share in it but they are backward Elohim,
present in the cosmos with the Elohim, only not willing to let
man come quite down to earth. He has, however, come down to
earth through the Elohim.
And
now from outside came other Spirits. We find them if we direct
the occult gaze to the Hosts of the Cherubim, Seraphim,
Thrones. Of the Spirits actually belonging to this order some
again have remained behind. They have not entered these hosts,
they have only become Spirits of Wisdom. One can say of them
that they would really like to begin quite a new creation' on
the earth, they would like to preserve a thorough
earth-man. He has been incorporated in the mineral kingdom
through the Elohim and they would like to take this as a
beginning and from then on carry evolution further. They would
like to wipe out the whole past; “Oh dear, the
past,” they say, “that no longer bothers us; man
has come down into the mineral kingdom, now let us tear him
away from the Elohim, they do not need him, let us tear him
away from the Elohim and begin a new evolution. Let him be the
original member and then live on and on!” —
Those are the Ahrimanic Beings. They want to expunge the
whole of the past and leave man with merely what he has gained
directly on the earth.
You
see how the Elohim take a middle stand; they would like to link
the past with the future. The Spirits whom I described before
would like to permeate man through and through with his lofty
past. The other Spirits want to wipe out the entire past, take
away from the Elohim what man is out of the dust of the earth
and make a new beginning, make evolution only begin from the
earth onwards, Away with this “balloon” of Saturn,
Sun, Moon. None of that is to have any meaning for man. A new
evolution is to begin with the Earth; this is to be the new
Saturn, then a new Sun comes, and so on. That is the ideal of
these Beings. They break into man's unconsciousness, into the
will-life, the metabolic-limb-life, that is where they make
their attack. They are that race among the Spiritual Beings who
want to give man a special interest for the mineral-material,
an interest in what is externally mechanistic. They would
particularly like to destroy everything that the Earth has
brought over from the Old Moon. They would like the animal
world to disappear, the physical human world to disappear, the
plant world to disappear, and of the mineral world only the
physical laws to remain. Above all they would like human beings
to be removed from the earth and to form a new Saturn out of
machines, a new world purely of machines. In this way, the
world should go on; that is actually their ideal. In the domain
of external science it is their ideal to reduce everything to
matter, to mechanise. In the sphere of religion these two
polarities are plainly to be perceived.
In
former times, as you know from other lectures that I have given
here, men were more exposed to the Spirits of the first kind
who work on the head-nature. Even in the time of Plato you find
that if one spoke of the eternity of the human soul, it was
especially of the pre-natal existence and what one actually
remembered of this previous existence. That ceased gradually
the further we come Into the Middle Ages, until the Church
entirely prohibited a belief in pre-existence. Today this
belief is held by the Church to be heresy. Thus on the one hand
there is a tendency to the knowledge of pre-existence, on the
other hand the Ahrimanised Church which continues man's life
only beyond his death and makes his future existence merely the
fruit of what he is here on earth.
You
have that as an article of faith — what a human being
experiences here in physical life he carries with him through
death. His soul always looks back to that. The whole succeeding
life is actually only the continuation of what was here between
his birth and death. That is precisely the same as what the
Ahrimanic Spirits want. This is just the important question
that lies before mankind today: Shall the Ahrimanic faith go on
flourishing as if there were only a life after death, or shall
the consciousness of pre-existence re-awaken and shall it then
come to a union of pre-existence and post-existence through a
centre balance?
That is what Spiritual Science must seek, the Christ-principle,
the equilibrium between the Luciferic-Ahrimanic — on the
one side pre-existence and post-existence on the other. That is
the weighty problem of the present day, namely, that after
humanity has succumbed for a time to the Ahrimanic belief in a
mere post-existence, we should unite with it the consciousness,
the knowledge, of pre-existence, in order to come to a
conception of full humanity.
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