tr>
V - The Soul's Experiences in Sleep
September 10, 1922
In
recent times, the question of the unconscious has come to the
fore and is often spoken of in psychology. Everything in human
soul life that cannot be reached, observed or explained
by ordinary consciousness is relegated to the region of the
unconscious. When this unconscious realm is mentioned, it
is always supposed — notwithstanding the assumption
that it must remain unknown — that it contains forces
that do work into the conscious soul life. The emergence of
this idea of the unconscious is due wholly to the fact that a
certain skepticism, indeed a feeling of impotence, has arisen
in recent times in regard to solving specific problems of
philosophy, cosmology and religion. The insight that we have
described here as imaginative, inspired and intuitive knowledge
has the task now of probing into this undefined reservoir,
which figures in so many ways in recent science as “the
unconscious.” It is just by means of this supersensible
knowledge — by reaching other levels of consciousness in
which a different soul condition exists, hence a different
perceptual capacity — that the concrete facts, which are
not accessible to ordinary consciousness, must be investigated.
Today I would like to give you an example of such research in
an unconscious region of the soul, namely the experiences the
human soul undergoes between going to sleep and waking.
Ordinary consciousness remains quite unconscious of what
happens to the human soul in sleep. But we should not believe
that these experiences have less meaning or are less decisive
in a man's life than experiences of waking consciousness.
Certainly, for external life, for our work and activities, for
humanity's outer progress, the waking hours are of
primary consideration. But for the configuration and the
development of man's inner being, the rich experiences of
the state of sleep are of the first importance. Even though man
remains unconscious of them, these experiences are real, and
their after-effects play into waking life. Man's general mood
of soul during his waking hours is permeated by the
after-effects of sleep. His physical and etheric organizations,
which are worked upon by his astral organization and his actual
spiritual organization, that is to say his ego organism, are
permeated also. They too are influenced during waking life by
the after-effects of sleep.
For
ordinary consciousness the phenomena of sleep appear as
follows: sense perception begins to dim down, in the end it is
entirely extinguished; the same also happens in the case of
thinking, feeling and willing. Except for the
transitional state when we are dreaming, man sinks into
an unconscious condition. But what happens to the soul
then — and this must be strongly emphasized — is
something absolutely real. What remains unconscious to ordinary
consciousness in this respect can be illuminated by
imaginative, inspired and intuitive cognition. Therefore, I
will describe for you
the
soul's experiences during sleep. At least sketchily, I will
describe how imagination, inspiration and intuition can
perceive what, for ordinary consciousness, is unconscious. I
will outline the soul's experiences as if they were lived
through consciously, for they are experienced consciously
through higher cognition. It is not as if the soul were
unconscious throughout the night, but what would
otherwise have remained unconscious can be seen by means of
imagination, inspiration and intuition. Light can in this way
be cast upon it so that it becomes visible. The following then
comes into view.
When man first enters into the state of sleep, the sense world
around him ceases to exist for the soul. He goes into an inner
experience that is undifferentiated, in a certain sense
indefinite. The soul feels — I say feels but it does not
feel; if it were conscious, it would feel — it feels
enlarged as in a widespread fog. In this inward feeling and
experiencing during this first stage of sleep subject and
object cannot at first be distinguished. No separate phenomena
and facts are distinguishable; it is a general sensing of a
nebulous universality, which is sensed as one's own
existence. But simultaneously there appears in the
sleeping person what may be called a deep need to rest in the
divine essence of the cosmos. With this outflowing of
experience into an undifferentiated condition is mixed an
indefinite longing — one must use such a word after all
— “to rest in God. “ As I said, I
describe it as if the events, experienced unconsciously,
were passed through consciously. Thus, the external world of
daytime, everything the soul receives through the senses, is
swallowed up. All the stimuli through which the soul feels in
the body are gone and, likewise, all the impulses by means of
which the soul sends its will through the body are gone. The
soul has at first a general, universal sensation
accompanied by a longing for God.
In
this condition, which arises initially after falling asleep,
dreams can intervene. They are either symbolic pictures of
outer experiences, memory pictures, symbolic images of inner
bodily conditions, and so on, or they are dreams in which
certain true facts of the spiritual world can be
intermingled without the ordinary dreamer being able to
acquire a definite knowledge of what the dreams really contain.
Even for one who views this condition of soul with
imaginative cognition — for by means of it one can
do this already — dreams do not throw light upon the
inner facts, rather do they veil the real truth. For this
truth, in relation to what is meant here, can only be perceived
by a person, if, out of his own free will, he prepares himself
in an appropriate manner through soul exercises such as have
been described here. Only as a result of these soul exercises
can a clear view of this first stage of sleep be attained.
If
you look with such cognitional faculties into this first stage
of sleep, when you can divine it, it shows itself to be similar
to, but not exactly the same as the unconscious
experiences of earliest childhood. Indeed, if man were in
a position to bring these experiences to consciousness and pour
them into the concepts and ideas of ordinary
consciousness, such as philosophy is occupied with, then
these philosophical ideas would attain reality. The
philosophy to which we should thus attain would be something
real. So it can also be said that in the first stage of every
sleep man becomes an unconscious philosopher. He attains to
what in waking consciousness is cultivated in his soul as
ideas, as dialectics and logical laws. If the flowing into the
cosmic mists of the etheric world and the soul's longing to
rest in God could be permeated with the experience of
actuality, if man could bring these two soul experiences to
consciousness and pour them into abstract philosophical ideas,
then these ideas would come alive. Philosophy would then be as
it was in Greece before
Socrates,
and in still earlier epochs of humanity. It would be an inwardly
experienced reality.
We
have now learned to know two stages of man's unfolding:
that of his earliest childhood, which, if brought to
consciousness, would represent the reality of
philosophical ideas and the experience of the first stage of
sleep, which, as we have noted, is quite similar to the
unconscious experience of childhood, and which, when brought to
consciousness, could in the same way give a living experience
of reality to a philosophy worked out during waking life.
That describes the first, somewhat brief stages that a human
being undergoes from the time of falling asleep to waking
up.
After the soul has been for a time in the state of sleep
described above, another condition sets in. This second stage
of sleep is such that instead of the experience of his own
physical and etheric bodies, which he has when awake, man has a
form of experience through which he feels inside himself
the cosmos that in daytime surrounds him. While in the first
stage the soul experiences no clear distinction between subject
and object, this difference now becomes increasingly
meaningful except that during sleep man has come into the
reverse condition from that of being awake. He now feels and
experiences himself in the cosmos and looks back on his
physical and etheric organisms as upon an object. Just as he
vaguely feels his organs — lungs, liver, heart, and so on
— in day consciousness, now, in sleep, he experiences the
cosmic content within himself; he himself becomes, as it were,
cosmos in his soul. Not as if he extended out into the whole
cosmos; rather, he experiences something like a
reflection of the cosmos within him.
The
first unconscious experience — which even so is wholly
real — is, I might say, a fragmentation of this inner
soul experience. The soul feels as if it were divided up
into many separate parts of a manifoldness. It feels itself not
as a unity but as a multiplicity; as if, when awake, we were to
experience ourselves in the brain not as a homogeneous
being but as a multiplicity of eyes, ears, lungs, liver and so
on, and we were missing the sense of unity. Thus, during sleep,
we experience, so to say, the cosmic ingredients without
at first experiencing their unity. That brings about a
condition of soul which, if we were conscious of it, we should
have to describe as permeated by anxiety, even fear. The soul,
however, really experiences the objective processes that
cause this nightly anxiety, just as the organic processes of
the physical and etheric organisms underlie what might be
experienced here or there by the soul as anxiety coming
from within. They are, in fact, fear-inspiring occurrences that
the soul has to live through.
In
this stage of sleep, occurrences of waking life now
reveal their effects. For modern man living after the
Mystery of Golgotha there appear the after-effects of what he
experiences in waking life as inner religious devotion to
Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha. The attention man gives to
it, all reverence and worship that he develops for the Christ
and that Mystery during his waking life, have after-effects in
this second stage of sleep. It was otherwise for those who
lived on earth before the Mystery of Golgotha. They received
from their religious leaders appropriate measures, religious
functions to carry out, whose effects they could carry over
into sleep and that worked there in such a way that this
anxiety could gradually be overcome. For a person living after
the Mystery of Golgotha his inner bond with Christ, his feeling
of belonging to Him, the religious rituals directed to Christ
Jesus, his whole relation to Him and his actual conduct in
reference to this relationship, all this now works into the
life of sleep and helps to overcome that anxiety which
oppresses the soul.
As
I said, I describe things as they appear to inspired
consciousness, but they certainly are experienced by the soul
as reality. So, while I present concepts taken from
conscious life, the actual corresponding processes are
really present in the life of the soul. If, in daytime, we have
developed a relation to the Christ, we actually meet His
guiding power during this second stage of sleep. It is this
guiding power of Christ through which we overcome the anxiety
that oppresses the soul. Out of this anxiety there develops a
cosmic relationship of the soul to the world. As a result of
the development of this relationship, but in such a way that
the soul experiences it as its inner life, the movements of the
planetary system in our solar cosmos stand before the soul. It
does not expand out into the planetary world during sleep, but
an inner replica of it lives in the soul. It actually
experiences the planetary cosmos in a replica. Even if what the
soul experiences every night as a small, inner globe, a
celestial globe, does not illuminate day consciousness, it does
stream into the reality of daily life and continues on in the
physical and etheric organizations in the systems of breathing
and blood circulation, the whole rhythmic system, we find that
these processes are accompanied by impulses and stimuli that
live in the physical and the etheric body and work into waking
life out of the inner planetary experience which the soul has
in sleep. While we are awake, therefore, the planetary
movements of our solar system pulse through our breathing and
circulation as after-effects of sleep.
During sleep — supersensible vision shows us that astral
and ego organizations are outside the physical and etheric
bodies — the planetary movements do not work directly.
They are experienced by the soul outside the physical and
etheric organisms. But within the sleeping physical body the
impulses from the previous night echo and reverberate, the same
impulses that have pulsated through breathing and circulation
during the day. During the following night an after-effect of
these impulses is present, and they are renewed the next
morning as a consequence of what the soul experienced in
the night as an inner replica of the planetary cosmos.
Now
in addition to this cosmic experience during the second
stage of sleep something else happens. The soul receives
distinct impressions of all the relationships it has ever
entertained with human souls in its various lives on
earth. We actually have within us, I might say,
“markings” of all the relationships we have had
with other human souls in successive earth lives. They
now appear before the soul in a certain pictorial form.
Although unconsciously, the soul really experiences
everything that has been good or bad in its dealings with other
people. Likewise, it experiences its developing relationships
with spiritual beings who dwell in the cosmos and never live in
a physical body, who always live in a super-sensible existence
as opposed to the physical life of man. The human soul in sleep
thus lives in a rich network of relations with those
human souls with whom it has established such connections.
These connections reappear, as does everything that has
remained from them as after-effects of the right and wrong a
person has done to others, the good and evil he may have
caused. In short, the existing destiny of a person confronts
his soul in this stage of sleep.
What an older philosophy has called karma appears at this stage
every night before man's soul. Since the planetary experiences
continue to work as stimuli in the breathing and blood
circulation, and thus in man's physical and etheric
organizations, it is possible for someone capable of
perceiving such things through inspired cognition to
observe that this experience of repeated earth lives also plays
over into day consciousness, even though it is not directly
present. It is clearly evident to inspired cognition, which
perceives what the soul experiences, that repeated earth lives
are a fact, for to the view of inspiration they present
themselves directly together with the relationships established
at any time with other people. Man's development through
repeated earth lives presents itself because these
relationships are beheld. One relationship points back to one
certain earth life, another points to another life, and so on.
In this way, karma appears before man's eyes as an established
fact.
The
experiences of the soul during sleep work in such a manner into
day consciousness that man's general mood, making itself felt
during the day in the form of a dull awareness of
himself, depends on what we undergo in this second stage of
sleep. Whether we feel happy or unhappy in our dimly perceived
inner self, whether we feel lively or languid, is to a great
extent the result of what is experienced in this stage of
sleep. So, during this stage we find ourselves actually
outside in the cosmos, even though what we experience within
the soul is a copy of the cosmos; and what we experience
of repeated earth lives and karma appears before the soul as
images and reflections. These replicas of the cosmos and our
destiny that stand before our soul contain what can be called
man's inner existence in the cosmos. If you are able to
formulate in concepts and ideas what has been attained
through inspired cognition by letting it stream back into
ordinary consciousness, you arrive at a true cosmology that
encompasses the whole of man. Such a cosmology then is an
experienced cosmology. We can say that when this stage of sleep
is consciously reflected back, man learns to recognize himself
as a member of the cosmic order — a cosmic order that is
expressed in a planetary sense, as a cosmic ordering of
nature.
But
now, within this cosmic order, the moral world order arises.
This is not as it is in earth life, where on the one side we
find the order of nature with its own systems of laws but
lacking morality, and on the other side a moral world order
experienced as far as earthly existence is concerned only in
the soul. Instead, we have a unified world before us. What we
experience as a planetary cosmos is permeated and
spiritually impregnated by a continuous stream of moral
impulses. We live simultaneously in a natural and a moral
cosmos.
You
realize the full significance of these nightly events for
waking life. So, we can say that what the soul experiences in
the cosmos between going to sleep and waking is more real and
full of meaning for man's outward configuration than what
confronts him by day, for the life functions of the physical
and etheric bodies, as well as our own moral condition,
are results of our cosmic experience during sleep.
The
third stage of sleep is characterized by a gradual transition
from experiences within the planetary cosmos to an experience
of the world of the fixed stars, so that this world is
experienced by the soul as a kind of reflection. Yet these are
not reflections of those outer sense pictures of the
constellations such as we have in waking life. Instead, the
soul becomes familiar with those beings of whom it was said in
earlier lectures that intuition recognizes as the spiritual
beings corresponding to the stars. Here in the sense world in
our physical consciousness we experience the physical sense
pictures of the stars. When, as I have described, we penetrate
the spiritual world with intuition, we recognize that the sun
and other fixed stars as perceived by ordinary sense perception
are merely the reflected physical images of certain spiritual
beings. The soul lives within these spiritual beings of the
stars during the third stage of sleep. It feels after-images of
the star constellations, that is to say, it feels the
relationships that exist between the activities of the
spiritual star-beings. The soul experiences such
constellations.
Ancient dreamlike science specifically described how the life
of the fixed star constellations and zodiac streamed into the
soul. This is, after all, the main part of the soul's
experience in sleep. In the sense world you arrive at a
better correspondence to the single spiritual beings if
you look at the constellations as a whole instead of gazing at
single stars. In sleep, the soul, being free of the physical
and etheric bodies, becomes so liberated that it confronts them
both as objects, just as we usually have around us the objects
of the external world as perceived by the senses. The soul
really finds its way as a spiritual being into a cosmos
consisting of other spiritual beings. What it unconsciously
goes through there can be illuminated by intuitive knowledge.
But the experiences there also have their after-effects
in waking life; the general well-being, health and vigor of the
human body — not of the soul as in the first stage of
sleep — are after-effects of what the soul experiences
during the night among star-beings. Especially there comes
before the soul, even if unconsciously, the whole event
of birth in its broadest sense; that is, the way the soul
enters a physical body through conception and embryonic
life. Again, there comes before the soul how the body is
abandoned in death and how man's spirit being passes into the
soul-spiritual world. Every night, the truth concerning the
events of birth and death really confront the soul. It is
also an after-effect of the night-time experiences that
man has a dim feeling during the day that birth and death by no
means signify for human life only what they appear to be to
sense observation. It is simply not true that a man with sound
common sense could believe that birth and death are nothing but
the events they appear to be in outer material life. Man in
fact does not believe this, but it is not true to say that the
reason for his disbelief is only because in his fantasy he
imagines that he is an eternal being whose existence persists
beyond death. No, man cannot believe it because of the picture
experienced every night by the soul of how man enters earth
life from the spiritual world and withdraws again into the
world of spirit. This picture streams into the soul by
day and is experienced by it as a vague feeling about the world
and human life.
What appears during waking life as religious longing, as
religious awareness, is an after-effect of the soul's
experience among the stars. What I have just described is the
stage of man's deepest sleep. In actual fact, it is out of his
sleep that man derives the religious feelings of his waking
life.
Just as religious life can be founded today in knowledge by
means of the experience resembling that of primordial humanity
but permeated and formulated in intuitions by the fully
developed consciousness, it can also be said that man can
attain this religious knowledge if, through super-sensible
intuition, he is able to perceive and illuminate the condition
of deepest sleep. For what rests in the depths of sleep was
also the source of what preserved man's knowledge of the
divine. Our day-consciousness is only a reflection of the
potentialities for consciousness open to man. Likewise, what
man bears within him as a natural religious feeling
appears as a reflection of the glory and sublimity
experienced by his soul, even if unconsciously, in the third
stage of sleep. Man sinks into the life of sleep not only to
renew his tired body, or to gain the stimuli from sleep that
his breathing and circulation need, or to acquire from the
spiritual world the other impulses he needs. What permeates him
with religious feeling penetrates to the soul's surface,
to the region of day-consciousness from the profound depths
through which human soul life streams during sleep.
One
might say that as man lives a philosophical life during
the first stage of sleep, similar to that of earliest
childhood — however paradoxical that sounds to
present-day consciousness — and as in the second
stage he lives a cosmological life, so, in the third stage, he
lives a life of being permeated with divinity. From this third
stage of sleep, man must then return to daytime
consciousness.
Having retraced the above-mentioned stages in backward sequence
during the last stage of sleep, man returns again to waking
consciousness. Since man's soul and spirit are outside
his physical and etheric organizations in sleep, if this
phenomenon of sleep is to be comprehended fully, intuitive
knowledge must answer the question: Why is man drawn back into
his physical and etheric bodies again? What impulse is at
work there? If the intuitive perception of sleep is extended
far enough, it is possible to recognize this impulse. As man
cognizes these spiritual beings who correspond to the sun or
the constellations of the other fixed stars, he then recognizes
that the impulse comes from the spiritual beings whose
reflection in our physical world is the moon. Indeed, the
forces of the moon permeate our whole cosmos, and when, through
intuition, we recognize not only the physical existence of the
moon but also her spiritual correlations, we find that these
spiritual beings, who correspond to the physical moon,
are the entities who, in their working together, produce the
impulses to bring us back into our physical and etheric bodies
after we have reached the deepest stage of sleep. It is above
all the moon forces that connect man's astral and ego
organization with his physical and etheric organisms.
Every night, when out of the spiritual world the soul desires
to re-enter its physical and etheric bodies, it must place
itself within the streams of the moon forces. It is of no
concern here — that will be obvious to you —
whether it be new or full moon. For even when, as new moon, the
moon is not visible to the senses, those forces are
nevertheless active throughout the cosmos that bring the
soul back into the etheric and physical bodies from the
spiritual worlds. They are active even though the moon's phases
appearing to the senses as half-moon, full moon, etc., are
metamorphosed sense pictures that correspond to events in the
soul being of the moon; these, to be sure, have something to do
with man's spirit and soul in the physical and etheric bodies.
Indeed, the particular configuration in which man's
soul-spiritual and physical-etheric natures are linked is
determined by those forces that rule and interweave in the
cosmos and come to physical expression in the moon, the sense
object, with her various phases that we perceive.
Thus, we can also look into the concealed aspects of man's life
of waking and sleeping and inform ourselves concerning what it
is that brings him back each morning into his daytime life. He
returns through the same stages in reverse order, and while he
passes through the last stage, which is permeated by a longing
for God, the dreams mix again into his sleep life and he
gradually submerges into his physical and etheric
organizations.
Why
is it that when man goes through the gate of death he is no
longer subject to the moon forces? How does he withdraw from
them when he spends a long time in the spiritual world?
These questions as well as the secrets of birth, death and
repeated earth lives will be considered in the next two
lectures.
|