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VI - The Transition from the Soul-Spiritual Existence in Human Development to the Sensory-Physical
September 11, 1922
From the descriptions I have given of inspired and
intuitive knowledge it will be evident that it is
possible for man to experience the cosmos in his inner nature,
his soul and spirit. I was able to indicate yesterday that such
an experience occurs during sleep, only that ordinary
consciousness is unaware of it. Man experiences cosmically, but
in ordinary consciousness he knows nothing of it. One can say
that man in his physical sense life experiences himself in his
physical and etheric bodies and considers their organs as his
inner nature. In cosmic experience — as it occurs in
sleep, for example — he experiences as his inner
nature a reflection of cosmic beings. Thus, even in the state
of sleep man's ordinary inner world becomes in fact an
outer world. When he sleeps, he simply has before him as an
outer world his physical and etheric bodies, which
otherwise constitute his being, and the cosmos which to sense
observation constitutes the surrounding world becomes in a
certain sense an inner world.
But, during sleep, a continuing desire to return to his
physical body exists in man's astral and ego nature. This is
especially strong in that deepest stage of sleep which I
pointed to yesterday as the sleep in what I have called
“fixed star consciousness.” This desire to return
to the physical and etheric bodies naturally is connected with
the fact that these bodies continue to exist, fully alive,
during sleep. Man develops this intense longing to return
because of the spiritual moon forces active in the cosmos, as I
described yesterday.
If
spiritual science, anthroposophy, is to be rightly
understood, one must keep clearly in mind that the
various relationships must be presented from the greatest
number of viewpoints. For instance, someone might hear me say
that the reason why a man wants to return into his physical and
etheric bodies in the morning is that his soul yearns to do so.
Then someone else could say that this return depends upon the
moon forces. Both are correct, only that the wish to return is
aroused during man's cosmic experience by the moon forces that
also permeate his astral and ego organizations between
falling asleep and waking. These moon forces, that is their
spiritual correlation, cannot function when man is in his
pre-earthly existence prior to his descent from the spiritual
world and prior to his having taken on his physical body. When
he is in a purely spiritual cosmos in his prenatal existence,
no such relation to a physical and etheric body is possible,
for they are non-existent. During sleep, however, they wait to
be ensouled and filled again with spirit by the actual inner
human entity.
Such a physical-etheric organism is not present in pre-earthly
man, but something else is. At a certain stage of his
pre-earthly existence he experiences a kind of cosmos as his ,
inner world. In a way he feels himself to be a cosmos. But in
this prenatal existence, this cosmos differs from the one that
surrounds us between birth and death and is perceived by the
senses. This cosmos, which is experienced at a certain stage of
pre-earthly life, is a kind of cosmic seed of the later
physical human organism with which man must clothe
himself when he descends to earth existence. Just think
of everything earthly man possesses as his physical
organism, spread out boundlessly: lungs, liver, heart, etc.,
all their processes — naturally as forces, not as
physical-material organs — spread out into cosmic
infinity. Man experiences this in such a way, however, that his
soul encompasses this cosmos, having it at the same time
as his inner life.
When I say that man experiences his future physical organism as
a germ, a seed, there is a difference between using the
word germ in one instance for spiritual existence and in
another for physical existence. In the latter one means
something small that unfolds into a larger organism. But when I
say that the cosmic germ of man's physical body is experienced
in pre-earthly existence as a cosmos, this germ is immeasurably
large, and gradually contracts until at last it is small.
Naturally, one must consider that in this case — at least
for the spiritual, the pre-earthly existence — the word
large is used figuratively in relation to the later word small,
for in pre-earthly existence one does not experience space as
one does here in the physical world. Everything is
experienced qualitatively. Space as we know it in our
sense world exists only for this sense world. But in order to
illustrate this so that we can take something from human
language to characterize these conditions of pre-earthly
existence, this distinction can well be made. So, we can
say that the cosmic human germ is immense, and gradually
contracts more and more, until it finally appears small in
man's physical organism.
Thus, we must picture to ourselves that in his pre-earthly
existence man does not have the same star-filled view of the
cosmos as we perceive it from the physical world; he has a
cosmos around him that contains soul-spiritual beings. Man
feels himself bound up with them, he feels them, as it were,
within him. He feels his soul nature spread out far across this
cosmos. This cosmos is actually nothing else than his future
physical body expanded to a universe. Man experiences his
future inner world as a cosmic outer world, which, however, he
experiences along with his inner being. Therefore, we can say
that this whole cosmos — I would like to call it the
cosmos of man — that man experiences as his own, is his
own individual existence. At the same time, he
experiences the life of other beings, of other human
souls and spiritual beings who do not enter physical
existence. He lives into these beings, so that he experiences a
kind of universe of his own and at the same time a kind of
being-together with other beings. I should like to call this
being-together with other beings at this stage of pre-earthly
existence an active intuition; a real, experienced
intuition. What is at other times reproduced in supersensible
perception by intuition is a living reality for pre-earthly
existence.
Now, in the way I described it yesterday, while man in sleep
lives in a replica of the cosmos — being outside his
physical as well as etheric organizations which, however,
possess finished and completed form — in pre-earthly life
he has the developing physical organism as his being, I cannot
even say, around, but within himself. Yet, at the same time,
man is within as well as outside himself, and his life consists
in active soul-spiritual labor on the development of this
organism. Whereas, in physical life, we arrange our work so
that outer sense-perceptible objects are purposefully
transformed and we ourselves are changed with them, in
our pre-earthly life we labor to make our physical organism as
it should be. We incorporate into it what later in earth life
must be present as wisdom-filled cooperation of the physical
organs with each other as well as with the soul, and of the
soul with the spirit. Before birth, we live in a universe
(which is our own being), whose development consists in being
molded purposefully to serve as our future earth organism.
In
this pre-earthly condition, we possess consciousness because we
are present in this universe not only with our perceptions but
also with our activity of spirit and soul. Sleep, by contrast,
is without consciousness because the physical and etheric
bodies are no longer developing but completed, and we cannot
work in sleep on what is already finished. But we experience
them in the form described by me yesterday. In the pre-earthly
condition, everything representing our link with the developing
universe, which draws together increasingly so as later to
become our physical organism, all this is force, an inner
mobility that expresses itself as a form of consciousness
differing from that of earth life. It is a bright, clearer
state of consciousness than the one that comes into being in
our physical existence. With it we are able to experience our
own working toward earthly life that is to come. If, here in
earth existence, we observe our physical organism externally,
or in the way it is seen by anatomy or physiology, we certainly
cannot compare it with the grandeur, the glorious majesty of
the universe that surrounds us as the world of the stars, the
clouds, and so forth. Yet, what has been compressed into this
human physical organism is grander, more powerful, more
majestic than the physical cosmos around us in earthly
existence, when it is seen as the universe by the human soul
before it descends to earth. If you think of everything
contained in materialized form in the physical body, all that
is hidden in man here on earth because it has been compressed
and covered over by matter, and you picture all this
transposed into the spiritual, then you would have to think of
a universe with which our physical cosmos, despite all its
stars, suns, etc., cannot in the remotest degree be compared
for vastness, grandeur and majesty.
We
find our way into earthly existence out of a spiritual,
pre-earthly world view having a grand, mighty content. The
highest cultural work in which we can ever participate here on
earth is but a trifle compared to that in which man shares
during his pre-earthly existence. I say shares, because
countless spiritual beings of the most varied hierarchies
work together with man in creating the wondrous structure of
his physical organism. This work, when seen in its essence, is
of an inspiring and blissful nature. Truly, nothing small and
unimportant is indicated, when, to the question, “What
does man do between death and a new birth in pre-earthly
existence?” — the answer is: At a certain stage he
works with the spirits of the cosmos on the configuration, the
inner wisdom-filled structure of a physical human body by
preforming it as an universal spirit-germ.
[For this
concept see especially the cycle given in the Hague in November
1923 translated under the title of Supersensible Man, in
the fourth lecture of which Rudolf Steiner explains how the
spirit-germ of each organ is created in the different spheres
of the cosmos during the life between death and rebirth.]
Compared to man's earthly existence, this is a celestial,
blissful existence. But everything that happens in celestial
existence is concealed in immeasurable depths in the physical
organism in which man is clothed on earth. Indeed, as far as
ordinary consciousness is concerned, these celestial events
belong to the most concealed aspects of the human
physical organization.
This is the tragedy of materialism that it believes it can know
matter and speaks always of matter and its laws. But in all
matter, there lives spirit, but not only in such a form that we
can uncover it in the present; it lives in such a way that to
discover it we must look back into very different ages and
states of experience. What materialism knows the least about is
the material human organism. Not until materialism came into
being did the complicated material structures of physical earth
existence become as concealed as they now are from the
otherwise admirable natural science of the present time. We
shall now proceed to discuss other aspects of man's pre-natal
existence.
The
stage of pre-earthly experience I have just described can also
be characterized by saying that man experiences his given
environment, which is at the same time his own being, as an
existence he has in common with the spiritual universe.
That universe, however, is an association of living spiritual
beings, among whom man experiences himself as soul and spirit.
This consciousness, alive and luminous in the highest degree,
begins to dim, to fade at a definite point in time. It is not
that it is then experienced as a weak consciousness but
compared to the clarity and intensity it possessed during a
certain stage of pre-earthly existence, it dims down. If I
should describe by an imagination what a significant and
intense experience it is, I would express it like this.
At a certain point of pre-natal existence, man begins to say to
himself: Along with my own being I have seen other
spiritual-divine beings around me. Now it appears to me as if
these divine beings are beginning to cease to show their
complete form to me. It now seems to me as if they were
assuming an external figurativeness in which they envelop
themselves. It appears to me as if they were becoming star-like
— like the stars I learnt to know through physical sight
when I was last on earth. They are not yet stars, but spirit
beings which seem to be on their way to star-existence.
It
is a feeling as if the real spirit world withdraws a little
from the human being, then retreated more and more until only a
replica of it stood before him as a cosmic revelation of this
spirit world. Instead of the intuitive, active life with the
spiritual world, it is as if we were becoming inspired by a
cosmic replica of this spiritual world.
Parallel with this vision goes an inner soul experience that
man must undergo, as it were, in which the spiritual world in
its primal aliveness withdraws and bestows only a revelation of
itself to him. This awakens in his soul in pre-earthly
existence an experience that, if I may borrow a word from earth
life, I could call a sense of privation which expresses itself
— again describing it in earthly terminology — as a
longing for what he is about to lose. In the first stage
something he once possessed is in the process of being lost,
but it has not yet been lost. To the extent that man feels that
he is losing it, a sense of privation and a desire to have it
back arises inwardly. It is at this stage of pre-earthly
existence that the human soul becomes accessible to the
spiritual moon forces of the cosmos. The sense of privation and
longing just spoken of prepare the soul to be accessible
to them.
Earlier, these spiritual moon forces seemingly did not exist
for them. Now, as the spiritual cosmos begins to fade away, a
connection arises between what vibrates through the universe as
moon forces and the forces of desire that the cosmos, which
previously appeared to man as inwardly and spiritually
alive, changes into a mere revelation to the degree that the
earlier active, living intuition becomes an active living
inspiration, to this extent the moon forces cause an inner
individual being of man to appear. As a consequence, he
no longer feels himself to be in an universe where subject and
object do not really exist for him and everything is
subjective. Hitherto, he has lived within other beings. Now,
subject and object once again begin to have some significance
for him. He has a feeling that he exists subjectively as an
individual soul, something that the moon forces bring
about for him. At the same time, he now begins to sense the
revelation of the cosmos as an objective outer world.
To
make use again of an earthly way of expressing what is actually
present in this pre-earthly existence, I could say that in this
human soul, gifted with inwardness by the moon forces,
something like the following thought springs to life: I must
possess it, this physical body, toward which everything
has tended, which I myself along with others worked on as on a
cosmic, spiritual germ. In this way man becomes ready to
descend to earth existence. The sense of privation and longing
linked with the moon forces prepare him for desiring earthly
existence, to wish he were down on earth. This wish is the
after-effect of his earlier work on the universal, cosmic
part of the physical body. I said already yesterday that
the moon forces always represent the element that prepares man
for another earth life. During sleep it is these forces which
impel him back into earth life. As I said, in a certain stage
of his pre-earthly existence man is unconnected with
these moon forces, but then he penetrates them. To the same
degree, the tendency arises in him to turn again to the life on
earth. Even though the earthly physical body and etheric
organism are not yet there, within him are contained the
after-effects of what he himself worked on and brought about as
the cosmic-spiritual preliminary stage of the earthly body.
After the translation I shall proceed at once to discuss the
additional processes leading to earth life.
If
I am to speak further in the way I have thus far been
characterizing the relationships of man's total life as
perceived by inspired and intuitive perception, I must
say now that what man experiences in full clear consciousness
during pre-earthly existence, as I described it at the
beginning of today's lecture, is what he experiences later in
earth life as his religious disposition. This natural tendency
consists of these experiences as they are reflected in his
feelings and heart (Gemüt), the feeling of his connection
with the divine foundation of the world. If therefore man as a
soul being in pre-earthly existence wished to explain to
himself how this soul nature places itself here in earthly
existence, then, in the moment when he passes from sharing in
the living-spiritual cosmos to the experience of mere
revelation under the influence of the moon forces, he would
have to say: I pass from an existence saturated with divine
activity to a cosmic existence. Under the influence of the moon
forces, I now begin to draw together that brilliant cosmic
consciousness I previously developed out of the whole universe
into a more inward consciousness.
I
said, the brilliant cosmic consciousness grows dim, but the
more it fades the more does a subjective consciousness arise in
man's soul to which the cosmic revelations appear as something
objective. So we can say that man passes over into an
inspiration in which he knows himself as a member of the
cosmos. In this second stage of pre-earthly existence he
experiences cosmology.
What man bears within him on earth as a striving for
cosmological wisdom is an after-effect of these experiences of
pre-earthly existence that I have just described, in the same
way that the religious consciousness is an after-effect of the
earlier stage of divinely permeated consciousness. These things
are lived through in pre-earthly existence. They have their
after-effects in earthly existence in which they appear as the
religious and cosmological endowments of the human soul. Every
night, as I described yesterday, they are renewed afresh. They
are present as man is born into earthly life; he brings them
along as endowments. The sequences of day and night cause
them to become dim, but each night man's cosmological
inclinations are stimulated again by the experience of the
world of planets and stars. In the same way, his God-permeated
nature is kindled during the last stage of sleep as I have
already indicated. Therefore, one could say that if man desires
to come to a religious life founded on knowledge, and to a
cosmology grounded in knowledge, he must be able in fully
conscious earthly life to call forth pictures of what is
experienced in pre-earthly existence, as has been
described.
In
the stage when man is seized by the moon forces, when the outer
universal world, which earlier was the universe of his
own physical body, now appears only as a revelation — in
that moment there occurs what I may call the loss of his
connection with what earlier was his own human universe. Man
loses this universal germ of his physical body on which he had
worked so long. At a certain stage of pre-earthly life, he no
longer possesses it. Instead, he has an inner being, called
into existence by the moon forces, shot through and permeated
by the desire for earth life, and he is surrounded by images of
a spiritual cosmos. If he reaches out spiritually for these
pictures he pierces right through them. Their reality is no
longer there, at a certain stage of his experience in
pre-earthly existence, reality has been lost to his soul. The
soul no longer has the reality of this, man's universe, around
and within it. Shortly thereafter — after the loss of
this universal reality — earthly conception of the
physical body takes place. The physical body is now taken over,
drawn together out of the spiritual universe and further
developed within the course of physical, hereditary
evolution. What man worked upon cosmically for a long
time in the spiritual world falls away from him and reappears
again as conception of the physical human body takes place on
earth. The processes that man has undergone spiritually above
and in which he collaborated now find their physical
continuation on the earth below. For the time being man
remains unconscious of this physical continuation in his
prenatal spiritual existence, for it takes place below on
the earth. His spiritual-physical organism has streamed down to
the earth and contracts into the tiny physical human body. The
whole majestic universe is drawn together and permeated
and penetrated by what physical heredity contributes. What man
previously had as reality now surrounds him only in pictures;
it is a cosmic recollection of the cosmic reality of work done
on the physical organism.
In
this prenatal period of his pre-earthly experiences when man is
surrounded by the cosmic pictures of his human universe in
which reality is no longer contained, he becomes ready to draw
the etheric element into these pictures from all directions of
the cosmos — for the cosmos also includes an etheric
nature and is in this respect an etheric cosmos. Out of the
cosmic ether man now draws etheric elements into his cosmic
picture world. What is within him only as cosmic memory, he
fills with world ether, draws it together and so forms his
etheric organism. He does this at the time his Physical
organism has fallen away from him, finding its continuation
below, through conception, in the stream of physical heredity.
Thus, man clothes himself in his etheric organism.
Now
everything that lives in the soul as a sense of privation
and desires, as longing for earthly life, passes along into the
etheric organism, which is accustomed to being united with a
physical, bodily organization since it permeates the physical
organization of the cosmos. From all this arise the forces that
draw man down again into what he was unaware of earlier when he
had cosmic consciousness. Now, the soul-spiritual human being,
clothed in the etheric body, strives by its own wish down
toward what his physical organism has become on earth, which he
himself prepared in the first place in its spiritual form.
This, then, after the above-described experiences, brings about
the union of the soul-spiritual with the physical body. The
remaining points that can be mentioned will be added in the
last brief consideration.
I
believe it has become clear where the boundary exists between
that of what the human soul is aware and that of what the human
soul is unaware in a pre-earthly sense during the last
stage of prenatal experience which directly precedes
earthly experience. The human soul is conscious of the
subjective element that the moon forces have brought about in
the soul; it is conscious of the universal tableau that is now
merely present in pictures like a cosmic memory of the work
done on man's universe; it is conscious of how the forces draw
together out of the world ether to create the human etheric
organism. It remains unconscious of everything that
happens on the earth below in the physical human organism,
which only now has come into form through its physical
metamorphosis, and through conception will develop further in
the line of physical heredity. But, as I indicated, there is a
union of the last cosmic consciousness with what is
unconscious; a submerging into this unconsciousness.
With this, the cosmic consciousness is extinguished, and in a
tiny infant there appears something like an unconscious memory
of what has been experienced in pre-earthly exis tence.
An unconscious but active memory then works intensively
upon the baby's development, using the undifferentiated,
or little differentiated substance of the human brain and the
rest of the organism. Already during the embryonic stage,
during which the uniting process mentioned gradually
takes place, and also later, after birth, man works like a
sculptor on the formation of the brain and the remaining
organs. This unconscious but active memory of pre-earthly life
works on the organism most intensively in a child's first
years. While what is most essential has been previously
prepared and then is realized in its after-effects, much
is still to be worked into this cosmic-physical, spiritual
organism condensed into a physical human body. This is a
contradiction but must be understood in the context in which I
have described it for you today. Much is still to be worked
into this organism. It is therefore the unconscious but active
memory that works in the infant as an inner human,
sculpturing element.
If
the consciously experienced last stage of pre-earthly life
could be brought into earth life, the pure philosophy of ideas
would have its supersensible content. For just that cosmic
etheric element that plays into the images of the human
organism is what yields a truly alive philosophical conception.
But, even so, in spite of its lively quality, something
in this philosophical conception is lacking. It
corresponds, after all, to a stage of pre-earthly
experience where man is particularly estranged from his
physical organism, when he is unconscious of it. This lends a
somewhat otherworldly quality to even the most alive
philosophy, for instance the kind that arises out of the
dreamlike clairvoyance of primeval times. Because philosophy,
if it is alive, corresponds an experience which earth
life escapes, it always has a strong desire to comprehend
earthly activities but feels itself hovering above earthly
existence. Philosophy always has an idealistic quality, which
implies that it is based on something not of this earth,
particularly when it is inwardly alive. Actually, it is only in
the last stage of pre-earthly existence that a man is a
philosopher. It would be necessary to recall here in earth life
what is spontaneously present in his conscious experience in
that last period. There, man is a true philosopher, as earlier
he was a true cosmologist when confronting the cosmic
revelations, when the cosmic beings had already withdrawn from
him; and he was a true perceiver of religion in the first
pre-earthly stage I described today. But since an unconscious
but active memory appears in the infant, it was also possible
for me to say here: If you could include in the philosophy of
ideas and bring to full consciousness what appears
unconsciously in an infant, philosophy would arise. That is
quite natural, because what an infant experiences is the
unconscious memory of what the soul experiences in the
last stage before its union with the physical body.
Therefore, religious insight, cosmology and philosophy must be
gifts out of the supersensible world if they are to be right.
Only if they become this again, and are recognized as such by
man, will they fully satisfy humanity's spiritual needs.
Today I have sought to describe for you those matters connected
with the mystery of birth. In the following days I will have to
present the other side, the matters that are connected
with the mystery of death, in order gradually to round out the
picture that should represent for us how what is of the
greatest spiritual value here in earth life must be a
reflection, a replica, an effect of what man can experience,
perceive and know in supersensible existence, because he is not
only an earthly sense being but a soul-spiritual, supersensible
being and therefore belongs also to the world of soul and
spirit. And if he is to feel himself fully as man in human life
at every stage of sense experience, he must also include
knowledge of the supersensible in his life on earth.
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