IV
Rhythms of Earthly and Spiritual Life.
Love, Memory, the Moral Life.
Dornach, December 15, 1922
LET us recall what I have been telling you about man's
experiences between death and a new birth. The various
descriptions have enabled us to realize that this life —
above all in its main period, about the middle of the time
between death and rebirth — is such that man lives in
communion with the Beings referred to in the book Occult
Science as the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies. This life
of man in communion with those higher Beings is comparable with
the life he has here, when in the physical body, in communion
with the beings of the three kingdoms of Nature. Basically
speaking, everything in his earthly environment belongs to one
of the three kingdoms of Nature — to the mineral or the
plant or the animal kingdom, or indeed the physical human
kingdom, which in this particular connection can be taken as
belonging to the animal kingdom.
Man
has his senses, and through his sense-impressions he lives in
communion with the beings of the three kingdoms of Nature. What
unfolds in his life of feeling between birth and death, in so
far as it is the outcome of experiences arising from his
environment, is also related to these three kingdoms of Nature.
The same applies to what comes from the will, namely, human
action. Thus between birth and death man is interwoven with
what his senses convey to him from the three kingdoms of
Nature.
In
like manner between death and a new birth, in the time
indicated above, man lives within the higher realms, among the
Beings of the Higher Hierarchies. This life together with the
Beings of the Hierarchies is, in reality, all action, perpetual
activity. We have heard how the spirit-seed of the physical
body is produced in cooperation with these higher Beings. Here
on Earth, when we perceive or connect ourselves with the
entities belonging to the three kingdoms of Nature, we feel
outside them. But there is a condition between death and a new
birth when we find ourselves wholly within the Beings of the
Higher Hierarchies; we are entirely given up to them. That is
one of the conditions in which we then live. — Let us
picture it clearly. — Here on the Earth, when, for
example, we pick a flower, the fact is correctly described by
saying, ‘I pick the flower.’ But if this way of speaking were
applied to our life together with the Beings of the Higher
Hierarchies, the facts would not then be correctly expressed.
When we do something in connection with these Beings, we must
say: the other Being acts in us. Thus we are in a
condition which compels us all the time not to call the
activity — in which of course we ourselves partake
— our own activity, but the activity of the Beings of the
Hierarchies in us. We have in very truth a cosmic
consciousness. Just as here we feel heart, lungs and so on, to
be within us, so do we then feel the world to be within us, but
it is the world of the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies.
Everything that takes place is the outcome of an activity in
which we, too, are involved; but to describe the facts
correctly we should have to say: such and such a Being of the
Higher Hierarchies is acting in us.
Now
the condition thus described is only one of the conditions
obtaining between death and a new birth. We could not be men in
the true sense if we lived in this one condition only. In the
spiritual world between death and rebirth we should no more be
able to bear this condition only, than here on Earth we could
bear inbreathing without exhaling. The condition I have just
described must alternate with another, which consists in our
obliterating through our cosmic consciousness all thinking and
feeling about the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies,
obliterating too all will that works in this way in us from the
Beings of the Hierarchies.
Thus we may say that there are times during the life between
death and a new birth when we find ourselves filled through and
through with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies and their
radiance. We feel them within ourselves. But there is another
condition, in which we have first suppressed and then
obliterated altogether, this consciousness of the Higher Beings
manifesting in us. Then — to use earthly terms — we
are ‘out of our body’ — the condition is of course
entirely spiritual but let us put it in this way: we are out
of our body. In this condition we know nothing of the world
that lives within us, but we have as it were ‘come to
ourselves.’ We no longer live in the other Beings of the
Hierarchies but we live wholly in ourselves. Between death and
a new birth, we should never have consciousness of ourselves if
we lived only in the one condition. Just as here on Earth,
inbreathing must alternate with out-breathing, or sleeping with
waking life, so between death and a new birth there must be
rhythmic alternation between the inner experience of the whole
world of the Hierarchies within us, and a condition in which we
have come to ourselves.
Now
in a certain sense all earthly life is an outcome of what we
have experienced in pre-earthly existence between death and a
new birth. As you will remember, I have told you how even such
faculties in man's earthly life as walking, speaking, and
thinking are transformations of certain activities in
pre-earthly existence. Today we will turn our attention more
specifically to the life of soul.
What we experience in pre-earthly existence in working together
with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies leaves in us a
heritage for our earthly life, a faint shadow of this communion
with the Hierarchies. If between death and a new birth we had
no such community of life with the Beings of the Hierarchies,
we could not unfold, here on Earth, the power of love.
The power of love we unfold here on Earth is of course only a
faint reflection, a shadow of our communion with the
Spirit-Beings of the Higher Hierarchies between death and a new
birth, but it is a reflection of that communion. That
here on the Earth we are able to unfold human love, sympathetic
understanding for another human being, is due to the fact that
between death and a new birth we are able to live in communion
with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies.
Spiritual-scientific vision enables us to perceive what happens
to those who in previous earthly lives acquired little aptitude
— we shall presently speak of how it is acquired
— for living together during the appropriate period after
death with the Beings of the Hierarchies, in certain states
entirely given up to them. Such men here on Earth are incapable
of unfolding love in which there is real strength, incapable of
unfolding that all-embracing love which comes to expression in
the power to understand other men. We may say with truth: it is
among the Gods, in pre-earthly existence, that we acquire the
gift for observing our fellow-man, to perceive how he thinks
and how he feels, to understand him with inner sympathy. If we
were deprived of this intercourse with the Gods — for so
indeed it may be called — we should never be capable of
unfolding here on Earth that insight into other human beings
which alone makes earthly life a reality. When in this
connection I speak of love, and especially of all-embracing
human love, you must think of love as having this real and
concrete meaning; you must think of it as signifying a genuine,
intimate understanding of the other man. If to the
all-embracing love of humanity, this understanding of one's
fellow-man is added, we have everything that constitutes human
morality. For human morality on Earth — if it is
not merely expressed in empty phrases or fine talk or in
resolutions not afterwards carried out — depends upon the
interest one man takes in another, upon the capability to see
into the other man. Those who have the gift of understanding
other human beings will receive from this understanding the
impulses for a social life imbued with true morality.
So
we may also say: everything that constitutes moral life in
earthly existence has been acquired by man in pre-earthly
existence; from his communion with the Gods there has remained
in him the urge to unfold, in the soul at any rate, community
on Earth as well. And it is the development of a life where the
one man together with the other fulfils the tasks and the
mission of the Earth — it is this alone that in reality
leads to the moral life on Earth. Thus we see that love, and
the outcome of love — morality — are in very truth
a consequence of what man has experienced spiritually in
pre-earthly existence.
Now
let us think of the other condition in the life between death
and rebirth, when man's consciousness of communion with the
Beings of the Higher Hierarchies has been dimmed, when, as in
earthly sleep, the impressions from the environment are
silenced, when deliberate communion with the higher Beings
ceases and man ‘comes to himself.’ This condition too has a
consequence, an echo, a heritage, here in earthly life —
and this heritage is the faculty of Memory.
The
possibility for us to have experiences at a definite moment and
then after a lapse of time to draw forth from the depth of our
being something that brings pictures of these experiences into
our consciousness — this faculty of memory that is so
necessary in our earthly life, is a faint reflection, a shadow,
of our independent state of life in the spiritual world.
Here on Earth we should only be able to live in the passing
moment instead of in our whole past life as far back as a few
years after birth, if between death and a new birth we were not
able to emerge, as it were, from universal life and be entirely
alone, alone in ourselves.
While we are asleep here on Earth, our physical and etheric
bodies lie in the bed; our astral body and our Ego are outside
the physical and the etheric bodies and are then in a position
to experience — unconsciously, it is true — the
environment of soul and spirit. Man is unconscious between
going to sleep and waking. Nevertheless, as I have already
said, he does indeed have experiences during sleep, some of
which I have also described. But they do not enter the field of
consciousness, and in earthly life this is a necessary state of
things. What is the reason for it?
If
from the time of going to sleep to that of waking we were to
experience what we do in fact experience in our Ego and in our
astral body, so strongly and intensely as to be able to bring
it into consciousness, then every time on waking we should want
to impress into the physical and etheric bodies too, what we
experienced in sleep; we should want to make our physical and
our etheric bodies into something different from what they are.
One who has knowledge of what is experienced between going to
sleep and waking, must accustom himself to an act of
renunciation. He must be able to say to himself: ‘I will
refrain from the desire to press what I experience with my Ego
and my astral body during sleep into the physical and etheric
bodies, for in earthly life these bodies could not stand
it.’
It
is quite possible to speak in a grotesque way about these
things — indeed they can be made to seem almost comical,
although what is said is meant very seriously. During sleep man
does in fact experience images of the Cosmos. Because of this
he is continually being tempted, as an outcome of his sleep, to
give himself, for example, a different countenance. If that
which does not, in fact, come to his consciousness were to do
so, he would always be wanting to change his face, for the face
he actually has would be reminding him all the time of former
earthly lives, of sins in former earthly lives. In the morning,
before waking, there is actually a strong urge in man to do to
the physical body something that is like dressing it in
clothes. One who has knowledge of this must consciously refrain
from giving way to the urge; otherwise he would fall into a
completely disorganized condition; he would perpetually be
trying to change his whole organism, especially if in one
respect or another it happens to be not quite healthy, or
something is wrong with it.
But
during life between death and a new birth we experience so
consciously that this consciousness leads to the forming and
shaping of our next physical body. If this were left to
ourselves alone, we should not shape the physical body in
accordance with our karma. In reality, however, we form it
together with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies, the Beings
who watch over our karma. And so we get the eyes, the nose, and
so forth, which in all probability we should not, if it were
left to us, have given to ourselves. For there are certain
times between death and a new birth when we are intensely
egoistic — precisely at those times when the
consciousness of our connection with the Beings of the Higher
Hierarchies has been dimmed. Our experiences are then so strong
and intense that out of the forces they contain the physical
body can be formed; and we do in fact form it.
This is an experience of such intensity that it has in it the
seed of actual creation. Then, through the very fact that it is
much weakened in earthly life, it takes effect partly as
earthly love and partly as the faculty of remembrance, as
memory.
Here on Earth, the fact that we feel ourselves within an Ego,
depends upon memory. If we lived only in the present and had no
memories, our Ego would have no inner coherence. In fact, as I
have often said, we should not be able to feel ourselves in a
strongly marked Ego at all. You can understand how memory as an
earthly, shadowlike faculty comes into being. It comes into
being through the fact that in pre-earthly existence in the
spiritual world, a faculty of tremendous power is present
— the faculty whereby in those periods when we ‘come to
ourselves’ we prepare our body according to the instructions
received from the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies, when, in
the other state of existence, we live in union with them.
This faculty is at work, to begin with as a formative force, in
our body. In the child, as long as it has no consciousness
leading to memory — i.e. in the earliest period of
childhood — this stronger creative force still enters
into and works with the forces of growth. Then something that
is finer, more rarefied, is as it were separated out from these
stronger forces — and this is the human faculty of
memory.
The
fact that here on Earth too, man lives primarily in himself, is
again connected with this faculty of memory. Memory is also
very much connected with human egoism on the one side
and, on the other, with human freedom. Freedom will
become a reality in a human being in whose life on Earth there
is a true echo of what is experienced in pre-earthly existence
as a kind of rhythm: namely, feeling oneself united with the
Beings of the Hierarchies, freeing oneself, entering into union
again, and so on. Here on Earth the experiences come to
expression, not as a rhythm, but as two co-existing human
faculties: the faculty of love and the faculty of memory. But a
certain heritage from this rhythm in pre-earthly existence can
remain with man. If this is so, then in earthly life too, the
true relationship will be established in him between memory and
love. He will be able on the one side to develop understanding,
loving understanding of other men. And on the other side, from
his experience of the world together with other human beings,
his own re-collective thinking will contribute to his own
development, to the strengthening of his own nature.
A
true relationship of this kind can remain as a legacy of
the rhythm that is an essential in pre-earthly existence. But
the true relationship may also be upset. It may, for instance,
be that a man is willing to be guided only by what he himself
has experienced. This trait is greatly accentuated when a man
has little interest in what others experience, little faculty
of looking into the hearts and minds of others, when his
interest is confined almost entirely to what gradually
accumulates in his own store of memories. This again is
intimately connected with his Ego, and so egoism is
intensified.
Such a man gets ‘out of gear’ with himself, because the true
relationship existing between death and rebirth is lacking in
him; a certain rhythm is not there. And at the same time, when
a man takes interest only in what piles up in his own soul,
when he is concerned all the time with himself alone, then he
becomes increasingly unfit — if I may put it so —
for the experiences between death and a new birth. By being
interested only in himself, a man shuts himself off in a
certain respect from communion with the Beings of the Higher
Hierarchies.
A
man in whom love and memory are rightly interrelated evolves
the feeling of true human freedom instead of egoistic
introspection. For in another respect this feeling of human
freedom too is an echo of the emergence from communion with the
Beings of the Higher Hierarchies between death and a new birth.
The feeling of freedom is the healthy aftermath of that
emergence; egoism is the morbid aftermath. And as the life
together with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies between
death and a new birth is the basis of man's morality on Earth,
so the necessary emergence from life in communion with them is
at the same time the basis on Earth for the immorality of men,
for their severance from one another, for actions on the part
of the one that cut across the actions of the other, and so
forth. For this is at the root of all immorality. So you see it
is necessary for man to be mindful that what can appear here on
the Earth as something injurious, has a definite significance
for the higher worlds. On the Earth too it is the case that the
air we inhale is healthy, while the air we exhale is unhealthy,
capable of begetting illness, for in effect we exhale carbonic
acid. So too, that which underlies immorality here on the Earth
is something that is necessary for our experience in the
spiritual world.
These connections must be studied because, in effect, morality
and immorality cannot really be explained in the light of
earthly conditions. Anyone who attempts such explanations will
inevitably be on the wrong track. For through the fact that man
is moral or the reverse, he relates himself, in his life of
soul, to a supersensible world. And we may say: By directing
men's minds to the study of this relationship to a spiritual
world, anthroposophical Spiritual Science has made it possible,
for the first time, to acquire a basis for understanding the
moral. To a view of the world that will only acknowledge
the validity of science dealing with the world of Nature, the
moral can only consist in illusions arising from processes of
Nature which are supposed to take their course in man as
well.
Assume for a moment that the cosmic nebula of Kant and Laplace,
with its mechanical forces and mechanical laws, did actually
constitute the beginning of Earth-existence; assume that from
these whirling nebulae, through the working of neutral laws of
Nature, the kingdoms of earthly existence had come into being,
and finally Man. If that were so, man's moral impulses would be
mere dreams. For everything he calls moral would pass away
when, again in accordance with mechanical laws, the Earth had
reached her end. No vindication of the reality of the moral
life can ever arise from such a world-view if followed honestly
to its conclusions. Vindication of the moral can only result
when, as in anthroposophical Spiritual Science, those realms of
existence are revealed where the moral is as much a reality as
the world of Nature is a reality here in the life between birth
and death. As plants grow and blossom here, between death and a
new birth certain activities unfold when man is among the Gods.
These activities are the moral element in its reality, the
reality of the moral element. In that realm the moral has
reality, whereas on the Earth there is only a reflection of
that reality. But man, we must remember, belongs to both
worlds. Hence for him, if he can perceive these facts in the
light of Spiritual Science, the moral world has reality —
but knowledge of this reality can never be derived from
physical existence.
Here you have one reason why it is necessary for man to acquire
understanding of Spiritual Science. Without Spiritual Science
he could not really be honest with his knowledge. He could not
honestly ascribe reality to the moral world, because he is not
willing to investigate the realm where that reality lies. It is
of tremendous importance to understand such a sentence as this
in the right way. But there is still another respect in which I
want to emphasize how necessary the knowledge attainable
through Spiritual Science is to man. Here again we shall have
to turn to the realities of another world.
Already when we achieve Imaginative Knowledge — the
knowledge that enables us to live in the etheric world instead
of in the physical world, so that instead of physical things we
perceive the activities (for activities they are) in the ether
— already when this is achieved, three-dimensional Space
as it is on Earth falls away from our field of experience. To
speak of a three-dimensional space has no meaning, for we are
then living in Time. Hence from from other standpoints I
have spoken of the etheric body as a Time-organism. I
have said, for example, that here, in the spatial organism, we
have the head and, let us say, the leg; and if we sting or cut
our leg the head will feel it. Spatially, in this spatial body,
one organ is connected with the others. So in the time-body
which consists in processes — processes in which
everything lying in the deeper foundations of our human nature
between birth and death are involved — every detail is
connected with every other.
You
will remember that in lectures on Education I have said that if
at a certain age in childhood we have learnt to have reverence,
this power of reverence is transformed in later years into a
power of gentleness and blessing which can be conveyed to other
men. On the other hand, those who in childhood were never able
to revere in the true way cannot unfold this power to bless in
later life. As in the spatial organism the foot or the leg is
connected with the head, so youth is connected with old age,
and old age with youth. It is only for external physical vision
that the world flows in the one direction, from the past into
the future. For higher vision there is also the reverse stream,
from the future into the past. It is into this stream, as I
have described, that we enter after death, journeying
backwards.
In
the time-organism everything is interconnected. If the spatial
organism as a whole is to be in order, you cannot remove
essential organs from it. You cannot, for instance, remove any
considerable part of your face without ruining the whole
organism. Similarly you cannot remove anything belonging to man
that takes its course in time. Imagine that in the spatial
organism, at the place where your eyes are situated there were
some quite different growth — instead of eyes, some kind
of tumor. Then you could not see. As the eyes are situated at a
definite place in the spatial organism, so in the time-organism
— and I now mean not only the time-organism between birth
and death but the time-organism in man that reaches beyond all
births and deaths — in this time-organism is incorporated
everything that exists between birth and death and in this life
develops through concepts, ideas, mental pictures, of a
spiritual world. And what thus develops are the eyes for
beholding supersensible existence. If between birth and death
no knowledge of the supersensible world is developed, this will
mean blindness in the life in the supersensible world between
death and a new birth, just as the absence of eyes means
blindness in the spatial organism. Man passes through death
even if on Earth he acquires no knowledge of the supersensible
world; but he enters then into a world where he sees nothing,
where he can only grope his way about.
This is the agonizing experience that is the natural corollary
of the materialistic age for one who has true insight into
Initiation-Science today. He sees how men on Earth lapse into
materialism; but he also knows what this lapse means for the
spiritual life. He knows that it means eradication of the eyes,
that in the existence awaiting them after death, men will only
be able to grope their way about. In olden times, when there
was instinctive knowledge of the supersensible world, men
passed through the gate of death able to see. That old,
instinctive supersensible knowledge is now extinct. Today,
spiritual knowledge must be consciously acquired —
spiritual knowledge, I say, not clairvoyance. As I have
always emphasized, clairvoyance too can be attained, but that
is not the essential here. The essential thing is that what is
discovered through clairvoyant research shall be understood
— as it can be understood — by ordinary
human reason, healthy human reason. Clairvoyance is needed to
investigate these things, but it is not needed for
acquiring the faculty of sight in the supersensible world after
death. And anyone who declares that ordinary knowledge acquired
through healthy human reason does not give him eyes for
supersensible existence but that for this he needs clairvoyance
— anyone who speaks like this might just as well declare
that man cannot think unless his eyes do the thinking. As
little as in physical life the eyes need think, as little does
knowledge of the supersensible worlds need clairvoyance for the
purposes I have indicated today.
Naturally, there would be no supersensible knowledge on Earth
if there were no clairvoyance; but even the seer must make
intelligible in the ordinary way what he sees in the
supersensible. However powerful a man's clairvoyant faculty
might be in earthly life, however clear his vision of the
spiritual world, if he were too easy-going to bring into the
form of logical, intelligible ideas what he sees in the
spiritual world, he would still be blinded in the spiritual
world after death.
What constitutes the great suffering for one who has insight
into modern Initiation-Science is that he must admit:
materialism makes men blind when they pass through the gate of
death. And here again is something showing that it is of
significance for the whole of cosmic existence whether man
today inclines to supersensible knowledge or not. The time when
it is essential for him to do so has arrived; the very progress
of humanity depends upon man acquiring supersensible
knowledge.
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