VI
The Ruling of Spirit
in Nature
Yesterday I
tried to show how the confusion in dreams arises from the fact that during
sleep a man crosses the so-called Threshold unconsciously or
half-consciously. Leaving the physical world of the senses, he enters
the spiritual world and there encounters three worlds — a
memory of the ordinary physical world, the soul world, and the real
world of spirit. Events both inward and outward, experienced in our
ordinary earthly life, are gathered together from what these three
worlds reveal. But they are split apart when in sleep we enter the
super-sensible world, and what we experience is not then related to
the world where it belongs. That is why, for the usual
memory-consciousness, deceptions and illusions arise in dreams.
Imaginative consciousness does not see the dream merely in this way,
but makes it an object of observation, just as we look towards a
distant point in physical space — though now, with Imagination,
we look towards something distant in time. We do not simply remember
what is dreamt; we look at it, and so for the first time we arrive at
a true conception of what a dream is. Thus we find how a dream is
interpreted rightly only when we do not relate it to the physical,
naturalistic world, but to the spiritual — above all, in most
cases, to the moral world. The dream will never tell what it is
expressing if its content is given a physical interpretation, but
only when the interpretation is in accordance with the spiritually
moral.
To illustrate
this, let us turn to the confusion of the dream I told you about yesterday
— the dream in which someone going for a walk is suddenly
overcome with shame at finding himself without clothes in a
crowded street. I remarked how the whole mood of soul in
dream-consciousness is due to our confronting three different worlds.
Looking at a dream of this kind in the right way, however, we see
that although its content appears to belong to the realm of the
senses, yet through this medium the spiritual-moral is seeking to
reveal itself. Hence, anyone having such a dream ought not to look at
the immediate, symbolical course it takes, but should ask himself:
Haven't I sometimes had a tendency in daytime consciousness not
to be completely truthful about myself with others? Haven't I perhaps
been too fond of following the fashion in what I wear —
altogether too apt to take refuge in convention? Is it not a
characteristic of mine to give people a false impression of what I
really am?
When anyone
lets his thoughts take this course, he gradually arrives at the moral,
spiritual interpretation of the dream. He says to himself: When
during sleep I was in the super-sensible world, I met with spiritual
beings there — they told me that I should not be present in a
cloak of falsehood, but as I really am inwardly, in soul and
spirit.
When we
interpret dreams in this way, we come to their moral, spiritual truth.
A whole host of dreams can be interpreted thus.
People of an
older chapter in history, who even in the dreamy symbolism of sleep were
conscious of the Guardian of the Threshold, took to heart his warning
not to carry with them what belongs to the physical world of the
senses when they enter the spiritual world. Had these men dreamt they
had no clothes on in the street, it would never have occurred to them
that they ought to have been ashamed; this is something that holds
good for the physical world, for a man's physical body. They would
have given heed to the warning that what holds good for the physical
does not hold good in the spiritual world, and that what appears in
the spiritual world is being said to human beings by the Gods. A
dream, therefore, had to be interpreted as an utterance of the Gods.
Only during the course of human evolution have dreams come to be
interpreted in a naturalistic sense.
Or let us take
another common dream. The dreamer is going along a path that leads him into
a wood. After a while he realises that he has lost his way and cannot
go any further. He tries to do so, but the path comes to an end and
trees block the way. He begins to feel uneasy.
Now in
ordinary consciousness this dream is easily taken at its face value.
But if on thinking over it we forget all naturalistic associations, the
spiritual world will say to us: This confusion you have met with is
in your own thoughts. In waking consciousness, however, people are
often loath to admit how confused their thinking is and how easily
they reach a point where they can make no progress but only go round
in a circle. This inclination is particularly characteristic of our
present civilisation. People consider themselves enlightened
thinkers, but in reality they dance around in a circle with their
thoughts — either about conventional trivialities or about
atoms, which are intellectual constructions of their own. In ordinary
consciousness, naturally, they are not disposed to admit
this.
In a series
of symbolical pictures the dream brings out a man's true nature, and it
is spiritual beings who are speaking through it. When anyone takes
his dream experience in the right way, his self-knowledge will be
greatly enhanced.
Another common
human characteristic is that people allow themselves to be led by their
instincts and impulses to do what is most congenial to them. For
example, they find pleasure in doing something or other, but they are
not ready to admit that they are doing it for their own satisfaction.
They invent some way of interpreting it differently for their
ordinary consciousness — they say perhaps that they are
doing it for anthroposophical or occult or esoteric reasons,
connected with a high mission or something of that sort. With this
kind of self-justification they cover up — and this occurs with
extraordinary frequency — an endless amount of all that
rules and rages in the depths of our animal life. A dream —
which wishes to reveal through symbolical pictures the forces which
really hold sway even in the soul and spirit of the dreamer —
may present a picture of the man pursued by wild beasts and trying
vainly to escape. We shall interpret truly the moral significance of
such a dream, not by looking at its outward events, but by accepting
the self-knowledge it offers us. We have to recognise it as a warning
to search for the inner truth about our own nature and to consider
whether this does not resemble — if only slightly —
animal instinct rather than what we ideally conjure up.
Hence it is
possible for dreams to warn people in countless ways and to set them right.
When a dream is related in the true way to the higher world, it can
have a guiding influence on a man's life, and then, when the stage of
conscious Imagination is reached, one can see how the dream,
which at first naturally offers even to Imaginative knowledge
pictures drawn from the sense-world, is metamorphosed entirely into
moral-spiritual happenings.
Thus we see
how the dream can be said to lead ordinary consciousness into the spiritual
world, if only it is taken in the right way. But I have said also
that on raising ourselves through Imagination to the spiritual world,
we are not in the same state of soul as during our life here on
Earth. In this life, I stand here, the table is there outside me;
there is a physical gap between me and the table. The moment I enter
the spiritual world, this separation ceases. I no longer stand here
with the table over there; it is as if my whole being were spreading
out over the table and the table were taking me into itself. In the
spiritual world we sink right into whatever we perceive. Hence
our experience, either in dreams or consciously in Imagination,
should not be related merely to our inner life, but we can speak in a
spiritual-scientific sense if we say with the poet that the whole
world is woven out of dreams. It is certainly not woven out of the
play of atoms, which is a dream of the scientists, but out of what I
have described as the “chaos” of the Greeks, out of the
weaving of our dreams and of our conscious Imagination. I have called
it both subjective and objective, for the world is not woven purely
subjectively; but we have to explain certain aspects of the world as
being woven out of dreams.
For example,
if we are looking at a seed, we should not be content to explain it by the
laws of physics and chemistry. A scientist who sees nothing more than
those laws in a seed, or in an embryo, cannot possibly explain them;
for nature is dreaming in seed and embryo — their very essence
is the weaving life of a dream. Take the seed of a plant — in
it a dream is living and weaving. You can never enter into this with
the intellect, for that is limited to nature's laws; you must
approach it with the human faculty which lives otherwise in a
dream or in conscious Imagination.
The same kind
of dreaming that lives thus in the seed is active also in our whole
organism throughout our life on Earth. Hence we should not look in
our organism merely for the working of chemical and physical forces.
When a man is there before us physically, we have to look upon him in
his external physical form as a being who is living just for a time
in the physical world of the senses. Behind him lives something
else, invisible to the eye, inaudible to the ear, in so far as these
are physical. But it can be perceived in Imagination, and also in
what can be experienced in the unconscious Imagination of a
dream. In the whole of a man's body nature is dreaming. Nature's way
of thinking is not like man's intellectual thinking — it
is a dreaming. Out of this dreaming the forces of our digestion and
of our growth are guided, and everything is given form.
When we look
back in earthly existence we generally start from this age — what
shall we call this age of ours? We could take one of its symptoms and call
it the age of the typewriter. Thus we go back from this age of the
typewriter to the time when printing was first introduced; and going
still further back we come perhaps to the time of the Romans, to the
time of the Greeks, and then we arrive at the age in the East from
which the Vedic records come. We are then left with no external
documents. Many treasures have been excavated from the tombs of the
Egyptian kings, but we still come at last to a time with no records,
where we have to rely on Imaginative and Inspired spiritual
knowledge. There we meet with a frontier beyond which, for ordinary
consciousness, the past is vague, very much as sleep lies beyond the
dream. By going back in this way through the temporal evolution of
the world, we come in fact to that dream-veil we can experience
every night.
If we reach
that point with conscious Imagination, the further past lights up in a
spiritual way. But it appears different from the world we learn about
intellectually and from ancient records. This remote past in
world-evolution, lying behind a veil of dreams, reveals man in direct
connection with divine Spirits. He is himself still a divine
soul-being; and the divine-spiritual Beings, whose destiny does not
include entering an earthly body, meet together with him while he
awaits his incarnation on earth.
When, therefore,
we look back through history to this veil of chaos, to the dream-veil of
which we have been speaking during the last few days, we see the
divine Spirits foregathering with the still spiritual souls of
men destined to dwell on Earth.
Moreover, we
shall see how these things, connected as they are with human evolution,
are at the same time connected with cosmic evolution. Where in a
remote past this veil appears to Inspired Imagination, we see, too,
how within cosmic evolution — of which we shall have to speak
more precisely — the Moon, previously united with the Earth,
detaches itself and goes out into cosmic space, there to circle
the Earth. Thus we gaze back on a dream-veil, a veil of Imagination,
and looking through it we find the Earth united with the Moon, and
human beings in direct contact with divine-spiritual Beings. When
this dream-veil appears to the retrospective gaze of Imagination, we
perceive the momentous cosmic event of the Moon, in a quite
different form, sliding out of the Earth and going forth into cosmic
space as a separate body. So we look further back to the evolution of
the Earth, of mankind, and of the world, when these were all united
with the Moon. Man was already there, but as a being of soul and
spirit only.
As we gaze
further and further back, we find no epoch in cosmic evolution when man
was not there, at least in some primal form. So that, from the standpoint
of Spiritual Science, we cannot say that for millions of years the Earth
was evolving merely inorganically or with creatures of a lower order,
with man emerging only after that. We find man in a different form
connected at every stage with that cosmic evolution to which we look
back when, behind the veil of chaos and the dream, we can rise
through conscious Imagination to that which appears to us as
the divine-spiritual essence of the world.
As I have said,
when we look at a seed or anything in an embryonic state, Imaginative
cognition reveals in it the weaving of a dream. We see how
something real, though expressed in dream-pictures, holds sway over
the material part of the seed. Anyone able to perceive the spiritual
in the world will find it everywhere, though in a great variety of
forms. It is precisely the spiritual that goes through the most
varied metamorphoses. And when we have thoroughly grasped how
in the seed of a plant, in the embryo of an animal, this real
dream-weaving prevails, we are justified in asking: How is it, then,
with the apparently dead world of the minerals? If here we look out
of the window or go along the street, we see the bare hills, a world
that seems entirely lifeless, and the question at once arises: If in
any plant seed we pick up there is a dream-picture ruling, how is it
with these rocky mountainous masses, and with all the lifeless
substance that forms the ground we tread on in the physical world? If
in the plants we see the ruling of spirit, which in the weaving of a
dream seizes with comparative ease upon the material element,
so in the same way through Imaginative cognition we find the
spiritual in these rocky masses, but here the spiritual consists of
individual spiritual beings.
These spiritual
beings, however, are in a state not of dreaming but of deep sleep.
When you look at these rocks and hills you must not think of them as
permeated by a slumbering amorphous mist; you should think of
individual spiritual beings sleeping there. Presently we shall see
how these spiritual beings have come into existence through having
been split off from higher beings with a higher consciousness. We
shall see how they themselves, having in their present state only a
sleep-consciousness, are the result of that separation, and how these
elemental beings are asleep everywhere out there in the inanimate
world. When we walk over this mountainous mass of rock, we
should be aware that all around us there slumbers the creative
weaving of the spirit in concrete form. And when we enter further
into the sleeping of the spirit-weaving forms in the lifeless world,
we become aware in these elemental beings of a certain mood.
Imagination shows us these beings, but it is Inspiration that teaches
us about their mood. In these elementals of the mountains, the rocks,
and the soil, there lives what we can discover in ourselves when we
are waiting for something with justified expectation. The weaving and
creating of soul and spirit in the seemingly lifeless rocks is
permeated by this same expectant mood.
In fact, these
beings are waiting to awake from deep sleep into a state of dreaming. We
learn this through Inspiration, and more particularly when we enter
right into these beings through Intuition. All that confronts us out
there, in those hills, is expecting that one day it will be able to
dream, and so with dream-consciousness to take hold of earthly
substance that is ground down into lifeless matter, and from these
rocks and hills to conjure forth once more as embryos, as seeds,
living plants. It is indeed these beings who bring before our souls a
wonderful magic of nature, a creating from out of the
spirit.
And so, as we
go about here among these rocks and look at them in the physical light they
reflect, they can reveal to us, not in any symbolical sense but as
real knowledge, how they are now sleeping, how in the future they
will be dreaming, and how, later still, they will come to the
fully awake life of elemental nature-beings, who will one day become
beings of pure spirit.
The physical
material in a plant is still in a condition accessible to the dream-weaving
of the spirit. In the rocks, matter is crumbling away. Looking back with
Imagination and Inspiration, we realise how everything lifeless has
arisen from the living. It is when the living becomes lifeless that
the sleeping spirituality can sink into it. This sleeping spirit
waits in the lifeless until it can wake into dreams and lead over the
lifeless into cosmic embryonic life.
Now the various
parts of the Earth show in different ways this sleep of spiritual beings
in the mountains, in the firm crust of the Earth. It might be said: The
sleep of beings awaiting their future is different in regions such as
this from their sleep in other parts of the Earth. Here in
Penmaenmawr we find that the particular configuration of the Earth,
and the historical character of the rocks, enable these
sleeping beings to rise to the aeriform, to interweave even with the
light, while in other parts of the Earth this has long ceased to be
so. Thus it is that here, if we look on the weaving as due not to the
aerial atmosphere alone, but to the prevailing soul-atmosphere, which
permeates the air just as the human soul permeates a man's body, then
in Penmaenmawr we find that this soul-element in the atmosphere is
different from elsewhere. I will give just one example to make this
clear.
Suppose that
in a certain region Imaginative cognition exerts itself to call up an
Imagination of what is really going on there. This Imagination may be
more or less easy or difficult to hold on to, for the
possibility of retaining an Imagination in consciousness varies
in different regions. Here we are in a region where Imaginations
continue for a remarkably long time and so are able to become very
vivid.
The wise men
of the Druids, or others of that kind, sought out regions for their
temples and sanctuaries where the conditions were such as to allow
Imaginations to remain and not immediately to vanish away like
clouds. Hence we can understand how it was that such centres
for the holy places of the Druids were still sought for up to
comparatively recent times. In this region it has always been felt
that the difficulty of holding an Imagination is not so great as in
other places. Everything, of course, has a light side and a shadow
side. When an Imagination remains, Inspiration is made harder, though
it gains in strength. Because of that, whatever the spiritual world
has to say in this place streams down with — one might say
— greater intensity, but in words which are weightier and more
difficult.
Therefore,
even where the spiritual is in question, differentiations are to be found
throughout the Earth. A map might be drawn indicating the places
where, for Imaginative consciousness, there is no difficulty in
holding Imaginations. Those regions where they soon pass away could
be given a different colour, and we should get an extraordinarily
interesting map of the Earth. For the prevailing character of
soul-atmosphere here, we should need a particularly strong colour
— a sparkling, shining colour, full of life.
Hence I fully
believe that those taking part in this lecture-course will be able to
perceive here something of what I would call the esoteric mood of the
elementals. It looks in at the windows, meets us on our walks, in
fact is present everywhere in a quite special way. I am
particularly grateful to the organisers of the course for having thus
chosen a spot where the esoteric may be said to meet one at every
turn. It does so indeed in other places, but not with the same ease
and directness. So I am especially thankful for the choice of this
place, out of many possible for the holding of a course such as this.
From the point of view of the subjects discussed, this course may be
said to take its place, in a wonderfully beautiful way, in the whole
evolution of the Anthroposophical Movement.
It will be
clear from the descriptions I have been giving you that between the physical
world of the senses and the spiritual, super-sensible world, there is
a barrier which with a certain rightness we call the Threshold of the
spiritual world.
I have already
pointed out in various ways how necessary it is that we should be able to
cross this Threshold, and we have still to speak about it in greater
detail. But you will have gathered already from my lectures that in
older periods of human evolution this crossing of the Threshold was a
rather different matter from what it is at the present day. In those
ancient times people were able to cross in another way because even
by day their consciousness was dreamlike, but for that very reason
more alive to the super-sensible. Thus, in the way I have pictured,
they passed the Guardian of the Threshold half-consciously, dreamily,
both on going to sleep and on waking.
Here we can
see a transition from men of an older type, with little freedom, to those
who were becoming increasingly free. This former determinism was
bound up with the fact that on going to sleep, and on awaking, men
had some perception of the Guardian of the Threshold, who stood there
giving warning. Now, in place of this unfree situation, we have the
incapacity of present-day consciousness to see into the spiritual
world, which signifies an increasing freedom: herein lies a principle
of human progress.
Hence we can
say that, looked at from the spiritual world, people have lost a great deal
precisely because in the course of their evolution they have had to
be led towards freedom. What has been lost, however, must be
regained, in the way that Anthroposophy, for example, would show. And
now is the historical point of time when a striving to regain what
has been lost must begin.
But everywhere,
among people of very various kinds, there still rises up something
inherited from an earlier age, when man's relation to the spiritual
world was different. So that to-day, in the consciousness of those
given up to intellectualism, there is a strict frontier set up, as a
rule, between what they experience in the world of the senses and
what lies beyond in the spiritual world. The frontier is in fact so
rigorously maintained that even enlightened spirits are
unwilling to admit the possibility of crossing it.
In my brief
sketch of the way into the super-sensible world, I have indicated that it
is possible to cross the frontier and to enter that world in full
consciousness. But as a relic from the time when a man entered the
spiritual world in a more instinctive, unconscious way, and
even in his day-consciousness had more in him of the spiritual world,
there still rises up into his evolution to-day a certain heritage
from the past. And this is something we must imperatively understand
through conscious spiritual cognition. For, if not rightly
understood, it manifests itself in many deceptive ways, and in these
matters such errors can become very dangerous. Hence in the course of
these lectures, intended to describe the evolution of man and of the
world, I must speak about this question of a boundary, where
what was natural and taken for granted among the people of former
epochs re-appears to-day, and can lead to dangerous illusions in
those who have not the requisite clear knowledge for dealing with
it.
Among these
phenomena, situated for ordinary consciousness at the frontier between the
sense-world and the super-sensible, are visions. I mean the
visions where, in a state of hallucination more or less controlled by
the person concerned, pictures arise which have quite definite forms
and colours — they may even seem to speak — but
correspond to nothing external. For normal perception, the
object is outside; the image, in a shadowy way within; and a person
is perfectly conscious of how the shadowy, conceptual image is
related to the external world. The vision arises of itself,
claiming to be a reality on its own account. A person subject to such
visions becomes incapable of estimating rightly what reality there is
in the pictures which appear before him without his
initiative.
How, then do
visions come about? They come about because the human being still possesses
the capacity for carrying over into his waking world what he
experiences during sleep, and of bringing it into conceptual form
just as he does with his sense-perceptions. Whether, after perceiving
a clock that exists physically for the senses, I make an inner
picture of it, or whether, after experiencing in a dream the form and
inner reality of an external object, I wake up and make a picture of
my experience, the only difference between the two processes is that
I am in control of one of them — hence the image of it is more
shadowy and flat — while the other process is outside my
control. In the latter case I carry nothing of the real present
into my conceptual life, but something experienced when the soul was
outside in a past — perhaps long past — sleep, and out of
this dream-experience I build up a vision.
In an earlier
age of human evolution, when the relation of people both to the physical
world and to the spiritual world was ruled by instinct, such visions
were perfectly natural; it is human progress that has made them the
uncontrolled, illusory things they are to-day. We must
therefore be quite clear that modern man lacks something: when he has
some experience in the spiritual world during sleep and is
returning to the physical world, he no longer hears the warning of
the Guardian of the Threshold: “All that you have experienced
in the spiritual world you should note well and carry back to the
physical world.” If he does carry it back, he will know what is
contained in the vision. But if the vision appears to him only in the
physical world, without his realising that he has brought it back
from the spiritual world, so that he fails to understand what it
really is, then he is without guidance, and at the mercy of illusion
where his visionary experience is concerned. So we can say: Visions
come about because a man carries over unawares his sleep-experience
into his waking life, and in his waking life he then forms conceptions
of the experiences — conceptions which are much richer in
content than the ordinary shadowy ones, and these he builds up into
vivid visions complete with colour and sound.
Another thing
that comes about is this. A man carries over into his life of sleep the
feelings and perceptions of the kind he has in physical life. Then,
when he is in the act of carrying this over into the open sea of
sleep-life, he is warned to be careful not to do anything
foolish. If the sleep is very light — a far more common
condition in ordinary life than is realised, for we are often just a
little asleep when walking about quite normally, and we ought to be
more aware of this — we may then, without noticing it, carry
over the Threshold our everyday faculty of perception. Then
arise those obscure feelings, as if one were inwardly watching
something happening in the future, either to oneself or to someone
else, and we have a premonition. Thus, whereas a vision
comes about when experience during sleep is carried down into waking
life and the threshold is crossed unconsciously, premonition
comes about when we are in a light sleep without realising it and,
thinking we are awake, carry over the Threshold, again ignoring the
Guardian, our daytime experience. This, however, lies so deep
down in the subconscious that it is not noticed. We are, of course,
at all times connected with the whole world; and if we could draw
this knowledge up out of the subconscious, we should be able to draw
up much else also.
You will now
see how, because these legacies from the evolutionary past can still be
experienced, visions arise on one side of the Threshold, premonitions
on the other. But a man may also halt at the Threshold and still not
notice the Guardian. There may then be moments when inwardly, in his
soul, he is as if he were enchanted. But the word
“enchanted” does not quite meet the case, for he is not
enchanted in the sense we generally associate with the term —
it is rather that his attitude of soul undergoes a change. When
he comes to the Threshold in such a way that he still perceives
what is in the physical world while already perceiving what is
in the super-sensible, he experiences something which is widespread in
certain regions of the Earth — second sight, a
half-conscious experience at the Threshold. Hence to sum up
these legacies from the past, these phenomena in a man's life when
his consciousness is dimmed, we have those appearing on this
side of the Threshold as visions; those appearing beyond the
Threshold as premonitions; those actually at the Threshold as
second sight.
To-morrow I
shall have to speak in greater detail of the characteristics of these
three regions, going on from these to describe the worlds dimly indicated
by vision, premonition and second sight — worlds which new
knowledge will have to bring into the full clarity of enhanced
consciousness.
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