XII
The
Evolution of the World in
Connection with the Evolution of
Man
In the course
of our observations about the world and about man, we have seen how he
bears within him — if only in picture form — the past of
the world, and how it is possible for him, by gradual training, to
conjure up these pictures. In our ordinary daytime consciousness
there is nothing of all this, but only memories of our experiences
during earthly life. When, however, a man applies this ordinary
consciousness to following the path I have indicated, then, as
his spiritual consciousness grows clearer and clearer, more and more
of the past evolution of worlds arises within him. And we have found
how this experience of the past has to be renewed between death and
rebirth.
We can therefore
say: When things that are not perceptible for the senses become so
for Imagination, a man looks back beyond the memories of his current
life. He looks back on everything that has gone to shape him, on the
forces of growth and nourishment which have formed him from within
— all of which proceeds from the spirit.
And further,
in Inspiration a man looks into pre-earthly existence, but not only into
his own. We have seen already how he reaches out beyond the cosmic
island of the Earth to the great cosmic ocean in which the stars have
their dwelling, and he finds that the stars then become for him the
dwelling-places of spiritual Beings.
Then, when
Intuition arises, a man gazes back into past lives on Earth. At the same
time the whole past life of the world comes into the range of his vision.
He is, in actual fact, born out of the whole world; the whole world
lives in his physical, etheric and astral bodies, and — during
earthly existence — least of all as yet in his Ego. All this is
included in a man, working and weaving within him. As human beings we
bear within us the whole past evolution of the world, upon which
countless generations of the spirit have worked. We bear this divine
work in the building up of our organs, and in the forces weaving and
living in them; we bear it within us when those organs flower into
perception and thought. We carry within us the work that has gone
into the whole past evolution of the world. When now, after we have
— at least in thought — sharpened our vision into the
past, we look out at the world surrounding us here on Earth, we see
with ordinary consciousness only as much as the senses offer and
whatever our intellect can make of our sense-observations. Behind the
realm of sense-perception lies the all-embracing life of the spirit
— a life active in all colours and sounds of nature, in
everything we experience as warmth or cold, in every aspect of
natural phenomena that can affect us as human beings.
Besides the
physical nature revealed to the senses, there is a concealed spiritual
nature — a hidden spiritual environment. This surrounding
spiritual world, of which only the veriest surface is apparent to
sense-perception, carries even now in its womb man's future
evolution. Just as we bear within us in mighty pictures the entire
past and are ourselves the outcome of those pictures, so in the
concealed life of nature there works and weaves that which, in its
further unfolding as world-evolution, will bring us our future. Thus
we can set before us these weighty words: Man bears within him the
past of the world; the outer world is the bearer of his
future.
These are the
two fundamental principles upon which world-evolution and human evolution
are founded. And indeed they come to expression in individual human
life. There is a great difference between all that tends more
towards a man's head-organisation, and all that has more to do
with the rest of his body. To put it rather crudely, one might say:
Forces work up from the heart towards the head organisation and bring
about the particular configuration of the head, with its covering of
hard skull. This is filled with the most wonderful construction in
all the world — the convolutions and interweavings of the
human brain, in which the senses are embedded.
Everything
living in these forces, all that flows to a man's head from his breast
and heart, is an outcome of the past. This could become what it now is
in man only because — as we have already said — innumerable
divine generations of the spirit have worked upon it, through the
metamorphoses of cosmic-planetary bodies. In my
Occult Science
I have pointed out how a Saturn-evolution, a Sun-evolution, a
Moon-evolution, preceded in turn the Earth-evolution in which we are
living and during which the Saturn-, Sun- and Moon-evolutions have
been recapitulated. We are now rather past the middle of the actual
Earth-evolution, the evolution of man on Earth.
The forces which
through long ages have been gradually developing, under the influence
of divine generations of the spirit, all live in the physical body of
earthly man, and stream from his heart up to his head. All that you
bear continually in your physical, etheric, astral and Ego, as a
streaming up from the centre of your being to your head, has been
prepared and worked upon by generations of Gods through immeasurable
periods of time. And the last element which lives in these
up-streaming forces — though people to-day are still
unconscious of it — is that which expresses itself as a man's
karma — the past of his own Ego during his lives on
Earth.
We can put
it in this way. If we penetrate deeply into these forces of cosmic memory,
we come first to karma; then to the various stages of Earth-evolution;
after that to the metamorphoses, the planetary transformations which
the Earth went through before becoming the actual Earth. Before the
Earth could come into being, there had to be a cosmic body, Saturn,
consisting only of tenuous warmth. Saturn had then to pass away
before rising to a new existence as that Sun of which our Sun, now
seen outside in cosmic space, is the residue. At that time the Sun
was a cosmic body consisting of air alone; this again had to pass
away and give place to a cosmic body consisting of water — the
old Moon. Then the Moon in turn gave place to the firm mineral
substance of the Earth, on which man, as an earthly being, could
begin to evolve.
But just as
we have these upward-striving forces, so do we bear within us forces with
a downward trend. They have a kind of central point in the heart, and
the circulating blood carries both forces to the movements of our
limbs. These forces are active in every movement of our hands; when
you take hold of anything, or perform any ordinary earthly action,
they enter into every move you make. They do not now belong to the
past; they belong to the hidden world around us. They will be taken
up into the womb of the past — which will become the past only
in the future — when a man goes through the gate of death, and
exchanges his earthly existence for life among the stars. These are
the forces in which a man's future is prepared.
The future
comes about through the interplay of these forces with the forces concealed
in external nature. Thus the world bears man's future within its own
evolution. There is a sharp distinction in him between these upper
forces and the lower ones. The knowledge that can be acquired after
passing the Guardian of the Threshold bring out this
distinction strongly.
For ordinary
consciousness, everything below the heart remains unconscious. This
does not mean that it is any less fully imbued with consciousness,
but this is a consciousness beyond our normal reach to-day. Hence
what a man experiences inwardly differs from the content of his
consciousness. He is conscious only of what is on the surface,
rising like an island out of his other experiences.
When we are
able to penetrate further into the human being, we can see how he is still
endowed to-day with these subconscious forces. We can then see how a
man performs some deed which, for that moment of his earthly life,
causes him pleasure and satisfaction — his head is satisfied.
He may for some reason have done a thoroughly bad thing, but his head
is satisfied, and the implications of his action evade his ordinary
consciousness. But although his head may be perfectly
satisfied, the hand that carries out the action is
subconsciously affected by it — and the subconscious is
really another form of consciousness — and his hand quivers.
The quivering may be outwardly imperceptible, but in the etheric and
astral bodies it becomes an actual trembling. So we can see inwardly
how a man may be satisfied in his head with some deed that
subconsciously causes a trembling in the astral and etheric organs
connected with his arms or legs. In the satisfaction given to the
head by a bad deed, consciousness is — we might say —
benumbed; but another form of consciousness arises in the depths of a
man's being, and there the deed causes a trembling.
In this
trembling, future karma is being prepared. It is a trembling in face of
the forces concealed in nature, forces of the hidden world. The trembling
presages the judgment that will be passed upon the man by the Beings
of the stars, when, from this little island of the Earth, he goes out
into the wide starry ocean.
To sum this up:
Within the human being, in diverse ways, both the past and the future of
the world are living — even in the external form of his physical
body. A man's head-organisation, that most wonderful, most perfect
product of world-evolution, is to a great extent broken up, even
spiritually, when he passes through the gate of death. On the
other hand, his lower organisation, though merely physical in
outward appearance, is in reality a physical picture of that
which lives as soul and spirit in the arms and hands, in the whole
metabolic-limb system. Through this system, through all you can see
as flesh and blood shaped into arms and hands, spiritual forces flow.
In a future life on Earth these forces will flow through the organs
that bring about the movements of the upper and lower jaw. The bones
of the head in their plastic formation will then be the transformed
bones of arms and legs — naturally I mean the spiritual part of
these, for the physical falls away. That which now constitutes your
arms and legs will become in your next incarnation — to speak
in terms of forces and dynamics — the configuration of your
head. Hence the physical organisation itself affords a reflection of
how a man has gone through earthly life. Anyone who studies in the
right way the artistic shaping of a man's head can see in the very
form of his head how he used his arms and hands in his dealings with
other people and with the external world during his previous earthly
life. For the deeds of arms and legs in one earthly incarnation live
on in the formation of the head in the next incarnation. Ordinary
phrenology is superficial in giving all kinds of intellectual
interpretations of the shape of the head. But behind this is a deep,
occult phrenology which considers the individuality of each man and
does not conform to general rules — a phrenology that out of
Intuitions is able to discern how the formations of a man's head have
been prepared by the outcome of his movements, his behaviour and his
actions during a previous life on Earth.
That, then,
is how the human being stands before us to-day, and before himself, showing
in what he has become how divine generations of the spirit have worked
upon him through immeasurable periods of time. Naturally one can only
indicate in outline how a man's life to-day illustrates in pictures
all that these generations of the Gods have done for him, and for all
mankind, through the metamorphoses of Earth-evolution — Saturn,
Sun and Moon.
Let us take
first three particularly significant impulses in the earthly life of human
beings. If one looks quite simply, with ordinary consciousness, at
the wonders revealed in the progressive development of the human
being from the first days of his life, we can at least gain some
idea, some feeling, of the tremendous depths out of which the soul
and spirit struggle during those first days and weeks in order to
give an increasingly definite form to much that in the infant is
still formless; and then gradually to bring under control the chaotic
movements of arms and legs. We come to feel that we are being shown
how a spiritual activity, present in the endless depths of the hidden
life of nature, is expressing itself in the human body. And we can
say: There is nothing on Earth so wonderful to watch as the unfolding
of the inner human being within the outer, during the development of
a child in the very first years of its life. If we know how to watch
this with true artistic-religious insight, then all that can be seen
there, and the humility we can feel in face of this revelation of the
spiritual, surpass all other artistic, scientific or religious
impressions that can be received from the outer world.
But let us
single out three things in the development of a child. In ordinary life
we say: The child is learning to walk. In fact, this is something wonderful.
In this learning to walk an extraordinary amount of movement is
involved. All the limbs are called into play when, in order to stand
erect, the child raises itself out of the position where its spine is
parallel with the surface of the Earth. We take this for granted as
something obvious, but it marks the moment in the child's life when
it is learning to give all its forces a different, orientation on
Earth, and, with the help of the symmetry of those forces and its own
inner balance, is learning to establish itself within the Cosmos as a
whole. At the same time, we are really watching how a human being is
growing out of the animal world. For this is a moment that an animal
can never experience. It remains essentially with its spine parallel
to the Earth; for if it pulls itself upright, as the ape does, this
is contrary to its natural organisation.
If we are
to form a true conception of man, we must be able to see in the right
light this learning to walk on the part of the child. Scientists have
compared the bones of the human being with those of the animal, and
have found them to be animal bones transformed, and men's muscles to
be animal muscles transformed — and so on. Let this be so with
every organ; the difference between man and animal will still not be
found in this way. The difference can be seen only when we grasp how,
in the moment of standing erect, a human being is freeing himself
from his connection with the animal at the beginning of his life, and
establishing his balance in the whole world. Never during his life
would he have been able to acquire the skill for doing this had it
not been prepared in the most remote days; the seed for it was
already within the being of man during the Saturn-existence. Divine
Spirits then laid down the seed of the skill that comes to light when
the child learns, as we say, to walk. There were no animals then, for
they came later, during the Sun-evolution. Hence the human being, as
originally planned, is older than the animals.
All that lies
in these invisible forces that enable man to walk leads us back to his
origin during the Saturn-existence.
The second
faculty arising in the child comes from his new orientation in space;
this causes the forces to turn inwards and to appear in a different way.
For instance, I take up a piece of chalk; a force comes in an inward
direction, discharging itself in the internal organs. This
inward-turning force, coming through the limbs from the direction of
movement, makes its appearance in the child's development when
it learns to speak. First, when the child finds its bearings in
space, the forces take an outward direction; the same forces then
turn inwards and the child learns to speak.
Science knows
only a small part of all this. It knows that a right-handed person has his
speech-centre in the left half of the brain, and a left-handed person
has it in the right half. Everything in the brain that has to do with
the development of speech, however, is first worked into it by the
limbs when the child learns to walk, to grasp things, to move around
and turn its attention to objects. This springs from the inwardly
directed forces, which then go out from the brain into the organs of
speech. Here, again, divine-spiritual Beings have been preparing the
human organism through countless ages, so that the child should be
able to speak. Those divine Beings, who during the Saturn period
prepared the human being for walking, then worked during the Sun
period to bring about his capacity for speech.
The third
gift developed by the child, and by all mankind, through speech —
for it could not come before speaking in earthly evolution —
was the power to have thoughts. This was prepared by the
divine-spiritual Beings during the Moon age. That is how human
evolution took its course in the past ages of the world; generations
of spiritual Beings have prepared for man his walking,
speaking, thinking — through Saturn-evolution, Sun-evolution,
Moon-evolution.
In the evolution
of the world during the Sun age, animals made their appearance —
naturally in a form different from that of to-day. They now have to
feed on plants, which at that time they had no need to do, for then
they were creatures of the air and consisted of airy substance. It
was during the Moon-existence that the plants were added.
Then evolution
passed over to Earth-existence, when the human being first developed a
visible bodily form in which the forces of walking, speaking and
thinking could dwell. At the same time the mineral kingdom arose and
became an essential part of his organism. In this way man's past can
be described.
If we wish to
look at man's future, in the light of present-day conditions on Earth, we
must start from his old age, which means describing something that is
not at all apparent to-day. When a child begins to walk, speak,
think, external signs of this are clear enough, but how the spiritual
part of man is intensified in old age is far from evident to anyone
without spiritual vision. I spoke of the most wonderful experience of
watching the gradual revelation of soul and spirit in the growing
body of a young child, and of how, if one sees it in the right way,
one can be overwhelmed by the deepest religious feeling in face of
all the meaning that this artistic process conveys. But it is also
wonderful to see how all that a man has experienced through walking,
speaking and thinking during his earthly life disappears into the
spiritual. And then to see how his thoughts and words,
everything he has worked and struggled for with his hands, is
carried back into the life of the spirit when he passes through the
gate of death. Just as that which comes to expression in the child's
walking, speaking, thinking, points us back to previous stages in the
Earth's evolution, to the evolution of Moon, of Sun, of Saturn, so
does all that a man has experienced in his thoughts point us first of
all to his next earthly life, and then to the great periods in the
future evolution of the Earth.
So it is that
the thoughts of men point towards the Jupiter stage in the evolution of
the world and of man — a stage that can be reached only when
the Earth has passed through death and risen to a new planetary
existence. For thoughts will not then live in us in their present
fluctuating way; they will take definite shape and appear in the very
form of man.
To-day we are
able to keep our thoughts to ourselves, and on certain occasions our
countenance can appear perfectly innocent, although we are inwardly
guilty. We shall not be able to do this during the Jupiter-existence.
A man's thoughts will then engender the expression of his face. The
human form will have lost its mineralised firmness; it will be
inwardly flexible and will consist of a quite soft substance. A wrong
thought rising up in us will instantly show itself to other people
through a change in our expression. Everything in the nature of a
thought will at once take shape; a man will then go about in the
guise of his own enduring thoughts and temperament. Hence if, during
the Jupiter-existence, a man is a regular scoundrel, or has only
animal impulses, that is what he will look like. That is the first
stage in man's future.
The second
stage will exemplify the creative power of
speech. To-day speech arises inwardly and is sent out only
into the air. In the future, the spoken word will not fade away into
the air but will continue to exist, and with it a man will create
actual forms. So that in the Jupiter age he will have power to shape
himself by his thoughts; in the Venus-existence he will give form to
the world around him. If during the Venus-existence — when all
substance will be as fine as air — he utters an evil word,
something like a repulsive plant-form will come into being.
Hence a man will be surrounded by the creations of his own speech.
During the Venus existence creative feelings will arise, creative
speech, and the feelings that create through the word.
During the
last metamorphosis of the Earth, the Vulcan-existence, the activities
expressed in our walking and the movements of our arms will develop
further. To-day we go to our work and use our arms to carry out
actions, but nothing of that is lasting. I go to some place; I have
something or other to do. It may of course be something quite
complicated — possibly even the waging of war. Then we go
away again, and in the outer world none of our actions remain. During
the Vulcan-existence, everything will remain. A man will not simply
go about and perform actions; everything he does will leave its
imprint on the Vulcan-existence. His deeds will be actualised, will
become realities.
You see how
the Earth-existence makes a radical incision between past and future in
the evolution of the world and of man. Everything up to the time of
the Earth was brought about by divine generations of the spirit; that
which is to follow will be brought about by man himself. That is how
freedom enters his life within the cosmos. He is placed into the
world by the Gods, and given his free existence. From the Gods he has
acquired his capacity for walking, speaking, thinking — even
his form; but for the future evolution of the world he will have to
bring into this walking, speaking and thinking what he himself is. He
is now about to live himself out of the past into the future. Part of
the past, it is true, lies in his own karma; part of the future lies
in what he is willing to do for his own karma in the future. At
present he is serving a kind of apprenticeship between past and
future.
All this means
that things cannot work out in exact conformity with the
originally-intended plan I referred to yesterday. I spoke then
of 2,160 years having to pass between two incarnations. But during
his earthly life a man is far from absorbing all that he could
absorb; hence for many people to-day the interval between death and a
new birth proves to have changed — no longer 2,160 years for
anyone, but essentially shorter.
Men who have
given themselves up entirely to an earthly life, those with certain
criminal tendencies, are very poorly equipped for sailing out into
the ocean of starry existence; and after a short time between death
and rebirth they very soon return to earthly life. Others need a long
time in which to purify and perfect what they have made of their soul
and spirit during life on Earth. So one can say that those with
animal tendencies, who easily succumb to their instincts and desires,
soon come back to Earth, while those with a normal spiritual
development take longer to return. But there may also be human beings
who, through a deeper insight during earthly life into the way things
are going at the present time, are able to arouse in themselves a
self-sacrificing wish to return as soon as possible in order to
contribute to the future course of earthly affairs. For if a man has
filled his spirit with love during his life on Earth, he can make the
three to six transits, through Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, more
quickly. When persons with lower instincts pass through death, they
draw back trembling before these circles and do not complete them;
they are particularly repelled by the region of the planetoids.
To-morrow I shall be speaking of how human beings to-day are enabled
to enter various circles by submitting themselves to certain
influences in the world, in their personal life, in their national
life, and so on.
Those who enter
the region of the planetoids rightly will to-day spend seven or eight
hundred years between one earthly life and the next. That is normal
for people who are not of an actually degraded nature. But through
deeper insight into things, and through love of the spiritual world,
life between death and a new birth can be consciously shortened.
Those who have gained much from their life on Earth can make a
comparatively quick return, so that as soon as possible they can work
on the transforming of earthly civilisation and culture.
I have
had to take you in thought away from the earthly world into that of
the stars and their inhabitants, so that, in a way suited to the
present time, your attention may be directed away from the world in
which human beings are generally engrossed, to a world they have to
enter through deeper knowledge, if they wish to experience their
future aright. To-day, people in general are little inclined to
detach themselves from the claims of the material world and to seek
the spiritual directly in the physical world around them. We have no
time now to dwell on the obstacles met with when, in psycho-analysis,
for example — to which I shall be referring to-morrow —
attempts are made to investigate at least the spiritual part of man.
It is, however, precisely from observing directly the
sense-perceptible that a right path will open out for those who wish
now to work entirely within the field of present-day science, if they
really seek to discover the spiritual there. It can be done. Definite
proof of this is to be found in the booklet just issued by our
Institute of Physiology and Biology at Stuttgart. Here Frau Dr.
Kolisko has published the results of a beautiful piece of research
under the title
Physiological and Physical Proof of the Efficacy
of the smallest Entities.
[This treatise, translated into English, is
included in a volume entitled
Agriculture of To-morrow,
published by Frau Dr. Kolisko in 1939. It is now (1966) out of print,
but is obtainable from the Library at Rudolf Steiner House, 35, Park
Road, London, N.W.1.]
You know how homeopathy likes to work
with highly diluted substances. By this means, by bringing physical
substance in a highly diluted form, a way is opened into the
spiritual. Frau Dr. Kolisko has now succeeded in showing, by an exact
method, that the smallest entities, the highest dilutions, are
effective. She has been working most conscientiously for a long time
on the lines I have indicated, and she has now succeeded in producing
dilutions in the proportion 1 : 1
trillion.
If any substance
is completely dissolved in a glass of water, half of which is then
thrown out and the remaining half poured into a full glass of water,
we get a dilution of 1 : 2. When half the water is again
thrown out and the remainder poured into a full glass, we get
1 : 4, and so on. Now in our Biological Institute at
Stuttgart, by means of exact scientific methods, a way has been found
to produce precise solutions of 1 : 1 trillion — thus
arriving at the so-called higher potencies. The results can be
seen in the case, let us say, of antimony, about which I spoke in the
medical lecture given during our days here. We find that plant
growth, for example, the growth of a grain of wheat, is reduced to
its slowest rate at about the twenty-first potency, and brought to
its fastest rate at about the twenty-ninth or thirtieth potency. So,
you see, a substance has been diluted in fluid to a high potency, and
we find that the lower potencies have a different effect upon plant
growth while the highest potencies accelerate growth, which means
that they give the greatest stimulus to the life-force. In this way
it has been found possible to break down the purely material, so that
the spiritual can manifest there. For if you split up material
substance, not into atoms as atomists would have it, but in such a
way as to bring but the activity of its functions and forces, then
you are showing willingness, I would say, to go over to the spiritual
by permeating matter itself with spirit.
You can imagine
now what this means for observing accurately how remedies work on the
human organism, for the effect can indeed be seen. The dilution is
prepared; you have it in a laboratory flask, and you drop into this
potency a grain of wheat; then into the potency in the next flask you
drop another grain, and so on — grains and grains of wheat. For
in the course of this exact research whole rooms were filled with
these germinating grains, showing the effect of each potency on the
soil out of which the grains sprout. That is what must be done in
science to-day, in order to drive material knowledge on into the
realm of the spirit. You know what contention there has been between
homoeopaths and allopaths concerning the effectiveness of the
smallest entities in the higher potencies. The whole affair up to now
has been a question of opinion — the allopaths holding to one
view, the homoeopaths to another. Here, however, it is not a case of
siding with homoeopaths, but of establishing scientifically the
actual facts. In the future it will naturally be known when remedies
should be applied in the direct allopathic way, and when in a
dilution of the correct potency, so that they may have the desired
effect on the patient — particularly on his etheric body, which
represents the life-forces. We shall know exactly where to draw the
line — here you must give an allopathic treatment, there a
homoeopathic one. For just as other scientific experiments are
carried out with the utmost exactitude, so in this case Frau Dr.
Kolisko has shown in her booklet, with the same exactitude, how the
smallest entities really work. What was formerly mere surmise has
been raised to the level of an important scientific
subject.
But all this
points to something further. Just look in this booklet at the accurately
worked-out curves which show how the forces of growth go up and down;
notice how the curves have to be drawn according to whether the
potency is strong or weak, how with certain dilutions there is a
minimum of growth, and in more dilute solutions — higher
potencies — a maximum; then a return to the minimum, back again
to the maximum — and so on. Thus, in the remarkably
conscientious tracing of the curves, one gains direct insight into a
rhythm working in everything material — a rhythm that is indeed
the expression of the spiritual. With human beings, we can turn from
the metabolic system to the rhythmical system; it is possible in
nature, also, to find in a quite exact, scientific way its rhythmical
system. That is precisely what is to be seen in this work, which I
believe may prove to be an important landmark, not only in the
controversy between homoeopathy and allopathy but in all questions
concerning our insight into nature. If the results of this research
are estimated rightly, the laws of nature in future will no longer be
sought only in the present atomistic way, by measuring and weighing;
it will be recognised how in all material things there is a rhythm,
and how in the rhythm of events in nature the rhythm of the cosmos is
expressed.
I wanted to
draw your attention to this as a way leading out from exact science that
must be opened up. To-morrow I will go on to show how in psycho-analysis,
for example, there is a kind of theoretical aversion towards any real
setting out on the path leading from physical nature to the
spiritual. But if men are to go forward and not backward in
civilisation, they will be obliged to take this path to the
spirit.
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