The First Goetheanum
by
Rudolf Steiner
Translated from the German by Frank Thomas Smith
Lesson Three
Dornach, February 29, 1924
Let
us begin, my dear friends, with the words the Guardian speaks -
words we already know - when pointing in the direction of the
spiritual world, which characterize what the human being can
feel on the threshold of the spiritual world as he strides past
the Guardian.
From
the wide expanse of beings in space
Who experience existence in light,
From the tread of time's onward course
Which finds in creating its very activity;
From the depths of the feeling heart
Where in the Self the world is founded:
There resounds in the soul's utterance,
There shines from the spirit's thoughts,
Which from divine healing forces
in the cosmic-creative forces
Weave the mighty existential words:
O Man, know thyself!
It's about the path one should follow in thought, the path
which one will actually take when seeking access to the
spiritual world. And we should not say that when someone
experiences in thought - if he honestly and earnestly lives in
his thoughts - what the person in process of initiation
realizes in reality by entering the spiritual world, that the
former does not actually participate in what is revealed to the
human soul when entering the spiritual world, because it is
only a reflected ideation.
One
should not say: Let's leave gaining entrance into the spiritual
world to those who are striving to be initiates and stand with
their souls in the spiritual world as people stand in physical
existence with their senses. Rather should one say: When even
in thought one approaches the description of the path that
leads to the spiritual world, and provided the thinking is not
superficial, he will experience and feel fully what it means to
leave the world of the senses behind, a world only the
intellect can grasp, and enter the spiritual world.
That is what I will speak to you about today, my dear friends,
and not merely for those who already seek the transformation
which will lead them into the spiritual world, but also for
those who, at first, only experience the transformation in
their thoughts. And that includes all of you, else you wouldn't
be sitting here.
Therefore the following must be said: When man makes his
observations in the world of senses - life consists of such
observations - when man uses the things that he encounters in
the sense world to unfold his will, when he proceeds from
observation to action, and when he lets the combination of such
observations and actions have an effect on his feelings, he
stands to a certain extent on firm ground, for this process has
been implanted in him as a physical being on earth between
birth and death. Wherever he doesn't have this firm ground, he
looks for it. When he is expected to believe something, he
looks everywhere for the facts behind it. He asks: What
experience proves this or that? He doesn't like to accept
something in ordinary life which is not proven by this or that
outward experience. He stands on firm ground because he says to
himself: What is true is what is seen, what is real is what is
held in the hand. The world, the world order itself, provides a
certain security in human life. And because of this security,
man differentiates - insofar as it is necessary for ordinary
life between birth and death - he differentiates between truth
and illusion, truth and semblance, truth and dream. When
verification cannot be found, he calls it semblance. And only
by differentiating between true and false, reality and
semblance, is life secure.
Just imagine, my dear friends, that you were to go through life
between birth and death in a way that you could never really
know whether something that confronts you is truth or illusion.
You could not determine whether a person who stands before you
and speaks to you is a real person or the semblance of one. You
could not differentiate between something happening to you
being real or merely a dream. Just imagine what insecurity,
what terrible insecurity that would cause in your life.
But
exactly as you would feel if life were to withdraw the
possibility of knowing whether you were dreaming or confronting
reality, is also the way the adept feels standing at the
threshold of the spiritual world. That is the very first
important experience he has when he realizes that on the other
side of the threshold is the spiritual world.
As
we have already seen, only darkness streams at first from this
spiritual world. Yet although here or there brilliant flashes
of light emanate from the darkness - in which the Guardian of
the Threshold's words are heard, as we learned last time - with
all the knowledge of the senses and reason you may have gleaned
in the physical world, you would never be able to know whether
a real spiritual being, a real spiritual fact stands before you
or a shape in a dream.
That is the first experience of the spiritual world, that
semblance and reality are mixed up and to differentiate between
semblance and reality is problematic at first. That is
something which should be borne in mind especially by those who
have experienced impressions from the spiritual world not
through normal spiritual training, but due to elementary
forces, which can be the result of any number of things, such
as shattering events, illness and the like. He shouldn't
deceive himself by saying: well, now you have the spiritual
world, because it could well be that whatever it is that seems
to suddenly shine from out of the spiritual world is merely an
illusion. Therefore the first thing one must learn in order to
enter the spiritual world is the ability to distinguish between
truth and error, between reality and illusion - independent of
what is experienced in the physical world. One must acquire
completely new capacities for distinguishing between reality
and illusion.
In
our times, when people no longer pay much attention to how the
spiritual world illuminates life, in which they only pay
attention to what is palpable, to what can only be seen by
physical eyes; in our times, when people are completely attuned
to the overt security which life between birth an death
provides; in these times it is especially difficult to acquire
this capacity to distinguish between truth and error, reality
and semblance in respect to the spiritual world. It is in this
area where the most earnestness is required.
And
where does this come from? You see, when you confront the outer
world as a physical person, you think about this outer world.
And at the same time you have impressions from the physical
world, which in a certain sense slip under your thoughts,
supporting them. You don't have to do very much in order to
live in reality. Reality accepts you as a physical reality.
It
is quite different in the spiritual world. You must first grow
into the spiritual world. For the spiritual world you must
acquire the correct feeling of your own true reality. Then you
will gradually be able to differentiate between truth and
error, between reality and semblance of reality.
When you sit down on a chair - at the moment you don't fall on
the floor, but are able to sit safely on the chair, you know
that in the physical world the chair is a real chair and not
merely an imagined chair. The chair itself provides proof of
its reality.
That is not the case in the spiritual world. For why is it so
in the physical world? Because in the physical world your
thinking, your feeling, your willing are held together by the
physical body. You are a threefold human being: a thinking,
feeling and a willing human being. But they are all unified
within each other by the physical body.
At
the moment when the human being enters the spiritual world, he
immediately becomes a triple being. His thinking goes its own
way, his feeling goes its own way, his willing goes its own
way. So you can think in the spiritual world, have thoughts
which have nothing to do with your willing; but these thoughts
are illusions. You can have feelings which have nothing to do
with your willing; but these feelings contribute to your
undoing, not to your advancement.
That is the essential thing, that when a person approaches the
threshold of the spiritual world it seems to him that his
thinking flies out into distant space and that his feeling goes
beyond his memory.
Consider for a moment what I just said. You see, memory is
really something which comes very close to the threshold of the
spiritual world. Let's say you experienced something ten years
ago. It returns in memory. The experience is there again. You
are justifiably satisfied, as far as the physical world is
concerned, if you have a vivid memory of it. For someone who
has entered the spiritual world, however, it is as though he
pushes through the memory, as though he goes farther than the
memory reaches. In any case he goes farther back than his
memory of physical earthly life can reach. He goes back beyond
birth.
And
when one enters the spiritual world, he immediately senses that
his feeling does not stay with him. Thinking at least goes out
into the presently existing universe. It disperses, as it were,
in cosmic space. Feeling goes out of the universe and if one
wants to follow feeling one must ask: Where are you now? When
you have become 50 years old, then you have gone back in time
farther than 50 years; you have gone back 70 years, 100 years,
150 years. Feeling leads you completely out of the time in
which you have lived since childhood.
And
willing, if you take it seriously, leads you ever farther back
in time, back to your previous earth lives. That is something
which happens immediately, dear friends, when you really come to
the threshold of the spiritual world. The physical body ceases
holding you together. One no longer feels within the confines
of the skin; one feels split into parts.
You
feel as though your thoughts, which were previously confined by
feelings, are streaming out into cosmic space and becoming
cosmic thoughts. Your feelings seem to go back in time in the
spiritual world between your last death and your present earth
life. And with your volition you feel yourself in your previous
earth life.
It
is just this splitting of the human being - I described it in
my book How to
Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds- which causes
difficulties upon entering the spiritual world, because your
thoughts expand. They had previously been held together and now
stream out into cosmos space. At the same time they become
almost imperceptible. So one must achieve the ability to
perceive the thoughts which have thus expanded.
Feeling is no longer permeated by thoughts, for the thoughts
have gone, so to speak. So your feeling can only turn
prayerfully, with reverence and devotion, to the beings with
whom you pass your life between death and a new birth on earth.
This is possible if one has cultivated such reverence for the
spiritual world in life.
But
the moment one's volition, which wants to proceed to previous
earth-lives, takes over, the person meets a great difficulty in
that he feels an enormous attraction for the contents of his
lower nature. And here works most strongly what I previously
said about the difficulty in being able to to differentiate
between semblance and reality. For the person acquires a strong
preference for semblance. I'll describe it as follows.
When a person begins to meditate, when he or she is really
dedicated to the meditation, he would like to continue in
tranquility. He does not want it to deprive him of life's
comforts. Well, this desire not to be deprived of life's
comforts is a strong producer of illusions and semblances.
Because when you dedicate yourself completely to meditation,
necessarily from the depths of your soul the question arises
about your capacity for evil. One cannot do otherwise than to
feel through meditation, through that penetration into the
depths, everything you are capable of perpetrating. But the
urge to deny this is so strong that one submits to the illusion
that one is essentially a very good person.
The
real experience of meditation does not indicate such a result.
It shows how one can be full of all kinds of vanity and
overestimation of one's self and underestimation of others.
Also, one judges people not only because they have something
important to say, but because one wishes to bask in the good
opinion of others. But that is the least of things. He who
really meditates honestly will see what drives live in his soul
and what he is therefore capable of. Man's lower nature appears
strongly before the soul's inner vision. And this honesty must
exist in mediation. When it is there we can see what the will's
disposition really is, which is reflected in the words we have
already heard:
Behold
the first beast, the crooked back
The bony head, the scrawny body,
His skin is all a dullish blue;
Your fear of creative spiritual being
Begat the monster in your will;
Because the human being tends to succumb to illusion, he
suppresses the impression that necessarily arises in
meditation, and he feels the urge to mock the spiritual world.
Only by honestly facing these opposing forces can he stand in
the spiritual world in the right way. Then the sight of the
second beast appears on the threshold:
Behold
the second beast, it bares
Its teeth in a warped face, scornfully it lies,
Yellow with gray spots is its body;
Your hate of spiritual revelation
Begat this weakling in your feeling;
And
then when we are helpless to follow the thoughts we had in our
heads during earth life and are now cosmic thoughts, because of
this inability to bestride our cosmic thoughts, that the third
beast appears:
Behold
the third beast, with cloven muzzle,
Its eye is glassy, posture slouching,
Dirty-red its form appears to you;
Your doubts in the power of spiritual light
Begat this ghost within your thinking;
The
less we succumb to illusions about this trinity, which reflects
our own being, the more we find in us the true human who can
receive the light from the spiritual world and who is in a
position to really solve the riddle, insofar as it is possible
on earth to do so, which is conceded to us with the words:
“O man, know thyself!”. For through this
self-knowledge streams forth the true knowledge of the world
which can lead us in the right way through life. Therefore,
this threefold splitting in which one's thinking goes its way,
feeling goes its way and willing goes its way, which otherwise
are united by exterior forces, may be expressed by the words
the Guardian of the Threshold says to the adept. We heard them
the last time:
The
third beast's glassy eye,
Is the evil counterpart
Of thinking, that denies itself
In you and chooses death,
Forsaking the spirit-force
which before it's earthly life
Lived its life in fields of spirit.
The second beast's mocking countenance
Is the evil counter-force of feeling,
Which hollows out its own soul
And creates an empty life
Instead of fullness of spirit
With light from the force of the sun
Before earthly existence.
The first beast's bony spirit:
The will's evil creative power,
Which would estrange your own body
From the soul's inherent strength
And devote it to the counter-forces,
Which would steal in future time
Cosmic being from the gods.
These are the words spoken by the Guardian as a warning so that
we know how we should not enter the spiritual world.
Upon entering the spiritual world we must have become
accustomed to a different way of judging, a different way of
feeling and a different way of willing from what prevails in
the physical world. And for that it is really necessary that we
grasp this threefold element within us, that we firmly direct
our gaze within in order to be alert to what our thinking
really is, what our feeling really is, what our willing really
is and what they must become for us to be able to step across
the threshold into the spiritual world, if only in our
thoughts. For the fact is that the gods place will-power before
the bliss of knowledge and they require it.
Therefore, directly after the Guardian has spoken these
discouraging, perhaps frightening words, he continues with the
other words which tell us what we should do. At this
point the first lessons of this class also become practical in
that they instruct us what should enter into our thinking,
feeling and willing forces in order to enter the spiritual
world in the right way.
And
the verse should also be threefold which should flow into us in
a way that we can live with it. For in living with it we are
setting out on the path to the spiritual world. In the same way
that we eat and drink , that we see and hear, must something be
evoked in us by what the Guardian of the Threshold, standing
before the spiritual world, says with earnest visage.
See in
yourself the weaving thoughts:
Cosmic semblances confront you,
Selfhood as such hides from you;
Plunge beneath the semblances:
Etheric essence flows in you;
Selfhood as such should revere
Guiding beings of your spirit.
Let
us examine the verse. When the human being lives in the
sense-world between birth and death, he feels to be within his
physical body. He knows that his legs carry him through the
world. He knows that blood circulation gives him life. He knows
that his breathing awakens life. He commits himself to this
breathing, blood circulation and the movement of the members
that carry him through the world. In doing so, he is a physical
being on the earth. Just as he commits himself to these things
physically, he must also commit with his soul to the leading
powers of the spiritual world if he wants to participate in it,
knowledgeably enter into it.
Just as I must say that for physical health your blood must
circulate in the correct way, your breathing must be in order, I
must also advise the person who wishes to stand correctly in
the spiritual world, that his soul must follow, be sustained
and led by his own spiritual guides:
[The
first verse, beginning with the last words, is written on the
blackboard:]
Guiding beings of your spirit
But, my dear friends, you are committed to your blood by the
force of nature, as you are to the movement of your limbs, also
your breathing. But you cannot be committed in this way to your
spirit's guiding beings in the spiritual world. Inner activity
is required. You don't reach them as you achieve breathing by
movement of the lungs; you reach them, however, by learning to
revere them.
[Over
“Guiding beings of your spirit”
“revere” is written:]
revere
Guiding beings of your spirit.
Revere
with what is deepest in you, with your selfhood.
[“Selfhood” is written in front of
“revere”.]
selfhood
revere
Guiding beings of your spirit.
Selfhood as such should revere
Guiding beings of your spirit.
[When
spoken, the missing words are added, then written on the
blackboard:]
selfhood as such should revere
Guiding beings of your spirit.
Thus, you have the manner in which you must stand within the
spiritual world, given in the words spoken by the Guardian of
the Threshold.
And
how do you stand within? Not as though you were standing with
your legs on solid ground; not through the warmth of your blood
in physical life; not by drawing breath. You stand there by
virtue of feeling yourself in the half-spiritual etheric
essence flowing through you:
Etheric essence flows in you
The
feeling is as though one were a small cloud around which a
spiritual wind blows, that one is carried by this wind in which
selfhood, one's own I, reveres the spiritual guides which
approach with the wind from all sides. We are invited to
submerge into it. But what is it initially? As long as we
remain in our meditation in what I have just described, it is
mere semblance. We must submerge in this semblance fully
conscious that the wind and the reverence for the spiritual
guides is only semblance.
[The
fourth line from the bottom is written on the blackboard.]
Plunge beneath the semblances
Why
should we do all this? Well, in earth-life initially we have
only a vague sense of our I - “Selfhood” - we
define it with the word “I”, but in reality it is
an undefined, dim, hidden feeling.
[The
fifth line from the bottom is written.]
Selfhood as such hides from you
We
don't know much about it. And what we do know is not
cosmic-being, it is cosmic-semblance.
[The
sixth line from the bottom is written.]
Cosmic semblance confronts you
When
we follow the Guardian of the Threshold's indications ...
[The
seventh line from the bottom is written.]
See
in yourself the weaving thoughts
it all
becomes the weaving of our own thoughts.
Now
we have the first mantric verse which can give us the strength
in our thinking to accept the challenge with our selfhood which
can initially be expressed in the words:
See in
yourself the weaving thoughts:
Cosmic semblances confront you,
Selfhood as such hides from you;
Plunge within the semblances:
Etheric essence flows in you;
Selfhood as such should revere
Guiding beings of your spirit.
This is the invitation to us when observing our thoughts in
retrospection. If you close yourself off from the outside world
and observe how your thoughts fluctuate and then you follow the
invitation in these seven lines, you have complied with the
Guardian of the Threshold's first demand.
Now
you are to approach what the Guardian says to your feelings:
To hear within the flow of feeling:
when semblance and being within you blend,
Your selfhood tends towards the semblance;
So plunge into what's seemingly being:
In you the cosmic-psychic forces;
Your selfhood then should well consider
Your own soul's living powers.
Just as through the first mantric verse we enter thinking, we
enter the inner world of thinking through the second.
[The
second verse is written on the blackboard.]
To
hear within the flow of feeling
Put
aside thinking and try to observe your own feelings. In
thinking everything is semblance. But when we descend into
feeling semblance and being blend, intermix.
That is immediately apparent.
when semblance and being within you blend
Only our I, selfhood, does not wish to enter real existence. It
is used to outside semblance and appearance. It tends towards
semblance, still retaining this from the world of the
senses:
Your selfhood tends towards the semblance
So plunge into what's seemingly being
in
what results from feeling. It is seemingly being, a mixture of
semblance and being.
“So plunge into what's seemingly being”: when we
will feel the mood which lies in these four lines, we will
realize that it has become serious as we plunge into the
semblance:
In
you the cosmic-psychic forces
First of all, selfhood had to “revere” by sinking
into thought; now selfhood should “consider”. The
thoughts are to be brought down into feeling. We then encounter
something which assures us of true being:
Your selfhood then should well consider
Your own soul's living powers
No
longer “semblance”, but “living
powers”. Whereas our self, our I tends towards semblance,
the gods give us the rock of being in the depths of
feeling.
In
order to convert the verse into a mantram, it would be good to
revisit such correspondences.
Revere
|
|
consider well
|
- in the third verse we will see how it increases. -
|
|
semblance
|
you experience.
Here [first verse] is only semblance;
and here [second verse]
|
|
semblance and being within you blend.
|
|
guiding spirits
|
[in the first verse] your own
|
|
living powers
|
[in the second verse],
|
the
beings who guide us through the ether; the living powers who
guide us back to pre-earthly existence - where feeling
goes.
If
you wish to make it into a true mantram however, you must take
something else into consideration. Read the first verse:
See
in yourself the weaving thoughts:
Cosmic semblances confront you,
Selfhood as such hides from you;
Plunge within the semblances:
Etheric essence flows in you;
Selfhood as such should revere
Guiding beings of your spirit.
Clearly this is a trochaic rhythm, which I beg you to observe.
If you stress this strongly and this weakly [the iambic rhythm
symbols breve and macron ̆ - are placed above the
beginning of each line and then spoken with the appropriate
stress], it corresponds to the correct etheric movement in the
soul where reverence for the higher beings requires such a
tone. Thus you will be led into the spiritual world.
It
is otherwise in the second verse:
To hear within the flow of feeling:
when semblance and being within you blend,
Your selfhood tends towards the semblance;
So plunge into what's seemingly being:
In you the cosmic-psychic forces;
Your selfhood then should well consider
Your own soul's living powers.
The
way in which the soul feels these words, either trochaic or
iambic - here [in the first verse] there is a distinctly
trochaic beat, and here [in the second verse] a distinctly
iambic beat - gives the soul the corresponding verve.
It
is not a question of merely acquiring intellectual information,
even when the soul is making its way to the spiritual world
only in thought. Rather is it important that the soul enters
with the right breathing and rhythm of cosmic being. If you use
an iambic rhythm in striving to enter cosmic thought, you have
misunderstood the Guardian of the Threshold. If you use a
trochaic verse and not an iambic one for entrance into the
world of cosmic feeling, again you have misunderstood the
Guardian of the Threshold.
The
third element we must plunge into is willing. And the Guardian
of the Threshold also gives us a verse for this. Now that we
have contemplated the first two, the last one will be easy to
understand.
[The
third verse is written on the blackboard.]
Let
strive in you with thrust of will:
Which rises out of semblance-being
With creative self it rises up;
it
surges up from the will to what gives the self substance,
content ...
Turn your life in full to this
Filled it is with cosmic-spirit-force;
Your inner self should truly grasp
Cosmic creative power in the spirit-I.
Feel again the escalation:
revere:
|
one is far away, one looks up, one reveres from without;
|
|
consider well:
|
one draws closer in thought, one enters;
|
|
grasp:
|
the highest escalation, one enters and grasps it.
|
|
Guiding beings
living powers
|
and now:
|
|
cosmic creative power
|
- now at the beginning of the line, corresponding to the
reality of the direct power of the will.
|
You
will feel that all three are mantric verses if you pay
attention to the trochaic element here [the first verse], the
iambic here [the second verse]. Here however [the third verse]
we have two stressed syllables.
[on
the line beginnings on blackboard the spondaic symbols - - are
placed and spoken with the corresponding emphasis:]
Let
strive in you with thrust of will:
Which rises out of semblance-being
With creative self it rises up;
Turn your life in full to this
Filled it is with cosmic-spirit-force;
Your inner self should truly grasp
Creative cosmic power in the spirit-I.
Here you have a spondee rhythm.
This is what must be observed. You must release yourself from
the mere intellectual content and attend to the trochee, iambus
and spondee rhythms. At the moment, we are able to move on from
the intellectual meaning to commitment to the rhythm, from that
moment it is possible to leave the physical world and really
enter the spiritual one. For the spiritual, cannot be grasped
only using the words whose meanings apply to the physical
world; but only if we use the opportunity to carry the rhythms
of these words out to the living cosmos.
Therefore, self-observation is exercised on the soul in a
threefold sequence of thinking, feeling and willing. The soul
will then express itself correctly if it experiences this as it
does eating and drinking by the body, as it experiences blood
circulation and breathing, if it experiences the rhythm in
these words:
See in
yourself the weaving thoughts:
Cosmic semblances confront you,
Selfhood as such hides from you;
Plunge beneath the semblances:
Etheric essence flows in you;
Selfhood as such should revere
Guiding beings of your spirit.
To hear within the flow of feeling:
when semblance and being within you blend,
Your selfhood tends towards the semblance;
So plunge into what's seemingly being:
In you the cosmic-psychic forces;
Your selfhood then should well consider
Your own soul's living powers.
Let strive in you with thrust of will:
Which rises out of semblance-being
With creative self it rises up;
Turn your life in full to this
Filled it is with cosmic-spirit-force;
Your inner self should truly grasp
Creative cosmic power in the spirit-I.
In
words you have at first the blood; with the corresponding
rhythms you have the circulating blood. Seek the sense of these
rhythms, let them act in your soul and you will come near to
the Guardian's first warning - which I told you at the
beginning of these lessons, my dear friends:
Where
on earthly ground, color on color
is manifest in creation;
from earthly matter, form on form,
lifeless is given shape;
sentient Beings, strong in will
themselves in joy of existence;
you, O man, your bodily being
from earth and air and light.
Your true being enters
night-enveloped, cold darkness;
ask in the dark sweeping expanse
longer, who you are and were and will be.
your own being the day grows dimly
soul's night, to spirit-darkness;
you turn with angst of soul
the light that from darkness streams.
And
if we wish to find the light that emerges from the darkness, we
will find it if we seek it by this threefold path, filling
ourselves with this lifeblood for the soul that wishes to tread
the path to true knowledge of the spirit and of God.
|