The First Goetheanum
by
Rudolf Steiner
Translated from the German by Frank Thomas Smith
Lesson Nine
Dornach, April 22, 1924
My
dear friends,
First - without taking notes - let us be reminded of the
admonition which directs human beings to the ancient holy words
of knowledge:
O man,
know thyself!
So resounds the cosmic-word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it vast in spirit.
Who speaks so vastly cosmic?
Who speaks so deeply heartfelt?
Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?
Is it you yourself who
In feeling space, in experiencing time
Create the Word, feeling foreign
In space's psychic vacancy,
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destructive flow.
*
We
can, my dear friends, look up to the distant stars and let our
vision rest upon what radiates down to us from the universe in
the forms the constellations possess. When we immerse ourselves
in the sublimity of what the vast universe offers, we will gain
enhanced inner strength. And especially for the strength to
hold the soul separate from the body, we need to inwardly
direct our gaze toward the heavenly bodies. By
“inwardly” is meant the following: We have seen the
stars so often and have stored the vision in our hearts and
minds so that we no longer need to even look up at the heavenly
bodies in order to make the powerful image of the star-embedded
heaven's vault effective in our inner consciousness. If this
picture arises from our own inner being, if the soul empowers
itself to create it, then it will be able, through this
empowered force, to liberate itself from its corporeality.
And
we can also observe all that radiates down and streams through
us from the planets which circle the earth, and in their
circling directly affect the earth's wind and weather. And when
we again create a picture in our hearts of all this, the
sensation of being integrated in the movement of the circling
constitutes the second experience.
And
then when we are conscious of all that binds us to the earth,
that we are heavy bodies among other heavy bodies. In other
words what lives in us as a feeling of being bound to the earth
becomes a facet of our soul, and it is the third aspect.
And
from these three inner experiences: what we have gained in
luminous, radiant, living thought derived from the stars; and
then when we merge with the path of our earth in the universe,
merge with what the planets say to us meaningfully from space
by their movements - so that having felt ourselves to be at
rest in respect to the stars, now we feel ourselves to be set
in movement through the cosmos itself. And thirdly, if we then
feel ourselves bound to the earth by the force of the earth
itself, then we will gradually and harmoniously be more and
more able to make a beginning at entering into the spiritual
world. And today everyone can make this beginning.
This leads to the question: Why is it then that so few do so?
The answer to this must be: most people don't want to
experience things so intimately in order to enter into the
spiritual world. They disdain experiencing so intimately. They
prefer titillating experiences such as the spiritual world
approaching them with all the characteristics of the sensory
world.
It
would be easy to convince people about the spiritual world if
for example a table from the spiritual world were to approach
them. But there are no tables in the spiritual world, there are
only spiritual beings in the spiritual world, and they must be
perceived with what is spiritual in man. But spiritual is what
we can read in the stars, what we can feel in the movements of
the planets, what we can experience in the forces which hold us
to the earth and make us people of the earth. Therefore whoever
desires to understand in the right way must do so inwardly.
With common sense we can understand all of anthroposophy, but
to understand inwardly means to transfer more and more what is
understood to inner life. Whoever wishes to do this must decide
to undertake a really intimate exercise of these three
sensations - or experiences, it doesn't matter what we call
them.
And
now, my dear sisters and brothers, what is flowing to you from
the spiritual world through this School wishes to speak to you
about how by means of an intimate exercise you can become more
aware of the connection of humanity with the world than you are
accustomed to through normal consciousness.
Firstly, we humans should in later life be more like we were to
a great extent when we were children. As children we are almost
all sensory organs: eyes, ears. The child experiences
everything that happens in its environment as though its whole
body were a sense organ. That's why he imitates everything,
because everything continues to vibrate within him; and in the
same way in which it vibrates within him, it seeks to emerge by
means of the will.
The
child retains this characteristic only as long as we protect it
from doing with its senses what we as adults do with them. The
child develops this inner sensory capacity only as long as we
carry it, protecting it so that it is not yet exposed to the
forces of the earth. And it is really wonderful how the growing
child's sensory-being is protected from the effects of the
earth forces as long as this sensory-being is especially vital
and alive.
At
the moment when the child stands on its feet and begins to move
about is when its movements become susceptible to the earth's
forces and it must find its own equilibrium, at that moment the
intimate sensory-being ends. The human being of course does not
remember back to this first stage of infancy, and therefore
does not know what it means to feel his whole being as a
sensory-organ. But we must, if we want to experience the human
in us more and more, be able to feel and experience our whole
human being as such a sensory organ.
You
grasp something, my dear sisters and brothers. It presses on
you. You perceive the pressure. Or you perceive the texture of
the surface you are touching. But in reality, you are
continually touching in that you place your whole body from top
to bottom on the earth and feel the earth under the soles of
your feet. Only you are so used to it that you don't notice.
When you begin to notice it, then you will first feel
yourselves as human beings standing amidst the earth's forces.
Therefore, the admonition at the threshold to the spiritual
world.
[written on the blackboard:]
O
man, touch and sense in your body's being
How earth forces support your existence.
[Certain essential words are underlined later, as described in
the text. Trans.]
Thus, we let the first stage of this inner experience work in
us.
Now
we can feel ourselves as the ones touching, sensing. We can
experience this touching, feel inwardly as the person doing the
vibrant touching. When we advance enough to feel this touching
itself, we are then not perceiving earth forces, but we begin
to feel the vibrating water forces in us, the fluid forces
which as blood and other liquids course through our bodies. And
in these forces, we feel how all the fluids which course
through our bodies are connected to the ether in the
universe.
[writing on the blackboard:]
O
man, experience in the whole round of your touch
How water-beings are the framers of your being.
If
we only had earth forces to touch in our whole being, we would
be constituted as something continually crumbling away. The
water forces in us shape the form of the human body from the
cosmic ether. Only the earth has influence over what is solid
in us. But the whole wide world of ether has influence over the
liquids in us .
But
then during the third stage we can immerse ourselves in what
lives and weaves in the fluidity. We can feel it dimly,
inwardly. When we feel our breathing, for example, we will
realize how we are continually nurtured by the essence of
breathing and of the air. We would be helpless children if we
weren't continually nurtured by the forces of breathing flowing
through us.
[writing on the blackboard:]
O
man, feel in the whole weaving of your life
How the powers of the air nurture your existence.
And
now if we have advanced to the third stage of inner experience,
we can come to the fourth, if we feel inner warmth, and are
attentive to our own fulfilling warmth which is in breath,
which lives in everything air-forming within us. For only
through what is air-forming in us is our warmth created.
But
what lives in us as warmth can be reached with thoughts. And
here we have a most important secret of human nature.
My
dear sisters and brothers, you cannot reach with thought, but
only with the sense of touch, how earth forces act on you and
support you. You cannot reach with thought, but only with inner
experience, how the water forces are your formative builders.
You cannot reach with thought, but only with inner feeling, how
the airy powers in you are your nurturers. You can be thankful
for this nurturing, you can love these nurturers, but you
cannot directly reach them with thought. But what man can reach
by thought, by meditating on his warmth, is to experience
himself as a being of warmth.
The
physician comes with a thermometer; he measures warmth from
without. Just as warmth can differ on different places of the
body, it is also different in the individual inner organs. You
can direct your thoughts down to the individual organs and will
find that the whole inner warmth-organism is differentiated.
One can reach his own warmth organism with thought.
But
then, having done that, you have a specific feeling. This
feeling, my dear sisters and brothers, will now be revealed to
your souls. Imagine that you have achieved it, that in thought
you have descended into your organism, reached the
differentiating warmth - the warmth of the lungs, the warmth of
the liver, the warmth of the heart, which are all God-spirit
created entities within you. You achieve this with thought. Now
for the first time you know what thought is. Before you didn't
know what thought is. You know now that thought, by descending
into what was before only warmth, turns the warmth into flame,
into fire. For in ordinary life thought appears to you in its
imperceptible inwardness as abstract thought. When you sink it
down into your own body, the thought appears to you as
luminous, radiantly penetrating into the lungs, into the heart,
into the liver. Just as the light which goes out from your brow
stretches downward, so does thought illumine the inner organs,
differentiating itself into various nuances of color.
One
cannot merely say: I think through to the differentiations of
my warmth; one must say: I enlighten myself by thinking through
to the differentiations of my warmth.
[writing on the blackboard:]
O
man, think in the full flow of your feeling
How the fire-powers are your helpers in being.
Everything in these eight lines can be summarized by letting
what has been intimately worked through be summed up in your
souls with the words:
[On
the blackboard each element is placed after the corresponding
mantra-phrase.]
O
man, see yourself in the kingdom of elements.
Elements: |
|
Earth
Water
Air
Fire |
Thus, do you measure yourselves, radiate, strengthen yourselves
in respect to the body. But note how this strengthening, this
measuring of the mere physical extends to the moral:
Here we have the support of man, the physical support. [In the
first mantra sentence “support” is underlined.]
Here we have the formative forces. [In the second mantra
sentence “formers” is underlined.] Still somewhat
physical, but permeated with the etheric.
Here we have nurturer. [In the third mantra sentence
“nurture” is underlined.] It already has a certain
morality. Then as we ascend from water to air we feel that the
beings who are in the air are permeated with morality.
And
in the fire, we have not only nurturer, but also helpers,
[“helpers” in the fourth mantra sentence in
underlined], comrades, beings similar to us.
Just as we feel through to our bodies, we can also feel through
to our souls. For this we must not concentrate on the elements,
rather must we concentrate on what pulls the planets that
circle the earth and pulls the air and sea currents along with
it. We feel our physicality in our spirituality when we measure
the body as has been explained; but we directly experience our
soul-life.
[written on the blackboard:]
O
man, let act in the depths of your soul
The cosmic powers that guide the planets.
It
can also be summarized in the sentence:
O
man, through the cosmic circling renew yourself.
We
realize and experience the spiritual in us when we elevate the
spirit to the stars, which reach us in their groupings and
formations and become like a celestial script to us. If we
preserve what is thus written in the starry heavens we will
become aware of our own spirituality, that spirituality which
doesn't speak about man personally, but about the entire
universe.
[written on the blackboard:]
O
man, retain in your spirit's creativity
The constellations' cosmological words.
Summarizing:
O
man, recreate yourself through celestial wisdom.
Not
by vague generalities, not by vague sensations are we able to
gradually extract our souls from our physical bodies and pass
over to the universe, but rather by grasping the elements in
the specified way, by the movement of the planets, by the
meaning in the stars. We unite with the universe when we do
this.
And
we will note that once the first part of the exercise is
accomplished we feel a life in us, the life of the
universe.
[Alongside the first eight lines of the mantra is written:]
Life
Once we have finished the second part of the exercise we feel
love towards the whole world.
[Alongside the tenth and eleventh lines is written:]
Love
Once we have finished the third part we feel a sense of piety
in us.
[Alongside the thirteenth and fourteenth lines is written:]
Piety
And
it really is an ascension from life through love to piety, to a
truly religious cosmic sense which can be undergone through
such mantric words.
But
if it is really undergone, if we really end up being pious
through such an exercise, then the world ceases to be physical
for us. Then we say to ourselves with total certainty: the
physical in the world is only semblance, maya; the world is
everywhere through and through spirit. As humans we belong to
this spirit. And if we feel ourselves as spirit in the
spirit-world, then we are beyond the threshold to the spiritual
world.
Then, however, once we are beyond the threshold to the
spiritual world, we sense how here, on this side, our body
holds thinking, feeling and willing together through its own
bodily force; how at the moment we are body-free in our
experiencing, thinking, feeling and willing are no longer one,
but threefold. Then it is as though by binding ourselves to the
earth-powers in water, air, fire, earth, that by sending our
will to the earth we become one with the earth through our
will.
Furthermore, because we feel love in our souls for the
movements of the planets, that is, for the spiritual beings who
live therein, it is so that we experience the Powers circling
cosmic space as feeling. And if we can say: the sun moves in
the feeling of cosmic space, Mercury moves in the feeling of
cosmic space, Mars moves in the feeling of cosmic space, then
we have grasped feeling in its cosmic being separated from
thinking and separated from willing.
And
if we are able to grasp thinking in such a way that thoughts
are freed from physical existence, it is as though our thinking
were to fly out to the [resting] stars and rest there
themselves.
[Translator's Note: in German the stars themselves can be
referred to as “resting” stars, in contrast to the
“wandering” or “moving” stars: the
planets. In this lecture there is much play on words between
the two concepts, which is necessarily lost in
translation.]
And
we say to ourselves when we have arrived on the other side of
the threshold: my thinking rests in the resting stars; my
feeling moves in the wandering stars [planets]; my willing
unites with the earth forces. So thinking, feeling, willing are
separated in the cosmos.
And
they must be again joined together. Here on the earth man does
not need to bind thinking, feeling and willing together,
because they already are so due to the physical body being a
unity. Thinking, feeling and willing would be constantly
falling apart if they were not held together by the physical
man, without his intention or awareness. Now though, on the
other side of the threshold, they are divided so that thinking
rests above with the stars, feeling circles with the planets,
and willing unites with the forces of the earth. And with
strong inner determination, with our own forces, we must bring
them back together as a unity.
In
doing this we must experience thinking, feeling and willing in
such a way that we can communicate to thinking, which has gone
to the stars, something of feeling and willing; to feeling,
which is circling with the planets, communicate something of
thinking and willing; to willing, which is bound to the earth,
something of thinking and feeling. This something we indeed can
do using such a mantric formula.
We
must look up to the stars and with devotion say to ourselves:
there is where your thinking lies. But I will bring the starry
sky into movement; just as feeling likewise does for the
planets, in spirit I will slowly move the starry sky. I feel
myself attracted to the starry sky; I want to go up there and
be at one with that star-filled heavens. Thus have I
incorporated feeling and willing into thinking, which is bound
to the stars.
Then I look up to the planets and feel: In these planets [Ger.
wandering stars] my own feeling wanders. But I will attempt to
fix the moment as the stars [Ger. fixed stars] are fixed in
place. And through my rhythmic system - to which heart and
lungs belong - I will become as one with the entire planetary
system. Then I have assigned thinking and willing to
feeling.
And
when I become aware of how, through this mantric formula, I am
bound to the earth as a human being, then I should add feeling
and thinking to this being bound to the earth. In thought I
should set the earth in motion so that like a planet I
accompany it on its rounds without perceiving its weight: bound
to it as if I were guiding the earth through cosmic space.
Feeling is combined with willing. I add thinking to the mixture
when I accompany the earth's movement in thought, but can bring
it again to a standstill, thus making the earth itself a
[fixed] star by my own meditating force of thought.
When I carry out such a meditation again and again, I gradually
come to feel myself as a human being outside my body in the
cosmos. For this, my dear sisters and brothers, this mantric
formula can work on the soul with special force.
[written on the blackboard:]
Bring to thinking life
What as pure contemplation
(that
is: as meditation, as contemplation)
in
the soul light-filled
shine:
Feeling and willing
And you are spirit
Among pure spirits.
Secondly:
Bring to force of feeling
What as noble love
Through the soul warmly
weave:
Thinking and willing,
you are soul
In the realm of spirits.
Thirdly:
Bring to the Powers of will
What as spiritual impulse
For the soul actively
live:
Thinking and feeling,
And you shall see yourself
As body from spiritual heights.
Only seen thus does the human body appear in its true form.
What is gleaned from the spiritual world, what the initiate
experiences in the spiritual world, if it is expressed in
words, they are mantric words, and he who experiences them will
be led into the spiritual world.
Therefore, if you let the words work on your soul, they are a
true guide to the spiritual world:
Bring
to thinking life
What as pure contemplation
On the soul light-filled
shine:
Feeling and willing,
And you are spirit
Among pure spirits.
Bring to force of feeling
What as noble love
Through the soul warmly
weave:
Thinking and willing
And you are soul
In the realm of spirits.
Bring to the Powers of will
What as spiritual impulse
For the soul actively
live:
Thinking and feeling,
And you shall see yourself
As body from spiritual heights.
Then, my dear sisters and brothers, when what lies in these
mantric words is clearer and clearer to you, then when you come
again and again to these lessons it will be with greater
understanding, that is, with ever greater cosmic experience
that you will hear these words:
O man,
know thyself!
So resounds the cosmic-word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it vast in spirit.
Who speaks so vastly cosmic?
Who speaks so deeply heartfelt?
Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?
Is it you yourself who
In feeling space, in experiencing time
Create the Word, feeling foreign
In space's psychic vacancy,
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destructive flow.
Blackboard Texts for the Ninth Class Lesson
Life
O man, touch and sense in your body's being
How earth forces support
your existence.
Earth
O man, experience in the whole round of your
touch
How water-beings are the
framers of your being.
Water
O man, feel in the whole weaving of your life
How the powers of the air
nurture your existence.
Air
O man, think in the full flow of your feeling
How the fire-powers are your
helpers in being.
Fire
O man, see yourself in the kingdom of elements.
Love
O man, let act in the depths of your soul
The cosmic powers that guide the planets.
O man, through the cosmic circling renew yourself.
Piety
O man, retain in your spirit's creativity
The constellations' cosmological words.
Bring to thinking life
What as pure contemplation
On the soul light-filled
shine:
Feeling and willing,
And you are spirit
Among pure spirits.
|
Bring to force of feeling
What as noble love
Through the soul warmly
weave:
Thinking and willing
And you are soul
In the realm of spirits.
|
Bring to the Powers of will
What as spiritual impulse
For the soul actively
live:
Thinking and feeling,
And you shall see yourself
As body from spiritual heights.
|
|
|