Lecture Five
MORAL EXPERIENCE OF THE WORLDS OF
COLOUR AND TONE
Dornach, 1st January 1915
Everything in the world, each event and
every act of human conduct has two sides, which are, as it
were, polar opposites.
Yesterday it
was my task to point out to you that through a feeling
understanding of our spiritual-scientific world outlook, the
human soul should acquire reverence and devotion for the
spiritual worlds. The opposite pole to this devotional
attitude is energetic work on our inner life, an energetic
taking-in-hand of the evolutionary factors of our own soul,
making a point of always using our experiences for the
purpose of learning something from them and making progress
with regard to our inner forces, so that — whatever
meets us in life and whatever takes place around us, whether
it is easy to understand or not — we shall always avoid
the danger of losing ourselves. May we always have the chance
of keeping hold of ourselves and of finding within ourselves
the strength to develop an understanding for what can
encounter us in an often incomprehensible way, and may the
kind of devotion for things we were talking about yesterday
make such an impact on the development of our souls, that we
acquire a proper understanding of universal existence; this,
my dear friends, is the New Year greeting I wanted to give
you today at the start of the year. We have just been
remembering devotion, and I would like to follow that with a
reminder of the energetic work on our inner life. The full
moon shining down on us out of the cosmos on New Year's Eve
is a symbol for the sequence in which we are remembering
these things. If it had been the other way round, and the
year had started with the new moon, I should have done the
right thing in bringing these reminders to you in the
opposite order. I should then have closed the year with a
reminder of the power of inner development and should have
had to leave the thoughts on reverence until today.
We must
attach more and more importance to really noticing a symbol
like this that shines on us out of the macrocosm. And in our
quiet moments this year let this indication work on us in
such a way that it can have a special significance, to think
first about the transformation the power of reverence can
bring about in us, then to follow this with thinking about
the transformation that the power of inner preservation, the
maintaining of inner soul energy, should bring about in
us.
The sequence
of these thoughts has been set for the coming year by the
writing of the stars, and the world will gradually come to
realise again that reading the star script really has a
meaning for man. So let us try even in details like this to
pay heed to the great law of human existence and to strive
for harmony between the macrocosm and the microcosm. The
macrocosm is speaking to us over these days in the most
obvious way and we shall find how to keep our microcosm in
harmony with the macrocosm, if we conduct ourselves in line
with it, in the course of this year that has begun amidst
such painful events.
If you try
and notice what has been the prevailing mood of our talks in
the last few days you will discover that, regarding the facts
that spiritual science has made significant for us, we live
in a time of change, in a time of hope, as it were, for we
should now be getting an inkling of the direction the further
course of human cultural development should take; of the
change that has to come about from a purely materialistic
world conception to a spiritual one. What is meant here,
however, cannot really fully take place unless it enters
every sphere of life and particularly takes hold of the
spiritual cultural areas to a marked degree.
We have
already had various indications showing that an understanding
of the spiritual-scientific outlook, which has taken hold of
our feelings and is not merely rational, is bound to bring a
change into both artistic creativity and artistic
appreciation, because the forces we gain from this can give
us an artistic conception of the world. And in our Goetheanum
building we have just made the attempt to show at least a
small part of what can take an artistic form, from out of
spiritual-scientific impulses.
We can see a
time coming when we shall be able to enter fully into the
feelings that can arise from the spiritual-scientific world
conception, a time when the way to artistic creation will in
many respects be different from the past; it will be much
more alive and the medium of artistic creation will be
experienced much more intensely in the human soul; the soul
will be capable of experiencing colour and sound far more
inwardly, in a kind of moral-spiritual way, and in artists'
creations we shall meet, as it were, traces of the artists'
experiences in the cosmos.
In
essentials, the attitude of artistic creation and artistic
appreciation in this past epoch was a kind of external
observation, an appeal to something that affects the artist
from outside . The need to refer to nature and to a model for
external observation has become greater and greater. Not that
in the art of the future there is to be any one-sided
rejection of nature and outer reality. Far from it, for there
will be a much more intimate union with the external world;
so strong a union that it will cover not merely the external
impression of colour and sound and form, but that which one
can experience behind the sound and colour and form; what is
revealed in them.
Human beings
will make important discoveries in the future in this
respect. They will actually unite their moralspiritual nature
with the results of sense perception. An infinite deepening
of the human soul can be foreseen in this domain. Let us pick
a particular example to start from. We will simply imagine
that we are looking at a surface shining all over with the
same shade of strong vermilion, and let us assume we succeed
in forgetting everything else around us and concentrate
entirely on experiencing this colour, so that we have the
colour in front of us, not merely as something that works
upon us but as something with which we ourselves are united,
that we are within. You will then be able to feel as though
you were in the world, and in this world the whole of you has
become colour, the whole of your innermost soul, and wherever
your soul goes in the world you will be a soul filled with
red, living in, with and out of red. Yet you will not be able
to experience this intensely in the soul unless the
corresponding feeling is transformed into moral experience,
real moral experience.
If we float
through the world as though we were red, had identified
ourselves with red, and our very soul and the whole world
were entirely red, we shall not be able to help feeling that
this whole red world is filling us with the substance of
divine wrath, coming towards us from all sides in response to
all the possibilities of evil and sin in us. In this infinite
red space we shall be able to feel as though we were before
the judgment of God, and our moral feeling will become the
kind of moral experience our souls can have in infinite
space. And when the reaction comes, when something emerges in
our soul as we are having this experience in infinite red or,
I could also say in the one and only red, I can only describe
it by saying we learn to pray. If you can experience the
raying and glowing of divine wrath, together with all the
possibilities of evil in the human soul, and if you can
experience in the red how one learns to pray, the experience
of red is enormously deepened. We can also experience the
form red takes on when it enters space.
We can then
understand how we can experience a being that radiates
goodness and is full of divine kindness and mercy, a being
that we want to feel in the realm of space. Then we shall
feel the need of expressing this divine mercy and goodness in
a form which arises out of the colour itself. We shall feel
the need to let space be pushed aside so that goodness and
mercy may shine forth. Before space was there it was all
concentrated at the centre, and now goodness and mercy enter
space and, just as clouds are driven apart, space is rent
asunder and recedes to make way for mercy, and we have the
feeling that what is being scattered must be drawn in red.
Here in the centre (a drawing was done) we shall have to
indicate faintly a kind of magenta shining into the
scattering red.
We shall then
be present with our whole soul as the colour takes on form.
And with our whole soul we shall feel an echo of how the
beings who belong especially to our earth process felt, when
they had ascended to the Elohim stage and learnt to fashion
the world of forms out of colours. We shall learn to
experience something of the creative activity of the Spirits
of Form who are the Elohim, and we shall then understand how
colour can create forms, as indicated in our
first Mystery Play.
We shall also understand something of how the surface nature of
the colour becomes something that has to be overcome, as it were,
because we accompany colour into the cosmos. If strong desire
is also present, a feeling can arise like Strader has when he
sees the portrait of Capesius, and says he would like to
pierce the canvas.
You will see
that an attempt has been made in these Mystery Plays really
to show in artistic form what it is like for the soul, when
it attempts to expand in the cosmic forces and to feel what
the spirits of the cosmos are feeling. That was, in fact, the
beginning of all art. But the materialistic age had to come,
and ancient art, with its divine quality of differentiation,
in which spirit was revealed in matter, had to change into
secondary, materialistic ‘after’-art, which the
art of the materialistic age is, in essence; the kind of art
which cannot create but only imitate. The sign of all
secondary art, all after-art, is that it needs objects to
imitate, and that it does not produce the form primarily out
of the material.
Let us take
another example. Let us imagine we do the same thing with a
more orange coloured surface that we did with the red
surface. We shall experience something quite different this
time. If we submerge ourselves in it and unite with it, then
instead of feeling divine wrath bearing down upon us, we
shall have the feeling that what comes to meet us here has
much less of the serious side of wrath about it and does not
only want to punish us, but wants to impart itself to us and
arm us with inner strength.
When we enter
the world and unite with the orange surface we move in such a
way that with every step we take, we feel that by
experiencing orange, by living in the forces of orange, we
are becoming stronger and stronger, and that what comes to us
out of orange does not come merely to punish us and break us
with its judgment, but is a source of strength. This is how
we go into the world in orange. We then feel the longing to
understand the inner nature of things and to unite it with
ourselves. By living in red we learn to pray, by living in
orange we experience the desire for knowledge of the inner
nature of things.
If we do the
same thing with a yellow surface we feel as though we were
transported back to the beginning of our cycle of time. We
feel that we are then living in the forces out of which we
were created when we entered upon our first earthly
incarnation. You feel an affinity between what you are
throughout the whole of earth existence, and what comes to
meet you from the world into which you take the yellow with
which you are united.
And if you
identify yourself with green and accompany green into the
world — which can be done very easily by gazing at a
green meadow, shutting out everything else and concentrating
completely on it, and then trying to immerse yourself in the
green meadow as if the green were the surface of a coloured
sea — you experience an inner increase in strength in
what your are in that particular incarnation. You feel
yourself becoming inwardly healthy, yet at the same time
becoming inwardly more egoistic, you feel a stimulus of the
egoistic forces within you.
If you did
the same with a blue surface, you would go through the world
with the desire to accompany the blue forever and to overcome
your egoism, become macrocosmic, as it were, and develop
devotion. And you would find it a blessing if you could
remain like this for your meeting with divine mercy. You
would feel blessed by divine mercy if you could go through
the world like this.
Thus we learn
to know the inner nature of colour and, as I said before, we
can foresee a time when an artist's preparation will mean a
moral experience in colour of this kind, when the experience
preparatory to artistic creation will be much more inward and
intuitive than it ever was in past ages. For these are only a
few indications I am giving you, and they will be developed
much further in the future. They will take hold of men's
souls and enliven them with a tremendous sense for artistic
creativity, whereas the materialistic culture that has
entered our modern age has dried up the soul and made it
passive. Souls must be stimulated again by a power from
within; they must be taken hold of by the inner forces of
things. As a specific example I have taken the colours that
flood the world.
The world of
sound will deepen and enliven the life of soul in a very
similar way. During the period that is now drawing to a
close, the essential thing was that a person experienced a
tone as such, and the relationship of one tone to another. In
the future people will be able to experience what is behind
the tone. They will regard the tone as a kind of window
through which they enter the spiritual world, and then it
will not depend on vague feeling of how one tone is added to
another, to form melodies for instance, but by going through
the tone the soul will also experience a moral-spiritual
quality behind the separate tones. The soul will enter the
spiritual world as though through a window. The secrets of
the individual tones will be discovered in this experience
behind the tones.
We are still
a long way away from this feeling of being able to go from
the sense world to the spiritual world through the window of
each tone. But this will come. We shall experience the tone
as an opening made by the gods from the spiritual world
yonder to this physical-material world, and we shall climb
through the tone out of the physical-material world into the
spiritual world. Through the tonic, for example,
which we experience as absolute and not in reference to
previous tones of the scale, we experience danger as we pass
from the sense world into the spiritual world. We are
threatened on entry with being taken captive; the tonic wants
to suck us in most horribly through the window of the tone
and make us completely disappear in the spiritual world.
Assuming that we experience the tonic as absolute, we shall
feel that we are still too weak in a spiritual sense in the
physical world, and that we are sucked up by the spiritual
world when we climb through this window. This is the moral
experience to be had on entering the spiritual world through
the tonic. I am over-simplifying it now, though; we shall
have a very differentiated experience which contains an
infinite variety of detail.
When we climb
out of the physical world into the spiritual world through
the window of the second, we shall have the
impression of powers in the spiritual world yonder that, as
it were, take pity on our weakness and say, ‘Well! so
you were weak in the physical sense world! if you only climb
into the spiritual world through the tonic I must dissolve
you, suck you up and break you to pieces. But, if you enter
through the second, I will offer you something from the
spiritual world and remind you of something that is
there.’ The peculiar thing is that when we climb from
the physical to the spiritual world through the second, it is
as though a number of tones rang out to receive us. We enter
a totally silent world if we enter the spiritual world
through the absolute tonic. If we enter through the second we
come to a world where, if we listen, various quiet
high-pitched tones ring out wanting to comfort us in our
weakness. Yet we must go through the window in a way we most
certainly could not do in a physical-material house, for the
owner would give us a strange look if we were to walk in
through the window and take the whole window with us. But in
the spiritual world that is what you have to do, take the
tones with you and, in union with them, live over there in
the beyond, the other side of the thin partition that
separates us from the physical-material world, and in which
we have to imagine the tones as windows.
If you enter
the spiritual world through the third, you will have
the feeling of an even greater weakness. If you enter the
spiritual world this way, you will feel that you were really
very weak in the physical-material world, where its spiritual
content is concerned. But with regard to the third —
and remember that you have become sound; you yourself have
become a third — you will feel that there are friends
over there who, although they themselves are not thirds,
approach you according to the kind of disposition you had in
the physical-material world. If you enter through the second,
it is like a gentle sounding of many tones, with whom you
share life in general when you enter through them, whilst
tones that are, as it were, friends with one another, come to
meet you through the third. People who want to become
composers will have to enter especially through the third,
for that is where the tone sequences, the tone compositions
are, that will stimulate their artistic creativity. You will
not always be met by the same tone friends, for which ones
you meet will depend on your mood and your feeling and your
temperament — in fact how you are disposed to life at
the time when you go through the third into spiritual life.
This results in an infinite variety of possibilities.
If you
penetrate through the fourth into the spiritual
world, you will have a strange experience. Although no new
tones appear from any direction, those that have come before,
when you were experiencing the third, will live lightly in
the soul as memories. And you will find that in continuing to
live with these tone memories they perpetually take on a
fresh colouring; at one time they become as bright and
cheerful as can be, at other times they descend to the utmost
sadness; now they are as bright as day, now they sink down to
the silence of the grave. The modulating of the voice, the
way the sound ascends and descends; in short, the whole mood
of a tonal creation will have its origin along this path,
from these sound memories.
The
fifth will produce experiences that are more
subjective, that work to stimulate and enrich the life of the
soul. It is like a magic wand that conjures up the secrets of
the sound world yonder, out of unfathomable depths.
Experiences
of this kind will come to one when one no longer just looks
at the things and phenomena in the world, or just listens to
them, but experiences them from within. These are the kind of
experiences mankind must have, particularly through colour
and sound, but also through form; in fact, altogether through
the realm of art, in order to get away from the purely
external relationship to things and their functioning —
which is characteristic of the materialistic age — and
to penetrate into the inner secrets at the heart of
things.
Then
something tremendously significant will happen to man, and he
will be filled with the awareness of his connection with
the divine spiritual powers, which are sub-conscious when
his awarenesss is confined to the material realm, and which
guide and lead him through the world. And then, above all, he
will have inner experiences, such as experiencing the forces
which guide man from one incarnation to the next.
If we omit to
heat a locomotive, it cannot pull a train. The forces which
make things happen in the world have to be continually
stimulated. The forces which drive mankind forward also need
to be stimulated. And this does happen. However, man has to
learn that he is connected with these forces.
I once had
the following remarkable experience. There was a lawyer, a
famous advocate, in the town where I lived for a while, an
extraordinarily famous advocate, whom the people absolutely
flocked to, because they believed he was bound to win the
most difficult lawsuits. And this was often the case. His
legal dialectic was extraordinary, and people who knew him
had the deepest respect for it. Now he was once entrusted
with the difficult case of a rich man. The rich man would
have to suffer a severe penalty if the lawsuit resulted in
his being sentenced. The advocate used his greatest dialectic
and the most wonderful of his legal skills. He made a long
speech, and the people who heard him were convinced that if
the jury were not to acquit the accused, nothing further
could be done about it. Everyone who heard the advocate's
amazing skill were absolutely convinced the jury would now
withdraw and acquit the accused.
But in the
law court there was not only a skilful counsel but also a
skilful judge, and although the hour was not yet so advanced
that a judgment could no longer be given, the judge said,
‘Let us close the session for today and continue
tomorrow.’ So the jury's session was to take place the
following morning, and this gave them time to think the
matter over again during the night. The following day came.
This ‘overnight delay’ as he called it, had
already proved very irksome for the advocate. The session
began, the jury withdrew, and everyone awaited their return
with tense expectation, most of all our advocate. The jury
came back after only a quarter of an hour, and when the
advocate heard them coming back from the conference room so
soon, he fainted. Yes, he fainted. He did recover again, and
a friend helped him up. The accused really had been
sentenced, but the advocate only heard this after he had
recovered from fainting.
Now what
could be said about the course of events looked at from the
point of view of external perception? One could say that the
advocate was a very ambitious man, for he cared so much about
winning this lawsuit that he lost consciousness before the
verdict was pronounced. As soon as he saw that the jury had
only conferred for a short time he was sure the accused had
been sentenced, for if they had acquitted him they would, of
course, have taken much longer.
But that was not how the matter stood; it only appeared to be
so from an external point of view. There was a kind of second
layer of events behind what I have just told you. This other
layer, or story, is like this: Before this lawsuit took place
this advocate had become addicted to what one can call the
demon of gambling — I knew him well, of course. He used
the sums of money entrusted to him, as deposit to gamble
with. It was an absolute passion with him, and not long
before this lawsuit began he had reached the point where he
had gambled away large sums of money entrusted to his care.
But he had been promised that if he should win this suit, he
would be paid so much that he could more or less balance the
difference.
So he did not
faint only out of wounded ambition; he fainited when the jury
returned with the verdict after only a quarter of an hour,
because his existence had in fact been destroyed. For he had
no hope any more of replacing the deposit money he had lost.
Therefore his whole existence had depended on the outcome of
the lawsuit. He fainted as symbolic indication that he was
now completely ruined for this incarnation. He had to escape
to America after that, and had to endure a not very enviable
existence there for the rest of his life.
An example of
this sort shows us that judgment can very often be wrong, for
some people might never have had the chance to hear anything
about what went on behind the lawsuit. If these people had
only heard the clever advocate during the lawsuit and seen
him fainting, they could very well have concluded that some
people are so ambitious that they lose consciousness if a
speech of theirs misfires. And they could have left it at
that.
To be able to
judge correctly you would therefore have to know a further
layer of facts. In many instances you would even have to know
several more layers, otherwise you could be correct with
regard to the layer you can see and yet make a wrong
judgment. That is the external aspect. But the matter has
more behind it. The fellow also had to find a way of getting
from this incarnation to the next one. And here we have an
example of how wise world guidance puts into the soul the
forces it needs to lead it from one incarnation to the next.
The man was in such inner conflict that it had destroyed his
existence. He was in a terrible position. A situation had
been created in which there were no forces left to carry him
over to his next incarnation. Also, a situation had been
created in which forces of that nature could not be brought
to his conscious mind. So his consciousness had to be
extinguished for a moment. During short breaks in
consciousness all kinds of other spirituality can enter the
human soul. And in that moment he received forces capable of
restoring his impulse to go forward into the next
incarnation. Of course an impulse like this can be given in
many different ways. What I have described here was one
particular case.
These
impulses are always there. But I just wanted to show you that
man's conscious life is linked with an ongoing process in the
unconscious, and that in man's conscious life there are
really points where the consciousness is suppressed so that
something can enter out of the unconscious. Sometimes these
unconscious moments need not be long; they can be short
spells similar to fainting. Yet a tremendous amount of
spiritual life forces can stream into the human being at such
moments, both good and bad, and capable of good and evil.
What I want
to show you with this example is that, in observing the
world, mankind must try to notice links of this kind, which
are of no significance to a materialistic outlook.
You will
gradually reach the point of becoming so perceptive for
living links that you will recognise the moments in which the
spirit comes near to each human being. In the future the
world will no longer be explained so unequivocably as it is
now, on the basis of material causes, but matter will be
relegated to its right place, and at the same time people
will realise that the material phenomenon is not the only
thing, for spirit shines through
it.
We have seen
that colours and sound are windows through which we can
ascend spiritually into the spirit world, and life also
brings to us windows through which the spiritual world enters
our physical world. The advocate's fainting fit was this kind
of window. If we interpret this phenomenon correctly we have
to say that spiritual life streams down to us through this
window. It is clear to us that these forces flowing into us
cannot be explained on a purely material level. So there are
windows in the tones through which we ascend from the
physical-material world into the spiritual world; and there
are also windows through which, if we remain in the
physical-material world, the spirit can descend to us.
If we do not
perceive the fact that spirit descends to us through such
windows, it is like someone opening a beautiful book who
cannot read. He has the same thing in front of him as someone
who can read, but if he cannot read he sees unintelligible
scribble on the white pages which, at the most, he can just
describe. Only a person who can read is capable of following
a biography, perhaps, or a piece of information that has been
laid down in these strange signs. A person who cannot read
world phenomena is like a cosmic illiterate where these
phenomena are concerned. A person who can read, however,
reads the ongoing process of the spiritual world in them. It
is characteristic of the present materialistic age that
materialism has made people illiterate with regard to the
cosmos, almost a hundred per cent so. At a time when people
are so proud of having reduced the percentage of illiteracy
in civilised countries to such a great extent, they are
enthusiastically heading towards illiteracy where the cosmos
is concerned.
It is the
task of spiritual science to eliminate this cosmic
illiteracy. Few people nowadays are illiterate in the
ordinary sense. In the time of ancient clairvoyance human
beings were far less illiterate in the spirit. But this must
not make us conceited. It is a fact that when we acquire an
inkling of our task in the spiritual-scientific stream, we
ought to change from being illiterate to becoming people who
can read the cosmos. Yet we should remain humble, for the
times are such that we are still very much in need of the
elementary level of education. We can hardly read yet, but
only spell out the letters. Yet we can be gripped by the
impulse to change, an impulse which is breaking in upon
mankind through these things. And if we are gripped by them
we shall have the right attitude to what the signs of the
times are demanding of us, and we shall enter into them as
people who rightly belong to the spiritual-scientific world
conceptual stream.
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