Lecture Seven
FUTURE JUPITER AND ITS BEINGS
Dornach, 3rd January 1915
If you recall the talks we had in
connection with the evolution of the Earth through the
Saturn, Sun and Moon periods, you will know that at each of
these evolutionary stages, one particular kind of being from
among what we would now call the higher hierarchies, attained
their human level, as it were. We know that during the
ancient Saturn period the Spirits of Personality, the Primal
Beginnings, the Archai reached their human level, during the
Sun period the Archangels, during the Moon period the Angels
and during the Earth period, mankind.
You will also
have seen from our talks on evolution, that each level of
beings that reaches a certain stage of development, received
preparation in advance. We know that the human being was
being prepared throughout the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods,
and that what we nowadays call man's completed physical body
has been evolving since the Saturn period, the etheric body
since the Sun period, the astral body since the Moon period,
and that the ego was only added to these during the Earth
period; that is, all the beings that are at a certain level
are prepared as a whole.
Now you may
be anxious to know whether, in our present period of
evolution, beings are being prepared to attain their human
level in the Jupiter period. Another thing you know is that
during the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods — you can look
it up in my book Occult Science — the spirits of the
higher hierarchies took part in the preparation of humanity.
There is a description of how the Angels, Archangels and
Archai were involved in the development of human beings, and
therefore an obvious question is whether human beings, during
their Earth existence, are possibly involved in preparing the
beings who will reach their human level during the Jupiter
period?
This question
is certainly a vital one for every feeling person, if his
feelings have been inspired by spiritual science, as we have
been describing. For it could be the case that human
behaviour in general during the course of Earth evolution
could either help, or omit to help, the beings who might
attain their human level on Jupiter. We might say,
‘What could be worse than behaving in such a way during
Earth evolution as to make it impossible for proper Jupiter
beings to arise through our deeds?’ We must of course
take it for granted, if we want to talk about these things,
that there is a certain goodwill, for these are truly
important secrets of initiation, the kind of initiation
secrets that modern science detests as a matter of course.
One certainly has to prepare one's feeling to be able to look
at the attitude modern science is bound to have to the real
truths of life.
In the
previous lectures I have already tried to say a little about
the way modern science necessarily relates to life. It cannot
make direct contact with the secrets of life. It cannot even
want to; it must not even pretend to want to reach these
secrets of life. It is surely a good thing to make
hard-boiled eggs for the people who like eating eggs when
they are hard-boiled, and hard-boiled eggs are useful for
those who like them. But if someone wanted to go and say that
he takes the eggs away from the hens to hard-boil them, and
then lets them hatch them after that, he would be doing
something absurd. A person does exactly the same thing as far
as the cosmos is concerned, if he sets out to solve the
secrets of the cosmos and wants to use modern science for it;
this is the same attitude as wanting to hatch hard-boiled
eggs that have nothing left in them to be hatched out.
I will show
you by means of a comparison just how misleading this science
is that is bound up with the whole way of modern thinking,
particularly when it approaches the real riddles of life. If
somebody wants to hold forth about whether science is helpful
or harmful he will usually start off by asking, ‘Is
science right about this or that?’ And if he can prove
that it is right in one or another instance, he will swear by
it as a matter of course.
But this is
just what we have to get away from, this attaching so much
importance to the question of whether what science says is
right or not. We must reach the point of seeing that this is
not the main thing when it comes to the solving of riddles of
life. If someone sees a horse-drawn cart with a man in it, he
will be quite right in saying that the horses are pulling
this person in the cart, and drawing him along behind them.
This is correct, of course. And anyone who wanted to say that
the horses were not drawing the cart and the man sitting in
it, would obviously be wrong. But it is also true that the
man sitting in the cart, through the way he guides the
horses, is controlling the direction in which they should
pull him; and that is surely the more important aspect from
the point of view of the destination. Modern science can be
compared to the statement of the person who denies that the
man in the cart is guiding the horses, and insists that the
horses are drawing the man in the cart.
If you think
the comparison through in detail, you will get the right idea
about the relation of modern science to modern research into
truth. I have to say these things over and over again,
because a person who bases himself on our world outlook, must
come more and more into the position where he can defend and
protect our spiritual-scientific outlook against the attacks
of the modern world outlook. But you will be able to do this
only if you enlighten yourself as to the relation of modern
external science to a genuine research into truth. You must
always approach spiritual-scientific questions with a certain
attitude and a certain kind of feeling, otherwise you will
not make the proper connection with them.
Now our
question concerning the beings who will reach the human level
on Jupiter is connected in very truth with the deepest
questions of man's Earth evolution. There is something in our
Earth evolution that has always been a philosophical problem,
namely the relation between man's moral behaviour and his
natural existence. As an earthly being, man has to decide to
what extent he is the kind of being who is ruled by his
instincts, has to obey and satisfy them, and is at the mercy
of his instincts and their satisfaction, because the laws of
nature simply insist on their being satisfied. That is one
side of human nature. In this respect we say, ‘We do
these things because we have to. We have to eat and we have
to sleep.’ But there is another realm of human conduct
on this earth, a realm in which we cannot say
‘must’, for it would lose its whole significance
if we were to say ‘must’ here. This is the wide
realm of ‘shall’, a realm where we feel that we
have to follow a purely spiritual impulse as distinct from
instinct and everything arising out of ourselves on a natural
level. ‘You shall’ never speaks to us from out of
our instincts but directs us in a purely spiritual way.
‘You shall’ comprises the realm of our moral
obligations.
There are
some philosophers who cannot find any connection between what
is implied by the ‘you shall’ and ‘you
must’. And our present age that is almost bogged down
in materialism, especially where moral life is concerned, and
will get more and more bogged down, would like to turn all
the ‘you shalls’ into ‘you musts’. We
are heading for times where, in this respect, the turning of
‘you shall’ into ‘you must’ will be
blazoned forth with a certain amount of pride, and actually
called psychology. Terrible aspects present themselves if we
look at what has begun to develop in the field of criminal
psychology. It is already evident that the human being is
being conceived of in such a way that people do not ask
whether he has overstepped a ‘you shall’, but try
to prove that he was driven to one or another destructive act
out of the necessity of his nature. Strange experiments are
on the increase to define crime merely as a particular case
of illness. All these things arise out of a certain
materialistic lack of clarity in our times, regarding the
relation of ‘you shall’ to ‘you
must’.
What does
this ‘you shall’, or in other words the
categorical imperative, actually signify within the whole
framework of human existence? Whoever obeys the ‘you
shall’ is known to carry out a moral action. Whoever
does not obey the ‘you shall’ commits an immoral
action. This is of course a trivial truth. But now let us
attempt to look at ‘moral’ and
‘immoral’, not only with regard to the external
maya of the physical plane, but with regard to the truth and
what is actually behind physical maya. Here the moral element
corresponding to the ‘you shall’ appears to
initiation science as something that hits you in the eye,
spiritually, to put it rather crudely. If you look at a
person — these truths which the materialistic outlook
detests have to be told sometime — if you look at
someone in certain temperature and weather conditions —
you see this even better in horses, but we are not speaking
about horses now — you will see him breathing out, and
the breath becoming visible as vapour in the air. Obviously
as far as materialistic science is concerned, this breath a
person exhales, disperses and dissolves and has no further
significance. But it has significance for a person who
follows up the phenomena of life with initiation science, for
he sees in the patterns of the breath the exact traces of the
moral or immoral conduct of the person. A person's moral or
immoral behaviour can be seen in the steamy breath, and the
breath of a person who is morally inclined is quite different
from the breath of a person who is inclined to immorality.
You know, with regard to various things in the human being,
the more delicate qualities can only be seen in the more
delicate parts of the etheric and astral aura. But man's
moral and immoral nature in the ordinary sense of the word is
actually visible in the etheric-astral content of the steamy
breath. The physical part of it dissolves. But what is
incorporated in it does not dissolve; for it contains a
genie, which, in the case of steamy breath, has a physical,
an etheric and an astral part, only the physical is not
earthly, just watery. Something that has an extremely
differentiated form can be seen in this breath.
Deeds which
arise out of love show something quite different from deeds
which are done out of enthusiasm, a creative urge or the urge
for perfection, for instance. But in every case the form in
the breath reminds one of beings that do not exist on earth
at all as yet. These beings are a preparation for the ones
that will reach their human stage on Jupiter. Their forms are
very changeable and will pass through further changes in the
future, for these beings are the first advance shadow images
of the beings who will reach the human level on Jupiter.
In a certain
way we also owe our existence to the exhalation of the
Angeloi on the Moon, and it is one of the moving experiences
of spiritual life to know that Jupiter human beings of the
future will evolve out of what we breathe out in present
ages. If we turn to the Bible with such knowledge in mind,
and read the opening words, we can tell ourselves, ‘Now
we begin to understand what is meant when it says that the
Elohim formed earthly man by breathing into him.’
I will
confess that I would never have understood the part about the
Elohim breathing the living being of man into his mouth and
nose, if I had not known beforehand that the breath of
earthly human beings also contains the first germinal
beginnings of the beings who will become human on Jupiter.
But Jupiter human beings can only arise from the kind of
breath that owes its existence to deeds that obey the
‘you shall’, and which are therefore moral
actions.
Thus we see
that through our earthly morality we take a creative part in
the whole cosmic order. It is indeed a creative power, and we
can see that spiritual science gives us a strong impulse for
moral action by telling us that we are working against the
creation of Jupiter human beings, if we do not act in a moral
way on earth. This gives morality a very real value and makes
its existence worthwhile. Our human conduct is very strongly
formed by what we acquire through spiritual science,
especially as we become acquainted with real secrets
regarding the cosmos.
I have
already made references to similar things and mentioned at
various times that language also symbolises man's own future
creativity. I do not wish to dwell on this today though, but
just wanted to show you, to begin with, what significance
moral behaviour has in the whole of the cosmos.
You could now
ask, ‘What about immoral behaviour?’ Immoral
behaviour also comes to expression in the formation of the
breath. But immoral behaviour imprints a demonic form on it.
Demons are born through man's immoral conduct. Let us look at
the difference between the demons that arise through immoral
behaviour and the spiritual beings — spiritual in so
far as they only have a watery existence on earth — the
spiritual forms that are created by moral actions.
These beings
that incarnate as far as a transitory watery existence and
arise from moral conduct, are the kind of beings that have an
astral, an etheric and finally a physical body condensed to
the level of wateriness, just as, in the Moon period, we had
an etheric, an astral and a physical body, and this physical
body was also only condensed to a wateriness. We were more or
less like that, even if not exactly the same. And this
creature, with a physical body, etheric body and astral body
that arises out of moral actions, is predestined to receive
an ego, just as in the Moon period our physical, etheric and
astral body were predestined to receive an ego. They have the
basis for receiving an ego, and beings of this kind are
qualified to undergo a regular progressive evolution in the
cosmos. The other beings, the demons created out of immoral
actions, also have an astral body, an etheric body and a
physical body, at the watery stage, of course, but they do
not have the basis for developing an ego. They are born
without heads, as it were. Instead of taking up the basis for
progressing along a regular evolutionary path to the Jupiter
existence, they reject this basis. By doing so they fall
victim to the fate of dropping out of evolution. But this
only increases the hordes of luciferic beings, for they come
under their power. As they cannot progress in a regular way
they have to become parasites. This is what happens to all
the beings that reject their normal path; they have to attach
themselves to others in order to move on. These beings that
arise through immoral actions have the particular inclination
to be parasites in human evolution on earth under Lucifer's
leadership, and to seize hold of the evolution of the human
being before he makes his physical entry into the world. They
attack man during the embryonic period and share his
existence between conception and birth. Some of these beings,
if they are strong enough, can continue to accompany the
human being after birth, as seen in the phenomena of children
who are possessed.
What is
brought about by the criminal demon parasites attached to
unborn children is the cause of the deterioration of the
generation succession, which are not as they would be if
these demons did not exist. There are various reasons for the
decline of families, tribes, peoples and nations, but one of
them is the existence of these criminal demon parasites
during man's embryonic period.
These things
play a great part in Earth evolution as a whole, and they
bring us into contact with deep secrets of human existence.
This is often the cause of people acquiring certain
prejudices and points of view before they are born into earth
existence. And people are tormented by doubts and
uncertainties in life and all kinds of other things, because
of these demonic parasites.
There is not
much more these beings can do with the human being once his
ego has entered and made itself felt, but they prey on him
all the more before he is born or during his earliest years.
Thus we see that evil actions have a significant effect in
the cosmos, too, and work creatively, but their creativity
works in the direction of the ancient Moon existence. For
what man passes through in the embryonic period when these
demonic beings can prey on him, is basically the heritage of
the old Moon period, which makes its appearance in
subconscious, instinctive behaviour. Something that even
physical science preserves an instinct for is that, in older
and better times, man's embryonic period was not calculated
according to ordinary months but lunar months, therefore it
speaks of ten lunar months, and knows certain other things,
too, concerning the connection of embryonic development with
the phases of the moon.
So we see
that our Earth evolution contains two tendencies: good deeds
that contain the impulse to work creatively on Earth in
preparation for Jupiter, so that man's successor on the human
level can come into being. But evil deeds have also brought
into our evolution the tendency to drag the Earth back again
to the ancient Moon period and make it dependent on
everything to do with the subconscious. If you think about
it, you will find a great number of things that are connected
with these subconscious impulses; in fact, there are far more
of these subconscious impulses in materialistic humanity of
modern times, than there were in bygone ages when people were
less materialistic.
I believe
that the kind of things I have been telling you about again
today will make you feel what a deep impression spiritual
science can make on your outlook on life, and that it really
and truly will not only give you theoretical knowledge but
will be capable of giving human life a new direction. A time
will come when life will become quite chaotic if people do
not use the chance of giving it a new direction out of
spiritual-scientific knowledge. Man must get beyond a
knowledge that is restricted to the physical body. Our
materialistic age does not want knowledge of any other sort
than the kind that is restricted to the physical body. But
man has to lift his knowledge out of the physical body. And
what we know today as the first exercises in
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds
will gradually — though
‘gradually’ will be quite a long time —
they will gradually turn into something he does naturally,
something he will feel to be second nature. Particularly what
we call thought concentration will come naturally to
people.
People will
more and more feel the need really to concentrate their
thoughts, to focus their whole soul activity on sharply
defined thoughts which they place in front of their
consciousness. Whilst they would otherwise let their senses
roam from one thing or fact to another, they will more and
more often direct their thought life to certain things of
their own choosing; even if only for a short time, they will
concentrate on a definite thought, so as to focus their soul
activity on this thought. They will then discover something
that a lot of you know very well. Everyone makes a certain
discovery in the course of concentrating. If we place a
thought in the centre of our consciousness and focus all our
soul activity on it, we shall notice the thought growing
stronger and stronger. Certainly it does. But then there
comes a point where it does not get stronger any more but
gets weaker and fades away. This is an experience lots of you
will have had. The thought has to fade away, it has, as it
were, to die away inside. For the kind of thoughts we have to
begin with and the way we think, are through the instrument
of the physical body, and we concentrate the kind of thinking
we do by means of the instrument of the physical body until
the moment the thought dies, then we slip out of the physical
body.
We would go
into the unconscious altogether if, parallel with this
concentration exercise, we did not attempt to do something
else to maintain our consciousness when we have slipped out
of our physical body. What we have to do to maintain our
consciousness when we are outside, is what we call leading a
calm and composed life and accepting the things of the world
calmly. We can do even more than accept things calmly. We can
take seriously a theory we know so well, namely the concept
of karma. What do I mean?
A person is
not at all inclined, to start with, to take the idea of karma
really seriously. If he has only a small mishap that hurts
him, or anything at all happens to him, he sometimes gets
furious, but at any rate he has antipathy for it. We
encounter what we call our destiny with sympathy or
antipathy. It cannot be any different in ordinary life, as it
is absolutely essential that we feel sympathy for some of the
occurrences of destiny and antipathy for others. To us,
destiny is something that meets us from outside.
If we take
the idea of karma seriously, we must really recognise our ego
in our destiny and realise we ourselves are active in what
happens to us through destiny; that we are the actual agents.
When someone offends us it is certainly difficult to believe
we are hidden behind the offender. For it may be necessary in
physical life to punish the offence. But we must always keep
a corner within us where we admit to ourselves, ‘Even
when someone offends you it is you offending yourself, when
someone hits you it is you hitting yourself, when unpleasant
blows of destiny hit you, it is you, yourself, dealing
yourself these blows.’ We forget that we are not only
within our skin but are in our destiny; we forget we are
within all the so-called chance happenings of our
destiny.
It is very
difficult really to acquire the attitude that one's own ego
brings one one's destiny. But it is true that with our own
ego we bring ourselves our destiny, and we get the impulses
for this in the life between death and a new birth according
to our earlier incarnations, so that we can bring ourselves
our destiny. We have to unite with our destiny and, instead
of warding off hard blows of destiny with antipathy, tell
ourselves more and more often, ‘Through having this
blow of destiny, that is, through meeting yourself in this
blow of destiny, you are making yourself stronger, more
vigorous and robust.’ It is more difficult to form a
union with your destiny in this way than to resist it, but
what we lose when our thought passes away can only be
regained by drawing into ourselves, like this, what is
outside us. We cannot stay in what is within our skin if the
thought fades when we concentrate on it, but it will carry us
out of ourselves if we have taken hold of our destiny, our
karma, in the true sense. We thus awaken ourselves again. The
thought dies, but we carry forth the identification we have
grasped between our ego and our destiny, and it carries us
about the world.
This
composure with respect to our destiny, this sincere
acceptance of destiny, is what gives us existence when we are
outside our body. Obviously this does not need to alter our
life on the physical plane. We cannot always do that. But the
attitude we have to acquire in a corner of our soul must be
there, for the moments when we really want to be able to live
consciously outside our body.
Two maxims
can be our guiding principles and can mean a very great deal
to us. The first of these to impress upon our minds is:
Strive
for the dying away of the thought in the universe.
For the
thought becomes a living force outside, only when it dies
away in the universe. Yet we cannot unite ourselves with this
living force unless we work at the content of the second
maxim:
Strive
for the resurrection of destiny in the
‘I’.
If you
achieve this, you unite what has been reborn in the thought
with the resurrected ego outside you.
There is a
great deal in human nature, though, which makes it difficult
to progress in the spirit of these maxims. It is particularly
hard to look at the relationship between inner and outer in
the right way. The more ethics we can learn from spiritual
science in this connection, the better. And we can learn
ethics from it in so far as certain ethical concepts acquire
life and blood for the first time through what spiritual
science can bring to them.
For instance,
there are people who are perpetually complaining about other
people and the awful things they do to them. They go as far
as to say that other people persecute them. Everything of
this kind is always connected with the other pole of human
nature, you only have to observe life in the right way, which
means according to spiritual science as properly understood.
Of course there is good reason to complain about unkindness,
but in spite of this you will always find, if you go through
life with vision that has been made somewhat clairvoyant by
spiritual science, that most of these complaints come from
egoists, and that the suspicion that everyone wants to be
nasty to them arises most often in egoistic natures, whereas
a loving disposition will not readily suspect persecution,
nor that people are trying to harm them in all kinds of ways,
and so on.
When it is
put into words like this it is easy to agree with it in
theory. I am actually convinced that most people will admit
to it theoretically, if they stop to think about it. But to
live accordingly is what matters.
Now you may
ask, ‘How do we live accordingly?’ And again the
answer must be, ‘You must actually live with the
spiritual science you are striving for, live with it as much
as you can.’ That is the point. That is why spiritual
science is not given in compendiums or short sketches, but we
are trying to make spiritual science a force of life in which
we can live, and from which we can constantly draw
stimulating impulses.
This was the
main reason that led us to make the Goetheanum building a
kind of focal point for this living anthroposophical
striving, for as I mentioned yesterday, the Goetheanum
building, in its form, and in the whole way it has been
built, has a bodily, a soul and a spiritual nature in a
spiritual-scientific sense. It is itself a token of the fact
that we are striving according to impulses from the spiritual
world to bring into human evolution what it so badly needs,
if the immediate future is to go the way it should. The very
fact that you can perceive the being of spiritual science in
the forms of the Goetheanum building makes it a sort of
centre, a focal point around which the kind of
anthroposophical striving can crystallise, that has to become
an essential part of the evolution of humanity.
We probably
often say that we live in troubled times and that many things
exist today which stand out in stark contrast to spiritual
science. Yet our karma has allowed us to come so far as to
overcome, as it were, the material basis out of which our
Goetheanum is built, so that it can be a token of spiritual
science even in its external form.
Each one of
us can acknowledge this to himself, as I often do, especially
in the difficult times we are going through in face of the
strong attacks being made on anthroposophy at present. Some
people can question how much personal progress we have made
on our part towards what ought to be crystallising around the
Goetheanum. Even if one or another individual cannot be
physically present any more in the work being done on the
physical plane, the fact that the building is there, and that
our karma has brought it to us, is an important step forward.
And if we bear in mind that people with as deep an
understanding of spiritual science as Christian Morgenstern,
for example, remain united, even after physical death, with
what the Goetheanum is intended to be, then our building can
also be a token in our time of the kind of activity within
our spiritual movement that is not concerned with boundaries
between what is usually called life and death.
We can really
feel united with this building, and therefore it can
stimulate us to think the kind of serious thoughts which it
is quite natural for us to think at a time like ours, when
materialism is at its peak. Even if this building finds one
or another individual co-operating only as a spiritual being,
the building will be important for the continuation of our
movement. This, you will understand, is said only to show you
that our movement has a seriousness that goes beyond life and
death.
We have
encountered this seriousness to a special degree this week.
And if one thing happens, why should not other things be able
to happen soon, too? It is extraordinarily difficult to
achieve what I have spoken about and mentioned again this
time. I have stressed that I give the strictest attention to
choosing and finding exactly the right words for which I can
be fully answerable to the spiritual worlds. So it is to be
desired that these words shall be heard and received in the
same spirit.
Times will
certainly come when people will be able to be more
light-hearted with regard to the anthroposophical movement.
But now, right at the beginning, we must get used to taking
things very, very seriously. A while ago I talked here about
occult research, among other things, because I thought it
would be of use to some of you. I was mainly describing
facts. I thought these would be of help to one or another of
you in understanding our present difficult times. But that
which I presented with this intention has not been treated
with sufficient caution — there are one or two
exceptions, of course, but I am right in saying that not
everyone has treated it with the necessary discretion and
regard, and it has transpired that it was repeated here and
there in a form that conveyed exactly the opposite of what I
said here.
If I just
think of what has been made out of something that cannot have
been misunderstood because it is
already in print,
regarding the classification of the peoples of Europe according
to sentient soul, intellectual or mind soul, consciousness soul
and the ego, which was truly not meant to express a superiority;
if I think of the statements that have gone out into the world
and the opposition and bad feeling they have aroused, it is easy
to see that the principle of taking things quite exactly,
even in such difficult cases, has not been given due
consideration. If, for instance, I have ever said that the
ego activity which is there among the European peoples ought
to be effective in organising the European population, I
would have been talking nonsense. Yet this is one of the
things that has been made public, and it creates the most
fearful misunderstandings and bad feelings.
So I am
duty-bound not to say a word about these things in my
lectures for the time being. I must desist from any mention
of them, and whereas everybody else is free to speak about
it, it has become impossible for me to do so because of the
way people have misconstrued what I said.
All these
things go to show that we should look at ourselves and see if
we cannot take the anthroposophical movement absolutely
seriously. For sometimes we completely fail to notice how
much feeling of responsibility there is for each sentence of
the communications of genuine spiritual research, when the
matter is taken seriously. To stir up emotions is certainly
not what spiritual science is for, nor to oppose or pacify
them. And if anyone says these things are communicated in
order to oppose somebody, he ought to ask himself whether the
right or wrong use has been made of that which has been
communicated with the utmost objectivity and reverent love of
truth. These are things which add even more pain to my occult
experiences, which are already painful enough. Even if I
cannot mention certain important things, and a lot has to be
omitted which I thought we could investigate soon, there are
still some important and substantial matters left for us to
discuss during our time together.
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