Lecture Eight
WORKING WITH SCULPTURAL ARCHITECTURE II
Be sure to compare this version with these other versions of this
Lecture,
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Dornach, 4th January 1915
I should like to begin today by saying a
few words about the boiler house attached to the Goetheanum
and the architectural principle underlying it. If you want to
study what motivated the architectural forms of this house,
you must bear in mind that it is part of the whole Goetheanum
building and belongs to it. This fact of it belonging to the
building has to come to expression in the artistic conception
of the building itself, if this conception is correct. It
should not be an abstraction but has to be expressed in the
artistic form.
Now let us
have a look at the whole question of related artistic forms.
We get closest to this if we do what human beings
unfortunately do far too seldom, and think of the tremendous
artistic creative activity we find exemplified if we are able
to look at the spiritual aspect of nature and recognise
natural creation as a product of the spirit. I would like to
draw your attention to the forms of the bony system because
it is easiest to see there. Man's bony system, especially, is
less difficult to study than the forms of any other living
organisms.
You will know
that I have been trying for decades to arouse some
understanding in the world for the significant discoveries
Goethe made in the field of anatomy and physiology, which I
should like to call his second major achievement in this
realm. I will not touch on the first one today but only refer
to the second. This second significant discovery owes its
origin to what one might, in the external materialistic
world, call the combination of chance and human genius.
Goethe himself relates
that one day when he was going for a walk in the Jewish
cemetery in Venice he found a sheep's skull that had fallen
apart at the seams. Picking it up and looking at the form of
the bones the thought occurred to him, ‘When I look at
these head bones, what actually are they? They are
transformed dorsal vertebrae.'
You know, of
course, that the spinal cord that encloses the spine marrow
as a nerve cord is composed of rings which fit into one
another, rings with a definite shape and processes
(procesus vertebralis). And if you imagine one of
these rings expanding so that the hole the marrow passes
through — for the rings fit into one another —
begins to get larger and the bone gets correspondingly
thinner and expands like elastic, not only in a horizontal
direction but also in other directions, then the form that
arises out of this ring form is nothing else but the bone
formation which forms our skullcap. Our skullcaps are
transformed dorsal vertebrae.
On the basis
of spiritual science we can develop this discovery of
Goethe's even further and can say today that every bone man
has is a transformation, a metamorphosis of a single form.
The only reason we do not notice this is because we have very
primitive views of what can arise through transformation. If
you think of a bone of the upper arm — you know of
course what it looks like — a tubular bone like that
would not immediately strike you as being similar to a bone
in our head. But that is only due to our not having developed
the concept of transformation far enough.
The first
idea you will have is that the tubular bone has to be puffed
up until it is hollow inside, then you ought to arrive at the
form of the head bone. But that is not the principle
underlying the shapes of the bones. A tubular bone would
first have to be turned round, and you would not see the
similarity it has to the skullcap until you had turned it
inside out like a glove. But when a person turns a glove
inside out he expects it to look the same as it did before,
doesn't he? This is because the glove is something dead. It
is quite different with something living. If the glove were
alive, the following would happen when it was turned inside
out: changes would occur like the thumb and the little finger
getting very long, the middle finger very short, and the palm
contracting, and so on. The turning inside out and the
varying elasticity of the material would bring all sorts of
changes about, in fact, the glove would acquire a totally
different form, although it would still be the glove. This is
how you must imagine a tubular upper arm bone being turned
inside out, and then a skullcap would emerge.
You will
realise that the wise powers of the Godhead in the cosmos
possessed a greater wisdom than arrogant man has today, to be
able to set the forces of transformation in motion that are
needed to form a skull.The inner unity in nature comes from
the very fact that, fundamentally, even the most dissimilar
forms are transformations of one archetypal form. There is
nothing in the realm of life that could not arise as a
metamorphosis of a primary form. In the course of this
metamorphosis something else happens as well. Certain parts
of the primary form become larger at the expense of others,
and other parts become smaller; also various limbs expand,
but not all to the same extent. This produces
dissimilarities, although they are all transformations of the
same primary form.
Now look at
the primary form of our whole Goetheanum
building. I can only give you a very sketchy account of
what I want to tell you, and only mention one point of view.
If you look at the Goetheanum you will see that it has double
domes and that the domes rest on a cylindrical sub-structure.
The fact that it is a building with double domes is vital,
for these double domes are an expression of the living
element. If there had only been one dome then in essence our
building would have been dead. The living quality of our
building is expressed in the fact that the consciousness of
the one dome is reflected in the other, as it were, that the
two domes mirror one another, just as the part of man that is
in the external world is reflected in man's organs. The basic
concept of the double dome must be borne in mind in relation
to anything organically connected with the Goetheanum, for if
it were not to contain the double dome form, however hard it
was to recognise, it would not express the essential nature
of the concept of the building. Therefore the annexe must
also contain the concept of the double dome.
Now look at
the double dome and its additional constructions. First of
all we have the interpenetration of the two dome motifs,
whose importance I have often referred to. They represent a
kind of new innovation in architecture and, as you know, were
done with the help of Herr Englert. The interpenetration of
the two domes is of special importance in the main building
because it expresses the inner connection of the two elements
which mirror one another. I am giving you this concept of
mirroring in an abstract way at the moment. A very great deal
is contained in this interpenetration of the two dome motifs;
an infinite amount of different aspects. The further stage of
the building, the artistic stage, that expresses the image of
the concept of spiritual science, can only come into being
because we have succeeded in achieving this interpenetration
of the double dome motifs. So we have this interpenetration
in the main building. If we were to cancel the
interpenetration and separate the dome motifs, we move
towards the ahrimanic principle. If we bring them closer
together or overlap them completely, by building one inside
the other, we would approach the luciferic principle.
So the
ahrimanic principle has to be taken out of the building. In
the annexe the domes have to be pushed apart, for in the case
of the annexe, too, the dome concept is vital. And now
imagine the domes kept apart. Imagine that on one side, this
side motif (south portal of the main building) has shrunk to
nothing, so the dotted line has gone, and on the other side
it has grown considerably larger (and become the chimney).
With the main building in mind, imagine that here (south) you
have the separated domes, here is a front structure, and here
the whole thing has been pushed in (see a). There the whole
thing has been pulled out instead of being pushed in (b) but
here (a) it has shrunk to nothing instead of growing. Imagine
that on the other side (the front structure of the north
portal) it developed considerably, and you have the
transformation motif for an annexe of our main building which
has developed out of the primary forms. For if you imagine
this getting smaller and smaller (the chimney), that coming
out again and the whole thing pushed together, then the
annexe would be transformed into the main building.
(Dr. Steiner
was using a model of the boiler house as he spoke.)
The point is
that this metamorphosis of our main building shall be
suitable for its purpose. Just as a vertebra arises out of
the same primary form as the human skull, and you can think
of one changing into the other, you can also think of the
main building and the annexe changing from one to the other.
The concept of the form can pass from one form to the other,
if it metamorphoses and becomes alive.
We really
have to become apprentices of the creative hierarchies who
created by means of metamorphosis, and learn to do the same
thing ourselves.
Now imagine
the kind of force necessary to enlarge this
insignificant-looking part on this side (north portal of the
main building which becomes the chimney). If you have a small
rubber bag that you want to enlarge, you have to press it
this way and that way from inside so that it gets bigger. A
force has to be there that can enlarge things and develop
them. So if one of these side wings really has to be puffed
up, it would have to be done by a force working from inside,
from here (see left diagram).
What kind of
forces can they be, in there? You can study these forces in
the forms of the architraves. If you imagine the forces in
the architraves jumping into the side structure and pushing
this up, you get this form (chimney and back wall). You have
to try and slip inside these forms of the architraves with
your formative artistic thinking and contract and expand
them. Imagine, that because you have slipped inside, you
enlarge what is small in there. Then this form arises
(chimney and back wall). There is no other way of going about
creating things that belong together, than by trying to get
inside them.
This slipping
into things and being inside them is another way of imitating
the creative forces in nature, and unless modern industrial
civilisation does this, it will not overcome its
godforsakenness. It would be impossible to imagine the
ordinary kind of chimney as a product of natural creation. It
only exists because there is a denial of divine-spiritual
forces in nature. There is hardly anything outside in nature
that you could compare with an ordinary chimney except
possibly the rather hideous-looking asparagus plant. But that
is a kind of exception. Whatever grows with the forces of
earth can never go straight upwards like a chimney. If you
want to study the forces that work in an upward direction, a
tree is the best example in which to find what corresponds to
the hidden forces in the earth, for a tree does not only
develop a trunk in the vertical, but also has to reach out
with its branches. The point obviously is not to imitate this
directly in the model, but to study those forces which
radiate out from the earth and overcome the purely vertical
direction of the tree trunk by reaching out breadthways and
putting forth branches. This part here does justice to the
centrifugal forces in space, in the cosmos, to what I would
like to call the branchlike centrifugal forces (on the
chimney).
Although I
have only been able to show you the roughest principles, I
could justify the principles behind this architectural form
in minute detail in the case of every single plane, but it
would take too long.
Now a form
such as this is only complete when it is fulfilling its
purpose. If you look at the form now it is not complete. It
will only be complete when the heating is actually
functioning inside and smoke is coming out; smoke belongs to
it, it really belongs, and this has been included in the
architectural form. One day when the rising of the smoke is
observed clairvoyantly, and the smoke coming out of the
chimney, the spiritual part of the rising smoke will also be
taken into consideration — for we shall know, when we
have really observed it clairvoyantly, that the physical also
contains a spiritual element. For just as you have a
physical, an etheric and an astral body, the smoke also has
at least an etheric part. And this etheric part goes a
different way from the physical: the physical part will go
upwards, but the etheric part is really caught by these twigs
that reach outwards. A time will come when people will see
the physical part of the smoke rising while the etheric part
wafts away. When this kind of thing is expressed in the form,
a principle of all art is gradually being complied with,
namely, the presenting of the inner essence in outer form,
really making the inner essence the principle according to
which the outer form is created.
As I said, I
would have to do a lot of talking if I were to go into all
the details on which these architectural forms are based,
although these might be far more interesting than those we
have already discussed. One of these interesting things is
that it was possible to express everything that had to be
expressed in this modern material, and build with concrete.
For it will be possible to go a long way with form-making in
this modern material, especially in the designing of
buildings in this style that will serve modern ahrimanic
civilisation. In fact it is essential to do so. There is no
need for me to go into any further details, because I am more
concerned with showing you the principle of this building and
everything to do with it. This principle can he modified in
many respects. For instance the dome can be modified so that
it does not look like a dome any more, if it is looked at
merely from the geometrical-mathematical point of view and
not organically, and so on. But today I wanted to discuss the
particular principle of inner metamorphosis and
transformation, the life principle within these. I wanted to
cite this to show you in what way real artistic creativity,
when it has to do with our spiritual-scientific conception,
has to differ from any kind of symbolic interpretation, for
that is external. It is a matter of getting an inner grasp of
what you are being shown here and following the process with
your whole soul.
When the
building is eventually finished we do not continually want to
be asked, ‘What does this mean and that mean?', and
have to witness people happily believing that they have
discovered the meaning of some of these things. Regarding
some of these interpretations, we have come into a strange
position along some of the by-paths of theosophy, with
respect to quite a number of poetic and literary works. For
instance, people have explained plays by saying that one
person means manas, another person buddhi and a third person
atma, and so on. If you want to, you can of course explain
everything like this. But we are not concerned with this kind
of interpretation, but with entering into things and joining
in the process of creativity that came from the higher
hierarchies and fills and forms the whole of our world. There
is no need to avoid doing this just because it is more
difficult than symbolic or allegorical interpretation. For it
leads into the spiritual world and is the very strongest
incentive for really acquiring imagination, inspiration and
intuition.
A vital part
of the present-day impulses for change is that we acquire
more and more understanding for the way the human soul rises
into the realms that open up to imaginative, inspirational
and intuitive observation. For these realms contain the
elements that will make our world whole again, and which will
lift us up out of mere maya and lead us to true reality.
It has to be
stressed again and again that the new spiritual knowledge we
are moving towards, cannot consist of repeating the results
of earlier clairvoyance. There are certainly a lot of people
striving to repeat earlier clairvoyance, but the time for
this clairvoyance is over, and it is only atavistic echoes of
ancient clairvoyance that can possibly occur in these few
individuals. But the levels of human existence to which we
must ascend will not open up to a repetition of ancient
clairvoyance. Let us have another look at the essential basis
of this new clairvoyance. We have often referred to the
principle of the thing, and now we want to try and approach
it from another angle.
Again we will
start with something we all know, namely, that during waking
day man lives with his ego and his astral body within his
etheric and his physical body. But I have already emphasised
during the past few days that, awake as he is between waking
up and going to sleep, man is not fully awake, for something
in him is still asleep. What we feel as our will is really
only partly awake. Our thoughts are awake from when we wake
up until we go to sleep, but willing is something we carry
out completely in a dream. This is why all the pondering
about freedom of will and about freedom altogether has been
in vain, because people have failed to notice that what they
know about the will during the daytime is actually only the
dreaming of their will impulses. If you have an impulse of
will and make a mental image of it you are certainly awake.
But in waking life man only dreams with regard to how the
will arises and goes over into action.
If you pick
up a piece of chalk and make a mental image of picking it up,
that is of course something you can have a mental image of.
But with only your day consciousness and without clairvoyance
you know no more about how the ego and astral body stream
into your hand and how the will spreads out, than you know
about a dream whilst you are dreaming. We can only dream
about the actual will with ordinary waking consciousness, and
where most things are concerned we do not even dream, we just
sleep. You can clearly visualise putting a mouthful of food
on your fork, and to a certain extent you can visualise
chewing it, but you do not even dream about swallowing it.
You are usually quite unconscious of it, as you are
unconscious of your thoughts while you are asleep. So during
waking life a major part of our will activity is carried out
in waking day sleep.
If we did not
sleep with regard to our desires and the feeling impulses
bound up with them, something strange would begin to happen.
We would follow the course of our actions right into our
body; everything we do out of will impulse would be followed
up inside us in our blood and throughout the whole
circulation. That is, if you could follow the picking up of a
piece of chalk from the point of view of the will impulse,
you would follow what is going on in your hand right into the
blood circulation; you would see the activity of the blood
and the feelings that are bound up with this from inside. For
instance, you would have an inner perception of the weight of
the piece of chalk and become aware that you are seeing the
nerve channels and the etheric fluid inside them. You would
feel yourself moving through the activity of the blood and
the nerves, which would amount to an inner enjoyment of your
own blood and nerve activity. But we have to be free of this
inner enjoyment of our own blood and nerve activity during
earthly life, otherwise we would go through life wanting this
inner enjoyment to accompany everything we do. Our enjoyment
of self would increase enormously. But as man is now
constituted he should not have this enjoyment. And the secret
of why he should not have it can again be found in a passage
of the Bible, for which we ought to feel greater and greater
reverence.
After what
had occurred in paradise and is told in the paradise myth,
man was permitted to eat from the tree of knowledge but not
from the tree of life. Now this inner enjoyment would be the
enjoying of the tree of life, and man is not permitted to do
this. I cannot develop this theme further today as it would
lead too far, but through meditating on it yourselves you
will be able to discover more about it. Another thing that
can have special significance for us in connection with these
present lectures and arises out of this, is the following:
not being able to eat from the tree of life means not being
able to enjoy the blood and nerve activity going on within
us. Yet just because we know the outer world by means of our
senses and our reason, something comes about that surely has
something to do with this kind of enjoyment. Whenever we
perceive anything in the outer world and whenever we think
about it, we follow the course of our blood circulation in
the region of the senses — eyes, ears, nose and taste
nerves — and, in the case of thinking, the nerve
channels. But we do not have the perception of what is going
on in the blood circulation and nerve channels, for what we
would have perceived in the blood is reflected and mirrored
by the senses, thus causing the sense impressions to arise.
And what is conducted through the nerve channels is also
reflected and conducted back to the nerve ends, where it is
then mirrored as thought.
Now imagine
for a moment a human being who is in the following situation:
he does not just follow the course of his blood as it
responds to the outer world and then receive a mirror image
of what his blood does, nor does he just follow the course of
his nerves and receive a mirror image of what his nerves do,
but he is in a position to experience within himself what is
denied us with regard to our blood and our sense nerves; he
experiences the blood moving towards the nerve and the eyes.
If this were the case he would enjoy his own inner process,
at least in the blood and the nerves in this area. This is
how the inner pictures of atavistic clairvoyance arise. What
we see reflected are only pictures, filtered pictures as it
were of what is in the blood and the nerves. There are world
secrets in the blood and nerves, but the kind of world
secrets that have already given their substance to creating
us. It is only ourselves we get to know when we acquire the
imaginations resulting from experiencing the blood
circulating to the senses, and it is only the inspirations
which have the task of building up our bodily nature we get
to know, when we experience ourselves in the nerves leading
to our senses.
A whole inner
world can arise in this manner, and this inner world can be a
collection of imaginations. Yet although, when perceiving the
outer physical world in a way that is proper for our earth
evolution, we perceive reflections of our blood and nerve
activities, we still cannot get beyond the senses when we
indulge in inner enjoyment, but reach only to the point where
the blood circulation flows into the senses. Then the
experience of the imaginative world is comparable to swimming
in blood like a fish in water. But this imaginative world is
in reality not an outside world but a world living in our
blood. If one lives in the nerves leading to the senses one
experiences an inspirational world full of music of the
spheres and inner pictures. This is cosmic again but it is
nothing new. It has already fulfilled its task in that it has
flowed into our nerve and blood systems.
The kind of
clairvoyance arising in this way, and leading man further
into himself instead of beyond himself, is self-enjoyment,
veritable self-enjoyment. This is why a kind of refined
voluptuousness is brought about in people who become
clairvoyant in this way and experience a world which is new
to them. And on the whole we must say that this kind of
clairvoyance is a return to an earlier stage of evolution.
For although this experiencing of a person's own sense organs
and blood, as I have been describing to you, did not exist
then in the form in which it does today, the nervous system
was already there in a germinal state. This kind of
perception was the normal one for man on ancient Moon, and
what he had then in the way of the beginning of nerves served
to give him an inner perception of himself. The blood had not
yet taken form inside him. It was more like a warm breath
coming towards him from outside, like we receive the rays of
the sun. Therefore what is now, on the earth, a perception of
the inner blood system was regular, normal perception of the
outside world at the Moon stage.
You could say
that if this is the borderline between man's inner and outer
world (a diagram was drawn), then, what are now our nerves
were already there, in germinal form, on the Moon. By
following the course of the nerves he could perceive what was
within him, as a world of inner imagination. He saw that he
himself belonged in the cosmos. He also had an imaginative
perception of what came to him as a breath from outside and
not from inside. That has now ceased, and what was outside,
on ancient Moon, has become internalised as the blood
circulation in Earth evolution. So it is a regression to the
old Moon evolution.
It is good to
know of these things, because that kind of clairvoyance keeps
on making its appearance. It does not need to be acquired
along the hard path of meditation and concentration described in
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.
The kind of
clairvoyance that arises as a result of learning to
experience one's nerves and blood as an inner enjoyment is
just a more refined development of organic life, a further
development of the experience of eating and drinking. This is
certainly not mankind's present task, but is a kind of
hot-house plant which arises when self-enjoyment of things
such as eating and drinking is developed to a fine art. Just
as a wine connoisseur has an inner after-taste which is only
an imagination of the taste and is not formative, some people
have a subtle inner enjoyment which is their
clairvoyance.
A lot of
clairvoyance is nothing more than a subtle, refined, forced
kind of after-taste of life. We must become aware of these
things again in our time. For people have not known about
these secrets nor referred to them in literature since the
first half of the nineteenth century. Then the second half of
the nineteenth century came, with all the discoveries that
are considered so wonderful, and they certainly are wonderful
from their point of view, and an understanding of these
things and the finer connections of existence were lost. But
what has not yet been lost — and this is said in
parenthesis — is the enjoyment of the effects of the
coarser things we imbibe. Mankind continues to be able to
live in the after-enjoyment of eating and drinking, and,
precisely in the materialistic age, has cultivated this to an
extent.
But mankind
lives in a rhythmic cycle where things like this are
concerned. Of course, because it has eradicated the general
feeling it used to have of indulging in self-enjoyment in
the senses, nerves and blood circulation, which people had to
a greater extent in the past, the materialistic age can
devote itself even more strongly to the effects of eating and
drinking. You can easily study the whole change and rapid
development that has taken place in a relatively short time
in this realm. You have only to compare a hotel menu of the
1870's with a present-day one (1915), and you will see the
progress that has been made in the sphere of refined
pleasures, in the self-enjoyment of one's own body. Yet
things of this kind also move in cycles, and achievements are
only carried to a certain level. Just as a pendulum can only
swing to a certain point before it has to go back again, the
indulgence in mere physical pleasure will also have to go in
the other direction once it has reached a certain point. This
will occur when the keenest epicureans, that is, people with
the most longing for pleasures, will look at the choicest
dainties and say, ‘Ugh! I don't feel like having that,
that is just too much!' This moment will certainly come, for
it is a necessary development. Everything moves in
cycles.
Man
experiences the other side of life during sleep. His thought
life is asleep and quite different conditions prevail, of
course. Now I said that it was chiefly the first half of the
nineteenth century that had insight into these matters still;
and the kind of clairvoyance that arises when one follows the
course of one's own blood and nerve channels was still called
pythian clairvoyance at that time, from certain memories the
people had, and it is indeed related to the foundations of
ancient pythian clairvoyance.
Other
conditions prevail during sleep. Man is outside his physical
and etheric body with his ego and astral body. In ordinary
life thoughts are then suppressed and devitalised. But
between falling asleep and waking up man lives continually
with the longing for his physical body. This is precisely
what sleep consists of, acquiring a longing for his physical
body from the moment he falls asleep. This rises to a climax
and then urges him more and more to return to his body. When
he is asleep the longing to return to his own physical body
becomes stronger and stronger. And because the longing
pervades the ego and the astral body like a mist, the life of
thought is dimmed. Just as we cannot see the trees any more
when mist encloses them, we cannot experience our life of
perception within us when the mist of our longing envelops
us.
Now it can
happen that this longing grows so strong during sleep, that
man does not keep it outside his physical and etheric body,
but that his greed grows to the extent that he partly takes
hold of his physical and etheric body and comes into touch
with the extreme ends of his blood and nerve channels; he
penetrates from outside as it were through his senses into
the extreme ends of his blood circulation and his nerve
channels.
In ancient
times, when man still had experiences like these with the
help of the gods, as it were, it was a normal and healthy
process. The old Hebrew prophets, who accomplished so much
for their people, acquired their prophetic gifts through
making use of the tremendous love they bore precisely for the
blood and nerve composition of their own people, so that even
during sleep they did not want to let go altogether of that
which lived physically in their people. These prophets of
Jewish antiquity were seized with such longing and filled
with such love that even in sleep they wanted to remain bound
to the blood of the people to whom they belonged. This is
precisely what gave them their prophetic gifts.
This is the
physiological origin of these prophetic gifts, and splendid
achievements came about through this channel. This is
precisely why the prophets of the various peoples had such
significance for their people, because even when they were
outside the body they maintained a contact with it in this
way.
As I
mentioned, there was still a certain awareness right up to
the first half of the nineteenth century, of this connection
in the life of humanity. Just as they called the other kind
of clairvoyance pythian clairvoyance, this kind of
clairvoyance, which came about through contact of the
ego-astral nature of man with the blood and nerve channels of
the physical body during sleep, was called prophetic
clairvoyance.
If you look
at the literature of the first half of the nineteenth century
you will find descriptions of pythian and prophetic
clairvoyance, even if they are not as precise as
spiritual-scientific descriptions of them would be today.
People do not know the difference between them any more,
since they have no understanding for what they can read about
them in the books of the first half of the nineteenth
century. But neither of these kinds of clairvoyance can
really help humanity forward today. Both of them were right
for olden times. Modern clairvoyance, which has to develop
further and further in the future, can come about neither
through enjoying what is going on in our bodies while we are
awake, nor by entering into the body from outside in a
sleeplike state, urged on by love — even if it is not
for ourselves, but for the part of mankind to which our body
belongs. Both these levels have been superseded.
Modern
clairvoyance must be a third way, neither a taking hold of
the physical body from outside, in loving longing, nor an
enjoying of the physical body from inside. Both these
phenomena, that which lives within and floods the body with
pleasure, and that which can seize hold of the body from
outside, have to go out of the body, if modern clairvoyance
is to occur; they may only have the sort of relationship with
the body, during incarnation between birth and death, in
which they neither enjoy nor love the blood and nerves,
either from inside or from outside, but remain connected with
the body whilst freely abstaining from such self-enjoyment or
self-love. The connection with the body has to be maintained
nevertheless, of course, otherwise it would mean a dying. Man
must remain bound to the body that belongs to him in physical
incarnation on earth, and this must be done by means of the
organs which are remote, as it were, or at least relatively
remote from the activity of blood and nerves. A detaching
from the activity of blood and nerves must be achieved.
When a person
no longer indulges in enjoyment of self along the channels
leading to the senses, nor takes hold of himself, from
outside, as far as the senses, but has the kind of
relationship to himself, both from inside and from outside,
in which he can actually take living hold of what symbolises
the death of physical life, then the proper condition has
been reached. For we actually die physiologically because we
are able to develop the bony system. When we are capable of
taking hold of the skeleton which folk wisdom recognises as
the symbol of death, and which is as remote from the blood
system as it is from the nervous system, then we come to what
we can call spiritual-scientific clairvoyance, which is
higher than either pythian or prophetic clairvoyance.
With
spiritual-scientific clairvoyance we take hold of the whole
and not just part of the human being, and it actually makes
no difference whether we take hold of it from inside or
outside, for this kind of clairvoyance can no longer be an
act of enjoyment. Instead of being a subtle enjoyment it is
an opening up and rising into the divine-spiritual forces of
the All. It is a uniting with the world. It is no longer an
experiencing of the human being and the mysteries that have
been woven into him, but an experiencing of the deeds of the
beings of the higher hierarchies, whereby one truly lifts
oneself out of self-enjoyment and self-love. Man must become
a thought as it were, an organ of the higher hierarchies,
just as our thoughts are organs of our souls. To be thought
of, pictured and perceived by the higher hierarchies, is the
principle of spiritual-scientific clairvoyance. To be
received, not to take oneself.
I would like
to express the wish that what I have just been saying might
become a real object for your meditation, for precisely that
which I have been telling you today can bring many, many
things to life in all of you and enliven the actual impulses
of our spiritual-scientific movement to an ever greater
extent. And how seriously we have to take the enlivening of
our spiritual-scientific movement has often been spoken of
during these days together. We could bring to realisation a
further part — I will not say of what was intended
— but of what ought to be intended within this
spiritual-scientific movement, if as many people as possible
would resolve to think about this threefold form of knowledge
of higher worlds in a living way, so that our thoughts become
clearer and clearer about what, at bottom, we all intend, and
which can become so easily confused with what can be had much
more comfortably.
Truly, it is
not for nothing that we work
from cycle to cycle
to accumulate more and more concepts and ideas. It is not
needless work studying these concepts and ideas, for it is
precisely the way to prepare the soul impulses that will lead
us to real spiritual-scientific clairvoyance. By snatching up
one or two ideas given by anthroposophy you can sometimes
make a chink in one or another part of the human
organisation, causing fragments of pythian and prophetic
clairvoyance to arise, enough to make people proud of
themselves. If this is the case, we often hear statements
like this, ‘I don't need to study everything in detail,
and I don't need what the cycles say. I know all that, I knew
it already.’ And so on. Many people are still satisfied
with the principle of living in a few imaginations which we
could call blood and nerve imaginations. A lot of people
fancy they have something really special if they have a few
blood and nerve imaginations. But this is not what can lead
us to selfless co-operation in mankind's development.
Indulging in blood and nerve imaginations actually leads to a
heightening of self-enjoyment, to a more subtle form of
egoism. Then, of course, the cultivation of spiritual science
can be the very thing that breeds an even more subtle kind of
egoism than you ever find in the outside world.
It is taken
for granted that one is never referring to the present
company nor to the Anthroposophical Society, which is, of
course, here. But it should be permissible to mention that
there are societies in which some people manage to turn the
principles in their favour, and without really giving their
unselfish support, make use of one or another thing,
preferably those things which stimulate blood or nerve
imaginations, and then imagine they can spare themselves the
rest. As a result they acquire an atavistic clairvoyance, or
perhaps not even that, but only the feelings that accompany
that kind of imaginative clairvoyance. These feelings are not
an overcoming of egoism, just a heightened form of it. You
find in societies like this — the Anthroposophical
Society excepted for politeness’ sake — that
although it would be people's duty to develop love and
harmony out of the depths of their hearts from one member to
another, you find disharmony, quarrelsomeness, people telling
tales about one another, and so on. I can say things like
this, for as I said, I always make an exception of the
members of the Anthroposophical Society.
This shows us
that dark shadows are thrown just where a strong light is
about to appear. I am not finding such faults because I
imagine these things can be exterminated overnight. That
cannot happen, because they come from nature. But at least
each person can work on himself; and it is not a good thing
if you are not made aware of these things.
It is
thoroughly understandable that just because a particular
movement has to be founded, the shadow sides also make
themselves felt in these societies, and that what is rampant
in outside life is far more rampant within them. Yet it
always gives one a bitter feeling if this happens in
societies which, by their very nature — otherwise there
would be no point in having a society — should develop
a certain brotherliness, a certain loyalty, but just because
they come closer together, certain faults that are
short-lived in the outside world develop all the more
fiercely. As the present company, the Anthroposophical
Society, is excepted, it will give us all the more
opportunity to think and reflect about these things quite
objectively and impartially, so that we really know what they
are about. Then if we come across them somewhere, we shall
know them for what they are, and not imagine that if someone
thinks he has a particularly deep grasp of anthroposophy,
that we cannot understand that faults which occur in the
outside world appear much more strongly in him. We shall
understand it, but we shall also know that we have to combat
them. Sometimes we cannot combat them until we have really
understood them.
This is
another example showing how closely connected life is with
the spiritual-scientific outlook; that this spiritual-
scientific outlook cannot, in fact, achieve its aim unless it
becomes an attitude to life, an art of life, and is brought
into the whole of life. How wonderful it would be if in
— let us now say the Anthroposophical Society —
all the various human relationships proved to be as
harmonious as we have tried to make the forms of our
Goetheanum building, where they change from one to the other
and each is in harmony with the other. If it could be the
same in life as it is in the Goetheanum, and the whole life
of our Society could be like the wonderful co-operation among
the people engaged in building the Goetheanum, so that even
this very building activity is a harmonious and noble image
of what comes to expression in the building itself.
Thus, the
inner significance of the life principle of our Goetheanum
building and the inner significance of the co-operation among
the souls — no, I would rather not say that — the
inner significance of the harmony of the forms of our
building, should find their way into all the various human
relationships in our society, and their inner formative force
should stand before us as a kind of ideal. I should just like
to assure you that the wrong words did not slip out just now,
when I stopped in mid-sentence. I stopped quite deliberately,
and sometimes the thing is said without actually saying
it.
To summarise
the theme I have given in many variations over these days;
what I want to recommend to you most warmly is not only to
look at the thoughts and ideas of spiritual science, the
results of spiritual research, with your intellect and
reason, but to take what lives in spiritual science into your
hearts. For the salvation of mankind's future progress really
depends on this. This can be said without presumption, for
anyone can see it if they try at all to study the impulses of
our evolution and the signs of our times. With these thoughts
I will close the series of lectures I ventured to give you at
the turn of the year.
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