LECTURE V
Rudolf Steiner: Gentlemen! I mentioned our wish
to look further into the history that is connected with our present
study of the world. You have seen how the human race gradually built
itself up out of the rest of mighty Nature. It was only when
conditions on the earth were such that men were able to live upon it
— when the earth had died, when it no longer had its own life —
that human and animal life could develop in the way I have pictured.
Now we have also seen that in the beginning, human life
was actually quite different from what it is today, and had its field
of action where the Atlantic Ocean is now. We have to imagine that
where the Atlantic Ocean is today, there was formerly solid ground.
Today we have Asia on the one hand; there is the Black Sea, below it
is Africa, then there is Russia and also Asia. On the other hand,
there is England, Ireland, and over there also America. Formerly all
this in between was land, and here very little land; over here in
Europe at that time there was actually a really huge sea. These
countries were all in the sea, and when we come up to the north,
Siberia was sea too; it was still all sea. Below where India is
today, the land was appearing a little above the sea. Thus we
actually have some land there, and on the other side again land.
Where today we find the Asian peoples, the inhabitants of the Near
East and those of Europe, there was sea — the land only rising
up later. The land, however, went much farther, continuing right on
to the Pacific Ocean where today there are so many islands, Java,
Sumatra, and so on; they were all part of the continent formerly
there — all this archipelago. Thus, where now the Pacific Ocean
is, there was a great deal of land with sea between the two land
masses.
Now the first peoples we are able to investigate have
remained in this region, here, where the land has been preserved.
When we took around us in Europe we can really say: Ten, twelve or
fifteen thousand years ago the earth, the ground, became sufficiently
firm for men to dwell upon it. Before that, only marine animals were
there which developed out of the sea, and so on. If at that time you
had looked for man, he would have been where the Atlantic Ocean is
today. But over there in Asia, in eastern Asia, there were also men
earlier than ten thousand years ago. These men naturally left
descendants, and the descendants are very interesting on account of
their culture, the most ancient on earth. Today these are the peoples
called the Japanese and Chinese. They are very interesting because
they are the last traces, so to say, of the oldest inhabitants of the
earth.
As you have heard, there was, of course, a much older
population on earth that was entirely wiped out. That was the
humanity who lived in ancient Atlantis, of whom nothing remains. For
even if remains did exist, we would have to dig down into the bed of
the Atlantic Ocean to find them. We would have to get down to that
bed — a more difficult procedure than people think — and
dig there, and in all probability find nothing. For, as I have said,
those people had soft bodies. The culture which they created with
gestures was something that one cannot dig out of the ground-because
there was nothing that endured! Thus, what was there long before the
Japanese and Chinese is not accessible to ordinary science; one must
have some knowledge of spiritual science if one wants to make such
discoveries.
However, what has remained of the Chinese and Japanese
peoples is very interesting. You see, the Chinese and the older
Japanese — not those of today (about whom I am just going to
speak) — the Chinese and Japanese had a culture quite different
from ours. We would have a much better idea of it if our good
Europeans had not in recent centuries extended their domination over
those spheres, bringing about a complete change. In the case of Japan
this change has been very effective. Although Japan has kept its
name, it has been entirely Europeanized. Its people have gradually
absorbed everything from the Europeans, and what remains of their
ancient culture is merely its outward form. The Chinese have
preserved their identity better, but now they can no longer hold out.
It is true that the European dominion is not actively established
there, but in those regions what the Europeans think is becoming
all-prevailing, and what once existed there has disappeared. This is
no cause for regret; it is in the nature of human evolution. It must,
however, be mentioned.
Now if we observe the Chinese — among them, things
can be seen in a less adulterated form — we find a culture
distinct from all others, for the Chinese in their old culture did
not include anything that can be called religion. The Chinese culture
was devoid of religion.
You must picture to yourselves, gentlemen, what is meant
by a “culture without religion”. When you consider the
cultures that have religion you find everywhere — in the old
Indian culture, for instance — veneration for beings who are
invisible but who seem to resemble human beings on earth. It is the
peculiar feature of all later religions that they represent their
invisible beings as manlike.
Anthroposophy does not do this. Anthroposophy does not
represent the super-sensible world anthropomorphically but as it
actually is. Further, it sees in the stars the expression of the
super-sensible. The remarkable thing is that the Chinese have had
something of the same kind. The Chinese do not venerate invisible
gods. They say: What is here on earth differs according to climate,
according to the nature of the soil where one lives. You see, China
in the most ancient times was already a large country and is still
today larger than Europe; it is a gigantic country, has always been
gigantic, and has had a tremendously large, vigorous population. Now,
the idea that the population of the earth increases is just
superstition on the part of modern science, which always makes its
calculations from data to suit itself. The truth is that even in the
most ancient times there was a vast population in China, also in
South America and North America. There too in those ancient times the
land reached out to the Pacific Ocean. If that is taken into account
the population of the earth cannot be said to have grown.
So, gentlemen, we find a culture there that is quite
ancient, and today this culture can still be observed as it actually
existed ten thousand, eight thousand years ago. The Chinese said:
Above in the north the climate is different, the soil is different,
from what they are farther south; everything is different there. The
growth of the plants is different and human beings have to live in a
different way. But the sun is all-pervading. The sun shines in the
north and in the south; it goes on its way and moves from warm
regions to cold regions. They said: On earth diversity prevails, but
the sun makes everything equal. They saw in the sun a fructifying,
leveling force. They went on to say, therefore: If we are to have a
ruler, our ruler must be like that; individual men differ, but he
must rule over them like the sun. For this reason they gave him the
name “Son of the Sun.” His task was to rule on earth as
the sun rules in the universe. The individual planets, Venus,
Jupiter, and so on, act in their various ways; the sun as ruler over
the planets makes everything equal. Thus the Chinese pictured their
ruler as a son of the Sun. For they took the word “son”
essentially to imply “belonging to something.”
Everything was then so arranged that the people said:
The Son of the Sun is our most important man. The others are his
helpers, just as the planets are the helpers of the sun. They
organized everything on the earth in accordance with what appeared
above in the stars. All this was done without prayer, for they did
not know the meaning of prayer. It was actually all done without
their having what later would constitute a cult. What might be called
their kingdom was organized so as to be an image of the heavens. It
could not yet be called a state. (That is a mischief that modern men
perpetrate.) But they arranged their earthly affairs to be an image
of what appeared to them in the stars above.
Now something came about through this circumstance that
was naturally quite different from what happened later: a man became
the citizen of a kingdom. He had no creed to profess; he simply felt
himself to be a member of a kingdom. Originally the Chinese had no
gods of any kind; when later they did have them, they were gods taken
over from the Indians. Originally they had no gods, but their
connection with the super-sensible worlds was expressed by the
essential nature of their kingdom and its institutions. Their
institutions had a family quality. The Son of the Sun was at the same
time father to all the other Chinese and these served him. Although
it was a kingdom, it partook of the nature of a family.
All this was only possible for men whose thinking had as
yet no resemblance to that of later humanity. The thinking of the
Chinese at that time was not at all like that of later men. What we
think today would have been quite foreign to the Chinese. We think,
for example, “animal”; we think “man”; we
think “vase” or “table”. The Chinese did not
think in this way, but they knew: there is a lion, there a tiger, a
dog, there's a bear — not, there is an animal. They knew: my
neighbor has a table with corners; someone else has a table that is
rounder. They gave names to single things, but what “a table”
is, never entered their head; “table” as such — of
that they had no knowledge. They were aware: there stands a man with
a bigger head and longer legs, there one with a smaller head, with
shorter legs, and so on; there is a smaller man, here a bigger man,
but “man” in general was to them an unknown factor. They
thought in quite a different way, in a way impossible for man today.
They had need, therefore, of other concepts. Now if you think
“table,” “man,” “animal,” you can
extend this to legal matters, for Jurisprudence consists solely of
such concepts. But the Chinese were unable to think out any legal
system; with them everything was organized as in a family. Within a
family, when a son or daughter wants to do something, there is no
thought of such a thing as a legal contract. But today, if someone
here in Switzerland wants to do something, he consults liability
laws, marriage laws, and so on. There one finds all that is needed,
and the laws then have to be applied to individual cases.
Inasmuch as human beings still retain something of the
Chinese in them — and there always remains a little —
they don't really feel comfortable about laws and must always have
recourse to a lawyer. They are even at sea sometimes with general
concepts. As for the Chinese, they never had a legal code; they had
nothing at all of what later took on the nature of a state. All they
had was what each individual could judge in his individual situation.
So, to continue. The whole Chinese language was
influenced by this fact. When we say “table,” we at once
picture a flat surface with one, two or three legs, and so on, but it
must be something that can stand up like a table. If anyone were to
tell me a chair is a table, I would say: A table? You stupid! that's
not a table, that's a chair. And if someone else came along and
called the blackboard a table, I'd call him something even stronger,
for it's not a table at all but a blackboard. With our language we
have to call each thing by its own special name.
That is not so with Chinese. I will put this to you
hypothetically; it will not be a precise picture, but you will get
the idea from it. Say, then, that Chinese has the sounds OA, IOA,
TAO*, for instance.
*The following pronunciation:
A: English ah, as in father
I: English ee, as in feet
It has then a certain sound for table, but this same
sound signifies many other things too. Thus, let us say, such a sound
might mean tree, brook, also perhaps pebble. Then it has another
sound, let's say, that can mean star, as well as blackboard, and —
for instance — bench. (These meanings may not be correct in
detail; I mean only to show the way the Chinese language is built
up.) And now the Chinese person knows: there are two sounds here, say
LAO and BAO, each meaning things that are quite different but also
both meaning brook. So he puts them together: BAOLAO. In this way he
builds up his language. He does not build it up from names given to
single things, but according to the various meanings of the various
sounds. A sound may mean tree but it may also mean brook. When,
therefore, he combines two sounds, both of which — beside many
other things — mean brook, the other man knows that he means
brook. But when he utters only one sound, no one knows what he means.
In writing there are the same complications. So the Chinese have an
extraordinarily complicated language and an extraordinarily
complicated script.
And indeed, gentlemen, a great deal follows from this.
It follows that for them it is not so easy to learn to read and write
as it is for us-nor even to speak. With us, reading and writing can
really be called simple; indeed, we are unhappy when our children
don't learn quickly to read and write — we think it is “mere
child's play.” With the Chinese this is not so; in China one
grows quite old before one can write or in any way master the
language. So you can easily imagine that the ordinary people are not
at all able to do it, that only those who can go on learning up to a
great age can at last become proficient. In China, therefore, noble
rank is conferred as a matter of course from a spiritual basis on
those who are cultured, and this spiritually high rank is called into
being by the nature of the language and script. Here again it is not
the same as in the West, where various degrees of nobility can be
conferred and then passed on from one generation to another. In China
rank can be attained only through education and scholarship.
It is interesting, gentlemen, is it not, that if we
judge superficially we would surely say: then we don't want to be
Chinese. But please don't assume that I am saying we ought to become
Chinese, or even particularly to admire China. That is what some
people may easily say about it. Two years ago when we had a Congress
in Vienna
(see Note 6 ),
someone spoke of how some things in China were managed
even today more wisely than we manage them — and immediately
the newspapers reported that we wanted Chinese culture in Europe!
That is not what was meant. In describing the Chinese culture, praise
must be given in a certain way — but only in a certain way —
for what it has of spiritual content. But it is a primitive culture,
of a kind that can no longer be adopted by us. So you must not think
I am agitating for another China in Europe! I simply wish to describe
this most ancient of human cultures as it actually existed.
Now — to continue. What I have been saying is
related to the whole manner of Chinese thinking and feeling. Indeed,
the Chinese (and also the Japanese of more ancient times) occupied
themselves a great deal, a very great deal, with art — with
their kind of art. They painted, for instance. Now when we paint, it
is quite a different affair from the Chinese painting. You see, when
we paint (I will make this as simple as possible), when we paint a
ball, for example, if the light falls on it, then the ball is bright
in one part and dark over in the other, for it is in shadow; the
light is falling beyond it. There again, on the light side, the ball
is rather bright because there the light is reflected. Then we say:
that side is in shadow, for the light is reflected on the other side;
and then we have to paint also the shadow the ball throws on the
ground. This is one of the characteristics of our painting: we must
have light and shade on the objects. When we paint a face, we paint
it bright where the light falls, and on the other side we make it
dark. When we paint the whole man, if we paint properly, we put
shadow in the same way falling on the ground.
But beside this we must pay attention to something else
in our picture. Suppose I am standing here and want to paint. I see
Herr Aisenpreis sitting in front; there behind, I see Herr Meier, and
the two gentlemen at the back quite small. Were I to photograph them,
in the photograph also they would come out quite small. When I paint,
I paint in such a way that the gentlemen sitting in the front row are
quite big, the next behind smaller, the next again still smaller and
the one sitting right at the back has a really small head, a really
small face. You see, when we paint we take perspective into account.
We have to do it that way. We have to show light and shade and also
perspective. This is inherent in the way we think.
Now the Chinese in their painting did not recognize
light and shade, nor did they allow for perspective, because they did
not see as we see. They took no notice of light and shade and no
notice of perspective. This is what they would have said: Aisenpreis
is certainly not a giant, any more than Meier is a dwarf. We can't
put them together in a picture as if one were a giant and the other a
dwarf, for that would be a lie, it is not the truth! That's the way
they thought about things, and they painted as they thought. When the
Chinese and the Japanese learn painting in their way, they do not
look at objects from the outside, they think themselves right into
the objects. They paint everything from within outwards as they
imagine things for themselves. This, gentlemen, constitutes the very
nature of Chinese and Japanese painting.
You will realize, therefore, that learning to see came
only later to mankind. Human beings in that early China thought only
in pictures, they did not form general concepts like “table”
and so on, but what they saw they apprehended inwardly. This is not
to be wondered at, for the Chinese descended from a culture during
which seeing was different. Today we see as we do because there is
air between us and the object. This air was simply not there in the
regions where the Chinese were first established. In the times from
which the Chinese have come down, people did not see in our way. In
those ancient times it would have been nonsense to speak of light and
shade, for there was not yet any such thing in the density the air
then had. And so the Chinese still have no light and shade in their
painting, and still no perspective. That came only later. From this
you can see the Chinese think in quite a different way; they do not
think as men do who came later.
However, this did not in the least hinder the Chinese
from going very far in outer cleverness. When I was young — it
is rather different now — we learned in school that Berthold
Schwarz
(see Note 7 )
invented gunpowder, and this was told us as if there had
never been gunpowder before. So Berthold Schwarz, while he was doing
alchemistic experiments, produced gunpowder out of sulphur, nitre and
carbon. But — the Chinese had made gunpowder thousands of years
earlier!
Also we learned in school that Gutenberg
(see Note 8 )
invented the art of printing. We did learn many things that were correct,
but in this case it looked to us as if there had formerly been no
knowledge of printing. Actually, the Chinese already possessed this
knowledge thousands of years earlier. They also had the art of
woodcarving; they could cut the most wonderful things out of wood. In
such external things the Chinese have had an advanced culture. This
was in its turn the last remnant of a former culture still more
advanced, for one recognizes that this Chinese art goes back to
something even higher.
Thus it is characteristic of the Chinese to think not in
concepts but in pictures, and to project themselves right into
things. They have been able to make all those things which depend
upon outer invention (except when it's a matter of steam-engines or
something similar). So the present condition of the Chinese, which we
may say is degenerate and uncultivated, has actually come about from
centuries of ill-treatment at the hands of the Europeans.
You see that here is a culture that is really spiritual
in a certain sense — and really ancient, that goes back to ten
thousand years before our time. Much later, in the millennium
preceding Christianity, individuals like Lao Tse
(see Note 9 )
and Confucius
(see Note 10 )
made the first written record of the knowledge possessed by the
Chinese. Those masters simply wrote down what had arisen out of the
intercourse among families in this old kingdom. They were not
conscious of inventing rules of a moral or ethical nature; they were
simply recording their experience of Chinese conduct. Previously,
this had been done by word of mouth. Thus everything at that time was
basically different. That is what can still be perceived today in the
Chinese.
In contrast to this, it is hardly possible to see any
longer the old culture of the Japanese people, because they have been
entirely Europeanized. They follow European culture in everything.
That they did not develop this culture out of themselves can be seen
from their inability to discover on their own initiative what is
purely European. The following, for example, really happened. The
Japanese were to have steamships and saw no reason why they should
not be able to manage them perfectly well themselves. They watched
how to turn the ship, for instance, how to open the screw, and so on.
Their instructors, the Europeans, worked with them for a time, and
finally one day the Japanese said proudly: Now we can manage by
ourselves, and we will appoint our own captain! So the European
instructors were put ashore and off steamed the Japanese to the high
seas. When they were ready to turn back, they turned the screw, and
the ship turned round beautifully — but no one knew how to
close the screw, and there was the ship whirling round and round on
the sea, just turning and turning! The European instructors watching
from the shore had to take a boat and bring the revolving ship to a
standstill.
Perhaps you remember Goethe's poem, “The
Magician's Apprentice” where the apprentice watches the spells
of the old master-magician? And then, to save himself the trouble of
fetching water, he learns a magic verse by which he will be able to
make a broom into a water-carrier. One day when the old magician is
out, the apprentice begins to put this magic into practice, and
recites the words to start the broom working. The broom gets really
down to business, and fetches water, and more water, and always more
water. But the apprentice forgets how to stop it. Just imagine if you
had your room flooded, and your broom went on fetching more and more
water. In his desperation the apprentice chops the broom in two —
then there are two water-carriers! When everything is drowned in
water, the old master returns and says the right words for the broom
to become a broom again.
As you know, the poem has been done in eurythmy
recently, and the audience enjoyed it immensely. Well, the same kind
of thing happened with the Japanese: they didn't know how to turn
back the screw, and so the ship continued to go round and round. A
regular ship's dance went on out there until the instructors on land
could get a boat and come to the rescue.
Surely it is clear from all this that the European sort
of invention is impossible for either the Chinese or the Japanese.
But as to older inventions such as gunpowder, printing and so forth,
they had already gone that far in much more ancient times than the
Europeans. You see, the Chinese are much more interested in the world
at large, in the world of the stars, in the universe as a whole.
Another people who point back to ancient days are the
Indians. They do not go so far back as the Chinese, but they too have
an old culture. Their culture may be said to have arisen from the sea
later than the Chinese. The people who were the later Indian people
came more from the north, settling down in what is now India as the
land became free of water.
Now whereas the Chinese were more interested in the
world outside, could project themselves into anything, the Indian
people brooded more within themselves. The Chinese reflected more
about the world — in their own way, but about the world; the
Indians reflected chiefly about themselves, about man himself. Hence
the culture that arose in India was more spiritualized. In the most
remote times Indian culture was still free of religion; only later
did religion enter into it. Man was their principal object of study,
but their study was of an inward kind.
This too I can best make clear by describing the way the
Indians used to draw and paint. The Chinese, looking at a man,
painted him simply by entering into him with their thinking —
without light and shade or perspective. That is really the way they
painted him. Thus, if a Chinese had wanted to paint Herr Burle, he
would have thought his way into him; he would not have made him dark
there and light here, as we would do today, he would not have painted
light and shadow, for they did not yet exist for the Chinese. Nor
would he have made the hands bigger by comparison because of their
being in front. But if the Chinese had painted Herr Burle, then Herr
Burle would really have been there in the picture!
It was quite different with the Indians. Now just
imagine the Indians were going to paint a picture: they would have
started by painting a head. They too had no such thing as
perspective. But they would at once have had the idea that a head
could often be different, so they would make another, then a third
again different, and a fourth, a fifth would have occurred to them.
In this way they would gradually have had twenty or thirty heads
side-by-side! These would all have been suggested to them by the one
head. Or if they were painting a plant, they imagined at once that
this could be different, and then there arose a number of young
plants growing out of the older one. This is how it was in the case
of the Indians in those very ancient times. They had tremendous
powers of imagination. The Chinese had none at all and drew only the
single thing, but made their way into this in thought. The Indians
had a powerful imagination.
Now you see, gentlemen, those heads are not there.
Really, if you look at Herr Burle, you see only one head. If you're
drawing him here on the board, you can draw only one head. You are
therefore not painting what is outwardly real if you paint twenty or
thirty heads; you are painting something thought-out in your mind.
The whole Indian culture took on that character; it was an inner
culture of the mind, of the spirit. Hence when you see spiritual
beings as the Indians thought of them, you see them represented with
numbers of heads, numbers of arms, or in such a way that the animal
nature of the body is made manifest.
You see, the Indians are quite different people from the
Chinese. The Chinese lack imagination whereas the Indians have been
full of it from the beginning. Hence the Indians were predisposed to
turn their culture gradually into a religious one — which up to
this day the Chinese have never done: there is no religion in China.
Europeans, who are not given to making fine distinctions, speak of a
Chinese religion, but the Chinese themselves do not acknowledge such
a thing. They say: you people in Europe have a religion, the Indians
have a religion, but we have nothing resembling a religion. This
predisposition to religion was possible in the Indians only because
they had a particular knowledge of something of which the Chinese
were ignorant, namely, of the human body. The Chinese knew very well
how to put themselves into something external to them. Now when there
are vinegar and salt and pepper on our dinner table and we want to
know how they taste, we first have to sample them on our tongue. For
the Chinese in ancient times this was not necessary. They already
tasted things that were still outside them. They could really feel
their way into things and were quite familiar with what was external.
Hence they had certain expressions showing that they took part in the
outside world. We no longer have such expressions, or they signify at
most something of a figurative nature. For the Chinese they signified
reality. When I am becoming acquainted with someone and say of him:
What a sour fellow he is! — I mean it figuratively; we do not
imagine him to be really sour as vinegar is sour. But for the Chinese
this meant that the man actually evoked in them a sour taste.
It was not so with the Indians; they could go much more
deeply into their own bodies. If we go deeply into our own bodies, it
is only when certain conditions are present — then we feel
something there. Whenever we've had a meal and it remains in our
stomach without being properly digested, we feel pain in our stomach.
If our liver is out of order and cannot secrete sufficient bile, we
feel pain on the right side of our body — then we are getting a
liver complaint. When our lungs secrete too freely so that they are
more full of mucus than they should be, then we feel there is
something wrong with our lungs, that they are out of order. Today
human beings are conscious of their bodies only in those organs that
are sick. Those Indians of ancient times were conscious even of their
healthy organs; they knew how the stomach, how the liver felt. When
anyone wants to know this today, he has to take a corpse and dissect
it; then he can examine the condition of the individual organs
inside. No one today knows what a liver looks like unless they
dissect it; it is only spiritual science that is able to describe it.
The Indians could think of inner man; they would have been able to
draw all his organs. With an Indian, however, if you had asked him to
feel his liver and draw what he felt, he would have said: Liver? —
well, here is one liver, here's another, and here's another, and he
would have drawn twenty or thirty livers side-by-side.
So, gentlemen, you have there a different story. If I
draw a complete man and give him twenty heads, I have a fanciful
picture. But if I draw a human liver with twenty or thirty others
beside it, I am drawing something not wholly fantastic; it would have
been possible for these twenty or thirty livers really to have come
into being! Every man has his distinctive form of liver, but there is
no absolute necessity for that form; it could very well be different.
This possibility of difference, this spiritual aspect of the matter,
was far better understood by the Indians than by those who came
later. The Indians said: When we draw a single object, it is not the
whole truth; we have to conceive the matter spiritually. So the
Indians have had a lofty spiritual culture. They have never set great
store by the outer world but have had a spiritual conception of
everything.
Now the Indians took it for granted that learning should
be acquired in accordance with this attitude; therefore, to become an
educated man was a lengthy affair. For, as you can imagine, with them
it was not just a matter of going deeply into oneself and then being
capable all at once of knowing everything. When we are responsible
for the instruction of young people, we have first to teach them to
read and write, imparting to them in this way something from outside.
But this was not so in the case of the ancient Indians. When they
wanted to teach someone, they showed him how to withdraw into his
inner depths; he was to turn his attention away from the world
entirely and to focus it upon his inner being.
Now if anyone sits and looks outwards, he sees you all
sitting there and his attention is directed to the outer world. This
would have been the way with the Chinese; they directed their
attention outwards. The Indians taught otherwise. They said: You must
learn to gaze at the tip of your nose. Then the student had to keep
his eyes fixed so that he saw nothing but the tip of his nose,
nothing else for hours at a time, without even moving his eyes.
Yes indeed, gentlemen, the European will say: How
terrible to train people always to be contemplating the tip of their
nose! True! for the European there is something terrible in it; it
would be impossible for him to do such a thing. But in ancient India
that was the custom. In order to learn anything an Indian did not
have to write with his fingers, he had to look at the tip of his
nose. But this sitting for hours gazing at the tip of his nose led
him into his own inner being, led him to know his lungs, his liver,
and so forth. For the tip of the nose is the same in the second hour
as it is in the first; nothing special is to be seen there. From the
tip of his nose, however, the student was able to behold more and
more of what was within him; within him everything became brighter
and brighter. That is why he had to carry out the exercise.
Now, as you know, when we walk about, we are accustomed
to do so on our feet and this going about on our feet has an effect
upon us. We experience ourselves as upright human beings when we walk
on our feet. This was discouraged for those in India who had to learn
something. While learning they had to have one leg like this and sit
on it, while the other leg was in this position. Thus they sat,
gazing fixedly at the tip of their nose, so that they became quite
unused to standing; they had the feeling they were not upright men
but crumpled up like an embryo in a mother's womb. You can see the
Buddha portrayed in this way. It was thus that the Indians had to
learn. Gradually they began to look within themselves, learned to
know what is within man, came to have knowledge of the human physical
body in an entirely spiritual way.
When we look within ourselves, we are conscious of our
paltry thinking; we are slightly aware of our feeling but almost not
at all of our willing. The Indians felt a whole world in the human
being. You can imagine what different men they were from those who
came later. They developed, as you know, a tremendous fantasy,
expressed poetically in their books of wisdom — later in the
Vedas and in the Vedantic philosophy, which still fill us with awe.
It figured in their legends concerning super-sensible things, which
still today amaze us.
And look at the contrast! Here were the Indians, there
were the Chinese over there, and the Chinese were a prosaic people
interested in the outer world, a people who did not live from within.
The Indians were a people who looked entirely inward, contemplating
within them the spiritual nature of the physical body.
So — I have begun to tell you about the most
ancient inhabitants of the earth. Next time I will carry it further,
so that we will finally arrive at the time we live in now.
Please continue to bring your questions. There may be
details that you would like me to enlarge upon, and I can always at
some following meeting answer the questions they have raised. But I
can't tell you when the next session will be, because now I must go
to Holland. I will send you word in ten days or so.
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