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Rudolf Steiner e.Lib
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Man in the Past, Present, and Future; The Evolution of Consciousness
Rudolf Steiner e.Lib Document
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Man in the Past, Present, and Future; The Evolution of Consciousness
Schmidt Number: S-5428
On-line since: 19th April, 2004
MAN IN THE PAST, THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE
Stuttgart, 16th September 1923
You will have been able to realize from the lecture yesterday that a
certain state of consciousness, which was an actual experience to men
of earlier times, has to some extent been lost. I told you that the
special sort of waking consciousness we have today, which consists
predominantly in more or less abstract ideas or at the best in shadowy
pictures, did not then exist in the same form, and that in its place
there was a kind of waking-dreaming, or dreaming-waking. This was not
experienced as we experience dreams but as a living picture which
corresponded pretty well with spiritual reality. There was a condition
of sleep which, though it was dreamless, left an after-effect of the
kind described, and there was a third state of consciousness beyond
this which was experienced as a resting in the surging Moon-forces,
forces which, reaching under the Earth, lift man out of earthly
gravity and allow him to experience his cosmic existence. The
essential point about these older conditions of soul was that they
allowed man to experience his cosmic existence. In our ordinary everyday
consciousness there is only a shadowy image left of that older state
of consciousness a shadowy image that is noticed by very few
and is mostly entirely unheeded.
I will try to describe this survival of a primeval state of
consciousness. When we observe our dreams chaotic as they are
we find that all sorts of experiences drawn from earthly
existence flow into them. Things long forgotten crop up altered in
many ways, even things which passed unnoticed at the time. The times,
too, at which events took place may be thoroughly confused. But if you
look more closely into the details of a dream, you will discover the
remarkable fact that in essence practically everything which crops up
in it is related to the happenings of the last three days. You may
perhaps have a dream about something that happened to you twenty-five
years before; you may dream of it in all its vividness, though
somewhat altered in detail. But if you study it closely you will
always discover something of the following sort: in this dream about
an event of twenty-five years before, a character appears whom we will
call Edward, and you will find that you have somewhere heard the name
casually in passing, or your eye has caught it as you were reading. In
the details of a dream, even the remotest, there is always some
relation, however insignificant, to something which has happened
during the last three days. The reason is that we bear within
ourselves the events of the last two, three or four days the
period is of course approximate in a quite different way from
those which occurred earlier.
Our perceptions are, as you know, taken up into our astral organism
and our ego-organism, and the events thus perceived do at first live
in direct connection with our consciousness. What we have experienced
in the course of three days that is, when at least three days
have passed goes more intensively into our feelings. Ordinarily
we do not notice these things, but they are realities all the same.
The reason is that all we perceive or think, which is taken up into
the astral organism and the ego-organism, has also to be somehow
imprinted upon the etheric body, the body of formative forces, and at
least to some extent even upon the physical body. This process takes
two to four days, so that we have to sleep two or three times on
anything we experience before it is imprinted on the etheric and
physical bodies. Only then is it firmly fixed in the etheric body so
that it may be a permanent memory. Thus in man there is a perpetual
inner reciprocity, a sort of struggle, between the astral and etheric
bodies, and the result is always that what we have experienced
consciously is imprinted into the denser, more material elements of
our being. After three or four days, what was at first only a
transitory sense-experience is transferred into the body of formative
forces and into the physical body.
But how little of what I have been describing actually comes into
men's consciousness nowadays! Yet it is something which is perpetually
taking place in the life of the human body and soul. Every experience
of which we have been aware has to wait three or four days before it
is fully our own. It fluctuates between the astral and etheric bodies,
and cannot decide one might say whether it has really
been impressed into the etheric and into the physical body.
This is something of extraordinary significance. Remember that
basically our true being is only our ego and astral body. We cannot
really claim that the etheric body is our own property. In this
materialistic age people talk as though the etheric and physical
bodies were their, whereas actually they belong to the whole Cosmos.
And so when in the course of three or four days, what our ego and
astral body have experienced is passed on to the etheric and physical
bodies, it is then part, not only of ourselves but of the Cosmos. It
is only for three days that we can claim any action of ours in the
world as significant for ourselves alone. After that we have, as it
were, imprinted it on the Universe, and it rests within the whole
Universe and belongs not only to us but also to the gods.
In very early periods of human evolution, as a result of that state of
consciousness which is now lost and which has deeper than sleep, men
had a definite impression of this remarkable fact, and the Initiates
were able to give information about what lay behind it. Particularly
in the epoch of which I spoke yesterday, the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, it
was only a vague feeling that men had. But the priests were initiated
into the real nature of the fact. Whereas nowadays Initiation must be
a purely inner experience of soul and spirit, at the most with symbols
and rites of a physical nature only, in those earlier days Initiation
was an external process and the effects of that external process
passed over into man's inner being. To take one example: when a man
was to be initiated, for three or four days he was put by the
Hierophant who was initiating him, into this state of consciousness
which we have now lost. The purpose of this was to enable him to see
for himself what happens during these three days in the world external
to him, and how it finds entrance into the real being of man. The
Initiate was enabled to see what happens to an idea, to an experience
or a feeling, before it becomes a man's own property.
Our materialistic attitude to the world today affords us no conception
at all of the extraordinary significance of the wisdom that lay within
this condition that is so deeply concealed from us. I can perhaps best
explain to you what was accomplished in the three days of this
Initiation during that dim condition of consciousness if I remind you
first of our ordinary dream-life with an attitude based purely on what
we might call scientific method, there is still something
extraordinarily profound involved.
How is this dream-life really revealed? There are of course many kinds
of dreams, but let us keep for the moment to what consists largely in
the recollection of past experiences. Pictures of these experiences
arise in dreams. How do they arise? You are aware that they appear
radically transformed. This transformation may go a very long way; for
instance, we may take the case of a tailor who in his ordinary life
has never had the occasion of making a Minister's state robes; he may
have made a number of coats and been very proud of them, but for all
that he has not the slightest chance of making such a robe as he now
dreams he makes. In a dream like this there may be a number of
different influences at work. For instance, the man may in a former
life have been the attendant of a Roman magistrate and among his
duties had to help him on with his toga. A dim feeling of all this
survives and what a man experiences in this life may be colored by
what streams over from a previous one.
This is just an example of how the content of dreams may be altered;
the important fact is that they undergo the intense transformations we
all know. One must really ask what is contained in these dreams, what
is at work in them. It is external events which give the occasion for
this type of dream, but the external events make their appearance in a
wholly altered form.
The reason for this is quite beyond the conception of our ordinary
scientific ideas. The sort of law which we should recognize as
scientific, the laws we look for in the external world by our method
of observation and experiment, cease to be valid as soon as we pass
inside the skin of a human being. We should be very much mistaken were
we to assume that the natural laws laid down in the laboratory were
valid within the human being. Not only are the substances transformed
within our organism when we consume them in the ordinary course of
nourishment, but the laws of the substances are also changed, down to
the smallest atoms. What appears in our dreams is not just the
abstract reflection of some reality; in our dreams we see the weaving
of the organic laws within which man has his being. Dreams are much
closer to us than is our normal abstract thinking; they show the way
in which external substances act within man. Our dreams are a protest
against the part of reality that is shackled within the laws of
Nature. From the time you go to sleep until the time you wake, you
live in a world where according to the scientist everything is
controlled by these laws. Actually the moment you enter, even to the
slightest degree, into the spiritual world through your dreams, your
dream-experience arises as a protest against the laws of Nature.
Dreams cannot run their course in the way of external events, or they
would be very much like actual waking life. Dreams which emerge from
real sleep are in their make-up a protest against the laws of Nature,
and they concern us much more intimately.
In this regard modern investigators of a materialistic turn of mind
have made some interesting discoveries. Some of you will know a book
by a man called Staudenmaier, entitled Experimental Magic,
which appeared a good many years ago and is typical of the spiritual
constitution of many modern scientific thinkers. Staudenmaier wanted
to find out if there is any reality in the spiritual world. Of
Anthroposophy he admitted that he knew only what its opponents had
written. People don't like studying Anthroposophy; they find it
difficult, particularly if they are typical scientific thinkers of
today.
Staudenmaier attempted, by spiritualistic methods, to get into the
spiritual world. He dulled his consciousness until he was in a sort of
mediumistic state; then he began automatic writing and was surprised
that he wrote a lot of nonsense which did not at all agree with what
he knew about reality. In particular, the fact that spirits seemed to
be speaking to him did not agree with it! He knew that was impossible
and yet what he wrote assured him that spirits were speaking. He was
appalled by the lies that these non-existent spirits told him. You
should read in his book all the incredible lies which flowed into his
writing. He became to use no worse a word a medium, and
he did not know what to make of it all. A friend advised him to give
the whole thing up and to lead a normal, sensible life and go out
shooting. So he did, and he went out after magpies; but even there he
found that whatever it was he had stirred up inside himself continued
its activity, and he could not rid himself of it. If he looked up at a
tree, he saw, not a magpie but a fearful dragon with terrible fangs,
which looked at him with horrifying eyes. The same things happened
everywhere, and he lived in an inner struggle to get himself back into
a normal condition.
I mention all this because here we have experimental evidence that
there is an immediate protest against the external order of Nature as
soon as we are not merely dreaming while awake but are using this
device to contact and arouse the inner being of man. Obviously we
regard it all as lies. When we have thought of a man as a friend and
as a decent fellow, and if after he has got into this mediumistic
condition we see him putting out his tongue at us or making long
noses, then inevitably we say that the spiritual world is lying and
that this experience is simply that of a dream. Now there is something
in this. Whenever man approaches the spiritual world inside himself,
within which everything inside his skin is enclosed, there is an
immediate protest from this sphere against the natural order. It is
not surprising that when a man enters it with underdeveloped faculties
of judgment, all kinds of elemental beings appear and create delusion.
But there is always this protest against the natural order when we
approach the spiritual; and ordinary dreams make this clear.
We ought to realize that we then enter a quite different order of
being, and, even though it appears only in the fleeting form of the
dream, it is all the same a protest against those admirable laws of
Nature which we establish by laboratory experiments. This is the first
step into the spiritual world where we immediately find the protest
against natural laws, which are, as it were, robbed of their dignity
as soon as we penetrate a little into man's inner being.
The old Initiates knew very well through their three days' Initiation
that there is not only a natural order, but that within and behind
that natural order there is a spiritual one. It is moreover still
possible for anyone who has acquired some knowledge of Initiation to
penetrate with modern methods into these things and to pass through
the experiences a really fearful torment of the soul. When dreams
begin to weave their forms we actually enter a world where the laws of
Nature collapse, and just because the ordinary laws no longer hold
good, their interrelations change, however many recollections of
ordinary life may still be effective. If we have come to regard
natural laws as the last word, we find ourselves face to face with
nothingness. It is painful, almost tragic, for a modern man, as he
passes through Initiation, to experience entry into a sphere of being
where this protest against the laws of Nature is encountered; he feels
that everything he had got from his intellect, and which was
determined by the laws of Nature is swamped. His soul can no longer
breathe because he has been too much accustomed to the natural order.
He finally realizes that an altogether different world is pressing in
from a quite different direction. This is no longer a natural but a
spiritual order, which is throughout permeated with what in the depths
of our present-day human conscience we experience as a moral
world-order. He gradually learns that on the one hand there is the
order of Nature perceived by the senses, for which the laws have been
established by natural science; on the other hand, if he moves out of
this natural order, he moves into a world that protests against the
natural order. As he experiences this protest, a sort of luminous
water of life pours round him and he can once again breathe
this is the moral order which ultimately expands into the spiritual.
The highest knowledge gained by the ancient Initiates was when they
discovered the protest against the physical world-order and saw the
true moral world-order extend into the physical. It is indeed
experienced in a much weaker degree during the three days described:
whatever we experience in the external world, whether actions or
feelings, takes three or four days to be imprinted on our organism.
But when the process is completed, the imprinted form is not like that
which we experienced externally; it becomes an impulse demanding a
moral expression very different from the natural order. If we could
see how our experiences have changed in our inner being during those
three of our days, we should see that what we experienced in its
natural form during our earthly existence has been imprinted in our
external being and is no less real than it was in the external world.
But now it lives within us as the impulse of a moral world-order by
means of which we may move further over the ocean of life. Thus we
carry the results of what we have experienced naturally as the moral
foundation for our later life.
In recent periods of human evolution, however, when men plunged into
that lower sleep, if I may call it so, that Earth-embraced
sphere, he plunged into the outer ether. There his experiences find
their compensation. He is not merely set within the moral world-order
as regards the direction of his inner life; in that lower sleep he is
set within the moral order of the Cosmos. Since this deep sleep has
been lost to our forms of consciousness and we now have only a very
faint echo of it in the three-days' experience described, this contact
with the Cosmos has been lost also. Indeed, we should have been
gradually thrust out of the self-subsisting moral world-order if a
particular event had not occurred in the course of Earth-evolution.
The experience undergone by the older Initiates so as to be able to
tell men what happens during those three days, was undergone as a
unique world-event, as an event in world-history, by the Christ Being
who descended from spiritual worlds into the body of Jesus of Nazareth
and, though a God, lived a truly human life. That experience of the
three days now became available for all mankind. What could previously
be discovered in the sleep of deep consciousness, taking place in man
not consciously but at least subconsciously, in a natural way, had to
be gone through in order that man might find his connection with what
was brought about for earthly humanity by Christ in the Mystery of
Golgotha. This was the vicarious deed of a God. Man was to take a step
upwards in his evolution and to experience in moral form through
Christianity what had previously come to him naturally. The Mystery of
Golgotha is therefore closely related to the whole meaning of earthly
evolution, because of its relation to the evolution of man's
consciousness. We can understand what was to be accomplished by the
Mystery of Golgotha only if we can look back on what had once occurred
naturally and was now to occur morally.
In this respect, however, our modern consciousness, which runs its
course between waking, sleeping and dreaming, has not yet attained
inner harmony. Since the fifteenth century, when this modern
consciousness first received its imprint, it has looked on Nature
one-sidedly and has claimed to understand the order of Nature,
considering that what is found there constitutes reality. Beyond this
reality men will not look; they will not press forward to that
strengthened form of human knowledge to which the spiritual reveals
itself just as the natural order does. Thus it has become customary to
speak of the moral order as of unknown origin. To do this was not
strictly honest, since the common view of Nature cannot admit any
reality in the moral order. One could, even if a little dishonestly,
get over this difficulty by saying that on the one side we have
knowledge, on the other, faith; and that the moral order belongs to the realm of
faith; that knowledge cannot become faith nor faith, knowledge; and
that the moral order belongs to the realm of faith. Such is the
convenient formula which has become customary. The distinction has
even come to be regarded as something specifically Christian, though
even five or six hundred years ago no genuine Christianity, and
certainly not original Christianity, would have admitted the
distinction. Even today it is not yet Catholic dogma, however much it
may be Catholic custom, to distinguish in this way between faith and
knowledge.
We cannot get a proper notion of the relation between the natural and
the moral-spiritual order because we are not aware of the transition
between them; because the dream is not understood which leads out of
the natural order and protests against it, thus preparing the way. If
we have gone through this preparatory stage, we can make contact with
the moral order of the world.
Only an honest view of the past of mankind, and of something which
modern man does not yet possess, can lead to a satisfying picture of
all this. Failing that, even historical documents of ancient times
remain just things which can be studied but convey no real meaning.
Now we spoke this morning a good deal about the opponents of
Anthroposophy. I could say much that would be for their good, though
certainly not in their favor. The comments of our opponents ... I
often have to recall an anecdote supposed to be based on truth which
the famous Professor Kuno Fischer was fond of telling. He used to
relate how he had had two schoolfellows they may have been
brothers with an uncle who was a thorough simpleton. The boys
got to the stage of learning logarithms and having to buy log tables.
The uncle caught sight of these tables and when he saw the mass of
figures he asked his nephews what they were. The boys were completely
at a loss to explain, but at last the young rascals conceived the idea
of telling him they were the house-numbers of all Europe. The uncle
believed them and finally thought it an excellent idea to be able to
know at a glance all the house-numbers of London, Paris, and so on.
Now people who are unable to see with insight into the meaning of the
ancient documents are like the old uncle with his log tables. Our
modern historians who edit these ancient documents do not tell us much
more about them than the uncle did about logarithms when he took them
to be the house-numbers of Europe. We must make it clear to ourselves
how far their interpretation, based on present-day abstract thought,
is removed from the real spiritual facts. We must have the
determination to do that, or we shall never be able to see how man has
developed into the present out of a past when he was very different.
We are living at a time when all sorts of inner conflicts must arise
from our present-day experience of sleeping, waking and dreaming, if
we are in the least capable of real self-observation. Just as men lost
the real knowledge of that deep sleep which was so significant for
them that the Initiates had to explain its nature to them, so in
modern times our ordinary sleep tends to crumble to pieces. I do not
mean that in the future men will dream the whole night through, but
rather that their dreams will be dulled. Just as man has passed since
olden times from that waking dreaming to our modern
abstract thinking, our present-day chaotic dreams will be dulled, and
that duller kind of sleep will become normal. Dreams will no longer
extend into our consciousness, which will be overlaid entirely by our
present-day form of abstract logical thinking. But then a
super-consciousness will emerge, already apparent to anyone who can
understand these things. This super-consciousness is concerned with
the human will and with the effects of the will when it acts on the
nervous system. If with the help of Initiation-knowledge you observe
the unrestrained way in which human will is developing, you will be
able to see how various psychological manifestations, sometimes going
as far as actual physical illness, are really the herald of a form of
consciousness higher than our present waking consciousness.
But there is something beyond this which men will not yet be able to
experience unless they can actually acquire spiritual science: a
science, that is, which needs a quite different sort of thinking from
the normal and is in reality far more practical than the theoretical
attitude to life, which is in fact completely unpractical. This
spiritual science adds an inner living power of thinking to ordinary
abstract thinking. Yet this is not something we can arbitrarily add or
neglect; it occurs because an organism is coming into being within man
which did not exist in earlier times and of which only the first
foundations have so far emerged. The way in which the blood circulates
through man's limbs, his arms, legs, hands and feet, is continually
changing. What we often call nervousness (a nervous state)
nowadays is an expression of the fact that a higher condition is
striving to make its way into man, but that he is unwilling to accept
it because of its strangeness, and this produces a restlessness which
will cease only when he makes the new consciousness his own.
Thus we can visualize three further states of consciousness towards
which man is making his way: a dulled dream life, waking, and a
heightened state of waking. All the turmoil and upheaval which show
themselves even in external conditions today are due to the fact that
men are trying, for the most part quite unconsciously, to fight
against something that is approaching humanity from the spiritual
worlds. It is struggling to make its way especially into the human
will. We shall have to understand as nowadays we do not
that as soon as the spiritual comes into action, we pass at
once into a sphere where a protest is uttered against natural laws. We
shall also not properly understand the Mystery of Golgotha unless we
can rise to the realization that the full import of that Mystery
cannot be attained by our ordinary knowledge. To grasp its full
meaning we have to develop a new faculty; we have to pass with right
understanding beyond mere dreaming, which indicates a natural process,
and penetrate to an understanding of the other side of being. It is
from the side of the spirit that we have to acquire the elements of
understanding adequate for future comprehension of the Mystery of
Golgotha. What we must do is to set our experience of the present in
this way between the past and the future, and so feel ourselves as a
sort of bridge between them. Thus we shall increasingly achieve the
understanding required for the use of spiritual truths alongside the
natural.
It is easy to understand our ordinary illusions, just because the
things that are false are so uncommonly logical. We do not suspect
that falsehood can be so logical. What could be more logical than to
argue as follows: first observe how long it takes some particular
geological stratum to reach a particular thickness, then, if we are
dealing with another stratum, divide the smaller into the greater
thickness and multiply it by the time taken by that stratum to form,
and so reach the conclusion that some epoch, the Silurian or Devonian
for instance, was twenty or 200 million years ago. The arithmetical
calculation is quite correct and there is nothing to be said against
it. It is only ordinary logic that is here deceiving us.
This sort of logic always reminds me of the logic one of the greatest
mathematicians of all times applied to his own life. When he had
already reached a considerable age he suddenly became ill with some
kind of lung trouble; and seeing that he had had a good deal to do
with doctors, he had the idea of calculating how many tiny abscesses
would have to be got rid of in order to shake off the lung trouble.
His calculations about the further development of the illness showed
him that it would take fifteen years, and then he would be cured.
But ... he died two years later. That was the reality; the other
was only logic.
The same sort of thing applies to the relationship between reality in
the Cosmos and our ordinary logic. Things are very easily proved by
logic, and the logic is perfectly sound. It is just as sound as if we
calculated as follows: Our heart goes through certain phases of
development; in a definite period it will have reached a definite
condition; then we calculate how long it would take to reach that
condition and the answer is 300 years. Then we can calculate backwards
300 years and see what our heart looked like 300 years ago.
Unfortunately we were not alive, at least as physical beings, 300
years ago, and we shall not be alive 300 years hence. Equally the
Earth did not exist in those past ages that are worked out by the
geologists. The destinies undergone by the Earth can be known only in
spiritual terms. That is the distressing thing about modern science:
it can prove so logically what is really an illusion, and its proofs
tell us nothing about reality.
Human beings today, though people do not realize it consciously
because they refuse to be aware of it, are living with the unconscious
fear that they are on the way to losing touch with truth. We can see
this fear manifesting itself in various forms. Fundamentally, the
people who base their philosophy of life on materialism are very ill
at ease. They are always harassed by anxiety about the limits they
have set themselves, for their cherished limits create appalling
obstacles to living a fully human life. People already feel
intuitively that if they have nothing more than the natural order to
rely on, they cannot draw life from it; above all, that the ideas
derived from this natural order cannot lead them to any genuine
artistic and religious experience or ideas.
We must always remember that our existing religious systems originated
in the times when men were dependent on that deep sleep I have
described for their understanding of the Cosmos. All our religious
institutions derive from those times: the religious institutions, yes,
but not the Mystery of Golgotha. That is independent of any religious
view; it stands grasped by those conditions of consciousness that are
still in course of preparation. For centuries now, even millennia, the
religiously creative side of man has lain barren and the same is true
of real artistic capacity. With rare exceptions we have to live on
what we can get from various cultural revivals. We do not possess any
original power of creation. But that is what is seeking to make its
way into this age, and the general unrest typical of our civilization
today is something like the birthpangs of a new age, a new age in the
scientific and artistic spheres but also in the social, religious, and
moral spheres. The future of mankind that is what we must
strive to take to heart. There has never been a time when humanity has
been less disposed to listen to Initiation-knowledge and yet never a
time when humanity has been in greater need of it.
That is why I wished particularly to speak to you about the past,
present and future of humanity from the point of view of the evolution
of consciousness. Of course, in three lectures I could do it only in
outline, but you can work out within your own hearts what I have told
you. Because our consciousness lies closest to our own being, it is
there that men can become most easily fruitful and be stirred towards
spiritual experience. In order that present-day man may develop into a
man of the future, what we need is not any materialistic experience
but spiritual experience. Ever since we have been victims of abstract
thinking and ideas, our inner habit is really such that anyone
participating in our present culture must have the same sort of
impression from any talk of the spirit as the simple old uncle in the
story about the log. tables, and will interpret all the powerful
evidence for the entry of the spiritual as if it were like the
house-numbers of Europe. The analogy is a little far-fetched but if
you remember what I have told you, you will understand what it means.
Our normal attitude to life, or rather our ordinary judgments about
life, penetrate into all our scientific thinking and produce there a
philistinism and banality raised to the nth degree, even a moral
hypocrisy claiming scientific validity. If there is any, even the
slightest, sign of the entry of the spiritual, it is assumed to be
something which intelligent human reason, according to this
materialistic view, can only call mad.
There is a good story, founded on fact, which also illustrates this
attitude. At the beginning of the forties of the nineteenth century
the old philosopher Schelling was called from Munich to Berlin. He had
held his peace for several years, but a high reputation had preceded
him. People looked forward to lectures on philosophy of a more
positive kind, as opposed to those he himself called negative. Anyway,
in these lectures at Berlin University he was to deal with the
spiritual development of man, the essence of religion and the
Mysteries, in a much deeper fashion than anyone had done hitherto.
When Schelling began his lectures, the front rows were occupied by the
most brilliant intelligences, the professors of various subjects, the
heads of the teaching departments and the most distinguished
representatives of spiritual life certainly not mere callow
students, who had to sit at the back. They were all waiting as
far as they were able to wait to see what Schelling's great
reputation would accomplish. As the lecture proceeded, the faces of
the audience grew longer and longer. Schelling did in fact speak in a
remarkable way about the spirit; just at the moment when materialism
was reaching its climax and coming to its fullest flower, he spoke of
the spirit. As he spoke, the faces grew appreciably longer because the
audience had no idea what he was after. Trendelenburg, well-known
later on as a philosopher, who was sitting in one of the front rows,
said he thought he had understood a little, though most of it was
beyond him; but he was not even sure he had understood that little!
Then, some days later, two of the people who had been present at the
lecture happened to meet. There had been a good deal of discussion
among Schelling's hearers, and these two had taken part in it,
wondering why on earth he had been called to Berlin, since not a word
of what he had said was intelligible. But one of them now had the
answer: Schelling's daughter had got engaged to the son of the
Minister of Education! So everyone could understand why Schelling had
been willing to come to Berlin. The whole thing was explained!
It may seem strange to tell you these things, but I am obliged to talk
to you in this way. For the form of thinking characteristic of the
present day is so far removed from the sort of thinking proper to
Anthroposophy, which is moreover not just a whim of ours but an
absolute necessity for man's future unless he is to fall into
decadence. Only this new form of spirituality will be able to
experience fully the three stages of consciousness which will emerge
in the future: namely, a damped-down dream-sleep, ordinary waking, and
a heightened consciousness. Otherwise man will never be able to
experience his humanity properly in future lives on Earth. For the
gods wish out of present threefold man to form the threefold man of
the future, as they have formed the present threefold man, the
dreaming, sleeping and waking man, out of the former threefold man who
dreamt in pictures, slept, and on waking experienced the after-effects
of his sleep, and also slept deeply. In this present age of freedom,
as I have so often explained to anthroposophists, we must resolve by
our own free knowledge to live towards the goal laid down for us by
the divine Powers of the world. If we do that we shall not only think,
we shall above all feel, in the right way about the past, present and
future. Then we shall also have the right will with regard to this
life on Earth, in accordance with the divine-spiritual ordering of the
world from the past, through the present, into the future.
This is what I wished to talk about, and with these words I will bring
our studies to a close, not however without expressing a wish that
tomorrow a discussion may begin here which will show that in the
Anthroposophical Society some desire exists to promote a fully living
consciousness in this Society of what man in his fullness is to be
the whole man who must be comprehended as including man
of the past, man of the present, and man of the future. For these
three are also one. What man has been in the past, what he is in the
present, and what he is to be in the future, will embrace in face of
the divine World-Order the whole being anthropos. But in
order to strive for this there must be an enthusiastic, heart-felt
grasping of Anthroposophy to lead us to the true anthropos, the
whole man, man in his fullness.
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Last Modified: 02-Nov-2024
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