The Rudolf Steiner Archive

13. The Kernel of Wisdom in Religions

[ 1 ] Throughout the millennia, various peoples have sought to satisfy their deepest needs in religion. In our time, it is easy to misunderstand the significance of peoples’ religious aspirations. People today readily succumb to illusions about the nature of religion. Since one of the principles of Theosophy is to fathom the core of wisdom within religions, we will now also discuss the goals and tasks of the Theosophical Movement in general.

[ 2 ] Scholars of religion initially discussed our topic from a cultural-historical perspective. In the past, people did not give such matters any thought at all. Back then, individuals were convinced that they could find the truth within their own religion. It was not until the nineteenth century that people decided to compare the various religions. A curious fact emerged: a consistency in the various religious creeds among the different races of humanity. However, they did not progress much beyond the assumption that the childlike imagination of different peoples forms concepts of God and humanity in the same way. It has, in fact, become customary to view the various religions of different peoples as merely childlike stages of human spiritual development—and nothing more. If one delves more deeply into the question hinted at here, one arrives at the conclusion that even the simplest religious concepts are underestimated if they are not taken seriously and thoroughly. When one delves deeper, one acquires the proper humility—the humility that says to oneself: You understand something of these great, powerful images, but there is much you cannot yet fathom. One learns to recognize more and more as one ascends the ladder of human development.

[ 3 ] Let us delve into ancient Egyptian culture. There we find the male deity Osiris and the female deity Isis. When we come to understand the deity Osiris from the perspective of the Egyptian people, he reveals himself as a significant religious concept. It is said that Osiris was dismembered by his brother Typhon, and that the individual pieces were buried in various places. This gives rise to the idea that everything that lives on Earth has emerged from Osiris. Everything that happens on Earth is regarded as a resurrection of Osiris. When a person experiences their own spiritual core, they say to themselves: Osiris rises within me. — The Earth is the dismemberment of Osiris. The human being is the resurrection of Osiris.

[ 4 ] Now let us turn to the legends and myths of the Norse world. There we encounter the giant Ymir, who was vanquished by Wotan, Will, and Weh. We learn [that he was dismembered], that his bones became the rocks, his blood the streams and seas, his brain the vault of heaven, and so on. This earth is an enlarged, idealized human being. It is a sleeping giant.

[ 5 ] We find similar ideas everywhere in the religions of various peoples. One must not believe, for example, that “less developed” peoples practice religions that are entirely childish compared to ours. Let’s take an example of how a sublime religion can be found among another people. As the ancient Native Americans of North America were increasingly pushed back by the peoples of Europe, the Europeans believed that they were far superior to the Native Americans. An Indian chief once gave a speech at a gathering with the Europeans. It beautifully reflects the entire religious sensibility of the [Native American] tribes of the Americas. Just as the chief spoke, so too have many representatives of these peoples spoken about God.

[ 6 ] They had promised to give these people land, but had not done so. The chief then said the following to the representatives of Europe: You learn from books, which contain little black symbols about God and what this God says. The white man knows about his God only from the black symbols in the books, but the brown man recognizes the Great Spirit as he speaks to him through the whisper of the wind, the lapping of the waves, [and the lightning and thunder]. You promised to give us land, but you did not do so. Your God has not taught you to speak the truth, et cetera.

[ 7 ] This is how many peoples thought of the Great Spirit before the emergence of what we call religion. The word “religion” comes from “religere,” meaning “to reconnect.” We want to understand why religion finds its meaning in this reconnection.

[ 8 ] Before our present human race populated Europe, Asia, and Africa, it was preceded by the Atlantean population on the Atlantean continent, between America and Europe. The Atlantean human race inhabited this continent. There the Atlanteans lived, with a distinctive spiritual life. What remains of Atlantean culture can be found in the seemingly primitive—but in reality merely backward—culture on the periphery of what was once Atlantis.

[ 9 ] There, people felt in a primal and fundamental way what one might call the equivalent of religion among them. What constituted the religion of the earliest ancestors of early humanity has been preserved in the form we find in the religion of China, the so-called Taoist religion.

[ 10 ] When the Chinese speak of the Tao, they feel something similar to what that Native American felt when he spoke of the Great Spirit. It was a completely different way of feeling and thinking; it was a sense of oneness with the rest of the world. People did not see themselves as separate beings, as we do today. — People today pay little attention to their breathing as they inhale and exhale. The act of breathing is treated as a purely mechanical process. For our ancestors back then, breathing evoked a sense of connection. They felt gratitude toward the Great Spirit as they breathed. They felt that He united with them with every inhalation. They united with Him with every exhalation. When they felt their pulse, they attributed this power to the Great Spirit. They felt themselves to be one with the Universal Spirit. To them, the breath was Spirit; the blood pulsing through their veins was Spirit. They felt themselves to be a part of the Great World Spirit. One must try to empathize with what goes on in the soul of a person who feels themselves to be one with the Great Spirit of the Universe flowing through them—the divinity within themselves and within the divinity itself. Just as our ancestors were utterly blissful in this sensation, so must we learn to empathize with it.

[ 11 ] Only one feeling comes close to this—when the Vedantist experiences the “Tat twam asi”: “That is you,” he says to the world around him. But our very being has, for the most part, lost what our ancestors felt. That empathy with the entire world was called the Tao. The Tao is what lives in the wind, what lives in lightning and thunder, what lives in animals and plants, what is within humans, what pulses through them as their life. It was a unified feeling. Our thinking itself is a product of evolution. Those who felt the Tao, therefore, did not yet possess this intellect. The intellect is precisely a characteristic of our present race. As our race developed from the Atlantean race, intellectual thinking emerged from the clairvoyant gift of the Atlanteans. People now learned to think in concepts. Conceptual thinking had the consequence that human beings strictly separated themselves from their environment. This had significance as human beings mastered the intellect. The Atlantean did not feel separated from others. Tao was the blood, the air; Tao was the other human being. The feeling of separation arose within him through the intellect working within. Everything he felt in the world, he now had to experience inwardly.

[ 12 ] The God who pulsed through humanity was a unity that flowed outward and inward. Now the separation had taken place. Now the “religere”—“reconnecting”—had to occur: the religion that connected the outside with the inside. The entire fifth root race strives, through religion, for reconnection with the divine Universal Spirit.

[ 13 ] Based on what has just been said, one must ask: How can a person in our present cycle conceive of his God? He must first seek Him within himself. But when they realize that this is the same God as the one out there, then they have, in their own way, achieved something akin to what the ancient Atlanteans experienced in the Tao. This is expressed in the ancient, sacred religion that the Rishis taught their disciples—the religion that preceded the Vedas. The Vedas are merely an echo of that ancient, sacred religion of ancient India. One can awaken this religion of ancient India within oneself even without esoteric knowledge. For it lives everywhere between the lines and the words. It is a religion of life, which proceeds from the assumption that the divine is found within the human being. Whereas in earlier times people had felt a connection with the God in the external world, in ancient India they sought God within the isolated individual soul. People sought to develop themselves to the point of direct realization that what lives within the individual soul lives within all souls. When one was able to experience one’s own divinity in this way, when one had found that which transcended all particularity—the illusion of separateness—then this was called the divine Brahman. This could not be theorized about. One had to experience it within oneself. Then one gradually learned to recognize this unified divinity from three perspectives. These three perspectives, through which Brahman is sought, can be found in all religions.

[ 14 ] In the inner life of various religions, the three aspects of divinity are understood roughly as follows: The divine spirit lives within you. But the divine spirit also lives out there in the universe. And within you lives a spark of this divine spirit. The Spirit that lives within you—when you have an impulse, a passion, or an ideal—also lived when it built the house in which you now feel and perceive everything. The deeper one penetrates the edifice of human wisdom, the clearer it becomes how this divine Spirit has worked within you. Your passions and your sense of truth are still subject to error. But the human body is not subject to error. Only the soul makes mistakes. It constantly launches attacks on the marvelous organism that the Divine has constructed as the human being’s vessel. The structure of the human body is perfect. Every bone, for example, is marvelously designed. It is composed of delicate beams in such a skillful manner that no engineer today could replicate it. The femur has a framework that moves back and forth in such a way that it can support the body with the slightest amount of force.

[ 15 ] The higher bodies of human beings are far more imperfect than the physical body. This perfect physical vessel was constructed by the Great Spirit; then He was drawn into this vessel like a spark. Now take this entire world of creation that lives around you—apart from what lives within you as the soul—and you have the third aspect of the Deity, the Holy Spirit. - Then take your own soul and the souls of your fellow human beings and fellow creatures. That is the Son, the second aspect of the Godhead, the second form in which the Godhead appears. At the beginning of the world process, we have all that which surrounds us as the perfect world. That is the Holy Spirit. What now lives within it as a soul—that is the Son. That which the Son will become, and that to which we will come through the Son—what we will be at the end of days—that is the first aspect, the Father. Through these three aspects, the religions beheld the Primordial Being: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

[ 16 ] One can explore all religions, and one will always find this Trinity as the fundamental concept underlying all of them. This was explained to the students countless times. — When I speak, my words break free from my soul. They vibrate in the air. Then those vibrations reach the other soul. Imagine that the sense of hearing were turned off—I would speak—the words could be made visible—then one could see what I am saying. Imagine if one could transform the vibrating air into water and then into something solid. Imagine if one could very quickly condense the [vibrating] waves. Then the words would fall down as pieces of solid matter. They would lie on the ground below. This is how religion conceives of everything around us—simply by imagining the macrocosm to be formed in a similar way to how the words are here.

[ 17 ] The macrocosm was once a very fine substance. Then the Deity uttered a word, a primal name. The substance condensed, and thus everything came into being. This is also how rock crystal came into being. The words of God were spoken into this substance, and it condensed. Everything was the thought of God; everything was spirit. That from which the Spirit emerges is the original Word. The Word of God resounding into space was called the “Word,” the second aspect of the Deity. The divine thought that had condensed was the third aspect of the divine essence. The Word that resounded forth was the second aspect of the divine essence. God was in the Word, and in the Word was God. (John 1:1) — But before the Word can be spoken, something must precede it. That was God the Father, the Beginning. A profound connection has been recognized in all religions between what was in the beginning—God the Father—and the life of the present. The Son is the life of the present. In the soul, the Son lives as the Word. Veda—Edda means “the Word.” That which is called the true revelation in the various religions always goes back to the Word. The divine scriptures express this Word. That is why they, too, are called the Word. The religious scriptures contain what the Spirit of God has spoken out into the world. An echo of this lives on in the human soul.

[ 18 ] Another aspect of the core wisdom of all religions is the awareness that human beings are in the process of evolution, that they can reach ever higher and higher stages of development. The soul can become more and more like God. In my own body, I see that the forces and substances of nature have worked together to create my perfect physical body. Plants and animals are experiments. A process of development has taken place. In human beings, we encounter the culmination of this development. — Within us we carry the seed of the spirit like a bud. Through this, we share in the spiritual world. Thus, human beings live in a physical environment and, at the same time, grow into a spiritual world. Within themselves, they possess powers and abilities through which they are connected to the spiritual world. Stones, plants, and animals are beings at various degrees of perfection. [The soul, too, exists in varying degrees of perfection], existing in a sequence of stages. This begins with us. We are the most imperfect in the spiritual world. We must grow into a community with supersensory beings, with spiritual beings who form the connection between human beings and the Supreme Deity—devas, Dhyan-Chohans, angels, archangels, and so on. Everywhere, in all religions, the core of wisdom lies in a spiritual world, in a collection of beings of a supersensible nature. Just as human beings belong to the rest of the [physical] world through their physical bodies, so do they belong to the spiritual world through the core of their being.

[ 19 ] Another core truth shared by all religions is that all development proceeds in cycles that can be compared to exhalation and inhalation, or day and night. Human life, too—the life of the soul—proceeds in such cycles. Human beings alternate between this side of existence, where they gather experiences, and another, where they live in communion with spiritual beings, in Devachan. In a rhythmic sequence, physical earthly life appears again, followed once more by the life of the spirit. The idea that one earthly life is but one among many is a fundamental principle shared by all developed religions.

[ 20 ] It is a mistake to say that Christianity does not teach reincarnation. In its esoteric teachings, it does teach reincarnation. It is only outwardly that it does not teach it. Christ spoke to his innermost disciples about reincarnation. When he was alone with the disciples, he explained many things to them—on the mountain. He revealed the most intimate truths only to his closest disciples—James, John, and Peter—at the Transfiguration. The expression “building huts” appears there. (Mark 9:5) These are the innermost disciples who have ascended to the level where one builds huts. One experiences what the one who can build huts experiences. Space and time are overcome. Moses and Elijah appear. The deepest mystery is revealed to the disciples. Elijah is the Way. “El” means “the Way.” Moses is the Truth, and Christ is the Life. He stands in the center: the Way, the Life, the Truth. This primordial wisdom of the Christian religion stands here in embodied form; it appears to the disciples in the devachanic, rapturous state. Christ said to them: “Elijah has returned.” They simply did not recognize him (Mark 9:19). He spoke to them there about reincarnation, but added: “But tell no one about this until I return” (Mark 9:9). By “return” is meant that point in human evolution when humanity will be mature enough to find the inner Christ.

[ 21 ] Angelus Silesius points out the nature of this inner Christ and its significance:

[ 22 ] If Christ had been born a thousand times in Bethlehem and not within you, you would be lost a thousand times!

[ 23 ] The inner experience of Christ is what enables us to perceive Christ in the world. When people are ready, then we can speak of reincarnation again. Until then, it should be kept secret. Among the Egyptian slaves, there was a vivid awareness: This is one life among many. In the next life, I will be like the one who commands me now.” — Thus they recognized the law of reincarnation and karma—the connection between cause and effect in the moral world. They experienced this as the law of their lives. Then we understand the profound significance that the law of karma and reincarnation held in their souls.

[ 24 ] But humanity would have looked only upward and lost its appreciation for the single life between birth and death. At some point, the soul had to pass through a life in which it knew nothing of reincarnation. Approximately 1,500 [or 2,600] years is the period that elapses between two incarnations. In the 2,000 years after Christ, the soul has passed through such an incarnation once. That is why the disciples were not to teach reincarnation until people could comprehend the Christ within themselves.

[ 25 ] The doctrine of reincarnation is inherent in Christianity, not merely as a doctrine, but as a legacy for the future. This doctrine was not lost in Christianity by chance or through negligence, but was deliberately not taught for 2,000 years. Humanity has evolved from the whole of nature. Goethe expressed the Taoist sensibility in the words he addressed to nature in his “Hymn to Nature.” In it lies an exploration of how he empathized with nature.

[ 26 ] Human beings had to become a unique being, but then had to be reunited with the Divine. The ancient mystics of the Middle Ages called this search for the path back to the Divine “deification.” Through this, human beings express that they are created in an eminent way for development. In order for them to grow toward deification, the Divine must be present within them as a seed.

[ 27 ] To make this the substance of one’s life—that is what it means to be a religious person. And to know what then lives in the soul and flows through it—that is theosophy. Theosophy is, in a different form, what religions give to human beings. It makes religions understandable to them. It is divine wisdom, the counterpart of the soul’s content, which is itself permeated and pulsed through by truth. In a sense, the earlier religious concepts were the content of faith. This content of feeling must be raised up into full, clear daytime consciousness. The deepening of all religions into wisdom, so that they permeate us completely with their living content, so that the soul thereby attains the [goal] of deification—that is what theosophy will lead us to.