The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Theosophical Cosmology II

[ 1 ] Following last Thursday’s introductory remarks, I would now like to begin by giving you an outline of world history, as we can present it based on our theosophical insights. Please bear in mind that, since we only have a few hours, I can only provide a brief outline, in which some points can only be touched upon. Perhaps an opportunity will arise to elaborate on this further later.

[ 2 ] Before we trace the history of the universe’s evolution—and, above all, the formation of our Earth—from a theosophical perspective, we must familiarize ourselves with certain concepts that Westerners have lost sight of, having devoted themselves exclusively to physical phenomena for so long. In every book on cosmology, it is repeatedly pointed out that we need only cast our gaze into outer space to see thousands upon thousands of worlds spreading out before our eyes, worlds that are just like our own solar system, and that our Earth—the planet on which our lives have unfolded for millions of years—appears like a tiny speck of dust amidst these countless worlds; and within this vast cosmos, humanity appears as a minuscule living being upon that speck of dust. Science has recognized all of this since the emergence of the Copernican theory. Science tells us how wrong it was for people in ancient times to regard the Earth as the center of the world and to believe that everything that happened in the cosmos was merely a preparation for human existence. Science has drummed into us just how small humanity is in comparison to the universe. It is human arrogance, we are told, to believe that the world is shaped as it is for our sake. Schiller, after all, directed the beautiful words of “To the Astronomers” against this view and way of feeling:

Don’t go on and on to me about nebulae and suns!
Is nature great only because it gives you something to count?
Your subject is, of course, the most sublime in space;
But, friends, the sublime does not dwell in space.

[ 3 ] And Goethe—whom you know from other lectures to have possessed occult knowledge—expresses his thoughts on this point something like this: What, after all, would be the purpose of the entire world, with its solar systems and stars, if it were not directed toward humankind, so that people might be uplifted and find joy in it all? — You see, people with a true spiritual worldview, like these two, could not be satisfied with the idea of humanity’s insignificance and the world’s insignificance, like a speck of dust.

[ 4 ] Let us now, in the spirit of theosophy, consider cosmology and humanity in relation to the entire history of evolution. I must first present a few preliminary ideas. Let us examine the position that modern humanity occupies in the world from a cosmological standpoint. Everything that human beings can perceive with their senses—whether the coarse senses of everyday life or the finer ones that natural science offers us through its microscopes and methods of analysis—everything that we encounter in human beings is, after all, only the outer, physical human being. Those who have frequently attended theosophical lectures know that this outer human being is merely the shell, the outer manifestation of the true, inner human being. What, then, is the physical human being? If you study the physical human being anatomically, you will find that it consists of various systems: the skeletal and muscular systems, the nervous system—which has developed into a brain—and so on. You also know that the brain is the organ of thought. As Theosophists, you also know that it is not the brain that thinks, but that the brain is merely an instrument—that is, the true essence of the human being uses the brain only as a tool for thinking. This essence that thinks within the human being cannot be perceived with physical sensory organs; even those whose astral senses are developed cannot yet see it. It requires a highly developed clairvoyant sense to truly perceive what is actually thinking within a human being. In the theosophical sense, we refer to that which thinks within a human being as the human being’s true Self. This inner core of being, this true Self of the human being, is of a spiritual nature. It is not something that extends in space, nor is it something that flows away in time. It is timeless and spaceless; it exists beyond time and space; it is eternal. You have received a description of this Self in my lectures on Devachan, and you will be able to find a detailed description in my book on “Theosophy,” which will be published in the coming days.

[ 5 ] In order to live and think in this present epoch of human development, the spiritual self needs a physical brain. With this spiritual self, we could perceive in the astral world and in the devachanic or mental world without a physical brain, but in this outer, physical world, we can perceive only with the physical brain. If we wish to understand modern human beings correctly, we must say: Modern human beings are spiritual selves embodied in a physical brain. This physical brain, however, first had to come into being; it first had to develop; it is not eternal like the spiritual self. We can trace the spiritual self back to infinitely distant times in the past and also follow it into infinitely distant times in the future. At a certain point in time, this spiritual self clothed itself in the brain; it created the brain for itself; it formed this brain in accordance with its own nature. One cannot simply create such an organ in the physical world. It would be entirely impossible for anyone to create a viable brain out of thin air through any process in the world. It would be an artificial object, but not a viable brain that a spirit could use as a tool. For such a brain to come into being, other organs had to develop first. A brain can develop only within a physical body such as the human body. Therefore, it was necessary for the development of the rest of the human body to precede the development of our brain as a tool. When we look back at the stages of development that preceded our present one, we see how slowly and gradually that which humanity now possesses as its tool—through which it communicates with its environment—first took shape. The fact, dear attendees, that human beings, through their spiritual self, acquired organs capable of guiding them in this way toward an understanding of the world—that is the goal and purpose of our present earthly evolution. Everything that has happened on this Earth over millions of years has occurred with the aim of enabling evolution to reach the point where a spiritual self can make use of a brain.

[ 6 ] Let us take a moment to go back with me to the starting point of our earthly evolution. Those whose mental vision is developed will have the following perception before them: At the beginning of our planetary evolution, our spiritual self had reached a certain stage of its existence. Each of us, back when the Earth was in its embryonic state, was at a certain stage of development. You can all imagine the spiritual selves that are, were, or will be incarnated on our Earth today, transported back to the moment when our earthly evolution began. You were all already present back then, though not as you are today, but in a completely different state. In earthly evolution, we have a very specific task; through this earthly evolution, the human being must become something. Let me briefly describe, in narrative form, what the spiritual self was like when it entered into earthly evolution. When it stood at the gates of our earthly existence, our spiritual self possessed a consciousness quite different from the one we have today. We can grasp this by putting ourselves in the position of a person in a dull dream, who is unable to reflect in concepts on the images flitting past their consciousness, but simply has them set before them and sees them playing out like a panorama. Every single spiritual self possessed this dream-like consciousness, and it had to pass through earthly evolution—and must also pass through further stages of development—in order to evolve from the dull consciousness of pictorial perception to the bright, clear, conceptual consciousness of waking life. The dreamlike state of consciousness in which the spiritual self found itself at the beginning of earthly evolution is comparable to that of an animal, but the level of consciousness is not the same. This is the task our spiritual self must accomplish during the course of this planetary period: to make consciousness ever brighter and brighter; and when, in the distant future, we emerge from this earthly evolution, we will have brought this bright, clear consciousness to its highest peak.

[ 7 ] We call the beings who entered earthly evolution at that time “Pitris,” which means “Fathers.” We were such Pitris back then; we had acquired this nature in our earlier state of development. Before we entered earthly evolution, we had already gone through preliminary stages, and we had worked our way up to the dreamlike state of the Pitri. So now we know where we ourselves stood when earthly evolution began. The Pitris had to gradually surround themselves with all the organs they needed so that, by means of a physical brain within the physical body we know today, they could communicate with the environment, which is also physical. The final step that human beings had to take—as is evident from the preceding considerations—was this: in order for their Self to be able to think within the physical realm, they themselves had to become physical thinking beings.

[ 8 ] And now I come to the second point I must make clear from the outset. If you examine the brain—if you investigate it scientifically from every angle—you will find that this human brain, when examined solely through the senses, consists of the same substances and is governed by the same forces as the rest of the physical beings on Earth. If you look at a rock crystal, a piece of calcite, a piece of rock salt, a plant, or an animal, and examine them chemically and physically, you will find that the entire physical world—insofar as it can be seen with the eyes and touched with the hands—consists in the same way of the same chemical and physical forces that are at work in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. That is why we say in Theosophy: In order for human beings to reach their present stage of development, they had to clothe their spiritual self in a mineral body. The spiritual self has created a mineral body for itself. This took a long time, and this process is not yet complete even today. In the future, human beings will continue to develop within this mineral shell. There are still embryonic organs in our body that have yet to develop, new senses that are present only in a rudimentary form today. As you can see, it took a long time for human beings—their spiritual self—to clothe themselves in the physical body they have today.

[ 9 ] Now imagine the moment when the human spiritual self began the work of forming this mineral body—one that can walk and stand, that possesses all the functions of growth and reproduction necessary for human beings, and that has a nervous system and a brain suited to human needs. Transport yourself back to the time when all of this was in a primordial state, and then transport yourself to a time when humankind will have reached the pinnacle of its development—a time when an organ will have developed in the center of the head, through which humankind will be able to perceive things differently than we can today. The entire mineral development of present-day humankind unfolds during the period between these two points. In theosophical terminology, we call such a period a “round.” The round I have just described to you—this stage of development—we call the “mineral round.” But before human beings developed this body in such a way as to create the tool of the brain, they first had to prepare other parts of their being. The spiritual Self—this purely spiritual being—could not simply have directed such a mineral body. For my sake, imagine the spiritual Self as a point, and imagine that point inside a mechanism such as our body; this point would never be able to move the mechanism, nor would it ever be capable of thinking through a physical brain.

[ 10 ] Thus, we have two things: We know that our spiritual self initially possessed a dreamlike consciousness, but it could never have controlled the mineral body. It had to create an intermediary in order to move the body. How do I move my hand? First, I form the thought: I want to move my hand. — If I merely had the thought, the thought would indeed live within me, but it would never be able to raise a physical hand, just as a mere thought could not, for example, lift a bottle. If you want to move the bottle, a force must be added to the thought—a force that acts as the mediator between the thought and my physical body. And we call this force an astral force. It is a force of the kind that exists in the astral world. I would not be able to move my arm if there were not, within me, an astral force between my thought and my physical body—to which my arm belongs—that acts as the mediator between my thought and my physical body, my physical arm. There must be a mediator between my spiritual self and my physical body, and this mediator is of astral nature. Whether I move my leg or my hand, or whether I set my brain in motion to formulate thoughts—my physical body must be connected to my thought through the astral organism.

[ 11 ] You know from previous lectures that human beings have an astral body, which the clairvoyant sees as an astral cloud—what we call the aura—in which their wishes, their will, and their desires dwell. When I form a thought, that thought alone is powerless to do anything. When the desire and the will are added to this, it becomes a force, a radiation that is perceptible to the clairvoyant. Before a human being could build up a physical-mineral body such as the one he has today, he first had to create an astral body—a body of desire—which can serve as a mediator between his thoughts and his physical-mineral being. The epoch of development that I have called the “mineral round” must have been preceded by another epoch of development that brought the astral body into being. You must therefore transport yourselves back to an epoch that prepared the human astral body. Only then could the mineral-physical body be embedded within the astral body. We call this epoch—which in turn has a beginning and an end and which preceded the mineral round—the “astral round.”

[ 12 ] As you can see, we have two “ages.” One is the one in which we now live: the Mineral Age. This was preceded by another, the Astral Age. But the human astral body itself needed further preparation. It is possible to incorporate it into human nature only in a very specific way. After all, the astral body was not present before we were born, and it will no longer be present some time after our death. It arises and passes away; it is subject to certain laws of arising and passing away. Look at a child. In a child, the astral body is correspondingly small; it grows along with the child’s physical growth. Growth and reproduction underlie the mineral-physical and etheric essences of the human being. It is the laws of growth and reproduction according to which the human being must develop within earthly life. The fact that we come into being and grow—that we are living beings at all—is not rooted in our astral body. The astral body contains only desires, will, and cravings. We are astral beings, just as animals are astral beings, and we share with plants and animals that aspect of our being which is capable of producing our own kind from within the organism, causing them to grow from small to large. If you wish to put this into words, you can say: What I have described is the form-giving, the form-shaping force. Our physical and etheric bodies must have a very specific form at the time of their formation, and this form must be able to grow and expand. You can get a sense of this if you take a seed ... [gap in the postscript].

[ 13 ] The creative power does not belong to the astral realm. The astral realm can manifest itself within what has been created, but it must first be created itself. The human astral body could not have come into being had it not been preceded by another epoch of development—the epoch in which the human form was prepared. Let me call this epoch the formative epoch, or, in theosophical terms, the “Rupa Round.” It is the epoch in which the human form was prepared so that its present form could come into being.

[ 14 ] All we can observe in these three “cycles” are the forms, the sheaths, of the human being’s spiritual self. In the mineral cycle, the human being clothed itself in a mineral sheath. In the preceding epoch, the astral round, the human being prepared its astral sheath, and in the epoch that preceded that even further, the Rupa round, the human being acquired the ability to take on the form it needs to be able to perceive, think, and act as a human being.

[ 15 ] As Theosophists, we can say: When we were still Pitris, when we were still living in that dreamlike state of consciousness, at the beginning of our earthly evolution—back then, if I may put it this way, we were the result, the fruit. We did not arise out of nothing back then, but had already developed to that state; we were the result of earlier epochs, which we will describe later. Just as a plant sprouts from a seed when it is planted in new soil in the spring, so too did we first have to prepare ourselves for the stage of Earth in order to be able to develop there. We were the result of another world, and now we had to become the beginning of an entirely new world—but we first had to find our way into it. Just as you let a seed that you receive in the fall overwinter and then plant it in new soil in the spring, so too does the Pitri nature behave, as it were. It must first be immersed in a new environment, in the substances of the earthly world that did not exist in the earlier planetary epoch. If you were to try to imagine what kinds of forces and substances existed on the earlier planetary stage where we developed into Pitris, you would find entirely different forces and substances there. Therefore, this epoch of development must have been preceded by yet another, in which the human spirit itself—which had carried itself over from an earlier epoch—first had to acclimate to the new milieu, to the new environment. Here we are already approaching a development epoch that lies far in the past.

[ 16 ] The further we move away from the present, the more difficult it becomes to form concepts. The theosophist does not believe that he can go back with his questions all the way to the beginning of the world. When people hear about theosophy for the first time, they often ask: How did the world actually come into being? — As theosophists, we can no longer ask a good portion of such questions, for we do not arrive at a beginning. You have seen the point in time when we crossed over from the Pitri nature. The clairvoyant can trace this point in time through certain methods. But human beings did not come into being only then; they were already at a certain level of development at that time. The Theosophist does not indulge in speculation; he does not think about these things in abstract terms. He follows his experiences, his intuitions, and his encounters in the supersensible realm, and to the extent that he has experiences and encounters, to that extent he recounts them. Just as an explorer in the earthly realm would do nothing other than describe the regions he has seen—say, in Africa—and would not describe anything he has not seen, so too will the theosophist say nothing about the beginning of the world, which lies far, far in the past. The theosophist can only trace a portion of our evolution, and we trace this portion through experience, not through speculation.

[ 17 ] It was a seed that carried over from an earlier time into our evolution. Human beings were once a formless earthly seed. We call this period the “Arupa Round,” the formless round. Thus, we have passed through four periods of time leading up to the one in which we now find ourselves. We call these periods “cycles.” The first, second, and third cycles have passed; we are now in the fourth cycle, and three more cycles will follow, which we will discuss later. We call the human being of the fourth round the human being of the mineral kingdom, because he has taken shape within the mineral forces; and we call a human being of the preceding round—the astral round, in which he was able to form his astral body—a human being of the third elemental kingdom. We distinguish between human beings of the third, second, and first elemental kingdoms. During the first elemental kingdom, or the first round, human thoughts moved within formless thought-matter. During the second elemental kingdom, or the second round, human thoughts moved within shaped thought-matter. And in the third elemental kingdom, human thoughts were already able to take shape as desires; they could assume the form that we can trace as astral rays in the astral world. It is not until the fourth round that human beings are ready to master the mineral kingdom. Just as a human astral brain formed from astral matter in the third round, so too could human beings in the fourth round form a physical brain in which they can think.

[ 18 ] So we have three elemental kingdoms and the mineral kingdom. Humanity of the past lived in the three elemental kingdoms. I can only hint at what follows, but you will be able to understand it based on the analogy. Our current cycle will be followed by another, in which humanity will reach an even higher stage of development. Humanity will then be able to think not only with its physical brain, but also with the force we call the astral force. Humanity will then be capable not only of mastering physical matter, but also of mastering the astral force. To illustrate this, let me give you an example: If I want to move this glass from here to there today, I need a physical medium—my hand. Humanity has progressed so far in the fourth round that it can act consciously in the physical, mineral world. However, it cannot yet consciously wield the astral force; it has not yet developed an astral organ of will. But they will be able to do so in the fifth round. Human beings of the fifth round will be able to master the astral world just as they now master the physical world. In the sixth round, human beings will have progressed even further. They will then be able to master the formative world just as they now master the physical world and will master the astral world in the fifth round. In the fifth round, human beings will be able to fulfill a wish not only at the place where it is made. They will be able to send their wishes to distant places. In the sixth round, human beings will be able to shape reality themselves. They will then be able to master the rupa-force themselves. After the sixth round, our earthly evolution will have reached its completion, and only then will human beings have absorbed within themselves everything they could learn on Earth. Only then will they have attained, in the true sense of the word, their genuine, clear self-awareness. They will then no longer need any mediation; they will have reached their goal directly. In the seventh round, humanity will have reached its goal. It will once again be formless. But it will have absorbed everything it had to learn.

[ 19 ] Humanity must go through seven cycles. I could only describe these seven cycles in general terms. Now we must note one more thing: During our mineral cycle, humanity and the Earth were not always physical; rather, they first had to evolve toward this state, they first had to assume this state in order to become physically perceptible. From our mineral cycle, we look back on the other stages of development. In doing so, we can see that we are dealing with a seven-stage development of our Earth and that the spiritual self had to pass through seven stages or cycles. During each of these seven cycles, the spiritual self was in one of the kingdoms of nature. — Let us look at human beings. They have passed through the first, second, and third elemental kingdoms and are now in the fourth cycle, which is our present world.

[ 20 ] Next time, I will show that only human beings reach the mineral stage during this fourth round. However, what is a mineral today—what is inanimate natural matter, such as rock crystal, calcite, and so on—had already reached the peak of its development during the first round. What is now a plant reached the peak of its development during the second round, and what is now an animal reached the peak of its development during the third round. Human beings reached the peak of their physical-mineral development during the fourth round.

[ 21 ] We see, then, that millions of years ago, another Earth preceded ours. At that time, the mineral kingdom came into being. Humanity, however, was still in the first elemental kingdom. In the second round, the plant kingdom emerged; by then, both the mineral and plant kingdoms already existed; humanity was in the second elemental kingdom at that time. The third round arrives, and the animal kingdom is incorporated into Earth’s evolution. Humanity, however, is still only an astral being; it cannot yet descend to the level of mineral embodiment. Only in the fourth round, when the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms are already present, can human beings achieve mineral embodiment. Therefore, in the four rounds, we have four kingdoms existing side by side: the mineral kingdom in the first round, the plant kingdom in the second round, the animal kingdom in the third round, and the human kingdom in the fourth round. The human kingdom was preceded by the other three kingdoms as preparatory stages. That is why Goethe is right when he says: What would all of nature actually be if it were not directed toward the human being? This great cosmic event had to take place; the human being had to develop through three rounds so that it could assume a mineral form in the fourth round. In invisible form, humanity has been the creator, the co-creator. As Pitri, it came over from another epoch of evolution. With our dreamlike consciousness, we worked through the first cycles. We worked preparatorily on the formation of our Earth so that a kingdom could be formed that would serve as the foundation for our development.

[ 22 ] This is the course of Earth’s development from its very beginning—which I was able to present to you today—up to the point where we stand now. We will add to this next time.