The Rudolf Steiner Archive

15. The Lord's Prayer

[ 1 ] Through what I was able to share with you here last time, we have seen how a well-known prayer actually expresses the entire spiritual-scientific view of human nature. We were able to see for ourselves how religious movements, religious teachings, and practices have been drawn from what we have come to know over the course of time through spiritual science itself. In this context, we must imagine the process in such a way that humanity originally proceeded from a universal, all-encompassing fundamental worldview, which is expressed in the religious creeds of the various peoples according to the diversity of their national characters. Now, of course, you may ask: How exactly are we to conceive of the connection between the fundamental truths and wisdom of humanity and what was proclaimed in the various individual religious creeds by the founders of religion to this or that people? — It is certainly a striking fact in itself that the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer truly present us with the fundamental concepts of spiritual science, and to an outsider who has given little thought to what can be learned through spiritual science today, much of this must seem fantastical, and he might then easily say: “All of this has simply been inserted into what you have preserved from the religious texts.”

[ 2 ] To delve a little deeper into the question of how the great fundamental truths originally found their way into religious creeds, one must first start with a fundamental question. One must realize that what we can know today—what is taught to us today through the spiritual-scientific perspective—was not presented in the same way in religious views during the most ancient times. One must be clear that the way in which such truths were conveyed to people varied greatly from one era to another. The ancient religious texts you open speak to people in images rather than in concepts. These images, which often draw on sensory perception, have been preserved as much as possible in the religious texts. For example, knowledge is always described as a light, and wisdom as a kind of liquid element—as water. Time and again, if you look closely, you can find the same images in the most ancient times. There is a very specific reason for this, and today we will summarize some of what we already know in order to truly immerse ourselves in how the very first teachers of humanity influenced the peoples to whom they brought the blessing of religious teachings. If we wish to understand how the founders of religions—those we call the great Initiates, such as Hermes, Zarathustra, Buddha, Moses, and finally the greatest of all, Jesus Christ—worked, we must once again immerse ourselves in the difference that exists between the ordinary consciousness and the astral or imaginative consciousness of human beings.

[ 3 ] Today, from morning until night, the average person experiences what we have called “objective consciousness,” which presents things to them in such a way that they appear to exist outside of themselves, with the qualities that their senses reveal to them. This consciousness is not the only one. However, for most people today, the other states of consciousness are hidden, submerged in an indeterminate darkness that we call dreamless sleep—a state that, however, has a very specific meaning for the initiate. For the initiate, who also knows the world beyond this physical appearance, there is a conscious state from the moment of falling asleep until waking up, in which he does not, however, perceive the same things that are here in the same way they are here, but rather perceives a world in and of itself. Just as dreamless sleep is an unconscious state for the ordinary person, so is it a conscious state for the initiate, in which he beholds the spiritual world.

[ 4 ] If we wish to understand how this unconscious state becomes a conscious one, we must consider that intermediate state with which human beings are also familiar: dream-filled sleep, which presents our ordinary, everyday perceptions or the inner states of the soul to us in symbolic form. You can also find this imagery, which the dream reveals, when you study the consciousness of the initiate as he dwells in the spiritual world. He sees things in the spiritual world as images. However, these are not as chaotic as the images the dream shows you. They have only one thing in common with the images of the dream: they are constantly changing. The table and the chair always retain the same form once they are in place. Plants and people, insofar as they are external objects, retain the form they once had. But the further we move into the realm of the conscious, the more we encounter transformations. The plant that sprouts from the seed and develops a stem, leaves, flowers, and fruit; the animal that expresses its free will; the human being—in the changing gestures and facial expressions, we see them in motion. All of this, however, is something permanent compared to what a person in a higher state experiences in the world of Devachan. There we see a continuous transformation. Whoever finds entry into the spiritual world through the relevant exercises learns there how the color of a plant stands out from the plant like a flame. He learns to recognize how colors are formations rising and falling in free space. However, they only gain a true insight when they are able to perceive colors and tones in and of themselves and to associate them with specific beings. Such beings are constantly around us. If you could extract the violet of this flower so that the violet moves freely through space, you would have in it the expression of the life of the plant’s inner spiritual world. This is also how the human aura functions, as well as what we call the astral body. All human inclinations—feelings of vanity and selfishness—are expressed in it through very specific streams of color, so that we can say: inner spiritual experience is expressed in the human aura. The aura is never still; nothing in it is stationary, as things are stationary here in the sensory world. And when a being in the spiritual world has an emotional or volitional impulse, you can always see how this is expressed in very specific changes in colors and tones. Eternal movement is the essence of the higher worlds.

[ 5 ] Of course, this is confusing for someone entering the higher worlds for the first time. But this also means that in these higher worlds, everything that exists there is revealed instantly. While a person can conceal their inner life from someone who can only observe them with physical eyes, they can conceal nothing from someone who can see with spiritual eyes. There, everything is clearly laid bare, so that you must say to yourself: If we wish to explore a person as they stand before us with our physical eyes, we must infer the state of their soul from outward appearances—such as whether they smile or weep. It is different in the higher world. There, one does not draw conclusions about the inner from the outer. The inner lies completely open there. There we live in communion with the essence of things. In our time, only the initiate can attain this state of consciousness. Only he can live consciously in the higher world. He can add another state to the range of consciousness that extends from waking to falling asleep, through which he is able to integrate the inner with the outer. Just as he can consciously experience the inner nature of things, so too could all people, in a certain sense, in ancient times. Before their present state of consciousness, people possessed a state through which they saw things from within.

[ 6 ] If we go back to time immemorial, we encounter people who possess less and less of what humans have today. People today can count and do arithmetic. In the heart of Atlantis, you would find people who could not yet count or do arithmetic, and for whom logic was not yet a concept. In this respect, even the least accomplished schoolchild today can do more than any Atlantean ever could. But the Atlanteans could do something else. When they observed any natural being—a plant, for example—they could feel a very specific emotion welling up within them. For them, every plant had a specific emotional value. While modern humans walk past plants with a certain indifference, vivid sensations and feelings arose in the Atlanteans. Indeed, if we go back far enough, to the times of the first Atlanteans, we would find that they did not yet have such vivid conceptions of color as modern humans do. If such an Atlantean had approached a violet, he would not have seen it as it stands here, but rather as if a kind of misty formation were rising from it. Likewise, when looking at a rose, he would not have seen the red color on the rose itself, but rather a red aura surrounding the rose, with the red color floating freely. If you look at any crystal now—say, a ruby—you see it as red. The first Atlanteans, however, would not have seen the color within the crystal itself. It would have appeared to them as if surrounded by a halo of colors, and the ruby would have appeared to them, as it were, merely as a sort of indentation in this halo of colors. As you approach those times, you enter a distant past where human beings would no longer have seen the outlines of another human being at all, nor the outlines of a plant or an animal. When they approached another person who was hostile toward them, they would instead perceive a brownish-reddish color. If they perceived a beautiful bluish color, they could say to themselves: “This person is peacefully disposed toward me.” — This is how a person’s inner life was expressed to them through such colors.

[ 7 ] If we go back even further, we arrive at the distant past of ancient Lemuria, which lay between Asia, Australia, and Africa. Not only was consciousness in the act of perception completely different there, but even everything that can be called a “will impulse” was different. The will still operated magically; it exerted a power over other objects; it manifested itself as a force of nature acting upon them. When a Lemurian held his hand over a plant and focused his will upon it, he could, through his sheer will alone, cause that plant to grow rapidly.

[ 8 ] The forces out there in nature are none other than those found within human beings. Because human beings have become self-contained beings, enclosed within a skin, their forces have become increasingly distant from the forces of nature and increasingly dissimilar to them. Human thought is the most dissimilar of all to the forces of nature. Combining and calculating are the things most foreign to what exists as such in nature outside. Nevertheless, if you could go back far enough, you would see that there were beings back then—the spiritual ancestors of humanity—who would have regarded it as—relatively speaking—utter nonsense to say: “I form a concept of some external thing.” —They could not have said that at all; rather, they would have “seen” the concept, as it were—and indeed seen it as an activity, even as an entity. Anyone who forms a concept of any object today must imagine that this object was originally formed from that very concept. You can get an idea of this by recalling the process of any human creation. You can form a concept of a finished watch, the mechanism of its movement, and the forward motion of the hands. You could never do so if there had not been a watchmaker before you who had already conceived what you are now thinking. Reflect on what he put into it.

[ 9 ] All the concepts that human beings can form today, everything that thought does today, existed in our past as reality that was first embedded in things. Every being is understood through its concept. Once upon a time, every being was formed according to this concept. It was no different in the world than it is today in human art: The concepts that humans form today were originally embedded within things. If you were to go back even further, you would see how those people could never have said, “I form a concept by looking at things”—rather, they actually saw what was happening there, how the concept was embedded within them. They watched, as it were, the master craftsmen of things at work.

[ 10 ] This illustrates the difference between the human mind of today and the intellect of that time, which we must call the creative intellect. But if you were to get to know these beings, who still knew of the creative intellect from their own direct experience—in contrast to today’s merely receptive intellect—you would find that these beings were quite different. They had not yet been incarnated in a human body. What dwells in human bodies today was, at that time, still contained within the bosom of the divine-spiritual beings.

[ 11 ] We have imperceptibly moved beyond that stage of Earth’s development, which we might picture as follows: Down on Earth, physical life already existed; there were beings down there—quite different, yet similar to today’s minerals, plants, and animals—and then there were beings who were not human. but who stood between the animals and humans and were ready to receive the human soul. They were organized to such an extent that they could accommodate the human soul. One can only describe this in relative terms: Down on Earth, human beings walked about who were, in fact, still animal-like beings. Now imagine the human bodies as individual little sponges and the souls as drops of water, all of which were still united into a single mass of water; the physical Earth, with its entire teeming multitude of beings, was, as it were, enveloped—just as by today’s atmosphere—by a soul-like envelope. Within this, everything was still undifferentiated, like the drops of water. And just as when you allow the water to be absorbed by the little sponges, so that each one receives a single drop for itself, so it was in those days. What was a unified soul substance was absorbed by the individual human bodies and distributed among them. It was through this process that the human soul first came into being. Without this process, the human substance would never have divided into many individual personalities.

[ 12 ] But this also marks the beginning of the process through which human beings gradually separate themselves from their surroundings, and through this they also acquire a distinct, concrete consciousness. Previously, human beings possessed a consciousness that did not form concepts; rather, the soul itself was still wholly immersed in the world soul, and it received all its wisdom from the collective world soul as if from within. It did not need to look outward. Indeed, one could say that this shared world soul was still capable of everything; it formed, according to shared concepts, everything that exists on Earth today. Human beings received these concepts when that drop of wisdom was bestowed upon them by the shared world soul. This is the difference between the ancient knowledge, before it was ever embodied in the flesh, and today’s knowledge, which arises as human beings turn their attention outward.

[ 13 ] The moment a person ceases to perceive through the senses, their inner being sinks into the indeterminate darkness that we call dreamless sleep. When a person sleeps, the physical body and the etheric body remain behind, while the astral body departs. What is it within a person that perceives the external world? The astral body perceives colors and sounds. The astral body experiences pleasure when it enjoys something pleasurable; the astral body perceives pain as such. However, this astral body cannot effect anything in a person today unless it is within the physical body, for it needs eyes, ears, and all the physical instruments—including those for pleasure, suffering, pain, joy, and so on—in order to perceive its surroundings. Although the physical body is merely an instrument, it is necessary for the astral body as it exists today. The moment the astral body leaves the physical body, it can no longer perceive anything.

[ 14 ] This astral body is exactly the same as the one that was formerly part of the collective soul substance surrounding the Earth. If you were to separate all the astral bodies and combine them, you would obtain what, as astral or soul substance, surrounded human beings at that time. If one could put all people on Earth to sleep today—so that the entire human race were asleep—and then extract all the astral bodies and mix them with the remaining substance, one would see how dreamless sleep would cease entirely. Although the souls would not perceive colors and sounds through their external senses, colors would begin to rise from all these astral bodies, and constantly changing images of color would float all around them, while sounds would begin to emanate from within. All of this would then once again surround the Earth, just as it did in that time before the first incarnation of any soul took place.

[ 15 ] The darkening of that ancient state of consciousness—which you now experience in your dreamless sleep—occurred because the collective astral substance was divided into individual parts by the World Soul, and those individual parts were drawn into human bodies. You can go even further. What is night today—what sinks into an indeterminate darkness for people today—was, at a time we are now speaking of, thoroughly filled with light, filled with perceptions of the spiritual world; it was, in fact, day. So you have now been led to a state of humanity in which the whole of humanity perceived the astral realm, though not in a physical body.

[ 16 ] Now ask yourself this question: What has humanity actually gained since that time? What has been added to what it already had? What has humanity gained through physical incarnation? — It has gained the ability to say “I” to itself. The entire consciousness, however clairvoyant it may have been, was merely a more or less heightened dream consciousness. People were not yet self-conscious. This, then, is what humanity has gained. This is the true gift of God, as recounted in religious texts such as the Bible: that at the time when humanity became incarnate, self-consciousness was bestowed upon human beings. People did not know this before, and this self-consciousness will continue to increase more and more in present-day humanity. It is what has been revealed since that time, which we no longer spend in a dull or clairvoyant state of consciousness: the “I Am,” which we can call by no other name than “I Am the I Am.” There you have the word of Yahweh: “I Am who was, who is, and who will be.”

[ 17 ] Thus we have returned to a time when this “I Am” word had not yet emerged. It was not yet present in human beings. Human beings possessed a consciousness that had been instilled in them—one they did not acquire by observing external objects. Where was an “I Am” consciousness? Divine beings possessed this self-consciousness. Human beings acquired it after their physical incarnation. Therein lies the difference between what is called the Holy Spirit in Christianity and the Spirit in and of itself. The Holy Spirit is the one who, above, before incarnation, possessed self-consciousness, and the Spirit in itself is the one who possessed “I”-consciousness within human beings. So that if you were to bring all “I”-consciousnesses together—and thereby separate them from egoism—you would once again obtain the Holy Spirit.

[ 18 ] Now you have taken what we started with and expressed it in its most radical form. We have gone back to a very peculiar kind of teaching. While today teaching is conducted in such a way that one person stands before another and tells the student, “This is how things are”—back then, only one thing was possible: a form of teaching that was at the same time work and action. It was an outpouring of wisdom into individual beings. Wisdom did not come from the outside; it flowed to people from within—a process known today only to the initiated. If you were now to trace the course of time from the era I have just described—where there was no teaching, but only an illumination from within—to our own time, you would find an intermediate period in which people were, so to speak, half in one state and half in the other. That was the middle of the Atlantean epoch. At that time, human beings could already discern certain outlines of things; they could see how color gradually settled on the surface of objects and how individual things acquired characteristics. But they saw this only as if everything were shrouded in a mist of color. They still heard the whole world resounding with tones—wise tones—that spoke to them and brought them news of other beings. But all of this was still very confused in this intermediate state. This was also the time when a teaching began that gradually transformed into the later form of religious communication to humankind.

[ 19 ] If we could go back to the ancient Atlantean era, we would find a great school of adepts. The fact that anyone today can absorb wisdom is made possible by the fact that the Turanian adepts of that time had disciples; their disciples, in turn, instructed others right up to our own time, so that a direct tradition leads all the way back to the Turanian school of adepts. At that time, one had to take into account that people were in an intermediate state, in which they possessed only a portion of today’s mode of perception. They could only perceive objects in vague outlines. Yet to some extent, they were also able to receive the truth from within. Very few people at that time could have counted past five. This is not possible without self-awareness. But they were able to absorb what was reflected into their inner being, into their semi-somnambulic consciousness. One had to enlighten them if one wished to teach them the highest wisdom. But one had to teach them through imagery, and the Turanian adepts had certain methods for this. They could not have done this in the same way one gives a lecture today. The adepts themselves were far ahead of humanity and knew all this themselves, but the rest of humanity was still extraordinarily primitive. People were put into a hypnotic state in order to teach them wisdom. What is considered wrong today was perfectly normal back then. People were put into a kind of sleep state, and this sleep state was used to enlighten them in the following way. Before the human soul’s first incarnation into the body, there was no night; all people were enlightened. At that time, dreamless sleep was precisely the state in which people had perceptions. By then, they no longer had this. It had disappeared, and in its place they had acquired the ability to see objects in general outlines. To the extent that there was an influx of external perceptions, so much had been lost in inner perception. But by then, certain abilities had been developed among the adepts. They had learned what is today called occult writing, and what one would also call occult speech today. You all know that there are so-called mantras, certain primordial formulas of prayer, and that there is a specific effect inherent in the sound of language. The first words of the Gospel of John were of this nature as well. When it says here: “In the beginning was the Word”—there lies a specific value in the “beginning,” which originally resided entirely in the very first words of the Gospel of John. Yet all of this is but a faint shadow of what was practiced at that time as a composition of sounds in the school of adepts. This served to replace what people of that era had lost in terms of their capacity for enlightenment. As for the other person, who was an initiate, he could regain this enlightenment during hypnotic sleep, so that these students received a kind of artificial enlightenment from their more advanced brothers, through which the human being once again saw the spirits at work in that world which had always surrounded him, just as before, before the human soul had incarnated. This is what the disciples of the Turanian period experienced; such were the first religious teachings; this is how the laws of the world were taught to them. And from those illuminations, people received formulas and drawings, for one could also work through drawings; if the line followed a very specific law, it had the power to impart great cosmic mysteries to human beings. If you were to draw a vortex for a person, they would not have seen that vortex with their eyes open. But if this vortex were held up to them during hypnotic sleep or even tapped out, it would have evoked very special sensations—for example, like how a plant develops into a seed and a new plant emerges from the seed. Such symbols, such lines, were then passed down from these schools of adepts and later given to the peoples by the various founders of religions.

[ 20 ] The further back we go, the more what was distributed among individual human beings as the soul is, in fact, a single, unified soul. It is because the individual souls were distributed and separated from one another that they have become distinct. Even today, all astral bodies are similar to one another during sleep; during the day, they look quite different. This was also the case in this hypnotic state, where the astral bodies were actually being instructed, and they were all quite similar at that time. There, it was possible to impart a certain primal wisdom to all of them. But once humanity had lost this ability to receive wisdom in such a way, it became necessary in ancient India to teach in the manner required by the Indian body, in Persia in the manner required by the Persian body, and again differently in Greece, Egypt, and among the Germanic peoples. This was dictated by the outer physical bodies in accordance with the various influences exerted upon them. The original founders of religion had cast this into those forms that have been handed down to us today as the Egyptian teachings of Hermes, the teachings of Zarathustra, and so on.

[ 21 ] But in all the fundamental forms of true religions, the very essence that gave rise to them still lives on. That enlightenment which human beings once received is, after all, something entirely different from what is possible today. It was a communication not through teachings, but through life itself. This is a much more intimate way for the student to relate to the teacher. You can imagine, for example, that the vortex directly stimulated sensations. Today, concepts are conveyed, and the sensations must first be kindled by those concepts. But it was precisely from this kind of influence through life that the religious formulas arose. Thus, the sevenfold nature of the human being was precisely what was taught in the Turanian school of adepts. Today, however, these concepts remain hidden as thoughts within the Lord’s Prayer. This Lord’s Prayer is the expression of the sevenfold nature of the human being.

[ 22 ] This was made clear to the student of the Turanian adepts by presenting him with a musical scale as a symbol of the seven members of the human being, combined with specific color concepts and a scale of aromas. Whatever lay within the seven-part scale of harmony arose within him as an inner experience, for which what was present externally served merely as a means. The great founders of religions cast this into certain formulas, and the greatest of them also cast it into the Lord’s Prayer; and everyone who prays the Lord’s Prayer experiences the effect of the Lord’s Prayer.

[ 23 ] The Lord’s Prayer is a prayer that, as such, is not a mantra. It will still have its significance even after thousands upon thousands of years have passed, for it is a mantra of thought. The effect of the Lord’s Prayer has been instilled into the mind, and just as it is true that a person can digest food quite well without first having a physiologist explain the mechanism of the digestive process, so too is it true that whoever prays the Lord’s Prayer feels its effect, even without being told so. The effect of the Lord’s Prayer is there, for it lies within the power of thoughts themselves. However, there is also a higher insight that lends the Lord’s Prayer a deeper meaning, and no one should close themselves off from it. Such is the path that religious truths have taken.

[ 24 ] Your souls, which today dwell within your bodies, once lived within the common divine spiritual substance and were enlightened there in a somnambulistic state. Without a sense of self, they were able to perceive how the spiritual-divine forces create. Then the souls were incorporated. As a result, this perception became increasingly obscured to them, and they were even deprived of the ability to artificially induce this state, as was still possible in the Turanian school of adepts. Religious teachings and formulas, drawn from that primordial wisdom which the world itself created, are merely an echo of the sensations that can be communicated from person to person. The wisdom of the Old Testament is, as it were, spoken by the primordial ideas, by the primordial wisdom that underlies all things and that your soul once possessed. In the future, it will be the case that people will once again possess from within their souls what they originally possessed in a dim, dreamlike consciousness—but now in a bright, clear consciousness. Human beings will possess their present bright, clear consciousness, along with enlightenment. To attain self-consciousness, human beings had to give up their original clairvoyance, and the more this original clairvoyance was dimmed, the more the inner sense of self blossomed. Once this has reached its peak, humanity will have arrived at its final incarnation, bearing within itself—as the fruit of its life—the old clairvoyance and, in addition, a newly acquired element.

[ 25 ] Time and again one hears the phrase that human beings must gradually merge into a universal consciousness. That would be salvation—if they were to lose their present consciousness and merge into a universal consciousness. But that is not how it works. The sense of self—which once did not exist at all—will continue to exist even after the final incarnation. What has separated from the common spiritual substance will flow back together again. But imagine it this way: Originally, you had clear water, which was absorbed by many little sponges. During this process of separation, however, everything that can be absorbed from the surroundings is taken in. Each drop takes on a very specific color. When the little sponges are squeezed out again, each one brings its own color with it. This is a diversity of colors, iridescent, more beautiful than it could ever have been before. Thus, when every human being returns to the universal spiritual realm, they bring their own unique color with them. This is their individual consciousness, which cannot be lost. A symphony of all consciousnesses, a harmony—this will be the Universal Consciousness. In freedom, the beings who have passed through humanity will be one. They will remain many, yet because they wish to be one—not because they are forced to form a unity—they will be one. Each has retained its consciousness, and all together, through their will, form a unified consciousness. This is how we must imagine the beginning and end of our present world process.

[ 26 ] We must not resort to clichés, but must view things as they are. Talking about “merging into a universal consciousness” is a pantheistic cliché. Precisely when we speak from the perspective of eternity, we must hold before our souls a principle that shows us that humanity was not here in vain, that it had a significance in the universe. In other words, those who engage in the study of the facts of the world ultimately tell themselves that human beings are called upon to contribute something, to give meaning to this life. Ultimately, he must lay down upon the altar of the Deity the offering he has earned for himself. And from this, as the saying so beautifully goes, the fabric will be woven that the entire spirit of the earth weaves. This encompasses all human selves, and Goethe spoke as a true initiate when he described it as a real process:

In the torrents of life, in the storm of deeds
I surge back and forth,
Weaving to and fro!
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A shifting weave,
A blazing life,
Thus I create at the whirring loom of time
And weave a living garment for the Deity.

[ 27 ] The Deity will wear the immortal garment when the Earth has reached its perfection, and individual human beings will have woven the fabric as they move upward through their various incarnations, in their passage through birth and death.