The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Second Lecture

[ 1 ] Last time we spoke about the way in which the method known as the Rosicrucian method establishes its relationship to the human being and to culture as a whole. Although all knowledge of the higher worlds can be gained only through the seer—through the highly developed spiritual powers of the human being—this method nevertheless aims to ensure that what emerges within Rosicrucian theosophy can be understood through the application of ordinary logic. This knowledge is discovered through the seer’s developed senses, but ordinary human logic is sufficient for comprehension. One must not, however, believe that what can be said in a single lecture is already capable of withstanding every supposed criticism. This is only the case when the matter is examined in light of all the reasons accessible to logic. And there is yet another characteristic that we already emphasized in the last lecture, namely that the Rosicrucian method aims to bring spiritual science into practical life. Therefore, everything here is presented in such a way that it can take root in real life. But you must also be patient with regard to this matter; at first, some things may not seem as though they could find their way into practical life. But when you are able to survey the whole, you will see that the details are arranged in such a way that they can be integrated into everyday activities. Wisdom that can be put to use in life—that is what the Rosicrucian method of research can provide.

[ 2 ] First, we will examine the nature of the human being. We will become acquainted with the individual components of human nature. Only if we proceed step by step in a systematic manner and lose nothing from sight will we see how everything is organically structured. Then we will consider the fate of the human soul after death, and we will examine the waking, sleeping, and dead human being in relation to the structure of human nature. We will have to investigate what the human being does from death until rebirth. It is a widely held view that the human being is inactive in the time after death. That is not the case. Rather, the human being must act and create; he has work to perform that is significant within the cosmos. Then we will have to explain what is called reincarnation and karma—destiny—in connection with the course of human development, how humanity has developed in the past, and how the prospects for human development unfold into the future.

[ 3 ] Today, it will be my task to describe the nature of the human being to some extent. When we speak of the nature of the human being, we must be aware that, to the eye of one who approaches the observation of the human being with developed spiritual organs of perception, human nature appears far more complex than it does in ordinary sensory observation—which is permeated by the human intellect and can perceive only a very small part of the whole human being. From the perspective of occultism—as we have already indicated—it is incorrect to call what stands before us the physical body. The physical body, as it stands before us, is already permeated by the etheric body and the astral body. It is a union of these three bodies, and only if one could separate the other bodies would one have the true physical human body before one. This physical body is the aspect of the human being that it shares with the entire physical nature surrounding human beings—with minerals, plants, and animals.

[ 4 ] We can only view this physical human body correctly if we say that it extends as far as the relationship between the human being and the mineral kingdom surrounding him. However, you must realize that this aspect of the human being can least of all be considered in isolation from the rest of the cosmos. The forces at work in the physical body act from within the cosmos. Anyone who understands this perceives it in much the same way as they experience the nature of a rainbow. For a rainbow to form, a very specific constellation of conditions must be present—involving the refraction of sunlight, rain clouds, and so on. You cannot make the rainbow disappear if the constellation of rain clouds and sunlight is just right. The rainbow is thus a kind of consequence, a phenomenon brought about from the outside. In the same way, the physical body is also a kind of mere phenomenon. You must seek the forces that hold the physical body together in the rest of the world around you. The question now arises: where, then, do these forces actually lie in their true form—the forces that cause our physical body to appear as it does? There we are led up into higher worlds, for in the physical world one can see only what is the phenomenon of the physical body. The forces that constitute this phenomenon lie in a very high spiritual world. We must therefore consider, to some extent, the worlds that exist beyond our physical one.

[ 5 ] When the occultist speaks of higher worlds, these are worlds that surround us at every moment; one need only open one’s senses to them, just as the eye must be opened to the world of colors. When certain spiritual senses are awakened—senses that lie one degree higher than the physical senses—the world around us becomes permeated by a new phenomenon known as the astral world. Rosicrucian theosophy calls this world the imaginative world, although “imaginative” here refers to something far more real than is usually understood by the term. There, one sees a ebb and flow of images. Color, which is otherwise bound to objects, undergoes manifold transformations within the astral world. We will come to understand this in greater detail. In the Rosicrucian method that has become popular—within the movement that has affiliated itself with the Rosicrucians—this world is also called the elemental world, so that these three terms—the imaginative world, the astral world, and the elemental world—mean the same thing in the Rosicrucian sense.

[ 6 ] You will also find an even higher world when even higher senses are developed. It is the world of spherical harmonies, which penetrates the world of images and beings of color. It is called the world of Devachan, or the mental world, or the world of Rupa-Devachan; in Rosicrucian terminology, it is the world of spherical harmonies or the world of inspiration, because sound is the source of inspiration once the senses have been opened to it. This world has also been called the heavenly world within the movement that has aligned itself with the Rosicrucian tradition. The lower or Rupa-Devachan world, the Devachanic world, the world of inspiration, and the heavenly world are, in turn, one and the same.

[ 7 ] Then we finally have an even higher world that opens up even higher senses. The Rosicrucian method refers to it as the world of true intuition, whereby intuition is something far higher than what is commonly understood from the trivial use of the word in human life: a merging, a penetrating into the essence of things, so that one perceives them from within. This world of intuition is called the world of reason in the movement that has affiliated itself with the Rosicrucians. This world is so far above the ordinary world that it casts only a sort of shadow into the human world. Rational concepts are faint shadows compared to what are realities in this world.

[ 8 ] Thus, in addition to our physical world, we must consider three other worlds if we are to understand the world in its true form. Beyond the forces that hold the physical world together, we must seek the forces in the highest, intuitive world. Compared to what you can find there in terms of essential beings, what the physicist finds in the physical world appears like faint shadows. If you were to ascend into the highest of the worlds, you would find living beings corresponding to every concept you form of a crystal or the eye. What is a concept here is the shadow image of entities in this highest of worlds. Thus, our physical world is composed of forces that appear in their true form—as theosophical terminology puts it—in the Arupa-Devachan.

[ 9 ] We can gain an even clearer understanding if we ask ourselves what such a view of the mineral kingdom means for us. Human beings have a sense of self. We call a mineral unconscious. But it is only unconscious if we remain on the physical plane. When we ascend into the higher worlds, it is no longer unconscious. However, when you enter the elemental world, you will not yet find the “I” of the mineral world, for you will find the mineral’s sense of self only in the highest of the worlds we have now enumerated. Just as the finger has no consciousness of its own, but you must go from the finger to your “I” if you wish to find its consciousness, so the mineral leads to the “I” through the currents that can be traced upward all the way to this highest realm of world existence. A fingernail belongs to the entire human organism; you find its consciousness in the “I.” If we look at a fingernail, it relates to our organism just as the mineral relates to the highest spiritual world. Thus there is an “I” of the entire organism, and just as with the mineral, the fingernails are the outermost expression of what has solidified in this life. The human physical body shares this with the minerals: insofar as the physical body is purely physical, a consciousness in the spiritual world above belongs to it. Insofar as a human being is endowed with a purely physical consciousness without being aware of it—insofar as they have a physical body whose consciousness resides up there—human beings are constituted in such a way that forces act down from above upon the physical body. You have no control over what shapes the physical body. Just as your “I” is when you move your hand, you are influenced by a higher world with regard to your physical body, and thus the “I”-consciousness of the physical body brings about the physical processes of the body. Only the initiate who has risen to the level of intuition gains control over his physical body, so that no nerve impulse passes through his nerves without his knowing it. Only then can he become a companion of those beings who live above and direct his physical body.

[ 10 ] The second aspect of human nature, which humans still share with the plant and animal kingdoms, is the etheric or life body. To the occult seer, it appears to have roughly the same form as the physical body. It is a body of force. If you could imagine the physical body away, this etheric body would remain as a body of force—a body permeated by lines of force that have built up the physical body. The human heart could never take on the form it has if there were not an etheric heart within the etheric body that permeates the physical body. This etheric heart contains certain forces and currents, and these are the builders, the architects, the shapers of the physical heart. It is as if you were to imagine having a vessel filled with water; if you cool this water, solidifications—ice formations—arise within it. What is ice there is water, only solidified, and the forms that the ice formations take were already present in the water as lines of force. In the same way, the physical heart is formed from the etheric heart; it is merely a solidified etheric heart, and the currents of force within the etheric heart have given the physical heart its form.

[ 11 ] If you could imagine the physical body away, you would see the etheric body—especially in its upper regions—as quite similar to the physical body. However, this similarity extends only as far as the middle of the body, for the etheric body does, after all, differ greatly from the physical body. You will understand this when I tell you that the etheric body is feminine in men and masculine in women. Without this insight, much will remain incomprehensible in practical life. Moreover, it appears as a luminous form and extends slightly—but only slightly—beyond the physical body in all directions. Human beings share this etheric body with the plant kingdom.

[ 12 ] The situation with the etheric body is similar to that of the physical body: the forces that hold the etheric body together are found in the world we call the inspiring world, or the world of Rupa-Devachan, the heavenly world. All the forces that hold the etheric body together lie one level lower than those that hold the physical body together. Therefore, you must also view the matter in such a way that you seek the “I”-consciousness of plants in this world of inspiration, the lower Devachan; and in this world of spherical harmonies, where the “I”-consciousness of the plant world resides, there is also the “I”-consciousness that permeates the human etheric body—the one that lives within you without your knowing it.

[ 13 ] Now we come to the third aspect of the human being, the astral body, or, to use the Rosicrucian term: the soul body. This astral body is something that humans share only with animals. Wherever sensation arises—pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, emotions and passions—the astral body is the bearer of these inner experiences of a being; desires and cravings, too, are, as one says, anchored in the astral body. This astral body, in turn, must be characterized in such a way that we say: within it lies that which is also found in the animal world. Now, the animal world, too, possesses consciousness. The astral entity of humans and animals is held together by forces that lie in the astral world—in the imaginative world, or, as the Rosicrucians put it, in the elemental world—so that the forces that hold the astral body together and give it the form it has can be recognized in their true form in the astral world. That is why animals, too, have their sense of self in this world. Just as we speak of an individual soul in humans, so we speak of a group soul in animals, and this is to be found on the astral plane. The difference is that it is not the individual animal living here on the physical plane, but the species—all lions, all tigers together—that collectively possesses an “I,” which you must seek as the group soul on the astral plane. Thus, what lives here in the animal can only be understood if you can trace it all the way up to the astral plane. You would find strands that emanate, for example, from the lions and unite on the astral plane to form the common group “I” of the individual lions living here on Earth.

[ 14 ] Just as a human being has an individual “I,” so too does a portion of a group “I” live within every astral body. This animal “I” lives within the human astral body, and it is only then that the human being becomes independent of this animal “I”—when he becomes astral-sighted, a companion to the astral beings—when the group souls of the animals encounter him on the astral plane, just as individual animal beings do here. There, beings wander about who can only descend in fragmented form as so many animals onto the physical plane. At the end of their lives, they are reunited with the rest of this being on the astral plane. An entire group of animals is, up on the astral plane, a being with whom one can speak just as one would with a single individual here. They look somewhat different, but it is not without reason that they are characterized in the second apocalyptic seal by being given various forms, and by being described as divided into four classes: lion, eagle, bull, and human—a human who has not yet descended to the physical plane. These four apocalyptic beasts are the four classes of group souls that are closest to the human being in his individual soul on the astral plane.

[ 15 ] Now let us consider what it is that human beings no longer share with the world around them—that aspect of their being which finds its expression in the “I.” Through this fourth aspect of their being, they are the crown of the physical creation on Earth. It is only in this aspect that human nature is endowed with what consciousness possesses here on the physical plane. Just as mineral consciousness resides on the Arupa-Devachan, plant consciousness on the Rupa-Devachan, and animal consciousness on the astral plane, so does the human “I”-consciousness, as the fourth aspect of human nature, reside in the physical world. It is only here, in his “I,” that human beings possess something into which no other being intrudes, into which no other conscious “I” enters.

[ 16 ] We have now become acquainted with the fourfold human being: the physical human being, the etheric human being, the astral human being, and the I. However, the point is that all of this does not yet encompass the entire human nature. Human beings also possessed these four parts during their very first incarnation here on Earth, and the passage through the various incarnations signifies a higher development of the human being. This development consists in the human being now working through the three parts mentioned earlier, starting from the “I.” If we consider a human being from the distant past in his or her first incarnation on Earth, such a person follows all his or her emotions and desires. Although he possesses his four members, including the “I,” he behaves like an animal. If we now compare such a person with a lofty idealist, the difference lies in the fact that the former, the “savage,” has not yet worked on his astral body from the perspective of his “I.” The next stage of progress in human evolution consists in the human being working on his astral body. In such a person, this work is expressed by the fact that certain original qualities of this astral body are brought under the control of the “I” from within. The average European says to himself regarding certain impulses: “You may follow these”—while he forbids himself to follow others. To the extent that a person has brought under the control of his “I” what originally lived in his astral body, we call this the “spirit-self”; it is the same thing that has been designated as Manas. This Manas is a product of the transformation of the astral body by the ego. In terms of substance, it is the same as the astral body. It is merely a different arrangement of what was originally in the astral body and has now been transformed into the spiritual self.

[ 17 ] A person who continues to develop gains the ability to work not only on their astral body but also, from the “I,” on their etheric body. Let us clarify the difference between working on the astral body and working on the etheric body. If we recall what we knew when we were eight-year-old children and consider what we have learned since then, it is an enormous amount. Everyone has absorbed a vast number of concepts that prevent them from blindly following their emotions and passions. But if one recalls, for example, that one was a quick-tempered child and considers how far one has overcome that quick temper, one will find that it still gets the better of one from time to time. Or how little one has succeeded, if one had a poor memory, in changing it, or how little a person transforms their characteristic dispositions—the strengths and weaknesses of their conscience. I have often compared what a person transforms in terms of temperament and so on to the slow advance of the hour hand on a clock. This is precisely the essence of the student’s initiation: learning is regarded as mere preparation; it is far more essential and contributes much more to initiation when one’s temperament is transformed. If one has transformed a weak memory into a strong one, a quick temper into gentleness, or a melancholic temperament into an even-tempered one, then one has accomplished more than if one had learned as much as possible. In this lies a source of inner occult powers. This is the expression of the fact that the “I” works on the etheric body, not merely on the astral body.

[ 18 ] To the extent that these dispositions manifest themselves, one must indeed seek them in the astral body; but if one wishes to change them, one must seek them in the etheric body, and one can change them only by working on the etheric body. To the extent that the ego has transformed the etheric body, to that extent is present in a human being what is referred to in German as the “spirit of life” (Lebensgeist), in contrast to the “life body” (Lebensleib). In theosophical literature, this is referred to as “Buddhi.” The substance of Buddhi is nothing other than the part of the etheric body that has been transformed by the ego.

[ 19 ] When the “I” becomes so strong that it learns not only to transform the etheric body, but also the physical body—the densest aspect of human nature, the one shaped in such a way that its powers extend far into the highest of worlds—then we say: Human beings develop within themselves the highest aspect of their present nature, that which is called Atma or the true spiritual human being. The powers for the transformation of the physical body are to be found in the highest world. One begins the transformation of the physical body with the transformation of the breathing process, for Atma means “breathing.” Through such a transformation, one alters the nature of the blood that works within the physical body, thereby working one’s way up into the highest of the worlds.

[ 20 ] Now one must distinguish between two forms of transformation; to be more precise, one speaks of an unconscious and a conscious transformation. In truth, every European has unconsciously transformed the lower aspects of his nature from within his “I.” Consciously, in his current cycle of development, he transforms them only in relation to Manas, and he must become an initiate if he wishes to learn to consciously transform his etheric body.

[ 21 ] We thus have the original three aspects of human nature that every human being possesses—even the most primitive individual at the first stage of development—and within them, the “I.” Now the transformation begins. For a long time, this transformation was unconscious; now humanity is beginning to consciously transform the astral body. The initiates are now consciously transforming the etheric body, and in the future, all human beings will consciously transform both the etheric body and the physical body.

[ 22 ] Thus we have the three original components of human nature: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and then the “I.” The “I” has a transforming effect; one sees the “I” first transforming these three components—a process that, for modern humans, belongs to the past. It has unconsciously given rise to the sensory soul, the intellectual soul, and the conscious soul as latent capacities.

[ 23 ] Rosicrucian theosophy distinguishes between the soul of sensation, the soul of intellect, and the soul of consciousness. It is only in the soul of consciousness that conscious transformation begins to shine forth; it is there that the “I” begins to work consciously on this transformation. First, the spiritual self is developed within the astral body. Within the etheric body, the life spirit is developed as the counterpart to the life body, and furthermore, the actual spiritual human being, Atma, is developed within the physical body. Thus, we have a total of nine members of human nature.

[ 24 ] To the outer eye, two of these members of human nature—the sentient soul and the soul-body—are, as it were, nested within one another, like a sword in its sheath. The sensory soul is contained within the soul-body, so that the two appear as one. Likewise, the spiritual self and the conscious soul are one, so that these nine members are reduced to seven.

[ 25 ] Now we can list seven points:

1. Physical body
2. Etheric or vital body
3. Astral body, in which the sensory soul resides, and then
4. the “I,” and as the higher members:
5. The Spiritual Self or Manas with the Consciousness Soul
6. The Life Spirit or Buddhi, and as the highest
7. The Spiritual Man or Atma

[ 26 ] Such is the inner structure of human nature, which in truth consists of nine elements, with two and two coinciding. Therefore, in the Rosicrucian method, one distinguishes three times three = nine elements, which, through this interconnection, are reduced, as it were, to seven. However, we must recognize the nine within the seven; otherwise, we will arrive only at a theoretical understanding.

9. Spiritual Man
8. Life Spirit
7. Spiritual Self
6. Consciousness Soul
5. Intellectual Soul
4. Sensitive Soul
3. Astral Body
2. Life Body
1. Physical Body

[ 27 ] The “I” shines forth in the soul, and then the work on the bodies begins.

[ 28 ] But the transition from theory to life can only be achieved by truly considering the nature of the matter. What is hinted at here should guide us tomorrow as we turn our attention to the sleeping, the waking, and the dead.