The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Theosophy and Rosicrucianism II

[ 1 ] After discussing the purpose and nature of the spiritual science movement in a sort of introduction yesterday, let us now delve directly into the nature of this science itself. This does have the disadvantage that, for those who are not yet familiar with these matters, the result may be somewhat shocking; but one must be patient and realize that some things that seem downright nonsensical at first will, over time, prove to be coherent and comprehensible in and of themselves.

[ 2 ] Of the topic assigned to us, we will first have to examine the nature of human beings.

[ 3 ] This human being, who is none other than ourselves, is to stand before our soul. He is a very complex being—the most complex that can ever confront us in the world as we know it. That is why, throughout the ages, this human being has been called the “microcosm” by those with deep insight, in contrast to the “macrocosm,” the universe. Paracelsus used a very beautiful comparison to illustrate the nature of the human being: Look at the nature that surrounds you, and imagine every being—plant, animal, stone—as a letter of the alphabet; and when a word is written from these letters, you have the human being.

[ 4 ] In this regard, we will find that Goethe’s words ring true: One must understand all of nature in order to comprehend human beings. — To begin with, what I say today is meant to be, so to speak, merely a sketch of the nature of human beings. Just as a charcoal drawing relates to a painting, so today’s presentation is meant to relate to what we will be discussing over the next few days regarding the nature of human beings.

[ 5 ] When we, as earthly beings, observe a human being with our physical senses—as he stands before us, as our eyes see him and our hands touch him—he is, from the materialist’s point of view, perceived as a whole human being, as a being in his entirety. For a deeper, that is, a spiritual understanding of the world, however, this is only a small part of the human being that we can perceive here with our physical senses; it is the part of the human being that the anatomist dissects and breaks down, and which he seeks to comprehend in this way with his intellect, breaking it down into its individual parts—into cells perceptible only under a microscope—through which he seeks to form a picture of the structure and mode of operation of the individual organs.

[ 6 ] In science, all of this is considered part of the physical body. Today, however, people very often view this physical body incorrectly, believing that what stands before them in life as a human being is nothing more than this physical body. But that is not the case at all; rather, higher aspects of human nature are closely connected to it, acting through this physical body and causing it to appear just as it presents itself to us as a human being in each of our fellow human beings. This physical body would look quite different if we could separate it from the higher aspects of human nature. This physical body is something that human beings share with the entire mineral world. All the substances and all the forces at work among the individual mineral substances—iron, arsenic, carbon, and so on—are also at work in the substances of the human body, the physical bodies of animals, and plants.

[ 7 ] We are immediately reminded of the higher aspects of human nature once we realize what the enormous difference is between this physical body and the other physical substances that surround us in the mineral world. You all know that this marvelous structure of the physical body contains within itself what we call inner life, consciousness, pleasure and pain, joy, love, and hate; that this physical body contains not only substances from the mineral world, but also thoughts. You can certainly see the flush on the cheeks and the color of the hair, but you do not see what is taking place within this physical body—pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, and so on. We do not see any of this, yet it all takes place within the skin’s envelope. This is already the clearest and most irrefutable proof that, apart from this body, there must be something else besides mere physical matter.

[ 8 ] When you see a tear roll down, that tear is the purely physical expression of the grief taking place within. Now look at the world of minerals. This world of minerals stares back at you in silence. No joy, no pain—none of that can be perceived. The stone has no feelings, no consciousness like ours. For the spiritual scientist, this stone is comparable to the nails on our fingers or our teeth. Consider a fingernail: it, too, has no feeling, no sensation; and yet the nail is a part of us. Just as we must have something within us that causes nails and teeth to form, so there is also something in the world that forms minerals. The nails themselves have no consciousness, but they belong to something that does have consciousness. If a little beetle crawls over a fingernail, for example, the fingernail may well be a mineral to that beetle. It is the same when we crawl over the earth and do not realize that there is a consciousness behind this mineral earth; for just as there is a consciousness behind the fingernail, so too is there one behind the minerals. We shall yet see that there is a world and that there is a consciousness underlying the mineral world. This “I-consciousness” of the mineral world lies as far above us as the consciousness of the beetle crawling over our fingernail is surpassed by our own consciousness, which lies behind the nail.

[ 9 ] Rosicrucian philosophy attributes this consciousness of the mineral world to a realm it calls the world of reason; that is where the consciousness of minerals resides, and that is also where human reason originates, through which we form our thoughts. But the thoughts that live within us are a highly deceptive thing; the human world of thought relates to the entities of this world of reason much as our shadow on the wall relates to ourselves. Just as the shadow on the wall is not myself, but merely my shadow, so too are human thoughts merely shadows of the world of the spirit. But the fact that a thought is conceived here has its reason in the fact that in the world of reason there truly is a creative entity that produces this thought. It is a world where our thoughts are real entities that one encounters there, just as one encounters other people here. For the initiate, this is the higher Devachan world, the Arupa Devachan of the Indians, or also the higher mental world—that is, the world of reason of the Rosicrucians. When an initiate walks through this physical world, life speaks to him from every patch of earth, and he feels in everything the manifestations of another world. Since we, in our physical bodies, are nothing other than parts of this physical world, we also possess a subordinate physical consciousness that extends upward into the higher world of reason—precisely to the point where the consciousness of the mineral world also lies.

[ 10 ] So our physical body is mineral in nature in terms of its material composition, and the consciousness of this physical body is also found where the consciousness of this mineral world is to be found.

[ 11 ] But what, then, is the difference between this physical body and a mineral, such as rock crystal? If we compare our body to a crystal, we readily find that, in comparison to it, our body is a very complex thing. Let us consider for a moment what the difference is between a mineral and a living being. In terms of substances, there is no difference at all, for the exact same substances are found in a living being as in a mineral; it is only the structure that is much more complex.

[ 12 ] When you have the mineral in its natural form before you, it remains the same mineral in and of itself. This is not the case, however, with living beings—plants, animals, and humans. For as soon as matter becomes so complex that it can no longer sustain itself—that is, it would have to disintegrate within itself—there is something within this matter, precisely when it becomes too complex to sustain itself, that prevents this disintegration, and then we have before us what we call a living being. Therefore, spiritual science states: A living being would spontaneously disintegrate into the individual components of its matter if the factor preventing this disintegration were not present within it. And what prevents this living being from disintegrating at every moment—that is, the factor that prevents this disintegration—we call the etheric or life body, which is, however, a structure of an entirely different nature than the physical substances of which the physical body is composed, yet which has the ability to form and maintain the complex physical substances in every living being and to prevent their disintegration. What manifests itself in such a purely external way within an organism, we call life. This etheric or life body—or body of formative forces—cannot be perceived with physical eyes, but it can be perceived through the first degree of clairvoyant vision; and the task of the seer is to train himself so that he can see this etheric body just as we see the physical body with our physical eyes. Modern natural science, too, is searching for this etheric body, but it seeks to form a conception of it only through speculation and speaks, for example, of the life force or life energy.

[ 13 ] So how does this etheric body appear to the clairvoyant eye—that is, to the clairvoyant?

[ 14 ] For example, if you observe an object from the mineral world—say, a rock crystal—with the seer’s eye, and for this purpose set aside the physical substance by diverting your attention, then you will see nothing in the space occupied by the physical crystal. The space is empty. But if you observe any living being—that is, a plant, an animal, or a human—in the same way, then this space occupied by the physical body is not empty, but is still filled with a kind of luminous form, and that is precisely the etheric body mentioned earlier. This etheric body is not the same in all living beings; rather, it varies extraordinarily—differing even in shape and proportion from the physical body of the living being in question—and this varies entirely according to the stage of development the living being has reached. In plants, this etheric body is shaped quite differently from the plant itself; in animals, it already resembles the animal’s outer form more closely; and in humans, the etheric body appears as a luminous form that corresponds almost exactly to the physical body in shape. If, for example, one looks at a horse from this perspective, one sees this etheric body protruding quite far outside the head, in front of the forehead, in the form of a luminous figure that roughly conforms to the shape of the horse’s head, whereas in the average person today, the etheric body protrudes only very slightly above the head and on both sides of it.

[ 15 ] As for the substantiality of the etheric body, people usually have misconceptions about the material nature of this etheric body. Even within the Theosophical Society, much that is erroneous and confusing has been said and written about this etheric body, but this is part of the Theosophical Society’s growing pains and must be overcome. To form a correct conception of the material nature of the etheric body, please follow me in a comparison.

[ 16 ] Imagine you have a hundred marks and keep spending more and more of it; then your wealth becomes thinner and thinner, and eventually you have nothing left. That, then, would be the thinnest state of wealth. But there is an even “thinner” state, in which one reduces one’s “nothing” of possessions even further by incurring negative wealth—that is, debt. One can thus reduce one’s wealth even further, for now one would have less than nothing if, for example, one were to go ten marks into debt.

[ 17 ] Or imagine this applied to something else. Imagine a battle with its tremendous din; as you move farther away from it, the din grows fainter and fainter, quieter and quieter, until you can no longer hear it at all. If you now diminish this state of not hearing—it becomes quieter than quiet, more soundless than soundless—such a stillness does indeed exist. And it is something supremely blissful, even if the ordinary person cannot easily imagine it.

[ 18 ] But now imagine applying these examples to the density of matter; you’ll first have the three generally known states of matter: solid, liquid, and gaseous; but we must not stop there, in accordance with the example of “capacity” cited above. Just as we can dilute wealth into negative wealth, so too does matter here become thinner and thinner, extending beyond the gaseous state. And so imagine a kind of matter that would be the opposite of physical matter; then you will arrive at a rough idea of what the ether consists of.

[ 19 ] Just as negative wealth has the opposite conditions of positive wealth—positive wealth makes one rich, negative wealth makes one poor; the more wealth I have, the more I can buy; the less wealth I have, the less I can afford to buy—so, too, does the world ether, of which the etheric body of every living being is a part, possess the exact opposite properties of physical matter. Just as solid matter tends to fall apart, so the etheric body strives to hold everything together and prevent the physical body, which it has permeated, from disintegrating. This disintegration into its individual constituent elements occurs in every living being immediately as soon as the etheric body leaves the physical body—or, in other words, when the physical death of the living being occurs. Thus, we have traced matter into a world where it has the opposite effect of our physical matter.

[ 20 ] When I say that in human beings the etheric body resembles the physical body, I am stating a fact that one must be aware of and that should be mentioned here, since important conclusions arise from it for the later lectures. This statement, in fact, requires a very important qualification, for in truth the etheric body is very different from the physical body and is actually similar to it only in its upper part, the head; but it differs greatly from the physical body in that it has a gender opposite to that of the physical body: the etheric body of a man is, in fact, female, and conversely, that of a woman is male. Every human being is therefore hermaphroditic; physical sex is merely an outward expression that has its opposite pole in the etheric body. Just as a magnet has a north pole and a south pole—and just as a magnet does not have a north pole alone—so too here there is a pole and an opposite pole.

[ 21 ] This etheric or life body, also called the body of formative forces, is thus the second component of the human being and remains intimately connected to the human physical body from birth until death; and the separation of this life body from the physical body is precisely what death is.

[ 22 ] The physical body is first built up by the etheric body; this etheric body is, so to speak, the architect of the physical body. If you want to visualize this, consider the example of water and ice. When water cools, it takes on a different form—it becomes ice. And just as ice is formed from water through condensation, so too is the etheric body formed from the physical body.

[ 23 ] Ice: water; physical body: etheric body; that is to say, the forces of the etheric body have become tangible and physically perceptible in the physical body. Just as the forces that later manifest in solid ice were already present in the water, so too are all the forces necessary for the formation of the physical body already present within the etheric body. Thus, for example, the etheric body already contains a force from which the heart, the stomach, the brain, and so on develop. Thus, for every organ of our physical body, there is a predisposition present in the etheric body; but these predispositions are not substances, but rather currents of force. Human beings share this etheric body with all plants and all animals—that is, with all physical beings that manifest life.

[ 24 ] Now one might ask: Do plants possess a kind of consciousness in the same sense that we have found consciousness in the world of minerals? — We saw earlier that the consciousness of minerals is found in the higher world of reason through spiritual research, which is also where our thoughts originated.

[ 25 ] Just as our fingers do not possess an independent consciousness—but rather, the consciousness of a finger is part of the consciousness of the whole human being—so, too, do plants belong to a consciousness, and this lies in the lower world of reason, the world of the stars, the heavenly world, the Rupa Devachan. When the spiritual researcher enters this world, he encounters the souls of the plants there. The souls of the plants are beings just like us here; and these beings relate to the plants in much the same way as a human relates to his fingers.

[ 26 ] The consciousness of plants is thus anchored in this lower Devachan world. The forces that underlie all growth and all organic development are rooted in it. It is also the source of the forces that build up our own physical body—that is, the forces of our etheric body, which we have already described as the architect of the physical body. This consciousness of the plant world is immeasurably higher and wiser than human consciousness.

[ 27 ] This will become clear to you immediately when you consider how wisely not only the human physical body, but also the bodies of all beings permeated by an etheric body—that is, all living beings—are constructed. What immense wisdom is required to construct even the simplest physical body of any living being, let alone the most artfully crafted structure of all earthly living beings: the human body!

[ 28 ] Just consider, for example, the upper part of the human femur—how wonderfully the individual bone beams are joined together according to all the rules of architecture! At this very point, the femur is actually a much more complex structure than it appears to be when viewed from the outside; it is composed of a framework of beams whose angles are so wisely arranged relative to one another that the entire body can be supported with the smallest possible amount of material. Truly, it is a greater work of art than the most complicated bridge, and no engineering in the world can replicate anything like it. Or consider the structure of the heart; it is so wisely constructed that man, with all his wisdom, is but a child compared to the wisdom revealed within it. And what does this human heart endure, even though human folly tries to ruin it almost daily—for example, through our so-called “stimulants”: coffee, alcohol, and nicotine.

[ 29 ] To create a marvel such as the physical body, forces are needed that extend all the way up into the astral world, and only the beings of this astral world are—to put it simply—smart enough to construct such a physical body.

[ 30 ] And now we come to the third aspect of human nature. Plants have a physical body and an etheric body; but they lack something that animals and humans possess: they do not experience suffering, pleasure, pain, or sensation. This is the difference between animals and humans on the one hand, and plants on the other. The difference lies in the fact that inner processes take place within animals and humans. Modern science has even sought to attribute sensation to plants based on the processes observed in them. It is lamentable to see what nonsense is made of these concepts, for no inner processes whatsoever take place here as they do with any sensation; one could just as rightly ascribe this “sensation” to blue litmus paper. But that is what happens when one seeks sensation here in the physical world. In the physical world, one cannot find any sensation in a phenomenon such as that observed in some plants; for that, one must turn to the heavenly worlds. To prevent misunderstandings, it should be noted here that in the case of so-called responsive plants, such as the mimosa, this process of stimulation is not reflected as sensation in the physical world, but only in the lower world of reason, where the consciousness of plants is located. Here below in the physical world, only humans and animals have desires and passions, joys and pains. Why? Because, in addition to the physical body and the etheric body, they also possess the astral body, the third member of the human being.

[ 31 ] To the seer, the astral body appears as if the entire human being were enveloped in an egg-shaped cloud, and within this cloud every sensation, every impulse, and every passion finds expression. This astral body is thus the bearer of pleasure and suffering, joy and pain. This third member differs from the physical body and the etheric body. For when a person sleeps, only the physical body and the etheric body lie in bed, while the astral body, together with the “I,” has withdrawn; when, on the other hand, the astral body and the etheric body step out of the physical body, death occurs, and with it the decay of the physical body.

[ 32 ] Why is this component of the being called the astral body? There is simply no more fitting term for it. Why? This component has an important task, and we must understand this important task clearly. This astral body is not idle at night, for as the seer can observe, it works on the physical and etheric bodies during the night. During the day, you wear down the physical and etheric bodies, for everything you do is, after all, a form of wear and tear on the physical body, and the manifestation of this wear and tear is fatigue. Now, what you wear down during the day, the astral body repairs during the night. In fact, the astral body eliminates fatigue during sleep. This explains the importance and necessity of sleep. The clairvoyant can consciously carry out this repair. The restorative quality of sleep is based on the fact that the astral body has worked properly on the physical and etheric bodies. However, because the astral body must first return to the physical and etheric bodies, the restorative effect of sleep occurs only gradually—that is, about an hour after waking.

[ 33 ] There is another important aspect associated with this emergence of the astral body during sleep. For when the astral body comes into contact with the external world during waking life, it must coexist with the physical and etheric bodies; but when it detaches itself from the body—that is, during sleep—it is freed from the constraints of the physical and etheric bodies. And then something marvelous occurs: the forces of the astral body extend into the world of the stars, where the soul-beings of the plants reside, and from this world it draws its strength. The astral body rests in the world in which the stars are embedded. This is the world of the Pythagoreans’ spherical harmony. It is a real reality and not a fantasy. When one lives consciously in this world, one hears the harmonies of the spheres; one hears the forces and relationships of the stars resonating with one another. In this sense, Goethe was an initiate, and it is from this spirit that the opening of the “Prologue in Heaven” from Faust is to be understood:

The sun resounds in the ancient way
In the spheres of brotherhood, a contest of song,
And its prescribed journey
It completes with a thunderous roar.
Its sight gives strength to the angels,
Though none can fathom it;
The incomprehensibly lofty works
Are glorious, just as on the first day.

[ 34 ] People know very little about Goethe and are generally unaware that he was an initiate; they simply say: A poet needs such images. — But Goethe knew that the sun stands at the very center of a circle dance, and that it resounds as the spirit of the sun! That is why Goethe remains within this image and continues:

Listen! Hear the storm of the Horae!
Resounding to the ears of the spirit
The new day is already being born.
Rock gates creak and rattle,
Phoebus’ wheels roll with a crackling sound;
What a din the light brings!
It thunders, it blares,
The eye squints and the ear is astonished,
The unheard cannot be heard.

[ 35 ] The astral body dwells in this celestial realm during the night. And while during the day it falls into a kind of disharmony with earthly things, at night, during sleep, it is once again nestled in the bosom of the starry world. And then it returns in the morning with the powers it has brought back from that world. One brings the harmony of the spheres with oneself from this astral world when one emerges from sleep. In the celestial world—the astral world—the astral body has its true home, and that is why it has been given this name: astral body. — Thus, we have now become acquainted with three members of the human being: the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body.

[ 36 ] We will explore the fourth element—the “I”—next time. The “I” is the element that makes human beings the crown of creation and elevates them above the animal.

[ 37 ] Animals do not yet possess a consciousness like that of humans; they do, however, have a consciousness, just as we have seen in plants and minerals; but this consciousness of animals lies in the astral world. The fourth member of the human being—this “I”—combines with the other three members to form the sacred quaternity of the human being, of which all the ancient schools speak.

[ 38 ] Thus, human beings share the physical body with minerals, the etheric body with plants, and the astral body with animals. Only the “I” is unique to them; and this elevates them above all else. In human beings, we find, so to speak, an essence of everything we see spread out around us. Indeed: a microcosm! Therefore, if we want to understand human beings, we must first understand what surrounds us.

[ 39 ] Thus, we must conceive of the three constituent elements—these three bodies—as three sheaths woven from the most diverse regions, and within these sheaths we—that is, the “I”—dwell together with the higher elements of the human being, our immortal part.