The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] This series of lectures aims to provide an overview of research in Spiritual Science that enables us to gain insight into the most important mysteries of human life, to the extent possible given the conditions and limitations that are currently imposed on our understanding of the higher worlds. Specifically, this overview will be presented in such a way that it begins with the more familiar and, from this familiar foundation, attempts to ascend into ever higher realms of existence and into the ever more hidden mysteries of human life. This time, the presentation should not so much proceed from any fixed concepts or ideas that resemble dogmas, but rather, in the simplest way possible, it should first refer to that which every human being must perceive as something familiar even in ordinary life. Spiritual research—and Spiritual Science in general—is based, after all, on the assumption that underlying the world in which we initially live, the world initially familiar to us, lies another—let us say, the spiritual world— and in this spiritual world—which underlies our sensory world and, to a certain extent, our psychological world as well—we must seek the actual causes and conditions for what actually takes place in the sensory and psychological worlds. Now, as is surely known to everyone here present—and as was touched upon in the introductory public lectures—there are certain methods that a person can apply to their inner life and through which they can awaken certain faculties of their soul that lie dormant in ordinary, everyday life, so that they experience the moment of initiation, through which they find themselves surrounded by a new world, namely the world of spiritual causes, the spiritual conditions for the sensory and soul world, just as, for example, a person who was blind until then, after an operation, finds the world of colors and the world of light all around them. From this world—which is, in fact, the very one we seek to explore more and more with each passing hour in this lecture series—from this world of spiritual realities and spiritual beings, human beings are, after all, separated in their normal lives today. Indeed, human beings are separated from this spiritual world in two respects: on the one hand, in what we might call the outer aspect, and on the other hand, in what we might call the inner aspect.

[ 2 ] When a person turns their gaze toward the external world, they see in that external world whatever first presents itself to their senses. They see colors and light; they hear sounds; they perceive warmth and cold, smells, tastes, and so on. This is the world that initially surrounds a person. If we imagine this world around us as it unfolds before our senses, we can say: in it we initially encounter a kind of boundary, for through immediate perception, through immediate experience, a person cannot see beyond this boundary—which is given to them by the world of colors and light spreading out before them, by the world of sounds, smells, and so on. They cannot perceive beyond this boundary. We can, in fact, illustrate this quite—I would say—trivially, showing how we have a boundary extending outward. Let’s look at a surface painted blue, for example. Under normal circumstances, a person cannot see what lies beyond this blue-painted surface. Well, yes, of course! A trivial person might object that one need only look behind it. But that is not how it works with regard to the world that extends around us. It is precisely through what we perceive that an outer spiritual world is veiled from us, and at most we can sense that we have, in color and light, in sounds, in warmth and cold, and so on, outer manifestations of a world lying beyond. But at any given moment, we cannot perceive or experience what lies behind the colors, the lights, and the sounds by looking through them. We must perceive the entire outer spiritual world precisely through these manifestations of it. For if you just give it a little thought, even the simplest logic will lead you to conclude: Even if, for example, modern physics or other scientific endeavors posit that there is moving etheric matter behind color, it takes only a little reflection to realize that what is assumed to lie behind color is merely something added by the mind, something deduced solely through thought. No one can directly perceive what, for example, physics explains as vibrations or movements of which color is an effect. No one can say at first whether what is supposed to lie behind sensory impressions corresponds to any reality. At first, it is merely something conceived in the mind. This external sensory world spreads out like a carpet, and we then have the sensation that behind this carpet of the external sensory world there is something into which we cannot initially penetrate with our external perception.

[ 3 ] There we have one boundary. We find the other when we look within ourselves. Within ourselves, we find a world of pleasure and suffering, of joy and pain, of passions, drives, desires, and so on; we find within ourselves everything that we call, in other words, our inner life. We usually summarize this inner life by saying: I feel this pleasure, I feel this pain, I have these drives, I have these passions. But we also have the sense that something lies hidden behind this inner life, that there is something behind it that is just as obscured by our inner experiences as something external is obscured by sensory perceptions. For who could be under any illusion that pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, and all the other experiences of the soul arise, as it were, from some unknown source upon waking in the morning—that human beings are, in a certain sense, at their mercy? And who could deny—if, in a certain act of self-reflection, one were to set all this before oneself—that there must be something deeper within oneself, something initially hidden from one’s view, which allows our pleasure and our suffering, joy and pain, and all our inner experiences to flow forth as if from within itself; experiences that are, at first, just as much revelations of the unknown as external sensory perceptions are revelations of the unknown.

[ 4 ] Now let us ask ourselves: If two such boundaries exist—or at least might exist, hypothetically—do we, as human beings, not have certain possibilities for penetrating these boundaries in some way? Is there anything in human experience through which a person can, so to speak, penetrate the outer veil of perceptions—as if piercing a thin membrane that covers something—and is there anything that leads deeper into the human inner world, beyond our desire, beyond our pain, beyond our joy, beyond our passion, and so on? Can we, so to speak, take a step further into the outer world, and can we take a step further into the inner world?

[ 5 ] Now, there are indeed two experiences that bring about something that enables a person, so to speak, to overcome the skin on the outside and the resistance on the inside in a certain way. How can it become apparent to us that something like the outer membrane—the outer tapestry of the senses—is, in a certain way, torn away from us, allowing us to penetrate a world that is veiled by this outer tapestry of the senses? How can this become apparent to us? This can become apparent to us when, in certain life processes, we experience something that we must describe as new experiences in contrast to the ordinary experiences of daily life. If there is such a thing as entirely new experiences—ones that a person cannot ordinarily perceive—and if, during such experiences, a person can also have the feeling that the external perceptions reaching us through the senses are fading away, that is, that the outer sensory tapestry is, as it were, torn apart—if that were somehow the case—then we could say, we are penetrating somewhat into this world that lies beyond our sensory perceptions.

[ 6 ] Now, to begin with, there is such an experience. However, this experience has a very significant drawback for human life as a whole. This experience is what is commonly called—and here the term is meant in the literal sense of the word—ecstasy, which for a moment causes a person, if we may put it that way, to forget the sensory impressions of the world around them, leading them to a state where, for fleeting moments of existence, they see nothing of the colors, light, sounds, smells, and so on, that surround them, and makes them impervious to ordinary sensory impressions. Under certain circumstances, however, this experience of ecstasy can indeed lead a person to new experiences—experiences that do not fall within the realm of ordinary daily life. Mind you, this ecstasy is by no means intended to be presented here as something to be striven for; rather, it is merely described as something that is possible. Nor should every ordinary state of being beside oneself be labeled as ecstasy. For two possibilities exist. One is that when a person loses receptivity to external sensory impressions, they simply find themselves in a kind of state of unconsciousness in which black darkness spreads around them in place of sensory impressions. For the normal person, this is actually, in essence, the best thing at first. But there is such a thing as ecstasy, and in the course of these lectures we will hear what significance such ecstasy holds—through which not merely black darkness spreads around the person, but through which this field of black darkness becomes, so to speak, populated by a world that the person had never known before. Do not say that this might be a world of illusion, a world of deception. Fine, let it be, for the time being, a world of illusion, a world of deception. Call it, for my sake, a collection of misty formations or whatever—that is not what matters now. What matters is—whether they are illusions, images, or whatever—that it can indeed be a world that human beings have not known until now. Human beings must then ask themselves: Am I, after all the abilities I have acquired so far, capable of constructing such things myself from within my ordinary consciousness? — If the world of images that he sees there is such that a person can say to himself: I am incapable, with the abilities I have acquired so far, of constructing such a world—then it is clear to him that this world must be given to him from somewhere. Whether some mighty world-magician is conjuring illusions within it or whether it is a reality—let us not decide that here; we will make that decision later. For now, the only thing that matters is that there are states in which a person sees worlds that were previously unknown to them.

[ 7 ] However, this ecstatic state is associated with a very particular drawback for the average person. For a person cannot naturally enter this ecstatic state except by having what he otherwise calls his “I”—his strong inner self, through which he always holds all his individual experiences together—effectively erased. A person who is in ecstasy is truly beside themselves; their “I” is as if suppressed. They are as if poured out and flowing into the new world, which is now filled with black darkness. So, first of all, we must describe this one experience—an experience that countless people have already had and are capable of having; we will discuss further in the course of these lectures how they can have it and have had it. And we have a twofold aspect in this experience of ecstasy. The first is this: the sensory impressions fade; everything a person is accustomed to perceiving through the senses is extinguished; extinguished are the experiences a person otherwise has in relation to the sensory world, where they feel: “I hear sounds, I see colors.” — The “I” is also extinguished. A person never experiences their “I” in a state of ecstasy; in ecstasy, they do not distinguish themselves from objects. Consequently, it remains initially unclear whether one is dealing with an external reality or with an illusion. For, fundamentally, it is only the “I” that can decide whether one is dealing with an illusion or with reality.

[ 8 ] These two experiences thus occur in parallel during ecstasy: the loss—or at least the diminishing—of the sense of self on the one hand, and the fading of external sensory perception on the other. Ecstasy thus truly reveals how the fabric of the sensory world dissolves and crumbles, and how our “I”—which we otherwise feel as if it were touching the skin, the fabric of the external sensory world—now flows through sensory perceptions and lives in a world of images that is something new to it. For this is the defining characteristic: that in ecstasy, a person comes to know beings and events that were previously unknown to them, which they would never find anywhere, no matter how far they might go with their sensory observation and with reasoning based on sensory facts; this, then, is the essential point—that a person comes to know something new. We will explore the relationship this has to reality in later lectures.

[ 9 ] Thus, in ecstasy, we see something like a breaking through of the outer boundary imposed upon human beings. Whether we enter a true world in ecstasy, and whether this world is the one we suspect lies at the foundation of our sensory world as a spiritual reality, remains to be seen.

[ 10 ] Now let us ask about the other side: Can we also go beyond our inner world—beyond the world of our pleasure, our suffering, our joy, our pain, our passions, instincts, and desires? There is a way there, too. There are, in turn, experiences that lead us beyond the realm of the inner life as we delve deeper and deeper into it. The path taken here is one you are already familiar with; it is the path of so-called mysticism, the path of many mystics. Mystical deepening consists in a person first diverting their attention from external impressions, but in return devoting themselves all the more to their own inner spiritual experiences, striving in particular to pay attention to what they experience within themselves. Such mystics—who have the strength not to inquire into the external causes of their interests, sympathies, and antipathies, nor into the external causes of their pain and pleasure, but who look solely at the experiences that ebb and flow within the soul—such mystics do indeed penetrate more deeply into the life of the soul. They then have very specific experiences that differ from ordinary psychological experiences.

[ 11 ] I will now once again describe something that countless people have experienced and may still experience. To begin with, I will describe only the experiences a person has when they step just a little beyond normal experience. Such experiences consist, for example, in the mystic, as he immerses himself, reshaping certain feelings and sensations within himself, transforming them into something entirely different. Let us say, for example, that when an ordinary, normal person—who is living his everyday life and is very far removed from any kind of mystical experience—receives a blow from another person that causes him pain, his feelings are usually directed against that other person. That is, after all, the natural course of life. The person, however, who immerses himself mystically within himself, experiences a different feeling when struck in this way as a result of his immersion. So, mind you, I am describing an experience; I am not saying it must be this way; I am describing what certain people—and there are many of them—experience. They feel within themselves: You would never have received this blow if you yourself had not, at some point, brought it upon yourself through an action in your life. That person simply would not have been placed in your path if you hadn’t done something that was the cause of this blow. You therefore cannot justifiably direct your resentment toward this person, who was actually only led into your path by the events of the world so that you could feel the blow you deserved. — Such people, when they delve exceptionally deeply into all their various soul experiences, also develop a certain overall sense of the entire life of the soul, and this overall sense can be characterized something like this. They say to themselves: I have a great deal of suffering, a great deal of pain within me, but I myself caused it at some point. I must have done certain things; I must have behaved in a certain way. If I cannot recall having done them in this life, well, then it is quite clear that there must have been another life in which I did the things that I am now balancing out through my suffering and my pain.

[ 12 ] It is thus the case that, through this descent of the soul into itself, the soul changes its previous feelings and, so to speak, now turns more inward, seeking within itself what it previously sought in the world. For one looks more within oneself when one says: “The person who struck me was placed in my path because I myself provided the cause for it”—rather than when one directs one’s feelings outward. And so it comes to pass that such people turn more and more inward, as it were, increasingly intensifying the inner life of the soul. Just as the ecstatic person penetrates through the veil of the external sensory world and gazes into a world of beings and realities previously unknown to them, so the mystic delves beneath their ordinary “I.” For this ordinary “I” turns against the blow that comes from without; but the mystic penetrates to something that underlies this impact—to that which was the actual cause of the impact. In this way, the mystic gradually loses sight of the external world entirely. He gradually loses all concept of the external world, and his own “I”—that which is within him—expands, as it were, into a whole world of its own. Just as we do not wish to decide today, at this early stage, whether the world of the ecstatic person is a reality or a fantasy, some kind of illusion, so too do we not wish to decide today whether what the mystic finds within his soul beneath the veil of ordinary soul experiences is something that is real or not, or whether it is he himself who has caused what brings him pain. Perhaps this is merely a daydream, but it is an experience that a person can actually have. That is what matters. In any case, on the other side, the human being enters a world that was previously unknown to him. That is the essential point. Thus, the human being enters a world that was previously unknown to him on both sides—outwardly and inwardly.

[ 13 ] If we now reflect on what has just been said—that a person loses their sense of self when they enter a state of ecstasy—we must conclude that this ecstatic state is therefore not something that is particularly desirable for the average person. For all human orientation in the world, all possibility of fulfilling our mission in the world, rests on the fact that we have in our “I” a firm center of our being. If ecstasy robs us of the ability to feel this “I,” to experience this “I,” then we have, through ecstasy, first and foremost lost ourselves. If, on the other hand, the mystic attributes everything to the “I”—if he makes the “I,” so to speak, the culprit for everything we feel—then this has another drawback. It has the disadvantage that we would ultimately seek all the causes of what happens in the world within ourselves, and that we would thereby also lose our healthy orientation in the world. For if we were to put this into practice, we would never do anything other than burden ourselves with nothing but guilt and would be unable to establish the proper relationship with the outside world.

[ 14 ] Thus, in both directions—through ordinary ecstasy and as ordinary mystics—we lose the ability to orient ourselves in the world. Therefore, we may say that human beings are, so to speak, constantly propelled in two directions. When he unfolds outwardly with his ego, he comes up against sensory perceptions, which do not allow him to penetrate to what lies behind the veil of the sensory tapestry; and this is, for the time being, good for the human being, for in this way he can maintain his ego in normal behavior. And on the other hand, the experiences of the soul also do not allow him, in normal behavior, to penetrate beneath the “I”—beneath those feelings of the “I” that lead precisely to normal orientation. Human beings are enclosed between two boundaries: they venture out into the world for a while and are limited there; they enter into their inner life and experience what we call pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, and so on, but in normal life they do not penetrate any further than to that which enables them to find their bearings in life.

[ 15 ] Now, what has been described here is, so to speak, a comparison of the ordinary state with the abnormal states found in ecstasy or in a form of mysticism in which one loses oneself. Ecstasy and mysticism are abnormal states. But there is something in ordinary human life where we can observe these states much, much more clearly, and that is the ordinary transitions we go through in a twenty-four-hour period—the transitions between waking and sleeping.

[ 16 ] What do we actually do while we sleep? Well, in a certain sense, what we do while sleeping is exactly the same as what we have just described as an abnormal state in ecstasy: we project our true inner life outward; we extend the inner self into the outer world. That is indeed the case. Just as we, so to speak, pour our “I” outward in ecstasy—just as we lose our “I” in ecstasy—so do we lose our sense of “I” in sleep. But we lose more in sleep, and that is the good part. In ecstasy we lose only the “I,” but we retain a world around us—a world that we did not know before, a world of images hitherto unknown to us, of spiritual facts and entities. In sleep, we lack this world as well; in sleep, this world, too, does not exist. Thus, sleep differs from ecstasy in that, in order to extinguish the “I,” a person also extinguishes what is called the capacity for perception. Whether it is physical or spiritual, in sleep a person completely extinguishes the ability to perceive anything at all. While in ecstasy one merely extinguishes the “I,” in sleep one also extinguishes the capacity for perception—or, as we rightly say, one extinguishes consciousness. Consciousness has departed from one’s human experience. One has poured into the world not merely the “I,” but has also surrendered one’s consciousness to this world. So what remains of the human being during sleep is something from which consciousness and the “I” have departed. Thus, in the sleeping human being whom we encounter in ordinary life, we have before us something that has divested itself of its consciousness and its “I.” And where have consciousness and the “I” gone? We can even answer this question following the description of ecstasy. When ecstasy sets in—and not sleep—we are surrounded by a world of spiritual beings and realities. Now let us suppose that we also strip away our consciousness down to the “I”; let us also relinquish our consciousness—at that very moment, pitch-black darkness descends around us—we are asleep. Thus, in sleep we have relinquished our “I,” just as in ecstasy, and also—and this characterizes sleep—our consciousness. Therefore, we can say: Human sleep is a kind of ecstasy in which a person is not merely outside their body with their “I,” but in which they are also outside their body with their consciousness. What we call the “I,” we have surrendered in ecstasy. This is a member of the human being. In sleep, another element departs as well: the bearer of our conscious phenomena, namely the astral body. There you have a concept—derived initially entirely from ordinary life—of what is called the astral body in Spiritual Science. The “I” is that which leaves the physical body during this ecstasy; when, during sleep, that which is called the astral body also leaves, the possibility of having consciousness is thereby extinguished.

[ 17 ] Thus, we must first depict the sleeping person as a connection to that which remains in bed—we will not examine this further at present. Something remains in bed that can be perceived externally. But something exists outside this sleeping person; something is surrendered to a world that is, at first, a world of the unknown. Surrendered is one aspect of the human being that is also surrendered in ecstasy: this is the “I.” But a second aspect of the human being is also surrendered—one that is not yet surrendered in ecstasy—and that is the human being’s astral body.

[ 18 ] Sleep, then, reveals to us a kind of division within the human being. The truly inner human being—human consciousness and the human “I”—separates from the outer human being, and what occurs during sleep is that the human being enters a state in which he is no longer aware of any of the day’s experiences, in which he no longer retains in his consciousness anything that enters it through external impressions. In sleep, the human being, as the inner self, is surrendered to a world of which he has no consciousness; he is poured out into a world of which he knows nothing. Now, for a certain reason—which we shall come to know well enough—the world in which the inner human being resides, that is, the world that has taken in his “I” and his astral body, in which the human being has forgotten all the impressions of the day, is referred to as the macrocosm, as the great world. So we say—and let this be just a hint for now; we will come to understand the validity of this expression—that while the human being sleeps, he is surrendered to the macrocosm, poured out into the macrocosm, only he knows nothing of it.

[ 19 ] Even during ecstasy, a person is already immersed in this macrocosm; only, at that moment, they are unaware of this state. That is the peculiarity of ecstasy: that a person experiences something—be it images or realities—that is spread out all around him, something that, so to speak, occupies an immense space and into which he feels as if he were lost. This is what he experiences in ecstasy. With his “I,” he experiences something like a loss of this “I,” but in return a pouring out into a realm he has not known until now. This immersion in a world that differs from the ordinary world of everyday life—where one feels confined solely to one’s body—this surrender to such a world justifies speaking from the outset of a great world, of a macrocosm, in contrast to the small world in which we live out our ordinary daily experiences. There, we feel confined within our own skin. At first, this is merely the most superficial characteristic of this physical world. When we are in ecstasy, we are as if we have grown into the great world, into the macrocosm, where at every turn fantastical figures rise up before us—fantastical figures because they bear no resemblance to the things in the physical world. We cannot distinguish ourselves from them; we do not know whether it is not ourselves who live within these figures; we feel expanded into a vast world, into the macrocosm. And when we grasp ecstasy in this way, we can also—at least comparatively—form a concept of why we lose our sense of self in ecstasy.

[ 20 ] Imagine this human “I” compared to a drop of some colored liquid. Now let’s suppose we have a very small vessel, just large enough to hold this drop; then this colored drop will be visible. If we now take this drop and spread it out, perhaps in a large basin filled entirely with water, the same drop is there in the water, but nothing of it can be perceived anymore. If you apply this analogy to the “I” that expands into the vast world, into the macrocosm—simply pouring itself out in ecstasy over the macrocosm—you can create a mental image of it feeling weaker and weaker as it grows larger and larger. As it pours itself out over the macrocosm, it loses the ability to perceive itself, just as the drop is lost in the large basin. Thus we understand that as the human being passes into a vast world, the “I” is lost. It is still there; it is merely poured out over this vast world, and therefore knows nothing of itself.

[ 21 ] But something else important for human beings occurs during sleep. This is that, as long as a person is conscious, they act. Now, in ecstasy, they are conscious, but they lack the self that provides orientation. Thus, they act outside of their “I.” They do not control their actions; they are, as it were, surrendered to the impressions of their consciousness. This is the essence of ecstasy: that a person engages in some kind of activity, and that if one observes such a person—who is acting in a state of ecstasy—from the outside, one finds them to be as if transformed. One finds that he is not really himself; he acts as if under entirely different impressions, and because what he sees there is generally a multiplicity—for many events occur in ecstasy—he is devoted now to this, now to that entity, and gives the impression of a torn-apart being. This is the characteristic feature of the person in ecstasy, and this is the danger of ecstasy. In ecstasy, the person is indeed devoted to a spiritual world, but to a spiritual world of multiplicity that tears him apart in relation to his inner essence.

[ 22 ] Now, however, when we consider sleep, we must surely have already gathered from the description—without going so far as to list every possible reason we could cite—that this world into which we enter does indeed possess a certain reality. One can deny the existence of a world as long as one does not perceive any effects from it. You might be standing with someone in front of a wall. That person claims, “There’s someone standing behind the wall.”—You cannot believe this for yourself as long as the person behind the wall does not knock; but as soon as he knocks, you are not acting with sound reason if you deny that someone is standing behind the wall. As soon as you perceive effects from a world, the possibility of viewing that world as mere fantasy ceases. Are there effects emanating from that world which we still perceive in a state of ecstasy, but which are extinguished during sleep for the ordinary, normal person? Well, anyone can convince themselves of the effects emanating from this world when they wake up in the morning. When one falls asleep in the evening, one is tired; one has, so to speak, used up one’s energy. This energy must be replenished. One wakes up in the morning with energy that was not present when one fell asleep that evening. So during what period of time did one acquire this energy? Well, one acquired it during the time that elapsed between falling asleep and waking up. So while one is immersed in sleep—with one’s astral body and I in that world which one still sees in ecstasy but which, for the ordinary, normal person, is obscured during sleep—one draws from that very world the very forces one needs for daily life. They come from that world. One needs sleep because one must draw from this very same world—which one sees in ecstasy but not in sleep—the forces needed for daily life. Exactly how you form your mental image of this is, for our purposes today, of no consequence for the time being; but what is important is that this world—which we see in ecstasy but which is erased for ordinary consciousness during sleep—presents itself as the very world from which the forces flow that enable us to dispel the fatigue that is present in the evening. This is exactly like the person knocking in our example, who stands behind the wall—whom we do not see, but whose effects we perceive. Every morning we perceive the effects of that world which we see in ecstasy but do not see during sleep. But where there is a world that exhibits effects, we can no longer speak of its unreality. The world we see in ecstasy—but which is erased from ordinary consciousness during sleep—reveals its effects to us in ordinary daily life. Thus, we will no longer be able to speak of its unreality.

[ 23 ] So we speak of drawing from the very same world—the one we glimpse in ecstasy and which is obliterated for ordinary consciousness during sleep—the forces that sustain us in daily life. But we do this under very special circumstances. We do so under circumstances in which—if we may put it this way—we do not observe ourselves while drawing out these forces, while pouring these forces forth from a spiritual world. This is the essence of sleep: that we accomplish something in sleep, and that we do not observe ourselves engaged in this activity. If we were to observe ourselves during this activity, we would realize that we would do it much worse than we do when our consciousness is not present. Even in ordinary everyday life, there are things about which one must say: “Hands off!”—because some people only make things worse when they meddle with them. Human beings are in the same situation when the forces expended the previous day must be replenished through nighttime sleep. If the person were present, he could watch himself performing that difficult operation that takes place as the expended forces are replenished; he could participate himself—well, then something beautiful would come of it; but instead they would thoroughly ruin the entire procedure, because they are simply not yet capable of it. Thus, the blessing truly lies in the fact that at the very moment when a person—if they were present—could disrupt their own further development, they are robbed of consciousness, so that they forget their own existence.

[ 24 ] And so, as we fall asleep—through the forgetting of our own existence—we step into this great world, into the macrocosm. Every evening, as a person falls asleep, they step out of their small world—out of their microcosm—into the great world, into the macrocosm, and unite with this macrocosm—with the great world—by pouring their astral body and their “I” into it. But because, in the course of his present life, he is capable only of acting within the world of daily life, his consciousness ceases the moment he enters the macrocosm. Esoteric science has always expressed this by saying: Between life in the microcosm and life in the macrocosm lies the stream of forgetfulness. Human beings enter the macrocosm—the greater world—via the stream of forgetfulness by passing from the microcosm into the macrocosm as they fall asleep. We can therefore say that when a person falls asleep in the evening, they cross over into another world—the macrocosm, the great world—and that this crossing over is characterized by the fact that every night the person surrenders two aspects of their being to this great world, to the macrocosm: the astral body and the ego.

[ 25 ] Now let us consider, by contrast, the moment of waking up. This moment of waking up consists in the fact that a person once again begins to experience, first of all, his pleasure, his suffering, his joy, his pain—everything he has experienced in terms of drives, desires, and so on during the past days. He experiences these things again, little by little, today; that is the first thing. The second thing, however, that returns to him upon waking, is his sense of self. Out of the indeterminate darkness of human experience during sleep, the soul experiences and the sense of self emerge upon waking. Now, when a person wakes up, we must ask ourselves: If only a person possessed only that which remained in bed during the night while he slept, then he would not suffer pain, nor would he be able to experience joy, pleasure, and all those things that constitute his soul experiences. The human being could not do that. For what lies there in bed is, in the true sense of the word, like a plant: it lives like a plant; it does not experience such things as joy and pain and so on. But that which is the inner human being does not experience such feelings at night either, and yet this inner human being is the bearer of the soul’s experiences. It is not that which lies in bed that experiences suffering and pain, pleasure and joy, but rather that which, upon falling asleep, has gone out into the great world, into the macrocosm. From this we can see that, in order to experience pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, drives, desires, passions, sympathy, and antipathy, something else is necessary besides the astral body—namely, that it must immerse itself in what the outer human being is, in what has remained lying in bed. If a person does not immerse themselves in what has remained in bed, they do not feel their inner soul experiences. We can therefore say: What we have poured out into the macrocosm—into the great world—during the night becomes perceptible to us in normal human life only when we immerse ourselves in the morning in what has remained in bed.

[ 26 ] Now, this is, in turn, a twofold reality into which we immerse ourselves. The first aspect into which we immerse ourselves when we wake up in the morning is that which we experience, so to speak, solely as inner life. During the day, we experience the ebb and flow of sensations and feelings, our interests, our sympathies and antipathies—we experience the inner workings of the soul. We cannot experience them during the night; rather, we can only experience them when we, as it were, encounter them—when we immerse ourselves in what has remained behind in bed during sleep.

[ 27 ] But when we immerse ourselves in it, we experience not only our inner spiritual experiences, but also the outer world of sensory impressions. We experience not only the joy of the rose, for example, but also the red color of the rose. The joy of the rose is an inner experience; the red color of the rose is something that exists outside of us. This is true of everything we experience during ordinary waking life. Everywhere we experience a duality: we immerse ourselves in our physicality, and as we do so, our inner soul experiences are reflected back to us, coming toward us like an echo; but an outer world also emerges when, upon waking, we immerse ourselves in what has remained behind in bed during sleep. Therefore, what remains in bed during sleep must consist of two parts: one part must, as it were, reflect what we experience inwardly, and one part must enable us, as it were, to penetrate ourselves and see the external world as a reality. Thus, what has remained in bed during sleep cannot be a unity; it must be a duality. If there were only one, then when we slip into it upon waking, we would experience only an inner world, or we would experience only an outer world. Only a panorama would be spread out before us, or else we would have only inner fluctuations—pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, and so on. But we have both, not just one or the other. We immerse ourselves in the outer self that remains in bed while we sleep, and we do so in such a way that we find an inner world conjured up before us, as well as an outer world. We do not, therefore, immerse ourselves in a unity, but in a duality. Just as what we poured out into the macrocosm upon falling asleep was a duality, so, upon waking, we enter the microcosm, and this, too, is a duality. What enables us to experience an inner soul life is what we call the etheric or Life-Body; and what enables us to perceive an outer tableau of the sensory world is the physical body. Thus, what lies in bed during sleep consists of two parts: the physical body and the etheric or Life-Body. If we were to enter only the physical body when we wake up in the morning, we would be faced with an external scene, but we would be inwardly empty and desolate; we would have no pleasure, no pain, no interest in anything that is around us and taking place; we would stand cold and soulless before the scene of the sensory world. That is how it would be if we were to enter merely our physical body. If we were to enter merely our etheric or Life-Body, then we would not have an external world before us; rather, we would have a world of pleasure and suffering, of joy and pain, and so on, which would rise and fall; we would not be able to attribute it to any external world—we would simply have a world of feelings that bubbled up and down.

[ 28 ] From this we see that when we wake up in the morning and immerse ourselves in our outer being, we immerse ourselves in a two-part entity—one that we describe as a mirror of our inner world, the etheric or Life-Body— and we immerse ourselves in what we call the cause of the outer tapestry of the senses, the outer tableau—that is, the physical body.

[ 29 ] We have thus shown, based on actual experiences, that we have a certain right to speak of a fourfold being in human beings—of four members of the human being—two of which, during sleep, belong to the macrocosm, the great world: the “I” and the astral body. While awake, these two aspects of the human being—the “I” and the astral body—belong to the microcosm, the small world enclosed within the human body. Thus, human life unfolds in such a way that the human being alternately lives in the microcosm and in the macrocosm. Every morning, a person enters the microcosm. This small world, the microcosm, is the source of our daily experiences from the morning, when we wake up, until the evening, when we fall asleep. And the fact that, in sleep, we are poured out with our astral body and the “I” into the entire vast world—into the macrocosm—just as a drop is poured into the contents of a large basin—is the reason why, at the moment we step out of the microcosm, out of the small world, we must pass through the stream of forgetfulness.

[ 30 ] Now we can ask ourselves the following question: How can a person, when immersing themselves mystically, in a certain way bring about that state which we characterized at the beginning of our lecture? — We have understood ecstasy as a state in which the “I” is poured out into the macrocosm, while the astral body remains within the microcosm—that is, within the physical body. When we grasp the matter in this way, we understand ecstasy. Ecstasy is simply an outpouring of the “I” into the macrocosm, while the astral body remains within the microcosm. What, then, is the nature of what we described at the beginning of today’s reflection as a mystical state? This mystical state consists of the following: Our life in the physical body and in the etheric or Life-Body—in the microcosm, in the small world—from the morning when we wake up until the evening when we fall asleep, is highly peculiar. We do not descend into our etheric or Life-Body and our physical body in the morning upon waking in such a way that we would perceive the etheric body and the physical body; we do not perceive the innermost part of our physical and etheric bodies, even though we enter them. Our physical and etheric bodies make our soul life and our external perception possible; these two members of the human being make this possible for us. Why, then, do we perceive our soul life when we wake up in the morning? We perceive our soul life precisely because the etheric or Life-Body does not allow us to truly perceive its inner workings. Just as a mirror does not allow us to see what lies behind it—and yet, precisely for that reason, enables us to see ourselves in it—so it is with our etheric or Life-Body. Our etheric body reflects our soul life back to us. It does not allow us to perceive what lies within it, but rather reflects our soul life back to us. Because it reflects it back to us, it appears to us as the actual source of our soul life. It proves impenetrable to us; we cannot see through to its innermost being. This is precisely what is unique about the human etheric or Life-Body: that we do not penetrate it, but rather that it reflects our own soul life back to us. But this is the case with the mystic due to the intense development of his soul life. Through what he experiences in inner contemplation, he succeeds to a certain degree in penetrating this etheric or Life-Body, not merely to see the reflection, but to actually delve into the microcosm. By penetrating this small world, this microcosm, he experiences within himself what a person in a normal state otherwise experiences externally—what is otherwise poured out into the external world. For example, while a person would normally ward off a blow, the mystic experiences, as it were, a turning inward, seeking the cause of the blow within himself. The mystic, then, delves to a certain degree into his etheric body; he passes through that threshold through which the life of the soul is otherwise reflected and penetrates into the interior of his etheric or Life-Body. And these are processes within his own etheric body that the mystic experiences when he crosses that threshold through which the life of the soul is otherwise reflected. But then, when he crosses this threshold, the mystic does indeed experience something that, in a certain sense, is similar to the loss of the “I” through ecstasy. The “I” has, as it were, been diluted, in that during ecstasy the human being has poured it out into the macrocosm, into the entire vast world. Now, during mystical contemplation, the human being drills his own inner being into the etheric body. Through this, the “I” now becomes condensed. And indeed, the person experiences this condensation of the “I” through the cessation of what is dominant in the ordinary “I”—namely, the ability to orient oneself through the intellect and the senses, which are bound to the brain—and through the fact that the person receives the impulses for action through certain inner feelings. For the mystic, everything that arises is a profound inner experience, because these things emerge directly from his etheric or Life-Body—experiences that other people receive only as reflections through the etheric body. These are the reasons why the mystic has such powerful inner experiences: because he penetrates deep into the innermost core of his etheric or Life-Body.

[ 31 ] So while the ecstatic person expands into the macrocosm, the mystic draws inward with his inner being into the microcosm. And now something most remarkable becomes apparent. Both experiences—that of the ecstatic person, when he perceives certain events and beings externally, and that of the mystic, when he experiences certain feelings internally that cannot otherwise be experienced—stand in a certain relationship that can be characterized as follows: Our world—which we see with our eyes and hear with our ears—stirs within us certain feelings of pleasure and pain and so on—we sense that these belong together in normal life. One person may take greater joy in the things and events of the external world, another less; but these are merely differences of degree; they are not of the same nature as the differences found in the terrible, intense pain and, conversely, in the ecstasies of the mystic compared to ordinary experience. There are, however, enormous differences between what the ordinary person can experience and what the mystic experiences in terms of inner bliss, ecstasy, and torment. This is an enormous difference in quality. Likewise, there is a vast difference between what the ordinary person can see with their eyes and hear with their ears, and what the ecstatic person perceives when they are immersed in a world that is unlike the sensory world. But if one were to let the ecstatic person describe his world and then listen to the mystic and let him describe his bliss, raptures, and torments, then one could say: Yes, through such entities and realities as the ecstatic person sees, that which the mystic experiences can be brought about. On the other hand, if one were to listen to the mystic, one would say: Something like this would also be possible if one had the experiences of the ecstatic; one might believe that the ecstatic is describing this world.

[ 32 ] Just as the mystic’s world is real—subjectively real, that is, in the sense that he truly sees it—so too are the entities of the ecstatic. Whether or not they are objectively real, we will leave that question open for now. But one thing we can say today: whether illusion or reality, it makes no difference—the ecstatic person sees a world, a world that is different from what can be perceived in the sensory world, and the mystic experiences feelings, bliss, rapture, and torments that cannot be compared to anything the ordinary person experiences. Both worlds exist only for certain people. However, the mystic does not see the world of the ecstatic person, and the ecstatic person does not experience the world of the mystic. Both worlds are independent of one another. A third person, however, can comprehend one of the two worlds through the other. This is a most peculiar relationship—that one world is explained through the other, that the two worlds are in harmony.

[ 33 ] We have thus pointed out a certain connection between the world of the mystic and that of the ecstatic, and have shown how human beings, so to speak, encounter the world of the spirit outwardly and inwardly.

[ 34 ] What we have merely described today will still be up in the air for you. It will now be our task to answer the following questions: To what extent can we actually enter a real world once we penetrate the veil of the external sensory world? To what extent is it possible to go beyond the world of the ecstatic to penetrate outward into a true spiritual world? And to what extent is it possible to delve beneath the inner world of the mystic and find a true spiritual world there? — The paths leading into the spiritual world through the macrocosm and the microcosm—we will have to describe these in ever greater detail over the next few days.