The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Second Lecture

[ 1 ] What was explained here yesterday may well have illustrated how the ascent into the higher, spiritual worlds depends on a person strengthening the inner powers of the soul life, so that through the exercises they undertake for the purpose of penetrating into higher worlds, develops powers in the soul that go far beyond what a person needs in ordinary life. That a person must attain a certain strengthening of their soul forces in order to experience inner life and develop inner activity may already be evident from the fact that when the human soul becomes independent of the physical body in ordinary life—that is, during sleep—it immediately falls into unconsciousness. This means that in normal life, the human being does not possess sufficient powers to truly unfold consciousness and inner activity when the physical body and the etheric body are not there to assist them—that is, when they are to live, as in sleep, independently of their physical and etheric bodies. Into that which, in ordinary sleep, becomes independent of the physical and etheric bodies, the exercises of meditation, concentration, and contemplation must work in those forces that lead to a penetration with consciousness of the I and the astral body, so that these may come to experience and perceive independently of the physical and etheric bodies. The powers of the soul that the human being develops there, which are stronger than those of ordinary life, are what enable him to achieve what was explained yesterday in the course of the lecture: after having stood, so to speak, before nothingness, to enter a new world which he can experience by pouring out—just as the spider spins its web from within itself—the spiritually substantial content of his soul into the vastness, and in what he pours out, to receive the spiritual worlds that then stand before him.

[ 2 ] Thus, having left the ordinary physical, sensory world in this way, the human being has passed through a state of standing over an abyss—for that is what it feels like to face nothingness—into the realm of a new world. And in this new world, they now experience not only different things, but they experience them in a completely different way, in a different manner, than they did in the physical-sensory world. Here we can start from a very ordinary experience of the physical plane. On the physical plane, the facts subject to the laws of nature and everything subject to the moral laws indeed appear to human beings as two entirely separate realms of existence.

[ 3 ] In our ordinary physical lives, when we turn our gaze to the phenomena of nature—even when we look as far as the animal kingdom—we are always aware that we are inquiring into these phenomena according to natural laws, mere natural laws, and that we cannot actually apply moral standards. For example, we do not ask why a rock crystal appears before us in such a way that we have a six-sided column, capped by two six-sided pyramids; we do not ask why this mineral substance combines in such a way that this crystal form emerges. We ask nothing other than to have a natural law as our answer. We do not ask: What good has the rock crystal done to have become a rock crystal? We do not ask: What is the rock crystal’s disposition? We do not apply moral laws to the mineral world, nor do we apply them to the plant world, and at most in a somewhat figurative way—and one might say, in accordance with the sympathies of modern, Darwinian-minded people, we also apply moral concepts to the animal kingdom. But what interests us first and foremost in the animal kingdom is the laws of nature.

[ 4 ] When we ascend to the human realm, we feel compelled to judge people by the standards of benevolence, love, and the like. Separately, as mentioned, insofar as we stand in the physical world, we regard the facts as caught in the web of natural events and human actions and states of mind, to which we impose as a standard the judgment according to moral laws, and we truly do not serve the judgment of the physical plane well if we mix these two sets of facts together. Living on the physical plane, people then become accustomed to judging the world in this twofold manner. Therefore, it is not entirely easy, after having, so to speak, leaped across the abyss of nothingness, to pass into the spiritual world, where a completely different kind of judgment is necessary: where, in fact, there is no separation between what might be called natural laws—similar in nature to natural phenomena on the physical plane—and purely moral events, which likewise exist only on the physical plane. Therefore, once the point reached yesterday has been attained, one must accustom oneself to judging what occurs in a manner similar to how we judge natural facts, but also to how we judge moral facts in the physical world. The moral world and physical lawfulness—though this does not mean “laws” in the sense of the natural laws existing in the physical world—that is, the world of natural laws and the world of moral lawfulness, merge into one another when one enters this spiritual world.

[ 5 ] This becomes immediately apparent, for example, when one is presented with the realm that a human being experiences between death and a new birth. There the seer can encounter—and will encounter, if he has seriously progressed as far as was indicated yesterday—those souls who, having passed through the gate of death, are undergoing their development between death and a new birth. We then come to know the nature of these souls’ experiences, and one must adopt entirely different ways of thinking if one wishes to assess what these souls are experiencing. Let this be explained with a few examples.

[ 6 ] There we find souls who, during a certain period between death and a new birth, have to endure quite difficult living conditions. At first, as a seer, one has the impression that these souls—a certain category of souls—have become servants in the spiritual world to quite terrible spiritual beings, and that they have condemned themselves through their lives before death to this work, in which they are servants to quite terrible spirits. As a seer, one gradually works one’s way into understanding the difficult fate of these souls, and one does so in the following manner. One cultivates within oneself a deeper understanding of how a human being lives in their physical life from birth to death, and how—as has often been described in the course of our lectures on Spiritual Science—so-called natural death is brought about by an inner law of experience when, so to speak, a person has exhausted their life forces in old age. We will not speak of this kind of death now. But there are other kinds of death. There are those deaths through which a person can be cut down in the prime of life by external misfortunes or by illness. We do not all die after the measure of our life has been fulfilled. People die at every age, and we must ask ourselves: Where do the forces come from that underlie these deaths at the various stages of life? We understand that when a person’s measure of life is fulfilled, they must die at some point. We have often seen how this is motivated from the spiritual worlds. But everything that happens in the physical world occurs through influences from the spiritual world. Even deaths that occur, so to speak, at an untimely hour, happen through influences from the spiritual world; that is to say, they are brought about by forces and beings of the spiritual world.

[ 7 ] We also observe something else in the physical world that we must take into account if we are to understand the period between death and rebirth. We see the physical world plagued by diseases and epidemics; in earlier times, we see this physical world ravaged by those epidemics that are, of course, well known. One need only look at the devastating waves that swept through the older European population, where the plague, cholera, and the like ravaged the lands. In the present time, we are—to use the word—still relatively fortunate in regard to such things. Yet certain epidemics are already brewing, as has already been pointed out in our lectures. Thus we see death, so to speak, sweeping across the earth at an untimely hour, and so too we see diseases and epidemics sweeping across the earth. And the seer sees souls living there between death and a new birth, aiding those spirits who carry from the supersensible worlds into the sensory world the forces that bring epidemics, diseases, and, so to speak, untimely deaths. It is one of the most terrible impressions to perceive human souls at certain times in their lives, between death and a new birth, who have become servants of the evil spirits of disease and death, and who have condemned themselves to becoming such servants of the evil spirits of disease and death.

[ 8 ] If one attempts to trace the lives of such people back to the time before they passed through the gate of death, one will always find that those who have brought about the fate just mentioned lacked conscientiousness and a sense of responsibility during their lives on the physical plane. It is a constant law revealed to the seer that souls who pass through the gate of death, and who previously possessed unscrupulous dispositions or lived in unscrupulousness, become, at a certain time between death and the new birth, the servants of those who must cooperate in bringing epidemics, diseases, and untimely deaths into the physical-sensory world. Here we see natural processes to which these souls are subject, and of which we cannot say that they are, like a crystallization or the collision of two elastic spheres or the like, independent of any moral failings; but in what is happening there, in what these souls show us, we see how, in the higher worlds, that which acts as a natural law in the higher worlds intermingles with the moral world order. How things happen in the higher worlds depends on the beings to whom one thing or another happens, depending on how they have positioned themselves morally within the world.

[ 9 ] Or, to give another example, one can look at what the seer learns by focusing on a trait that is very widespread among people: it is what can be described as laziness, or a craving for comfort. Comfort, the craving for comfort, is truly a more widespread trait than is commonly believed. People do far more out of comfort than one might think. People are comfortable in their thinking; they are comfortable in their outward actions and behavior. And they appear particularly comfortable when they are asked to change anything in their thinking or in their actions and behavior. If people were not so comfortable in the depths of their souls, it would not have happened so often that, when faced with the demand to relearn something in this or that matter, they resisted it. They resisted because it is uncomfortable to relearn anything. It was indeed uncomfortable, after having thought for so long that the Earth stands still and the Sun and the starry sky move around it, to suddenly hear from Copernicus about the Earth’s motion and to have to change one’s thinking! It was an uncomfortable thing, having the ground pulled out from under one’s feet—at least theoretically—in this way. And everything that rebelled against this new idea at the time sprang from intellectual laziness, from a craving for comfort, because rethinking everything is uncomfortable. But one need only observe the most ordinary of daily life to find the “virtue”—which is actually, of course, a vice—of comfort widespread. In recent times, we have already gained some inkling of the truly immense prevalence of comfort among humanity. This may be evident from the following:

[ 10 ] There are many economic theories. I do not wish to discuss them now. But there is, for example, that economic theory—which has already been largely abandoned today but once played a major role—based on the idea that all people, at heart, seek to compete freely in the exchange of goods and the like, and that the best way to live together in society would be precisely when completely free competition takes place. Other, more socialist theories have since taken hold. Recently, however, some economists have pointed out that all these theories actually take a highly one-sided approach. For what happens in the world in the exchange of goods and in social coexistence is subject far more to the law of convenience than to the law of competition or the law of the desire for progress—indeed, even more than to the laws of conscious egoism! Thus, even in economics, the recognition of the law of convenience is making its way in. It is entirely to be acknowledged that even in such a field, one eventually becomes quite reasonable and draws attention to something that is there—and which one can only overlook if one adopts an ostrich-like attitude toward life.

[ 11 ] Comfort is a common, widespread human trait. And if one follows the souls that were attached to it after death, one sees how this addiction to comfort continues after death, and how the human being must then, as it were, pass through a province in which he must even spend a certain time between death and rebirth, becoming—as a soul—a servant of the god or gods of resistance, those gods who oppose all the corresponding obstacles to development, as a result of this love of comfort. And these are again the spirits who stand under the dominion of Ahriman. Ahriman has various tasks to perform, including the one of directing forces from the spiritual world into the physical world, which give rise to the resistances in physical life. Thus, on the one hand, people are comfortable, but on the other hand, the lives of these comfortable people also turn out in such a way that, if one wishes to do something, one once again encounters a universal law of the world. The resistances are everywhere, even if they do not appear in the grotesque form in which a German poet and aesthetician once described them. But they are present in the most tragic form. A German poet described them as the so-called “treachery of the object.” This “treachery of the object” is particularly evident, for example, when a preacher stands in the pulpit and has to deliver an incredibly long tirade; then a fly lands on his nose—and he has to sneeze terribly. That is the “treachery of the object.” But in fact, it stands out all the more when people who are unlucky in this regard are exposed to this “treachery of the object” at every turn. Friedrich Theodor Vischer once wrote a novel in which someone is constantly exposed to this “treachery of the object.”

[ 12 ] In reality, however, these things range from the grotesque to the tragic. All opposition, however, is directed from the spiritual world, and the lord of this opposition is none other than Ahriman. And because souls are complacent, they make themselves servants of Ahriman for a certain time between death and the new birth. All in all, it is not so terrible to contemplate the punishments of a life of ease as it is for souls to have to live under the oppression of the spirits of illness and death. But there is at least a concept of how morality and the laws of nature intermingle as soon as we ascend into the higher worlds.

[ 13 ] These are the kinds of experiences one goes through when one has reached the point described yesterday. And one must go through these experiences in order to be able to experience other, necessary conditions as well—we will see why they are necessary—so that one can make progress in terms of higher experience. The matter of ascending into the higher worlds is not such that one says: “Today you begin your ascent into the higher worlds, and then you proceed step by step upward”—rather, for the one who wishes to become an initiate, this takes place, so to speak, unnoticed by external events, between the actions and facts of external life. So one does indeed ascend step by step into the higher worlds, but the fact is that one steps out again from this standing within the higher worlds and lives in the ordinary world. But one then carries something from the experience in the spiritual worlds back into the physical world. Once one has become an initiate, one finds oneself walking about in the physical world—despite having become an initiate—endowed with feelings and sensations different from those one possesses when one is not a seer.

[ 14 ] Through training, one must ensure—and proper training does ensure this—that one is not led astray in ordinary life by changes in sensations and feelings. The goal must be achieved that, if one is a seer, one is a seer only for the higher worlds, and that one does not carry into the ordinary physical world the character and soul disposition that one must possess for the higher worlds. One should not do that in any way. One should be able to become a seer and yet be a perfectly sensible person in the ordinary physical world, just like anyone else. Therefore, those least suited for training as seers are people who are predisposed to enthusiasm from the outset. Enthusiasts, abstract idealists who, so to speak, already experience in the physical world what is indeed fully justified in the spiritual world— —that is, people who already “hear the grass grow” in the physical world, who, so to speak, already perceive everywhere what only the dreamer perceives, what the sober, reality-oriented nature does not perceive—people who easily delude themselves—there are far more people of this sort than one usually thinks—are not suited for the training of the clairvoyant spirit. People who stand with both feet firmly in reality, who also understand something of reality and judge things as they are, are best suited for the training of the clairvoyant spirit. This already indicates how one must not allow one’s feelings and sensations—which are necessary for the physical world—to be misled by what one acquires for the ascent into the higher worlds.

[ 15 ] So certain specific feelings and sensations do remain with you, which you experience within yourself once you have become a seer. In a sense, one has also become a different kind of human being in relation to the physical world. But in order for this not to be harmful, one must, so to speak, apply these new feelings and sensations to things in the outer physical world that one previously did not take into account at all, to which one was previously not at all attentive. Then, once one has become a seer and has cultivated certain feelings and sensations within oneself, one will find that one’s relationship to nature has gradually changed—not in a bad way, but precisely in a good way. One will feel differently, for example, toward the plant world, toward the spreading carpet of plants on the earth, than one did before. One used to look at the plants, was enchanted by their greenness, was enchanted by the abundance and colors of the flowers, by everything the plant world offered, insofar as it grows out of the earth and delights the eye and perhaps other senses as well. Let us not think of some ascetic in this regard, but of a person who can truly enjoy to the fullest what the beauty of the Earth’s plant cover can evoke in the soul; and let us not think that anyone who has become a seer would have to lose even the slightest bit of the feelings they previously had toward the Earth’s plant cover. But something else arises within them. When he now looks upon the plant world, a feeling arises within him of a certain intimate kinship between the plant world and what lies outside the plant world in nature: with the sun, also with the moon, and with the rest of the starry world. In a sense, what spreads out there as a green carpet of plants merges in his perception, in his gaze, with what is in the universe.

[ 16 ] In abstract terms, people today have a sufficient mental image of what is meant here. Everyone today, provided they have studied the subject even a little, knows how the plant world is connected to the effects of the light the sun sends down, and how plants cannot grow without the specific effects of the sun’s rays. And people can indeed sense that it is not only the plant world that is influenced by what happens on the sun, but that the world of the stars also has an influence. That is indeed where people tend to fall into unbelief. But there was another great, significant mind in a time not so long past who, from a purely scientific standpoint, studied, for example, the influence of the moon on the weather and thus also on the vegetation of the Earth. I am referring to Gustav Theodor Fechner. He did not attempt to determine, from the standpoint of any superstition, but rather from the standpoint of entirely empirical observations, how differently the new moon, how differently the full moon, for example, affects the Earth’s rainfall patterns and so on. There were many people who sought to demonstrate their scientific mindset precisely by mocking Gustav Theodor Fechner and his lunar studies. One who laughed particularly hard was the famous botanist Schleiden, who was of the opinion that it certainly did not depend on the full moon or the new moon whether there was more or less rainfall over a period of fourteen days. Then Gustav Theodor Fechner said—this was at a time when conditions were still somewhat patriarchal compared to today—: Let’s settle the matter indirectly through the women; learned men are all too prone to quarrel. Since conditions were still somewhat patriarchal back then, the two women—Professor Schleiden’s wife and Professor Fechner’s wife—had always set up containers in their courtyard in Leipzig to collect rainwater for laundry, and Gustav Theodor Fechner then suggested that the women should decide the question of which area received the greater amount of rainwater, with Professor Schleiden’s wife always placing her containers in the courtyard during the new moon, while his wife should do so during the full moon. It would then become clear during which period the greater amount of rain fell. And lo and behold, Professor Schleiden’s wife did not agree with her husband at all, for she received the smaller amount of rainwater!

[ 17 ] Thus, I might say, a decision had been made in an ironic way, but we do not wish to attach any importance to it now. Later, however, it will become clear that everything—sunlight, solar heat, and the other stellar influences—exerts an effect on the plant world. For now, however, this is merely theoretical knowledge. For the seer, however, it turns out that he has a direct perception of how the influences coming from the Earth and those coming from the starry space merge within him. He ultimately regards them as one, and he feels vividly in the unfolding of events the pouring of sunlight over the Earth’s vegetation and again the receding of the sunlight. He feels it deeply when the plants are deprived of sunlight. Just as one feels sympathy for a child who is very attached to its mother when the child is deprived of the sight of its mother for a time, so the seer feels sympathy when the plants are deprived of sunlight. This empathy with the plant world of the Earth is something that arises for the seer, so that the seer who has reached the point spoken of yesterday acquires such sensations, through which he becomes, as it were, a “sympathizer” with the relationship between Earth growth, plant growth—and the sun and stars.

[ 18 ] The fact that one begins to feel this makes one capable of feeling something else as well. One can feel this other thing when one returns from the spiritual world to the physical world and, for example, finds oneself facing a sleeping person or a person who is awake. Even if one has, so to speak, switched off one’s sense of perception and sees only the physical world with the sleeping person, even then the feeling arises that this person, who is lying there asleep, has been abandoned by something. This feeling is very similar to the one one gets, for example, in the fall when the sun’s rays change in relation to the vegetation, just as is the case here. The feelings toward nature, abandoned by the sun and stars, are quite similar to the feelings toward the human body, abandoned by its ego and astral body. And now one experiences the peculiar fact that, in this respect, the human being is independent of physical celestial conditions, whereas plant growth is dependent on physical celestial conditions.

[ 19 ] We know that a plant cannot fall asleep at will, say, based on its own internal conditions: it must wait until the sun sets in the evening, or it must wait until autumn arrives. We know that humans, in our time and especially in our cultural context, no longer orient themselves by the sun at all. For example, we could not be here together at all if we had to orient ourselves by the position of the sun, just as the plant does. In humans, the same transition—which in plants is still strictly regulated by the movement of the sun and stars—has been emancipated from the movement of the sun and stars. True, when we go out into rural, unspoiled surroundings and notice how not only the chickens but also the people in the village go to sleep at a certain time and wake up at a certain time, we still sense something there—one might say—of a plant-like connection between humans and the course of the sun and the stars. But we cannot judge it otherwise than that, in the course of human development, human beings have emancipated themselves from the cosmic course of events, so that they can enter, with their physical and etheric bodies, into that state into which the plant enters only through the position of the sun and stars—out of inner conditions, I do not wish to say out of inner arbitrariness. Human beings can take their “afternoon nap” out of their own inner circumstances, that is, they can step out of their physical and etheric bodies. The plant cannot take an afternoon nap at will; it must align itself entirely with the course of the stars. But what is a human being when he lies in bed as physical body and etheric body, and outside are his I and his astral body? The physical body and etheric body then have the value of a plant. The plant has a physical body and an etheric body. If we now hold together everything that has been said, you will say: If I have a plant before me, then the plant gradually grows together with the world of the sun and the stars, becoming one with it. One must therefore direct one’s perception from the plant toward the starry worlds, toward the sun. One must develop the same direction of feeling from the sleeping human being—who is also a physical body and an etheric body, and thus has the value of a plant—toward his I and astral body, which, when the human being sleeps, are initially quite independent of the position of the sun and exist outside the physical body and etheric body, just as the physical sun exists outside the physical body and etheric body of the plant.

[ 20 ] What I have just explained to you is what a seer experiences. If, starting from such sensations, one arbitrarily brings about the independence of the ego and the astral body from the physical body and the etheric body—if one has managed to turn the physical body and the etheric body into a kind of plant by stepping outside of them—then one now knows something quite extraordinary. One knows something that cannot be expressed any other way than as the sun might speak if it were to look down upon the plants and see them before itself. There it might say: Yes, this physical and etheric body of the plants belongs to me; it belongs to me because it needs what I can send to it! Just as the sun would speak to the plant growing below, so the human ego can say to its physical and etheric bodies: This belongs to me as the plant belongs to the sun; I am like a sun for the physical and etheric bodies. A sun for the physical and etheric bodies—this is how the human being necessarily learns to speak of its ego! And just as he learns to speak of his I in relation to the physical and etheric bodies, as the sun would speak to the plant, so he learns to speak of his astral body in the same way that the moon and also the planets would have to speak to the plant. This is a very special mystery experience, an important mystery experience.

[ 21 ] As I have now explained, this mystical experience—as a direct experience, a genuine experience—was first cultivated in the mysteries of Zarathustra, and then carried through the entire course of world history back to the mysteries of the Holy Grail. This experience was always called “seeing the sun at midnight” because, especially during the time of the Egyptian mysteries, people had it most clearly when, while asleep around midnight, they spiritually beheld the sun and felt united with the forces of the sun in the way that has just been described: Experiencing the solar aspect within one’s own self as a solar force shining upon the physical body and the etheric body.

[ 22 ] Here we have a third element that was common to all the various mysteries of the world. What they had and still have in common is the “pushing to the very limits of death,” the “experiencing of the elemental world,” and now the “beholding of the sun at midnight.” This is a technical term; the corresponding experience consists of what has just been described. One must simply be clear that at the moment when one feels separated and perceives one’s own etheric and physical bodies as if they were stars or the sun, one no longer perceives the sun and the stars merely in their physical substance, but rather comes to know the spiritual beings and worlds associated with them. One must be clear that the experience of the cosmos is an experience in the spiritual worlds.

[ 23 ] Now, in order to grow upward into the higher worlds in a proper manner—to truly have experiences that correspond to spiritual realities—it is important and necessary to first go through what familiarizes one with the spiritual world, which is entirely different from the physical world. One comes to know this all too well when one can examine and observe the consequences of complacency and the consequences of a lack of conscience for the soul’s experience in the time between death and the new birth as a test, and many other things besides. Through these things, the seer must, so to speak, open up his own soul to conditions that are fundamentally different from those of the physical plane. Only then does he become ready to immerse himself in the spiritual cosmos, to recognize the inner connection of the I and the astral body with the cosmos. All previous theorizing is actually just a play on words once the moment described above has arrived, when one has experienced that, in regard to the highest aspects of his being, the human being not only belongs to the Earth but is at home in the entire cosmos. One then also knows that in the evening, upon falling asleep, every human being, having stepped out of the physical and etheric bodies, merges with forces that are cosmic forces, seeks strength from the entire world, and carries the forces gathered from the moment of falling asleep until waking into the physical world upon awakening, to use them there. One experiences this connection with the cosmos at a certain stage of the mystery path. We shall begin from this stage tomorrow.