The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eleventh Lecture

[ 1 ] Once again, we first remember those who stand out in the vast fields of current events:

Spirits of your souls, watchful guardians,
May your wings bring
The pleading love of our souls
To the earthly people entrusted to your care,
So that, united with your power,
Our plea may shine with help
Upon the souls it lovingly seeks.

[ 2 ] And for those who have already passed through the gates of death as a result of these events:

Spirits of your souls, active guardians,
May your wings bring
The pleading love of our souls
To the beings of the spheres entrusted to your care,
So that, united with your power,
Our plea may shine forth in aid
To the souls it lovingly seeks.

[ 3 ] May the Spirit we seek through our striving for spiritual knowledge—the Spirit who, through the Mystery of Golgotha, brought healing to the Earth and freedom and progress to humanity—be with you and your heavy burdens!

[ 4 ] My dear friends, I would like to begin today by reminding you of something I have probably already mentioned to most of you in occasional earlier reflections. As the human soul develops in the sense that has been sufficiently indicated in the public lectures, we arrive at a different kind of worldview. The essential point is that, with our soul, we are, as it were, walking the path from the sensory world into the spiritual world.

[ 5 ] As we evolve spiritually, the physical world gradually transforms into the spiritual world as we perceive it. One could say that, little by little, the characteristics of the sensory-physical world disappear, and the forms, beings, and realities of the spiritual world emerge within the horizon of our consciousness. Now, one could describe an important aspect of what thus rises to our consciousness in the following way: We ourselves become different—from our own perspective, of course— we ourselves become different, and the world that surrounds us in sensory perception also becomes different. Let us first stick to what is closest to us, to the world of our Earth. Basically, within the course of earthly life, human beings know very little indeed about the world outside Earth, if we remain within the way we have grown together with our earthly life. But when we venture into the spiritual world—for we are then outside our body—it becomes clear, when we look back upon our body or our entire physical life or indeed our whole being, that it actually becomes ever richer and richer; this human being becomes ever more substantial, expanding into a world. The human being himself literally grows into a world as we look back upon him in this way. This is the truth of what is often emphasized: that as the human being develops spiritually, he becomes one with the world. He sees a new world, a world within which he otherwise stands, as emerging from himself. He expands into a world. From the Earth, on the other hand, the solid—or that which appears to us in ordinary physical perception as mountains, rivers, and so on—disappears. That disappears, and we gradually learn to feel ourselves within the Earth; I say explicitly within the Earth, as if inside a great organism. We are out of our own world, and this inner world, this inner reality, becomes a vast world, and what has surrounded us as the earthly world becomes substantial, becomes a being within which we must think of ourselves as being, can create a mental image of ourselves. As we grow out of ourselves, our human world simultaneously expands into a vast world; immediately we then grow into the Earth organism and feel ourselves within it just as, let us say, if our finger were to become conscious, it would feel itself within our organism.

[ 6 ] This is an experience that people have, and it is very often expressed by those who are more deeply sensitive or have a poetic disposition. Thus, people very often compare their waking in the morning with the awakening of nature outside, their daily life with the rising of the sun, and twilight with the need for sleep that comes with tiredness. Such comparisons arise from the feeling that human beings are immersed in earthly nature. But such comparisons are not worth much, for they do not capture the essence of the matter. I have therefore often stated that if we wish to choose a comparison that truly captures the reality of the situation, we must choose one other than the one in which we compare the process of falling asleep and waking up with the course of nature outside. Rather, we must compare our life within twenty-four hours to the Earth’s annual cycle. Only when we take the entire annual cycle is this a valid comparison with what takes place within us through a single cycle of waking and sleeping over the course of twenty-four hours. And it is wrong to compare the human waking state from waking up to falling asleep with summer, for example; rather, one must compare precisely this waking state in the natural world outside with winter, and one must compare summer with the human state of sleep. So that we could say, if we make the comparison: the human being falls asleep, that is, he enters the summer of his personal existence, and as he wakes up, he develops into the winter of his personal existence; and the waking state would roughly correspond to the last autumn, the winter, and the first spring. Why would this correspond to the facts? Because, if we truly develop in the manner indicated into a member of the entire Earth organism, we must indeed observe how, in summer, that which is the Earth spirit sleeps; this is the Earth’s true state of sleep, in which the great consciousness of the Earth spirit recedes. With the arrival of spring, the Earth Spirit begins to fall asleep, and it awakens in the fall when the first frosts come; it then believes it is in its waking state of consciousness. This is the course of the Earth Spirit’s day throughout the year.

[ 7 ] When we look back at the sleeping person, we see that this falling asleep—in which the person steps out with the ego and the astral body—actually triggers a kind of vegetative activity within the organism from which the astral body and the ego have departed. This begins to evoke an activity within the human being. We truly perceive the first stages of sleep as the beginning of a vegetative process, and sleep proceeds in such a way that the body, as it were, becomes permeated—as seen by the clairvoyant gaze—with a plant-like growth that we then truly perceive through imaginative insight. Only this vegetation grows differently from the vegetation of the earth. Such things can be described, and one can meditate on them at length, and one then goes ever further.

[ 8 ] On Earth, plants grow upward from the ground. It is different when we observe this “plant growth” in human beings. Here, the plants grow with their roots on the outside, and they grow inward into the human being; so we must look for the blossoms within the human being. This human being is truly very beautiful—I mean, as the clairvoyant sees him in sleep. He is, as it were, an entire earth that sprouts and shoots forth, into which vegetation grows. What mars the view is that we simultaneously have the impression that the astral body is gnawing at the roots. And this presents itself as the course of sleep. While the animal world consumes and devours from above what grows during the summer, we find that our astral body does indeed act like the animal world, only it gnaws at the roots. Were this not the case, we would not be able to develop that core which we carry through the gate of death. What the astral body appropriates in this way represents what we truly carry through the gate of death as the fruit of life. I am describing things as they appear to the clairvoyant consciousness. And just as winter comes over the fruits of the earth and freezes them away, so, I would say, when the astral body and the ego submerge into the etheric and physical bodies, there is a freezing away of that which has arisen during the night as vegetation, as spiritual plant growth within our organism.

[ 9 ] In what I have called the Earth Spirit—which is truly a personal being just like ourselves, except that it leads a different existence (for to it, a year is a day)—within this Earth Spirit, everything I have expounded regarding the Impulse of Golgotha becomes vivid to us, for within it one finds the life-giving force that was not in the Earth before the Mystery of Golgotha; in it one finds oneself sheltered, embraced by the Spirit who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. And through this one gains the certainty that this Spirit has truly flowed into the Earth through the Mystery of Golgotha. We become aware of this when we can truly immerse ourselves in the state in which, for us, the Earth is a being to which we ourselves belong, just as a finger belongs to our organism. Thus, it cannot be otherwise than that for the people of our time, occult immersion in the world takes on the character of religious contemplation of that which, as the Divine, flows through and spiritualizes the world. Therefore, true knowledge of the spiritual world can never take away religious feeling, but on the contrary can only deepen it.

[ 10 ] I wanted to give a hint of what it really looks like when one enters the world of images of the spiritual-real; for what we appear to be in our everyday, physical consciousness is only an illusion, is only an inner core. But I will have to say right away that this is incorrect, because words are not easily coined for these significant facts, and what we appear to be is always with us when we are outside our bodies with our soul. That is why it is not correct to say: it is a core, because a fruit has the shell on the outside and what is valuable inside. But just as it is so often the reverse in the spiritual realm, so in human beings the valuable part is on the outside, and what is the shell is on the inside: the inner part is the shell-like aspect, and the spiritual is what can be described spatially as the shell-like aspect. One learns, when one walks the path into the spiritual world, that the human being is not a simple being, but a complex being. We have already sufficiently grasped that, through what they carry within themselves, human beings participate in all the worlds accessible to them. With our physical body, we belong to the physical world; with our soul, we belong to the soul world; with our spirit, to the spiritual world. We reach into the three worlds. We know that when a human being sets out on the path into the spiritual world, they indeed experience themselves as if in a kind of multiplication. This is what is frightening: that the comfortable unity dissolves, that one actually receives a sense of belonging to multiple worlds. Now, one can bring up the most diverse points of view. Today I wish to present a particular perspective by drawing your attention once more to what has repeatedly formed the basis of my recent lectures.

[ 11 ] When we look inward at human life, we must conceive of it as structured; and when we step outside the body, the human being truly reveals itself as divided into four parts. First, there is the power that underlies our memory. In memory, we bring to life before our consciousness what we have already experienced in earlier times. This memory brings coherence into our life, so that this life between birth and death is a unity. A second element is what we call our thinking, what we call a mental image. I cannot elaborate further on these concepts here; that is not what matters now; but what constitutes the activity of imagination is that which takes place in the present. And if we proceed further, we encounter feeling, and further still, willing. As we look within ourselves, our own inner life appears to us as memory, as thinking, as feeling, as willing. Now we can raise the question: what is the essential difference between these four activities of the soul? Ordinary psychology lists these activities of the soul and makes no further distinction. But one arrives at the truth only when one can delve into the nature of these four soul activities, and there one comes to the realization that willing is, so to speak, the baby among our soul activities; feeling is already older, thinking is even older, and the activity exercised in memory is the old man, the oldest among our soul activities. You will see this even more clearly when I present the following point of view to you.

[ 12 ] We have spoken repeatedly about how human beings did not simply evolve on Earth, but how this evolution was preceded by the ancient lunar evolution, the ancient solar evolution, and the ancient Saturn evolution. Humanity did not first arise on Earth; to become what it is today, it required this evolution through Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon. Now you see, what we develop in our will, as we now understand this will, is an Earth product for humanity; it is not even yet complete in its development—it is a fully Earth-based product. During the Lunar stage, humanity was not yet an independently willing being; angels willed on its behalf. Willing, so to speak, only began to be instilled with the Earth stage. In contrast, feeling was already acquired during the Lunar evolution, thinking during the Solar evolution, and memory during the ancient Saturn evolution. And if you connect what I am saying now with other things expressed in the *Akasha Chronicle* and *The Secret Science*, an important connection will become clear to you. During the Saturn evolution, the first rudiments of the human physical body arose; during the Sun evolution, those of the human etheric body; during the Moon evolution, those of the human astral body; and during the Earth evolution, the human ego takes shape.

[ 13 ] Now let us consider, in and of itself, what we call the act of remembering. What is remembering? Just as something of the image of an event we have experienced remains in the soul, so too does something remain in the book we are reading of what the author intended. When you have a book in front of you, you can read everything, think everything—sometimes not, but I won’t count that now—that the author of the book thought. Remembering is a subconscious act of reading; what remains are signs that the etheric body has imprinted on the physical body. If you had an experience years ago, you went through what was to be experienced in that event. What remains are impressions that the etheric body imprints into the physical body; and when you now remember, that act of remembering is a subconscious reading.

[ 14 ] The secret processes that take place within the organism, enabling the etheric body to imprint the signs that underlie memory, were formed during the ancient Saturn evolution. It is indeed the case that we carry within our organism precisely this secret Saturn organism; it manifests itself in such a way that we can perceive within it an essential quality into which the etheric body is able to inscribe, in the form of signs, the experiences it has externally, in order to then retrieve them again in memory. The fact that human beings engage in this subconscious recording activity is essentially due to the fact that during the first seven years of life, the body—specifically that part of the physical body intended to receive these imprints—is still malleable. That is why, as I pointed out, for example, in my essay on “The Education of the Child,” one should not mistreat the child by training its memory. During the first seven years, the aim is to allow the malleable organism to be left to its own elementary forces, so that we do not mistreat it in this regard. We should therefore tell the child as much as possible, but not place too much emphasis on the child having to artificially train their memory at this early stage; rather, they should be left to their own devices with regard to memory development. In this way, Spiritual Science will be of immense importance for educational life.

[ 15 ] Just as the capacity for memory is one of the oldest components of human nature, so the activity that underlies thinking belongs to what might be called that which is formed in the Sun. This, too, is relatively ancient. The solar forces contain that which organizes the etheric body in human beings in such a way that it can perform this unique activity of thinking and creating mental images. You can see from this that one must reach far, far back into the cosmos if one wants to answer the question: why can human beings remember, and why can they think? One must go back as far as the Saturn and Sun stages of development.

[ 16 ] When considering human emotional activity, one need only go back to the lunar stage of development; for volitional activity, one need only go back to the terrestrial stage of development. This will help you understand many things. People who are particularly shaped by their past incarnations—who are not flexible but sharply defined—will have a great deal pressed into their organism. These will be people who have an almost automatic memory, but they will not develop much of their thinking productively. So while you must primarily associate human memory with the physical body, thinking with the etheric body, and feeling with the astral body, you will therefore have to associate human volition primarily with the I. It is only because the human being is a being of will that he can say “I” to himself. If he were to think only, life would still unfold like a dream. Now we are, in this way, I would say, an organic interconnection of inner soul activities that have imprinted themselves upon our soul being in the course of evolution. I said, with regard to our volition, that it only emerged during Earth’s evolution; on the Moon, the higher spiritual hierarchies—the Angeloi—still willed on behalf of humanity. Consequently, the entire will of humanity during the lunar evolution was such that, when one recalls it into clairvoyant consciousness, one does indeed perceive a higher level, yet it remains an involuntary will in humanity, much like what we observe in animal evolution on Earth. The animal necessarily follows what boils and bubbles within it; it is within the collective will of its species.

[ 17 ] Just as during the lunar evolution spiritual beings of a higher order—that is, the angels—acted on our behalf, so now these spiritual beings of a higher order are at work, determining our karma from one incarnation to the next. The angels do not act upon our will, but they do act within the ongoing stream of our karma. Just as human beings during the lunar evolution did not feel the will as their own, but as that of the angel, so we, as human beings of the Earth, do not live in the belief that we create our own karma: it is governed by the spirits of the higher hierarchies. Only when our will can, so to speak, fall silent for a moment, can it happen that something shines through—even to a consciousness that has not become clairvoyant—of what otherwise remains hidden from the course of karma.

[ 18 ] Keep in mind what I have explained: that a core forms within the human being which passes through the gate of death into the spiritual realm; this core is the bearer of our karma. What each of us will do tomorrow is already karmically determined within us today. If we did not have the task on Earth of developing the will, we could see through our karma. We would be able to perceive it to such an extent that, under certain circumstances, we might foresee our lives for the time to come. But as the will strikes into the karmic stream, it obscures our view of what will happen to us, let us say, the next day. Only when the will is completely silent can we perhaps glimpse something of what happens not through us, but with us. I would like to cite an example of this, which is told by Erasmus Francisci and is based on truth. As a young man, Erasmus Francisci lived with his aunt; and once he dreamed that a man, whose name was also called out to him in the dream, would shoot at him, but he would not be shot; rather, his aunt would save his life. That is what he dreamed. The next day, before anything had happened, he told his aunt about the dream. She was very alarmed by this dream, told him that just recently someone in their neighborhood had actually been shot, and strongly advised her nephew to stay home so that nothing would happen to him. She also gave him the key to the apple pantry so that he could go up at any time to get apples. He went up to his room and sat down at his desk to read. What he was reading, however, was something that interested him less at that moment than the key to the apple pantry in his pocket, which his aunt had given him. He decided to go up to the pantry. But no sooner had he stood up than a shot rang out, aimed so precisely that the bullet struck the spot where his head had been while he was reading. Had he not stood up, the bullet would have gone right through him. The servant of the neighboring house, whose name was indeed the same as the one called out to Frasmus Francisci in the dream, and who was unknown to him—this servant did not know that the two rifles he was handling were loaded, and as he began to fiddle with them, the rifle went off, and had Francisci not stood up at that very moment to go to the apple pantry, the key to which his aunt had given him, he would undoubtedly have been shot. The dream is thus an exact reproduction of what took place the very next day.

[ 19 ] You see, here we have a result about which we can say that the will had absolutely nothing to do with it, for Francisci could do nothing with his will; he could not protect himself; something came upon him that fell into the person’s karma in such a way that the person was meant to continue living. In this case, the spirit bringing about the karma already had the saving thought. The dream is the foresight of the spirit guiding the karma, which looks ahead to what will happen the next day; and because this young person possessed a certain spiritual disposition—such that, through a kind of natural meditation, the soul had already experienced a certain deepening—something occurred as a result that I could compare to something in external life. Isn’t it true that human beings are only prophets to a limited extent with regard to external earthly life? In a certain sense, we are all prophets, for you all know that it will become light at a certain time tomorrow and so on, or that someone walking across a field today can predict what it will look like over that field tomorrow; but what he will not foresee is, for example, whether it will rain on that field tomorrow and so on. So it is also with regard to the inner life. Human beings live according to their will, and karma is embedded within that will. Just as one can acquire a sensory insight into the immediate future, so too can a certain inner light emerge for those who experience a deepening of the soul—precisely for those events where the will must remain silent. For the study of Spiritual Science, it is important to occasionally cast one’s gaze upon such things, because it shows us how something certainly lives within the human being that points toward the future and that the human being cannot grasp with ordinary consciousness. Through the silent will, karma comes through.

[ 20 ] All the things that can come to our attention in this way through Spiritual Science research are capable of showing us how what is called the “great delusion” consists primarily in the fact that human beings, with their ordinary consciousness, cannot grasp what they truly are: that human beings belong to the whole world, whereas ordinary consciousness actually shows them only the shell, as if enclosed within the skin and so on. But what is shown to them within this enclosure is only a fragment of what human beings truly are, and that is as vast as the world. And in fact, even in ordinary life, we look back at our human beings from the outside. If we bring such things clearly to our consciousness, we can gradually acquire a sense of how what is called the human etheric body is present within the human being. And indeed, even in ordinary life, observations can be made that show us how at least this second human being, the etheric human, is contained within the physical human; we just have to observe life more closely than is usually done. Imagine, for instance, that you are lying in bed in the morning, feeling quite lazy, not at all inclined to get up, but wanting to stay in bed, and it is difficult for you to make the decision to get up. If you rely solely on what is within you, it is difficult for you to get up. But suppose it occurs to you that there might be something in the other room that you’ve been expecting for a few days. A thought arises about something outside: then you will see that this thought can work a small miracle. You will see that, if you give yourself over to this thought a little, you will even jump out of bed! What has happened here? As you wake up and become immersed in the physical body, you feel what the physical body makes you feel—this is not conducive to generating the thought of getting up within you; the etheric body has begun an independent activity because you have engaged it through something external: there you can indeed see how you have set your etheric body against your physical body, and how the etheric body grasps you and lifts you out of bed. One arrives at a quite distinct sense of oneself, namely the sense of observing and distinguishing between two kinds of human activities one undergoes. These are the activities one performs in the ordinary drudgery of life, and those activities in which one senses that inner activity is asserting itself. These are finer observations that one can, of course, always deny if one wishes. One must adapt one’s observations to life and truly see through life as it presents itself: then the whole of human feeling is directed in the right direction. One must be clear that the path into the spiritual world cannot happen all at once, but rather leads out of the world gradually, and thus we ascend to what I have just mentioned, where for us that which was formerly the world loses its deadness and becomes a being in itself.

[ 21 ] In this way, the human being grows together with the spiritual world through insight. He grows together with that which we can say is his own, once he has shed what he possesses through the instrument of the physical body—and which essentially constitutes his life between birth and death. We grow by passing through the gate of death, into the world that is very similar to the one just described as the one that yields to higher knowledge. And then we realize the one infinitely important thing: In this world we enter when we pass through the gate of death, if we wish to settle into this world in the right way—just as we need a light to illuminate a dark room—we need there that which we can develop here on Earth in the innermost depths of our soul. Earthly life is not something we need to regard merely as a prison, as a dungeon. Certainly, it is part of the natural course of development that human beings pass through the gate of death. Of course, human beings can live in the life between death and new birth; but the whole of life exists so that every part of us may contribute something necessary, something new, and as we pass through this cycle that is now here, life here is meant to give us that which ignites like a torch, through which we not only live in this life of the spirit, but through which we recognize and live this life with clarity. The light that illuminates us is that which is, as it were, conquered by us as the enduring element between birth and death for the life between death and new birth.

[ 22 ] This is what must always be emphasized, especially in our time, so that as many people as possible may come to understand it: that for spiritual life, what one comprehends here in the physical world, in the physical body, from the spiritual world must be like an illuminating flame. In a certain sense, all the difficulties that the most developed segment of humanity must currently endure should serve as a reminder to deepen the life of the soul, and it must be that a longing for the worlds to which the human being belongs as a soul is drawn forth from the depths of the human soul. May that longing be prepared in the time in which we now live, through which every soul says to itself: human beings are something quite different from what they appear to us to be because they are clothed in a body. May what is experienced stand as a reminder for deepening, for the soul’s immersion into spiritual feeling, into spiritual seeing. And again, out of this awareness of the necessity for deepening in Spiritual Science in our time, and out of the awareness that the difficulty of our time is meant to be a warning, let us conclude today with what we have always concluded with before parting. Hopefully we will be able to continue these reflections here again in the not-too-distant future; today let them be concluded with the words:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the suffering of the forsaken,
From the sacrifices of the people
The fruit of the spirit grows—
Guiding souls with spiritual awareness
Toward the realm of the spirit.