The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fourteenth Lecture

[ 1 ] My dear friends, we once again begin by remembering 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, watchful 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 brought healing to the Earth and freedom and progress to humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha—be with you and your heavy burdens!

[ 4 ] In this extraordinary reflection today, I would like to recall various points that have been the subject of our various discussions and that we now wish to summarize from a particular perspective, by shedding light—here and there—on matters already considered, as they present themselves to us. This is precisely what stands in the way of Spiritual Science in our time—a prejudice, a preconception, a premonition of rejection—namely, that people have so little inkling of how small a part of what a human being actually accomplishes, in every hour, in every moment, is what a human being possesses in their ordinary consciousness as a being of the physical world. One need only consider how little one would be able to live as a human being at all if one were to have in one’s consciousness everything one needs in order to live as a human being. It is rightly emphasized time and again how little human beings still know today—let us take, for the moment, the purely physical functions of their lives—about how the brain, liver, heart, and so on actually work to accomplish what human beings must accomplish in order to live as physical beings on Earth. But all that which a human being must accomplish in this way merely for the development of his outer physical life—all that he must indeed do. And consider how little a human being can accompany this with his consciousness. One need only consider the very slightest event in life to see: the human being as a cosmic being, as an earthly being, is one thing, and what one might call the conscious human being is something quite different; it is something that, in relation to what the human being is in its entirety, is very small, truly quite small. And so it should come as no surprise to anyone that a drive arises in human nature to continually expand this small conscious human being beyond the realm that opens up when one considers the human being as a cosmic being. Today we wish to do this precisely from perspectives that have already presented themselves to us, which we merely wish to consider once more in a different context.

[ 5 ] Our conscious existence as human beings begins, in a certain sense, through our sensory perceptions—through what we perceive of the external world with our senses. The fact that our senses perceive—that is, that impressions are made on our senses, and that these impressions arise through certain processes—is something quite different from our having a consciousness of them. Just imagine that you were to sleep—rabbits, after all, do not sleep with their eyes closed but with them open—then the surroundings of the eye, unless it is pitch dark, would always make impressions on the eyes, and only the awareness of these impressions would be lacking. In fact, the ears are always open, and every sound—everything that is accompanied by consciousness during the waking state of the day—naturally takes place in the processes of the ear just as well when a person is asleep. All our sense organs can always be engaged in the entire process of earthly life; but what significance they have for us depends on our accompanying this process of the sense organs with consciousness. For only what we take into our consciousness belongs to us as earthly human beings.

[ 6 ] Does what we call our sensory perceptions—the ability of our eyes, ears, and so on to perceive—have significance only for us as human beings on Earth, or does it have some other significance in the wider cosmos? This question can only be answered if one attempts, with the help of clairvoyant insight, to form a view of what it actually is that we see of the stars in outer space. Isn’t it true that those who take the standpoint of our materialistic physics say: Well, when we see a planet, it is the light of the sun that falls upon it and is reflected back, and in this way we see the planet. — This is how we see objects on our Earth. That one sees planets in this way, too, is merely concluded by physicists on the basis of an analogy, for there is not a single reason—not even the slightest one—that could possibly apply to the universe, that what is applicable to our Earth—the conclusion that light shines upon objects and, when it is reflected back, the objects become visible—that this also applies to celestial bodies. There is absolutely no reason to extend this conclusion to the universe. Regarding the fixed stars, these physicists now say: Well, they simply shine on their own. I still remember, when I was a fairly young lad, asking a former classmate from the village school: How do you learn about light where you come from? I had already heard, with a somewhat childish skepticism, about the so-called real cause of light—namely, all those dancing little ether globules and light waves—but the boy, who had been trained at the seminary at the time, had never heard of any of that and said: “We’ve only ever heard it said, whenever the question arose: ‘What is light?’ that ‘Light is the cause of the bodies’ glow.’” — Now you see, of course, something enormously “powerful” is said about light when one says: Light is the cause of the luminousness of bodies. But fundamentally, it is not much more than when today’s Marianalist physics says: One simply sees the celestial bodies when they emit light. It is essentially quite the same.

[ 7 ] I have already mentioned on another occasion that it would be quite a surprise for materialist physicists if they could travel to the sun and see for themselves what the sun actually is. I said that because, in fact, there is nothing at all where the Sun is. Rather, what one would find there would be a constellation of purely spiritual beings and forces; there is nothing material there at all. Now, if one examines the stars with this clairvoyant consciousness and inquires into the reason for their light, one finds that what is actually present there—and which we call their light—consists in the perceptive faculty of beings, whether more or less coarse, as is the case with earthly human beings, or more finely developed. And if any being on Venus or Mars were to look down upon the Earth, that being, upon seeing the Earth shine, would have to say to itself: this Earth shines, not because rays of the Sun are reflected there, but because there are human beings on Earth who perceive through their eyes. This process of seeing does not merely signify something for our consciousness, but it radiates out into the entire cosmos, and what human beings do by seeing is the light of the respective celestial body. We do not see merely so that we may take in the results of what we see with our consciousness, but we see so that, through our process of seeing, the Earth may shine out into the cosmos. Thus, in fact, each of our sense organs has the task not only of being what it is for us, but also has a cosmic task. Through his sensory perception, the human being is a cosmic being. He is not only the being he is through his consciousness as an earthly human being; he is a cosmic being.

[ 8 ] As we delve deeper into the inner workings of our soul, we encounter thought. We actually regard this thinking even more as our own private possession, for not only is there the saying that thoughts are duty-free—which is meant to imply that thoughts really have significance only for our individual self—but there is also a widespread belief that everyone, through their thinking, is merely carrying out an inner process, that this thinking has, more or less, significance only for the individual themselves. The reality, however, is quite different. This thinking is actually a process of our etheric body. And of what actually happens during thinking, the human being knows the very least. The very least of what happens in his thinking is accompanied by his consciousness. As the human being thinks, he does know something of what he thinks. But infinitely more unfolds as accompanying thought even during waking thought. And on top of that, we continue to think at night when we sleep. It is not true that thinking stops when we fall asleep and starts again when we wake up. Thinking continues. And among the various processes of dreaming, the processes of the dream life, there are also those in which, upon waking, a person, with their ego and astral body, submerges into their etheric body and physical body. There he dives in and enters a surging mass, a weaving life, of which he can know, if he only observes it a little: these are weaving thoughts; I am diving in as into a sea consisting solely of weaving thoughts. Many have said to themselves upon waking: If only I could remember what I was thinking there, it was something very clever; it would help me immensely if I could remember it now! This is no mistake. Down there is truly something like a surging sea; that is precisely the surging, weaving, ethereal world, which is not merely a somewhat thinner form of matter, as English theosophy so often depicts it, but is the weaving world of thought itself, is truly spiritual. One plunges into a weaving world of thought.

[ 9 ] What we are as human beings is truly much wiser than what we are as conscious human beings. There is nothing left for us to do but admit it. It would also be sad if we were not unconsciously wiser than we are consciously, for otherwise we could do nothing but repeat ourselves at the same level of wisdom in every life. But in fact, we already carry within us in this present life what we can become in the next life; for that will be the fruit. And if we were truly always able to catch a glimpse of what we are immersing ourselves in there, we would catch a glimpse of much of what we will be in the next life. So down there it surges and weaves; there lies the seed for our next incarnation, and we take that into ourselves. Hence the prophetic nature of the dream life. Thinking is something immensely complicated, and only a part of what goes on in thinking does a person take into their consciousness. For what takes place in thought constitutes a process of time. In perceiving with our waking senses, we are at the same time cosmic human beings. Our act of seeing brings about the light; there we are cosmic beings of space. Through what takes place in thinking, we are cosmic beings of time; everything that happened before our birth, everything that happens after our death, and so on, all plays a part. Thus, through our thinking we participate in the entire cosmic process of time, and through our sensory perception in the entire cosmic process of space. And only the earthly process of sensory perception is for ourselves. Now let us proceed to feeling. We have even less of feeling in our consciousness than of sensory perception and thinking. This feeling is a deep, deep process. For if one wishes to know the true meaning of thinking, if one wishes to know the real truth that thinking has this cosmic significance, then one must rise to the imaginative perception, as described in “How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?” As soon as one strips thought of the abstractness it possesses for our consciousness and dives into that sea of the weaving world of thought, one is compelled not only to have abstract thoughts like the earthly human being, but to have images within it. For everything is created from images; images are the true causes of things; images lie behind everything that surrounds us, and we immerse ourselves in these images when we plunge into the sea of thought. These are the images Plato meant; these are the images meant by all who have spoken of spiritual sources; these are the images Goethe meant when he spoke of his “primordial plant.” These images are found in imaginative thinking. But this imaginative thinking is a reality, and we immerse ourselves in it when we immerse ourselves in the surging thinking that flows along in the stream of time.

[ 10 ] We only immerse ourselves in feeling when we arrive at what is called inspiration, which is a higher form of insight than imagination. Everything that underlies our feeling is actually a surge of inspirations. And just as the image reflected by the mirror is only an image of what exists as an object out in the world, so too are our feelings merely mirror images of the inspirations that reach us from the universe, reflected back by our own organism. But just as the mirror is incapable of reflecting everything—it can only reflect external forms, mirrors only the inorganic, not life— so too can our feelings not reflect what lies in the element of the world as inspiration, but they are a mirror image that relates to what flows in the world only as the dead mirror image relates to the living being it reflects. For in each of these images are reflected the qualities of the beings of the higher hierarchies, who express themselves in the world through inspiration. And just as we do not remain at the level of feelings but progress to clairaudient perception, we perceive the world as it interacts from a great diversity of beings of the higher hierarchies. The world is this being, this interaction of the beings of the hierarchies. The deeds of the higher hierarchies take place in the world. And we are drawn into this, are reflected within it, and the deeds of the higher hierarchies are reflected back through our mirror. We then perceive this reflection through our consciousness. Thus we live in the bosom of the qualities of the hierarchies as feeling human beings and perceive these qualities through our consciousness. Even smaller is the human being who accompanies feelings with his consciousness, in relation to what he actually is through his feelings, than was the case in the other instances with the conscious human being and his sensory perceptions and thinking. For by virtue of being feeling human beings, we are also beings of the hierarchies, and we also act within the realm where the hierarchies act. We act within this fabric, performing deeds that are not merely for ourselves, but through which we contribute to the entire structure of the world. Through our feelings, we are servants of the higher beings who build the world. And while we believe that we are, so to speak, standing before the Sistine Madonna and merely satisfying the feeling that rises within us, it is a fact that here stands a human being before the Sistine Madonna, and as he directs his feelings toward her, a real process is at work—a real event! If this feeling were not there, if such emotional elements were not present, then those beings who are destined to participate in the building of the celestial body Venus would not possess the forces they need for this task. Our feelings are necessary for the house that the gods are building as the world, just as the bricks are used to build the house; and what we know about our feelings is, in turn, only a part of the whole. We know what a joy it is for us to stand before the Sistine Madonna—but what happens there is part of the whole of the world, quite regardless of how we accompany it with our consciousness.

[ 11 ] And when we look at our will, that too is merely a mirror—but now of the essence of the individual members of the hierarchies. We are likewise beings of the hierarchies, only on a different level. Our reality consists of our will; we give substance to the world by allowing our will to live out in reality in some way. Once again, it is so: the fact that we accompany our will with consciousness has meaning only for us as human beings; alongside this stands our will as reality—that is the material from which the gods build the world.

[ 12 ] You can see how our sensory perceptions, our thinking, feeling, and willing have cosmic significance, how they fit into the whole of cosmic life. And yet it seems that even in the present, human beings really should not lack the understanding necessary to grasp this, provided they have the will to do so. Sometimes it becomes apparent that people are aware that there is a small human being—the conscious one—and a great human being—cosmic reality. Friedrich Nietzsche, in his *Thus Spoke Zarathustra*, also spoke of this fact, sensed something of this fact. And so it is with many, only that they do not take the trouble to walk the paths through which one recognizes how to ascend from the small human being to the greater human being. But it is truly necessary that a greater number of people realize that the times are past when one can get by without this insight. The old era still had remnants of the ancient clairvoyance through which, in ancient times, people looked into the spiritual world, where they truly saw as a human being does when, with their ego and astral body, they are outside the physical and etheric bodies and out in the cosmos. Humanity would never have attained full freedom or individuality; a lack of self-reliance would have set in had the old clairvoyance remained. Humanity had to lose the old clairvoyance; it had to, as it were, take possession of its physical ego. The thinking that it would develop if it could see the whole surging mass beneath consciousness—which exists there as thinking, feeling, and willing—would be a heavenly thinking, but not independent thinking. How does humanity attain this independent thinking?

[ 13 ] Now, imagine that you are sleeping at night, lying in bed. That is to say, the physical body and the etheric body are lying in bed. Now, upon waking, the ego and the astral body enter from outside. Thought continues in the etheric body. The ego and the astral body now emerge; they first take hold of the etheric body. But it doesn’t last long, for at that very moment a thought may flash through: “What was I thinking just now? What was that clever idea?” But the human being has the desire to immediately take hold of the physical body as well, and at that moment it all vanishes; now the human being is fully within the sphere of earthly life. It is therefore because the human being immediately takes hold of the earthly body that he cannot bring the subtle ripples of etheric thinking into consciousness. In order to develop the consciousness “it is I who am thinking,” a person must take hold of their earthly body as an instrument; otherwise, they would not have the consciousness “it is I who am thinking,” but rather “it is the angel who protects me who is thinking.” This consciousness “I am thinking” is only possible through taking hold of the earthly body. That is why it is necessary that, in earthly life, human beings be enabled to use their earthly body. In the time to come, they will have to take hold of this earthly body more and more through what the earth gives them. Their justified egoism will grow ever greater. A counterbalance to this must be created by gaining, on the other hand, the insights provided by Spiritual Science. We stand at the starting point of this era. Now people might say: Let us not worry about this any further; what does it matter to us what the gods want from us? Should we not first explore the will of the gods! We accept what the gods give us in the course of earthly life; there they give us the physical body as an ever-stronger instrument of physical thinking; but to have scruples about the fact that we should first begin to acquire something other than strength—that is quite inconvenient. And one doesn’t have to do it, after all; let the gods take a different path! That is what people say, too, only they say it in such a way that they invent philosophies and so on.

[ 14 ] One must realize that, in the world, things do not depend on one’s desire to limit what must happen according to one’s own subjective convenience; it is entirely impossible for a certain measure³ of what is allotted to a person to be reduced. And if a person is meant to develop certain powers in a particular age and develops only a part of them, the others will still emerge. It is not true that they do not emerge! Just as when you heat a machine, what is heated does not disappear but radiates outward, so too in human life what is there cannot disappear. So it is not true that what people today so despise—the mystical powers—does not exist. People can deny it. But within the world, it remains present. You can deny it; you can be a great materialist in your consciousness, but you cannot be so as a whole human being. This will then, without his knowing it, develop in such a way that what he would otherwise offer to the regular gods, he offers to Ahriman and Lucifer. For everything you suppress in your consciousness, everything you do not allow to unfold, you offer to Ahriman and Lucifer.

[ 15 ] You see, my dear friends, there can certainly be no contemporary culture today that has driven a more intense materialism into the very fibers of the soul than Italian culture. Contemporary Italian culture, as a national culture, is indeed a culture that arose because the folk-souls work through the emotional soul of the people. If English culture produces materialism, that is its mission; materialism there will be superficial, but it will be as it ought to be. This is where what the Earth once needs in terms of materialism comes into being. That is the mission of the British people: to give materialism to the Earth’s development. There it cannot nestle as deeply into the soul as it does in the Italian, who absorbs everything into the deepest feelings; there materialism lives down to the very depths. That is why Italian contemporary culture is currently experiencing veritable fits of nationalistic materialism with its whole soul, while materialism itself cannot be grasped with the whole soul. One can defend it against the world, but one cannot be enthusiastic about it unless one is a member of the Italian folk-soul. But just as it is true that our age is the most materialistic of all, it is equally true that among the southern peoples the most materialistic sentiments arise precisely from the emotional soul. Consider what Fichte said: “Whoever believes in the freedom of the spiritual actually belongs to us!” — For him, what nationality is supposed to be in his sense is characterized entirely by the spirit: a concept of the spirit. None of that is found in the Italian concept of nationality; here, it is the matter of blood that matters; it is a wholly naturalistic nationalism. When one person speaks of nation, they mean something entirely different than when another speaks of nation. A thoroughly nationalistic materialism prevails among the Italian people. Of course, all this applies only to the present day. Now consider: if the soul strives so decisively toward a naturalistic materialism in the nation’s aims, then the mystical sense cannot be lost because of this; it remains. It is merely cast out of consciousness and then settles upon something else; it is not cast out of the truest, innermost being, but rather it comes into the service of those forces we designate by the technical terms “Ahrimanic” and “Luciferic” forces; these forces are then not directed into the path of the progressive deities, but into the path of the Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces. One might assume that something will emerge among these peoples as a result of mystical forces being cast out into public life. Do we find such a thing in the South, as a truly cast-out mystical current of will?

[ 16 ] It was in 1347, on Pentecost Sunday in May, that Cola di Rienzi, at the head of a great procession in ancient Roman armor—in keeping with the sensibilities of the time—and bearing four standards, ascended to the Capitoline Hill, to the very spot from which one had always spoken when addressing the Romans about Romanism. And from there, Rienzi proclaimed what he had to proclaim, as he himself said, as the representative of Jesus Christ and as the one who had to speak to the Romans in the name of the freedom of the whole world. At that time, an incredible number of phrases were indeed spoken. They had a certain significance back then—in 1347—but they had no reality. The whole thing was something that fizzled out like a flash in the pan. But that is not what I mean. I would like to point out that this took place on Pentecost Sunday, May 20, 1347. That was back when the representative of this entire movement described himself as a representative of Christ. And later, as he further developed his teachings, he also called himself the one inspired by the Holy Spirit. And once again on a Pentecost Sunday, the declaration of war against Austria was made. This was preceded by the fact that the man—who, admittedly, did not call himself the representative of Christ, but who nevertheless so easily let it be understood that he was imbued with the Holy Spirit—had spoken in Rome at the head of a large procession immediately beforehand. One who certainly had not a trace of that mysticism in his soul in whose name Rienzi spoke back then. But—there you have what has been cast out of mysticism—it was spoken on the right day, namely when it was Pentecost Sunday again. But it was spoken in the service of the other powers. It is the Christ impulse cast out of consciousness. And just how much it was the Ahrimanic—which, after all, must be expected in this age—is shown by a few words spoken at that time. Of course, in the twentieth century, the speaker could not come this time in a tank with four standards, but he came in a car. That is, of course, what must be sacrificed to our materialistically oriented age. But he had to—perhaps unconsciously—take into account to some extent that what is actually cast out as mystical human power and now flows out into the world has been handed over to another power—transformed into its opposite. After his speech—the man who, by his own choice of name, is called d’Annunzio, though in reality his name is different—he did not merely speak in such a way that one might believe—which is, of course, easy to do in the Italian language— all the great, fiery words of *Rienzi* come alive again, which he so clearly sought to evoke in every sentence, but after delivering this speech—in which, admittedly, a Central European consciousness can see only empty phrases—he subsequently took a sword in his hand, kissed this sword, as a sign that he now wished to transfer the power of the speech to the power of the sword. This sword belonged to the editor of a magazine one often sees when visiting Italy. It was the sword that the editor of the magazine presented to the mayor of Rome on this occasion as a sacred legacy. This sword belonged to the editor of the satirical magazine “Asino.” The world will one day in the future realize, when it judges from different foundations than those from which judgments are so often made today, that? so much of what is happening in our present must be judged from the perspective of how much of what exists as a mystical force within human beings is cast out, handed over to the world process, yet is not lost, but becomes the prey of the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers. And rarely does the irony of world history reveal so clearly in immediate perception what is happening here as in the case just mentioned.

[ 17 ] Based precisely on what we have been able to take in through our efforts over the past few years, let us try to be clear about the fact that a certain measure of spiritual power is appropriate to human nature. And because, on the one hand, mystical spirituality must be cast out of consciousness by the fact that humanity can become free through the appropriation of the physical, it must, on the other hand, be taken into consciousness; otherwise, what is cast out of consciousness will be seized by the Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces. This is what I would like to remind you of again and again, my dear friends: that by striving for years to take this into our consciousness, we also create within ourselves a feeling that something must emerge from these bloody events of the present that leads humanity toward spirituality, toward the recognition of the spiritual. In the sense that I have often spoken of the need for souls to be found who, through Spiritual Science, are capable of looking up into the spiritual world, where all the etheric bodies are that have come out of young people—have ascended into the spiritual world—and which now remain present, because even in this realm the forces are not lost. We should now look up to them; they will connect with the forces from the spiritual world that shine toward us, and what the dead have to say will become impulses in the future, when there are souls who understand their language. In this sense, we speak once more the simple words:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of battle,
From the suffering of the forsaken,
From the sacrifices of the people
The fruit of the spirit grows—
Guiding souls, spiritually aware,
Toward the realm of the spirit.