The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eighth Lecture

[ 1 ] Today, in preparation for the next two reflections, let us bring to mind a few thoughts about the nature of the human being, insofar as the human being is a thinking being. It is precisely this characteristic of the human being—that he is a thinking being—that is misunderstood scientifically today and interpreted in a completely wrong way. It is thought that thoughts, as experienced by human beings, arise within them; that human beings are, so to speak, the bearers of thoughts. It is no wonder that people hold this view, for the true nature of the human being is, in fact, accessible only to more subtle observation. It is precisely this human essence that eludes coarse observation.

[ 2 ] When we regard human beings as thinking beings, it is because, in the waking state—from the moment we wake up until we fall asleep—we perceive that they accompany their other experiences with thoughts, with the content of their thinking. These thought experiences seem as though they arise in some way within the person and as though they cease, in a certain sense, during the time between falling asleep and waking up—that is, during sleep. And because people believe that thought experiences exist for a person only as long as they are awake, but dissolve into some indeterminate state during sleep—a state about which they make no further effort to gain insight and simply imagine it to be so—they cannot truly gain insight into the human being as a thinking being. A more subtle observation—which, admittedly, does not yet penetrate very deeply into the region I have described in my book How Does One Gain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?—shows that the life of thought is by no means as simple as it is usually imagined to be. We need only compare this ordinary life of thought—this coarse life of thought, which anyone who observes a person between waking and falling asleep becomes aware of—with an element that is, admittedly, problematic for ordinary consciousness: the element of dreaming.

[ 3 ] Usually, when we talk about dreams, we are really referring to nothing other than a general characterization of dreaming. One compares the state of dreaming with the state of waking thought and finds that in dreaming there are, as one might say, arbitrary associations of thoughts, that images follow one another without any perceptible connection in this sequence, such as is perceptible in the external world. Or one may relate what takes place in a dream to the external sensory world, observing how it stands out, as it were, and how, in terms of its beginning and end, it does not fit into the processes of the external sensory world.

[ 4 ] Certainly, one does arrive at these observations, and with regard to these observations, there are indeed some very fine results to report. But what goes unnoticed is that, first of all, when a person allows himself, I might say, a hint of contemplation, lets themselves go a little, and allows their thoughts to run free, they can then perceive how, into this ordinary flow of thought—which follows the external course of events—something does indeed intermingle that is not unlike dreaming, even when we are in the waking state. One could even say: From the moment we wake up until we fall asleep, a kind of indefinite dreaming takes place—while we strive to adapt our thought life to the external circumstances in which we are entwined. It may seem to us, in a sense, as if there were two currents: the upper current, which we control with our will, and a lower current that actually flows just as dreams themselves flow in their succession of images. Certainly, one must surrender a little to one’s inner life if one wants to notice what I am speaking of right now. But it is always there. One will always notice: an undercurrent is present. There, thoughts swirl into one another just as vividly as they do in dreams; there, the most colorful images follow one after another. There come reminiscences from all sorts of things, which—just as a dream does based on the mere assonance of words—evoke other thoughts and connect with them. And people who let themselves go inwardly—people who are too comfortable to adapt their train of thought to external circumstances—can sense how there is an inner striving to surrender to such waking dreams.

[ 5 ] This lucid dreaming differs from ordinary dreaming only in that the images are fainter, that they are more like figments of the imagination. But in terms of the interrelationship of these images, this lucid dreaming does not differ particularly from so-called real dreaming. There are, after all, all kinds of people, ranging from those who do not even notice that such lucid dreaming exists in the undercurrents of their consciousness—who thus let their thoughts run entirely along the thread of external events—to those who indulge in lucid dreaming and allow it to unfold in their consciousness; as, I might say, thoughts there seek to interweave and swirl together. From such dreamy dispositions—whatever one may call them—to those who are entirely pragmatic, accepting nothing but what corresponds exactly to some course of events, there are indeed all degrees of human nature. And we must say that a large part of what inspires people artistically, poetically, and so on stems from this undercurrent of waking dreaming during the day.

[ 6 ] That is one side of the matter. It should certainly be taken into account. We would then realize that, in fact, a constant surge of dreaming is taking place within us, which we can only rein in through our interaction with the outside world. And one would also realize that it is essentially the will that adapts to the outside world and brings system, coherence, and logic to the otherwise chaotic mass of inner thoughts. It is the will that brings logic to our thinking. But as I said, that is only one side of the story.

[ 7 ] The other side of the matter is this: Here, too, one can once again notice and observe—as soon as one begins to enter those regions that I have described in my book How Does One Gain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? —how, upon waking, one carries something with them from the state in which we were from falling asleep until waking up. And if one adds just a few things to what one can perceive there, then one will be able to notice very clearly how, as it were, one wakes up from a sea of thoughts the moment one wakes up. One does not at all wake up from the indeterminate, from darkness, so to speak, but rather one actually wakes up from a sea of thoughts—thoughts that, admittedly, give the impression of having been very, very definite while one was asleep, yet one cannot hold onto them when one transitions into the waking state.

[ 8 ] And if one continues such observations, one will be able to notice that these thoughts—which, so to speak, we bring with us from the state of sleep—are very similar to the ideas and inventions we have regarding anything we are to carry out in the external world—that even these thoughts, which we bring with us upon waking, are very similar to the moral intuitions, as I have called them in my Philosophy of Freedom.

[ 9 ] While with the former type of thought-weaving—which, in a sense, flows as an undercurrent of our clear consciousness—we always have the feeling that we are facing ourselves in our waking dreams, as something simmers and bubbles within us, we cannot say the same of the latter type. With the latter type, we must rather say to ourselves: When we wake up and return to our body and the use of our body, we are unable to hold on to that in which we lived while thinking, from the moment we fell asleep until we woke up.

[ 10 ] Anyone who truly brings these two aspects of human life to consciousness will cease to regard thoughts merely as something that is, so to speak, produced within the human organism. For what I have just described—that which we emerge from upon waking—we cannot directly regard as any product of the human organism as such; rather, we can only regard it as something we experience between falling asleep and waking up, when we are torn from our physical body along with our “I” and our astral body.

[ 11 ] Where, then, are we? This is the question we must first ask ourselves. We are, with our “I” and our astral body, outside our physical and etheric bodies. A simple consideration—one that cannot be avoided if we simply surrender to life with an open mind—must tell us: In that which appears to us when we direct our senses toward the outer world—as the veil of the world’s sensory perceptions, as all that sensory qualities present to us—in that we are present, even when we are outside of ourselves. It is just that, for ordinary life, consciousness then fades away. And we sense why consciousness fades when we wake up from this state in the morning. We then feel weak in our body—too weak to hold onto within it what we have experienced from falling asleep until waking up. As our ego and our astral body submerge into the physical and etheric bodies, they cannot retain what they have experienced there. And as they then participate in the experiences mediated through the physical body, what was experienced from falling asleep to waking up fades away for them. And as I said, only when we have thoughts relating to the external world, or when we have moral intuitions, do we experience something akin to what, upon direct observation, must appear to us as that in which we live between falling asleep and waking up.

[ 12 ] When we look at it this way, we see a very clear contrast between our inner world and the outer world. This also sheds light, in a certain sense, on the statement we often make—that the external world, as it presents itself to us from the moment we wake up until we fall asleep, is a kind of illusion, a kind of Maya. For in this world, which shows us its outer side, we are immersed within it—not when we are in our bodies, but when we are outside our bodies. Then we immerse ourselves in the world that we otherwise perceive only through our sensory experience. So that we must say to ourselves: This world, which we perceive through our sensory experience, has underlying layers—layers that actually contain its causes, its essences. And in our ordinary consciousness, we are too weak to perceive these causes and these essences directly.

[ 13 ] Nevertheless, even an unbiased observation reveals something that reaches far into the realms described in How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?; an unbiased observation already reveals what I can schematically represent in roughly the following way. If I wish to depict ordinary thought life, I do so by having it encompass everything that a person experiences inwardly and mentally from waking until falling asleep, based on external perceptions or on physical pain, physical sensations of pleasure, and so on. So what is experienced mentally in ordinary consciousness, I would like to depict schematically at first in roughly this way (see drawing, white). Beneath this—like a waking dream—weaves and lives, not subject to the laws of logic, what I depicted first (red below). In contrast, when we transition into the external world between falling asleep and waking up, we live—as we can perceive in retrospect after waking—once again in a world of thought, but of thoughts that envelop us, that are not within us, and from which we emerge upon waking (red on the outside). Thus, through our ordinary thinking, we have, so to speak, separated two worlds of thought from one another: an inner world of thought and an outer world of thought—a world of thought that fills the cosmos, which envelops us as we fall asleep. We can call this latter world of thought the cosmic world of thought. The former is simply a world of thought; we will examine it in greater detail over the course of these days.

[ 14 ] In a sense, we find ourselves, with our ordinary world of thought, placed within a general world of thought that is kept separate as if by a boundary, and of which one part is within us and one part is outside us. That which is within us appears to us very clearly as a kind of dream. There is always a chaotic web of thoughts lying at the bottom of our soul—we might say, something that is not permeated by logic. But this outer world of thought—well, ordinary consciousness certainly cannot perceive it. Thus, the nature of this outer world of thought can only be revealed through direct observation, through direct experience—that is, through true spiritual vision, which then penetrates deeper into the realms described in How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?. But then it also becomes clear: this world of thought into which we plunge between falling asleep and waking up is a world of thought that is not merely as logical as our ordinary world of thought is, but one that contains a much higher logic. If one does not wish to misunderstand the expression, I would like to call this world of thought a “super-logical” world of thought. It is, I would say, just as far above ordinary logic as our dream world—our waking dream world—lies below logic.

[ 15 ] As I said, this can only be fathomed through spiritual vision. But there is another way in which you can verify this spiritual vision in this regard. Surely it is clear to you that ordinary consciousness cannot penetrate certain regions of one’s own organism. I have spoken a great deal about this in recent lectures. I have said: Because we possess memory and the capacity to recall for the purposes of ordinary consciousness, a sort of skin has, so to speak, been drawn inwardly over our internal organs. We cannot directly observe through inner vision what the internal organs—the lungs, the liver, and so on—actually are. But I also said: It is a false mysticism, a nebulous mysticism, that merely fantasizes about the inner world and speaks in a manner similar to Saint Teresa or Mechthild of Magdeburg, who conjure up all sorts of beautiful poetic images—the beauty of which should not be disputed—but which are nothing more than organic outpourings. If one does not surrender to this nebulous mysticism but rather to genuine spiritual research, then precisely when one penetrates into the inner being of the human being, one arrives at an understanding of the organs. One spiritually perceives the significance of the lungs, liver, kidneys, and so on; one spiritually pierces through the veil of memory and arrives at an inner insight into the human being. But this is something that simply cannot be achieved with ordinary consciousness. With ordinary consciousness, it is only possible to observe externally, through anatomy, what the organs look like when viewed as belonging to the ordinary physical and mineral world. But to look inwardly at the forces that permeate them, that interweave through them, that are active within them—which I have described to you over the past few days—requires a truly developed spiritual vision.

[ 16 ] So there is something deep within a person that he cannot reach with ordinary consciousness. Why can’t they reach it with ordinary consciousness? Because it does not belong to them alone. What can be reached with ordinary consciousness belongs solely to the human being. That which pulsates down there in the organs does not belong to the human being alone; it belongs to the human being as a cosmic being—it belongs both to the human being and to the world.

[ 17 ] Perhaps the following discussion will make this clearest of all. If we look at a human being schematically and consider any organ within them—such as a lung or a liver—we find forces within such an organ. These forces are not merely inner human forces; they are forces of the worlds. And when everything that constitutes the external physical world—and which appears before our eyes as the physical world—has one day vanished with the end of the Earth, that which now exists as the inner forces of our organs will continue to act. One might say that everything our eyes can see and our ears can hear—the entire external world—is a world that will initially fade away with the end of the Earth. What our skin covers, what we carry within us, what is enclosed by our physical constitution—this contains, in a spiritual sense, that which will endure when the external world perceived by our senses is no longer there. Essentially, something is at work within the human skin that lives beyond the Earth; within the human skin lie the centers, the forces of that which works beyond earthly existence. We do not stand in the world as human beings merely to enclose our organs for ourselves; we stand in the world as human beings so that the cosmos itself may take shape within our skin. Within that which our ordinary consciousness cannot reach, we enclose something that belongs not only to us but also to the world. Is that which belongs to the world built up from what the chaotic processes of waking dreaming represent?

[ 18 ] We need only consider these chaotic processes of waking dreaming, and you will say to yourself: The entire structure—everything you perceive there, so to speak, as an undercurrent of your consciousness—is most certainly not the builder of your organs, of your entire organism. Your organism would look quite a sight if everything that’s chaotically swirling around in your subconscious were building your organs, your entire organism! You’d see just what strange caricatures you’d be if you were a reflection of what’s pulsating in your subconscious. No, just as the external world reveals itself to us through the senses—revealing itself, so to speak, on the surface it turns toward us—and just as this world is built up from the thoughts we experience between falling asleep and waking up, so too are we ourselves, in that which we cannot reach within ourselves with ordinary consciousness, built up from the same external forces of thought. So if I want to fully depict what a human being is, I would have to draw a diagram like this. I would have to say: Here is the surrounding world of thought (red). This surrounding world of thought also builds up the human organism, and this human organism generates—as it were, flowing over it—the higher world of thought (white), toward which the sensory, outer Maya between our thoughts and the surrounding world (blue) inclines.

[ 19 ] Try to really bring to mind just how only a small part of yourself is what you encompass with your consciousness, and how a large part of yourself is made up of the very same external world into which you immerse yourself between falling asleep and waking up. But after all, if one considers human beings impartially, this can also be observed from another perspective, and I have already alluded to this aspect here on several occasions.

[ 20 ] With their ordinary consciousness, human beings actually encompass only their thoughts; their feelings are like dreams floating beneath those thoughts. Feelings arise and ebb away. Human beings do not perceive them with the same clarity with which they perceive their thoughts and ideas. But the experience of what is volitional within us during the day is exactly the same as the experience between falling asleep and waking up. And what does a person know—as I have often told you—about what happens when he moves his hand or arm through his will! He knows all of this through mental images; first, he knows: “I want to move my arm.” That is a mental image. He then knows what it looks like in his physical form once he has moved his arm: again, a mental image. What he knows of this in his ordinary consciousness is a web of mental images; beneath this web of mental images, feelings surge. But what is at work within him as will remains just as deeply dormant even while he is awake as our entire being does from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up.

[ 21 ] What is sleeping there? That which sleeps down there—that which is woven into us from the outer cosmos—is just as much a sleeping entity as the minerals and plants outside are sleeping entities to us. This means: We do not penetrate them from the outside; we do not look down into what is cosmic to us. We weave and live within this cosmic realm from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up. And to the same extent that we see through the outer world, we become attuned to our own inner organization. To the same extent, we cease to have merely fragmentary memories—as we peel them away from the events of life—and instead gain an understanding of the forces that constitute and build up our organs—the lungs, the liver, the stomach, and so on. To the same extent that we learn to see through the external world, we learn to see through our own piece of the cosmos—the one we have incorporated, the one we are part of, the one that is within our skin—without being aware of it in our ordinary consciousness.

[ 22 ] What do we take with us from this cosmos when we wake up in the morning? What we take with us is experienced very clearly by the impartial observer as will. And fundamentally, the waking life of thought differs from what flows dreamily in the subconscious below by nothing other than the fact that it is permeated by the will. It is the will that introduces logic, and logic is, in essence, not really a theory of thought; rather, logic is a theory of how the will organizes and tames mental images and brings them into a certain external order that then corresponds to the course of the external world.

[ 23 ] When we wake up from a dream, we perceive particularly strongly this surging mass down below—this chaotic, illogical whirl of images—and we can observe how we project our will into this chaotic whirl of images, which then organizes what lives within us in such a way that it is logically ordered. But we do not take the logic of the world with us—what I just referred to as “superlogical”—we take only the will with us.

[ 24 ] How is it, then, that this will does indeed operate logically within us? You see, here lies an important human mystery, something extraordinarily significant. It is this: When we immerse ourselves in our cosmic existence—which is not accessible to ordinary consciousness—when we immerse ourselves in our entire organism, then we sense, in our will as it expands there, the cosmic logic of our organs. We sense the cosmic logic of our organs.

[ 25 ] It is extremely important to realize quite clearly that when we wake up in the morning—that is, when we enter our body—this act of entering compels us to shape our will in a certain way. If our body were not already shaped in a certain way, the will would whirl agonizingly in all directions upon waking; the will could strive chaotically in all directions upon waking. It does not do so because it immerses itself in the existing human form. There it submerges, taking on all these forms; this gives it its logical structure. This is what enables it to impart logic—from within the human body—to thoughts that would otherwise swirl chaotically. At night, when a person sleeps, they are bound up in the overarching logic of the cosmos. They cannot hold onto it. But when they now submerge into the body, the will takes on the form of the body. Just as when you pour water into a vessel and the water takes on the shape of the vessel, so the will takes on the shape of the body. But it is not merely as when you pour water into a vessel and the water takes on the entire shape of the vessel; it is not only in this way that the will assumes spatial forms, but it flows into the tiniest veins everywhere. That cannot move—at most, in Professor Traub’s case, tables and chairs move of their own accord in the room, but that is theological university logic; otherwise, such an apparatus does not move—there, the water assumes a stationary form and only comes into contact with the outer walls. But in humans, this will branches out completely into all the individual ramifications, and from there it then governs the otherwise chaotic flow of images. What one perceives there as an undercurrent, I would say, is detached from the body. It is truly detached from the body; it is something that, while connected to the human body, actually strives continually to free itself from it, constantly seeking to break out of the forms of that human body. But that which a person carries out of the body as they fall asleep—that which they carry into the cosmos, that which then submerges—submits to the law of the body.

[ 26 ] The fact is that with all of this organization—which is the organization of the human mind—human beings would arrive at nothing but images. It is a common physiological misconception that, for example, we also use our minds to judge and draw conclusions. No, we merely imagine with our heads. If we had only our heads and the rest of our bodies were inactive in our imaginative life, then we would be waking dreamers. For the head has only the capacity to dream while awake. And when we return to our bodies in the morning via the detour through the head—by passing through the head—our dreams come into our consciousness. Only when we penetrate deeper into our body again, when the will adapts not only to the head but also to the rest of the organism, only then is this will once again able to bring logic into the otherwise pictorially swirling forces of imagery.

[ 27 ] This brings us to something I have already discussed in previous lectures. One must be clear about the fact that human beings imagine with their heads and that, as strange and paradoxical as it may sound, they actually judge with their legs and also with their hands, and then, in turn, draw conclusions with their legs and hands. This is how what we call a conclusion or a judgment comes about. When we imagine, it is only the image that is reflected back into the head; we judge and draw conclusions as whole human beings, not merely as “head people.” Of course, it does not follow that if a person is physically disabled, they cannot or should not judge and draw conclusions, for it depends on how things are constituted

[ 28 ] are found in those who, in a sense, happen to be missing one or another limb. We must learn to relate what a person is in terms of mind and soul to the whole person, and to realize that we bring logic into our life of imagination from the very same regions that we cannot reach with ordinary consciousness—regions occupied by the emotional and volitional aspects of our being. Our judgments and our reasoning arise from the same dormant regions within our own inner being from which our feeling and our willing resound.

[ 29 ] The most cosmic aspect within us is the mathematical realm. The mathematical realm belongs to us not merely as human beings at rest, but as human beings in motion. After all, we are always moving in mathematical figures in one way or another. When we observe this externally in a person walking around, we see something spatial; when we experience it internally, we experience the mathematics within us—which is cosmic—except that the cosmic also builds us up. The spatial directions we encounter outside also shape us, and we experience them within ourselves. And as we experience them, we abstract them, taking the images reflected in the brain and weaving them together with what appears to us externally in the world.

[ 30 ] It is indeed necessary today to draw attention to the fact that what human beings introduce into the world through mathematics is, in fact, the very same thing that constitutes them—and is thus of a cosmic nature. For through senseless Kantianism, space has been reduced to a mere subjective form. It is not a subjective form; it is something we actually experience in the very same realm where we experience the volitional. And there it appears. There, this emergence into the world becomes something through which we then penetrate that which presents itself externally.

[ 31 ] Today’s world is still far from being able to study this inner interconnectedness of human beings with the cosmos, this way in which human beings are embedded within the cosmos. I have drawn attention to this embeddedness in a striking way in my Philosophy of Freedom, where you will find remarkable passages in which I show that, in ordinary consciousness, the human being is connected to the entire cosmos, that he is a member of the entire cosmos, and that, in a sense, the individual human being blossoms forth from this universal cosmic whole, which is then encompassed by ordinary consciousness. It is precisely this passage in my Philosophy of Freedom that has been understood by very few; most have not known what it is about. It is also no wonder that in an age in which abstraction flourishes to the point of “Einsteinism”—an age in which this perspective, which is indeed extraordinarily ingenious in itself but absolutely abstract, is presented as something special to the world—that which seeks to introduce us to reality, to true reality, is not understood.

[ 32 ] It must be emphasized time and again: It is not enough for something to be logical. Einstein’s theories are logical, but they do not correspond to reality. All relativism, as such, does not correspond to reality. Thinking that corresponds to reality begins only where one can no longer leave reality behind through thought. Isn’t it true that today people read—or rather, I would say, listen—quite calmly when Einstein gives this example: What would it be like if a clock were to fly out into the cosmos at the speed of light? — Yes, people today listen to that quite calmly. A clock flying out into the cosmos at the speed of light—for someone who lives in accordance with reality in their thinking, who lives in accordance with reality in their soul—is roughly the same as if someone were to say: “What becomes of a human being if I cut off their head, and along with that their right hand and left hand, or their right arm, and so on?”—They simply cease to be a human being. In the same way, what one is still justified in imagining when speaking of a watch flying out into the cosmos at the speed of light immediately ceases to be a watch! It is impossible to imagine this. One must hold fast to what corresponds to reality if one wishes to arrive at valid thinking. Something may be logical and ingenious to an immense degree, but that does not necessarily mean it corresponds to reality. Yet we need thinking that corresponds to reality in this age. For abstract thinking ultimately leads us to no longer see reality at all, lost as we are in a sea of abstractions. And today, humanity admires the abstractions presented to it in this way. Whether these abstractions are somehow logically substantiated or the like is irrelevant. What matters is that people learn to grow together with reality, so that they can no longer say anything other than what is spoken directly from reality.

[ 33 ] But such conceptions of human beings themselves—as I have once again presented to you today—provide a kind of guide to thinking in accordance with reality. They are often ridiculed today by those who have been conditioned by our abstract thinking. For three to four centuries, Western humanity has indeed been conditioned by mere abstraction. But we live in an age when a reversal in this direction must take place, when we must find our way back to reality. People have become materialistic, not because they have lost logic, but because they have lost reality. Materialism is logical, spiritualism is logical, monism is logical, dualism is logical—everything is logical, provided it is not based on actual errors in thinking. But just because something is logical does not mean it corresponds to reality. Reality can only be found if we increasingly bring our own thinking into that realm of which I have said: “In pure thought, one has a corner of world events.” — This is stated in my epistemological writings, and this is what must be gained as the foundation for an understanding of the world.

[ 34 ] At the very moment when one still has thought, even though one has no sensory perception, at that very moment one has thought as will at the same time. There is no longer any difference between willing and thinking. For thinking is a willing, and willing is then a thinking. When thinking has become entirely free of sensibility, then one has a hold on the course of world events. And that is what one must strive for above all else: to grasp the concept of this pure thinking. We will then continue our discussion from this point tomorrow.