The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eleventh Lecture

[ 1 ] Today I will summarize a few truths that will then serve as a basis for further elaboration in a certain direction over the next few days. When we consider our inner life, we can say that at one pole of this inner life lies the element of thought, while at the other pole lies the element of will; between the two lies the element of feeling—that which we in everyday life call “feeling,” the content of the heart, and so on. In real soul life, as it unfolds within us in our waking state, of course neither thinking nor the will is ever present in isolation; rather, they are always connected with one another and intertwine. Let us suppose we conduct ourselves quite calmly in life, so that we might say, for example, that our will is not active outwardly. Yet even when we think during such outwardly directed calm, we must be clear that the will is at work in the thoughts we develop: as we link one thought to another, the will is at work in this thinking. So even when we are, so to speak, seemingly merely contemplative—merely thinking—the will is at work within us, at least inwardly; and unless we are behaving in a frenzied manner or sleepwalking, we cannot act volitionally without allowing our impulses of will to flow through our thoughts. Thoughts always permeate our volitional activity, so that we can say: Even the will is never present in the life of the soul in isolation. But what is not present in isolation can still have different origins. And so one pole of our soul life—thinking—has an entirely different origin than the life of the will.

[ 2 ] Even if we consider only the phenomena of everyday life, we will find that thinking actually always relates to something that exists, something that has prerequisites. Thinking is mostly a form of reflection. Even when we plan ahead—that is, when we set out to do something that we then carry out through the will—such planning is based on experiences that guide us. In a certain sense, this kind of thinking is, of course, also a form of reflection. The will cannot direct itself toward what is already there; if it did, it would, of course, always be too late. The will can direct itself solely toward what is yet to come, toward the future. In short, if you reflect a little on the inner nature of thought and on the inner nature of the will, you will find that even in everyday life, thinking relates more to the past, while the will relates to the future. The soul—feeling—stands between the two. We accompany our thoughts with feeling. Thoughts delight us or repel us. From our feelings, we bring our impulses of will into life. Feeling—the content of the soul—stands right in the middle between thinking and willing.

[ 3 ] But just as is the case in ordinary life—albeit only to a limited extent—so it is in the wider world. And here we must say: What constitutes our power of thought—what enables us to think, the very fact that the capacity for thought exists within us—we owe to the life prior to our birth, or rather, prior to our conception. Essentially, the small child standing before us already possesses, in embryonic form, all the capacity for thought that a human being ever develops. The child uses these thoughts—as you know from lectures I have given before—only as guiding forces for the development of its body. Especially during the first seven years of life, up until the change of teeth, the child uses its thought forces as guiding forces for the development of its body. Then they increasingly emerge as actual thought forces. But these powers of thought are indeed already inherent in the human being when he or she enters physical, earthly life.

[ 4 ] What develops as the powers of the will—as an unbiased observation readily reveals—is, in the child, actually only loosely connected to this power of thought. Just observe the wriggling, moving child in the first weeks of life, and you will already say to yourself: This wriggling, this chaotic movement, is something the child has only acquired because its soul and spirit have been clothed in physical corporeality by the external physical world. In this physical embodiment, which we develop only gradually from conception and birth onward, the will is initially present; and the development of the child’s life consists precisely in the fact that the will is gradually, so to speak, captured by the powers of thought that we bring with us into physical existence at birth. Just observe how the child, at first quite aimlessly—as if emerging from the activity of the physical body—moves its limbs, and how, little by little, I would say, thought penetrates these movements, so that they become purposeful. It is, therefore, a forcing in, a thrusting in of thought into the life of the will, which lives entirely within the shell that surrounds the human being when he is born—or rather, when he is conceived. This life of the will is entirely contained within it.

[ 5 ] So that we can schematically depict a human being in such a way that we say he brings his life of thought with him as he descends from the spiritual world. I want to illustrate this schematically (see drawing, yellow). And they establish their life of will within the physical body given to them by their parents (red). Within it lie the forces of will, which manifest chaotically. And within it lie the forces of thought (arrows), which initially serve as guiding forces to spiritualize the will within its physical body in the proper way.

[ 6 ] We become aware of these forces of the will when we pass through death into the spiritual world. There, however, they are organized to the highest degree. There we carry them through the gate of death into spiritual life. The powers of thought that we bring with us from the supersensible life into earthly life—we actually lose them in the course of our earthly existence.

[ 7 ] The situation is somewhat different for human beings who die young; for now, let’s focus on the average human being. The normal human being who lives past the age of fifty has, in essence, already lost the true powers of thought brought over from a previous life, while retaining the directing forces of the will, which are then carried over through death into the life we enter when we pass through the gate of death.

[ 8 ] One might well assume that some people are now thinking: “So, if you’ve lived past fifty, you’ve lost your ability to think!” — In a certain sense, that is indeed the case for most people today who have no interest in anything intellectual. I would just like you to really take the time to notice how much genuine, original thinking power is produced today by people who have reached the age of fifty! As a rule, it is the thoughts from earlier years—which move automatically—that have been imprinted on the body, and the body then moves forward automatically. After all, the body is a reflection of one’s thought life, and a person simply rolls along—following the law of inertia, doesn’t he?—in that old rut of thought. Today, there is hardly any way to protect oneself from continuing down this path of old, habitual thought patterns other than by absorbing, even during one’s lifetime, thoughts of a spiritual nature—thoughts similar to the thought forces we were immersed in before our birth. So that, in fact, the time is drawing ever closer when older people will become mere automatons if they do not take the trouble to absorb thought forces from the supersensible world. Of course, a person can continue to engage in thought activity automatically; it may appear as though they are thinking. But it is merely an automatic functioning of the organs into which thoughts have settled and become interwoven—unless the person is seized by that youthful element that arises when we absorb thoughts from spiritual science. This absorption of thoughts from spiritual science is by no means mere theorizing; rather, it penetrates quite deeply into human life.

[ 9 ] But the matter takes on special significance when we now consider humanity’s relationship to the surrounding natural world. By “nature,” I now mean everything that surrounds us through our senses—that is, everything to which we are exposed from the moment we wake up until we fall asleep. In a certain sense, this can be viewed in the following way. One can visualize—I mean in one’s mind’s eye—what one sees. We call it the tapestry of the senses. I will sketch it out schematically as follows. Behind everything one sees, hears, perceives as warmth, the colors in nature, and so on—I draw an eye as a symbol for what is perceived there—behind this tapestry of the senses, there is something. Physicists or people with the current worldview say: Behind it are atoms, and they’re swirling—and afterward, aren’t they, they keep swirling; there’s no “carpet of the senses” at all, but somehow in the eye or in the brain or somewhere—or perhaps nowhere at all—that’s where they then produce the colors and the sounds and so on. But now, please, just imagine for a moment, completely without preconceptions, that you begin to think about this tapestry of the senses. If you begin to think and do not start from the illusion that you could observe this vast army of atoms, which chemists arrange in such a military fashion—let’s say, for example, there stands Corporal C, then two privates, C, O, O, and then another private as H; isn’t that right? That’s how we’ve arranged it militarily: ether, atoms, and so on. Now, if, as I said, one does not succumb to this illusion but remains grounded in reality, then one knows: The tapestry of the senses is spread out; out there are the sensory qualities, and what I further encompass with my consciousness—that which lies within the sensory qualities—is precisely thought. In reality, there is nothing behind this tapestry of the senses but thought (blue). I mean, behind what we have in the physical world, there is nothing else but thought. We will discuss later that these are carried by beings. But we can only reach what we have in our consciousness by going beyond the sensory tapestry with our thoughts. The power to think, however, comes from our prenatal life—or rather, from the life before our conception. Why is it, then, that through this power we are able to go beyond the sensory tapestry?

[ 10 ] Just try, for a moment, to become thoroughly familiar with the idea I’ve just introduced; try to properly consider the question based on what we’ve just hinted at again—what we’ve already examined in many contexts. Why is it that our thoughts take us beyond the tapestry of the senses, even though our thoughts originate from our prenatal life? Very simply: because behind it lies that which is not at all in the present, but rather in the past—that which belongs to the past. What lies beneath the tapestry of the senses is, in fact, something past, and we can only see it correctly if we acknowledge it as such. The past influences our present, and from the past springs forth that which appears to us in the present. Imagine a meadow covered with flowers. You see the grass as a green blanket; you see the meadow’s floral adornment. That is the present, but it grows out of the past. And if you think through this, you will find that beneath it lies not an atomistic present; in reality, what lies beneath is the past, connected to that which originates from your own past.

[ 11 ] It is interesting: When we begin to reflect on things, it is not the present that the world reveals to us, but rather the past. What is the present? The present has no logical structure at all. A ray of sunlight falls on a plant; it shines there; the next moment, when the direction of the sunbeam changes, it glistens in another direction. The image changes at every moment. The present is such that we cannot grasp it with mathematics, nor with the mere structure of thought. What we grasp with the mere structure of thought is the past, which continues in the present.

[ 12 ] This is something that can reveal itself to a person as a great, as a significant truth: When you think, you are, in essence, thinking only of the past; when you construct logical arguments, you are, in essence, reflecting on what has passed. — Whoever grasps this thought will no longer seek miracles in the past. For as the past weaves itself into the present, it must be in the present exactly as it is in the past. Think about it: if you ate cherries yesterday, that is a past action; you cannot undo it because it is a past action. But if the cherries had the habit of leaving a mark somewhere before disappearing into your mouth, that mark would remain. You could not change that mark. If, after you ate cherries yesterday, each cherry had recorded its past inside your mouth, and now someone were to come along and try to erase five of them, he could indeed erase them, but the fact itself would not change. Nor can you perform any miracle with regard to natural phenomena, for they are all projections from the past. And everything we can encompass with the laws of nature is already in the past; it is no longer part of the present. You can only grasp the present through images; it is something that fluctuates. When an object glows here, a shadow is cast. You must, so to speak, allow the shadow to be properly defined and so on. You can construct the shadow. The fact that the shadow truly arises can only be ascertained through devotion to the image. So that one can say: Even in ordinary life, delimitation—I could also say, logical thinking—relates to the past. And imagination relates to the present. With regard to the present, human beings always have imaginations.

[ 13 ] Just think for a moment: if you wanted to live logically in the present! After all, living logically means deriving one concept from another, moving from one concept to the next in accordance with the laws of logic. Well, just put yourself in the midst of life for a moment. You see some event: is the next one logically connected to it? Can you logically deduce the next event from the previous one? When you look at life as a whole, isn’t it similar in its images to a dream? The present is similar to a dream, except that the past intermingles with the present, which causes this present to unfold according to certain laws, to unfold logically. And if you want to foresee anything in the future from the present—indeed, if you simply want to think of anything you intend to do in the future—then this process begins, at first, in a completely abstract way within you. What you will experience tonight does not exist within you as an image, but as something even more abstract than an image. At most, it exists within you as inspiration. Inspiration relates to the future. Logical thinking: past; Imagination: present; Intuition; Inspiration: future.

Logical Thinking:	Past	Intuition
Imagination:	Present
Inspiration:	Future

[ 14 ] We can also use a simple diagram to understand what this is all about. When a person—I’ll characterize them here through this eye (see drawing on page 198)—looks out at the tapestry of the senses, they see it in its ever-changing images, but they now step in and introduce laws into these images. They construct a natural science out of the changing images of the sensory world. They construct a specialized science. But just think for a moment about how this natural science is developed. One investigates; one investigates through thinking. If you want to develop a science about what spreads out as the tapestry of the senses—a science that proceeds through logical thoughts—you cannot possibly derive these logical thoughts from the external world itself. If what is recognized as thoughts—and natural laws are, after all, thoughts as well—if what is recognized as the laws of the external world were derived from the external world itself, well, then it would not be necessary for us to learn anything about the external world; then the person who, for example, looks at that light over there would have to know the laws of electricity and so on just as precisely as the other person who has studied them! Nor does a person, if they have not learned it, know anything—let’s say—about the relationship between an arc of a circle and its radius, and so on. It is from within ourselves that we bring forth the thoughts we project into the external world.

[ 15 ] Yes, it is true: What we project into the external world as thoughts comes from within us. We are, first and foremost, this human being who is conceived as the “main human being.” This person looks out onto the “carpet of the senses.” Within this carpet of the senses lies what we reach through thought (see illustration on page 198, white), and between this and what we have within ourselves—which we do not perceive—there is a connection, a sort of subterranean connection. This is why we bring forth from within—in the form of our life of thought—that which we do not perceive in the external world because it extends into us, and place it into the external world. This is already the case with counting. The external world does not dictate anything to us; the laws of counting lie within us. But the reason this is true is that there is an underground connection—a sub-physical connection—between these predispositions that exist in the external world and our own earthly laws, and so we draw the number from within ourselves. It then corresponds to what is out there. But the path does not lie through our eyes, nor through our senses; rather, the path lies through our organism. And whatever we develop as human beings, we develop as whole human beings. It is not true that we grasp any natural law through the senses; we grasp it as whole human beings.

[ 16 ] These things must be taken into consideration if one wishes to properly understand the relationship between human beings and the environment. After all, we are constantly immersed in our imaginations, and one need only compare life to a dream without prejudice. When a dream unfolds, it certainly does so in a very chaotic manner, but it is much more similar to life than logical thinking. Let’s take an extreme case. Suppose—well, I’ll even take as an example a conversation among reasonable people today: You listen, and you join in the conversation yourself. Just think for a moment about what is said, say, over the course of half an hour—whether there is more coherence in it, when you consider it in its sequence, than there is in a dream, or whether it is a coherence like that found in logical thinking. If you were to demand that logical thinking develop there, you would probably be greatly disappointed. The present world presents itself to us entirely in images, so that, strictly speaking, we are actually dreaming constantly. We must first introduce logic into it. We wrest logic from our pre-birth state; we first bring it into the context of things and thereby also encounter the past within them. We grasp the present through imaginations.

[ 17 ] When we consider this imaginative life that constantly surrounds us in the sensory present, we can say to ourselves: This imaginative life simply presents itself to us. We do nothing to bring it about. — Just think for a moment how much effort it took you to arrive at logical thinking! To enjoy life, to contemplate life, you don’t have to make any effort at all; it reveals its images to you of its own accord. Well, we are already well off in life when it comes to visualizing the ordinary environment. But all that is needed now is to acquire the ability to create such images—but this time through one’s own activity, as one otherwise does in thinking—and to experience images through inner effort, as otherwise happens in thinking. Then one not only sees the present in images, but also extends this pictorial imagination to life before birth or before conception; then one looks back to the time before birth or before conception. And when one looks into those images, one’s thinking becomes filled with them, and then prenatal life becomes a reality. We need only, by cultivating the abilities described in How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?, accustom ourselves to thinking in images without these images presenting themselves to us of their own accord, as is the case in ordinary life. When we make this life of images—in which we are actually always immersed in ordinary life—into an inner life, then we look into the spiritual world, and then we truly see the way in which our life actually unfolds.

[ 18 ] Today, it is regarded almost exclusively as spiritual when someone—I have spoken about this often—truly despises material life and says: “I strive toward the spirit; matter remains far beneath me.” — That is a weakness, for only those who do not need to leave matter behind them, but who understand matter itself in its activity as spirit—who can recognize everything material as spiritual and everything spiritual, even in its manifestation as material—truly attain a spiritual life. This becomes particularly significant when we consider thinking and willing. At most, language—which, after all, contains a secret genius within itself—still possesses something of what leads to knowledge in this realm.

[ 19 ] Consider the basis of volition in everyday life: You know that it arises from desire; even the most ideal form of volition arises from desire. Now, take the crudest form of desire. What is the crudest form of desire? Hunger. Therefore, everything that arises from desire is, at its core, always related to hunger. From what I wish to suggest to you today, you can see that thinking is the other pole; it will therefore behave as the opposite of desire. We can say: If we base desire on the will, we must base thinking on satiety, on fullness, not on hunger.

[ 20 ] This actually corresponds to the reality of the matter in the deepest sense. If you consider our main organism as a human being and the other organism attached to it, then it is indeed the case that we perceive. What does it mean to say that we perceive? We perceive through our senses. As we perceive, something is actually constantly being worn away within us. Something from the outside enters our inner being. The ray of light that penetrates our eye actually wears something away. In a sense, a hole is drilled into our own matter (see drawing on page 201). There was matter; now the ray of light has drilled a hole in it; now there is hunger. This hunger must be satisfied; it is satisfied from within the organism, from the available food; that is, this hole fills up with the food that is within us (red). Now we have thought; now we have taken what we perceived and thought about it: by thinking, we continually fill the holes formed within us by sensory perceptions with a sense of satisfaction that rises from our organism.

[ 21 ] It is extraordinarily interesting to observe, when we consider the organization of the head, how we introduce matter from the rest of our organism through the openings that arise there—through the ears and eyes, through sensations of warmth; there are openings everywhere. Human beings fill themselves completely by thinking, by filling in what has been hollowed out (red).

[ 22 ] And if we want to, it is similar. Only then it does not act from the outside in, so that we are hollowed out, but rather it acts from within. If we want to, cavities form everywhere within us; these, in turn, must be filled with matter. So that we can say we experience negative effects—hollowing-out effects—from both the outside and the inside, and we are constantly pushing our matter into them.

[ 23 ] These are the most intimate effects—these eroding effects—that actually destroy our entire earthly existence within us. For as we receive the ray of light, as we hear the sound, we destroy our earthly existence. But we react to this; we in turn fill it with earthly existence. We thus have a life oscillating between the destruction of earthly existence and the filling of earthly existence: Luciferic, Ahrimanic. The Luciferic principle is actually constantly striving to partially transform us into something non-material, to lift us entirely out of earthly existence; for if he could, Lucifer would like to spiritualize us completely—that is, to dematerialize us. But Ahriman is his opponent; he acts in such a way that whatever Lucifer excavates is continually filled in again. Ahriman is the constant filler. If you were to sculpt Lucifer and sculpt Ahriman, you could quite easily—as the material intermingles—push Ahriman into the hollow of Lucifer, or cover him with Lucifer. But since there are hollows on the inside as well, you must also cover them. Ahriman and Lucifer are the two opposing forces at work within the human being. He himself is the state of equilibrium. Lucifer, through continuous dematerialization, results in continuous materialization: Ahriman. When we perceive, that is Lucifer. When we think about what we have perceived: Ahriman. When we form the idea that we should want this or that: Lucifer. When we truly will on Earth: Ahriman. Thus we stand between the two within ourselves. We oscillate back and forth between them, and we must be clear about this: as human beings, we are placed in the most intimate way between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. In fact, one can only truly come to know a human being by considering these two opposing poles within them.

[ 24 ] Here you have a perspective that is by no means limited to an abstract spiritual realm—for this abstract spiritual realm is, after all, a nebulous, mystical concept—nor to a material one; rather, everything that has a material effect is at the same time spiritual. We are dealing with the spiritual everywhere. And we see through matter in its existence and in its effects by being able to look into the spirit everywhere.

[ 25 ] I have told you: Imagination comes to us naturally when it comes to the present. When we cultivate imagination artificially, we look into the past. When we cultivate inspiration, we look into the future, just as one calculates the future by, for example, calculating solar or lunar eclipses—not in terms of details, but in terms of the great laws of the future at a higher level. And intuition brings all three together. And we are actually constantly subject to intuition; we simply sleep through it. When we sleep, we are fully immersed in the outer world with our “I” and our astral body; there we unfold that intuitive activity which one must otherwise consciously unfold through intuition. However, in our present physical constitution, human beings are too weak to be conscious when they are intuiting; yet they do indeed intuit at night. So one can say: While sleeping, human beings develop intuition; while awake, they develop—to a certain degree, of course—logical thinking; between the two lie inspiration and imagination. As a person emerges from sleep into waking life, their ego and astral body enter the physical body and the etheric body; what they bring with them is the inspiration to which I have already drawn your attention in previous lectures. We can say: While asleep, a person is in a state of intuition; while awake, in a state of logical thinking; upon waking, they are inspired; and as they fall asleep, they imagine. — You can see from this that the activities we describe as the higher activities of cognition are not foreign to ordinary life, but are indeed present in ordinary life; they merely need to be brought up into consciousness if a higher form of cognition is to be developed.

[ 26 ] What must be emphasized time and again is that, over the last three to four centuries, the external sciences have compiled a vast body of purely material facts and codified them into laws. These facts must first be spiritually penetrated. But it is good—if I may say so, even though it sounds paradoxical at first—that materialism existed; otherwise, people would have fallen into a state of confusion. They would eventually have lost all connection with earthly existence. When materialism began in the 15th century, humanity was, in fact, on the verge of succumbing to Luciferic influences, gradually becoming more and more hollowed out. That is when the Ahrimanic influences began to take hold. And over the last four or five centuries, these Ahrimanic influences have developed to a certain degree. Today they have become very strong, and there is a danger that they will overshoot their mark if we do not counter them with that which, so to speak, causes them to subside: if we do not counter them with the spiritual.

[ 27 ] But the point here is to develop the right sense of the relationship between the spiritual and the material. In the older German tradition of thought, there is a poem called “Muspilli,” which first appeared in a book dedicated to Ludwig the German in the 9th century, but which, of course, dates from a much earlier time. There is something purely Christian in this poem: it depicts the struggle of Elijah against the Antichrist. But the entire manner in which this narrative unfolds—this battle between Elijah and the Antichrist—is reminiscent of the ancient battles in mythology, between the inhabitants of Asgard and the inhabitants of Jötunheim, the realm of the giants. It is simply that the realm of the Aesir has been transformed into the realm of Elijah, and the realm of the giants into the realm of the Antichrist.

[ 28 ] This way of thinking, which we still encounter here, obscures the true reality less than later ways of thinking. Later ways of thinking, in fact, always speak of a duality—of good and evil, of God and the devil, and so on. But these ways of thinking, which were developed in later times, no longer correspond to the earlier ones. Those people who conceived of the struggle between the realm of the gods and the realm of the giants did not see the gods in the same way that, for example, today’s Christians understand the kingdom of their God; rather, these older conceptions placed, for instance, Asgard—the realm of the gods—above, and Jötunheim—the realm of the giants—below; in the middle lies humanity, Midgard. This is nothing other than, in the Germanic-European tradition, the same concept that existed in ancient Persia as Ormuzd and Ahriman. In our language, we would have to say: Lucifer and Ahriman. We would have to refer to Ormuzd as Lucifer and not merely as the good God. And this is the great error that is committed: that this dualism is understood as if Ormuzd were merely the good God and his adversary Ahriman the evil God. The relationship is rather that between Lucifer and Ahriman. And in Midgard—at the time this poem “Muspilli” was composed—it was not yet quite correctly conceived as: Christ lets his blood shine down from above—but rather: Elijah is there, who lets his blood shine down. —And humanity is placed in the middle. The conception at the time when Ludwig the German likely transcribed this poem into his book was still more accurate than the later one. For later times committed the error of disregarding the Trinity; that is, of conceiving the upper gods in Asgard and the lower gods—the giant gods—in the Ahrimanic realm as the whole of the cosmos, and specifically of regarding the upper, Luciferic gods as the good gods and the others as the evil gods. That is what the later period did; the earlier period still correctly grasped this opposition between Lucifer and Ahriman, and therefore placed a figure like Elijah within the Luciferic realm with his emotional prophecy, with what he was able to proclaim at that time, because one wanted to place the Christ in Midgard, in that which lies in the middle.

[ 29 ] We must return to these concepts with full awareness; otherwise, if we speak only of the duality between God and the Devil, we will not arrive once again at the Trinity: the Luciferic gods, the Ahrimanic forces, and, in between, what constitutes the Kingdom of Christ. Unless we make progress in this direction, we will not arrive at a true understanding of the world. Consider this: it is an immense mystery of the historical development of European humanity that the ancient Ormuzd was made into the good God, whereas he is actually a Luciferic power, a power of light. This, however, has allowed people the satisfaction of being able to portray Lucifer as evil as possible; because the name “Lucifer” did not suit Ormuzd, Lucifer was associated with Ahriman, creating a mishmash that still resonates in Goethe’s figure of Mephistopheles, in which Lucifer and Ahriman are indeed blended together, as I have explicitly shown in my little book Goethe’s Spirit. It is indeed European humanity—the humanity of our present civilization—that has fallen into great confusion, and this confusion ultimately permeates all thought. It can only be counteracted by leading people back from duality into the Trinity, for everything dual ultimately leads to something in which human beings cannot live—something they must view as a polarity—in which they can truly find balance: Christ is there to balance Lucifer and Ahriman, to balance Ormuzd and Ahriman, and so on.

[ 30 ] This is the topic I wanted to bring up, and we plan to continue discussing it in various ways over the next few days.