The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. The Individualized Logos and the Art of Extracting the Spirit from Words

[ 1 ] On the anthroposophical foundation of the present day, we must once again develop the art that was one of the arts of the ancient mysteries—those mysteries that were based on a completely different kind of human knowledge than we rely on today, but which, in their customs and in the very foundations of their entire way of acting, contained much that has been lost to humanity and that must be renewed. The art I am referring to with these very words can be described entirely in the spirit of the ancient mysteries by saying: Spirit must be drawn from words. It was indeed the case in the ancient mysteries that when one said “Word,” “Logos,” one meant something far more profound than what is meant by the word “word” today. But we must learn to associate deeper and ever deeper meaning with the things and processes of the world, and thus also with the statement: We must once again learn to draw the spirit from the words. Let us consider this today with a very specific example.

[ 2 ] It is, in essence, something extraordinarily abstract to speak of human beings as consisting, in their very nature, of the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, the “I,” and so on. For this reason, attempts have been made on various occasions to characterize what is actually meant by these individual constituents of the human being. But one can go ever further in such characterizations; in doing so, one becomes increasingly spiritual. And in this spirit, let us today perceive the human etheric body through the eye of the soul in such a way that we characterize what emerges from supersensible observation regarding the nature of this human etheric body. One must not remain at the vague conception that arises, for example, from characterizing the relationship of this etheric body to the physical body in terms of its different substantial nature, or the like. All of these are approximations to reality, and only when one pushes these approximations to reality ever further does one come to penetrate the true essence of such a thing.

[ 3 ] Now we all know that when a human being enters the state of sleep within their earthly existence, the etheric body also remains within the physical body, and that—as we have always described—the astral body and the “I” emerge from this physical body and the etheric body. At the present stage of their cosmic development, this astral body and the “I” are—I would say—still so feeble that they cannot have any conscious experiences between falling asleep and waking up. We have already spoken on several occasions, albeit only in general terms, about the nature of these unconscious experiences that the astral body and the “I” have between falling asleep and waking up.

[ 4 ] But today we want to turn our gaze back to what, so to speak, remains in bed when a person sleeps, and look in particular at the etheric body—treating the term “etheric body,” as it were, in such a way that we extract the spirit from it using the art I just mentioned, which was practiced in the ancient mysteries. The task here is truly to grasp this etheric body with the eye of the soul, to describe what actually presents itself to supersensible perception as the essence of this etheric body when a person sleeps. As a person falls asleep, we see the physical body coming more and more to rest; we see how, during sleep, the person loses the ability to move their limbs. But we also see how they lose the ability to direct their will through their inner physical structure in such a way that their senses would have to be active. The relationship of the external world to the senses does not change, but the relationship of the senses to the external world does change in that the person, so to speak, becomes as still internally as he becomes externally still with regard to his arms and legs, so that the will is not directed through the sense organs, and the sense organs do not respond to the external world with those subtle movements that must be present when sensory perceptions arise. But it is a complete mistake to believe that the sense organs themselves—or rather, the space in which the sense organs extend—are filled with inactivity during sleep. The physical body remains still throughout its entire extent, but the human etheric body becomes all the more active, all the more inwardly mobile, between falling asleep and waking up. This is precisely the characteristic feature: to the same extent that the activity of the physical body subsides upon falling asleep and thereafter, the activity of the etheric body becomes all the more lively as sleep begins. And this activity and liveliness of the etheric body radiates particularly from the senses. So one can say: If one directs the supersensible gaze, the supersensible observation, toward the sleeping human being—that is, toward that part of the human being which is present within the physical shell—then one finds that a continuous activity and liveliness radiates inward from the locations where the sense organs are situated. And this activity and liveliness is the life of the etheric body, or life body, during sleep.

[ 5 ] For example, one can see how, as one falls asleep, a particular kind of activity begins to emanate from the area of the human eyes. It is as if, through the effects of light during wakefulness, the eye fills with the energy needed for an activity that only unfolds once sleep sets in. And this activity is precisely an etheric one. To the same extent that the external effects of light and color in the eye dim, the eyes themselves begin, like two phosphorescent suns, to radiate ethereally through the inner being of the physical part of the sleeping human being. A phosphorescent glow illuminates the inner space of the human being. You need not be surprised that this phosphorescent glow, which radiates into the human being’s interior, cannot be seen in the ordinary way. For the fact that the eyes of another person cannot see what glows within during sleep is understandable, since the human being, by virtue of his entire constitution, is opaque to the physical eye and belongs to the category of opaque bodies. What takes place within cannot be seen with the external physical eyes. But within the physical body there is, at first glance, no organ that could directly perceive this glowing, phosphorescent light.

[ 6 ] We have thus characterized one of the inner activities and movements of the etheric body in the human being during sleep. Another activity flows into this one. In fact, what a person can still sense as they fall asleep—a certain humming and chirping, a flowing murmur from their inner constitution—continues during sleep as a musical activity extraordinarily rich in melody and harmony, which also permeates the entire inner being of the person during sleep. This musical activity lasts from the moment of falling asleep until waking. And the parts of the being—the ego and the astral body—that are outside the physical and etheric bodies are strongly impressed by what they have left behind in bed: the resonant, ringing etheric body, which, however, also glows as it resonates and rings. At first, though, what is exerted as an impression on the ego and the astral body remains in the unconscious.

[ 7 ] Similarly, ethereal heat currents are radiated inward from the entire surface of the skin. Together with many other things that lie beyond what is perceived in the outer world as heat, light, and sound—things that are therefore difficult to characterize—all of this results in an immensely beautiful, magnificent, and powerful inner rain, movement, and surging of the human etheric body. It is as if, from the universe, the human etheric body were to rise—for inner reasons—which inner reasons, however, are none other than the human being itself, its very existence—rising, as it were, like an island, I might say, out of the general etheric substance of the cosmos: this particular sounding and shining and surging in warm currents of the individual etheric body of the human being. And this warming surging, this phosphorescent glow, this musical sound—it is precisely these that, a few days after a person’s death, detach themselves as the etheric body from the astral body and the “I,” and flow out, stream out into the general ether of the universal, of the cosmic.

[ 8 ] Perhaps some of you have noticed how, when a person wakes up in the morning after having attended a concert the night before—one that made a vivid impression on him—the act of waking up seems as if the soul were rising up out of the repeated experience of the music heard at the concert. It is as if the soul had relived the entire concert once more during sleep. The process, however, is more complex than it appears to ordinary consciousness. For in truth, the soul rises above the impressions of that world music, which becomes individualized in the human etheric body. But as the human being returns once more to his etheric body, and as everything I have described to you regarding this etheric body is drowned out by the receptivity of the physical body, the human soul translates what is individualized cosmic music into the earthly tones heard most recently. These are, so to speak, the garment that this cosmic music puts on at the moment of waking, because this cosmic music shares a certain affinity with the surging masses of sound from the concert that was heard. Since human beings in ordinary consciousness are unable to perceive cosmic music, this cosmic music cloaks itself in what is most comparable to it from earthly life: the masses of sound heard in the concert. This is the true experience underlying a phenomenon that perhaps most of you have experienced at some point.

[ 9 ] So you can see just how complex the human etheric body actually is. And when one tries to penetrate further using the means by which one can enter such worlds, one realizes that this warming flow, this phosphorescent, gentle glow, and this fluctuating music are the outward manifestation of the ruling beings of those worlds. In fact, everything I have described to you is, in turn, the outer garment, the outer manifestation, the appearance of the ruling beings of the worlds. And these ruling beings of the worlds reveal themselves as those we know from anthroposophical literature as the Exusiai. I have therefore often referred to these Exusiai as revelations, because, in their inner essence, they live in that which radiates from the human sensory organs toward the inner being of the human being during the state of earthly sleep. It is precisely in this radiance that the life and activity of those beings of the higher hierarchies, whom we call the Exusiai, are revealed.

[ 10 ] Now, however, using the same methods by which we observe these manifestations of the human senses—which become so active in their ethereal substance precisely during sleep—we can further investigate how this inward radiating and flowing continues to take effect inwardly. Just as one says to oneself in the waking state: “You see some luminous object”; and then, in a sense, trace the line from the eye toward this luminous object—the luminous object is found somewhere along the path outside, which forms the line of sight of the eye, that is, of the sense organ”—so one can, but now inwardly, trace that which flows, floods, and radiates inward from the senses in an ethereal form. One will not have to travel such long distances there—only short ones—and will very soon encounter something else. The phosphorescent, gentle glow emanating from the eyes; the musical effect that manifests itself locally from the organs of hearing; the flowing warmth that moves inward from the entire surface of the skin—all of this very soon merges into an organically self-contained etheric system. Whereas, when observing a person who is awake, one sees the etheric body in activity—the person’s entire physical body as well, of course, but engaged in a somewhat different kind of activity than I have described for sleep; one then sees this activity extending slightly beyond the human physical body—one now sees, as it were, that which flows, undulates, and radiates inward from the senses and the entire skin, forming, over a certain distance, a sort of bowl-like replica of the human being that extends inward. One sees a phosphorescent glow emanating inward from the eyes, which then transitions into something else, which I will describe in a moment. One sees the warming flow moving inward from the skin, a sort of shell modeled on the human physical organism, which reaches a certain density but then transitions into a kind of etheric organization that, in its substantial content, is as if intermingled and composed of musical activity, phosphorescent light, and streams of warmth. All of this, along with many other elements, flows together in a complex interplay, influencing one another and forming a kind of organization that is precisely the human etheric body. And when one now grasps this etheric organization of the human being with the eye of the mind, when one begins to understand it in light of all this, as it reveals itself, then one cannot describe it otherwise than as consisting entirely of thought-forms, of flowing thoughts. What flows within it is, at every point, thought. If one were to follow this constantly fluctuating inner activity of the sleeping etheric body at any given moment and then record it in an instant, one would naturally sketch lines or forms of color; but if one were to characterize the substance of these lines or forms of color, one could say nothing other than: It is as if thoughts were beginning to flow. — It is the same thing that otherwise lives in thought activity, but which there becomes a flowing, a undulating, a fluctuating. It is the individualized thought-formation of the cosmos. This individualized thought-formation of the cosmos reveals itself as the individualized Logos. For in truth one cannot even say: “What flows and weaves within the human being as thought-formation, as an inner connection to these sensory movements that radiate and flow inward—that is merely flowing thought”—but rather, it speaks—albeit a silent, yet one perceptible to the inner being of the human being—it truly speaks—just as all things speak to us through the Logos—in an individual form, expressing the essence of the human being in an inner word perceptible to the spirit. |

[ 11 ] So when we go deeper inward from the senses, human language—turned inward, as it were—appears to us. Yes, it is certainly true that one can say: The “I” and the astral body of the human being, which are outside the physical and etheric bodies from the moment of falling asleep until waking, remain, admittedly, unconscious to ordinary consciousness; yet they nevertheless experience what is happening. And just as they experience the etheric activity of the senses during sleep as inward-directed flows and radiations, so do this “I” and this astral body, during the human being’s sleeping state, experience the etheric body as an individualized Logos, like a language turned inward. It is as if the speech that otherwise radiates outward to the ears of our fellow human beings had, during sleep, been transformed etherically and turned inward, and as if we were to speak inwardly, once more in reverse order—beginning with the evening and ending with the morning—everything we had spoken during the day from waking until falling asleep. We speak inwardly, in a silent language, once again everything we have spoken from morning until evening, but in such a way that we reveal our entire inner life in this inward-turned language. Thus, insofar as the essence of the human being is experienced in what the person speaks from morning to evening, this experience of speaking is realized inwardly from evening to morning in the resounding, speaking Logos—that resounding, speaking, individualized Logos—which, at the same time as it is inscribed temporally into the etheric, expresses, in that glowing, gently phosphorescent light, the occult script for all that comes into effect inwardly during the night—and indeed during sleep—as the other side of what is spoken during the day: it is just the same as when a person takes a nap during the day, except that things then play out in a more fragmentary way.

[ 12 ] And if, using the very same means by which the inner weaving of the individualized Logos reveals itself, one now investigates what is actually there—what the Logos initially manifests in an appearance that is, after all, external to the true essence of the world—and if one further examines what the essential nature is, then one comes to the conclusion: This is the sum of those hierarchies that we have designated in anthroposophical literature as the Dynamis, which stand above the Exusiai.

[ 13 ] And thirdly, when one attempts to develop the art of seeking out the essential qualities from words, one finds the essential qualities of what I once described as a kind of counter-spine. Perhaps some of you recall how, many years ago, I described the human etheric body. Already in *Lucifer-Gnosis*, in the articles that describe the nature of the human being, it is explained how the currents that generally flow through the etheric body also interact to form a structure located at the front of the human being—just as, in the physical body, the bony structures of the spine with the spinal canal are located at the back. In the physical body, we have this vertically running spine with the spinal canal, and in the etheric body we have a convergence and interplay of what I have just described to you in a sort of counter-spine, which, however, when one considers the physical body, is located on the front side of the human being. And just as the nerve tracts—but also, for example, the rib bones—extend from the physical spine, so do the aforementioned radiations and currents in the etheric body run in such a way that they do not extend from this counter-spine, but rather converge within it, so to speak, and interact with everything they contain on the front side of the human etheric body. This results in an extraordinarily beautiful, magnificent, and powerful etheric organ, which, however, consists in particular of a glittering, luminous, resonant entity that discharges all manner of thermal effects but also speaks from within, and which reveals itself in this way especially during the human being’s state of sleep. And if one observes more closely, one can indeed gain a clear picture of how this organ then permeates what I once characterized—because such things must be described with complete vivid imagery—as the individual lotus flowers. Thus you can see how, through this organ—which brings itself into being by flowing together from the etheric body and then forms the lotus flowers with the currents of the astral body—the human being continues to find its connection to the outer astral, cosmic world.

[ 14 ] And once again, this is a kind of revelation. Yet again, it is something that can be described as an outer appearance, behind which one must seek the inner essence. And if one seeks this inner essence, one finds it in the hierarchy that I have referred to in anthroposophical literature as the Kyriotetes. Only now have you extracted from the term “etheric body” that which is actually the human being’s essential etheric body. It is an interplay, a confluence, a weaving together of the Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kyriotetes, which individualize their flowing, surging, resonating, and speaking activity and form the human etheric body.

[ 15 ] But when we observe that which, through its individualizing action, forms Kyriotetes, Dynamis, and Exusiai in such a way that—shining into the human physical body in its individualization, warming it, resonating within it, and speaking into it—it forms the human etheric body, then we have already arrived at the human astral body. For contained within this self-moving activity—this individualizing activity of the second hierarchy, which flows from the cosmos but individualizes itself within the human being—is that which constitutes the human astral body. This activity manifests itself in the etheric body; it is present in the astral body.

[ 16 ] And now consider this entire activity in which the human being is woven during sleep. During sleep, the human being is unconsciously woven into this activity of the second hierarchy; the human being needs this entire activity once he has passed through the gate of death. For in this activity he must continue to live between death and a new birth, once he has shed the etheric body as such, once—after a few days—the sound, this musical activity, this gentle phosphorescent glow, and this warming flow have ebbed away. When, a few days after death, this has flowed out into the universal cosmos; when one has observed the glow spreading farther and farther, yet also growing weaker and weaker; when one has observed the music growing quieter and quieter—I should actually put it differently: when speaking of these regions, it is natural to express a thing through its polar opposite; it would be better—for that corresponds more closely to what the deceased perceives—if I were to say: That which at first is like a silent sound, but which is perceptible to the inner human being, grows louder and louder as it spreads, and it is then as if—precisely because of this growing louder—which one, as a spiritual-soul being who has died to the earth, can no longer hear because one lacks physical ears, physical ears would simply have to be there—one perceives this growing louder and louder precisely as the fading away of the inner ethereal music.

[ 17 ] The situation is similar with regard to what a person experiences immediately after death, during the first few days. At that time, however, the person feels himself in his astral body. But that, of course, is again only the outer aspect we are speaking of—in a word: the human being finds himself in the world of the soul, as I have described in *Theosophy*. But what I described there—which initially conveys the impression to the next soul organ accessible to the human being—reveals itself to the universal, cosmic intelligence to be developed within the cosmos as an activity of the beings of the second hierarchy that intertwines and interweaves within itself.

[ 18 ] And now observe what this existence is actually like at first, after death, in the activity of these beings of the second hierarchy. One has lived on Earth between birth and death, alternating between waking and sleeping. While awake, one was interwoven with all this activity in which the human soul lives—in Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kyriotetes. One was always compelled to immerse oneself in the forms of the physical body through all of this. During sleep, one lived with the etheric body, which, however, also individualized all this activity within “the forms of the human physical body.” But in this context, the activity in which one was interwoven also took on, for this second hierarchy, everything that the human being was morally: to what extent he was good or evil, to what extent he was devoted to error or to truth. The activities appropriate to the beings of the second hierarchy individualize themselves according to what the human being is: a good or evil earthly human being, an earthly human being living in truth or in error. And one must first orient oneself toward what the beings of this second hierarchy, out of their very being, wish to carry out as an activity for the human being.

[ 19 ] To put it bluntly, one must, in a sense, take the following into account. Suppose one is connected to some being from the hierarchy of the Dynamis. By virtue of this connection—and through the mediation of an archangelic being—one then develops the ability to speak within the human organism. But as one develops this ability, the activities of the Dynamis are, so to speak, distorted and twisted into something petty. And when a person uses their words to express evil or hatred, these activities of the second higher hierarchy become severely distorted. And all of this must be restored. All of this must come to pass in such a way that the human being does not continue to live in the forms he has given to all that I have described here through his moral or immoral nature, but rather that he sheds all of this and finds his way into the activity and vitality that belong to the beings of the second hierarchy. This shedding of the distortions, the diminutions, this shedding of the inversions—which run counter to the vital forces of the second hierarchy—is brought about by everything I have described as the human being’s passage through the soul world. And then the human being has ascended to what I described in *Theosophy* as the “land of spirits,” when the human being can follow—with his own “I”-existence, with his innermost spiritual-soul existence—the activities that correspond to the nature of *Dynamis* and *Kyriotetes*.

[ 20 ] There, with your skill in distilling the essential from words, you have once again depicted and characterized the essence of the human being. In this way, one draws ever closer to a conception of the essence of the human being. Just as one might first sketch the arrangement of the figures in a Raphael Madonna—the Sistine Madonna, for example—onto a board with just a few characteristic strokes, so too must one use the terms physical body, etheric body, and astral body, I sketch what is in reality a fully realized inner liveliness and activity, within which liveliness and activity the essences of the cosmos—the physical, soul, and spiritual cosmos—reveal themselves. Ultimately, one always arrives at the essential. When one describes something as if it were something spreading indefinitely in space, as if it were floating in time—when one describes what is then called the physical world or the etheric world—one is actually always describing the manifestation. One actually describes it in the same way that, when there is a swarm of mosquitoes somewhere in the distance, one does not distinguish the individual mosquitoes but sees only a gray spot in the air: one then depicts a gray spot, because that is all one sees. In the actual world, such a gray spot is what is first called the etheric body or the astral body. If such gray spots exist in the physical air and one then looks more closely, drawing nearer, one discovers the individual, sentient mosquitoes. If one looks more closely at these spiritual gray spots—the etheric body and the astral body—one always discovers beings.

[ 21 ] Entities—that is what one must ultimately arrive at in any explanation of the world. For entities are the only thing that is real. Something comes into being only through the interaction of entities, whereby what is not truly real appears to the indistinct eye. Just as in the gray cloud—which is not truly real—the gnats are in fact the individual entities, so too are the individual entities the active force everywhere in the world, and the rest is merely an illusion arising from the coexistence of entities. Physical matter, too, is such an illusion. In truth, everything is grounded in essence. Human beings must come to realize this once again, so that they do not speak of what is not there at all—of matter, or, which is no better, of “spirit” in general—but so that they may learn to speak of entities, of individual entities of the universe.

[ 22 ] In the ancient mysteries, people once understood how to speak of the beings of the universe. And it was once known that matter, as well as what is commonly referred to in ordinary consciousness as “spirit”—which is, however, merely a gray spiritual substance said to be pantheistically present in all things—is not something by which realities are designated; rather, if one wishes to have realities, one must have the individual, essential things. However, awareness of these entities has gradually been lost; lost to the extent that this essential nature has developed more and more within human beings themselves. It is certainly the case that in more recent times, beginning with the first third of the 15th century—I have often mentioned this point in time—human beings have become increasingly intellectual. What people know about themselves is becoming increasingly abstract. But behind this more abstract existence lies an essential nature that lives ever more within itself, becoming ever richer in inner spirituality. And human beings have lost the dreamlike awareness they once had of the essential beings in the cosmos, precisely as they have increasingly become an essential nature capable of grasping itself. Humanity must once again come to realize that realities exist only where individual essences can be discerned in the cosmos. It was a necessary phase in human development that, in ancient times, people saw essence everywhere; but that was, after all, a dreamlike consciousness. Then came the time when people, so to speak, perceived things as if all these essential beings—all that which lives in the cosmos as the essential: Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai, Archai, Archangeloi, Angeloi, human “I’s,” animal group souls, plant cosmic souls, and so on—were realities. Not even the animals, as they live on Earth, are realities; they, too, are merely appearances; the realities are the group souls. The entire plant world of the Earth is not a reality; rather, the Earth soul is the reality. Plants are, after all, merely like the hairs on the Earth’s organism, just like the hairs on our own organism. But once one has realized that all these entities I have just mentioned are present in the universe—radiating, revealing themselves, expressing themselves—one knew: This self-expression arises from their very nature. That general resonance arising from the convergence of these individual entities as they express themselves—that is the Logos. But the Logos, too, was at first only an illusion. It was only through Christ’s act of synthesizing it—of, so to speak, condensing this illusion into his own essence—that, through the Mystery of Golgotha, the illusory Logos was born on Earth as the true Logos.

[ 23 ] One must therefore understand this connection. One can then describe the individual entities spiritually—how they glow and resonate with a gentle phosphorescence, how they radiate streams of warmth, how they express themselves. This results in a complete spiritual form for each individual entity. And these complete spiritual forms are the only reality in the universe. Much was known in the ancient, dreamlike consciousness about these sole realities in the universe. But, I would say, this knowledge shrank more and more. It was once known: This is how a certain being—one counted among the Kyriotetes—radiates form; this is how human “I’s” radiate; this is how Angeloi radiate, and so on. But people were able to perceive less and less of these realities; everything contracted more and more, as if into a single point. Originally, people knew quite well how the manifestations of the Exusiai, for example, differed from the manifestations of human “I’s,” and in turn, how the manifestations of human “I’s” differed from the manifestations of the animal group souls or the plant soul of the Earth. People knew the differences, but gradually a lack of awareness of these differences spread. And there came a time when only the belief remained: “Yes, such realities exist; everything else is not real. Space is not real, time is not real, matter is not real, nor is general spirituality real—but world-individualities are real.” But people could no longer distinguish them from one another. So they designated them with a single term: the term “monad.” This was the case with Leibniz and Giordano Bruno. They spoke of monads. These monads, reduced to the tiniest scale, were the very realities I just mentioned. And the only way one could still distinguish one monad from another was through the attribute added to the word “monas”: the monad of the Exusiai, the monad of humans, the monad of animals, and so on.

[ 24 ] And finally, people have also lost the ability to speak of the monads, to which the great German thinker had initially attributed a creative power, because he had a hunch that something spiritual lives within what had shrunk into a monad. We must not only remember that the monad is a living entity. If human civilization is not to decline but to continue developing, we must not only remember the monad; we must once again understand—and now with a heightened, clear consciousness—how all true realities are spiritual-soulful, living essences. But then what is initially sketched out as if with a few lines—the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body—must be brought to life in the way we have done today.

[ 25 ] And one comes to see, as it were, the human spiritual-soul aspect interwoven into the essences of the second hierarchy. But as one then traces how the human being passes from one earthly life to the next, how a balancing cosmic justice, karma operates from one earthly life to the next—and how this simultaneously corresponds to a certain activity within the cosmos—one comes to realize that here, too, one must not remain stuck at the abstraction of “karma,” the abstraction of “cosmic justice,” or even the abstraction of a “moral cosmic order,” but rather one arrives at concrete realities. Just as, when one begins to describe the etheric body, one ascends to the second hierarchy—and in doing so has simultaneously described the human astral body—so too can one begin with the astral body and, in a sense, capture within it the thinking, feeling, and willing that fade away upon falling asleep and that go out with the astral body. If one begins there and seeks the realities behind them, one finds: In our human thinking, the activity of the Angeloi actually lives; in our human language, which springs from feeling, lives—though dormant for the human being at night—the activity of the Archangeloi, and in what is revealed through the human movements of the limbs and through the will-driven actions of waking life—which, after all, also takes place in the astral body—the world of the Archai lives on at night when the astral body is outside the physical body. But what lives out there—these supersensible activities of the Archai, Archangels, and Angels, which are then reflected in the waking human being through willing, feeling, and thinking—must be attuned to the etheric body and the physical body. The physical body must now also be shaped in such a way that it can become an organ of thought, an organ of speech, or an organism of movement. Here we see how the activity of the Kyriotetes, Dynamis, and Exusiai once again transitions into an even higher activity: into the activity of the Thrones, which harmonize human volitional activity with the organization of the physical human being—the metabolic, limb-bearing human. We then come to the hierarchy of the Cherubim, who harmonize the human capacity for speech with the organization of that which can physically underlie speech. In the speech and singing organism—indeed, in everything that constitutes the organism for speech or speech-like functions in the human being—the Cherubim harmonize the human emotional life with the speech organization. Everything that constitutes the capacity for thought must also have its physical organ in the nervous-sensory human being: the Seraphim harmonize thinking with the nervous-sensory human being. Speech and everything connected with speech are harmonized with thinking and feeling by the Cherubim.

[ 26 ] Thus, when we consider the threefold human being, we see the creative Seraphim in the nervous-sensory organization, which forms the foundation for thinking; in all that constitutes the rhythmic human being—which, as a physical organism, must be brought into harmony with the ability to speak—we see the creative Cherubim. In all that is expressed in the movement of the human limbs and in all acts of the will, the inner organization of the metabolic-limb human being must be present; this harmony is brought about by the Thrones. From this we also see how the physical human form dissolves into appearance. The realities lie behind it: the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones. We always perceive the activity of the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones when the human “I” is interwoven with its inner activity, when the human being moves, speaks, feels, and thinks while awake.

[ 27 ] In this way, we can once again discover renewed mystery wisdom for humanity—that mystery wisdom which, so to speak, once more masters the art of extracting the spirit from the word, of finding the essential within that which can initially be sketched only with strokes as the physical human being, the etheric human being, the astral human being, and the “I.” Essential reality always consists of individual spiritual beings who, through their experience, carry within themselves the soul and who create the manifest, the physical. Realities are, in fact, nothing but existing spiritual individualities. The fact that they express themselves as the soul is because they experience one another inwardly and stimulate one another. The existence of a physical world is due to the fact that these spiritual individualities—which have been abstracted into monads and have thus entirely disappeared from human perception—reveal themselves through their own creative activity, according to their various stages of existence. Here we can move back from the created world—which is actually nothing other than the outward appearance of creative beings—to the world of experience, to the soul world, which is, however, the world of spiritual individualities experiencing one another. Then, when we ourselves return to true reality, we come to the spiritual individualities themselves, whose expression and life is the world. As long as a human being stands on Earth, he always lives within the manifestations of the spiritual individualities. Between death and a new birth, he must become aware of and fully pass through the very form of the spiritual individualities. And he must strive toward his perfection in his overall development by passing from the direct perception of the form of spiritual realities into the earthly form, in which he does not directly perceive the spiritual individualities, but in which the spiritual individualities, so to speak, reveal themselves only from the outside in their outer form.

[ 28 ] But if earthly life is not to sink into complete depravity, human beings must once again learn to perceive, recognize, and understand the inner spiritual individuality of the higher world through its outer form. Then human beings will see how their entire life consists of a struggle within the veils of the Divine and a life within the essence of the Divine. But they can attain a true immersion in the essence of the Divine only if they develop their own being more and more by also becoming aware of the outer veils. But he must also learn to penetrate through the outer form to the beings themselves. He must not stop at the outer description, but must advance to the inner life.

[ 29 ] Once a larger number of people begin to strive for this, the dawn will break for the future development of the Earth, including the reshaping of earthly existence into forms resembling Jupiter, Venus, and volcanoes. The Anthroposophical Society must unite people who today feel themselves to be the core of what must spread in ever-widening circles throughout human civilization, so that humanity’s progressive development can truly take place and life on Earth does not fall into decay.