The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] I would like to respond to Mr. Ingerö’s warm words by assuring you that it gives me the deepest satisfaction to be able to speak to you again in greater detail about anthroposophical matters in such internal lectures. The fact is that I have been particularly fortunate here in Norway to be able to repeatedly expound profound anthroposophical truths in lecture series. Here I was also able to deliver that series of lectures which is always present in my mind—on the European national souls—and here I was able to speak on many other anthroposophical topics. This has been brought about by the special circumstances arising from the fact that Norway, as I have repeatedly characterized it on earlier occasions, is situated at a remarkable juncture in the development of European civilization, and that the future of Europe will have much to expect from Norway in particular.

[ 2 ] But now I think I may well add another thought to these words of deepest satisfaction. That is to say that, my dear friends, whenever I now speak to our old anthroposophical friends about anthroposophy, the tragic events of New Year’s Eve 1922–1923 are always present in the background. Many of our Norwegian friends have also seen the Goetheanum; indeed, Norwegian friends worked devotedly on this Goetheanum for ten years—while we were working on it. And finally, I may recall with the deepest satisfaction the fact that it was precisely our Norwegian friends who provided us with the most extensive material support, especially at the very time when we needed it most for the construction of the Goetheanum, which has now, alas, been taken from us. The self-sacrificing efforts of our Norwegian friends in this regard will be deeply engraved in the history of the Goetheanum, for spiritually, that which was built into this Goetheanum remains connected to the history of anthroposophical development. And those who have made such great sacrifices, as some of our Norwegian friends have, will thereby also have inscribed something—we may say—significant in a spiritual sense into the annals of the history of spiritual development, which is linked to the Goetheanum.

[ 3 ] In the background, I would like to say, lies the terrible blaze that we saw consume our Goetheanum on New Year’s Eve—in a single night, everything that had been achieved through long and arduous work. And the only consolation for this terrible, painful event is the fact that there is something within anthroposophy itself that springs from an indestructible source, so that it must prevail in the development of humanity, even if, for the time being, this external monument and symbol has vanished from the face of the earth and, even under the most favorable circumstances, can only be rebuilt in a makeshift manner. Thus, in a certain sense, a note of melancholy must now permeate our reflections as we direct our thoughts toward this painful event.

[ 4 ] Now, in the course of this short series, I would like to discuss some of the aspects that are most intimately connected with the essence of the human being, with the shaping of human destiny, and with what might be called the relationship of the whole human being to the development of the world. And I want to—I would say—go straight to the heart of the matter and point out that the entire essential development of the human being, even within the realm of earthly life, is connected not only to what we observe as we participate in this earthly life with our ordinary waking consciousness, but that the human being is also very intensely and intimately connected to what takes place for that person during the state of sleep, from falling asleep to waking up.

[ 5 ] For external earthly culture and civilization, what is certainly of primary importance and significance is what human beings are capable of thinking, feeling, and accomplishing from their waking state. But human beings would be incapable of accomplishing anything in the external world if they did not continually renew their human powers from the spiritual world between falling asleep and waking up. Our spiritual-soul being—or, as we have come to say in anthroposophical terms, our astral body and our “I”—always leaves the physical body and the etheric body when we fall asleep, they enter the spiritual world and only re-enter the physical and etheric bodies upon waking, so that under normal circumstances we spend one-third of our earthly existence in this state of sleep.

[ 6 ] When we look back on our earthly existence, we always link one day to the next; in such a conscious review, we leave out what we experience between falling asleep and waking up. We, so to speak, overlook what—if I may put it this way—the heavens, the divine worlds, bestow upon us in our earthly life. And in such a review carried out with ordinary consciousness, we take into account only what our physical earthly experiences provide us. But if one wishes to form true, accurate conceptions of what we experience between falling asleep and waking up, then one must be willing to form ideas that differ somewhat from those of ordinary life. For it would be naive to believe that conditions in the divine-spiritual worlds are the same as in the physical-sensory worlds in which we find ourselves between waking and falling asleep. When we fall asleep, we return to the spiritual worlds, and in the spiritual worlds things are different than in the physical-sensory world. One must truly take this into account with the utmost seriousness if one wishes to form ideas about the supersensible destinies of human beings.

[ 7 ] In the religious texts of humanity, there are quite a few curious allusions that can only be understood when one, in turn, examines the very things referred to in these religious texts through the lens of spiritual science. For example, there is a remarkable passage in the Bible—one you are all familiar with, but which is usually not given sufficient consideration—the passage: “Unless you become like little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” Such passages are often interpreted quite trivially, but they are actually always meant to be extraordinarily profound. I would also like to draw your attention to something that you may already have noticed in the course of your—let’s say—anthroposophical journey.

[ 8 ] I, like others, have often referred to the science from which knowledge of the spiritual and supersensible is drawn as “initiation science.” One speaks of initiation science when one looks back at what was practiced in the ancient mysteries of humanity. But one also speaks of “initiation science,” or “modern initiation science,” when one wishes to speak of anthroposophy in a deeper sense. Initiation science points, as it were, to knowledge of primordial states, of states of origin. One seeks to gain insight into what exists at the beginning, into what formed the starting points. This, too, points to something deeper that is meant to come before our souls today.

[ 9 ] We imagine that when we fall asleep, say, on the evening of May 16, 1923, we have spent the time in sleep—until May 17, 1923—that someone who, say, stays awake and walks the city streets all night also experiences. We imagine it roughly this way: that our spiritual-soul aspect, our “I,” and our astral body spend the night—only in a somewhat different state—just as a night owl wandering the streets of Kristiania spends that night.

[ 10 ] But that is not the case; rather, when we fall asleep at night—or even during the day—it makes no difference, but for now I want to speak only of the nightly sleep that a decent person experiences— we go back in time each time to that phase of our life that lies at the very beginning of our earthly existence; indeed, we even go back beyond our earthly existence to our pre-earthly life. We return to the same world from which we descended when we received an earthly body through conception. We do not remain at the very same point in time at which we are awake, but rather we retrace our entire path through time. At the moment we fall asleep, we are at the same point in time at which we were when, if I may put it that way, we descended from the heavens to Earth. So, after we fall asleep, we are not at all on May 16, 1923; rather, we are at the point in time where we were before we descended, and still in the time we no longer remember, because we can only recall events back to a certain point in our childhood. Every night, we become children again in spirit and soul when we enter true sleep. And just as here in the physical world you travel a path through space that is two or three miles long, so too, when you have reached the age of twenty, you travel a path through time that lasts twenty years, and you actually go back to a state that predates your childhood—that is, let’s say, to the time when you first began to be human. You go back in time to the starting point of your earthly life. So while the physical body lies in bed, the etheric body—and certainly not the “I” and the astral body—are not at the same point in time; rather, they have gone back in time and are at an earlier point. Now the question arises: If we go back to this earlier point every night, what happens while we are awake with our “I” and our astral body?

[ 11 ] This question arises only when we realize that we return at night. But this return is actually only an illusion, for in reality, even while we are awake during the day, we—with our ego and astral body—have not left the state in which we were during our pre-earthly existence.

[ 12 ] You see, if we want to recognize the truth about these things, we must take on board ideas that are not ordinary ideas. We must grasp the idea that the “I” and the astral body do not, at first, participate in our earthly development at all. They essentially remain behind, staying where we are when we set out to acquire a physical and an etheric body. Thus, even while we are awake, our “I” and our astral body remain at the very beginning of our earthly life. We actually experience earthly life only with the physical body and, in a peculiar way, with the etheric body. We truly experience earthly life in space and ordinary time only with our physical body. Only our physical body grows old, and the etheric body connects the beginning with the point at which we currently stand in whatever period of life we are in.

[ 13 ] Let us assume, then, that someone was born in 1900. He is twenty-three years old today. His “I” and his astral body have, in essence, remained at the point in time of 1900. The physical body has reached the age of twenty-three, and the etheric body connects the moment of entry into earthly life with the moment in which the person is currently living, so that if we did not have the etheric body, we would wake up every morning as a very small child who had just been born. It is only by entering the etheric body before entering the physical body that we adapt to the age of the physical body. Every morning we must first adapt to the age of the physical body. The etheric body is the mediator between the spiritual-soul and the physical body, forming a link that spans the years. If a person has already reached the age of sixty or is even older, the etheric body forms the link between their very first appearance on Earth—at which point they remained as the “I” and as the astral body—and the age of their physical body.

[ 14 ] Now you will say: But we do have our “I.” Our “I” has grown old with us. Our astral body, our thinking, feeling, and willing have also grown old with us. If someone has reached the age of sixty, then surely their “I” has also reached the age of sixty. — If, in the “I” we speak of every day, we had our true, our real “I” before us, then the objection would be justified. But in the “I” we speak of every day, we do not have our real “I” before us at all; rather, our real “I” stands at the starting point of our earthly life. Our physical body, let’s say, becomes sixty years old. It reflects back—through the mediation of the etheric body—the mirror image of the true “I” at the precise moment in which the physical body is living. We see this mirror image of the true “I,” which we receive back from our physical body at every moment and which, in truth, originates from something that did not enter into earthly existence at all. And we call this reflection our “I.” This reflection naturally grows older, for it grows older as the mirroring apparatus—the physical body—gradually ceases to be as fresh as it was in early childhood, eventually becoming frail, and so on. But the fact that the “I”—which is actually only the reflection of the true “I”—also appears old is due solely to the fact that the mirroring apparatus is no longer as good once we have grown old in our physical body. And the etheric body is what now stretches out from the present—as if in perspective—toward our true self and toward our astral body, which do not descend into the physical world at all.

[ 15 ] That is why, as I have now described in my public lectures, we see this entire tableau of the etheric body or time body. This is what spreads out in an etheric way between our present moment—which only the physical body experiences—and our “I,” which never actually belongs completely to the physical earthly world but always remains behind, if we may put it that way, in the heavenly worlds. Essentially, our earthly life unfolds in such a way that we remain with our true “I” and our astral body at the beginning of our earthly existence; that we actually initiate earthly life through these two aspects of our human being, thereby making the beginning; and that we then, through the etheric body, always perceive the sequence of forces all the way to the physical body, which ages in the proper way. This is the correct, the true conception one must have if one wishes to penetrate these matters.

[ 16 ] Now you can imagine that, since these facts exist during life, the circumstances at the moment of human death must be quite special. First of all, we shed our physical body at death. But it is the physical body that has actually given us our earthly life. When we shed this physical body, what remains to us at first? What remains to us at first is that which we did not bring with us into earthly life. But filled with all the experiences of earthly life, the “I” and the astral body have, so to speak, remained at the starting point. Yet they have always looked toward what the physical body, with the help of the etheric body, has reflected back to them. And so, when we pass through the gate of death, we stand at the starting point of our life—but filled not with what we carried within us when we descended from the spiritual world, but with what has always come back to us as a reflection of earthly life during our time on Earth. We are completely filled with that. This gives rise to a special state of consciousness at the end of earthly life.

[ 17 ] This particular state of consciousness at the end of earthly life can be understood by focusing on what we, as human beings, experience every night during sleep, between falling asleep and waking up. It is also experienced in shorter durations—for example, during short afternoon naps and the like—but I do not wish to consider those here.

[ 18 ] If, equipped with imaginative, inspired, and intuitive insight, one can look at what otherwise remains unconscious—what takes place within a person between falling asleep and waking up—then one sees how every night a person relives their waking life. Yes, it is true: every night a person relives their waking life—some more quickly, others more slowly; one can relive it in five minutes, another in a single minute. In these matters, the relationship to time is entirely different from that in the ordinary external life of earthly existence. But if we consider an ordinary night, we can look upon what the I and the astral body are experiencing there with imaginative insight, with inspired insight. There they do indeed relive, in reverse order, what has been experienced in the physical world since the last waking. Every night we relive the day, but in reverse order. Every night we relive what we last did and experienced in the evening, then what happened a little earlier, then what happened even a little earlier, and then what lies further back in time. In reverse order, we relive the day’s experiences during the night, and as a rule, we wake up when we have reached the morning.

[ 19 ] You might object: Yes, but some people do get woken up by this or that noise. — That’s just because the circumstances are different. Imagine this: as a decent person, you go to bed—let’s say at eleven o’clock—and sleep peacefully until three o’clock, reliving in reverse order what you experienced while awake during the day up until ten in the morning; then you’re woken up by some kind of commotion. You quickly relive the rest—which can happen in just a few moments as you wake up. The rest is always relived quickly in such cases; otherwise, it would stretch out over hours. But the perception of time is different during sleep. Time can be compressed entirely, so that one can indeed say: During each period of sleep, a person relives in reverse what they went through during the last period of wakefulness. One experiences it not merely as an observation, but in such a way that a complete moral assessment of what one has gone through is now interwoven into this experience. One becomes, so to speak, one’s own moral judge during this retrospective reliving. And when one has finished reliving this upon waking, one has, in a sense, passed a value judgment on oneself as a human being. One assesses oneself as a person of such-and-such value every morning upon waking, after having relived, in reverse, what one accomplished during the day. In doing so, I am also describing to you what the human spirit and soul unconsciously undergoes every night—that is, during one-third of one’s earthly life, if it proceeds normally—only unconsciously. The soul relives life in reverse order, only somewhat faster, because we spend about one-third of our entire earthly life simply sleeping.

[ 20 ] When the moment comes for a person to pass through the gate of death, after the physical body has been shed—a process that takes several days—what I have called the etheric body or the body of formative forces in my writings gradually separates from the I and from the astral body. This separation is such that, having passed through the gate of death, the human being feels how his thoughts—which he had previously regarded only as something within himself—are realities, truths that are expanding more and more. Two, three, or four days after death, the human being has the feeling: “You actually consist of thoughts, but these thoughts are dispersing.” — As a being of thought, the human being grows ever larger and larger, and finally the entire being of thought dissolves into the cosmos. But to the same extent that the being of thought—that is, the etheric body—dissolves into the cosmos, that which has been experienced in ways other than through ordinary consciousness now becomes concentrated.

[ 21 ] In fact, everything we thought or imagined while awake vanishes three days after death. That is simply the way it is. There is no need to turn a blind eye to this fact. The very substance of our conscious earthly life has vanished three days after death. But precisely because what is so important to us—what is so essential during our earthly life—vanishes in three days, a memory arises from within of something that was not there at all before: namely, the memory of everything we have always experienced in reverse during the nights while sleeping, between falling asleep and waking up. Our waking life during the day fades away, and to the same extent, the sum of the experiences we have gone through during the night rises up from within us. These are, after all, the same experiences we have during the day, but in reverse order and interwoven with a moral sense in every single detail.

[ 22 ] Now remember, we are still, with our true self and our true astral body, at the beginning of life; but what we have acquired as reflections through the physical body—no matter how old we may have become—flies away with the etheric body. What we have not at all experienced during our earthly life—the nocturnal experiences—now emerge as new content. That is why, three days after the etheric body has departed, we feel all the more as if we have reached the end of our earthly life. So when we die—let’s say on May 16, 1923—we feel, as all these nocturnal experiences now come to life as if from the darkness of night, that we are being carried toward the end of our earthly life, yet at the same time with a tendency to return. And now we relive, night after night, the time we have always slept through. This accounts for about one-third of our earthly life.

[ 23 ] The various religions describe it as purgatory or Kamaloka, and so on. We live through our earthly life in the same way we have always unconsciously lived through it in our nighttime states, until we have truly arrived at the starting point of our earthly life through our experiences. We must return once again to the beginning of our earthly life. The wheel of life must turn and must return once again to its starting point. Such are the processes. Three days after death, our daily experiences pass by in a flash. We retrace one-third of our earthly lifetime, a period during which we actually become fully and consciously aware of our value as human beings. For what we have unconsciously gone through every night now occurs with full consciousness after we have shed the etheric body.

[ 24 ] In everyday life, we can only imagine that we are making paths that lie within space. But space has no significance for the spiritual-soul realm; space has significance only for the physical-sensory realm. And we must imagine that when we are in the spiritual-soul state, we also travel paths through time; that is, we must return after death to that from which we—I might say—departed from the heavens as fugitives with our physical bodies. However, we travel back three times as fast, because this is balanced out by the experiences we have had during our nightly sleep states. Thus, perhaps decades after our death, we have returned to the starting point, but our souls are now enriched with everything we have gone through as earthly human beings—not merely enriched with what remains with us as a memory. Even though it has departed with the etheric body, it remains with us as a memory—enriched not only by what we experienced in earthly consciousness, but also by what we unconsciously judge about our own human worth from within our fully human being during the states of sleep. Thus, depending on how we have lived, after a longer or shorter period of time—perhaps decades—we enter the spirit world from which we once stepped forth, though we stepped forth from it with only our consciousness. In fact, we have remained at the starting point and waited until the earthly course of the physical body proves to be fulfilled, so that we can return once more to what we were before birth or, rather, before conception.

[ 25 ] When describing these things—especially in public—one must do so in a way that does not immediately shock people with these concepts, which are of a completely different nature. One can, I would say, describe the matter figuratively as if life actually continued after death. But in truth, it is a return, a reliving after death. Time, in fact, turns around and returns to its starting point. One could say: The divine world actually remains in the place where it has been from the beginning. — Human beings merely make their excursions, their departures from the divine world. Then they return to it again and bring back into this divine world whatever they have acquired outside of it.

[ 26 ] Now comes the life that follows. When we have returned, so to speak—but now enriched by earthly life, not only the conscious but also the unconscious aspects of it—and have become little children, so that we may once again stand within the realms of heaven as little children, then the life that follows can be described something like this: The human being now perceives himself as he is. Just as they are here on Earth among plants, stones, and animals with their ordinary earthly consciousness, so does the human being perceive during the period we have now reached. — I am describing life after death. Then the human being perceives, first of all, that they are among the human souls who are no longer experiencing life on Earth but are experiencing it in the heavens—that is, those who have died or have not yet been born—but they also perceive themselves among the higher hierarchies: the Angels, Archangels, Archai, Exusiai, and so on. You know the names and the meanings of these names from my *Outline of Esoteric Science*. The human being gains experiences in this purely spiritual world. If I were to characterize these experiences, I would have to put it this way: It is as if the human being were now carrying his own being into the cosmos. What he has gone through during waking hours and during his unconscious earthly life at night, he carries into the cosmos; that is what the cosmos needs.

[ 27 ] Here we stand as human beings living on Earth, judging the cosmos that surrounds us—the Sun, the Moon, and the stars—solely from an earthly perspective. As astronomers, we calculate how the stars move, how the planets move, how they pass by the fixed stars, and so on. But, you see, this whole astronomical-scientific approach is actually like a human being standing here while a very small, tiny creature were observing that human—I mean this physical human being. A small, tiny creature—let’s say, a little ladybug—would establish a science and would observe a human being who is gigantic compared to the ladybug, watching how he comes to life. I assume that the little ladybug also has a certain lifespan. So it would observe what happens to this human being, would then conduct its investigations looking both forward and backward, but it would not take into account that the human being eats and drinks—and thus must constantly renew his being, his physical being—and would believe that this human being can be born, grows on his own, and dies on his own. It would not notice at all how the renewal of metabolism must take place there day by day. This is roughly how human beings, as astronomers, behave toward the world. They pay no attention to the fact that this world is a vast spiritual organism that needs nourishment; otherwise, the stars would long since have been scattered in all directions throughout outer space. The planets would have gone their separate ways. This gigantic organism needs nourishment—that which it must take in again and again so that it can continue to exist properly. And where does this nourishment come from?

[ 28 ] This raises the great questions concerning the relationship between human beings and the universe. Earthly science is so incredibly accurate that it can prove everything. Yet, in truth, the evidence does not really say much. When people hear about anthroposophy and see that it contradicts conventional science in many ways, they believe that conventional science can prove everything. And it can. Anthroposophy does not deny this either. It can prove everything. The fact is, however, that in certain cases, proofs of reality can mean absolutely nothing.

[ 29 ] Just imagine: I’m calculating how the human heart changes in its physical structure from one year to the next. Let’s assume this could be observed, and we say: A person who has reached the age of thirty-three has a heart with a certain physical structure; at thirty-four, it is like this; at thirty-five, like that; and so on. I observe the changes over five years and then calculate what this physical structure of the heart was like, say, thirty years earlier. I can calculate that. This gives me a physical structure of the heart. I can also calculate what it will be like three hundred years later or three hundred years earlier. There’s just one small detail: three hundred years ago, the heart didn’t exist yet, so the calculated state didn’t exist either. It is correctly calculated. One can prove that three hundred years ago the heart was of such-and-such a nature, only it was not yet there. One can prove that three hundred years from now the heart will be of such-and-such a nature, only it will no longer be there. The proofs are undeniably correct.

[ 30 ] But that’s how you can do it today with geology. You can calculate how this or that came about through a certain layer of the Earth. Then you can work out what it was like twenty million years ago or what it will be like twenty million years from now. The evidence works incredibly well—except that the Earth wasn’t even there twenty million years ago. The change couldn’t have taken place any more than it could with the heart. And likewise, the Earth won’t be there anymore twenty million years from now. The evidence is absolutely flawless, but reality has absolutely nothing to do with this evidence. You can see how things stand. The fact is that the potential for deception arising from physical life is the greatest conceivable. One must be able to penetrate somewhat into spiritual life if one wishes to gain a vantage point from which to judge the physical world.

[ 31 ] Now let us return to what I intended to explain solely through this discussion of the proofs—which do not at all pertain to reality—namely, how a person, having arrived at the point after death that I have described, begins to live within the world of spiritual realities and spiritual beings. He brings into this spiritual world what he has experienced here on Earth in both the waking and sleeping states.

[ 32 ] This is the nourishment of the cosmos; this is what the cosmos constantly needs in order to continue to exist. What we humans experience on Earth—whether in times of ease or hardship—we carry into the cosmos for some time after death, and we therefore feel our human being merging into the cosmos as nourishment. These are experiences of immense magnitude and tremendous sublimity that a human being undergoes between death and a new birth...

[ 33 ] Then comes the moment when a person no longer appears to themselves as a unity, but rather, as it were, as a multiplicity; when a person perceives themselves in such a way that one virtue, one quality, moves, as it were, toward one star, while another moves toward another star; when a person perceives their being distributed throughout the entire world, and where, at the same time, they perceive how the parts of their being conflict with one another, harmonize with one another, or are in disharmony. A person feels how what they have experienced on Earth, day or night, spreads throughout the entire cosmos. And just as during the three days after death, when thoughts have flown away—that is, everything that constituted our daily life has flown away—and we concentrate on what our nighttime experiences were, and as we relive our lives back to the starting point of our earthly existence—just as we cling to our nighttime experiences—so, when the entire experience of humanity flies out into the cosmos, we cling firmly to that which we, as human beings, are within a supersensible world order.

[ 34 ] Now our true self emerges from our fragmented—I would say, from our Dionysian-fragmented—human being. Little by little, the awareness arises: You are, after all, spirit. You have merely dwelt in a physical body; you have merely gone through whatever the physical body has brought upon you, even in your nocturnal experiences. You are, after all, spirit among spirits.

[ 35 ] One now enters into a spiritual existence among spiritual beings, while one sees what one was as an earthly human being being broken up and scattered throughout the entire cosmos. What we experience here on Earth is dispersed throughout the cosmos so that it may become nourishment for the cosmos, so that the cosmos may continue to exist, and so that the cosmos may receive new impetus for its stellar movements and celestial bodies. Just as we must provide our lives with earthly nourishment so that we can live as physical human beings between birth and death, so too must the cosmos live on human experiences, absorbing them into itself. And in this way we come to feel more and more like cosmic human beings, finding, as it were, our entire human being passing over into the cosmos—but into the spiritual cosmos. And the moment has arrived when we must seek the transition between death and a new birth—from the human becoming cosmic to the cosmos becoming human. We have ascended by feeling more and more cosmic. A moment comes—I have called it in my Mysteries the great midnight hour of existence—when we feel: We must become human again. That which we carry out into the cosmos must be returned to us by the cosmos in another form, so that we may return to the earth once more. I shall then speak to you tomorrow about this return.

[ 36 ] Today, I wanted to begin by describing to you the human being as it is carried out of earthly life into the cosmic expanses. So, for now, we are, so to speak, in the midst of life between death and a new human birth, with what is essentially a sketchy description—one that will be presented in greater detail in the coming days.